My Undercover Quest to Expose Right-Wingers and Make America Gonzo Again
People often ask me why I do what I do. Why go undercover to expose extremist Republicans like Senator Ron Johnson, Trump coup attorney John Eastman, or Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito? Can’t you just ask them for an interview?
To give you a fuller context for my motivation requires first going back to the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 in lower Manhattan.
Running late for class, I bounded up the stairs at the City Hall subway station, and was greeted by a construction boom that was not normal. As I made my way west on Chambers Street, I soon discovered its source. A plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. “Oh my God! What a terrible accident!” “Pilots can’t fly anywhere close enough for that to be an accident.” The scene was surreal, to be sure, but I kept on task. I made it to the street entrance of campus before turning to stare back at the towers in astonishment. The second plane suddenly came into view before exploding into the South Tower, and in slow motion I reeled backward. There was no more speculation: We were under attack.
There was also no cell service, nor transportation. People fled from downtown on foot, desperate to escape, but many of us stayed to bear witness to horrors we could not yet fathom. A woman screamed, “Oh my God! They’re falling out of the building!” We watched a man drop, tie flapping in the wind. Then another. And another. A retired firefighter spoke up, “They’re not falling. They’re jumping. Look at the spacing — it’s organized.” At 20-years-old, this was devastating. It’s more than 20 years later, and I’m crying as I type this.
Strangers became friends, trauma bonding as we watched the towers collapse, and ran from clouds of smoke and debris together. We crowded into bars with televisions tuned to the news; learned of the other attacks; and drank to dull the sensation of this newfound hellscape. Behind a covered fence encircling Ground Zero, the metal crater smoldered for months, emanating a stench of death. Burning plastic, burning chemicals, burning bodies haunt those of us who witnessed 9/11 on the ground that day and in the many days and weeks thereafter. The obligation to bear witness to history planted the seed for what would become my political reporting career.
Fast forward to the fall of 2020. Joe Biden had clearly won the election, but Donald Trump was contesting the vote in battleground states across the country. When I learned that there would be historic Senate runoffs in Georgia and that the state was under attack by MAGA extremists, I decided to spend several weeks there reporting. In early December, I talked to Rudy Giuliani at the state capitol, outside of an election commission hearing where he was arguing that massive voter fraud had occurred. Although I certainly tried to provoke him, it wasn’t like he was going to openly admit on a visible camera to committing crimes.
In order to have a better chance of eliciting incriminating evidence from the election deniers, I decided to go undercover as one of them. That’s how I got my first big scoop: that there would be a Senate objection to the Electoral College count to certify the 2020 election results. This was a big deal because the Beltway conventional wisdom was that the challenge was a fringe idea that would stay in the conservative House Freedom Caucus and go nowhere. But both then-Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville and then-Senator David Perdue confirmed to me that they planned to back the election-denial effort. The story went nuclear when Trump thanked me via tweet, calling Perdue a patriot. This led to Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz launching their own objections to the Electoral College count.
Everywhere I went in Georgia, Republican politicians were telling voters to keep fighting for Trump. It seemed pretty clear to me that something big was brewing. Much to the surprise of Beltway insiders, the Georgia Senate runoffs ended with two Democratic victories on Jan. 5, 2021. I was supposed to return to Washington, but I decided to relax instead. No more hustling for stories. No driving. I flipped on the TV to watch the news. There was smoke billowing from the U.S. Capitol, where insurrectionists were attempting to block the transfer of power. The scene was horrifying and surreal, but all too familiar. When I returned, fences had been erected around Capitol Hill, and would remain there for months. It was another Ground Zero, but this time, the work of an enemy within, to borrow a phrase from Trump.
Had I been in D.C. that day, I know in my bones that I would have been filming the traitors attempting a coup. Though they failed, I could see that they were not finished. And so I set out on a crazy, gonzo mission to capture evidence of what the insurrectionists had done, and what they were planning to do in the elections to come.
In my best Southern drawl, I told MAGA Republicans that I had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and asked why they didn’t do more to fight for President Trump. Ted Cruz told me he “led the fight” in the Senate. John Eastman, the lead architect of Trump’s fake elector plot, said there was “no question” his legal rationale was totally solid. Some answered contrary to my expectations. Vice President Mike Pence said we do not want federal bureaucrats deciding our elections. Sen. Ron Johnson explained how Trump legitimately lost Wisconsin.
As the years progressed, the election-denial movement did not wane, but intensified, and efforts to hold Trump and his co-conspirators accountable were stalling out in case after case. I broke stories about Trump coup attorney Cleta Mitchell and her plans to suppress the vote and install rabid election deniers as poll workers in battleground states. The Supreme Court appeared to be helping push Trump’s criminal trials until after the election — and remained shrouded in secrecy, despite damning reporting by ProPublica revealing massive corruption among its conservative members.
So I went undercover at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinners to see if I could get any clues from the justices. Alito’s colorful wife, Martha-Ann, went on an extended rant about suing media companies for defamation and her desire to design protest flags against gay people. A design she was particularly proud of involved the Italian word for shame — “vergogna” — emblazoned in flames. She alluded multiple times to her husband’s impending retirement (something he would likely only consider under a second Trump presidency). But my biggest scoop yet was delivered by Alito himself, as he admitted to a lack of impartiality, a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence, and asserted that America’s polarization can only be solved one way: “One side or the other is going to win.”
My detractors question my tactics, but my undercover reporting over the last four years has been in service of a greater public good: preserving our democracy in the face of very real and very imminent threats.
Longtime Trump ally and self proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who claims to be a born-again Christian, is fond of telling the MAGA faithful: “This is nothing less than an epic struggle between dark and light. This is a struggle between good and evil. This is a struggle between the godly and the godless, and if America loses this struggle, my friends, this country will step off into a thousand years of darkness.”
Right-wing extremists believe that they are at war with the Left, increasingly in these apocalyptic terms — and if they succeed, they will upend the great American tradition of the separation of church and state, and lead us down the path toward Christian theocracy. I went undercover with Stone on multiple occasions and he admitted to working on a plan to re-elect Trump that relies on judges and courts to contest and suppress the vote.
My first feature length documentary, Gonzo for Democracy — available online today! — is the culmination of my quest for truth from, and accountability for, our elected leaders. Gonzo connects the dots of all my reporting; features commentary from several members of Congress, celebrities, and media personalities — from Congressman Jamie Raskin, to Kathy Griffin, to George Conway; and attempts to answer the question of how we as a country got to the Jan. 6 insurrection in the first place.
How do we make sure it never happens again? I went gonzo to expose truths that all Americans deserve to know. What you do with them now is up to you.
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.