Elizabeth Kolbert

We should be turning towards other forms of energy.

And this is across agencies, across the entire federal government right now, but it has very, very long-lasting and serious consequences.

So Lee Zeldin was a congressman from Long Island from 2014 to 2022.

And in 2019, I think, is when he really attracted President Trump's attention.

That was when we got, you know, what would later come to be known as Trump's first impeachment inquiry.

That was the one that was launched over allegations that Trump had tried to pressure the Ukrainian president into investigating Joe Biden.

And Lee Zeldin was a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, and as such, he was part of the closed-door depositions.

We eventually got the transcript from those depositions, but they were originally closed-door depositions.

And he really...

threw himself into the fight to protect the president, both behind closed doors and publicly.

He often denounced the proceedings regularly as, you know, illegitimate, a charade, a fairy tale.

Those are just a few of the descriptions he offered.

And Trump started really to notice that he was one of his fiercest protectors.

He started to retweet what Zeldin was tweeting out there in one particularly, you know,

And what did he do in support of Trump after Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election?

Well, he was one of those Republicans out there very vigorously arguing that there had been irregularities in the voting, which, you know, were obviously never have never been substantiated.

There are still people out there obviously arguing that, but we've never gotten any proof of that.

And on the day of January 6th, which will, you know, a day that will, I guess, live in infamy to many people, he was interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Fox News.

He was interviewed with Daryl Issa, who is a very, you know, conservative pro-Trump congressman who

called this a bad day for the president.