On October 3rd, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives were threatening to do something unprecedented in American history. A faction of the far right had introduced a motion to oust their leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Before the final vote, McCarthy’s allies offered some words in his defense. The third member to rise to the dais was Jim Jordan, a fifty-nine-year-old Republican from Ohio, who for years has been the Party’s most influential insurgent. Colleagues used to call him “the other Speaker of the House,” because of his frequent maneuvers against leadership. But this time his tone was subdued. He was there to praise McCarthy, not to bury him.
“Kevin McCarthy has been rock solid,” Jordan began. He wore a dark suit jacket, which looked almost exotic on his shoulders. When he holds forth—as he routinely does in the House committee room and on conservative television—he’s almost always in shirtsleeves, speaking in a rapid-fire diction that can make him sound like an auctioneer crossed with a street preacher. Listeners who share his grievances are inspired; those who don’t often have little idea what he’s talking about. In his seventeen-year career in Congress, Jordan has not once sponsored a bill that became law. Instead, he’s searched for victims of liberal plots—the most famous being Donald Trump, whose election loss, in 2020, Jordan refused to certify.
Now Jordan recited the accomplishments of the previous nine months in the Republican House, ticking off a list of investigative probes into far-right causes célèbres which, he said, had revealed bias against conservatives at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, machinations by the deep state, malfeasance related to the 2020 Presidential election. These achievements, he went on, “happened under Speaker McCarthy.” But none of it would have happened without Jordan, who is currently the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. In paying tribute to McCarthy, Jordan was also dusting off his own résumé. The next morning, after eight Republicans, joined by every House Democrat, voted to remove McCarthy, Jordan declared that he was running for Speaker himself.
Straightaway, he had some two hundred backers. That he was in the running at all marked a seismic shift, both in Congress and in the Republican Party. The Speaker isn’t just the second in line for the Presidency; he sets the chamber’s entire legislative agenda. By his own admission, Jordan “didn’t come to Washington to make more laws.” He had risen in stature as a political hit man, a launcher of partisan inquisitions. In a conference of cynics, he had distinguished himself as a true believer. No one was more aggressive in prosecuting the Party’s paranoia or more creative in stoking its sense of victimhood. The villains in the schemes he rode to power could come from anywhere.
One of them was Kate Starbird, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. Starbird has what she calls a “sticky” name—it stays in people’s heads. She also has an unlikely background: for nine years, she played professional basketball, including five seasons in the W.N.B.A. After retiring, at the age of thirty, she completed a Ph.D. program, with a focus on a burgeoning field called crisis informatics—the study of how people use (and misuse) social media during natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks, and other outbreaks of violence. Often, her academic work involves analyzing online conspiracy theories: how and why they spread and who keeps them going. In her professional judgment, in the summer of 2022 she became the target of a very good one.
The origin was, in part, a single line taken out of context. It came from a report released in March, 2021, by the Election Integrity Partnership, a group of academics, students, and data analysts that tracked online misinformation during the 2020 election. Through an organization that received funding from the Department of Homeland Security, they were able to communicate with local and state election officials, sharing information and looking into tips. Kim Wyman, the former Republican secretary of state of Washington, told me that, in the past, “election officials saw posts that were wrong, but couldn’t take them down.” Now they could consult directly with a team of researchers, and send inaccurate information—misreported voting hours at a polling place, for instance—to the relevant social-media platforms, which would decide whether to remove it.
Starbird had joined the project, in the summer of 2020, with colleagues from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Stanford Internet Observatory, where the concept had originated. Several months after the election, the researchers published their final report. On page 183, they cited a critical part of their data set: 21,897,364 tweets, collected between August 15 and December 12, 2020, which dealt with false information or unsubstantiated rumors. Some three thousand tweets were flagged as potential violations of Twitter’s terms of use.
“My wife thinks I’m losing touch with reality when I try to explain the whole story,” Starbird told me recently. By the time of the report, Trump’s lies about a stolen election were starting to cool in the mainstream of the Republican Party. His lawyers and their allies had lost repeatedly in court; the Department of Justice was making arrests for the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th. Starbird observed the fallout in the far corners of the Internet, where increasingly wild theories would surface—January 6th was an Antifa plot or an F.B.I. setup—then wash out. One recurring idea, Starbird said, was “that there was censorship that hid the truth of what happened in 2020, that this was the real reason Trump lost.”
At some point—it was impossible to say exactly when—online conspiracists began claiming that Starbird and other researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership had colluded with the Department of Homeland Security to censor twenty-two million tweets during the 2020 election. This was, Starbird told me, “a literal misreading” of the group’s findings. But the conspiracy theory had all the key elements to spread widely, starting with the fact that it was politically useful. “People wanted to believe it,” she said.
Allegations began to appear on fringe news outlets, such as the Gateway Pundit. On August 27, 2022, Mike Benz, an ex-Trump appointee who runs an organization called the Foundation for Freedom Online, wrote that his exposé of D.H.S. would provide “the basis for a full-scale bipartisan Congressional committee armed with subpoena power.” The story soon reached Breitbart and Steve Bannon’s podcast. On Twitter, Trump supporters told Starbird to lawyer up.
In September, the University of Washington started to get dozens of public-records requests seeking access to Starbird’s and her colleagues’ work e-mails. These came from more established sources: the Republican attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmitt (who is now a U.S. senator); a journalist from the Intercept; the conservative foundation Judicial Watch. Since the university is public, the administration was legally obligated to supply the e-mails. “In reality, all these records would be a great defense if a real person were to go through them,” Starbird told me. Under the circumstances, her e-mails became a fount of quotable material for the conspiracists.
“I’ve said it until I’m blue in the face—keep sitting on walls and something bad’s going to happen. But what do I know? I’m just your mother.”
Cartoon by David Sipress
By then, campus police had alerted her to a complaint someone submitted alleging that she was abusing people via satellite; later, she received a death threat. “No one in the rest of the world knew this was happening,” Starbird said. “But anyone in the right-wing media ecosystem and the few of us who were targeted were hyperaware.” In the run-up to the midterm elections last November, when Republicans were expected to retake control of the House and the Senate, Starbird began warning colleagues, “There are going to be investigations.”
The current Republican House was sworn in at the start of this year with more of a complex than an agenda. The Democrats still controlled the Senate and the White House, so legislating wasn’t an option. Even if it were, the Republican conference was too divided to reach any consensus on policy. On the Hill, the different ideological factions inside the Party were known as the Five Families; the most unruly of these was the House Freedom Caucus, a group of thirty-three hard-line anti-institutionalists. The closest the conference came to a proactive message was its vow to investigate Joe Biden and to fight the scourge of the federal bureaucracy. “You have agencies that we know have spied on the American people, have suppressed the speech of the American people, have targeted members of the populace,” Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, told me. “We’re the ones really trying to save democracy.”
During the race for House Speaker in January, twenty members of the Freedom Caucus withheld their votes from McCarthy. In exchange for their support, they made numerous demands; one of them was the creation of a freestanding committee to uncover how the federal government was supposedly cracking down on conservatives. McCarthy appeased them, in part, by agreeing to create a subcommittee run out of the Judiciary Committee and led by Jordan, who had helped found the Freedom Caucus, in 2015. More than anyone in the House at the time, several G.O.P. insiders told me, Jordan held the key to McCarthy’s Speakership.
Ever since the revelation, in March, 2017, that the F.B.I. had opened a probe into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia, Jordan had been demanding that Congress “investigate the investigators.” In the summer of 2018, Jordan introduced articles of impeachment against Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, who had appointed a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the election. The next year, when Trump faced his first impeachment, Jordan organized the President’s defense on the Hill. After Trump lost the 2020 election, few Republicans amplified his lies about fraud and vote theft more vociferously than Jordan. “I don’t know how you can ever convince me that President Trump didn’t actually win this thing,” he said that December. “Sometimes you gotta beat the referee.”
On January 2, 2021, Jordan led a conference call with Trump to discuss how they could delay certifying the election. One of the ideas was to encourage Trump supporters, via social media, to march on the Capitol on January 6th. Jordan spoke routinely with the President by phone during the next few days, including twice on January 6th, and he texted Trump’s chief of staff with advice on how to get Vice-President Mike Pence not to count electoral votes. Hours after the insurrection, Jordan stationed himself next to the House floor to whip votes against certification. Before leaving office, Trump gave him the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jordan, Trump has said, “is a warrior for me.”
Around the time that Starbird joined the Election Integrity Partnership, Jordan was calling for a major investigation into partisan censorship. “I’ll just cut right to the chase,” he said at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee. “Big Tech is out to get conservatives. That’s not a suspicion. That’s not a hunch. That’s a fact.” He listed half a dozen instances: Google “censoring” Breitbart and the Daily Caller, YouTube blocking content that violated Covid recommendations made by the World Health Organization, Facebook taking down a post from Trump’s reëlection campaign. “I haven’t even mentioned Twitter,” Jordan said. “Four members of Congress were shadow-banned two years ago.” This was a reference to a brief period in which Jordan and his fellow-Republicans Matt Gaetz, Mark Meadows, and Devin Nunes couldn’t get their names to autofill on Twitter’s search bar, something the company called a glitch and promptly fixed. “Four hundred thirty-five members in the House, a hundred in the Senate,” Jordan continued. “Only four. Only four!”
From his perch as the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Jordan oversaw the production of a thousand-page report, released four days before the 2022 midterms, titled “FBI Whistleblowers: What Their Disclosures Indicate About the Politicization of the FBI and Justice Department.” It was mostly a compilation of angry letters mailed by the committee to various agency officials, claiming that the federal government had “spied on President Trump’s campaign and ridiculed conservative Americans.”
Jordan currently has a hand in every major investigation under way in the House. He is a member of the Oversight Committee, and, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he controls a staff of more than sixty and a nineteen-million-dollar budget, nearly triple what it was under the Democrats. This summer, when an I.R.S. whistle-blower appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee to share confidential information about Hunter Biden’s taxes, Jordan’s chief counsel, a veteran lawyer named Steve Castor, was permitted to work with the committee. The arrangement was a highly unusual work-around; by law, members of Ways and Means cannot share citizens’ tax information with anyone outside the committee. Now someone close to Jordan, who is not on the committee, had direct access to a sensitive probe.
