Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,1

on Twitter, and in mass emails from activist organizations. The event was announced several weeks early, which gave opposition groups lots of time to organize, book flights, and engage a full media blitz.

In our congressional offices, we noticed many of the rude calls we received originated from area codes outside of Utah. The vast majority of calls—both local and long distance—all asked a similar question: “Will you be checking ID at the door?” It didn’t take long to figure out why. The callers wanted to make sure they wouldn’t be turned away for not residing in the district. Like most representatives, I did not check IDs and didn’t care if people outside of my district wanted to attend my town halls. We welcomed all comers, and I tried to be just as responsive to visitors.

Recognizing that this town hall would likely attract more people than our usual one hundred to two hundred constituents, we quickly moved the venue from the Cottonwood Heights City Hall to the Brighton High School auditorium across the street, where we knew we could seat up to one thousand people. Even that venue would prove to be too small, but for the safety of everyone involved, we were advised not to go any larger.

At that point, we still had no clear picture of the extent of the other side’s coordination. But we did catch wind of a few ominous developments.

Not long after the calls began, we were given a screenshot of a Facebook group called Utah Indivisible, in which plans were being finalized for disruptive behavior at our town hall. They even had a training manual (produced by national, nonlocal groups) providing a how-to primer for disrupting and derailing town halls. They called it “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” The plans were very detailed. Fortunately for us, they were also very public.

The Security Challenge

You’re going to get death threats. If you serve in the United States Congress and you do anything at all controversial, someone somewhere will get angry and become unhinged. You have to take it seriously, but unfortunately, threats are not all that unusual. I once had a man leave me a voice mail suggesting he would find me and string me up on a light post. Another tweeted that he would shoot me in the head and yet another would slit my throat. Some threats were hand delivered. Some targeted my wife or my children. Direct threats were unusual but not unexpected.

This was different. We were not dealing with a few isolated cases of mental instability. We needed to be prepared to respond to real constituents with genuine fears and concerns. Against all odds, Donald Trump had just been inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States. Despondent Hillary Clinton voters were still, two months later, trying to process the results of an election for which they had been wholly unprepared. They sincerely believed America had made a terrible mistake.

In their minds, nothing less than our democracy was at stake. At this point, many of them saw Donald Trump as a modern-day iteration of Adolf Hitler, intent on plundering the Treasury, selling us out to the Russians, and reenergizing the Ku Klux Klan. Elected officials, activist groups, celebrities, and media pundits had been ratcheting up the hysteria for months.

In what they rationalize as a noble effort to save democracy, any means justify those ends. The only problem with this story is practically everything about it.

Fortunately, opposition organizers tipped their hand early enough for a savvy local chief of police and his extraordinarily professional team to have a few surprises in store for the would-be anarchists descending on Cottonwood Heights.

Now aware that scheming was under way to disrupt the event, the Cottonwood Heights Police Department (CHPD) went to work. They obtained a copy of the Indivisible Guide so they could be prepared for the planned disruptions. Working with my security team, they performed threat assessments, did a site survey of the venue, and put contingency plans in place. I credit them with the fact that we saw no violence that night.

I won’t lie—the conclusions of the initial threat assessment were disconcerting. But police assured us that the department had the training and personnel to control access to the venue, to calm the crowd, and to get me out safely when the event concluded. They were right.

“This one felt like a legitimate threat,” said Detective Brent Jex, a West Jordan City police officer who headed my private security team and