Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,5
prove challenging. We were prepared. Even during the program, my security detail was on high alert at all times. I stood alone on the front of a stage, backed by curtains. On either side, hidden from view, two beefy, athletic off-duty cops (who are my friends) stood like guard dogs at the ready on both sides. A third officer mostly waited directly behind me, hidden by the curtains. Had someone rushed the stage, the reaction would have been swift and physical. Though unarmed, the assailant would have been quickly subdued, and I’d have been whisked out the back. I hoped nothing like that would happen, but we were ready if something did.
That still left the matter of leaving the venue. A group at another event had mobbed a congressman’s car as he exited the hall. In that case, the car had been some distance away, forcing the congressman to run the gauntlet on foot through a crowd of rowdy protestors. “There’s no winning on that,” Russo said, so an evasion plan took shape.
Chief Russo happened to drive the same model vehicle as I did. So, the chief parked his unit at the top of the school’s driveway with officers standing around it as if securing the area. During the event, they kept checking the car, walking around it, making their presence obvious. They even stuck an American flag in the windshield.
Sure enough, the protestors surrounded the chief’s car as the event concluded, hoping to corner me on my way out. Jex was there. “A group started to mobilize at the west end of the building,” he remembers. “This was the same group that one of the CHPD uniformed officers reported brandishing guns earlier in the night. They were organizing a search for Jason’s car. They were masked—bandannaed up.”
“Operation Decoy” worked to plan. Drawing the menacing group’s attention to Chief Russo’s car created a window of opportunity for my exit from the venue. I won’t reveal the exact plan that got me safely out, but I do recall a few harrowing Crazy Ivans (high-speed U-turns) at the hands of Mike Fullwood, an off-duty officer who also worked private security for me at the event.
Jex, who has done security for at least a dozen other town halls, remembers this one feeling different. “There wasn’t that constituent feel,” he said. “All the other events that Jason did, there was definitely a different feel based on how the constituents talked and interacted. In the past, even the people who were not fans of Jason, who asked critical questions, were not like this. It was a different mentality.”
I share all that to fully illustrate the sea change in the public conduct we all witnessed that night. There was a malevolence, a barely subdued violence that dominated the night’s events. It was like nothing we had seen before in Utah, certainly where a congressional town hall—one of the oldest customs of our representative republic—was concerned.
I don’t think they got what they were after at my town hall, at least not if one cable news reporter I spoke with can be believed. But they had MSNBC, CNN, and other national outlets on hand just in case.
This opposition was far from organic. This was a reality show organized by groups outside my district, scripted and promoted like the professional public relations campaign it was, specifically designed to disappear the conservative supermajority in Utah’s 3rd Congressional District for the benefit of cable TV news audiences.
What did the national media think was going to happen? I can’t say for sure, but given my conversation with the cable news reporter, it’s fair to say the event was less explosive than promised. As loud and unruly as it may have been, that town hall did not deliver all that the outside instigators had implied.
They were looking for violence and chaos. Great staff preparation; an excellent display of community policing, crowd control, and crisis deescalation; and some terrific on-the-fly tactical execution kept it from going where anarchist forces wanted to go.
My office had been contacted ahead of the town hall by a national cable news reporter who wanted to ensure she could get an on-camera interview with me at the event. To be as open and transparent as possible, I insisted on speaking with her myself earlier in the day to prepare for the interview.
I asked her, “Why are you here?” I was fascinated that she and others would come. I reminded her that I’m a Republican in Utah who won with 73