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COMMENT: In a previous post, we chronicled the abrupt changes Trump made in the Defense Department following his defeat.
Unnamed officials in NATO countries have opined that the events of 1/6/2021 were a coup attempt by Trump’s forces.
In addition, there is an ongoing investigation of an active duty PSYOP officer who operated under the Special Forces command structure for leading a contingent of 100 strong to the “rally” on 1/6/2021.
As veteran listeners/readers will no doubt realize, these events are to be seen against the background of numerous programs and posts highlighting Specialized Knowledge and Abilities and Serpent’s Walk
* Multiple European security officials told Insider that President Donald Trump appeared to have tacit support among US federal agencies responsible for securing the Capitol complex in Wednesday’s coup attempt.
* Insider is reporting this information because it illustrates the serious repercussions of Wednesday’s events: Even if they are mistaken, some among America’s international military allies are now willing to give credence to the idea that Trump deliberately tried to violently overturn an election and had help from some federal law-enforcement agents.
* “We train alongside the US federal law enforcement to handle these very matters, and it’s obvious that large parts of any successful plan were just ignored,” one source told us.The supporters of President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday to stop the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory were attempting a violent coup that multiple European security officials said appeared to have at least tacit support from aspects of the US federal agencies responsible for securing the Capitol complex.
Insider spoke with three officials on Thursday morning: a French police official responsible for public security in a key section of central Paris, and two intelligence officials from NATO countries who directly work in counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations involving the US, terrorism, and Russia.
They said the circumstantial evidence available pointed to what would be openly called a coup attempt in any other nation. None were willing to speak on the record because of the dire nature of the subject.
While they did not furnish evidence that federal agency officials facilitated the chaos, Insider is reporting this information because it illustrates the scale and seriousness of Wednesday’s events: America’s international military and security allies are now willing to give serious credence to the idea that Trump deliberately tried to violently overturn an election and that some federal law-enforcement agents — by omission or otherwise — facilitated the attempt.
‘Today I am briefing my government that we believe with a reasonable level of certainty that Donald Trump attempted a coup’
One NATO source set the stage, using terms more commonly used to describe unrest in developing countries.
“The defeated president gives a speech to a group of supporters where he tells them he was robbed of the election, denounces his own administration’s members and party as traitors, and tells his supporters to storm the building where the voting is being held,” the NATO intelligence official said.
“The supporters, many dressed in military attire and waving revolutionary-style flags, then storm the building where the federal law-enforcement agencies controlled by the current president do not establish a security cordon, and the protesters quickly overwhelm the last line of police.
“The president then makes a public statement to the supporters attacking the Capitol that he loves them but doesn’t really tell them to stop,” the official said. “Today I am briefing my government that we believe with a reasonable level of certainty that Donald Trump attempted a coup that failed when the system did not buckle.
“I can’t believe this happened.”
A law-enforcement official who trains with US forces believes someone interfered with the proper deployment of officers around Congress
The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the perimeter of the Capitol complex; the official has direct knowledge of the proper procedures for security of the facility.
The security of Congress is entrusted to the US Capitol Police, a federal agency that answers to Congress.
It is routine for the Capitol Police to coordinate with the federal Secret Service and the Park Police and local police in Washington, DC, before large demonstrations. The National Guard, commanded by the Department of Defense, is often on standby too.
On Wednesday, however, that coordination was late or absent.
‘It’s obvious that large parts of any successful plan were just ignored’
“You cannot tell me I don’t know what they should have done. I can fly to Washington tomorrow and do that job, just as any police official in Washington can fly to Paris and do mine,” the official said. The official directs public security in a central Paris police district filled with government buildings and tourist sites.
“These are not subtle principles” for managing demonstrations, “and they transfer to every situation,” the official said. “This is why we train alongside the US federal law enforcement to handle these very matters, and it’s obvious that large parts of any successful plan were just ignored.”
The National Guard, which was deployed heavily to quell the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, did not show up to assist the police until two hours after the action started on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.
Video shows police doing nothing as rioters access the building
One video appeared to show some police officers opening a barrier to allow a group of protesters to get closer to the Capitol dome. Another video showed a police officer allowing a rioter to take a selfie with him inside the Capitol while protesters milled around the building unchecked.
Kim Dine, who was the chief of the Capitol Police from 2012 to 2016, told The Washington Post that he was surprised that the Capitol Police allowed demonstrators on the steps of the Capitol. He said he was also mystified that few rioters were arrested on the spot.
Larry Schaefer, who worked for the Capitol Police for more than 30 years, told ProPublica something similar: “We have a planned, known demonstration that has a propensity for violence in the past and threats to carry weapons — why would you not prepare yourself as we have done in the past?”
…
Systematic failures
The French police official detailed multiple lapses they believe were systematic:
1. Large crowds of protesters needed to be managed far earlier by the police, who instead controlled a scene at the first demonstration Trump addressed, then ignored the crowd as it streamed toward the Capitol.
2. “It should have been surrounded, managed, and directed immediately, and that pressure never released.”
3. Because the crowd was not managed and directed, the official said, the protesters were able to congregate unimpeded around the Capitol, where the next major failure took place.
4. “It is unthinkable there was not a strong police cordon on the outskirts of the complex. Fences and barricades are useless without strong police enforcement. This is when you start making arrests, targeting key people that appear violent, anyone who attacks an officer, anyone who breaches the barricade. You have to show that crossing the line will fail and end in arrest.”
5. “I cannot believe the failure to establish a proper cordon was a mistake. These are very skilled police officials, but they are federal, and that means they ultimately report to the president. This needs to be investigated.”
6. “When the crowd reached the steps of the building, the situation was over. The police are there to protect the building from terrorist attacks and crime, not a battalion of infantry. That had to be managed from hundreds of meters away unless the police were willing to completely open fire, and I can respect why they were not.”‘Thank God it didn’t work, because I can’t imagine how hard it would be to sanction the US financial system’
The third official, who works in counterintelligence for a NATO member, agreed that the situation could only be seen as a coup attempt, no matter how poorly considered and likely to fail, and said its implications might be too huge to immediately fathom.
“Thank God it didn’t work, because I can’t imagine how hard it would be to sanction the US financial system,” the official said. By sanctions, he means the imposition of the diplomatic, military, and trade blockages that democratic nations usually reserve for dictatorships. . . .
An Army psychological operations officer who led a group during the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that culminated in a deadly mob breaching the U.S. Capitol had resigned her commission several months prior to the event, according to a defense official familiar with the situation.
Capt. Emily Rainey, 30, was still on active duty during last week’s protests. However, she had already been handed down an adverse administrative action for a separate incident and resigned her commission, the official told Army Times.
Rainey’s involvement in the rally is currently under investigation by 1st Special Forces Command, which oversees her PSYOP unit . . . .
. . . . During last week’s events in D.C., Rainey led roughly 100 members of a group called Moore County Citizens for Freedom to the region. President Donald Trump spoke at the rally there and repeated false claims that the 2020 election had been rigged against him.
Moore County Citizens for Freedom describes itself on its Facebook page as a nonpartisan network promoting conservative values through education and activism.
Rainey told the Associated Press that her group and most people who traveled to Washington “are peace-loving, law-abiding people who were doing nothing but demonstrating our First Amendment rights.” . . . .
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/law-enforcement-military-probing-whether-members-took-part-capitol-riot-n1253801
Law enforcement and the military probing whether members took part in Capitol riot
Some active-duty and retired military service members and law enforcement officers are suspected of having participated in the protest and the ensuing riot.
NBC News
Jan. 12, 2021, 7:59 PM EST
By Janelle Griffith and Phil McCausland
Former and current members of law enforcement agencies and the military appear to have participated in last week’s chaos in Washington, alarming lawmakers on Capitol Hill and Americans nationwide as each day brings new video and information about the riot and the rioters.
Investigations by law enforcement agencies and news organizations, along with a series of arrests, have exposed a widening issue of domestic extremism among the ranks of those who are meant to protect Americans.
On Monday, even the U.S. Capitol Police announced that the agency had suspended “several” of its own and will investigate at least 10 officers for their actions.
Police departments in New York City, Seattle and Philadelphia, as well as smaller agencies across the country, are investigating whether their officers participated in the pro-Trump riot, which has been tied to the deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer. The investigations are based on tips, including social media posts.
The Army said it was investigating a psychological operations officer who led 100 Trump supporters from North Carolina to Washington. The FBI arrested a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel in Texas after he breached the Senate chamber wearing tactical gear and carrying zip-tie handcuffs known as flex cuffs. There are calls for a Pennsylvania state legislator, who is a retired Army colonel and taught at the Army War College for five years, to resign after he and his wife attended Wednesday’s event. Ashli Babbitt, 33, the QAnon supporter who was shot and killed by Capitol Police, was a 14-year Air Force veteran.
The Department of Justice is reportedly investigating 25 members of the service, though it is unclear whether they are retired or active in the military ranks.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D‑Ill., said in a letter to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller that the Pentagon needed to open an investigation to determine if retired or current members of the military “engaged in insurrection against the authority of the United States, or participated in a seditious conspiracy that used force to: oppose the authority of the United States; prevent, hinder and delay the execution of the Electoral Count Act; and unlawfully seize, take or possess property of the United States.”
That domestic extremist groups may have targeted for recruitment members of law enforcement agencies and the military as well as veterans is unsurprising to Elizabeth Neumann, who was the assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the Department of Homeland Security until she resigned in April.
Neumann said that the military and law enforcement agencies have long known that active-duty recruitment by the far right was an issue but that they have done little to address it. The problem was further deprioritized when President Donald Trump entered the White House, she said.
“It’s a movement,” said Neumann, who said right-wing extremism has developed around support for Trump and his dog whistles. “A lot of them are very decentralized, but there’s a sophistication in who and how they groom people and how they recruit people and where they try to encourage people to go for their longer-term aims.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that we have a problem of white supremacy and extremism in law enforcement and the military,” she said.
Congressional efforts to investigate members of the military and law enforcement agencies in the past, however, have largely been stymied.
Most recently, a bill titled the Domestic Terror Prevention Act made its way through the House, although it never came to a vote. Among other provisions, it would have required the secretary of homeland security, the attorney general and the director of the FBI to file an annual report that assessed “the domestic terrorism threat posed by White supremacists and neo-Nazis, including White supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies and the uniformed services.”
The Senate never considered the legislation after it was introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin, D‑Ill., with 13 Democratic co-sponsors. Durbin’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A former House staffer who worked on the legislation said Democrats and Republicans struggled to support the bill’s provision to require a domestic terrorism assessment of extremist groups’ potential infiltration of law enforcement agencies and uniformed services.
The military and law enforcement agencies were considered a dangerous third rail.
“Before Wednesday, a politician couldn’t even publicly acknowledge that this could be a problem. Two years ago, we were just trying to get a report to see if these were just one-offs, because we kept seeing growing domestic terror plots,” the staffer said about the work on the bill. “But everybody was like, ‘Dear God, whose boss is going to lose their seat over this?’ ”
Law enforcement at issue
Police departments across the country are investigating their own members’ involvement in the Capitol riot.
The mob showed up at Trump’s behest to march on Washington in support of his false claim that the November election was stolen and to stop lawmakers from confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
New York City’s mayor and police commissioner have said they intend to fire anyone who stormed the Capitol.
“This is a group of people who attacked our Congress, attacked it to disrupt the presidential vote count,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “Anyone who participated in that, anyone who stormed that building trying to disrupt the workings of government, should not be allowed to serve in government.”
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said Monday on the NY1 news channel that so far, one New York police officer is alleged to have participated in the attack and that “anyone committing crimes certainly would have a very short shelf life with the NYPD.”
Shea said the officer’s name wasn’t being released “because we don’t know if it’s true or not.”
Over the weekend, the Philadelphia Police Department said it was made aware of social media posts that alleged that one of its detectives “may have been in attendance at the events.”
A police spokesman, Sgt. Eric Gripp, said an internal affairs investigation had been launched to determine whether any of the department’s policies “were violated by the detective, and if they participated in any illegal activities while in attendance.”
Philadelphia police declined Monday to identify the detective, citing the internal investigation. Gripp said the detective’s assignment has been changed pending the outcome.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, citing sources within the police department, identified the officer as Detective Jennifer Gugger, a member of the Recruit Background Investigations Unit. Gugger couldn’t be reached for comment at numbers listed for her.
The police department in the town of Rocky Mount, Virginia, said in a statement Sunday that it was aware that “two off-duty officers were present at an event in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.”
Rocky Mount police said that they had notified federal authorities and that the officers are on administrative leave pending review.
“The Town of Rocky Mount fully supports all lawful expressions of freedom of speech and assembly by its employees but does not condone the unlawful acts that occurred that day,” the statement said.
Rocky Mount police didn’t return an emailed request for comment. NBC affiliate WSLS of Roanoke, Virginia, identified the officers through social media posts as Thomas Robertson and Jacob Fracker, neither of whom could be reached for comment.
If Trump actually attempted a coup it would have been far better organized since everything he has done with crowds has always been done efficiently.
Remember the Reichstag fire !
@Robert Severin–
Bullshit.
This is like saying if the Nazi Party and Hitler had launched the Beer Hall Putsch (a better comparison than the Reichstag Fire or Kristallnacht), it would have been better organized and succeeded.
Why do you think NATO security officials have said it was a coup attempt?
Get Real,
Dave Emory
This next AP article talks about how the “rioters” included a well organized and prepared group of men wearing olive-drab helmets and body armor trudged purposefully up the marble stairs in a single-file line, each man holding the jacket collar of the one ahead in a formation, known as “Ranger File,” which is a is standard U.S. military operating procedure for a combat team that is “stacking up” to breach a building. They had body armor and technology such as two-way radio headsets that were similar to those of the very police they were confronting.
Others at the rally were wearing patches and insignias representing far-right militant groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and various self-styled state militias.
Participants included:
— an active-duty psychological warfare captain from North Carolina who organized three busloads of people. A
— - a decorated Navy Seal that as a result of his participation was forced to resign resigned from a program that helps prepare potential SEAL applicants (i.e.t to recruit and program new extremists into the SEALS from the time they join.
— “Marine vet/ boxer/ patriot/ Proud Boy.” who was with a group at the Capitol whose members said they would have killed “anyone they got their hands on,” including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The witness further stated that members of this group said they would have killed (Vice President) Mike Pence if given the chance,”
The article also mentions that experts in homegrown extremism have warned for years about efforts by far-right militants and white-supremacist groups to radicalize and recruit people with military and law enforcement training. They wore military-style patches that read “MILITIA” and “OATHKEEPER.”
https://apnews.com/article/ex-military-cops-us-capitol-riot-a1cb17201dfddc98291edead5badc257
Capitol rioters included highly trained ex-military and cops
January 15, 2021
By MICHAEL BIESECKER, JAKE BLEIBERG and JAMES LAPORTA
WASHINGTON (AP) — As President Donald Trump’s supporters massed outside the Capitol last week and sang the national anthem, a line of men wearing olive-drab helmets and body armor trudged purposefully up the marble stairs in a single-file line, each man holding the jacket collar of the one ahead.
The formation, known as “Ranger File,” is standard operating procedure for a combat team that is “stacking up” to breach a building — instantly recognizable to any U.S. soldier or Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a chilling sign that many at the vanguard of the mob that stormed the seat of American democracy either had military training or were trained by those who did.
An Associated Press review of public records, social media posts and videos shows at least 22 current or former members of the U.S. military or law enforcement have been identified as being at or near the Capitol riot, with more than a dozen others under investigation but not yet named. In many cases, those who stormed the Capitol appeared to employ tactics, body armor and technology such as two-way radio headsets that were similar to those of the very police they were confronting.
Experts in homegrown extremism have warned for years about efforts by far-right militants and white-supremacist groups to radicalize and recruit people with military and law enforcement training, and they say the Jan. 6 insurrection that left five people dead saw some of their worst fears realized.
“ISIS and al-Qaida would drool over having someone with the training and experience of a U.S. military officer,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent and fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “These people have training and capabilities that far exceed what any foreign terrorist group can do. Foreign terrorist groups don’t have any members who have badges.”
Among the most prominent to emerge is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and decorated combat veteran from Texas who was arrested after he was photographed wearing a helmet and body armor on the floor of the Senate, holding a pair of zip-tie handcuffs.
Another Air Force veteran from San Diego was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to leap through a barricade near the House chamber. A retired Navy SEAL, among the most elite special warfare operators in the military, posted a Facebook video about traveling from his Ohio home to the rally and seemingly approving of the invasion of “our building, our house.”
Two police officers from a small Virginia town, both of them former infantrymen, were arrested by the FBI after posting a selfie of themselves inside the Capitol, one flashing his middle finger at the camera.
Also under scrutiny is an active-duty psychological warfare captain from North Carolina who organized three busloads of people who headed to Washington for the “Save America” rally in support the president’s false claim that the November election was stolen from him.
While the Pentagon declined to provide an estimate for how many other active-duty military personnel are under investigation, the military’s top leaders were concerned enough ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration that they issued a highly unusual warning to all service members this week that the right to free speech gives no one the right to commit violence.
The chief of the U.S. Capitol Police was forced to resign following the breach and several officers have been suspended pending the outcome of investigations into their conduct, including one who posed for a selfie with a rioter and another who was seen wearing one of Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps.
The AP’s review of hundreds of videos and photos from the insurrectionist riot shows scores of people mixed in the crowd who were wearing military-style gear, including helmets, body armor, rucksacks and two-way radios. Dozens carried canisters of bear spray, baseball bats, hockey sticks and pro-Trump flags attached to stout poles later used to bash police officers.
A close examination of the group marching up the steps to help breach the Capitol shows they wore military-style patches that read “MILITIA” and “OATHKEEPER.” Others were wearing patches and insignias representing far-right militant groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and various self-styled state militias.
The Oath Keepers, which claims to count thousands of current and former law enforcement officials and military veterans as members, have become fixtures at protests and counter-protests across the country, often heavily armed with semi-automatic carbines and tactical shotguns.
Stewart Rhodes, an Army veteran who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009 as a reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama, had been saying for weeks before the Capitol riot that his group was preparing for a civil war and was “armed, prepared to go in if the president calls us up.”
Adam Newbold, the retired Navy SEAL from Lisbon, Ohio, whose more than two-decade military career includes multiple combat awards for valor, said in a Jan. 5 Facebook video, “We are just very prepared, very capable and very skilled patriots ready for a fight.”
He later posted a since-deleted follow-up video after the riot saying he was “proud” of the assault.
Newbold, 45, did not respond to multiple messages from the AP but in an interview with the Task & Purpose website he denied ever going inside the Capitol. He added that because of the fallout from the videos he has resigned from a program that helps prepare potential SEAL applicants.
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Larry Rendall Brock Jr. of Texas was released to home confinement Thursday after a prosecutor alleged the former fighter pilot had zip-tie handcuffs on the Senate floor because he planned to take hostages.
“He means to kidnap, restrain, perhaps try, perhaps execute members of the U.S. government,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Weimer said. “His prior experience and training make him all the more dangerous.”
Federal authorities on Friday also arrested Dominic Pezzola, a 43-year-old former Marine from New York who identified himself on social media as being a member of the Proud Boys.
The FBI identified Pezzola as the bearded man seen in widely shared video shattering an exterior Capitol window with a stolen Capitol Police riot shield before he and others climbed inside. He also appears in a second video taken inside the building that shows him smoking a cigar in what he calls a “victory smoke,” according to a court filing.
In an online biography, Pezzola, whose nickname is “Spazzo,” describes himself as “Marine vet/ boxer/ patriot/ Proud Boy.” Service records show he served six years stateside as an infantryman and was discharged in 2005 at the rank of corporal.
According to court filings, an unidentified witness told the FBI that Pezzola was with a group at the Capitol whose members said they would have killed “anyone they got their hands on,” including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The witness further stated that members of this group said they would have killed (Vice President) Mike Pence if given the chance,” the affidavit said.
Army commanders at Fort Bragg in North Carolina are investigating the possible involvement of Capt. Emily Rainey, the 30-year-old psychological operations officer and Afghanistan war veteran who told the AP she traveled with 100 others to Washington to “stand against election fraud.” She insisted she acted within Army regulations and that no one in her group entered the Capitol or broke the law.
“I was a private citizen and doing everything right and within my rights,” Rainey said.
More than 125 people have been arrested so far on charges related to the Capitol riot, ranging from curfew violations to serious federal felonies related to theft and weapons possession.
Brian Harrell, who served as the assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security until last year, said it is “obviously problematic” when “extremist bad actors” have military and law enforcement backgrounds.
“Many have specialized training, some have seen combat, and nearly all have been fed disinformation and propaganda from illegitimate sources,” Harrell said. “They are fueled by conspiracy theories, feel as if something is being stolen from them, and they are not interested in debate. This is a powder keg cocktail waiting to blow.”
The FBI is warning of the potential for more bloodshed. In an internal bulletin issued Sunday, the bureau warned of plans for armed protests at all 50 state capitals and in Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, police departments in such major cities as New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston and Philadelphia announced they were investigating whether members of their agencies participated in the Capitol riot. The Philadelphia area’s transit authority is also investigating whether seven of its police officers who attended Trump’s rally in Washington broke any laws.
A Texas sheriff announced last week that he had reported one of his lieutenants to the FBI after she posted photos of herself on social media with a crowd outside the Capitol. Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar said Lt. Roxanne Mathai, a 46-year-old jailer, had the right to attend the rally but he’s investigating whether she may have broken the law.
One of the posts Mathai shared was a photo that appeared to be taken Jan. 6 from among the mass of Trump supporters outside the Capitol, captioned: “Not gonna lie. ... aside from my kids, this was, indeed, the best day of my life. And it’s not over yet.”
A lawyer for Mathai, a mother and longtime San Antonio resident, said she attended the Trump rally but never entered the Capitol.
In Houston, Police Chief Art Acevedo said an 18-year veteran of the department suspected of joining the mob that breached the Capitol resigned before a disciplinary hearing that was set for Friday.
“There is no excuse for criminal activity, especially from a police officer,” Acevedo said. “I can’t tell you the anger I feel at the thought of a police officer, and other police officers, thinking they get to storm the Capitol.”
___
Bleiberg reported from Dallas and LaPorta from in Delray Beach, Florida. Robert Burns and Michael Balsamo in Washington; Jim Mustian, Michael R. Sisak and Thalia Beaty in New York; Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland; Juan A. Lozano in Houston; Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia; Martha Bellisle in Seattle; Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles; and Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York, contributed.
___
Follow Associated Press Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck; Jake Bleiberg at http://twitter.com/JZBleiberg; and James LaPorta at http://twitter.com/JimLaPorta
___
Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org
This next article shows surprising knowledge of White House personnel by the good old American Patriot who sells MyPillow Mike Lindell. However, he may have been simply a messanger passing along a message. Mr. Lindell had a meeting with Don Trump and tried to persuade him to declare martial law, utilize the Insurrection Act for his purposes and execute CIA leadership shakeup in his last few days starting with Kash Patel to lead it. The article does not mention that before working in the United States Department of Justice National Security Division, where he simultaneously served as a legal liaison to the Joint Special Operations Command, Mr. Patel ws a public defender he represented clients charged with felonies including international drug trafficking, murder, firearms violations, and bulk cash smuggling.
For a pillow company owner and salesman, Mr. Lindell has an uncanny understanding of White House operations and who needs to be replaced before the Presidency expires.
Lindell made claims of election fraud claims on the Far Right wing Media Station Newsmax and they cut him off while he was on the air. On the day of the MAGA riots he was in D.C., and after it he asserted the event was staged by Antifa. He pushed the message that Trump supporters ‘broke the algorithms.’ These rantings are consistent with the far right propaganda that rallied the rioters to their cause.
Lindell also a relationship with Mike Flynn, the national security advisor who lied to the FBI, got a pardon, then went to the Oval Office and advocated martial law.
If one were trying to get a better night of sleep, I would recommend that they spend their money on a bet that pillow salesman Mike Lindell is a deep cover agent serving fascist objectives rather than on his pillow, even if it is made in America.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9153263/Donald-Trump-holds-talks-MyPillow-CEO-Mike-Lindell-brandishes-notes-MARTIAL-LAW.html
Donald Trump holds talks with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell who brandishes notes about ‘MARTIAL LAW’
By GEOFF EARLE, DEPUTY U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR and KEITH GRIFFITH FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 17:41 EST, 15 January 2021 | UPDATED: 22:15 EST, 15 January 2021
President Donald Trump reportedly cut short his meeting with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell within minutes, after the entrepreneur was spotted at the White House brandishing notes referencing martial law, the Insurrection Act and a CIA leadership shakeup.
Lindell said that Trump appeared ‘disinterested’ in his notes, and officials say Trump quickly dismissed him and sent him to the White House Counsel’s office, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
Lindell, an informal Trump advisor who enthusiastically backed conspiracy theories about massive election fraud, appeared unexpectedly at the White House Friday afternoon. A Marine was stationed outside the West Wing, indicating Trump was most likely there.
The MyPillow CEO claimed to Haberman that the notes he was carrying were on behalf of an unnamed attorney he’s been working with to ‘prove’ that Trump really won the presidential election.
Lindell denied that the notes referenced ‘martial law,’ but an administration official said that they definitely contained the phrase, and photos of his notes appear to show it.
Once Trump dismissed him, Lindell insisted on meeting White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, and the meeting turned awkward in part because the blacked-out part of his notes related to calling for Cipollone to be fired, Haberman reported.
PHOTO CAPTION: Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow, stands outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, U.S., January 15, 2021. A closeup of his notes revealed tense topics ranging from martial law to the Insurrection Act and the leadership of the CIA
PHOTO CAPTION: A Washington Post photographer snagged an image of Lindell’s notes, which he did not conceal outside the West Wing
Amid a huge National Guard presence in D.C. after last week’s MAGA riots in the Capitol, close-up of Lindell’s notes revealed some bizarre snippets about what may be on his mind.
Lindell, like Trump, spoke to the January 6 rally crowd outside the White House before Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
A Washington Post photographer obtained a close-up of papers carried by Lindell.
One ominous line said ‘martial law if necessary upon the first hint of any....’ The term does not come without precedent. Former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn spoke openly about it while parroting Trump’s claims of a ‘rigged’ election – and scored his own White House meeting afterward.’
Another line, partly obscured by Lindell’s hand, most likely referenced the ‘Insurrection Act’ – the subject of discussion before after the election about use of forces inside the country. It said to ‘Act now as a result of the assault on the ...’
Other lines hinted at recommended staff moves. One reads ‘Colon NOW as Acting National Security...’ – suggesting a staff move atop the National Security Agency or a new National Security Advisor.
The following lines reference Fort Mead and a top cybersecurity lawyer, which could identify Frank Colon, who according to his LinkedIn page is an attorney with Cyber Operations 780th Military Intelligence Brigade.
Colon said he had never met Lindell and was baffled by the proposal to install him in a high-ranking position, according to New York Magazine.
He described himself as ‘just a government employee who does work for the Army.’
PHOTO CAPTION: Lindell claimed that the notes he was carrying were on behalf of an unnamed attorney he’s been working with to ‘prove’ that Trump really won the presidential election
PHOTO CAPTION: The notes also appear to reference potential cabinet moves just days before Trump is to leave office
PHOTO CAPTION: MyPillow CEO speaks at ‘Stop the Steal’ rally, accuses Fox News of trying to overthrow Trump administration. Following the rally, a MAGA mob ransacked the Capitol
There are also references to ‘Kraken’ lawyer Sidney Powell, who oversaw failed election challenges in court and who has been at the White House post-election.
‘Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting,’ it says, in a line which could indicate a proposal to oust CIA Director Gina Haspel, and put in her place a Trump loyalist recently moved to the Pentagon.
‘I ordered the DOD to fully cooperate with President-elect Joe Biden,’ Patel wrote in an op-ed posted by Fox News Thursday – after the Biden transition complained for weeks it was not getting the briefings it requested.
Other lines are mere snippets, but they suggest Trump’s obsession with a ‘stolen’ election – although Joe Biden beat him by 7 million votes, or 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.
‘Been with getting the evidence of ALL the ... as the election and all information regarding ... among people he knows who already have security ... done massive research on these issues,’ the notes say.
‘Foreign Interference in the election Trigger ... powers, make clear this is a China/Iran ... domestic actors. Instruct Frank,’ it says.
PHOTO CAPTION: The notes mention ‘Kraken’ lawyer Sidney Powell, as well as other individuals
The meeting comes days after Trump took part in a scripted video where he finally said: ‘A new administration will be inaugurated on January 20.’ But he hasn’t said outright that Joe Biden won, even as Vice President Mike Pence finally called Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and began what appears to be a farewell tour.
Trump has been hunkered down in office, with bizarre White House schedules saying only that: ‘President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.’
A message to Lindell was not immediately returned. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the meeting.
Trump’s obsession with overturning the results are also reflected in charts that could be seen as trade advisor Peter Navarro walked on White House grounds. It said ‘Vote Irregularities and Illegalities by Category and State.’
Trump himself is expected to leave D.C. on January 20th, with no plans for the traditional meeting with President-elect Joe Biden.
The ominous snippets in Lindell’s notes about the election were contradicted by reality on the ground at the White House Friday afternoon. A procession of aides left the building with boxes, even packing away large framed photos that have adorned the building.
HOW MIKE LINDELL WENT FROM CRACK ADDICT TO CHRISTIAN PILLOW PITCHMAN TO QANON SPOUTING TRUMP ADVISER
With his preternaturally dark hair and mustache, ubiquitous TV ads and triumph-over-tragedy personal story, Mike Lindell should be the perfect pitchman for his pillows.
But his advocacy of Donald Trump appears to have taken him into darker and more dangerous territory, carrying notes about ‘martial law’ to the Oval Office for a meeting with Trump on his last Friday in the White House.
Lindell, 59, was a small-time Minnesota businessman who became addicted to crack cocaine and alcohol, losing his wife with whom he had four children to divorce because of it, but — according to his often-told story — still managed to invent his MyPillow in 2004 and turn it into a success.
The pillow itself is a patented foam design and from the beginning Lindell manufactured it in his native state and put its Made in America credentials in the pitch.
In its first years Lindell sold it at mall kiosks and state fairs but his own life had a dramatic change, he says, in 2009, when he became sober, putting it down to the power of prayer.
Cleaned up, he recorded a 30-minute live-audience infomercial at the cost of $500,000 in 2011 and watched the success take off — with Lindell the focal point as much as the pillows.
With tranches of TV ads Lindell made a fortune — not without bumps on te way including settling a lawsuit for claims the pillows helped with snoring and divorcing his second wife after less than two months of marriage — and made his evangelical faith and then his allegiance to Trump as much part of his pitch as his products.
They appear to have first met in August 2016 and he jumped on the Trump train, going to the first presidential debate in October, and speaking at a rally that November.
Since then he has become a regular rally performer, even pitching a run for Minnesota governor in 2022 — which he has not mentioned recently — and chairing the state’s Trump campaign.
At the rallies he would be introduced as ‘the MyPillow guy’ to cheers and describe Trump as ‘chosen by God,’ tout his own faith and soak up the applause.
A fairly regular White House presence, he touted to Trump an unproven COVID ‘cure,’ oleandrin, whose manufacturer he had a stake in.
Ben Carson, a distinguished neurosurgeon turned Trump cabinet member, took it. He succumbed badly to the infection; Carson has not maintained a medical registration for some years.
Lindell devoted himself to Trump in the weeks before the 2020 election, appearing at multiple rallies and convincing the president he would win Minnesota, which he lost handily.
But after the election defeat Lindell became obsessed by Trump’s claims of voter fraud and has pushed them at every turn, including on the Right Side Broadcasting Network YouTube channel which he has a financial stake in.
He lambasted Fox News for its coverage even though he is thought to be its biggest single advertiser, and he pushed the outer fringes of conspiracy theories from discredited ‘Kraken’ attorney Sidney Powell.
He appears to have funded the Right Side Broadcasting Network, a YouTube channel which aired rallies from the March for Trump bus tour whose speakers included Lindell and Lin Wood, the even more fringe attorney who suggested Mike Pence should be executed.
Among the cast of ‘reporters’ on RSBN’s coverage were other Trump rally regulars including the ‘wall guy’ who wears a suit which represents the Mexican border wall. The suit is designed to look like it is made of bricks, when the wall is in fact steel and rebar. The ads were inevitably for MyPillow.
Lindell also appears to gave developed a relationship with Mike Flynn, the national security advisor who lied to the FBI, got a pardon, then went to the Oval Office and advocated martial law.
So discredited were Lindell’s fraud claims that Newsmax had to cut him off live on air but he was unstoppable: on the day of the MAGA riots he was in D.C., then after they happened he spouted claims that the whole event was staged by Antifa.
From a private jet a few days later he recorded a message that ‘Donald Trump will be our president for the next four years.’
On January 20 he will find out if his faith in Trump has been rewarded or if his claims get the same F rating from reality which his company did from the Better Business Bureau.
PHOTO CAPTION: A Marine outside the door indicated the president was most likely there
PHOTO CAPTION: US President Donald Trump listens as Michael J. Lindell, CEO of MyPillow Inc., speaks during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 30, 2020
PHOTO CAPTION: Lindell’s pillow company regularly advertises on Fox News
PHOTO CAPTION: Former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn speaks during a rally to protest the results of the election, in Washington, U.S., December 12, 2020. He urged martial law in a post-election video
A viewing platform for the inauguration already has printed signage for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Biden spoke in Delaware about changes he plans to institute for vaccine rollout, following reports that the Trump Administration Operation Warp Speed name will be one of the first things jettisoned.
Even lower level aides in the West Wing have already departed, leaving a skeleton crew – even as the nation faced a relentless surge of coronavirus infections and deaths.
Lindell posted even after the riots with claims about ways to ‘suppress the evil’ and ‘beat the evil’ with claims that Trump supporters ‘broke the algorithms.’
He posted brief comments, which appear to be made aboard a private jet, where he wrote that ‘Donald Trump is going to be your president for the next 4 years.’
Lindell retweeted a tweet by Right Side Broadcasting Network January 10 which bashed the idea of impeachment as pointless. ‘Seems like a whole lot of trouble to go through to impeach someone who, if tradition has its way, will be gone from office in 10 days. What is going on here, Nancy? Seems a little desperate. There must be...other factors at play,’ it said.
Was the insurrection an inside job? That’s the question a group of congressional Democrats are demanding be investigated following a constellation of reports pointing towards exactly that scenario. President Trump’s role in fomenting the the violent mob was out in the open at the “Stop the Steal” rally that immediately preceded the storming. He openly called on his audience to go to the Capitol and ‘fight like hell’.
It’s the potential role of members of Congress that has Democrats howling for an investigation under the growing pile of investigation of collaboration between Republican members of Congress and the rioters. Secret collaboration that they don’t want to publicly discuss. That’s the picture that’s emerging now that we have other members of the House, notably Mikie Sherrill, who have publicly come forward claiming they witnessed rioters being given what appeared to be “reconnaissance” tours of the congressional complex on January 5 by Republican members of Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is already talking about possible prosecution of members of Congress who were found to have “aided and abetted the crime”.
As the following USA Today piece notes, the Capitol Police admitted on Friday that they had launched their own inquiry into these mysterious tours so some sort of investigation has apparently been started that could reveal Republican congressional members aiding and abetting the insurrection with aid that includes Jan 5 tours of the Capitol.
And as the following piece also disturbingly notes, the nature of the intent behind those mystery tours of the Capitol has become something of an area of dispute between federal prosecutors pursuing charges. On Thursday, federal prosecutors in Arizona told judges that there was “strong evidence” that rioters had intended to apprehend and “assassinate elected officials.”
But on Friday, the federal attorney in D.C. overseeing the investigation, Michael Sherwin, said that authorities have so far found only “bread crumbs” of evidence suggesting that the insurrection was coordinated. Sherwin also noted that the search for possible “command and control” of the violent mob represented a “top-tier” priority for investigators. And regarding the claims by federal prosecutors in Arizona that strong evidence planned on assassinating elected officials, Sherwin stated on Friday that there was “no direct evidence of kill and capture teams” so far. So we saw a distinct walk-back by federal prosecutors on Friday of the explosive claims made by federal prosecutors in Arizona on Thursday.
While it will be very interesting to see if a command and control mechanism was indeed directing at least some of that mob, it’s also the kind of investigative angle that ignores the nature of how ‘leaderless resistance’ works, where avoiding the need for command and control mechanisms is half the point. Trump’s exhortations at the rally were enough. Trump’s words were the command and control mechanism. It’s one of the concerning aspects of Sherwin suggesting there’s only “bread crumbs” of evidence that the insurrection involved coordination. Indirect coordination by vague inflammatory rhetoric is how the far right would likely pull off an insurrection. So either Sherwin was being diplomatic, or we’re already looking at sign of another questionable investigation into Republican high crimes that ignores how the far right really operates and coordinates:
“While officials said they were “making progress on all fronts,” D.C. U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin said that authorities have so far found only “bread crumbs” of evidence suggesting that the assault was coordinated.”
The overseeing investigator in DC has only found bread crumbs pointing towards coordination between the rioters and others. And yet this came a day after federal prosecutors in Arizona told a judge that “strong evidence” showed rioters intended to apprehend and “assassinate elected officials.” Why the backpedaling? Are investigators going to be allowed to ask difficult questions or is this the kind of ‘investigation’ tasked with coming up with an ‘answer’ that isn’t overly politically explosive. After all, if it turns out Republicans in congress did collude with the rioters, those federal prosecutors are going to probably face the death threats:
But federal prosecutors aren’t the only ones investigating the question of whether or not members of congress helped orchestrate the riot. The Capitol Hill police opened up an investigation too following a letter from 30 House Democrats calling for an investigation of the Jan 5 mystery tours:
So while the back and forth messaging from the federal prosecutors is troubling, at least it looks like there are multiple investigations asking the question of whether or not congressional Republicans colluded with the insurrectionary mob in advance.
Then again, it’s not like we should expect the Capitol police to produce a thorough investigation either. The Capitol police are also one of the many institutions charged with ignoring the warnings that something like this was in the works, after all and Congressional Democrats are calling for investigations into the House and Senate Sargeants at Arms too. If there really was a larger plot involving members of Congress it wouldn’t be surprising if some element of the Capitol police forces were in on it too.
So we’ll see what conclusions these parallel investigations by federal prosecutors and Capitol police. Will the conclusions roughly align? And what about collusion between the rioters and the White House? Is that be investigated too? Let’s hope so, because as the following ProPublica article describes, the collusion between the “Stop the Steal” organization and the rioters, and allusions to violence, was right out in the open for weeks. And “Stop the Steal” — which was founded by Roger Stone in 2016 to help Trump secure the GOP nomination — is basically a Trump White House operation and creation of Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, even if it’s technically run by Roger Stone acolyte Ali Alexander. That’s why Recall how ‘Alt Right’ personality Nick Fuentes — who spoke at the December 12 Stop the Steal rally where Trump did multiple Marine One flyovers — was openly ruminating about killing state legislators who don’t support the efforts to overturn the election for Trump. So if these investigations into collusion with the rioters doesn’t find collusion by the White House, we’ll probably need an investigation of the investigations because this is the kind of collusion that no one was hiding:
“The warnings of Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol were everywhere — perhaps not entirely specific about the planned time and exact location of an assault on the Capitol, but enough to clue in law enforcement about the potential for civil unrest.”
The warnings of planned violence were everywhere. Include coming from the mouth of Ali Alexander, the Stop the Steal founder who was telling followers to bring sleeping bags and plan to occupy the area outside of the Capitol. But at the same time Alexander was telling supporters to get ready for an occupation — something that could at least in theory be relatively peaceful — he was also making statements on Parler like ““If D.C. escalates… so do we.” And Trump was backing this up with calls for his supporters to take their grievances to the streets in a “wild” protest:
Was the wild nature of the Jan 6 insurrection the same “wild” protest Trump had in mind? Was it not wild enough? Were targeted kidnappings and assassinations part of the wildness that Trump and the Stop the Steal team planned? These are the question investigators need to be asking. So with multiple investigations already underway into official collusion with the rioters, and multiple versions of events already being portrayed by federal prosecutors, it’s looking like we’re in store for a pretty wild legal investigation. A wild legal investigation that’s either going to result in a wild set of high-level prosecutions or, more likely, a wild cover-up.
This next Jan. 15, 2021 Guardian U.K. article by Stephanie Kirchgaessner, talks about a possible source of funding for the efforts to overturn the U.S. 2020 Presidential Elections.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/15/trump-republicans-election-defeat-club-for-growth?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Some portions from the article are included below with commentary where noted, but does not included the entire article:
The Club for Growth has supported the campaigns of 42 of the rightwing Republicans senators and members of the House of Representatives who voted last week to challenge US election results, doling out an estimated $20m to directly and indirectly support their campaigns in 2018 and 2020, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
About 30 of the Republican hardliners received more than $100,000 in indirect and direct support from the group.
The Club for Growth’s biggest beneficiaries include Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, the two Republican senators who led the effort to invalidate Joe Biden’s electoral victory, and the newly elected far-right gun-rights activist Lauren Boebert, a QAnon conspiracy theorist. Boebert was criticised last week for tweeting about the House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s location during the attack on the Capitol, even after lawmakers were told not to do so by police.
Public records show the Club for Growth’s largest funders are the billionaire Richard Uihlein, the Republican co-founder of the Uline shipping supply company in Wisconsin, and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, an options trading group based in Philadelphia that also owns a sports betting company in Dublin.
While Uihlein and Yass have kept a lower profile than other billionaire donors such as Michael Bloomberg and the late Sheldon Adelson, their backing of the Club for Growth has helped to transform the organization from one traditionally known as an anti-regulatory and anti-tax pro-business pressure group to one that backs some of the most radical and anti-democratic Republican lawmakers in Congress.
Here’s the thing about the hyper wealthy. They believe that their hyper-wealth grants them the ability to not be accountable Reed Galen
The Club for Growth has so far escaped scrutiny for its role supporting the anti-democratic Republicans because it does not primarily make direct contributions to candidates. Instead, it uses its funds to make “outside” spending decisions, like attacking a candidate’s opponents.
In 2018, Club for Growth spent nearly $3m attacking the Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri, a race that was ultimately won by Hawley, the 41-year-old Yale law graduate with presidential ambitions who has amplified Donald Trump’s baseless lies about election fraud.
That year, it also spent $1.2m to attack the Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who challenged – and then narrowly lost – against Cruz.
Other legislators supported by Club for Growth include Matt Rosendale, who this week called for the resignation of fellow Republican Liz Cheney after she said she would support impeachment of the president, and Lance Gooden, who accused Pelosi of being just as responsible for last week’s riot as Trump.
Dozens of the Republicans supported by Club for Growth voted to challenge the election results even after insurrectionist stormed the Capitol, which led to five deaths, including the murder of a police officer.
Public records show that Richard Uihlein, whose family founded Schlitz beer, donated $27m to the Club for Growth in 2020, and $6.7m in 2018. Uihlein and his wife, Liz, have been called “the most powerful conservative couple you’ve never heard of” by the New York Times. Richard Uihlein, the New York Times said, was known for underwriting “firebrand anti-establishment” candidates like Roy Moore, who Uihlein supported in a Senate race even after it was alleged he had sexually abused underage girls. Moore denied the allegations.
Yass of Susquehanna International, who is listed on public documents as having donated $20.7m to the Club for Growth in 2020 and $3.8m in 2018, also declined to comment. Yass is one of six founders of Susquehanna, called a “crucial engine of the $5tn global exchange-traded fund market” in a 2018 Bloomberg News profile. The company was grounded on the basis of the six founders mutual love of poker and the notion that training for “probability-based” decisions could be useful in trading markets. Susquehanna’s Dublin-based company, Nellie Analytics, wagers on sports. [Editorial question: Could some of these “probability-based” decisions be related to trading on information with advanced knowledge of Trumps “crazy” or improper market moving Tweets?}
A 2009 profile of Yass in Philadelphia magazine described how secrecy pervades Susquehanna, and that people who know the company say “stealth” is a word often used to describe its modus operandi. The article suggested Yass was largely silent about his company because he does not like to share what he does and how, and that those who know him believe he is “very nervous” about his own security.
Yass, who is described in some media accounts as a libertarian, also donated to the Protect America Pac, an organisation affiliated with Republican senator Rand Paul. The Pac’s website falsely claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election. [Ed. Note: low profile and association with Rand Paul may suggest underground fascist links].
This Washington Post Article provides and interesting fact that Pardoned General and Trump Riot supporter Mike Flynn’s brother, Charles was part of the delayed National Guard Response and the originally denied this. “Army falsely denied Flynn’s brother was involved in key part of military response to Capitol riot. Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn is the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training. Why would a Constitutionally Sworn Military Personnel lie about this and violate the Military Code of Conduct? I recommend that you read the article and come to your own conclusion if there was influence with this Coup by infiltrations at the highest level of the military or not. Also if both Flynn’s became Generals, is this more than a coincidence. We need more information to determine if Mike and Charles Flynn be similar ideologically with similar fascist loyalties?
On a separate note, As I read this I realized that QAnon was created in part to mobilize what is referred to in the Nazi Book by National Alliance “Serpents Walk” as “Christian Fascists” in what they believe is a fight with Satan (the Democrats).
By Dan Lamothe, Paul Sonne, Carol D. Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis
January 20 at 10:42 PM ET
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/flynn-national-guard-call-riot/2021/01/20/7f4f41ba-5b4c-11eb-aaad-93988621dd28_story.html
Highlights state:
The Army falsely denied for days that Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn, the brother of disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, was involved in a key meeting during its heavily scrutinized response to the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Charles Flynn confirmed in a statement issued to The Washington Post on Wednesday that he was in the room for a tense Jan. 6 phone call during which the Capitol Police and D.C. officials pleaded with the Pentagon to dispatch the National Guard urgently, but top Army officials expressed concern about having the Guard at the Capitol.
Flynn left the room before the meeting was over, anticipating that then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who was in another meeting, would soon take action to deploy more guard members, he said. “I entered the room after the call began and departed prior to the call ending as I believed a decision was imminent from the Secretary and I needed to be in my office to assist in executing the decision,” Flynn said.
The general’s presence during the call — which has not previously been reported — came weeks after his brother publicly suggested that President Donald Trump declare martial law and have the U.S. military oversee a redo of the election.
The episode highlights the challenge for the Army in having an influential senior officer whose brother has become a central figure in QAnon, the extreme ideology that alleges Trump was waging a battle with Satan-worshiping Democrats who traffic children. Michael Flynn, who previously ran the Defense Intelligence Agency and left the Army as a three-star general, has espoused QAnon messages, and QAnon adherents are among those who have been charged in connection with the attempted insurrection. In November, Trump announced he had pardoned Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
The night before the Capitol siege, Michael Flynn addressed a crowd of Trump supporters at Freedom Plaza near the White House, saying: “This country is awake tomorrow. . . . The members, the members of Congress, the members of the House of Representatives, the members of the United States Senate, those of you who are feeling weak tonight . . . we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.”
“Charlie Flynn is an officer of an incredibly high integrity,” McCarthy said
The teleconference, organized by D.C. officials after authorities already had declared a riot at the Capitol, focused on what actions the military could take in response to the violence, with the Capitol Police chief pleading for help and the acting D.C. police chief growing incredulous at the Army’s reluctance to engage. The call included senior Army officials at the urging of Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, according to one person with direct knowledge of the situation.
It was at times difficult for the participants of the call to discern which top Army official was speaking. Officials on the call recalled hearing two Army leaders discussing the “optics” and “visual” of having National Guard members respond at the Capitol. One of the Army leaders described the protesters as “peaceful,” and Contee responded that “they’re not peaceful anymore,” two of the officials said.
One official directly familiar with the situation said there was concern in both the Army and National Guard about possible political fallout if it was discovered that Flynn was involved in the Army’s deliberations. That is despite it being commonplace that the person in Flynn’s role would have been involved
Army officials declined to answer several questions about Flynn’s statement, including how long he was in the room during the call, whether he said anything, and if he was the one who described the crowd at the Capitol as mostly peaceful.
The Army also declined to answer why it falsely said for days that Flynn, who already has been confirmed by the Senate for a promotion to four-star general, was not involved.
This next CNN Article from 1-18-2021 by Nelli Black, Scott Bronstein, Bob Ortega, Benjamin Naughton and Yahya Abou-Ghazala shows how people who were pardoned by Trump were part of the plot including Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. Also involved were his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and a newcomer whom I am sure we will be hearing more about in the future, Ali Alexander. This is an excellent summary of public evidence.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/18/politics/trump-bannon-stone-giuliani-capitol-riot-invs/index.html
How Trump allies stoked the flames ahead of Capitol riot
(CNN) — Steve Bannon evoked the beaches of Normandy. Michael Flynn drew comparisons to Civil War battlefields and spoke of Americans who died for their country. Roger Stone called it a struggle “between the godly and the godless, between good and evil.” Rudy Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” Ali Alexander said it would be a “knife fight.”
As 2020 faded into 2021, some of President Donald Trump’s most influential supporters — among them members of his inner circle who were in direct contact with the President — spoke in ominous and violent terms about what was coming on January 6.
Even as anxious eyes turn toward the Inauguration Day on January 20, the words of these firebrands in the leadup to the riots at the Capitol raise crucial questions about the relationship between the rhetoric of far-right figureheads and the violence that unfolded on January 6.
“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon, Trump’s former top White House adviser, promised listeners of his podcast — called “War Room” — on January 5.
The next day, Trump himself gave a rambling speech near the White House where he claimed the election “was stolen from you, from me and from the country,” and called on supporters to “walk down to the Capitol.”
“We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” he added, “and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you will never take back our country with weakness.”
Soon after, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, killing a police officer and assaulting others before charging inside — some carrying weapons and zip-tie handcuffs.
“What we have is influential, powerful people influencing the President and pushing out messages that are radicalizing large chunks of the population,” said Heidi Beirich, chief strategy officer for the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit organization that monitors extremism around the world. “It’s very dangerous.”
To be sure, as a rule most speech that doesn’t convey a direct threat or incite “imminent lawless action” is protected under the First Amendment.
But experts told CNN they believe Trump and his most visible allies bear a great deal of responsibility for stoking the flames that led to the January 6 uprising.
“When you are an adviser to a President, formal or informal, you need to think about the impact of anti-democratic rhetoric,” said John Hudak, an expert on governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “And the President himself, and a lot of the President’s supporters and certainly his children, seem to believe that it is responsible for a President and his advisers and family to be anti-democratic. That’s a real problem. And we haven’t really experienced that in our history.”
Trump has already paid a historic price for his words, with the US House on Wednesday voting to make him the only American president to have been impeached twice — this time for “incitement of insurrection.”
But while much attention has been paid to Trump’s words in the run up to the breach of the US Capitol, less talked about is the fiery rhetoric of his most high-profile champions.
Bannon and Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment. Stone rejected CNN’s questions as “defamatory attempts to say that my belief in God and my view of the last election in apocalyptic terms is somehow inciting violence.” Alexander argued he had “no involvement in the breach of the US Capitol.”
Flynn attorney Sidney Powell, who herself is facing a defamation lawsuit over her claims about the election (she’s denied the allegations), insisted that Flynn “encourages patriotism and lawful political action,” and to suggest otherwise is “absolutely ludicrous.”
Bannon’s menacing metaphors
PHOTO CAPTION: Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon exits the Manhattan Federal Court on August 20, 2020 in the Manhattan borough of New York City.
In the weeks between the election and that day, Bannon and his guests and co-hosts on his “War Room” podcast relentlessly promoted conspiracy theories of election fraud and cast the fight to overturn the election results in war-like and often apocalyptic terms.
Bannon’s menacing metaphors first landed him in hot water a few days after on Election Day, when he suggested in a video that posted to several of his social media accounts that, if he were in charge, he wouldn’t merely fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and Anthony Fauci — the US government’s top infectious disease expert — but would put their heads on pikes “as a warning to federal bureaucrats.” Twitter permanently suspended his account.
In December, Bannon’s co-host tweeted a video of Bannon speaking on “War Room” overlaid with cinematic music and dramatic images from the famous D‑Day battle scene of “Saving Private Ryan.” In it, he spoke of the “moral obligation” Trump supporters have to “the kids that died at Normandy.” He added that if they allow Biden — “that feckless old man” — to win, “I want you to explain that to the 20-year-old kid in the first wave on D‑Day.”
On December 28, Bannon insisted that patriotic Trump supporters had to be ready to fight in the spirit of George Washington’s soldiers during the American Revolution and American soldiers on D‑Day in World War II. “That’s our DNA, that’s where we come from,” Bannon said.
Bannon began promoting the upcoming DC protests of January 6.
“l’ll tell you this,” Bannon said the day before the riot. “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is, strap in ... You have made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready.”
The podcasts also pointed to close coordination with Trump’s team. “You and me were talking almost every day, many times, you know, 10 times a day,” Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn said to Bannon on December 28.
Meanwhile, a senior Trump adviser confirmed that the President and Bannon have been in communication in recent weeks, discussing Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election.
‘You either fight with us or you get slashed’
PHOTO CAPTION Roger Stone, former adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, is flanked by security during a rally at Freedom Plaza, ahead of the U.S. Congress certification of the November 2020 election results, during protests in Washington, U.S., January 5, 2021.
Just before Christmas, Alexander — a political activist who has organized pro-Trump rallies, including one of the demonstrations that converged on the Capitol lawn on January 6 — used violent metaphors to hint at what was to come in January when speaking to followers of his livestream channel on the social media platform Periscope. In his freewheeling monologue, Alexander credited Roger Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described “dirty trickster” whose 40-month prison sentence for seven felonies was cut short by Trump’s commutation in July. (He was given a full pardon in December).
“This is something Roger and I have been planning for a long time,” Alexander said. “And finally, he’s off the leash. So, you know, it’s a knife fight and your two knife fighters are Ali Alexander and Roger Stone, and you either fight with us or you get slashed. So I’ll let you guys know more about what that means as we evolve.”
Alexander has helped turn the “Stop the Steal” slogan that Stone launched on Trump’s behalf during the 2016 primaries into a rallying cry for conservatives around the country.
At a DC rally on the night of January 5, Stone took the stage clad in one of his trademark pinstripe suits as a dance track titled “Roger Stone did nothing wrong” blared from the speakers.
After repeating the falsehood that the election was stolen from Trump, Stone, 68, rallied the faithful with an us-versus-them battle cry.
“This is nothing less than an epic struggle for the future of this country between dark and light, between the godly and the godless, between good and evil,” he said. “And we will win this fight or America will step off into a thousand years of darkness. We dare not fail. I will be with you tomorrow shoulder to shoulder.”
Stone also has bumped elbows with extremist groups, most notably the Proud Boys. In September he endorsed the congressional candidacy of Nick Ochs, who founded the Hawaii chapter of the far-right organization. Ochs, whose bid for the US House came up short, was arrested for his role in the Capitol siege. Law enforcement was alerted to it by the photo Ochs posted on Twitter of himself enjoying a cigarette in the building, and by the comments he made to a CNN reporter.
Long a dispenser of supercharged rhetoric, Stone was not muted by his recent run-in with the law, and was talking about election fraud even before November.
In September, he went on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show, InfoWars, and the two mused discursively about “fake ballots,” Big Tech and the Clintons.
“If someone will study the president’s authority in the Insurrection Act in his ability to impose, impose martial law,” Stone said, “if there is widespread cheating, he will have the authority to arrest (Mark) Zuckerberg, to arrest Tim Cook, to arrest the Clintons, to arrest anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”
War analogies abound
PHOTO CAPTION: Former US National Security Advisor Michael Flynn speaks to supporters of President Donald Trump during the Million MAGA March to protest the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in front of the US Supreme Court on December 12, 2020 in Washington, DC.
For his part, Jones has joined “Stop the Steal” efforts since the November election and used inflammatory, dark rhetoric to bolster the movement’s false claims.
Two days after election day, Jones said, “We are in the attempted overthrow of our country.” When a guest on the show mentioned people showing up in person to protest the counting of votes, Jones drew a comparison to World War II.
“It’s like when Hitler was bombing London, most Brits were against a war because they had World War I. But once Hitler bombed them, over 95% said let’s go to war,” he said. “This is a war. This is not regular times.”
Jones did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Also employing war analogies is another beneficiary of Trump’s pardon powers — Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.
Speaking to a fired-up crowd at the DC rally on January 5, Flynn — who was pardoned by Trump in November after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian diplomat — managed to pack election-fraud conspiracy theories, violent innuendo and a call to action into a couple of sentences.
“In some of these states, we have more dead voters than are buried on the battlefields of Gettysburg, or the battlefields of Vicksburg, or the battlefields of Normandy,” he said. “Those of you who are feeling weak tonight, those of you that don’t have the moral fiber in your body, get some tonight because tomorrow, we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.”
Much of the rhetoric leading up to the riot has been draped in the language of existential threat.
Speaking at a January 6 rally just before the siege, Rudy Giuliani — Trump’s personal attorney — spoke in grandiose terms about the stakes at hand.
“This is bigger than Donald Trump,” he said. “It’s bigger than you and me. It’s about these monuments and what they stand for. This has been a year in which they have invaded our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, our freedom to move, our freedom to live. I’ll be darned if they’re going to take away our free and fair vote. And we’re going to fight to the very end to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
His mention of “trial by combat” was cited by the New York State Bar Association, which has launched an inquiry into Giuliani to determine whether he should be expelled from the group.
“Mr. Giuliani’s words quite clearly were intended to encourage Trump supporters unhappy with the election’s outcome to take matters into their own hands,” the group said in a statement. “Their subsequent attack on the Capitol was nothing short of an attempted coup, intended to prevent the peaceful transition of power.”
Experts concerned that incitement is far from over
John Scott-Railton, a researcher at University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab who now works with others to identify extremist groups who were part of the Capitol mob, said the rhetoric plays into the fantasies of armed protesters who have been gunning for a civil war.
“They’re ready — it’s what they’ve been prancing around in the woods, playing dress up, preparing for,” he said. “I’m just terribly worried that they weren’t satisfied with what happened on the sixth, and they’re going to come back for more.”
As for Bannon, the tenor of his podcast took a turn once the violence started unfolding.
On the morning of January 6, before the rally and march on the Capitol, Bannon echoed Stone’s words by saying the day would be a battle between “the children of light and the forces of darkness.”
But the podcast’s tone shifted sharply as footage of the violence at the Capitol was broadcast nationwide. Even as Bannon and his co-podcasters continued to describe Vice President Mike Pence as a traitor, they absolved Trump and themselves from any responsibility for fomenting violence.
“What’s going on right now was choices made by individuals who are fed up with what they’ve seen happen,” said right-wing activist Ben Bergquam on a War Room episode later that same day. “When I’m talking to people on the ground, that is what I’m hearing over and over and over again, it has nothing to do with President Trump’s words.”
Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, said anyone paying attention knew the events on January 6 would be a magnet for angry people. The violence of extremists, he added, has historically been sparked by a fear that something is being taken away — be it a White majority, guns or a way of life.
“Whether it’s illegal or not, people have gotta know better,” he said. “You don’t have to be a genius to know how people are incited by words.”
CNN’s Nelli Black, Scott Bronstein, Bob Ortega, Benjamin Naughton and Yahya Abou-Ghazala contributed to this report.
One of the most bizarre things about the Capital Insurrection is when Jacob Chansley, the man who painted his face in red, white and blue, was shirtless and had a Viking hat led a Christian prayer from the Senate floor podium. This on the surface appeared to be pure lunacy but actually there was a sub-rosa strategy behind this.
Jacob Anthony Chansley, 33, is a well-known supporter of the QAnon conspiracy in his home state of Arizona, where he is a failed actor and lives with his mom.
The ‘QAnon shaman’ who stormed the Capitol building during last week’s riot wearing a fur hat with horns and face paint was kicked out of the Navy in 2007 for refusing to take an anthrax vaccine, it has been revealed.
Chansley had also been planning to return to Washington DC to create a disturbance at Joe Biden’s inauguration before he was arrested Saturday, according to federal prosecutors.
The article states “In that photo, Chansley held a sign that read, ‘HOLD THE LINE PATRIOTS GOD WINS.’” I believe this is part of a strategy for the underground Reich to target fundamentalist Christian nationalists to support fascist causes.
The MOST SIGNIFICANT CLUE in the article stated “One of his tattoos is said to show the symbol of Wotanism, an acronym for ‘Will of the Aryan Nation.’”
‘I obey the orders of the president of the United States,’ he said.
https://mol.im/a/9176681
Donald Trump gave what may be an Aryan Fist Pump/ White Power Symbol as he boarded Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House while he made his final exit from the White House en-route to his Mar-a-Lago Florida Resort.
See picture # 5 out of 28 https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/in-pictures-trumps-fist-pump-as-biden-takes-charge-20210121-h1ti9o
Senator Josh Hawley who tried to delay the Senate Certification of the Election for Joe Biden also has a fist pump on January 6 to the crowd before they rushed the Capital. The article interpreted it as a show of solidarity for President Trump. Look near the bottom of the article for the fist pump picture.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article248354085.html
My question is if this was an Aryan Fist Pump identified by the ADL and it suggests Underground Reich loyalties more than simple pro-Trump loyalties:
The Washington Post has a new report giving us more details on the timeline of actions, or lack of actions, in the chain of command overseeing the DC National Guard during the January 6 storming of the Capitol. It’s more or less in line with what we already knew, but with more details about the nature of the obstructions in the chain-of-command that created the multi-hour delays in ordering in the Guard while a pro-Trump mob scours the Capitol for members of Congress. As the report describes, the obstructions were largely put in place in advance, including removing the ability of the head of the DC National Guard, Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, to independently send in emergency forces without first getting permission from the Pentagon. And many of these restrictions were publicly known in advance too, with a senior US official telling the Washington Post on Jan 5 that the military would be “absolutely nowhere near the Capitol building”. This was in response to what was then the growing concerns that then-President Trump would do something as extreme as declaring martial law in order to force a new election or worse.
And then, after the Capitol police formally requested the National Guard (a formal request that, itself, came in late at 1:49 PM, well after the Guard was clearly needed), the decision at the Pentagon to ultimately release the troops was apparently being wrestled over on a phone call described by participants as “chaotic”, where concerns of the ‘optics’ of sending in the Guard weighed heavily on top Pentagon officials. Oh, and it turns out one of the participants of the chaotic phone call included Charles Flynn, brother of Michael Flynn. So apparent sensitivities over the heavy-handed use of the National Guard by Trump to quell police brutality protests in the summer of 2020 were apparently the excuse used to first preemptively restrict the ability of the National Guard commanders to respond quickly to emergencies and then continuing holding back the Guard after the request was finally made:
“Walker and former Army secretary Ryan D. McCarthy, along with other top officials, briefed the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday behind closed doors about the events, the beginning of what is likely to become a robust congressional inquiry into the preparations for a rally that devolved into a riot at the Capitol, resulting in five people dead and representing a significant security failure.”
As we can see, there was no shortage of disturbing revelations when Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, and former Army secretary Ryan D. McCarthy kicked off the congressional inquiry into the Jan 6 insurrection. A day when standard operating procedures for the National Guard were not in operation and local commanders had their powers to take emergency military action preemptively restricted by the Pentagon leadership. Restrictions that were put in place, in part, because of concerns of a repeat of the heavy-handed use of the National Guard in the summer of 2020 to quell police brutality protests. So fears of repeating Trump’s prior abuses of power played into the decisions to preemptively hold back the Guard:
And yet, even if we accept at face value the concerns over optics as a reason for the preemptive moves to restrict the ability of the local commanders to call in emergency troops on their own, that still doesn’t explain the multi-hour delays in securing the higher-up authority when the request was finally made. We have DC police chief Sund making a request to the DC National Guard chief Walker at 1:49 PM (already way too late). Then Walker asks for authority from the Army leadership and doesn’t receive a response for another hour and fifteen minutes. And it’s ultimately three hours for acting defense secretary Christopher Miller gives the authorization:
Why the absurd delay in giving the authorization? Optics. That’s the explanation, we’re given, where extreme concerns inside the Pentagon led to the decisions to preemptively restrict the ability of local commanders to send in even the emergency troops, because “we don’t want to send the wrong message”. And this extreme apprehensiveness on the part of the Pentagon was publicly acknowledged by the Pentagon to the Washington Post on Jan 5, a day before the riot. It raises the question of whether or not these public messages in advance of Jan 6 about how the Pentagon was planning on having a minimal presence on the Capitol that day, despite all the warnings of possible violence, were taken by the insurrectionists as a kind of public ‘green light’ to proceed with the insurrection:
But then there’s General Walker’s the potentially highly explosive phone call with the Pentagon, described as “chaotic” and with a large number of participants. Who was on the phone call and what were they arguing? All we are told is that there were concerns by many, including Army staff director, Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, over the ‘optics’ of sending in the National Guard to back up the Capitol police. This conversation about ‘optics’ was, of course, happening while images of a ransacked Capitol were broadcast across the world:
Who was on that chaotic phone call at the Pentagon and what were they arguing? That remains a big open question in this inquiry, although we have some answers already. For example, the Pentagon was initially denying that Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn — brother of Michael Flynn — was on that phone call. But now we’re learning that, yes, Charles was on the call. Although he claims he was only on for four minutes and didn’t say anything but others on the call are telling reporters otherwise. So we know the brother of Michael Flynn — one of the biggest public backers of the idea of Trump declaring martial law — was on the Pentagon phone call, we know his presence on the call was initially hidden, and we know that he’s continuing to hide what he said on the call. But we still don’t know what he said. So hopefully investigators will be getting some answers to the question of what Charles Flynn actually said on that phone call, along with the rest of the call participants, because it sounds like the argument over whether or not to send in troops during that phone call may have been a major factor in the multi-hour delay:
“The general, who will soon be promoted to a four-star officer, said he could not remember whether he said anything on the call. “I do not recall saying anything in the conference, but I may have, and I just don’t recall saying anything to the audience on the other end,” he said. Other participants on the call have told The Post they heard Flynn speak.”
It’s another discrepancy in the story of this ‘chaotic’ phone call. First the Pentagon denies Flynn was on the call. Then we learn he was on the call, but Flynn assures us it was briefly and he didn’t say anything. But others on the call say otherwise. What was Charles Flynn arguing on this call? We still don’t know. But it’s not hard to imagine what he might have been advocating given all the efforts to obscure these details.
And that’s the part of this most clearly emerging from this investigation: we still don’t know what exactly happened, but it’s becoming increasingly clear a lot of people don’t want us to know what happened. The contours of a coverup are clearly visible.
Here’s a story that adds some disturbing context to the recent reports that Donald Trump’s planned impeachment defense will revolve around arguing that the Jan 6. storming of the Capitol was justified:
ProPublica has an interesting report on the individuals involved with the planning of the January 6 “March to Save America” pro-Trump rally that immediately preceded the storming of the Capitol. This is the rally associated with Roger Stone’s “Stop the Steal” group, leading many to suspect Stone himself may have been the ringleader for the event.
We’re now learning more about the people directly involved in organizing the rally. It turns out that, in the week leading up to the rally, there was a flurry of changed plans. Plans that suddenly included a late effort to get Donald Trump himself to speak at the rally. Who was behind these changed plans? Caroline Wren was suddenly asserting control over the planning. And Wren just happens to be a deputy to Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at Trump Victory, a joint presidential fundraising committee during the 2020 campaign. In addition, the production company that helped but on the event was owned by Justin Caporale, a former top aide to first lady Melania Trump.
But it doesn’t sound like the Trump campaign directly hired Wren to do that work on the event. Instead, it was Julie Jenkins Fancelli, the heiress to Publix Super Markets, who committed around $300k to fund the rally. Fancelli’s financing of the rally was reportedly facilitated by Alex Jones. So while the question of Roger Stone’s involvement in the rally/coup attempt is still an open question, those questions of who planned that rally and what exactly did they plan are questions that go well beyond Roger Stone now that we’ve learned that aides to Melania and Don Jr’s girlfriend were the key figures behind some sort of last-minute change in plans for the event that catalyzed the insurrection. An event that was paid for by a wealthy grocery heiress thanks to the work of Alex Jones:
“Wren was no ordinary event planner. She served as a deputy to Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at Trump Victory, a joint presidential fundraising committee during the 2020 campaign. The Justin mentioned in her text was Justin Caporale, a former top aide to first lady Melania Trump, whose production company helped put on the event at the Ellipse.”
Caroline Wren, Don Jr.‘s girlfriend’s deputy fundraiser, was the one calling the shots. That’s the picture that’s emerging of the final week leading up to the event. As well as a picture of an operation where the ultimate message of the event was very much in flux until the last minute. Why? Because that message depended on how many Republicans in congress they could ultimately get to join in on opposing the electoral vote count. In other words, the rally and the Congressional objections to the electoral count were jointly planned stunts that required coordination. Last-minute opportunistic coordination in this case:
But it wasn’t the Trump campaign that directly paid for the “March to Save America” rally. No, it was Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli who ended up paying the $300,000 for the rally with Alex Jones playing some sort of middle-man role:
It’s quite a snapshot of the state of American civics in 2021: a wealthy heiress coordinating with a far right internet trash conspiracy peddler finances a rally intended to whip the crowd into an insurrectionary fervor based on a blatant Big Lie. And the person directly running the show was a top fundraiser for the president’s son’s girlfriend. At this point, perhaps Donald Trump’s best impeachment defense just might be to diffuse blame by pointing to all of the other people who were clearly involved in its planning. There were already so many chefs in the coup-kitchen, Trump’s involvement in the planning wasn’t really necessary.
Ftr Coup Coup Radicalizing the Base 2–5‑2021
A March (and Apri)l, 2021 Mother Jones article by Mark Follman talks about how trump pushed the Communist Conspiracy message in a threatening “plot to steal America” with inflammatory and couched racist rhetoric to radicalize his base and incite violent attacks that serve his political agenda. His base is made to feel like they are a special group with a mission. However they mistakenly believe they are fighting against tyranny in order to gain back their own freedom, whicle in reality doing the opposite. He benefits from the propaganda outlet Epoc Times.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/02/trump-stochastic-terrorism-us-capitol-mob-incitement/
Selected portions of the article state:
Trump did more than just invite supporters to a rally. He also repeatedly shared a slickly produced video, titled “The Plot to Steal America,” that warned ominously of a Chinese communist scheme involving Biden, the Democrats, and the news media, and called for Trump supporters to mobilize. “We know that our rights don’t come from the government, but from God,” declared the narrator, an Ohio jewelry buyer formerly employed by the pro-Trump propaganda outlet the Epoch Times. “And we will fight to the death to protect those rights.” In a tweet the day after Christmas, Trump suggested that if the Democrats were in his position, the “Rigged & Stolen” presidential election would be considered “an act of war, and fight to the death.”
The description of Trump as a terrorist leader is neither metaphor nor hyperbole—it is the assessment of veteran national security experts. Trump, those experts say, adopted a method known as stochastic terrorism, a process of incitement where the instigator provokes extremist violence under the guise of plausible deniability. Although the exact location, timing, and source of the violence may not be predictable, its occurrence is all but inevitable. When pressed about the incitement, the instigator typically responds with equivocal denials and muted denunciations of violence, or claims to have been “joking,” as Trump and those speaking on his behalf routinely made.
“Stochastic” derives from the ancient Greek words stochastikosand stochazesthai, meaning “skillful in aiming” and “to target.” Among counterterrorism experts, the term historically was applied to the techniques used by ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as anti-abortion religious extremists, all of whom used inflammatory rhetoric to radicalize others to carry out horrific attacks. Trump did the previously unthinkable: He brought the method into the White House
Trump’s nods and winks to far-right hate groups began during his 2016 campaign and came to a head in August 2017 when he suggested that the torch-wielding white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, included some “very fine people.” His demagoguery was initially focused on “the other,” whether it was Muslims, or Mexican “rapists,” or migrant caravans, or “shithole” countries. He repeatedly attacked the news media as “the enemy of the people,” provoking violent threats and plots against journalists. By his 2020 reelection campaign, he’d turned his incitement squarely on the American political leaders who opposed him.
The campaign of incitement escalated last spring when Trump urged supporters to “Liberate Michigan!” in response to pandemic restrictions ordered by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He then sided with the armed protesters who swarmed the state Capitol: “These are very good people, but they are angry,” he tweeted. “They want their lives back again, safely!” By early October, the FBI had arrested 13 people for violent plots, including some who allegedly planned to kidnap Whitmer. Far-right extremists also allegedly targeted Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, whom Trump had blasted as “crazy” for his pandemic policies and for supposedly planning to take away Virginians’ guns. When asked during a presidential debate in September whether he would denounce the neofascist gang known as the Proud Boys, Trump infamously responded that they should “stand back and stand by.”
Trump’s nods and winks to far-right hate groups began during his 2016 campaign and came to a head in August 2017 when he suggested that the torch-wielding white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, included some “very fine people.” His demagoguery was initially focused on “the other,” whether it was Muslims, or Mexican “rapists,” or migrant caravans, or “shithole” countries. He repeatedly attacked the news media as “the enemy of the people,” provoking violent threats and plots against journalists. By his 2020 reelection campaign, he’d turned his incitement squarely on the American political leaders who opposed him.
The campaign of incitement escalated last spring when Trump urged supporters to “Liberate Michigan!” in response to pandemic restrictions ordered by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He then sided with the armed protesters who swarmed the state Capitol: “These are very good people, but they are angry,” he tweeted. “They want their lives back again, safely!” By early October, the FBI had arrested 13 people for violent plots, including some who allegedly planned to kidnap Whitmer. Far-right extremists also allegedly targeted Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, whom Trump had blasted as “crazy” for his pandemic policies and for supposedly planning to take away Virginians’ guns. When asked during a presidential debate in September whether he would denounce the neofascist gang known as the Proud Boys, Trump infamously responded that they should “stand back and stand by.”
On December 14, state electors in Michigan and Arizona faced with “credible threats” were compelled to take extraordinary security measures as they convened to certify Biden’s victory. “We are stuck parsing Trump’s words, forced into textualist debates about what he meant,” Kayyem tweeted that day. “Meanwhile his supporters know EXACTLY what he means
The Proud Boys embedded Trump’s “wild!” tweet in flyers encouraging members to join the DC rally and hawked T‑shirts with the slogan “Proud Boys standing by.” In late December, the Wall Street Journalreported, leaders of the group—some of whose members stormed the Capitol—vowed on social media to put “boots on the ground” and “turn out in record numbers” on January 6. Trump, one said, had just given them “the green light.”
“We love you. You’re very special,” Trump told the mob, looking directly into the camera. “I know how you feel.”
Even as his presidency neared its end, security experts warned that Trump still needed to be vanquished as a terrorist leader. “He tells them where to go. He tells them what to do. He tells them why they’re angry,” Kayyem said
The Capitol insurrection was a beginning, not an end—celebrated by far-right extremists as a thrilling affirmation of their relevance. National security experts and historians alike know that failed coup attempts are often followed by successful ones.
“Bad ideologies don’t die, but they do get shamed and isolated,” says Kayyem, noting Biden’s ability to rebuke Trumpism with a folksy “C’mon, man!” or a “You can’t be serious.” No ink was spared during the Trump presidency, she adds, over trying to understand the grievances of his ardent supporters. But violent extremism requires otherwise: “My hope is we’ll see the Biden administration push an agenda of shaming this.”
Everything from the monetization of far-right rage by Fox News and its upstart competitors to extremist groups recruiting and radicalizing people via social media must be confronted. “The biggest challenge,” observes Kayyem, “is going to be a cultural change with what was allowed to fester and how we root it out.”
Here’s an interesting point of conflict breaking out in the world of far right social media that threatens to drag the Mercers into the ongoing purge of the Republican Party and Conservative movement of anyone who shows of hint of ‘censoring’ even the most outrageous far right Big Lies:
The CEO of Parler, John Matze, was fired last week and he’s blaming the investors for the move. Matze says he received a written warning that he violated the terms of his confidentiality agreement by making disparaging statements and disclosing insider informatino to the media that could damage the reputation of the company. Matze claims that they fired him shortly before the platform was coming back online and did it because they are attempting to restrict his ability to speak his mind about his vision for Parler. The twist is that the main investor is Rebekah Mercer. So the CEO of the social media platform that was championed as the right-wing free-speech haven is claiming that Rebekah Mercer fired him in an attempt to silence him over his comments about the future of this free-speech platform.
What was the different in visions for Parler? Well, here’s where we find a double-twist: Matze claims that he and Mercer disagreed over how to regulate Neo-Nazis and any other domestic terrorism groups that incite violence. Matze wanted Parler to crack down on these groups but says his position was met with silence by Mercer. So, based on Matze’s claims, he was fired in an attempt by Rebekah Mercer to muzzle him and to keep Parler a pro-violence Nazi-friendly platform:
““That’s not the vision I had for the company,” Matze told USA TODAY. “These people just want to censor me. Obviously, my statement about their vision not aligning with mine must be true considering they are trying to stop me from speaking my mind.””
Matze is being muzzled. That’s how he put it. Muzzled over his warnings that Parler crack down on neo-Nazis and other domestic terror groups that incite violence. Rebekah Mercer wants to keep Parler open to such groups, according to Matze:
And Matze’s warnings about incitements to violence on the platform are directly related to the other major legal issue facing Parler: the role it played in in orchestrating the January 6 storming of the Capitol:
Or maybe Matze is a liability in the growing libel lawsuits brought by Dominion against the various media platforms that aggressively pushed the vote-rigging claims without evidence? It’s not clear. But as the following article points out, whether or not the Mercers were directly involved in planning the insurrection, they are perhaps the largest donor for the hyper-Trumpian wing of the GOP that most enthusiastically backed the insurrection, like Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. And Ali Alexander, the Roger Stone acolyte and primary organizer of the ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies, even received Mercer donations for his “Black Conservatives Fund” outfit back in 2014 and 2016. As we should expect, the Black Conservatives Fund is one of the groups that was promoting the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.
So between their broad backing of the far right groups that actually staged the and financing of Parler, it’s not all a stretch to describe the Jan 6 insurrection as being was orchestrated by the dominant ‘Mercer-wing’ of the GOP:
““The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution,” Bannon told The New Yorker in 2017. “Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.” Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, sees it differently. Rebekah Mercer, he said in an interview with Salon, is the “chief financier or one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement, and that’s what it is.””
Rebekah Mercer is the “chief financier or one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement.” That’s how former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt describes her. It sounds like Rebekah is the one most directly involved with managing the Mercer family’s political investments and she might even be more of a zealot than her father. And that’s fundamentally why we can predict with confidence that any investigation into the financing behind the insurrection will lead back to the Mercers. Although, thanks to the US’s dark money laws, it will probably be years before we get a better idea of just how much they spent:
It’s rather fitting that the first family of American fascism also owns the company claiming to have the US’s largest private cache of machine guns. Because if we had to attempt to characterize the Mercers’ political philosophy, it could roughly be symbolized as a giant pile of privately owned machine guns. The worship and execution of raw power. A political philosophy that’s as shallow as it is chilling. And quite a good fit with the Trumpian cult of personality that has stolen the hearts and minds of the GOP base. It’s arguably the worst aspect of the story of the rise of the Mercers: It isn’t just that the GOP is being taken over by the Mercers’ money. It’s been captured by their philosophy too. Not that the pre-Mercer GOP was anything to brag about, but they’ve managed to taking the rotting corpse of that party and make it even more rotten and souless.
So now that we have the former CEO of Parler publicly accusing Rebekah Mercer of coddling neo-Nazis and domestic terrorists, there’s the question of how Matze’s public accusations might end up impacting Rebekah’s legal culpability in fomenting the insurrection. But perhaps the bigger question is how much will her popularity increase with the GOP base as a result of Matze’s accusations and when is she going to run for office herself.
Here is a January 8, Rolling Stone Article on the symbolysm revealed on the QAnon Shaman’who gave a prayer in the Senate Chamber during the Capital Insurrection. His Tatoo’s have Nazi and White Supremacist symbolism.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-shaman-maga-capitol-riot-rune-pagan-imagery-tattoo-1111344/
Is the ‘QAnon Shaman’ From the MAGA Capitol Riot Covered in Neo-Nazi Imagery?
Runes and other Pagan symbols aren’t inherently racist — but they’ve long been coopted by white supremacists
Kim Kelly January 8, 2021 4:23PM ET
PHOTO CAPTION: Supporters of US President Donald Trump, including Jake Angeli, a QAnon supporter known for his painted face and horned hat, protest in the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.
Mere hours after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitolbuilding in Washington, D.C., forcing Congress to evacuate and giving every impression of staging an attempted coup, the right-wing propaganda machine whirred to life. Republican mouthpiece Sarah Palin, Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood (who has since been bannedfrom Twitter for inciting violence), far-right Florida Representative Matt Gaetz,and innumerable pro-Trump social media accounts all began spreadingan unfounded and utterly bizarre false-flag theory that antifascists, or “antifa,” had somehowinfiltrated the crowd and were actually behind all the violence and destruction. Among their major pieces of “evidence” were photos of Arizona QAnonsupporter Jake Angeli, who iswell-knownfor his outsized, costumed presence at pro-Trump rallies and far-right anti-lockdown protests. Angeli himself was mortifiedat being mistaken for antifa, tweeting plaintively, “I’m a Qanon & digital soldier. My name is Jake & I marched with the police & fought against BLM & ANTIFA in PHX.”
ARTICLE LINK: ‘QAnon Shaman,’ Man Carrying Pelosi’s Lectern Both Arrested Following Capitol Riot
But there may be an even more blatant sign that Angeli is no friend to antifascists: his much-photographed bare torso is covered in symbols that have long been used by the white supremacist movement. Given his penchant for showing up to protests shirtless, face-painted, and sporting a horned helmet like some kind of racist Party City Viking who took a wrong turn and ended up at Burning Man, Angeli’s many tattoos are often on full display, including his large trio of Odinist symbols. He has a mjolnir, or Thor’s Hammer, on his stomach, an image of Yggdrasil, or Tree of Life, etched around his nipple, and most significantly, placed right above his heart, a valknut, or “knot of the slain,” an old Norse runic symbol turned recognized hate symbol that is popular among white supremacists. In addition, the mjolnirhas become a symbol of identity among modern heathens, and is particularly popularamong those aligned with the explicitly white supremacist neo-Völkisch” or “folkish” movement.
The presence of Yggdrasil or even mjolniron their own isn’t necessarily cause for alarm, given their popularity among modern pagans and fans of Norse mythology, but there is far less ambiguity around the valknut. There issome debateabout its original meaning, and its three interconnected triangles have appeared on a variety of archaeological objects from the Viking era; the name itself is a neologism, a modern combination of the Old Norsevalr — the slain — and knut, “knot.” While it’s used in some Europeancorporatelogos, Heathens now use it to signify that one is ready to be taken into the ranks of Odin’s chosen warriors — essentially, to die a warrior’s death for the cause. When tattooed on a conservative activist who adheres to a blood libel-style conspiracy like QAnon, it wouldn’t even have to mean he was a white supremacist, but rather that conspiratorial world views have a historical context about which their believers should be slightly self-aware.
Understandably, many actual pagans are horrifiedat the way white supremacists have co-opted their religious and cultural icons and twisted them into symbols of hate. Talia Lavin, who explores the concept in her recent book, Culture Warlords, says that neo-Nazis’ Viking fetish harkens back to their obsession with both traditional European conceptions of masculinity and whiteness itself. “Neopagan symbols offer the hypermasculine aesthetic sheen of the Viking,” she explains via text message. “But we can also see a desire to ground their white supremacist ideology in a purportedly timeless myth, a desire to reach back to an anachronistic, ahistorical ‘perfect’ whiteness, thus grounding their violence in an idealized past, in white nationalism as in any other form of nationalism.”
This kind of Norse imagery had a long history of being co-opted by terrible people. The original Nazis famously made heavy use of Norse and Germanic runes (the “SS” bolt is the most famous example), as do their modern successorsin groups like the Nordic Resistance Movement, the Soldiers of Odin, and the National Socialist Movement,which hasadopted the othalaor odalrune as its logo. Members of the Aryan Brotherhood are fond of tattooing runes and Viking symbols alongside their swastikas and Celtic crosses; an explicitly white supremacist branch of modern paganism called Odinismor Wotanism is promoted by the Asatru FolkAssembly (whose founder, Stephen McNallen, attendedthe deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville) and continuesto proliferateand cross-pollinate with other fascist ideologies (notorious white supremacist and murdererDavid Lane was a fan); and runes are rampant within the neo-Nazi black metal scene (which is where I first came across the valknutafter stumbling on a Nazi black metal band named, well, Walknut). It’s similar to what happened to the swastika, in which an ancient religious symbol was violently co-opted by Nazis and forever poisoned; movements to “reclaim the swastika” exist, but some things simply cannot be undone, no matter how unfair it is to the innocent people who saw their sacred symbol stolen and perverted.
This is also where it can get sticky, though, because there are plenty of pagans and metal musicians who are not affiliated with white supremacist ideologies (as well as explicitly anti-fascist varieties of each). The existence of both Thorr’s Hammer, a highly respected and definitely not-fascist Nineties death/doom project with lyrics about Norse mythology and a Norwegian vocalist, and Thor’s Hammer, a virulently racist neo-Nazi black metal band from Poland with deep ties to the international Nazi black metal scene, make that apparent. Outside of subcultural niches, not every person who gets a rune or Norse symbol tattoo necessarily fully understands its political and cultural history, especially now that Marvel has brought the legend of Thor and his Hammer back into the mainstream.
There is even a growing movement to wrest these symbols and modern heathenism more generally away from white supremacists, with groups like Heathens Against Hateand Heathens United Against Racism offering an antiracist alternative.
If Angeli himself were not so obviously aligned with anti-Semitic far-right extremist politics, his tattoos would not carry nearly so much weight. But since he is, he seems to be sending a message with those interlocked triangles, one that could be recognized by the white supremacists he’s chosen to march alongside.The right’s attempt to paint him as antifa would almost be funny if it weren’t so utterly detached from reality. When someone goes to such extravagant lengths to show you who they are, believe them.
Ftr Coup Coup – Oath Keepers – Three Percenters Plot 02–13-21
This next article alleges that a leader of the far-right Oath Keepers, Thomas Caldwell militia group and led other extremists in a pre-planned plot to attack on the U.S. Capitol. Caldwell’s lawyer said that Mr. Caldwell not only held a leadership position in the extremist group Oath Keepers — had a top-secret security clearance for decades and previously worked for the FBI; potentially exposing the weaknesses of the security checks.
They discussed the possibility of getting a boat to ferry ‘heavy weapons’ across the Potomac River. He sent sent a text message to someone believed to be affiliated with another far right militant group, the Three Percenters. They had a “Quick Response Team” waiting for the heavy weapons a Caldwell was coordinating calls to discuss the plan, and joining forces with another far right wing militia Oath Keeper chapters.
Mr. Caldwell and his associates began plotting their incursion of the US Capitol in November 2020. A co-conspirator, Watkins invited recruits six days after the election for a training camp in Columbus, Ohio, to make people ‘fighting fit’ for Inauguration Day. He told them to prepare to ‘kill and die for our rights’. Another plotter, Crowl, a former Marine mechanic, allegedly attended a different training camp in North Carolina, in December.
These people said that they were working under the perceived directions of Donald Trump, embracing his claims of election fraud and readying themselves for bloodshed. One of these participants made it all the way to the house floor, another to Pelosi’s office.
Authorities found a ‘Death List’ in Caldwell’s home that included the name of an elected official from another state. Investigators also found invoices for more than $750 worth of live ammunition and what appeared to be a gun designed to look like a cellphone, prosecutors said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9251783/Oath-Keepers-rioter-Thomas-Caldwell-plotted-ferry-heavy-weapons-Potomac-prosecutors-say.html
February 11, 2021 Keith Griffith for the Dailymail.com and Associated Press
Oath Keepers ‘leader’ who claims to be a retired FBI section chief ‘discussed using boats to ferry “heavy weapons” across Potomac River for Capitol attack and had “death list” of officials’
A man authorities say is a leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group and led other extremists in the attack on the U.S. Capitol discussed the possibility of getting a boat to ferry ‘heavy weapons’ across the Potomac River, prosecutors say.
Thomas Caldwell, 66, is charged with conspiracy to obstruct Congress alongside two other alleged members of the militia group, and court papers filed on Thursday provide chilling new evidence in the plot on Capitol Hill.
Prosecutors said Caldwell sent a text message to someone believed to be affiliated with the Three Percenters, an anti-government movement, on January 3 about the possibility of sending weapons across the river.
‘How many people either in the militia or not (who are still supportive of our efforts to save the Republic) have a boat on a trailer that could handle a Potomac crossing?’ Caldwell wrote, according to prosecutors.
‘If we had someone standing by at a dock ramp (one near the Pentagon for sure) we could have our Quick Response Team with the heavy weapons standing by, quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms.’
PHOTO CAPTION: Prosecutors said Caldwell sent a text message to someone believed to be affiliated with the Three Percenters on January 3 about the possibility of sending weapons across the Potomac
PHOTO CAPTION: Oath Keepers are seen using the ‘ranger file’ to move through the crowd on January 6
PHOTO CAPTION: A map shows the proposed boat launch near the Pentagon that Caldwell allegedly proposed using to ferry a ‘Quick Response Team with the heavy weapons’ to the Capitol
Prosecutors revealed the evidence to make the case that Caldwell should remain locked up while he awaits trial.
Authorities also said that during a search of Caldwell’s home, they also found a ‘Death List’ that included the name of an elected official from another state.
Investigators also found invoices for more than $750 worth of live ammunition and what appeared to be a gun designed to look like a cellphone, prosecutors said.
Caldwell’s lawyer is urging the judge to release him, saying he denies being a member of the Oath Keepers or ever going into the Capitol building.
The details come days after Caldwell’s lawyer said the man — who authorities said holds a leadership position in the extremist group — had a top-secret security clearance for decades and previously worked for the FBI.
The FBI has not answered questions about the lawyer’s claim and Caldwell’s lawyer has not responded to multiple messages.
PHOTO CAPTION: ‘Caldwell planned with Donovan Crowl, Jessica Watkins, (pictured) and others known and unknown, to forcibly storm the U.S. Capitol,’ an arrest affidavit says
Group of Oath Keepers seen outside Capitol door on day of siege
Defense Attorney Thomas Thomas Plofchan said Caldwell has held a top-secret security clearance since 1979, which required multiple special background investigations. Caldwell also ran a consulting firm that did classified work for the U.S. government, the lawyer said.
The Virginia man is among more than 200 people charged with federal crimes so far in the deadly siege.
He was charged with conspiracy last month alongside two other accused members of the Oath Keepers, who are accused of planning in advance to carry out violence.
Authorities say Caldwell began plotting to undo President Joe Biden’s victory as early as the days after the election.
Prosecutors said the Oath Keepers communicated during the attack about the location of lawmakers.
At one point during the siege, Caldwell received a message that said ‘all members are in the tunnels under the capital,’ according to court documents. ‘Seal them in turn on gas,’ it said.
Caldwell is charged alongside Jessica Marie Watkins, 38, and Donovan Ray Crowl, 50, of Ohio.
PHOTO CAPTION: Jessica Watkins (left) and Donavan Crowl, both military veterans, were arrested in Ohio
PHOTO CAPTION: Jessica Watkins, 38, a bartender from Ohio, participated in the mob that stormed the Capitol, federal prosecutors say
The trio, who are all US military veterans and affiliated with the extremist Oath Keepers group, are accused of conspiring to obstruct Congress and other counts, punishable up to 20 years in prison.
Watkins, who authorities say conspired with Caldwell, indicated as Biden’s inauguration approached that she ‘was awaiting direction from President Trump,’ prosecutors said in another court filing Thursday.
‘I am concerned this is an elaborate trap,’ Watkins in a text message days after the election, according to the court papers. ‘Unless the POTUS himself activates us, it´s not legit. The POTUS has the right to activate units too. If Trump asks me to come, I will.’
There was no attorney listed for Watkins in the court record.
According to an indictment, Watkins began tapping up potential recruits six days after the election for a training camp in Columbus, Ohio, to make people ‘fighting fit’ for Inauguration Day, telling them to prepare to ‘kill and die for our rights’.
Crowl, a former Marine mechanic, allegedly attended a different training camp in North Carolina, in December, prosecutors said.
PHOTO CAPTION: Members of the Oath Keepers militia group, including Jessica Marie Watkins (Far Left), stand among supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump at the Capitol on January 6
Members of paramilitary group Oath Keepers riot in US Capitol
In the 15-page indictment unsealed last month, prosecutors said Watkins, Crowl and Caldwell all began plotting their incursion of the US Capitol in November 2020, and continued communications until January 19, when Caldwell was arrested.
Watkins, Crowl, and Caldwell are all reportedly affiliated with the anti-government extremist group Oath Keepers, while Watkins and Crowl are also members of the Ohio State Regular Militia.
Who Are the Oath Keepers?
Founded by Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers is an American far-right anti-government militia organization composed of current and former military, police, and first responders who pledge to fulfill the oath that all military and police take in order to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’
The group describes itself as non-partisan, though several organizations that monitor domestic terrorism and hate groups describe it as extremist or radical.
Mark Pitcavage of the ADL describes the group as ‘heavily armed extremists with a conspiratorial and anti-government mindset looking for potential showdowns with the government.’
Their frequent exchanges varied in topics from a call to action to logistics, including lodging options, coordinating calls to discuss the plan, and joining forces with other Oath Keeper chapters, prosecutors say.
In their planning, prosecutors claim, the group said that they were working under the perceived directions of Donald Trump, embracing his claims of election fraud and readying themselves for bloodshed.
Federal authorities say that Caldwell also sent Facebook messages following the attack.
‘Proud boys scuffled with cops and drove them inside to hide,’ Caldwell’s message said, according to court documents.
‘Breached the doors. One guy made it all the way to the house floor, another to Pelosi’s office. A good time.’
Authorities said Watkins and Crowl returned to Ohio, then went back to Virginia to stay with Caldwell at his Berryville home for three days through January 16.
The FBI complaint said Crowl and Watkins told police in Urbana, Ohio, they drove back to Ohio after hearing the FBI was looking for them.
All three are charged with federal counts including conspiracy, conspiracy to hurt an officer, violent entry, obstruction of official business and destruction of government property.
Caldwell has been detained in the Central Virginia Regional Correctional Facility in Orange, Virginia, since his arrest last month.
This next article by Seth Abramson in “Proof” on January 27, 2021 shows his evidence at what he terms a “War Counsel” which met on January 5, the day before the Capital Riot who met to plan at least a portion of what was the Coup. The meeting included Newly elected Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric Trump, Peter Navarro, Charles Herbster, Ali Alexander, Adam Piper, and Paroned former DIA General Michael Flynn, Corey Lewandowski (former campaign aid), David Bossie (former head of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation – the organization which won the court case to permit unlimited financial support for a campaign issue, that essentially destroyed our democratice representation who co-produced six feature films with Steve Bannon), Cyberintelligence specialists Phil Waldron My Pillow owner Mike Lindell and Trump supporter, and Daniel Beck,
This article was written before the impeachment trial, but interestingly it would explain why an apparently insignificant and newly elected Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville would be talking with President Trump as the Capital Riot started. This came out in articles the last day of Trump’s second Senate Impeachment Trial. The fact that Senator Tuberville denied his attendance at the January 5the meeting is suspicious.
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/more-revelations-emerge-on-secretive
More Revelations About Secretive January 5 War Council at Trump International Hotel
A few key questions have been resolved, but significant unsolved mysteries remain.
Seth Abramson Jan 27
Reporting in the Omaha World-Herald, as well as social media screenshots and videos, confirm a January 5 pre-insurrection war council at DC’s Trump International Hotel. Also confirmed by the evidence is a list of the gathering’s (minimum) fifteen attendees.
The first Proof article on this subject can be found here.
The secretive January 5 meeting—which one attendee, Senator Tommy Tuberville, has already been caught lying about, and which another, Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, has attempted to scrub his social media to conceal—included eight different components of Trump’s political machine:
¥ Family members: Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle (current girlfriend of Trump Jr., and a former on-air Fox News personality).
¥ Trump’s legal team: Rudy Giuliani.
¥ United States senators: Tuberville and at least two other senators (see below).
¥ Administration officials: Peter Navarro and Charles Herbster.
¥ January 6 organizers: Ali Alexander, Adam Piper, and Michael Flynn.
¥ Trump campaign officials: Corey Lewandowski (former), David Bossie (former).
¥ Cyberintelligence specialists: Flynn (information operations) and possibly Phil Waldron (self-described—see more below—as skilled in “intelligence analysis”).
¥ Trump donors: Mike Lindell, Daniel Beck, and Herbster.
Due to minimal ongoing coverage of this extraordinary pre-January 6 strategy meeting, questions about the Trump International Hotel gathering remain. This article outlines key questions and reveals the answers to several—all uncovered over the last 24 hours.
Question 1: How many senators attended Team Trump’s January 5 war council?
In his initial Facebook post, Herbster listed Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R‑AL) first on his list of meeting attendees, making the addition unlikely to have been—it would seem—an error or fabrication. Herbster’s claim about Tuberville was later confirmed by a Facebook post by meeting attendee Daniel Beck and an Instagram photo of Tuberville at Trump International Hotel. Through a spokesperson, Tuberville denied being at the hotel on January 5.
There’s now evidence Herbster is attempting to doctor his Facebook feed to protect Tuberville. An edit history of the Nebraskan’s deleted-then-reposted confession about attending a January 5 pre-insurrection strategy session reveals that Herbster at one point sought to fraudulently place the meeting at the White House, a lie that would exculpate Tuberville from having deceived the Alabama Political Reporter about his whereabouts, but would inculpate then-President Trump himself as a near-certain meeting attendee. This may be why the edit was quickly abandoned, and Herbster’s post returned to its original condition—in which the top Trump adviser asserts that the January 5 meeting took place in the “private residence of the President at Trump International.” Here’s Herbster’s attempted edit of his social media confession:
Readers will note that the since-abandoned edit also includes Giuliani as a meeting attendee, perhaps as a way of explaining how the meeting could have occurred at the White House—as of the list of meeting attendees in the now-deleted edit, only Giuliani would have had an obvious basis for already being at the White House and convening a meeting there with or without the presence of the president. In any case, Herbster’s fleeting addition of Giuliani to his Facebook feed further confirms Daniel Beck’s claim that Giuliani indeed attended the January 5 war council, albeit (as we now know) at the Trump International Hotel in Washington rather than the White House.
Evidence has also emerged that the now-discredited “voting-fraud expert” Giuliani had tried to promote in the weeks leading up to the insurrection, Phil Waldron, was also at Trump International Hotel in DC on January 5, though we do not know if he attended Trump’s war council. This photograph from Instagram provides the proof:
That Waldron is seen above posing with a woman who during the same period of time posed with Tuberville at Trump International Hotel certainly increases the likelihood that Waldron, like Tuberville, attended the war council (as does Giuliani’s attendance):
Incredibly, Waldron’s LinkedIn profile lists him as a “forklift driver” and “floor sweeper” at One Shot Spirits, a brewery in Dripping Springs, Texas.
Late yesterday, news came to light offering another possible reason for Herbster’s attempt to move the meeting to the White House in this Facebook confession: the revelation that there were at least three U.S. senators in attendance, a circumstance that would cause a meeting at Trump’s private residence in Washington to seem even more suspicious. Per a video posted by Txtwire CEO Daniel Beck, “several” senators attended the January 5 meeting, rather than only Tuberville.
This new claim by Beck is significant in part because it clarifies his earlier claim that “fifteen” people attended the meeting. If by “several senators” Beck meant that there were three, that would bring the known attendance at the January 5 Trump war council to precisely fifteen, while also meeting the generally accepted definition of “several” as meaning “more than two.” Here’s the video from Beck:
BREAKING NEWS: In Video, Txtwire CEO Daniel Beck Says “Several” Senators Attended January 5 Pre-Insurrection War Council at Trump International Hotel, Suggesting That at Least Two Senators (Besides Tommy Tuberville) Remain Undiscovered
There’s little utility in speculating about the identity of the other two (or, theoretically, more) senators at the January 5 war council, as at present even the one senator we know was present denies it—and still hasn’t had his feet held to the fire by major U.S. media.
We can, however, say this much: only a small roster of senators would have been there.
We know from the Omaha World Herald that the purpose of the January 5 meeting was to drum up support in Congress for challenging Joe Biden’s electors, which suggests that the members of the January 5 council were already supporters of such a challenge and intended, by congregating at Trump’s private residence at his Washington hotel, to strategize the augmentation of their camp. Only seven senators besides Tuberville objected to the certification of Biden’s electors 15 hours after the war council began:
¥ Sen. Josh Hawley (R‑MO)
¥ Sen. Ted Cruz (R‑TX)
¥ Sen. Rick Scott (R‑FL)
¥ Sen. Roger Marshall (R‑KS)
¥ Sen. John Kennedy (R‑LA)
¥ Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R‑MS)
¥ Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R‑WY)
If Beck’s claim is accurate, at least two of these seven men and women attended Team Trump’s pre-insurrection strategy session. While speculation will undoubtedly run rampant that the two attendees were Hawley and Cruz—certainly the most persistent and militant senators on the matter of objecting to Biden’s November election victory, Tuberville excepted—for now we can only confirm the probable universe of candidates for these two meeting “slots,” while acknowledging that Beck’s count of the total number of meeting participants could well have been low (suggesting that three or even more figures on the list above may have been present at the January 5 war council).
Question 2: Why did Trump’s top advisers—and even some of the January 6 event organizers—flee the Capitol area before rioters had trespassed on Capitol grounds?
Federal investigators will surely be looking to determine whether any of the January 6 plotters exhibited “consciousness of guilt,” including any evidence of foreknowledge or early awareness that they’d incited an armed mob to trespass upon and assault the U.S. Capitol. One sign of such a consciousness of guilt would be the unwillingness of January 6 plotters to themselves march to the Capitol as they had incited others to do.
As discussed in my prior articles—see here, here, and here—we already know from major-media reporting that Donald Trump was told prior to his January 6 speech that the Secret Service would not allow him to march to the Capitol, yet he falsely told Stop the Steal organizer and far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that he would do so and also, more importantly, falsely told the armed mob he was inciting that he would. In the event, he fled back to the White House with his family immediately upon the conclusion of his speech. We also know that Roger Stone was asked to lead the march but declined, and that Jones too was asked to walk at the head of the march but for unexplained reasons did not end up doing so, and indeed (while he trespassed on the Capitol grounds) never entered the building itself. Moreover, a video archive focused on the assault on the Capitol, compiled by ProPublica, indicates that Jones appeared to earnestly believe the president would be joining the march at the “front” of the Capitol and would “speak” to supporters from there, a possibility that (if imperfectly) exculpates him from believing his Capitol trespass was illegal, but also raises additional questions about the source of his information from the White House.
As for Stop the Steal coordinator and far-right activist Ali Alexander, a recently unearthed video shows him almost comically distant from the event he organized as it was unfolding. In the video, which is repeatedly punctuated by the sound of police sirens, Alexander points at the well-distant assault on the Capitol and declares, “I want to say something: I don’t disavow this, I don’t denounce this.” He says that the assault is “completely peaceful” (though he also adds, tellingly, the words “so far”) and only a “couple of agitators” in the mob have acted otherwise. In fact, the march—as its main coordinator would have known, had he participated in it—had by the time of his video turned extremely violent. This alone makes some of Alexander’s other comments, for instance his boast that this is “exactly what I warned about”, seem vile and churlish.
Alexander explicitly excuses the conduct of the insurrectionists, declaring that, due to the actions of his various adversaries across the U.S. government, “the people feel like this [storming the U.S. Capitol] is their last resort.”
A screenshot of a tweet containing the Ali Alexander video is below
This is Ali Alexander, leader of the so-called Stop the Steal campaign, saying: “I don’t disavow this. I do not denounce this.”
In the video, Alexander says he knows that the front of the Capitol is similarly mobbed with Trump supporters, raising questions about (a) what communications he was receiving from fellow insurrectionists in mid-coup attempt, and (b) whether he, like Jones, had been particularly told by parties inside the White House or connected to it to pay special attention to logistics at the front of the Capitol. It is already confirmed that Alexander had been in telephonic contact with Team Trump—via the January 5 war council—approximately 15 hours earlier.
What remains unclear is why Trump’s supporters were incited to march on the U.S. Capitol even as their leaders hung back. This raises a third question that will require an answer sooner rather than later.
Question 3: What ties did Team Trump have to the far-right organizations most responsible for breaching the Capitol, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers?
Vice has now confirmed that Trump adviser and Stop the Steal organizer Roger Stone used members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia as his personal security on the eve of the insurrection. Mere hours later, members of the Oath Keepers would, according to the Wall Street Journal, not only assault the U.S. Capitol but attempt to execute a plan that would “seal” the entirety of Congress in the “tunnels” below the Capitol and “gas” them to death.
As for the Proud Boys, the Daily Beast has called the far-right white supremacist “club” for men Trump pal Roger Stone’s “personal army” on the basis of Stone repeatedly taking pictures with members, endorsing them on social media, and using them for his personal protection detail at public events. The Wall Street Journal now confirms that the Proud Boys, along with the Oath Keepers, were “key instigators” in the January 6 insurrection. (Note: this fact was first reported by Proof, using a combination of articles by the Journal—which wrote of men in “blaze-orange hats” leading the first wave of Capitol attackers—and CNN, which reported and then erroneously retracted its reporting that the Proud Boys wore orange hats on January 6. That they had in fact done so was subsequently confirmed for CNN by Proof, using hours of documentary footage from the insurrection).
Proof has previously outlined Alexander’s connections to the Proud Boys, including his decision to wear one of the Proud Boys’ January 6‑signature blaze-orange hats on January 5, with video revealing him doing so while leading a “Victory or death!” chant. In his preposterously off-site video from January 6, Alexander falsely says that “we the people” (including himself in the designation) “[have] completely peaceful” intentions.
Given Alexander and Stone’s ties to the organizations that led the insurrection, federal investigators will wonder how both men knew to be nowhere close to the attack on the Capitol as it happened—as their apparent foreknowledge of the violent actions pre-planned by the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers may eventually produce criminal liability for them for seditious conspiracy.
Question 4: What about Herbster? Did he too flee the march, as he publicly claimed?
The answer: “sort of.”
While Herbster didn’t participate in the march—for reasons that remain unclear, as he was present for the speech by Trump that immediately preceded it, and in theory would have believed Trump (unless he had private information to the contrary) when the then-president told the crowd that he himself would be marching to the Capitol—he did lie to media about where he went afterward, and the truth on that question is jaw-dropping.
While Herbster initially told media, through a spokesperson, that flew home to Nebraska after Trump’s speech, that was a lie. According to Omaha World Herald political reporter Aaron Sanderford, Herbster now admits that he didn’t go to Nebraska after Trump’s Stop the Steal/March to Save America event, he went to Florida—with “Trump’s family.”
It takes no investigative skills to deduce—or at least imagine—that Herbster might not have wanted media to know that, after being with the Trump family on the evening of January 5 to plot a strategy for January 6, he then spent January 6 (and perhaps some time thereafter) with the very family accused of inciting an insurrection on that day.
Herbster’s duplicity as to his actions after the Trump speech on January 6 compounds his duplicity about his January 5 meeting with the Trump family—as evidenced by his various Facebook deletions, edits, and re-postings—and the still-unresolved question about what information he had about the March to Save America that convinced him to stay far away from it.
Herbster’s close relationship with the Trumps has come into even clearer focus in the last 24 hours not just because of Sanderford’s Twitter revelation but a further review of Herbster’s social media presence, which sees him declaring on Twitter on election day in November 2020 that “I am at the White House with the Trump family and a small group of dignitaries eating a beautiful dinner and getting ready to watch a victory tonight!” His photos of his election-day socializing at the White House include these:
ily” in a “small group of dignitaries” on one of the most important days in the history of that family underscores that Herbster may have been privy to information from Team Trump—either via fellow attendees at the January 5 war council or further updates from Trump’s political team on January 6—that it would be unwise to attend the March to Save America Trump had falsely said he would lead (and that Stone had declined to lead, and Alexander declined to attend).
While Donald Trump’s own attendance at the January 5 war council remains unclear, and while Herbster’s social media feeds—at least at present, as we can’t know how much the Nebraska Republican has deleted or edited—do not routinely reveal him spending time socially with the president (albeit he is on multiple occasions pictured with him in photo ops), Herbster’s public-facing media content begs the implication that he is also close with the now-former president.
This not only raises, again, the question of Trump’s presence at the January 5 war council, but also the subsequent conduct of others besides Herbster who attended the meeting. One figure of particular interest is Mike Lindell, given that Lindell has since January 6 been banned from Twitter, visited Trump in the Oval Office and asked him to impose martial law to extend his presidency, been threatened with a lawsuit by a voting software company (Dominion) for spreading misinformation about it, and had his MyPillow products removed from several popular retailers.
Question 5: Why didn’t Trump pull the trigger on Lindell’s proposed “martial law plan,” or the Jeffrey Clark-orchestrated effort to take over the Department of Justice and invalidate Georgia’s November 2020 election results? Why not preemptively pardon the fifteen participants in the January 5 war council, before leaving office?
This bundle of questions remains largely unanswered, though one possible clue to the explanation for Trump’s intermittent reticence in the final days of his presidency—for which he has lost some of his most vocal far-right support—comes in the form of a Senate vote on a “constitutional point of order” taken just yesterday (January 26).
On January 26, Sen. Rand Paul (R‑KY) raised such a point-of-order on the Senate floor, forcing the Senate to vote on whether it would hear and debate his objection to Trump’s second impeachment trial—an objection based on a fringe legal analysis of the Constitution that holds Congress can’t try former presidents post-impeachment, which analysis is rejected by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
That the “motion to table [debate]” on Paul’s fringe legal theory passed 55–45—with all but five Senate Republicans voting “no”—means that 45 GOP senators wanted to at least debate Paul’s premise, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has already called Trump’s conduct “impeachable.” Many media outlets have taken the vote on the motion to table as a proxy for the eventual post-trial vote in the Senate, arguing somewhat speciously that a vote to debate Paul’s premise equals agreement with it. While that’s not so, if Donald Trump believes, as some journalists do, that it is, this might explain several of the decisions he made in the final days of his presidency.
Now that he no longer has access to Twitter, and his YouTube and Facebook bans have been indefinitely extended, Trump faces the prospect of needing to return to politics to regain the daily media attention he craves and the power over others he covets. If he believes the Senate will never convict him of incitement to insurrection, he may commensurately believe that it cannot get the 60 votes needed to disqualify him from holding future office via Section 3 of the 14th Amendment rather than an impeachment trial. The only way for Trump to upset this state of affairs and run the risk of not being able to run for president again in 2024 would be if he confessed in some fashion that he and his team had directly coordinated with the January 6 plotters.
It’s for this reason that, despite the attendees at the January 5 war council now facing potential legal liability—even as they are among Trump’s top lieutenants, and so presumably deemed the most deserving of and eligible for late-presidency clemency—for Trump to have pardoned any of them, let alone executed the plan for martial law Mike Lindell and Michael Flynn proposed, would have risked revealing prior to the final Senate vote in his impeachment trial that he and his compatriots were in fact more intimately involved in the planning of the insurrection than Republican Party brass had previously believed (or, at a minimum, been forced to publicly acknowledge).
It’s for this reason that the information now being presented on this website is so critical: because if major media deigns to report on it only after Trump’s Senate trial has concluded, it will have implicitly provided cover to Congressional Republicans to treat Trump’s offenses as either glancing or a matter of “free speech.” Such claims could never be made about a seditious conspiracy headlined by a pre-insurrection war council Team Trump’s political superstructure attended—with the president himself possibly attending either in-person or via speakerphone.
And yet, if information about the January 5 war council doesn’t “break wide” before Trump’s impeachment trial starts on February 9—less than two weeks from now—a Trump candidacy in 2024 is all but assured. And given what we now know about Trump and his team’s virulent opposition to American democracy’s core processes, a Trump presidential run 48 months from now could imperil the country’s very survival.
As the US Capitol hunkers down in the face of threats of a March 4 pro-Trump repeat insurrection plot, here’s a pair of articles about the ongoing investigation and prosecution of the January 6 insurrectionists and the extent of the planning for potential mass violence that went into that event:
First, recall how one of the major questions about the government’s response to the insurrection, or lack of response, is the question of why the government’s “quick reaction force” (QFR) of 40 soldiers was never deployed, with the answer apparently being that acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller imposed a 3 hour delay on issuing the required approval.
Also recall how we learned that the Oath Keepers had a quick reaction force of their own, posted nearby the Capitol with heavy weapons that would be quickly rushed to the crowd. The group organizing the Oath Keepers’ QRF included Jessica Watkins, the individual who first claimed she had been coordinating with the Secret Service in providing security for VIPs at that ‘Stop the Steal’ rally that then-President Trump spoke at before the rally. Watkins later recanted after the Secret Service denied working with her, but by all accounts she was allowed into the VIP area of the rally before she was later filmed storming the Capitol.
We’re now learning more about the nature of the Oath Keepers’ QRF as prosecutors make their case in court, including the key role Jessica Watkins played in organizing it. As Watkins told a contact when preparing to attend a November election fraud rally in DC, that the QRF was designed so that “If it gets bad, they QRF to us with weapons for us,” but that, otherwise, “[w]e can have mace, tasers, or night sticks. QRF staged, armed, with our weapons, outside the city.” Watkins then advised the contact “to be prepared to fight hand to hand” while “guys outside DC with guns, await[] orders to enter DC under permission from Trump, not a minute sooner. So according to Watkins — who was in the VIP area of the rally before the insurrection — it was Trump himself who would give the order for the QRF to deliver the heavy weapons to the army of Trump supporters
And we’re also learning that the QRF that day probably wasn’t the only QRF deployed by the Oath Keepers recently. In the words of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, “As we have done on all recent DC Ops, we will also have well armed and equipped QRF teams on standby, outside DC, in the event of a worst case scenario, where the President calls us up as part of the militia to to [sic] assist him inside DC”:
““As we have done on all recent DC Ops, we will also have well armed and equipped QRF teams on standby, outside DC, in the event of a worst case scenario, where the President calls us up as part of the militia to to [sic] assist him inside DC,” Person One wrote, according to an FBI agents’ affidavit in a court filing for several alleged Oath Keepers conspirators.”
Yes, in the words of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes himself, there were apparently QRFs on ALL the “DC Ops” conducted by the Oath Keepers since the election. And it’s only Donald Trump call that the QRF will respond to, which, again, raises significant questions about what sort of coordination the Oath Keepers may have had with Trump directly. It’s one thing if the Oath Keepers publicly declare that they are making themselves available to Trump should he call for their support. But it’s another thing entirely if Trump was actively secretly coordinating with the people putting together the QRF.
And since we know Jessica Watkins was deeply involved with organizing the QRF and was also allowed back into the VIP area of the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally right before the insurrection, giving her potential direct access to Trump himself, we have to ask: Was Watkins allowed in the VIP area for the purpose of quietly receiving orders from Trump? Orders that included storming the Capitol? Hopefully prosecutors can get an answer to those questions. Because as the following article describes, the QRF was more than just one guy with a pickup truck fill of guns:
“Previously unpublished photos taken by ARLnow that day show the men loitering near the Marine Corps War Memorial, with the overrun Capitol in the background. Parked nearby are numerous vehicles, mostly pickup trucks and SUVs with out-of-state license plates.”
The Oath Keepers QRF was ready to go. They were just waiting for the orders. Or at least that’s the most reasonable explanation we have for the purpose of the group of men gathered near the Marine Corps War Memorial. A group that looked so conspicuous that at least one person called the police to check on them:
And just as Stewart Rhodes made clear that Trump, and only Trump, would be the person giving the orders to call in the QRF, we have Jessica Watkins telling the “guys outside DC with guns, await[] orders to enter DC under permission from Trump, not a minute sooner.” If the QRF came to the rescue, Trump was going to have ask for their help first. That was clearly the plan:
Quite a few questions are raised by the fact that Trump was apparently the person charged with calling in this QRF, but perhaps the biggest question at this point is why wasn’t the QRF ever called in? If we assume Trump was in on the plot, what more was he hoping the insurrectionists could have accomplished before calling int the QRF? The capture of members of congress, perhaps? It’s the kind of question that asks the more general question of what exactly were Trump and the insurrectionists thinking could happen to keep Trump in office. A question we still haven’t answered. To this day it remains very unclear what Trump and his followers were possibly thinking. And yet it’s also clear that they had a plan they thought might work. What were those scenarios in the minds of Trump and followers that could have possibly led to Trump staying in office? We still don’t know, but we do know storming the Capitol and seizing members of Congress was a big part of the plan. And if the QRF was to be deployed, odds are it would have been deployed after the ‘Rubicon’ had been crossed and members of Congress were already kidnapped.
So, again, we have to ask: did Trump neglect to call in the Oath Keepers’ QRF because he wasn’t in on that plan? Or because the other parts of the plan — capturing members of Congress — hadn’t been accomplished yet?
Following up on reports of the newly formed Association of Republican Presidential Appointees organizations — and its invitation of Steve Bannon to speak at its inaugural event about the need to train an army of “shock troops” ready to fill thousands of federal vacancies in a 2024 Republican White House for the purpose “deconstructing the administrative state” — it’s worth noting the language Bannon has started using on his show in response to those reports. As Bannon said on his WarRoom podcast Monday, “We control the country. We’ve got to start acting like it. And one way we’re going to act like it, we’re not going to have 4,000 [shock troops] ready to go, we’re going to have 20,000 ready to go.” We control the country and we’ve got to start acting like it. Steve Bannon is truly letting his fascist freak flag fly tall and proud.
Don’t forget the recent legal context of all this: Bannon was one of four figures recently subpoenaed by the House investigators regarding the January 6 Capitol insurrection. That subpoena happened shortly after the release of Peril, Bob Woodward’s and Robert Costa’s book in the final year of the Trump presidency that wrote that Bannon was in close touch with Trump for days before January 6th and privately told Trump to have a reckoning on January 6th, saying it’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib. Bannon responded to the release of that book be publicly confirming that, “Yeah, because his legitimacy...42% of the American people think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately.”
So Bannon has been responding to the reporting on his coup- maneuverings by not only admitting to the charges but also adopting more openly fascist rhetoric about preparing for the next coup. Or, as Bannon would put it, “We control the country. We’ve got to start acting like it.”
Interestingly, there’s one notable figure who doesn’t appear to share Bannon’s enthusiasm for taking credit for Jan 6: Trump. At least that’s what we can infer from Trump’s responses to questions about the reporting that Bannon was whispering in Trump’s ears in the days leading up to Jan 6 about the need to kill Biden’s presidency in the crib. When asked about that reporting on Monday, Trump insisted the two hadn’t spoken to the end of his administration. When asked directly, “So is he lying when he says he was talking to you in the last months of your administration?”, Trump replied, “Very little. We would speak very little. Now, Steve and I spoke very little. But I will tell you, he was very supportive.”
Yes, Trump is running away from his history with Bannon at the same time Bannon is openly organizing the next coup to put Trump back into office. Trump’s present consists of trying to simultaneously run away from his past and future coup-related legal troubles. But Bannon is just in full on open coup mode. It’s reached a point where it’s difficult to see how eventual the Republican 2024 nominee isn’t forced to run on a platform that has the ‘the 2020 was stolen!’ as the overarching issue.
So given that Trump is still displaying some degree of legal concern over his past coup-attempts at the same time Steve Bannon is clearly prepping the Republican Party establishment to get ready for a much bigger and substantial pushed to ‘win’ in 2024 through any means necessary — including a new coup if the Republican loses — it raises the question of how much that eventual 2024 nominee is going to run on a platform that includes preemptive pardons for all of the people involved with the Steven Bannon’s planned 2024 coup attempt. They’re planning on something big. Bigly seditious. The Republican is going to ‘win’ one way or another in 2024. Bannon’s ‘shock troops’ are going to be mobilized in some form. The 2024 Republican nominee is going to have to be a righteously insurrectionist nominee because that’s now the GOP’s brand. The Capitol insurrection was a just actions against a stolen election. It’s Steven Bannon’s brand even more than it’s Donald Trump’s brand. The “We control the country. We’ve got to start acting like it” brand. So if that’s the brand, what are the odds they just start campaigning on pardons for insurrectionists. The Jan 6 2021 insurrectionists, and any of the people involved in the insurrections Bannon has planned to secure that 2024 ‘win’:
“We need to get ready now...We control the country. We’ve got to start acting like it. And one way we’re going to act like it, we’re not going to have 4,000 [shock troops] ready to go, we’re going to have 20,000 ready to go.”
We control the country. We’ve got to start acting like it. Spoken like a true fascist. It’s like you can hear whatever is left of the US’s democracy exhale for the last time. Bannon’s strategy to prepare for the 2024 insurrection is to spend the next four years normalizing the idea. He even admitted to telling Trump to kill the Biden administration in its crib.
And yet Trump’s distancing from Bannon reminds us that coup attempts aren’t necessarily legal. It remains to be seen. They might all get away with it but that process is still being worked out:
It’s this somewhat tepid embrace of the politics of insurrection that forces us to ask not only whether or not the pardoning of Jan 6 insurrectionist going to be part of the 2024 GOP platform, but also whether or not the pardoning for the planned insurrection that’s going to secure the 2024 election will be part of the platform. In other words, if Trump (or whoever the nominee is) is going to be running on a “I’m going to win, by vote or by force, to avenge the theft of 2020” kind of platform, will the eventual pardoning of all the people who are going to be carrying out that coup be part of the 2024 platform too? We’ll see, but it’s the kind of platform that would probably help Bannon with the whole shock troop recruitment process.
Senate Judiciary committee Democrats tossed an evidentiary bomb onto the legal showdown already brewing between House congressional investigators of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and the investigation targets. The interim 394 page report was like a compilation of everything we already know about the plot. A plot that seemed to keep evolving and snowballing the closer they got to January 6. But it’s the when this damning report comes out that makes it significant.
Two weeks ago, days after Steve Bannon was openly admitting to advising Trump on January 5 to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib”, Bannon and three other key figures in the coup attempt — Mark Meadows, Kash Patel and Dan Scavino — were subpoenaed by House Democrats. In response to the subpoenas, we’ve only Bannon enthusiastically played the insurrectionist cheerleader role by calling for the creation of an army of MAGA ‘shock troops’.
And Bannon’s reaction to the subpoena appears to be representative of the entire coup-plotting network’s response to these legal challenges. Jeffrey Clark — who made that attempted coup inside the DOJ in late December/early January to he could block the certification — hasn’t indicated he’ll appear for question. They’ve all appeared to solidify around a strategy of opposing any cooperation with the investigation, with Donald Trump leading the way arguing that the investigation is corrupt and the real insurrection took place on Election Day on November 3.
That’s the context that makes this damning Senate report so significant. This utterly damning report comes at a time when the Trump network is doubling and tripling down on the narrative that everything it did was righteous because the election really was stolen. The issue of whether or not Trump attempted a coup is inevitably going to be a major political issue going forward. The kind of major issue that’s not going to die until one of two things happens:
1. The GOP dies.
2. The US democracy formally dies and there are no more elections.
Those are the two scenarios required for this issue to go away, barring a massive GOP mea culpa which is never going to happen. A party can’t really just live something like this down. The story told in the Senate report is too damning to ignore. By all sides. Democrats can’t help but focus on the report and the GOP can help but deflect it by embracing its damning contents. Embracing the insurrection really is Trump’s best defense because he doesn’t have a real defense. The Big Lie about a stolen election isn’t just Trump’s great excuse for losing. It’s his post-coup-attempt best legal defense. That’s why this report is so damning. The report is drawing the contours of the US’s sociopolitical crisis for the foreseeable future:
“The report is preliminary, and the investigation is ongoing. Jeff Clark has yet to agree to a request to appear before the panel; the National Archives has yet to respond to a spring request for documents.”
It may be a damning report, but it’s also just a preliminary damning report for an ongoing investigation. An ongoing investigation that may not actually be able to successfully subpoena or interview key figures like Jeffrey Clark. It’s another aspect of what makes this report so damning: the ongoing obstruction by the Trump team.
Obstruction coming from the top, according to the following Guardian article describing reports that the four top coup-plotters who just received those congressional subpoenas a couple of weeks ago are all planning on defying their subpoenas. Defiance with not only Trump’s open blessing, but his demands. According to sources, Trump is planning on insisting that Bannon, Meadows, Patel, and Scavino all defy their subpoenas. On what grounds? Executive privilege. Protecting Trump’s executive privilege is going to be the basis for defying this investigation. That’s Trump’s plan going forward, according to these sources:
“The legal battle to force some of Trump’s most senior White House aides to comply with the subpoenas – however it is manifested – is likely to lead to constitutional clashes in court that would test the power of Congress’s oversight authority over the executive branch.”
A constitutional clash: is a congressional investigation into a former presidency a violation of executive privilege? That’s the legal argument the subpoenaed coup-plotters. A legal argument emanating from the Trump himself, who is expected to insist that the four subpoenaed individuals stay unified in their defiance:
And as the following article reminds us, this isn’t a legal strategy Trump arrived at randomly. Citing executive privilege to dodge an investigation is something Trump already used to great effect during his first impeachment:
“As for the subpoenas issued to his top aides, Trump has said in recent days that he would invoke executive privilege to prevent Meadows, Scavino, Bannon and Patel from testifying to the select committee, repeating a tactic successfully used during his first impeachment.”
It worked before. The ‘protecting executive privilege’ tactic helped Trump avoid answering questions during his first impeachment hearing. Will it work again? How about for non-administration figures like Steve Bannon, who was not at all officially part of the Trump administration when he admittedly advised Trump on January 5 to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib”? Will Bannon be allowed to cite executive privilege to protect those kinds of conversations with Trump? He’s apparently going to try to find out. With lawsuits:
Is Trump himself going to file the lawsuits to block the testimony of figures like Steve Bannon? That’s apparently the plan. Just keep stalling while insisting that the entire thing is a farce. It’s, again, all part of why this issue of what actually happened on January 6 isn’t going away. The available details are too damning. The only real option the Trump team has is to complete embrace the insurrection as a just and proper action. That’s Trump’s best defense. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that he just gave an interview where he explicitly stated that nothing wrong happened on January 6 and the real insurrection took place on November 3:
“We are pressing it, and we’re going to continue to press it...And a lot of very good people say, ‘Sir, we should think to the future. Think to the future.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re not going to have a future if you don’t solve the past. And we don’t want the same thing to happen in 2022 and 2024.”
Trump himself is insistent that this issue can’t go away. And why would he want it to go away? All of the coverage of the insurrection and the investigation into what actually happened can be effectively turned into an advertisement for the GOP’s ‘stolen election’ Big Lie. It’s a simple recipe. Just repeat the Big Lie over and over at all opportunities...opportunities that include every time someone brings up the insurrection. “The insurrection took place on November 3...That was the insurrection, when they rigged the election, the big insurrection, the real insurrection, really the crime of the century.” Rinse and repeat:
January 6 wasn’t an insurrection. It was a counterinsurgency operation by patriots intended to overturn the real insurrection that happened on Election Day. That’s Trump’s defense. And in the face of so much damning evidence laid out in this report, that really is his best defense. What else could he possibly say?
So at this point, it’s looking like the next phase of this investigation isn’t just going to involve the legal battle over trying to get those subpoenaed individuals to testify. It’s also going to involve the immense ongoing propaganda effort to convince the US public that all of the obstruction by Team’s team is actually part of a counter-insurgency operation to depose the Biden coup regime. In other words, 2024 is shaping up to be two rival counterinsurgency campaigns. The real one and the other one. Keeping the public guessing which is which is more or less Trump’s 2024 strategy.
We’re getting reports that House Democratic congressional investigators looking into the January 6 Capitol insurrection are finally ready to do something LONG overdue: They’re getting ready to send Steve Bannon to jail over his refusal to respond to a congressional subpoena. Recall how Trump has been openly claiming executive privileges that would prevent Bannon and other Trump insiders from having to testify, a strategy he deployed to great effect during his presidency. Congressional Democrats will vote next week on whether to prosecute Bannon so we’ll find out soon whether or not this legal showdown gets amped up to the next level.
But as the following column reminds us, it’s important to keep in mind that this big legal showdown over whether or not figures like Bannon and Trump can openly foment an insurrection is entirely in keeping with Bannon’s long-term goal of imploding the US’s civil institutions. Or, to put it in Bannon-speak, “deconstructing the administrative state”.
It’s also the kind of fight Bannon wants precisely because he has such a good shot of succeeding. As the column points out, Bannon doesn’t have to win any legal battle with congress. He just needs to drag it out into 2023, at which point the House will come under control of the Republicans and the investigation will presumably be killed. That’s all Bannon needs to do to win this legal battle. Stall and wait for the GOP insurrectionist cavalry to arrive. And it’s hard to think of a more effective democratic death rattle than Steve Bannon winning this battle. Which he just might do.
At the same time, as the column notes, it’s not like Democrats have a choice in this. They have to pursue Bannon. There’s no other real option that isn’t a complete disaster for the US democracy. This is the situation the US finds itself in: thanks to the stunning weakness of US institutions in the face of the GOP’s sedition, Steve Bannon’s enduring defiance in the face of congressional demands has become a genuine existential threat to US democracy:
“But by moving forward to hold Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s nationalist populism, in criminal contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena, the panel may be providing the mastermind of Trump’s blow-it-all-up strategy yet another platform to try to tear down America’s institutions.”
It’s the implicit danger of trying to hold a democracy together: when a large or powerful enough group of society wants to blow it all up, it’s hard to stop them. Democracy and civil society really is a group effort. And congressional Democrats investigating the Capitol insurrection are now faced with the task of subpoenaing the leaders of the “blow it all up” movement. Leaders with a track record of success in obstructing the US’s governing institutions. That’s the dark truth that risks being revealed by this latest attempt to hold Steve Bannon accountable: it risks revealing how Bannon, and Trump, really have been effectively operating above the law. The dark truth is that America’s institutions lack the capacity to address a rising fascist anti-democratic movement. Steve Bannon’s and Donald Trump’s impunity is all the evidence we need of that dark truth:
And yet, as the piece notes, the congressional investigators don’t have a choice. They have to pursue Bannon, knowing full well he might get away with defying a congressional subpoena again. And yet there’s nothing that guarantees Bannon won’t successfully drag the subpoena fight into 2023, when Republicans are expected to retake control of the House, when House Republicans will presumably kill the investigation, at which point Trump, Bannon, and the rest of the insurrectionist leaders will have gotten away with all of it. That’s why this whole Bannon prosecution situation has the feel of being a kind of democratic death-rattle: Either Bannon goes to jail, or democracy falls. And Bannon’s probably not going to jail:
And that prospect of Bannon getting away with defying congress by stalling until 2023, at which point House Republicans let him off the hook, raises another intriguing question in all this: will Steve Bannon’s legal peril, and the prospect of a GOP House victory in 2023 relieving him of that peril, end up becoming a national issue in the 2022 mid-terms?
Could that kind of political dynamic emerge? Bannon’s legal fate? Because if you had to come up with a single case that distilled, for both parties, the stakes involved with the Capitol insurrection investigation, it’s Steve Bannon’s legal showdown. It’s not like Bannon is an obscure figure in American life. The guy is a known entity and when US voters cast a vote in those 2022 House races, they are going to be effectively deciding whether or not Steve Bannon gets to avoid any accountability. And it’s hard to imagine the insurrection isn’t going to be an issue in those House races. It’s not a stretch to imagine Steve Bannon’s legal battle becoming an issue too if which party controls the House in 2023 ultimately determines whether or not he’s prosecuted.
Will Republican House candidates be forced to answer questions on whether or not they would vote to drop the insurrection investigation and whether or not Bannon should be forced to testify? We’ll see, but the odds of that kind of scenario coming to fruition are going to be a lot if we see more reports like the following: The GOP candidate for governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, was just forced to distance himself from a fund-raising rally held in his name this week. Youngkin himself wasn’t at the rally, which was headlined by none other than Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. So why was Youngkin forced to distance himself from his own fund-raising event? No, it wasn’t Trump’s speech at the event decrying the election was stolen that Youngkin distanced himself from, even though Youngkin himself has said he doesn’t think the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. It was the fact that they started the event with a pledge of allegience to a US flag that was carried at the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that Youngkin had to distance himself from.
Yes, Trump and Bannon just headlined a fundraising rally where they brought out a US flag that was at the Jan 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that devolved into the insurrection and specifically pledged allegiance to that flag. That’s what Glenn Youngkin just had to back away from. That whole scene.
So if we keep seeing scenes like that, all the while Bannon is out there defying congressional subpoenas, we have to ask what the odds are of Steve Bannon’s legal battle becoming a nationalized issue. After all, Trump and Bannon themselves are the ones nationalizing it:
““I also want to invite Kim from Chesapeake. She’s carrying an American flag that was carried at the peaceful rally with Donald Trump on January 6,” organizer Martha Boneta told the crowd at the event Wednesday in Henrico County.”
There’s American flags and then there’s the real American flag. That was the unmistakable message from that rally. Trump and Bannon represent the real US government. Unless you’re pledging allegiance to that flag, you’re pledging allegiance to the fake US government that stole the election from Trump. A fake government that’s currently persecuting poor patriot Steve Bannon.
As we saw, Youngkin himself wasn’t exactly keen on embracing this message. But he’s also running in a relatively ‘Blue’ state. That’s not going to be the case for most Republicans running in 2022. If anything, embracing Bannon’s legal cause will be one of those things that GOPers use to distinguish themselves and win primaries. Especially if Bannon and Trump are both barnstorming the nation and headlining events that put the ‘stolen election’ at the center of the GOP’s message.
That’s all part of the political calculus that House Democrats have to be thinking about as they’re planning on how to vote next week on whether or not to prosecute Bannon over his subpoena defiance. Bannon has effectively forced them into this situation. They can’t ignore his defiance. But they also can’t assume they’re going to succeed, especially if the power to punish Bannon ultimate falls on the shoulders of Attorney General Garland.
All in all, you have to give credit where credit is due: Steve Bannon has managed to create a situation where his own legal fate in a case involving his attempted overthrow of the US government could determine whether or not the US government has the institutional capacity to withstand future coup attempts. And there’s a very good chance he’ll win this case. It goes to show that you don’t need to actually be in power in order to “deconstruct the administrative state”. You just need to show that those in power don’t actually have real power in the face of your defiance and the administrative state will just kind of whither away on its own at that point.
It’s worse than we thought. That’s the takeaway message from a new Washington Post report on the actions by conservative attorney John Eastman in the lead up to the January 6 Capital insurrection. But not just the lead up to the insurrection. After the insurrection too. Yes, Eastman was reportedly encouraging Vice President Mike Pence to continue with the scheme of blocking the certification of Electoral College vote after the insurrection took place and congress reconvened to complete the process. What was the basis for Eastman’s post-insurrection Plan B? Well, the delay imposed by the insurrection on the certification process caused the whole process to extend past the time limit laid out in the Electoral Count Act, and therefore Pence had a basis to halt the certification. Yep, the insurrection itself because the new excuse to halt the certification on the evening of January 6.
That’s how bad faith an actor John Eastman has been in all of this. Recall how we’ve already seen reports on Eastman advising Pence carry out these schemes as a surprise move without any warning. Also recall how Eastman was part of the team occupying the “War room” at the Willard hotel in the days around January 6, along with Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. He was a central figure in this story.
And now we just learned a lot more about what exactly Eastman was proposing to Mike Pence’s team during this period. Proposals that included multiple schemes of differing severity. Some schemes revolved around blocking the certification of some state electoral college votes for further investigation of fraud claims. But the most extreme proposal involved Pence just outright throwing out the votes of contested states, immediately handing the win to Trump. And we are told it was this scheme that Eastman first pushed during a January 5 strategy meeting at the Willard. That’s how extreme this plan was.
But perhaps the worst example of Eastman’s bad faith is the fact that he was apparently forced to concede by the end of the January 5 meeting that the idea of having Pence just outright throw out states had no basis in the constitution. But during phone calls later on Jan 5, after he was forced to concede the idea of Pence blocking the vote was a bad idea, Eastman was still proposing that Pence throw the votes back to the states. And he apparently justified this idea based on the idea that the courts would invoke “the political question doctrine” and not intervene. In other words, Eastman’s plan was to create a constitutional crisis so huge the courts would be too scared to intervene. It was a genuinely diabolical plan proposed with the worst kind bad faith.
And as we’ll see, when the insurrection finally transpires, Eastman has the gall to send Pence’s aide Greg Jacob, “The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened.” He actually said that.
Oh, and we have to point out that this is the same John Eastman who was publicly denouncing these schemes and distancing himself from them in an interview with the National Review last week, but who was then caught on tape backing up and justifying the schemes at a conservative event when questions by someone pretending to be a supporter just a few days later. The guy thrives on bad faith. So as this overall Capital insurrection investigation continues to play out, it’s looking like the open bad faith of John Eastman is set to become a bigger and bigger issue. Because while it still looks like the insurrection was part of the a long-term strategy laid out by the GOP’s fascists strategists like Steve Bannon, it’s looking more and more like the John Eastman has emerged as the GOP’s master mercenary legal tactician. An absolutely unrepentant mercenary legal tactician who is ready and willing to continue acting is profound bad faith:
“The attorney, John C. Eastman, also continued to press for Pence to act even after Trump’s supporters had trampled through the Capitol — an attack the Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had described as a “siege” in their email exchange.”
Yes, John Eastman didn’t just propose one absurd scheme after another for Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of the electoral vote in the lead up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. He continued pushing Pence to block the certification after the insurrection, using the insurrection’s disruption of the whole process as the legal justification! According to Eastman, the time limit for the certification of the vote established in the Electoral Count Act was violated by the insurrection. Therefore Mike Pence had grounds to block the certification of the vote. It’s such an amazingly bad faith argument:
It’s a pattern of bad faith that’s so pervasive in this story we even find Eastman sending Pence’s team emails blaming their lack of action for the insurrection as the insurrection was underway. As Eastman wrote to Jacob, “The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened” And that was obviously followed up by Eastman’s suggestion that the insurrection violated the Electoral Count Act thus giving Pence the leeway he needed:
Even more absurd is that one of Eastman’s proposed options for Pence was predicated on the idea tha the Electoral Count Act is, itself, unconstitutional. But it’s the suggestion by Eastman that Pence just outright reject votes for contested states that gives us an idea of just how far they were were willing to go in terms of devising legal justifications for what they were planning. Eastman really was operation as a kind of constitutional mercenary. And he rationalized it with the observation that it’s never been tried before:
Adding to the bad faith is the reporting on how Eastman was effectively started the January 5 meeting proposing that Pence take that extreme step of just outright rejecting Biden electors. That was apparently Plan A on Jan 5. By the end of the meeting, he was apparently forced to concede that the scheme had no constitutional basis. Even then, during this meeting Eastman apparently repeatedly suggested Pence go through with the scheme because the courts would invoke “the political question doctrine” and not intervene. It was a bad faith scheme relying on bullying a judiciary that is assumed to be operating on with a good faith deference to democratic institutions. Which is kind of the worst type of bad faith:
Lastly, as an example of how wildly bad faith an actor Eastman truly is, just note how his Dec 3 testimony to Georgia state senators making the case for voter fraud relied on theories from none other than the Gateway Pundit blog and an anonymous Twitter account:
Finally, not Jacob’s recommendation for Eastman’s incredible bad faith: legal consequences. Will that happen? Probably not, but this is good point to recall all of the conniving Eastman was making around legal precedent. He was looking for any precedent, or lack of precedent, he could find to justify his scheme. So what sort of legal precedent is being established by allowing Eastman to get away with all this?
Will John Eastman continue to be allowed to practice as an attorney after all this? Yes. So far. Just as he’s allowed to more or less So far the answer is yes. So it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that while we definitely saw an insurrectionary scheme play out, we didn’t see all of them play out. Eastman gave Pence quite a few options, after all. And he’s presumably still working on coming up with more for 2024. It’s not like anything is stopping him.
Are political hangings going to be part of the Trump 2024 reelection campaign platform? Maybe, according to newly released audio of a 90 minute interview of Donald Trump. At least that’s what we can reasonably infer from the answer Trump gave to questions of whether or not Trump was himself concerned about Mike Pence’s safety during the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Initially, Trump replay that now, he was not concerned because Pence was well-protected.
But when pressed about hearing the chants of people calling for the hanging of Mike Pence, Trump’s answer suddenly shifted. It was no longer an answer explaining why he felt Pence was safe that day and turned into an answer about why those chants for the hanging of Pence were actually just expressing common sense. Because it’s common sense that you would be extremely angry at someone for certifying a fraudulent vote. As Trump explicitly says in the answer:
And there we have it: Trump agrees to this day with the Hang Mike Pence chants of January 6. Because wanting to hang Mike Pence for certifying the electoral college vote that he knew was fraudulent is just common sense. He couldn’t be more explicit:
So that gives us an update on the odds of Mike Pence rejoining Trump on a 2024 ticket. Trump/Bannon 2024? Maybe, but in other news, Steve Bannon was charged with criminal contempt by the Justice Department today for his refusal to comply with a congressional subpoena over the January 6 insurrection investigation. What sort of treatment will the guy who is currently masterminding Trump’s 2024 coup attempt ultimately receive from the US justice system? We’ll see, but if he should somehow end up in prison over this there might need to be a Bannon jail-break provision added to the Trump 2024 platform. Which would only be common sense.
A number of questions were raised by the indictment of Steve Bannon over his refusal to submit to a congressional subpoena, but perhaps the most tantalizing immediate question is simply how long might Bannon be sent to jail. And the answer appears to be up to two years. One year for each of the two charges. And that leads to the follow up question of what type of access to the internet and his WarRoom podcast audience will Bannon be allowed to maintain while in prison? Will Bannon potentially be broadcasting the WarRoom from jail for the next couple of years? It’s a tragically non-trivial question. Because as we’ve seen, one of Steve Bannon’s pet projects in recent months has been leading his audience to flood the US election system and volunteer for the thousands of positions across the US administering elections. And that’s the kind of project that’s going to require a sustained drive. Tens of thousands of Bannon followers are going to have to be motivated and kept motivated if they’re going to remain committed to the project of embedding themselves into the US elections bureaucracy.
But as the following new Reuters investigation also hints at, there’s another potential angle to this scheme to put Bannon acolytes in charge of elections: a national intimidation campaign seemingly designed to scare existing elections officials into leaving their jobs. And it turns out this intimidation campaign, which consists of calling up public officials and leaving messages threatening violence, is apparently entirely legal and protected free speech. Yep. At least that’s the take by the authorities tasked with following up on these threats. In one case after another, the threats were deemed to be not specific enough to constitute illegal speech. Which presumably means this national intimidation campaign seemingly designed to get the US’s workforce of experienced election officials to resign is going to continue.
Of course, Trump’s own endorsement of threats to hang Mike Pence as only “common sense” is the ultimate fuel generating these flames, but there’s no denying Bannon’s role in strategically channeling those flames.
As we’re also going to see, while the individuals identified making these calls who were interviewed for the article all claimed to be acting on their own, investigators point out that we could be looking as a scripted larger inter-state campaign that isn’t just a bunch of individuals independently deciding to do the same thing.
So given that Steve Bannon is quite open about his desire to have his followers take of the administration of US election systems, what are the odds that this far right intimidation campaign isn’t also in part of a Steve Bannon operation? And that’s what the question of whether or not Steve Bannon be allowed to broadcast from prison is kind of a big question at the moment. Because Bannon really does appear to be the organizing figure at the center of the national ‘Big Lie’ campaign to radicalize the Republican base into an permanent insurrectionary fervor. And it’s that fervor that’s clearly driving this intimidation campaign, whether Bannon is actively steering this or not:
“All nine harassers interviewed by Reuters said they believed they did nothing wrong. Just two expressed regret when told their messages had frightened officials or caused security scares. The seven others were unrepentant, with some saying the election workers deserved the menacing messages.”
They did nothing wrong and will continue doing it until they are stopped. That’s the general message from the people interviewed in this report. And based on the answers from the law enforcement officials tasked with deciding whether or not to prosecute these individuals, the callers were largely correct. It really is protected free speech to engage in this kind of systematic intimidation campaign. As long as the threats of violence are vague enough to be non-specific, it’s protected. How vague? Well, that’s a matter of interpretation, with a number of legal experts viewing these threats indeed prosecutable under federal law. So we’re looking at a national election working intimidation campaign that could be prosecuted but isn’t for whatever reason in state after state:
So is this national intimidation campaign an example of ‘leaderless resistance’, where figures like Bannon indirectly encourage a large number of individuals to independently take up a particular line of action? Perhaps in part, yes. But as police in Vermont observed, these seemingly independent actors could be part of a “larger campaign” and the calls “may have been scripted”. But, of course, that’s what these kinds of leaderless resistance style campaigns are: larger campaigns of seemingly independent actors:
This is part of why the question of what Steve Bannon will be up to while in jail is potentially quite significant. He really is playing an important role as a leader in this ‘open leaderless resistance’ phase of Trumpism...a phase where the planned actions can’t be spoken out loud, at least not too directly, lest they lose their right to intimidate their political opponents out of the area with systematic threats of violence.
With the seemingly endless deluge of new details about the plotting leading up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection, some of the general questions raised now include how many hours long will the inevitable movie about these events be? Because a story this insane and important is going to have at least one movie made about it. But with this many details already available, that’s going to be a whale of story to tell. Can you really do it justice with just a single film? A two-parter perhaps? Is a trilogy of treason called for?
But as the following pair of stories make clear, whoever ends up landing these roles are going to have quite a challenge on their hands. Specifically, the challenge of effectively conveying just how utterly insane these central figures really were behaving without overdoing it and turning it into a dark comedy that everyone just laughs off.
In particular, whoever lands the roles of Michael Flynn and Sydney Powell are going to have the acting challenge of a lifetime on their hands. How does one accurately convey the genuine national peril being created by these two without undercutting the seriousness of the situation? Because as Jon Karl’s new book, “Betrayal”, describes the situation, both Flynn and Powell were actively lobbying then-acting undersecretary of defense of intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, to engage in extreme measures to secure the election for Trump.
First, shortly after Trump pardoned Flynn in late November, Flynn called Cohen-Watnick to ask him to return to DC from a trip overseas so he could sign orders like the military seizure of election ballots. That’s how close they got to that fateful decision of having the military directly intervene with the election dispute. They tried to make it happen. Pleaded. But Cohen-Watnick ultimately didn’t budge, and reportedly felt like Flynn sounded manic during the call.
Part of the reason this episode is so significant is that Cohen-Watnick was one of the figures operation in the Trump administration’s national security orbit who clearly shouldn’t have been there and was only there, in part, due to his long-time association with Michael Flynn. And yet while Cohen-Watnick was a likely target for a departure after Flynn himself was kicked out of the NSC in 2017 he reportedly had the backing of both Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner and was able to survive the post-Flynn purge. So Michael Flynn is someone Cohen-Watnick knows well and according to Cohen-Watnick, Flynn was manic at the time. This definitely calls for some method acting.
But shortly after Cohen-Watnick’s call with Flynn, he got another utterly insane call from Sidney Powell. Powell wanted Cohen-Watnick to travel to Germany, were then-CIA director Gina Haspel was apparently injured by US special forces who were carrying out a raid of the servers secretly used to manipulate the US 2020 election. Haspel were there on a secret mission to destroy the servers. In other words, Haspel was covering up the evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the deep state plot to steal the election when she was injured by presumably patriotic military forces working for Trump to expose the plot. Powell wanted Cohen-Watnick to travel to Germany immediately to force the injured Haspel to “confess”.
This call apparently really did happen, as insane as that sounds. Cohen-Watnick reportedly thought Powell sounded unhinged, and informed the then-acting Defense secretary of the call. It’s worth recalling the reports that Trump was preparing to fire Haspel in December and replacing her with loyalist Kash Patel. Milley sought to intervene, confronting then White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about it at the annual Army-Navy football game. So when we’re hearing about Powell’s fantasies of Haspel traveling to Germany to extract a confession out of Haspel, it’s important to keep in mind that Haspel was viewed as not being full on board with the Flynn/Powell scheming...scheming the obviously had Trump’s implicit backing.
Finally, it’s important to recall that Ezra Cohen-Watnick was just one of a number of figures who were promoted to senior level positions in the Pentagon following the November election, raising all sorts of eyebrows about what Trump had in mind for the military. Figures like Anthony Tata, Rich Higgins, and Michael Ellis. So when Cohen-Wathnick was elevate to acting undersecretary of Defense for intelligence and security at the same time Kash Patel was made the Secretary of Defense’s new chief of staff, it was clear something was in the works. We’re now getting a much clearer idea of what exactly was in the works, and it was a plot so insane they could even get Cohen-Watnick to go along with it. Not for lack of trying...:
“Months after Trump left office, Flynn fully endorsed a coup in the U.S. akin to the one in Myanmar in February, arguing during a pro-QAnon MAGA event that it “should happen here.””
When Michael Flynn declared a Myanmar style coup “should happen here” back in February, he should have said “almost happened here”. His own acolyte was placed in position at the Pentagon to issue the kind of orders they needed for the military to get involved in the election dispute. But after getting pardoned, Flynn calls Cohen-Watnick to put the plan into and action and is ultimately shot down. It was just too insane:
Shortly after Flynn’s manic call, Cohen-Watnick gets an even more insane call from Sidney Powell, asking him to travel to Germany to extract a confession from then-CIA director Gina Haspel, who was apparently injured on a secret mission to destroy a server containing evidence of the overseas election manipulation. This call really happened. It was so insane, Cohen-Watnick reported it to the then-acting Defense secretary:
This is the level of madness that was playing out at the highest levels of the Trump White House. One part of the cabal trying to convince another part of the cabal to go along with a plot so insane the cabal couldn’t ultimately hold itself together. A lot of separate moving parts needed to be working together for a scheme this vast to work, and having just one person not play along caused all their plans to fizzle.
So how crucial was Cohen-Watnick’s refusal to go along with this scheme in the eventual decision by the Trump team to not go along with the military seizure of ballots? Was Trump himself backing Flynn’s plan at that time when Flynn called Cohen-Watnick? How about Powell’s mission to Germany to extract a confession? Did Trump endorse that too? Was everyone else in the plot ready and willing to go with it? Again, Cohen-Watnick was elevated to his position after the November election. One of many figures promoted at that late hour for mysterious reasons. And we’re now learning he was pressured to carry out some extreme actions. So what about all these other figures promoted post-election? Were they also asked to carrying out insane missions for this plot? And did they agree? Just how close were we to seeing the military actually get involved in this election? It remains unanswered. The Trumpian deep state wasn’t quite deep enough to pull this off, but it was pretty deep. Almost deep enough to make this scheme happen, in which case we wouldn’t be talking about a Capitol insurrection but something far more dire like the day the military ended the US democracy.
Like with so many of these stories, the more answers we get the more dire the new questions are that get raised. But at at least we have a much better idea of why Mark Milley may have felt the need to call up China during the insurrection to let them know the US wasn’t about to descend into a military dictatorship. Talk about an acting challenge for whoever plays Milley during that scene...
Just how shocked and alarmed was Donald Trump Jr as the January 6 Capitol insurrection was playing out? That’s one of the many questions raised by a number of text messages released by President Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows to the House Jan 6 Committee this week. Text messages sent to Meadows from a variety of right-wing figures, including a number of Fox News hosts, begging him to get Trump to condemn and call of the attack. As Don Jr put it, in one text: “He’s got to condemn this shit ASAP. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.”
It’s the kind of text message that is simultaneously extremely guilty sounding but still seems to express a sense of shock and dismay over what was transpiring. So just how plausible is that apparent sense of shock and dismay? That’s one of the big questions raised by these newly released texts.
So it’s worth recalling a number of details related to exactly this topic of what role Don Jr and those close to him may have played in the planning and organizing of the January 6 rally and the events that day that led up to the insurrection. First, recall how we already learned back in January how Caroline Wren — the former deputy to Don Jr.‘s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle — had been raising money for the rally specifically from Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli. Fancelli’s financing was reportedly facilitating by none other than Alex Jones. And in the week leading up to the rally, there were a number of changes in the plans. Changes pushed by Wren.
We got some updates on those last-minute changes, including changes that Wren and Guilfoyle pushed for without success. It turns out both Guilfoyle and Wren were advocating at the last minute, on Jan 5, that figures like Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and Ali Alexander be allowed to speak a the rally. Interestingly, the day before, Breitbart leaked a list of the planned speakers that included these names. Guilfoyle apparently viewed the leaking of the list as interference by the White House.
Yes, it appears there was a real struggle inside the Trump camp over whether or not to have the most extreme figures associated with the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement speak at the rally, with Guilfoyle and Wren advocating on the side of the extremists. So when we read about Don Jr sending Mark Meadows alarmed texts during the insurrection, it’s important to keep in mind that part of that alarm probably had to do with a sense of culpability over the all the intense pre-insurrectionary planning he and his girlfriend had just been involved with:
“Guilfoyle’s texts, reviewed by ProPublica, represent the strongest indication yet that members of the Trump family circle were directly involved in the financing and organization of the rally. The attack on the Capitol that followed it left five dead and scores injured.”
It was less than a month ago that ProPublic published the strongest evidence yet that members of the Trump family were directly involved in both the financing and organizing of the January 6 rally. Evidence in form of texts between Don Jr’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle and her former deputy, Caroline Wren, showing how Wren and Guilfoyle had managed to find a whale of a donor with Julie Fancelli who alone pledged $3 million:
Then on the night of Jan 5, Don Jr, Guilfoyle, and Wren attended an event at the Trump International Hotel. During this time, both Wren and Guilfoyle made a push for adding Ali Alexander, Roger Stone, and Alex Jones to the speakers list at the rally. And as we see, Jones and Alexander left the rally early, with Wren escorting them away from the White House as they prepared to lead the march on the Capitol. There sure was a lot of coordinating that day:
And note this interesting detail: the speakers list for the rally had apparently been leaked by Breitbart and this list included Alexander, Stone, and other speakers deemed by some members of the Trump team to be too controversial. Guilfoyle viewed the leak as a form of interference and referred to having approved the list already. That strongly suggests it really was Guilfoyle and Wren who were making these decisions:
Finally, to underscore Fancelli’s involvement in all this, we find that Wren became the main fundraising consultant for a newly formed super PAC run by two of Trump Jr.’s closest aides but primarily funded by a company close to the Fancelli family foundation. It highlights how important a role Fancelli was playing during this post-election period. With Wren and Guilfoyle playing the role of key Fancelli intermediaries:
So when we read about Don Jr sending Mark Meadows on Jan 6 alarmed texts about how everything had “gone too far”, don’t forget that Don Jr’s girlfriend Kimberly had spent the prior night arguing that the planned speakers list didn’t go far enough, and could really use more talks from figures like Roger Stone and Alex Jones. Which is the kind of situation that could definitely lead to some alarmed texts. Just not necessarily innocent alarmed texts.
We’re getting new details on the fascinating military psychological warfare team that appears to have played a major role in the Trump White House’s scheming to stay in office through any means necessary.
First, recall how we’ve already learned about the “war room” that was created at the the Willard Hotel in downtown DC. Steven Bannon was there, along with Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and a team of “digitals warriors” lead by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations. Waldron, in turn, was working closely with Russell Ramsland, a Texas Republican who has been one of the key right-wing figures mass spreading election-fraud conspiracy theories ever since 2018, when Ted Cruz almost lost his Senate bid. Ramsland was present in one of the Willard rooms on the evening of Jan. 6. Ramsland’s private intelligence company, Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), was started in June 2017 by Adam T. Kraft, a former senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kraft was soon joined by a three men: Alvan “Locke” Neely, J. Keet Lewis, and Ramsland. Neely was a retired Secret Service agent who became ASOG’s chief operations officer. J. Keet Lewis was named ASOG’s vice president of strategy and Ramsland joined as ASOG’s chief financial officer. Ramsland and Lewis have both been members of the Council for National Policy, with Lewis having serviced on the executive committee.. Intriguingly, before it became focus on ‘election integrity’ following Ted Cruz’s near-loss in 2018, ASOG had been doing work for Bannon’s Chinese billionaire patron, Guo Wengui. It’s the activities of Phil Waldron and his ASOG team that we’re learning more about.
In particular, a PowerPoint presentation developed by Waldron’s team for how Trump could prevent the certification of the election results was leaked and published. And we’re learning that this same presentation was delivered to then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan 5. As we already recently learned, Jan 5 was the day Trump learned once and for all that then-Vice President Mike Pence was going to be unwilling to go along with any of the schemes Waldron and Eastman worked out. This reportedly prompted Trump to call the Willard Hotel war room team at some time between late Ja 5 and early morning Jan 6, when he informed them Pence wasn’t going to play ball and they needed a new strategy that didn’t require Pence’s cooperation. And they did indeed try to put such a strategy in place, with Rudy Giuliani contacting elected Republicans in the hopes they could somehow derail the certification process. So when we learn that Phil Waldron’s psychological warfare team put together a PowerPoint presentation that made its way into the White House’s inner circle on Jan 5, a day before the insurrection, it’s important to keep in mind that Jan 5 was the day the Trumpian panic was truly unleashed following the betrayal of Mike Pence:
“The PowerPoint circulated by Waldron included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” or replace them with Republican electors. It included a third proposal in which the certification of Joe Biden’s victory was to be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops were to help “secure” and count paper ballots in key states.”
They had options. All bad options, but they had them. All ready to go, as laid out in the mysterious PowerPoint presentation being circulation by Phil Waldron in the days leading up to Jan 6, with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows receiving the presentation the day before. It’s the fact that a document laying out schemes for overturning the election was in the hands of Trump’s chief of staff a day before the insurrection that makes this PowerPoint presentation so significant to investigators. It’s a direct link between the Trump team and operatives pushing the wildest scenarios for overturning the election:
But Waldron’s direct interactions with Meadows include a meeting around Christmas where Meadows asked Waldron what evidence would be required to establish some sort of election hack. Meadows then indicated he would pass on that evidentiary wish-list to John Ratcliffe, then the director of national intelligence:
But Waldron’s relations with Meadows is only one part of the story of his coordination with the Trump team. It was Rudy Giuliani, acting as Trump’s personal attorney, who was working with Waldron going back to November in the days following the election. Then there’s a Jan 5 meeting with several members of congress in a congressional office. We still don’t have the identifies of those members, but it’s hard to see how we can really understand what was planned unless we know who was at that meeting and what they discussed:
Also note how Waldron’s cybersecurity firm, PointStream Inc, appears to offer services that sound an awful lot like hacking services. Services like conducting untraceable “cyber lurking,” and providing data sets “virtually unknown” to either private industry or the U.S. government. It’s something to keep in mind for future stories about Democrats getting opportunistically hacked:
Finally, note how the company that was working closely with Waldon in this work, Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), was paid $700 by then-congressman Mark Meadow’s campaign in 2018 and 2019 for “security services”. What was the nature of these “security services”? We don’t know, but recall how it was Ted Cruz’s near loss following the 2018 mid-terms that prompted Ramsland to become one of the key right-wing figures spreading election-fraud conspiracy theories ever since 2018. So when we learn that Mark Meadow’s campaign paid for $700 in “security services” in 2018–2019, you have to wonder if that expenditure was in part an investment in Ramsland’s mass voter-fraud activities in anticipation for their use in 2020:
So those are some of the new details we’ve learned about the role Phil Waldron, Russell Ramsland, and the ASOG team of psychological warfare specialists and “digital warriors” played in the months and days leading up to Jan 6. Details that raise major questions about how closely not just Trump was backing Waldon’s proposals, but the entire GOP. As we saw, Waldron wasn’t just working with Trump’s team. The was a Republican congressional delegation dedicated to overturning this election too.
And as the following Guardian article from a couple of weeks ago describes, it was Trump himself who was openly asking his top ‘lieutenants’ at the Willard Hotel — including Steve Bannon — to come up with a last minute scheme to delay the certification just hours before the insurrection. Trump called the Willard Hotel “command center” some time between the late evening of Jan 5 and early hours of Jan 6, informing the group that Pence told him he would be unwilling to go along with any of the schemes John Eastman laid out during a Jan 4 meeting. Some sort of ‘solution’ that didn’t require Pence was needed. A solution that, instead, relied on Republican members of congress taking steps to delay the certification for a day and buy the Trump team time. That was the plan put in place at the very last minute, with Rudy Giuliani actually going as far as meeting with one Republican member of congress pitching this strategy. And while Giuliani couldn’t find enough officials to go along with him, he certainly tried. It’s an important part of the context of this story in terms of the question of what role Trump himself played on the insurrection: they were literally developing new schemes right up to the last minute:
“Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.”
A direct line from the White House to the “command center” at the Willard hotel. Well, two direct lines. One for the lawyers and one for the non-lawyers, so attorney-client privilege wouldn’t be jeopardized:
One round of direct calls from the White House to the Willard hotel “command center” took place some time between late evening on Jan 5 and the early hours of Jan 6. Trump informed the team that Pence wasn’t going to play along with the schemes laid out by John Eastman on Jan 4 and sought a means of delaying the certification. While we don’t know the contents of the call, it was pretty clearly a very incriminating conversation:
And note how they really did appear to develop a plan that didn’t require Mike Pence’s cooperation. A plant Giuliani tried to put in place. He just needed enough willing Republican officials who were willing to play along:
Giuliani was literally lobbying senator Tuberville at 7PM on Jan 6, hours following the insurrection and hours after the electoral certification was scheduled to happen. So in that sense, the insurrection did kind of work. The certification of the vote was delayed, giving Giulani a few extra hours of lobbying. It all raises the disturbing question: so just how close was this delay-without-Mike-Pence scheme to working had the insurrection not happened? Like, what what if the Capitol hadn’t been ransacked hours earlier, and Giuliani had simply aggressively lobbied more members of congress to take steps to block the certification? In other words, while we’ve understandably been focused on the insurrection itself, there’s a parallel question of what would have happened had the full blown insurrection not played out the way it did. And the answer to that question depends heavily on just what other schemes did Phil Waldron, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, and the rest of the Willard “command center” have in mind other than just the insurrection? Schemes they just needed a few more hours of lobbying to hammer out.
Roger Stone did exactly what we should have expected this week: Stone asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in the face of questions by the House panel investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. As Stone insisted, the move was “not because I have done anything wrong, but because I am fully aware of the House Democrats’ long history of fabricating perjury charges.” It’s more or less the narrative we can expect from most of the rest of the figures targeted in this investigation. But as we’ll see in the following article, Roger Stone is in a potentially very different legal situation from most of the rest of the figures suspected of playing leadership roles in orchestrating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Stone can’t claim executive privilege. His operation — the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement that organized the rally that devolved into the Capitol mob — was ostensibly working entirely separately from the Trump campaign. That’s Stone’s story. There was no communication.
And in particular, Stone insists there was no communication between his ‘Stop the Steal’ headquarters that was operating out of the Willard Hotel in downtown DC and the whole Trump campaign operation led by Rudy Giuliani, Bernard Kerik, and Phil Waldron that was also headquartered out of that hotel during this same period. That’s what we’ve been told by these groups. No communication at all. It’s an understandable assertion from a legal standpoint but it never really made sense from the standpoint of what actually happened that day. Stone’s operation was obviously in at least some contact with Giuliani/Kerik/Waldron operation. Why wouldn’t they be? They were working towards the same goal. And yet we were emphatically told there was no communication between Stone’s ‘Stop the Steal’ activities and the Trump legal time while they shared the Willard Hotel which was basically the Trump campaign’s legal team.
So Stone’s legal predicament appears to potentially be a kind of weak spot in the Trump team’s legal armor: he can’t claim executive privilege, and yet he also appears to have been adjacent to heart of the Trump team’s own operations working on the exact same goal. But as we’ve seen, Stone’s proximity to the Trump team working out of the Willard Hotel is only one of the aspects of the this story that Stone was involved with. Recall the reports of the Oath Keepers carrying out personal security roles for figures like Roger Stone and Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins being allowed into the VIP area of the Stop the Steal rally where the Trump Team was located. Also recall how Caroline Wren, the former deputy to Donald Trump Jr.‘s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, was acting as the liaison between the Trump campaign and Publix heiress Julie Francelli. Guilfoyle, herself was also deeply involved in managing the relationship with Francelli, who was financing much of the Stop the Steal effort and was keening interesting in helping Trump stay in power through whatever means were necessary. And not only was Francelli a huge fan of Alex Jones, but we learned that on the night of January 5, Wren argued that the speakers list planned for the Stop the Steal rally didn’t include speakers that were willing to go far enough and should include figues like Jones and Roger Stone. Guilfoyle concurred at the meeting. Wren was so adamant on these speakers on the morning of Jan 6 the White House called the US Capitol Police to have her escorted rom the Ellipse It was Wren who eventually escorted both Jones and Stone away from the rally early so they could lead the march to the Capitol. So there was an intense last minute push to get Stone, Jones, and other speakers who would be willing to say the most extreme kinds of things added to the speakers list.
And that’s just what we know about. What else was Roger Stone up to? These are all the kinds of questions Stone is refusing to answer while insisting he has nothing to hide. So given that Stone is refusing to self-implicate by pleading the Fifth, it’s going to be interesting to see how many of the third-party he was scheming with end up sharing his refusal to cooperate. It’s one of the tricky aspects of pleading the Fifth: Pleading the Fifth only works when everyone else involved pleads the Fifth too, and there are A LOT of other people involved with Roger Stone’s Jan 6 shenanigans because he appears to have been operating near the center of all:
“Unlike former members of the Trump administration, Mr Stone cannot hide behind a shield of executive privilege that the former president has attempted to throw over his allies, who have contended that some of the information requested by the committee is protected from release. That argument has failed twice in the courts, and is now likely headed for a ruling at the US Supreme Court.”
He couldn’t plead executive privilege, and that just leaves pleading the fifth. Will Roger Stone’s legal antics win in the end?
Also regarding the last-minute lobbying by the Trump team to convince Republican elected officials to take it upon themselves to stall the certification of the electoral vote following Mike Pence’s Jan 5 refusal to go along with their schemes, note that the lobbying didn’t technically end the night of January 5. Recall how we are told that Rudy Giuliani literally left a voicemail at 7 PM on January 6, hours after the insurrection, imploring Senator Tommy Tuberville to block the certification. It’s a potentially crucial aspect to this story: the insurrection was buying time that was being used for this last-minute lobbying or Republican elected officials:
Ok, and now here’s an article from last month describing a related legal complication for the attempts to shield the activities of the teams operating out of the Willard Hotel: It turns out no one wanted to pay Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik for their initial post-election efforts to investigation the election results. The RNC didn’t want to pay them and neither did the Trump campaign. It was only after an apparent intervention by Jeanine Pirro that they finally got paid...by the Trump campaign. And that could end up being a big mistake. Because campaign activity can’t hide behind the shield of executive privilege. So it’s not just Roger Stone who poses a threat to the veil of secrecy shrouding the activities at the Willard Hotel
“The fact that campaign funds were used to finance efforts to subvert Biden’s victory could complicate the former president’s ongoing attempt to use claims of executive privilege to shield documents and testimony from the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6, according to some legal scholars.”
It’s quite a complication: No one wanted to pay Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik. The Trump White House didn’t want to pay them and neither did the RNC. But they were eventually paid. By the Trump campaign itself, just for travel expenses. But those travel expenses appear to be much more extensive that just travel because the hotels became the headquarters for these operations as the pandemic played out. And you can’t assert executive privilege for campaign operations. It’s why the decision to play hot potato with Guiliani’s bills may end up becoming a very expensive game:
Also note how part of the wariness between the RNC and Guiliani appears to be rooted in Trump’s declaration in mid-November that he wanted Guiliani to be in charge of challenging the Biden victory. So one one wanted to pay the team in charge of the challenge. It’s another data point suggesting what was happenning at the Willard Hotel was central to the insurrection planning:
And note how it was mid-December when the Giuliani/Kerik operation relocated from the Mandarin the Willard. On Jan 3rd, they were joined by John Eastman, the figure taking the lead in coming up with constitutional justifications for the various schemes under consideration. Recall how Eastman reportedly told Mike Pence’s team during the insurrection that it was Pence’s fault the insurrection was happening and was arguing on the evening of January 6 that Pence should still not certify the election results. The scope of the schemes kept accelerating, even on Jan 6:
So as we can see, there are potentially quite a few avenues for information to leak out about the planning that went into the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection. Avenues leading back to the Willard Hotel. And the usual suspects. Who apparently weren’t communicating with each other.
Here’s an interesting set of updates on the finger-pointing taking place between the ‘usual suspects’ at the center of the January 6 Capitol insurrection: It appears that Roger Stone just can’t stop pointing the finger at Steve Bannon. Specifically, Stone just publicly suggested it was Steve Bannon who ultimately issued an order for the breach of the Capitol on January 6. It was the second time he publicly talked about the House investigation of Bannon over the past few weeks, each time using the encrypted messaging platform Telegram.
It’s also noteworthy that this is the kind of finger-pointing that doubles as a personal alibi for Stone because it’s an accusation that suggests Stone doesn’t actually known who made the call but merely suspects it was Bannon. Keep in mind that Stone himself is a top candidate for being the figure who ultimately issued the order. As we’ve learned, that rally crowd was a mix of chaotic Trump supporters with organized groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. And as we’ve also learned, Roger Stone’s personal security detail in the VIP area of the rally was headed by Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins, who later led the notorious ‘stack formation’ team of Oath Keepers into the Capitol. Watkins claims she had been coordinating with the Secret Service.
Also recall how the last minute planning for the Jan 6 rally included a struggle between Kimberly Guilfoyle — who was acting as the VIP liaison for the rally financier, Public heiress Julie Francelli — and the White House over the rally speakers list, with Guilfoyle expressing a desire to see more rabblerousing speakers added to the list, specifically Alex Jones and Roger Stone.
Finally, recall the implausible story we’ve been getting from Stone all along about how his operation at the Willard Hotel wasn’t in communication with the team run by Rudy Giuliani, Bernard Kerik, John Eastman, and other key figures directly on Trump’s last-minute legal gambits and which was also operating out of the Willard Hotel. Stone is a prime suspect. Sure, Steve Bannon is a prime suspect for that role too. But so is Stone. That’s part of what made the fact that Stone just double-down on the accusation so interesting.
This wasn’t the first time Stone publicly raises the prospect that investigators would be interested in Bannon, have previously stated, “I can’t discuss the January 6 committee subpoena other than to say they seem very interested in the relationship between Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein #StoneColdTruth.”
Interestingly, though, it doesn’t appear Stone decided to double down on the other accusation he recently made about the people involved with planning the January 6 violence. That would be the suggestion he made several weeks ago that White House aide Katrina Pierson was deeply involved in planning the violence too. And definitely not him. As Stone posted on Telegram at the time:
Recall how it was Pierson, acting as a representative of the Trump White House, who Guilfoyle was sparring with in the days leading up to the rally over the fact that figures like Jones and Stone weren’t on the speakers list. Pierson was very much in the middle of everything that went on, planned and unplanned.
Finally, as we’re going to see in the third excerpt below, part of what makes the question of who ultimately issued the call to breach the Capitol so interesting is that we just learned a few ago that “burner” anonymous cellphones were used for the last-minute high-level communication taking place between different groups involved with this rally. In particular, Kylie and Amy Kremer — the mother and daughter team who led the March for Trump group that helped plan the Ellipse rally. Three of these burner phones were purchased about a week before the rally. One phone was used by Kylie Kremer to communicate with figures in the White House like Eric Trump, Mark Meadows, and Katrina Pierson. A second phone was used by Amy Kremer and another rally organizer. It’s not known who received the third phone.
So there’s a third burner phone floating around out there that was used for anonymous communication in the days leading up to and during the events of January 6. And no clues as to who held it. Was Steve Bannon given that phone? Perhaps. He’s a prime suspect. Along with Roger Stone. And that’s all part of what makes Stone’s accusations against Bannon and Pierson so intriguing. It’s a prime suspect finger other prime suspects, and there’s no reasons to assume they aren’t all guilty:
“...“It is highly likely that [Steve] Bannon really gave the order to breach the capital [sic] and maneuvered patriots into dangerous positions,” he wrote. “A neophyte Steve Bannon was willing to try crazy things like this to curry favor with Trump who had a [sic] no interest in Bannon’s bullsh*t.””
It is highly likely that Steve Bannon really gave the order to breach the capitol. That’s what Roger Stone decided to post on Telegram from some reason on Saturday, just days after he pled the Fifth Amendment before the House investigator.
Is this just more of Stone’s trickery and an attempt at misdirection? Or does he really genuinely just hate Steve Bannon? Well, as we can see in the following piece from a few weeks ago, it’s not like Stone is exclusively pointing the finger at Bannon. It was Katrina Pierson Stone was fingering at that point. Although it’s not like this is a mutually exclusive accusation. Lot’s of people were presumably involved in the planning of the events of that day:
““Given what I know, I am perplexed as to why the January 6 committee has not issued a subpoena to Katrina Pierson, in other words, someone deeply involved in the violent and unlawful acts of January 6, rather than me, given that I was not there and have no advance knowledge or involvement whatsoever in the events at the Capitol That day #Jan6Cmte,” Stone wrote in a message to his Telegram channel subscribers.”
It’s quite an accusation Stone is making against Pierson. Because it’s an accusation that implicitly means there really was planning for the violence. The whole narrative about how this just spiraled out of control, and maybe it was antifa plants who were behind it, collapses in the face of Stone’s accusations. Stone is literally bragging about “what I know” when making these accusations:
And then we hear about Stone’s earlier posts hinting that the investigators were interesting in Bannon’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. It will be interesting to see if any Epstein-related information even ends up coming out of the investigation or if this was just Stone ‘flooding the zone with sh%t”, as Bannon might put it:
Finally, here’s a Rolling Stone piece from a month ago that reveals a key detail about how the planning for the insurrection was carried out: three burner phones were allegedly purchased and used for high-level coordination between the different parties involved in the whole process. One phone was used by Kylie Kremer to contact the White House team of figures like Mark Meadows and Katrina Pierson. A second burner phone was used by Amy Kremer, although we don’t know who exactly she was calling with it. And the third phone was given to a mystery person. So we have no idea who Amy Kremer was calling with the second burner phone and who ultimately received the third phone. It leaves quite a few open questions about how this cabal was talking to itself:
“Kylie Kremer, a top official in the March for Trump group that helped plan the Ellipse rally, directed an aide to pick up three burner phones days before Jan. 6, according to three sources who were involved in the event. One of the sources, a member of the March for Trump team, says Kremer insisted the phones be purchased using cash and described this as being “of the utmost importance.””
It was just days before Jan 6 that burner phones were suddenly needed. Who was using these phones and what were they discussing? We don’t know, other than being told that “high-level people” were going to be communicated with using these phones:
Was Roger Stone one of those “high-level” people? Don’t forget, Stone was himself allegedly getting VIP security treatment at the rally from a team of Oath Keepers who, themselves, ultimately breached the Capitol. Stone was a clearly a “VIP” in this operation. So was Stone one of the VIPs getting calls from these burner phones? Was Stone himself the recipient of the third mystery phone? Steve Bannon? Rudy Giuliani? Who received the mystery burner phone? It’s an important question in general in relation to this investigation. But in terms of answering the question of who ultimately gave the order to breach the capitol it could end up being the most important question to answer.
All that being said, if we take Roger Stone at his word, we already have an answer to the question of whether or not the insurrection was just a rally that spiraled out of control vs a planned breach of the Capitol. According to Roger Stone, yes, it was planned. With Steve Bannon and Katrina Pierson doing much of the planning.
It’s been an enduring mystery as to what precisely stalled the National Guard for hours on January 6. A mystery that deepened significant when we learned that Charles Flynn — brother of Michael Flynn — was one of the two Pentagon generals on a 2:30 PM call that day where the decision to keep the Guard on standby. And we learned this after the Pentagon first denied Flynn was on the call at all. Recall how Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, said the Pentagon essentially took away his power to call in the Guard himself in the lead up to January 6, giving Flynn and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt immense influence over when and how the Guard would be deployed that day. And yet, when directly asked whether they were involved with the decision to delay the Guard response, both Piatt and Flynn denied it. Also recall how the Guard was only ultimately allowed to show up after the insurrection failed and local and regional policy units had mostly suppressed the situation. What did Charles Flynn do, or not do, that day? It’s still a major mystery.
So it’s worth noting a pair of recent updates on that mystery. The first is a new analysis put out by Just Security — an NYU Law-based forum on law, rights and security — that incorporates the reporting on this topic with the the information found in the Pentagon’s inspector general report on January 6 released last month. Based on this body of data, the analysts concluded that the explanation for why the Pentagon seemed to be unwilling to send up help is due not just to fears of the optics of seeing the military occupy the Capitol, which we’ve already heard about.
Just Security concluded that it was also driven by a fear that Trump himself would weaponize the Guard for his own purposes to hold onto power. From that perspective, if Flynn or Piatt had taken steps to block the Guard’s deployment it could be seen as an end run around Trump’s schemes.
It’s perhaps the best possible interpretation of the Pentagon’s actions, or lack thereof, that day. And yet still extremely alarming, as TPM’s David Kurtz points out in the following piece. Because we’re still talking about a situation where the military had to effectively make moves to the defy the president, the head of the civilian chain of command. In other words, if this best case scenario really was was played out, it was a broken best case scenario for an utterly broken government.
But, of course, we don’t actually know if this analysis is indeed accurate. Its an educated guess, based heavily on the November Pentagon Inspector General’s report. And notably, if you read the full Just Security report, there’s no mentions of Charles Flynn at all.
And that brings us to a second except below from a a Politico report put out a couple of weeks ago about the scathing reviews given to that inspector general’s report. Scathing reviews from Maj. Gen. William J. Walker himself and Col. Earl Matthews, who was acting as Walker’s top attorney that day. Walkers has already called for the report to be retracted.
But it’s the actions of Charles Flynn and Walter Piatt that Matthews appears to be especially angry about, calling them both “absolute and unmitigated liars.” In particular, lying by denying that they did indeed recommend holding the Guard back, reportedly stunning everyone else in the room. In fact, it was Piatt and Flynn who recommended the Guard be held back during that 2:30 call, citing the bad optics of the Pentagon occupying the Capitol as a reason.
So we have a new Just Security report based on the Pentagon’s inspector general report last month that, if accurate, would suggest Flynn and Piatt stalled the deployment of the Guard based on a patriotic duty of preventing Trump from hijacking the military to stay on power. On the other hand, we have the scathing reviews of that same report by figures who were there that day, Walker and Matthews, and who accuse Flynn and Piatt of repeatedly lying. Where Walker, Mathews, and Just Security appear to agree entirely is that the US federal government was utterly broken that day:
“The Just Security analysis adds a lot more to the picture. It draws on subsequent reporting, much of it from recent books, and on last month’s report from the Pentagon’s inspector general. The IG report included written and oral testimony from Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller that bears directly on these questions and illuminates his thinking at the time. It all but confirms that he was operating from a defensive crouch, determined not to let Trump misuse the military for extra-constitutional shenanigans.”
The Just Security analysis draw on a number of sources, in particular the November Pentagon’s inspector general’s report. and based on these sources, Just Security raises a troubling possibility explaining the Pentagon’s apparent blocking of the National Guard that day: the decision to stall the deployment of the National Guard was driven by a palpable fear at the Pentagon that then-President Trump would then use his Commander in Chief powers to order the Guard to effectively assist in the coup:
Ok, now here’s that Politico article about the brutal condemnation of the same Pentagon’s inspector general report by Col. Earl Matthews, the top attorney of Walker that day. Matthews were there that day and in a position to cite inaccuracies in that report. And according to Mathews, it was indeed filled with inaccuracies. Inaccuracies that include the outright lies of Flynn and Piatt about their actions that day:
“Matthews’ memo levels major accusations: that Flynn and Piatt lied to Congress about their response to pleas for the D.C. Guard to quickly be deployed on Jan. 6; that the Pentagon inspector general’s November report on Army leadership’s response to the attack was “replete with factual inaccuracies”; and that the Army has created its own closely held revisionist document about the Capitol riot that’s “worthy of the best Stalinist or North Korea propagandist.””
Those are indeed major accusations made by Col Earl Matthews, who was serving as that day as the top attorney to Maj. Gen. William Walker, then commanding general of the D.C. National Guard. That’s the guy making serious allegations about major fabrications told in the Pentagon inspector general’s November report and told by Flynn and Piatt themselves. Many of those lies centered around a 2:30 phone pm call where the two highest-ranking Army officials on the call were Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff and Gen. Charles Flynn, who served as deputy chief of staff for operations on Jan. 6. Matthews calls them both “absolute and unmitigated liars.” In particular, lying by denying that they did indeed recommend to hold the Guard back, reportedly stunning everyone else in the room. What was the justification for their call? Avoiding the ‘bad optics’ of the National Guard occupying the capitol:
And then there’s the criticism of the inspector general report, with both Matthews and Walker calling it filled with fabrications, including fabrications by then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy about his ability to get in touch with Walker that day:
It’s not just Flynn and Piatt. Then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy doesn’t appear to have a story that matches the known facts either.
So how are we to interpret this? Did the Pentagon hold back the Guard to thwart Trump or help him? A bit of both? Keep in mind that we are told Piatt and Flynn were making the case about the ‘bad optics’ of sending in the Guard, a hesitancy that came in large part from the Pentagon’s bad optics in allowing the National Guard to play a role in the unleashing of tear-gas and rubber-bullet on a crowd of protestors near the White House. And then there’s the hesitancy the Pentagon may have understandably felt given all the calls from Trump supporters for Trump to use the military to reverse the election results. The point being that all the bad actions threatening the abuse of military force were apparently used as justification to keep the Guard at bay when it was actually needed. It’s not the best kind of synergy.
There have been a pair of updates related to the investigation into the January 6 Capitol insurrection over the last couple of days. Updates in particular about what Donald Trump himself may have said and done to endorse or facilitate the mob violence that ultimately unfolded.
The first update involves House investigators’ attempts to gain access to phone records between the White House and the Willard Hotel on Jan 5 and 6. Recall how the Willard Hotel has emerged as a kind of ‘headquarter of headquarters’ for the various Trump-related teams operating that day. Rudy Giuliani was there as part of Trump’s personal legal team. Then there was the separate psychological operations team with figures like Steve Bannon, Phil Waldron, Russell J. Ramsland Jr., and John Eastman. And Roger Stone’s operation was there too, although he insists it had no communication with the other Trump teams (Recall how Stone recently blamed the violence on Bannon). Then there’s the recent story about anonymous burner phones being used for some sort of yet-to-be-elucidated coordination between these teams
Updates that suggest House investigators could be getting closer to establishing direct evidence of Trump’s involvement in planning the mob violence as part of a strategic plot to disrupt the certification of the election. Maybe. Or maybe Trump will be saved by a legal technicality. We’ll see. It may come down to where Trump made these calls to the Willard. There were two locations at the White House Trump is suspected of making those calls from: the West Wing, and the White House personal residence. Calls from the West Wing would be memorialized in the National Archives automatically at the end of his term. Not so for calls from the personal residence. So if it turns out Trump made calls to the Willard Hotel from the West Wing, the contents of that call could potentially be available to congressional investigators.
So what are the odds that these calls contain evidence of Trump’s direct involvement in the planning of the insurrection? Well, this brings us to the explosive report from last month about how Trump responded to learning on the night of Jan 5 that Mike Pence was planning on certifying the election results. As we saw, Trump was apparently calling his team and imploring them to come up with new schemes for delaying the certification of the election. Schemes that included getting members of congress to wage so many complaints that it stall the certification process beyond Jan 6. Avoid a Jan 6 certification through any means necessary suddenly became a top priority, and hours later we got the insurrection.
And that brings us to the second update. This one comes from former Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro, who is doing interviews selling his new book. In that book, Navarro claims that it was he and Steve Bannon who devised the plans for what unfolded that day, although Trump was very much involved and approved of the plan. It was dubbed the ‘Green Bay Sweep’. The idea was simple: get members of congress in the contested states to wage formal complaints about the election results. Then fall back on laws that state each complaints requires a couple hours of public years. Get enough complaints together to do a 24 media blitz, where Republicans do an ‘end run’ around the media and just present directly to the American public their case for why the election was stolen. That was apparently the plan, which Navarro claims exonerates both Bannon and Trump was charges that they planned the violence that eventually erupted. It was all supposed to be entirely peaceful.
Except there’s one problem with Navarro’s narrative: The “Green Bay Sweep” also relied on Mike Pence’s refusal to certify the election results. So it’s simply not possible that the plan Trump and Bannon had in mind for Jan 6 was still the Green Bay Sweep on the morning of Jan 6. Pence already scuttled those plans the day before, leading to an evening of mystery calls between the White House and the Willard Hotel. And that’s all part of what makes the House investigation into the contents of those phone calls so intriguing. If direct evidence of who ordered the insurrection exists anyway, it’s like in those phone calls:
“Thompson said the select committee could not ask the National Archives for records about specific calls, but noted “if we say we want all White House calls made on January 5 and 6, if he made it on a White House phone, then obviously we would look at it there.””
The House investigators can’t ask the National Archives for information on specific calls. But they can make a blanket request of all White House calls made on January 5 and 6. And based on what we already know about the timeline of the events on Jan 5 and Jan 6, calls were made by Trump to his teams at the Willard Hotel during this period where the last-minute plans to stop the certification of the election were discussed after Trump learned Mike Pence wasn’t going to go along with their initial schemes. The content of those phone calls is what House investigators are now focusing on. Content that could obviously directly implicate Trump in the insurrection planning. It’s one thing to learn about the existence of these phone calls, but it’s another to actually learn that call content. Content that could directly legally implicate Trump in the plotting:
But, as with so many of these investigative avenues, it’s going to come down to a technicality: were the calls made from the West Wing, or from the White House residence? Because only the West Wing calls would have been automatically memorialized at the National Archives. Trump might escape on a technicality one more time:
And now here’s a Daily Beast piece about Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro, who had a new book out where is essentially claiming ownership over the Trump team’s schemes to overturn the election results. Ownership shared with Steve Bannon. The two allegedly came up with the “Green Bay Sweep” in the weeks before Jan 6. The plan was simple: get a large number of Republican members of congress to lodge complaints about specific state results. Then fall back on law require a public hearing for each complaint. The hope was to get enough complaints lodged against the six contested states to put together a 24 non-stop blitz of congressional hearings investigating the allegations. The hope was to create an end-run around the media and convince the American public directly that the election really had been stolen.
Interestingly, it doesn’t sound like Navarro’s claims are actively being investigated by the House investigators yet. Navarro is bragging that his book actually exonerates both Trump and Bannon by establishing that there was never a plan for violence, asserting that Trump was fulling on board with the plan. But as we’ll see, Navarro also makes claims that make it clear that this “Green Bay Sweep” couldn’t have still been ‘the plan’ heading into Jan 6 because the ‘Green Bay Sweep’ plan required the cooperation of Mike Pence. As Navarro writes in his book, when Pence certified the electoral votes he became “the Brutus most responsible… for the final betrayal of President Trump. Whether or not the “Green Bay Sweep” really was the plan on the morning of Jan 5, it couldn’t have still been the plan on the morning of Jan 6. That’s what the whole focus on the communications between the Trump White House and the Willard Hotel is about. Those plans that relied on Mike Pence’s refusal to certify the election results were already crumbling on the night of Jan 5.
So while these new details about the “Green Bay Sweep” doesn’t actual exonerate Trump and Bannon, it does give us a better idea of what they had in mind if Mike Pence had actually played along. And therefore a better idea of what to expect the next time they try to overturn the election:
“This last-minute maneuvering never had any chance of actually decertifying the election results on its own, a point that Navarro quickly acknowledges. But their hope was to run the clock as long as possible to increase public pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to send the electoral votes back to six contested states, where Republican-led legislatures could try to overturn the results. And in their mind, ramping up pressure on Pence would require media coverage. While most respected news organizations refused to regurgitate unproven conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud, this plan hoped to force journalists to cover the allegations by creating a historic delay to the certification process.”
Running out the clock to buy time. That was the ultimate plan. But buy time to do what exactly? That’s the crux of this ultimate plan. How was stalling the certification of the election go to ultimately block it? This is where the “Green Bay Sweep” scheme apparently comes into place: put together a bunch of congressional ‘challenges’ to the result in the six contested states. According to their interpretation of the law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge, adding up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress for the six contested states. Steve Bannon wanted to created a 24 hour media fiasco where the the GOP basically attempts to directly sell the US public on their package of ‘stolen election’ complaints. It was essentially a plan to take Bannon’s strategy of “Flooding the zone with b#llshit” to a new level for the purpose of executing a coup in open daylight:
But note how, crucially, this plan was predicated on Mike Pence’s willingness to not go along with the certification of the vote and had apparently been in development for weeks. In other words, we can reasonably conclude that this was NOT the plan that the Trump had in place on Jan 6, because Pence had already signal his unwillingness to play along the night before, hence the last-minute scheming between the White House and the teams at the Willard Hotel. At best, this “Green Bay Sweep” was the plan they were hoping to get back on track with the insurrection:
And that brings us to Navarro’s claims that his role in the planning actually exonerates Trump and Bannon. It’s a narrative that completely ignores what we’ve learned. After all, it’s not like we haven’t been reasonably assuming that the Trump team tried to overturn the election results without resorting to violence first. Of course a peaceful overturning of the election would have been desired. It was what happened on Jan 5, after Mike Pence made clear he wasn’t going to go along with any of these non-violent scheme, that’s the big question because that’s when any sort of last-minute desperate insurrectionary scheme would have been taking place in earnest. The evening of Jan 5 and early Jan 6. So telling us the Green Bay Sweep was being formulated by Bannon and Navarro weeks before doesn’t in any way somehow exculpate Trump and Bannon. The Green Bay Sweep was the thwarted plan — thwarted by Mike Pence on Jan 5 — that was replaced with the insurrection:
Yes, Contrary to Navarro’s claims , “Green Bay Sweep” actually potentially helps explain part of the rational for the insurrection. One of the major questions looming over this entire story the whole time was what exactly could they have been possibly try accomplish with that insurrection, barring some sort of public hostage-taking crisis. What was the end goal? Well, based on what we’ve learning about the Green Bay Sweep, the end was always the same: persuading a large enough chunk of the public that the election was stolen that the results just somehow have to be reverse. Just democratic poison-pilling. Yes, technically the decisions would be sent to the Republican-run state legislator in the contested states who would eventually choose a slate of pro-Trump electors. There was more to the plan than simply persuading the public. Don’t forget what we’ve learning about the Trump team’s actions during the insurrection: they were lobbying Republican members of congress to issue stronger challenges to the results. Rudy Giuliani was calling Senator Tuberville at 7 PM on Jan 6. That was the meta plan: just convince a large enough percent of the public into believing mass fraud took place and intellectually overwhelm them with a circus of accusations and showy trials. Bully and bomboozle the country into accepting a second Trump term. An advanced version of Flooding the zone with sh$t. And avoiding the certification of election results at all costs for as long as possible was a core objective of this plan. The certification simply could NOT happen. Taken together, it sure looks like the insurrection really was just the final Hail Mary to keep the Green Bay Sweep in play. Which isn’t exactly exonerating.
There was a bit of a quiet bombshell in January 6 Capitol insurrection investigation a few days ago. In a TPM exclusive, we learned about ANOTHER planned rally for that day. A second rally scheduled for outside the Supreme Court, next to the Capitol. A Supreme Court rally planned to continue the theatrics as the congressional vote was going on inside the Capitol. It was scheduled to start around 2–3 PM but effectively canceled by the insurrection. We’re only learning about the rally now, and it’s the kind the event that raises all sorts of questions about the narratives we’ve been hearing from the different organizers involved with the rallies that day.
First, recall how the main event on January 6 at the Ellipse was primarily organized by Amy and Kylie Kremer, the mother/daughter duo behind Women for America First, but done in close coordination with the Trump White House. Recall how we learned that the Kremers purchased three anonymous burner phones that were used by Kylie, Amy, and an undisclosed third person to communicate with the various groups involved with the organizing. We’re told they communicated with Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Mark Meadows and Katrina Pierson using these phones.
But then there was the second major event on that day. The Stop the Steal rally outside the Capitol, organized primarily by Ali Alexander. Recall how Stop the Steal was a Roger Stone creation first created to help Trump secure the 2016 GOP nomination. In the context of the 2020 election, Stop the Steal became a Roger Stone and Steve Bannon operation closely coordinating with the White House.
Next, recall the truly disturbing reports about congressional delegations led by figures like Lauren Boebert in the days leading up to January 6 that were described as potential ‘reconnaissance tours’, paired with the federal prosecutors in Arizona who claimed to have “strong evidence” that the insurrectionists planned on apprehending and assassinating elected officials that day.
Finally, recall how Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro recently came out seeming to take credit for the overall strategy for overturning the election. It was Navarro and Steve Bannon who allegedly devised the “Green Bay Sweep”, a plan that revolved around using congressional complaints as a pretext for creating a 24 hour congressional drama televised to the nation where they lay out the case for voter fraud, setting up the pretext for Republican-controlled swing states to overturn the results. And yet, as we saw, that was a plan that required Mike Pence’s cooperation, meaning the “Green Bay Sweep” was never truly ready to go. Without Mike Pence’s cooperation, the Green Bay Sweet needed some sort of supplementary boost. A violent mob that takes congress hostage, perhaps?
That’s all part of the context of the new revelations about a Supreme Court rally planned for later in the afternoon on Jan 6. Another rally scheduled for right next to the Capitol where the insurrection unfolded? And planned by the same people who planned the Ellipse rally? It’s the kind of revelation that raises a number of questions, in particular in relation to answers these various groups have been giving all along about their levels of coordination with each other.
Because as we’re going to see in the first to article excerpts below, there’s a major consistency problem with the narratives we’ve been getting from the organizers of these rallies. A narrative that seems to be trying to compartmentalize the fallout for the violence. As we’re going to see in the first except below — a Rolling Stone piece from back in October based on three anonymous sources who were involved with the planning of the “Women for America First” rally at the Ellipse — we are told the Kremers were working closely with the White House during the planning for the Ellipse rally, with chief of staff Mark Meadows acting as a key point of contact. We’re also told that they held concerns about Ali Alexander’s Stop the Steal rally being held so close to the Capitol, with a potential for violence. These concerns were apparently taken up with the White House via Meadows. Alexander apparently agreed to NOT hold his Stop the Steal rally and allow the Ellipse rally to be the only major DC rally that day but went ahead with the plans anyway. So that’s one narrative we’re hearing from the “Women for America First” crowd: that they knew violence was possible from Ali Alexander’s group and warned the White House. In other words: don’t blame us for the violence.
But then we get another explosive revelation in this article: a congressional delegation of far right members of congress — Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, and Louie Gohmert — was also closely coordinating with these groups. In particular Ali Alexander’s group. And they were apparently peddling offers of blanket pardons. Yep, that’s what we’re told. Blanket pardons were being offered by Rep Gosar. Or rather, assurances of pardons that Gosar was conveying from the Trump White House. So this group of far right congressional members of congress was apparently making secret offers of blanket pardons to the people who organized what ultimately descended into the insurrection. Yet this same congressional clique was working closely with the Ellipse rally planners and we are assured a rally near the Capitol was never part of their plan.
In the second except below — another Rolling Stone piece from back in November based on the same three anonymous sources — we learn more about when exactly the Kremers determined that Alexander was going back on his pledge to not hold the rally and took the issue up with the White House. They apparently became aware on December 31. So they knew for around a week that the Stop the Steal rally outside the Capitol was going to happen. A week during which we are assured they were frantically working with the White House and Mark Meadows to ensure the rally didn’t happen due to concerns over possible violence. And then it happened anyway.
So that’s all part of the context of the Kremers’ newly revealed Supreme Court rally plans. Plans we only learned about months after we were told by the anonymous sources in the following two Rolling Stone articles that the Kremers were super worried about a rally next to the Capitol over fears of violence. It’s a context that has the appearance of compartmentalization, where we have all these different groups working together and coordinating but with enough distance between the groups to provide a degree of plausible deniability in the aftermath if things don’t succeed. Compartmentalization that apparently included using Paul Gosar and other members of congress to quietly dangle offers of blanket pardons on behalf of the White House:
“The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, describe participating in “dozens” of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol as his election loss to President Joe Biden was being certified. ”
“Dozens” of planning briefings took place in the days leading up to January 6. Meetings between the various rally organizers, the Trump White House, and far right Republican members of congress. So when we’re asking who may have been involved in the planning the insurrection, we have to include these members of congress and their staffers in that investigation. This core group of House GOP members — Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, and Louie Gohmert — are prime suspects for having played a direct role in the planning for that insurrection.
Importantly, note how Gosar, Green, and Boebert were billed as speakers as the “Wild Protest” led by Roger Stone’s “Stop the Steal” outfit and Ali Alexander. Based on the available evidence, it was that “Wild Protest” that effectively descended into the insurrectionary mob at the Capitol. At least that’s what happened on the Jan 6 day of the Stop the Steal DC event. There was a Jan 5 event too, which included speeches like Ali Alexander leading the crowd on a “victory or death” chant. So those three members of congress were coordinating with Alexander, Stone, and other “Wild Protest” organizers up until the last minute. That’s part of why a focus on this far right congressional clique could end up being crucial for this investigation. The insurrectionary mob emerged from that rally. A rally led by chants of “victory or death” just the day before:
But it’s not just that this congressional cabal had dozens of meetings with key planners in the days leading up to Jan 6. It’s the allegations of offers of blanket pardons made by Paul Gosar’s office that is the most intriguing. Because let’s not forget: Paul Gosar doesn’t have the power to issue blanket pardons. Only the president can do that. So Paul Gosar’s office was apparently making offers to organizers of “blanket pardons” that only make sense if the offers were being made on behalf of the Trump White House. In other words, if this congressional group was offering blanket pardons we have to assume they were acting as an extension of the White House’s efforts. And when you’re offering blanket pardons to the same people you’re asking to protest the election results, that’s effectively a request to do ‘whatever it takes’ to ensure the election results weren’t certified. That’s another part of what makes this congressional clique’s actions so interesting: some of these actions only make sense of done if coordination with the White House. Like offers of blanket pardons:
So based on the available circumstantial evidence, it would appear that this congressional cabal was effectively coordinating with all of these different groups on behalf of the Trump White House. That’s the only way Paul Gosar could be making pardon offers. Ali Alexander himself has come out and said it was Gosar, Brooks, and Biggs who helped him formulate the strategy for the “Stop the Steal” event. And as we saw, it was that “Wild Protest” that appears to have directly morphed into the insurrection:
Intriguingly, we’re also told that Alexander promised the Ellipse rally organizers that he would NOT hold the “Wild Protest” at the Capitol on Jan 6. But he did so anyway, prompting the rally organizers to contact White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. What, if any, actions did Meadows take regarding that “Wild Protest”? That remains unanswered but we’ve seen zero indication anything was done by the White House to stop it. Also keep in mind that we’ve that Trump was informing his lieutenants in late-Jan 5/early-Jan 6 that Pence would NOT be going along with any scheme to block the certification of the election results. So the whole movement was given about a day to prepare for a non-Pence plan:
But these anonymous sources weren’t exclusively pinning the blame for the violence on Ali Alexander’s decision to go ahead with the “Wild Protest”. They’re blaming Trump too for his provocative words:
Also note, regarding the coordination with members of congress, how there really was a shortage of GOP Senators who were willing to play along with the scheme and file formal complaints. More than 100 Republican members of the House ultimately objected to the election results, but only a handful of Senators. This could end up being an especially important detail in terms of establishing the motive for why the insurrection was started in the first place: it bought time that could be used to lobby wayward Senators. Recall how we are told that Rudy Giuliani literally left a voicemail at 7 PM on January 6, hours after the insurrection, imploring Senator Tommy Tuberville to block the certification. So when we’re wondering what kind of last-minute calculus was at work as the Trump administration allowed the situation to spiral out of control, the fact that they clearly still needed more GOP Senators to go along with the scheme should be kept in mind:
Finally, and importantly, note how the two anonymous sources for this report assert that their concerns over Ali Alexander’s planned “Wild Protest” were rooted, in part, over the risk of drawing a large number of very angry people to the area directly outside the Capitol. As we’re going to see with the story of the newly discovered plans for a rally outside the Supreme Court later that afternoon, this Supreme Court rally was more or less right outside the Capitol, making these claims that there were concerns about a rally next to the Capitol seem rather convenient after the fact:
Ok, and now here’s another Rolling Stone article by Hunter Walker that was published a month later and appears to be based on the same three anonymous sources. We get a few more details on what exactly the coordination was between the “Women for America First” Ellipse rally planners and the planned Roger Stone/Ali Alexander “Stop the Steal” rally. For example, we learn that the Ellipse rally organizers appeared to realize on December 31 that Ali Alexander’s Stop the Steal operation was going to plow ahead with a Jan 6 rally despite prior assurances to the contrary. That’s six days they had to prevent that Capitol protest.
The piece also makes clear how closely the White House was working with the Ellipse rally organizers to ensure they get all the permissions needed for the event to happen. It’s a reminder of another crucial role the congressional clique likely played for the Stop the Steal rallies on Jan 5 and 6 outside the Capitol: you’re a lot more likely to get a license for your event at the Ellipse or outside the Capitol if you’re working with members of congress or the White House. So it looks like it was the congressional far right clique who gave Stop the Steal the congressional backing it needed to get permit for the Stop the Steal rally outside the Capitol and the White House who backed the slightly more respectable Ellipse rally. A divide and conquer strategy that helped compartmentalize the insurrection away from the White House:
“Kremer and Women For America First weren’t the only ones involved in planning events to protest the election result. Another group, Stop the Steal, which was led by far right activist Ali Alexander, held its own rallies around the country and planned a “Wild Protest” outside the Capitol on January 6. Two sources who were involved in the Ellipse rally planning previously told Rolling Stone they had concerns Alexander’s event could turn violent due to his apparent ties to militia groups and its location directly outside the Capitol. Those sources claimed Alexander initially agreed he would not hold the “Wild Protest” and would allow the Ellipse rally to be the only major pro-Trump event in D.C. on January 6.”
What’s the actual story here about the plans for the ‘wild’ Stop The Steal rally? Was it planned or not? We aren’t getting a clear answer. These anonymous sources claim Ali Alexander initially agreed he would not hold the “Wild Protest” and would allow the Ellipse rally to be the only major event that day. It almost sounded like the two rallies perhaps merged, with text messages from the morning of the 6th indicating consternation of Alexander’s attempts to shuffle the VIP seating arrangements. And yet, group chats from Dec 31 indicate that the Ellipse rally coordinators seemed to realize the Stop the Steal rally was indeed moving forward and was dismissed at the time as “all the people who aren’t invited or POTUS won’t be associated with.” So the Stop the Steal rally was set up to be like a less reputable garbage bin of the groups and figures who weren’t allowed to the Ellipse rally. Like militia types. It’s like an advanced compartmentalization of the forces. And they weren’t all that compartmentalized. Alexander was at the Ellipse rally, rearranging VIP seats:
As we saw above, it was concerns about the proximity of the Stop the Steal rally directly outside the Capitol and the potential for violence that prompted all the consternation in the first place. So if those professed concerns were genuine, how do the Ellipse rally organizers explain the recently revealed planned rally right outside the Supreme Court, adjacent to the Capitol? Sure, the Supreme Court rally didn’t actually end up happening because it was precluded by the insurrection. But it was indeed planned. So the same group of people telling us that they opposed the Stop the Steal rally over fears holding a rally next to the Capitol would foment violence had their own rally planned right next to the Capitol at the same time:
“But now TPM’s reporting suggests that the Ellipse rally organizers intended to hold a separate 2 p.m. ET event on the steps of the Supreme Court, across the street from the Capitol, where Congress began certifying the Electoral College vote at noon ET. It suggests that organizers wanted to keep up the pressure on Congress through an event far closer to the Capitol.”
A new surprise planned event, right next to the Capitol. And planned by the exact same group of Ellipse rally planners — Women for America First — who were allegedly all concerned about the potential for violence should Ali Alexander’s Stop the Steal rally also be held next to the Capitol. The story isn’t adding up.
Beyond that, there’s a question of how exactly the planners expected people to get from the Ellipse rally to the Supreme Court rally without a march after the Ellipse rally. There was no official planning for a match, and yet it’s hard to see how all those people at the Ellipse make it to the area outside the Supreme Court with a march. Again, this story just doesn’t make sense:
And note an archived version of the March for Trump website makes no mention of the planned Supreme Court rally at all. It’s like some sort of rally mirage. And yet DHS officials apparently expected “large groups” at both the Capitol and Supreme Court according to documents. So let the government know there was a planned rally outside the Supreme Court, but didn’t actually notify the rally attendees. It’s as if they planned for a rally they didn’t necessarily expect was actually going to happen. And sure enough, the insurrection got the rally canceled. An insurrection that happened after the rally goers march along the exact same path they would have had to march to get to the Supreme Court rally. It’s all quite a remarkable coincidence:
How many more rallies were planned for that day? We’ll see. But, again, don’t forget that whatever plans they had in mind on Jan 5 were no longer valid after Mike Pence decided to not play along on the evening of Jan 5. So not only should we not be surprised to learn about new last minute scheming but we also shouldn’t be too surprised if those schemes turn out to be crazier than we could have imagined. We’re already in secret blanket pardon territory here, after all.
We got an update to the ongoing mystery of what caused the nearly three hour delay in the response by the National Guard during the January 6 Capitol insurrection. William Walker, then the commanding general of the DC National Guard, held a press conference where he took questions regarding a email sent by then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The email was one of a trove of emails Meadows sent to the House investigation last month. And in this email Meadows asserts that the National Guard was going to be on standby to ‘Protect pro-Trump People’ on Jan 6. The recipient of this email from Meadows has not been identified.
When asked what could have prompted this email, Walker told reporters “Your guess is as good as mine”. This is a good time to recall how Walker is one of the figures who has been publicly hinting at some sort of cover up this whole time. For example, both Walker and Col Earl Matthews — the top attorney to Walker that day — have been highly critical of the Pentagon Inspector General’s report, calling it effectively a fabrication that obscures the role General Charles Flynn played in holding back the Guard.
But here’s the key detail to keep in mind regarding Meadow’s ominous email: it was sent on Jan 5. And as we’ve seen, it wasn’t until the evening of Jan 5 that it became clear that Vice President Mike Pence was NOT going to be going along with any schemes to block the certification of the electoral college vote. So when we now learn that Mark Meadows was assuring parties on Jan 5 that the Capitol Police would be on standby to protect pro-Trump forces, we have to ask the question: was this email sent before or after it because unambiguously clear that Mike Pence wasn’t going to go along with any of the vote-blocking schemes?:
“The claim surfaced in documents released by the Jan. 6 committee, where members describe an email Meadows sent on Jan. 5 in which he allegedly said that the Guard would be present at the Capitol to “protect pro-Trump people.” The committee did not identify to whom Meadows sent the email.”
You couldn’t have picked a more ominous date for Mark Meadows to have sent that ominous email. Based on available information, it was Jan 5 when the scheming went from desperate schemes centered around Mike Pence to desperate schemes through any means necessary. Again, was this email sent after the Trump team learned it wasn’t going to have Pence’s cooperation? We don’t know, but it’s worth noting another related detail found in the initial Politico report last month that first revealed the Meadows email assuring someone that the Guard would be on standby to ‘protect pro Trump people’: it was on Jan 3 that former Defense Secretary Christopher Miller was told by Trump to “do whatever was necessary to protect the demonstrators that were executing their constitutionally protected rights.” So the Trump team was already thinking about how to using the military to protect the ‘pro-Trump’ forces in the days leading up to the insurrection:
“It’s unclear who Meadows, the former White House chief of staff to Donald Trump, relayed the information to or whether it was the result of any insight provided by the Defense Department. But the exchange is of high interest to congressional investigators probing whether Trump played a role in the three-hour delay between the Capitol Police’s urgent request for Guard support and their ultimate arrival at the Capitol, which had been overrun by pro-Trump rioters. The comment also aligns with testimony from former Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who said that in a Jan. 3 conversation with Trump, the then-president told him to “do whatever was necessary to protect the demonstrators that were executing their constitutionally protected rights.””
Don’t forget what else we were told by then-Defense Secretary Christopher Miller about the instructions, or lack of instructions, that Trump gave him in the lead up to the insurrection. Miller told investigators that while he spoke to Trump ahead of the insurrection, he didn’t communicate with Trump as the riot unfolded. Why? Miller said he “didn’t need to” because he had the necessary authority and “knew what had to happen”.
That’s all part of what makes Mark Meadows’s “protect the pro-Trump people” Jan 5 email somewhat tricky to interpret. Are the ‘pro-Trump people’ in need of protection members of Congress who were willing to throw a wrench in the constitutional works to help Trump stay in office? Or were the ‘pro-Trump people’ the mobs of insurrectionists roving the halls of the Capitol searching for members of Congress to lynch?
Welp, it’s the one year anniversary of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, and Donald Trump has as strong a grip as ever on the Republican Party. At this point the US is just sleepwalking into the next one.
So it’s worth noting a piece published by Russ Baker yesterday about a little-recognized admission made by Roger Stone back in October of 2016: The Trump team were planning to the contest the 2016 election too. It just didn’t end up being necessary. But they had plans. Plans to to carry out widespread acts of civil disobedience to grind the country to a halt. This is apparently what Roger Stone admitted to journalist Len Colodny back in October of 2016 while both were attending a conference in New Orleans. Colodny shared this experience with Baker in 2020, prompting Baker to reach out to Stone and confirm the account. And Stone did indeed confirm this to Baker. They were prepared to block bridges, tunnels. Whatever it took.
It’s the kind of admission that’s obviously of potential importance to federal investigators looking into who planned and organized the insurrection. But let’s not overlook the other major red flag in this story: the Trump team was planning on an insurrection during a time when it didn’t have control of the White House, making it the kind of plan that could be very useful for Jan 6, 2025:
“I shared his concern. With the very real possibility that Trump could actually lose this time, the threat seemed palpable and formidable. I reached out to Stone, who confirmed it. Trump’s team in 2016 had been ready to block bridges and tunnels, among other things. Whatever it took.”
Who knows why exactly Roger Stone decided to confirm to Russ Baker this rather explosive admission. Then again, when you’re Roger Stone, there’s no shame in admitting your planned to overturn an election. It’s a badge of honor for the guy. Of course he admitted it. Let’s hope investigators are listening. Or we can just wait until January 2025, when we’ll presumably get to learn more about the plans as they’re being deployed in real-time.
Are the ring-leaders of the January 6 Capitol insurrection going to ultimately be prosecuted? That’s the prospect raised by the indictment of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and ten others on charges of seditious conspiracy against the United States. But how high up in the coup plotter leadership will those charges ultimately go? That’s one of the big questions raised by an indictment that doesn’t just indict Rhodes but also refers to an unnamed person labeled “the operation leader.”” Who is this operation leader?
It’s important to recall that an impeachment conviction isn’t the only thing that can prevent Trump from running for office again. A sedition charge would also prevent a future run for office. And, circumstantially speaking, Trump should be vulnerable to a potential sedition charge, through gross negligence in not stopping the insurrection, if nothing else.
This is a good time to recall some of the numerous Rhodes-related stories we’ve seen over the years:
* Multnomah County Republican party chairman James Buchal was using the Oath Keepers and other militia groups as a kind of security force for public events back in 2017.
* Rhodes was calling for volunteer armed guards stationed outside schools in response to the Parkland, Florida high school shooting in 2018.
* Rhodes was threatening a “full-blown ‘hot’ civil war” back in 2019
* Rhodes was openly calling on Trump back in August of 2020 to declare that there was already a national left-wing insurrection taking place around the country, and the National Guard should be called in to suppress the insurrection in the streets. This call was paired with a warning that if Trump didn’t handle this, this militias would do it themselves. Disturbingly, this narrative about an ongoing left-wing violent insurrection has been used by Rhodes to successfully recruit within law enforcement and the military.
* Recall how Rhodes appeared on Alex Jones’s show in October 2020 warning about a “Benghazi-style” plan by antifa to assault the White House on Election Day. He assured Jones the Oath Keepers were preparing for that eventuality.
Then there’s all the reports we’ve had about Rhodes’s direct involvement in the Oath Keepers actions on Jan 6:
* We’ve already seen how Rhodes was actively issuing orders to his Oath Keepers during the insurrection. Orders to literally breach the doors of the Capitol in one case.
* Despite Rhodes’s denials, evidence points towards Rhodes playing a direct role in the planning an coordination of the “Quick Reaction Force” (QRF) of weapons stationed near the Capitol ready to be called in on a moments notice.
* Recall how Rhodes referred to Oath Keeper Michael Simmons as the “DC team leader” that day. But Simmons, a former Blackwater mercenary, claims he was hired by Rhodes to work as security for Roger Stone and that his work was in a purely professional capacity. On January 6, phone records shone Rhodes and Simmons communicated in the minutes before multiple Oath Keepers entered the Capitol.
* The group organizing the Oath Keepers’ QRF included Jessica Watkins, the individual who first claimed she had been coordinating with the Secret Service in providing security for VIPs at that ‘Stop the Steal’ rally that then-President Trump spoke at before the rally. Watkins later recanted after the Secret Service denied working with her, but by all accounts she was allowed into the VIP area of the rally before she was later filmed storming the Capitol. Watkins then advised the contact “to be prepared to fight hand to hand” while “guys outside DC with guns, await[] orders to enter DC under permission from Trump, not a minute sooner.”
* Rhodes was welcomed at the 2021 CPAC back in July.
That’s just an example of the extensive evidence of Oath Keepers’ planning for a violent opposition to the transfer of power. Planning that included a Quick Reaction Force that reportedly was ready and willing to ship heavy weapons to the forces at the Capitol. And if those plans for heavy weapons were indeed executed, they were to be executed “under permission from Trump, not a minute sooner.” That was all of the available evidence publicly available before this indictment was issued. So we’ll see how much more information comes about as this prosecution plays out. But at this point there’s so much evidence of active planning for a violent coup already out there in the public that the trial of Stewart Rhodes is less a trial of Rhodes himself and more a trial of the US criminal justice system’s capacity to actually prosecute threats against the government when those threats are carried out in coordination with one of the two major parties:
“The indictment also hints at the potential of other attack leaders who have not been identified. At several points in the indictment, the document refers to an unnamed person labeled “the operation leader.””
There were three groups of Oath Keepers operating on Jan 6 — two “stacks” who assaulted the Capitol and one QRF waiting for the signal — and someone had to be coordinating them. We’re now learning that there was an additional mystery person playing that role along with Stewart Rhodes. Who is the unnamed “operation leader”? It’s one of the big questions raised by this indictment. Roger Stone? Ali Alexander? Donald Trump perhaps? Don’t forget how Jessica Watkins advised a contact “to be prepared to fight hand to hand” while “guys outside DC with guns, await[] orders to enter DC under permission from Trump, not a minute sooner.”, in reference to the Oath Keepers’ QRF. Trump was effectively the Operation leader in the words of these Oath Keepers. Is Trump the mystery leader in this indictment too? Whoever it was, if they were engaged in the encrypted “Leadership intel sharing” Signal chat, they were engaged in a seditious plot to block the election. A seditious plot that including plotting for civil war:
Finally, note the other aspect of this story that makes a conviction of the high-level leaders so crucial: the plotting continues. Jan 6 wasn’t just practice for these guys. They were serious. But it will effectively have become practice if the leaders behind this plot end up not facing any legal repercussions and are left in a situation where they can plot for a repeat. A more successful repeat next time:
This is probably a good time to note that gun sales in the US were actually down 12% in 2021 compared to 2020. It’s not as good as it sounds. It just means 2021 had the second highest level of gun sales, down from the record highs of 2020. Stewart Rhodes has been the only American on a gun binge lately. And that points towards what is really the larger story here in relation to the real leadership roles played by figures like Donald Trump in fomenting the sedition on Jan 6. Because with the GOP now having fully embraced the ‘stolen election’ narrative and largely endorsing or dismissing the insurrection, the question of whether or not the open close collusion between the Oath Keepers and the Trump White House was legal in light of the Oath Keepers sedition is now one of the major questions officials have to ask in preparation for preventing the Jan 6, 2025 insurrection. And likely one of the questions the Trump team and rest of the GOP is asking itself right now too. Legally seditious campaign strategies are the kind of thing you can be confident the contemporary GOP is earnestly investigating.
There’s a new report out of the Guardian about an interview by former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham with the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. It sounds like Grisham may have provided investigators with a set of extremely important details and clues directly related to asking the legal question: did Donald Trump and his team plan for the insurrection or was it a chaotic situation that spiraled out of control? And based on what Grisham reportedly told the investigators, the circumstantial evidence pointing towards a planned insurrection just keeps adding up.
In particular, Grisham reportedly told investigators about secret meetings held in the White House residency in the days leading up to Jan 6. Grisham herself can’t say who attended these meetings, which were coordinated by Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Recall how Meadows appears to have been playing a central coordinating role in the organization of the Trump White House’s Jan 6 plans. For example, there was the story of how the organizers of the “Women for America First” rally at the Ellipse, Kylie and Amy Kremer, purchased several burner phones in the days leading up to the insurrection which were used to communicate with White House figures like Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Katrina Pierson, and Mark Meadows.
But part of what makes this report so significant is the specific legal mystery it points towards investigators focusing on: the mystery of why Trump made the pledge to the crowd at the Ellipse rally that he would join them at the Capitol, but instead of marching to the Capitol, Trump returned to the White House to watch the insurrection unfold. Why did events play out that way and was this part of a plan? Was there a plan for Trump to effectively lure his fervent supports from the Ellipse to the Capitol, where they would be effectively led into the insurrection by groups like the Oath Keepers? Was Trump literally setting up his rube supporters to bum rush the Capitol and take the fall for him?
It’s important at this point to keep in mind the ongoing parallel mysteries of just how many rallies were planned for Jan 6. Recall how there was a second “Wild Protest”, although whether or not not this rally ever took place is somewhat ambiguous based on the reporting. It’s very confusing. Recall the story about how the Kremers and the White House allegedly became concerned that Ali Alexander’s planned “Wild Protest” at the Capitol on Jan 6 was going to be a potential source of violence. Alexander allegedly agreed to not hold his planned Jan 6 rally and allow the Women for American First rally at the Ellipse to be the only major rally in DC that took place that day. But then the Kremers learned that Alexander was proceeding ahead with his planned “wild” protest, so they took the issue up with Mark Meadows. And yet, in the end, there are reports that this “wild” protest did indeed take place at the Capitol.
Also recall how the far right members of congress like Paul Gosar, Majorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert who were all billed as speakers for “wild” protest were the same members who were reportedly involved in offering “blanket pardons” in people involved in the “Stop the Steal” organizing on behalf of the White House. Finally, recall the revelation that there were plans for a rally outside the Supreme Court, near the rally, later in the afternoon but that rally was cancelled after the insurrection started.
Finally, in light of the recent indictment of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, recall the myriad pieces of evidence pointing towards the Oath Keepers working in coordination with the White House.
So the basic facts of how many rallies were planned, or even took place, are still somewhat obscured in the fog of war. And one of the basic questions at this point remains the question of whether or not all of the ongoing unresolved questions are a reflection of an intentional campaign on the part of the Trump White House and its allies to compartmentalize and hide their joint coordination in advance of the insurrection. So we keep getting evidence pointing in the direction of the White House coordinating in advance with the violent actors on that day. And now we learn about secret White House meetings in the days before the insurrection. Secret meetings with participants that remain a secret:
Grisham gave House investigators an overview of the chaotic final weeks in the Trump White House in the days leading up to the Capitol attack, recalling how the former president held off-the-books meetings in the White House residence, the sources said.
Trump was holding off-the-books meetings in the White House residence in the days before the insurrection. That’s not suspicious or anything.
So who was Trump secretly meeting with and what exact did they talk about? Well, Grisham says she doesn’t know who attended these meetings and only a small number of aides knew about them, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Again, as we’ve seen, Meadows appears to be a central player in White House’s planning in the lead up to Jan 6. He’s a ‘usual suspect’ in this story, so it’s not at all a surprise to hear that Meadows would have been the organizers of these secret White House meetings. But it also just makes the still-unknown identities of the attendees of these meetings all the more intriguing.
Also intriguing is the fact that the other figure who would know the identities of the meeting attendees, former chief usher, Timothy Harleth, was treated rather poorly by the Trump White House. Let’s hope investigators got a good chance to talk with Harleth:
Then there’s the fact that Trump was apparently increasingly relying on conducting his activities in the days leading up to Jan 6 in the White House residence because he felt less watched by West Wing aides than in the Oval Office. Recall how this issue of the different legal implication depending on where Trump did something has already come up in relation to House investigators’ attempts to gain access to White House phone records on in relation to calls made to the Willard Hotel. And as we saw, calls made from the West Wing are automatically archived and therefore potentially accessible for House investigators, but calls made from the White House personal residence are not. This same legal technicality appears to be relevant for the investigation of these mystery meetings:
But in terms of establishing whether or not Trump planned on the insurrection, perhaps what’s most notable is the treacherous nature of the questions raised by this investigation: why did Trump pledge to march on the Capitol during his Jan 6 speech at the Ellipse, but then return to the White House? Was Trump luring his supporters into rushing the Capitol while planning on watching the chaos unfold from the safety of the White House? Abusing his most fervent supporters like that and treating them legal physical and legal cannon fodder would indeed be a highly Trumpian thing to do. But did he really do that? Was this actually the plan? A big speech where Trump says, “I’ll see you all at the Capitol!”, and then he heads off the White House and lets the insurrectionists in the crowd take it from there?
It’s an intriguing mystery. It’s no long a question of whether or not Trump planned the insurrection in advance. It’s not a question of whether or not he knowingly threw his supports to the legal wolves and consciously lured them from the Ellipse to the Capitol, knowing full well that his teams Oath Keepers and other militants would get the insurrection underway, drawing the clueless supporters into the mix. A scheme that basically turned Trump’s mob of supporters into a national crisis that would delay the certification of the vote while leaving Trump with a degree of plausible deniability. It’s intriguing in part because, well, this actually all sounds quite plausible. After all, we have yet to see if Trump ends up getting indicted over this. The plausible deniability part of the scheme is still working.
One of the really interesting common themes when an extremely convoluted criminal story plays out is how seemingly random tidbits of information that came out when the story was breaking suddenly become much more meaningful and significant as our understanding of the story deepens. So here’s a look back at an article from Jan 10, 2021, four days after the January 6 Capitol insurrection, containing a boast from Alex Jones that seems a lot more meaningful and significant in the wake of the deluge of details we’ve been learning over the past month about what exactly the various actors behind the insurrection were actually doing in the days leading up to the event.
Specifically, Jones boasted that he and Ali Alexander had a “deal” with the White House regarding the “Wild Protest” Alexander and Jones were leading outside the Capitol. “We had a legitimate deal with the White House,” Jones said. “‘Hey Jones and Ali,’ literally, they let us out early, we were supposed to lead a peaceful deal.” At the time, this was just one assertion in what was a chaotic period of finger-pointing and blame-shifting. But over a year later, with everything we’ve learned since, that claim of a deal with the White House to “lead a peaceful deal” is starting to look like a smoking gun and evidence of the Trump White House directly planning and orchestrating the insurrection.
* The “Wild Protest” led by Jones and Alexander has long been kind of a mystery in the sense that it was never actually clear if it happened. There were two major rallies initially planned for that day. The “Wild Protest” at the Capitol and the “Women for America First” rally held earlier that day at the Ellipse led by Kylie Kremer and her mother — and Council for National Policy member — Amy Kremer.
* Tensions between these two protests were boiling over in the week leading up to the rally, with the Kremers expressing concerns about the extremists associated with Alexander’s “Wild Protest” and the risk of violence. They reached an agreement to allow the Ellipse rally to be the only rally scheduled for Jan 6. But then the Kremers observed that the planning for the Alexander/Jones rally appeared to be ongoing so they brought these concerns up with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
* The Kremers purchased several burner phones in the days leading up to the insurrection which were used to communicate with White House figures like Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Katrina Pierson, and Mark Meadows.
* Caroline Wren — the former deputy to Don Jr.‘s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle — had been raising money for the rally specifically from Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli. Fancelli’s financing was reportedly facilitating by none other than Alex Jones. And in the week leading up to the rally, there were a number of changes in the plans. Changes pushed by Wren. We later learned Wren and Guilfoyle unsuccessfully pushed for last minute changes to the schedule of speakers at the Ellipse rally in order to get figures like Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Ali Alexander added to the speakers list. When Jones and Alexander left the rally early (to begin the march to the “Wild Protest”), it was Wren who escorted them away as they prepared to lead the march on the Capitol.
* The secret meetings taking place in the the White House in the days leading up to the insurrection. Mark Meadows was reportedly the person who was facilitating these meetings.
* The close coordination between Ali Alexander and a clique of far right GOP members of congress Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, and Louie Gohmert. As we saw, these members were reportedly offering blanket pardons to people involved with opposing the election results. Pardon offers made on behalf of the Trump White House, of course. An number of these figures were scheduled to speak at the “Wild Protest” rally (before it descended into an insurrection).
Those are just some of the details we’ve learned over the past year regarding the “Wild Protest” led by Alexander and Jones. Despite the “Women for America First” concerns about violence, the Alexander/Jones protest was seemingly given a quiet endorsement by the White House. And that’s why, a year later, those words from Jones about “a legitimate deal with the White House” to lead the march to the Capitol sound quite plausible. Trump wanted Alexander and Jones to hold that “Wild Protest”. The very same “Wild Protest” that devolved into the insurrection:
“Alexander’s “Wild Protest” rally was scheduled to take place on the northeast corner of the Capitol’s lawn, with a website claiming that Greene, Gosar, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R‑CO) would all speak at the event. Before the rally, Alexander attended Trump’s speech on the White House Ellipse, posting a picture from the front row.”
As much as the “Women for America First” group would like to separate their rally from the “Wild Protest” that immediately followed, there’s simply no denying that Ali Alexander and Alex Jones were given VIP status, even if they weren’t given a speakers slot. Alexander had a front row seat. And as we saw, both Alexander and Jones were escorted out of the rally early by Caroline Wren so they could lead the march from the Ellipse to the “Wild Protest” at the Capitol. The “Wild Protest” was always part of the White House’s plan, which only lends credibility to stories about Paul Gosar and other far right members of congress offering blanket pardons on behalf of the White House. People involved with a scheme to put “maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting”, as Alexander put it. And yet it’s taken a year of investigating and reporting for the clear evidence of that White House support for the “Wild Protest” to fully emerge:
And it’s that fleshed out context that it’s taken a year for us to get that puts this boast from Jones about a White House deal in a very different light. What seemed like possible bluster at the time looks obviously true today:
This is probably a good time to note that it was one month ago when Jones ended up suing the the Jan. 6 select committee to block the panel from obtaining his phone records or compelling his testimony and said he intends to plead the Fifth Amendment. So we’ll see if those phone records end up getting turned over. But at least we don’t have to wonder whether or not there was a deal with the White House. There’s no pleading the Fifth on something he already told us.
We just got a little more clarity on the ongoing mystery of what precisely was planned for January 6. Specifically, what were the exact arrangements between the Trump White House and figures like Alex Jones and Ali Alexander who led the crowd of people from the first rally at the Ellipse toward the second planned rally at the Capitol. A second ‘wild’ planned rally outside the Capitol that, as we all saw, never really happened because it devolved into the insurrection first. It got too wild.
And as we also saw, Alex Jones was publicly claiming in the days following the insurrection that he and Alexander has some sort of arrangement with the White House involving Jones and Alexander leading a march to the second rally at the Capitol “We had a legitimate deal with the White House,” Jones said in an InfoWars show. “‘Hey Jones and Ali,’ literally, they let us out early, we were supposed to lead a peaceful deal.” It’s that apparent mystery deal — a deal to lead the crowd from the “Women for America First” rally at the Ellipse to the second ‘wild’ rally at the Capitol — between the Trump White House and Alex Jones/Ali Alexander that we got more clarity on today. This was following Alex Jones’s meeting with the Jan 6 investigative committee. Jones admitted to pleading the Fifth Amendment almost 100 times.
But despite the repeated Fifth Amendment pleas, Jones did provide us some new information while continuing to insist that he had no idea of any planned violence and that he genuinely thought Trump himself was going to join Jones and Alexander at the second ‘wild’ Capitol rally. In other words, Jones is doubling down on the idea that there was a ‘deal’ between Jones and the White House for Jones and Alexander to lead the crowd from the Ellipse to the Capitol, where Trump would meet them to give a speech. Jones is acting as if he was effectively betrayed in this deal.
So why didn’t Trump show up at the Capitol as allegedly planned? Jones doesn’t give an explanation, but he did reveal this tantalizing tidbit following his appearance before the committee: Jones said he heard from witnesses to the committee that Trump had told his then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, that he wasn’t going to meet his supporters at the Capitol but could drive by or fly over the crowd with a helicopter because he had done that at other large events. Now, it’s not clear when exactly Jones heard this. But that adds a whole new possible twist to the events of that day.
Keep in mind that the insurrection didn’t take long to start after people started arriving outside the Capitol, so if Trump was planning a fly over for later that afternoon it likely would have been canceled by then. Also keep in mind that if the fly over had been planned in part to inspire the insurrection, it also wouldn’t have been necessary by that point. So who knows what exactly to make of these claims of a planned fly over, but it’s the latest indication that the White House had BIG plans for that day. Big plans that were so secret, even the people executing those plans didn’t necessarily know the details. Big compartmentalized plans. Yikes:
“Jones said that, by his lawyer’s count, he had pleaded the Fifth Amendment “almost 100 times” and that he had been told to do so “on advice of counsel.””
Almost 100 pleadings of the Fifth Amendment. That is some palpable fear of self-incrimination. Although Jones testimony doesn’t just threaten to incriminated himself. That’s part of what makes the scrutiny Jones is facing so interesting: he really was in the heart of it but he was also just one person in a larger orchestrated plan. Jones was effectively the public on-the-ground insurrection wrangler that day, leading the crowd from the Ellipse to the Capitol where the insurrection happened.
But, again, it wasn’t just Jones’s plan. Leading the crowd from the Ellipse rally to the area outside the Capitol was part of a broader plan coming from the Trump White House. According to Jones, major Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren was with a group of officials at the Ellipse on January 6 who led him “to the back of the stage so we could then go and get around the crowd and go lead the march.” So a group of people associated with Wren were involved with ensuring Jones and Alexander could get the march from the Ellipse to the Capitol underway. Recall how Caroline Wren was described by Cindy Chafian as an agent of the Trump White House. Ensuring a smooth transition from the Ellipse to the Capitol rally was clearly part of the plan. The White House’s plan:
And yet that plan obviously never happened entirely. Trump never showed up at the Capitol for a speech. What happened? Was the plan cancelled at the last minute? Or was tricking all the supporters into heading towards the Capitol with promises of a Trump speech — only to then trigger the insurrection — always the real plan? Was a Trump speech planned until the last minute, when they decided more force was necessary? These remain unanswered questions. But as we saw with the recent reports on the statements by former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham regarding the numerous secret White House meetings in the days leading up to the insurrection, Grisham told House investigators that the mystery surrounding Trump’s promise at the Ellipse rally that he would march with his supporters to the Capitol might be resolved in Trump White House documents.
This mystery of why Trump promised all these people he would speak at the second Capitol rally, but then bailed after Jones and Alexander already led everyone there, is at the core of the larger mystery of whether or not the insurrection was planned. Did they plan a giant switcheroo? Lure the crowd to the Capitol with promises of Trump, and then lure that same crowd into the Capitol with paramilitary teams implanted in the crowd? These remain massive questions in this investigation, and look at the answer Jones gave us: first, he says it was the belief of those at the Capitol that Trump was going to join them in some capacity after his speech at the Ellipse on January 6. That’s consistent with everything else we’ve heard. But then Jones said he heard from witnesses to the committee that Trump had told his then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, that he wasn’t going to meet his supporters at the Capitol but could drive by or fly over the crowd with a helicopter because he had done that at other large events. A planned flyover? That would have been pretty wild indeed. Was that actually part of the plan?
Finally, note the rather laughable denials by Jones that he had any idea whatsoever that violence could have been planned for that day. As Jones put it, he only heard about such chatter in news reports. Amusingly, one of those ‘news reports’ could have come from his own show, when guest host Matt Bracken warned audience on Dec 31, 2020, that “We’re going to only be saved by millions of Americans moving to Washington, occupying the entire area, if necessary storming right into the Capitol.” Jones claimed he had never heard this before, of course:
So while it’s hard to take Jones seriously when he makes claims like that about not knowing about any threats of violence, he still remains a fascinating witness in the context of this larger investigation. And a big part of what makes him such a fascinating witness is the growing possibility that Jones was manipulated and used by Trump to help lead an insurrection while Trump keeps his hands clean. Because if Jones is telling the truth of expecting Trump to show up at the Capitol, that really does sound like a scenario where Jones was just straight up played and used. And it’s not like it’s hard to fathom fellow far right figures using and abusing each other. It’s what they do. That’s why we have to ask: did Trump totally fool Alex Jones into triggering his insurrection? Just how compartmentalized was the last-minute insurrectionary Trump switcheroo?
Was the January 6 Capitol insurrection merely an act of “legitimate political discourse”? Yep. At least that’s how the Republican National Committee (RNC) sees it according to the language in the censure motion passed by the RNC on Friday targeting Republican Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House Jan 6 investigation.
Following the passage of the measure, the RNC clarified that it wasn’t referring to the people who actually entered the Capitol on Jan 6. Instead, they were referring to the non-violent people who are caught up in the investigation. So who are these non-violent people being investigated? Oh right, the Trump cabal, who actually organized it and fomented it on that day but didn’t themselves enter the Capitol. So the RNC is basically saying that the kind of open fomenting of violence and organizing that led up to the insurrection is an act of “legitimate political discourse”, even if those who actually entered the Capitol committed real crimes. Or at least that’s one way to interpret their motion. The other obvious interpretation is that the RNC really did intend on sending the message that the insurrection itself was perfectly legal and legitimate and is engaging in the kind of mealy-mouthed double-talk we’ve should expect. Either way, the RNC made it official: plotting and fomenting insurrections are acts of legitimate speech:
“On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.””
It’s not an investigation into who planned and executed the insurrection. It’s the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” It sounds like the kind of statement that’s referencing the hundreds of MAGA-loving ‘ordinary citizens’ who stormed the Capitol. But no, after the vote the RNC clarified that it wasn’t referring to the people who entered the Capitol. No, it was all the other ‘ordinary citizens’ who didn’t enter the Capitol but are currently under investigation. In other words, the ‘ordinary citizens’ the RNC is referring to are people like Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and the rest of the cabal who actually planned and organized the insurrection:
It’s also worth keeping in mind that, at this point, it looks like if Trump does make another run for the White House in 2024, he’s basically going to be campaigning in open defense of the insurrection and will presumably be actively fomenting a new one if necessary. So don’t be surprised if the RNC ends up doubling and tripling down on this resolution. There’s probably going to be a lot more “legitimate political discourse” for them to defend in the new few years. Practice makes perfect.
Now that the Republican National Committee has formally declared that the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection was just an act of “legitimate political discourse”, here’s another look at what we can expect from the GOP in the upcoming 2022 mid-term elections. If ever it was a ‘Democracy is on the ballot’ kind of election, this is it. An election that will hinge on the question of whether or not insurrections are ok. Or at least that’s what the election clearly should be focused on. But whether or not that public focus on the insurrection happens remains to be seen, and that brings us to the recent reports on the figure tapped by the House GOP leadership to mastermind their 2022 mid-term strategies: Newt Gingrich.
Yes, Newt has reportedly been leading brain-storming sessions with House leaders including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise. The architect of the 1994 ‘Republican Revolution’ is being given a crack as leading a 2022 revolution that could help serve to make the GOP’s official embrace of insurrections much more official in the legal sense. Because if we take Newt at his word, the plan is for criminal prosecutions of the Democrats who have been leading the investigation into Jan 6. That’s one of Newt’s big ideas for winning back the House in 2022: pledging criminal investigations of the Jan 6 investigators.
Newt also reportedly plans on keeping the GOP focused on the rest of its contemporary ‘greatest hits’: fearmongering about China, “Critical Race Theory”, and But Newt reportedly doesn’t want the GOP’s agenda to be limited to threatening Democrats and hopes the GOP will include a more positive policy agenda. Like opposing Biden’s tax measures, including the global minimum corporate tax negotiated by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and the 15 percent minimum tax the White House has pushed on large corporations. Oh, and a balanced budget amendment. An oldie but a goodie. Recall how the GOP tried and failed to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment in 2011 and 2018. Third time’s a charm. Plus, they’re expected to offer a “Parents Bill of Rights” that will offer parents basically the same rights that already have, but with extra fearmongering about critical race theory. In other words, they’re not going to actually offer any policies, unless those policies happen to be tax cuts or more official fear-mongering:
“Three decades before Trump inspired supporters to chant “Lock her up!” Gingrich popularized the idea that Democrats weren’t just wrong — they were criminals. They didn’t just disagree — they were corrupt and anti-American.”
It’s hard to think of a political figure who has done more to poison the well of US political discourse over the last generation than Newt Gingrich. It makes him the natural choice for guiding the GOP’s 2022 mid-term strategy. A post-insurrection strategy focused on convincing the American public that the real political criminals are the Democrats committing the crime of criminalizing the insurrection. An insurrection that the RNC just declared to be an act of “legitimate political discourse”. The GOP is poised to wage a war on democracy in 2022 by preemptively criminalizing the opposition. Gingrich was the natural choice:
So with Gingrich tasked with crafting the GOP’s 2022 pitch to voters, it raises the question: Are we going to see a new “Contract with America”? Sort of. Although it sounds like it might be more of a “Commitment to America.” A committment to prosecute the Democrats for investigating Jan 6, cut taxes, gut environmental regulations, and fear-monger about “critical race theory”. And not much else:
““Anytime you have an election that has contrast, clear contrast — like, if Republicans were trusted with the majority, what would you do?” McCarthy told Breitbart. “We’ll come out with a Commitment to America. … We’ve been working on policy.””
Will the “Commitment to America” be as popular with the electorate as Gingrich’s original “Contract with America”? Time will tell. Although with today’s hyper-gerrymandered House districts — far more gerrymandered than 1994 — the actual electoral appeal of the “Commitment to America” is less of an issue. Which is probably for the best for the GOP, but it’s not really clear how much popular appeal this “Commitment to America” will ultimately have: fear-mongering about China, “Critical Race Theory”, and investigations into Jan 6. It doesn’t really have the “Contract with America” feel of ’94, which did actual include a robust policy agenda, albeit a deceptive and destructive agenda.
Sure, Gingrich is pushing for a Balanced Budget Amendment platform, which is more aspirational than anything and only draws focus on the destructive fallout of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts. But keep in mind that the GOP was pushing the Balanced Budget amendment when the GOP controlled the House both in 2011 and 2018, and wasn’t able to get the required 2/3 majority required for passing a constitutional amendment resolution. So to a large extent Gingrich’s talk about a Balanced Budget Amendment appears to be designed to draw attention from the fact that this “Commitment to America” has almost no policy substance. But it does serve as a reminder that we should continue to expect the GOP to make a big push for an Article V Constitutional Convention of the States, whether or not the GOP retakes control of the House in 2022:
But there’s one area — beyond tax cuts and gutting deregulations — where we can expect some very loud GOP policy proposals: education policies. Specifically, a “Parents Bill of Rights”, which already exists. No, we can’t expect an new education policies that might actually improve education or even address a real problem. But we can expect extensive fear-mongering about how Democrats have turned public schools into transgendered anti-white Marxist Satanic indoctrination centers. Newt probably already has the slogans all worked out:
It sounds like they might even call it the “Commitment to America.” So it looks like 2022 is poised to be Newt’s Last Hurrah...and quite possibly the American democracy’s last hurrah. As well the first official hurruh for insurrections, with many more presumably to come.
There’s an interesting new investigative angle to the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection involving both the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, the two leading pro-MAGA paramilitary groups that had extensive contact with various groups working on behalf of the Trump White House in the lead up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. It turns out the leaders of the two groups, Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio, held a seemingly spontaneous meeting with four other people in a DC parking garage on January 5.
First, recall the extensive role Rhodes and the Oath Keepers played in the events of that day, including the stationing of a “Quick Reaction Force” with a large cache of arms ready to be delivered to the insurrectionists upon Trump’s orders according to Rhodes. Also recall how GOP legal strategists involved with the scheming to overturn the election, like John Eastman, ran simulations for various scenarios for keep Trump in office that the use of groups like the Proud Boys to help keep order in the streets in the event of massive national protests. Also recall the reports of Proud Boys actively standing with far right groups during street protest in the weeks following the November 2020 election threatening to exterminate their political opposition. To now learn about a meeting between the leaders of the two key paramilitary organizations involved with Jan 6 the day before the insurrection in a parking garage is more than a little suspicious.
So who else was at this meeting? One figure was Bianca Gracia, who heads a pro-Trump coalition called Latinos for Trump and an affiliated Political Action Committee named Latinos For America First. Importantly, it turns out Tarrio was formerly the head of the Florida chapter of Latinos for Trump. The reason that’s an important fact in this case is that it belies the ostensible reason we are told this meeting took place. Gracia, we are told, invited the attorney for Latinos for Trump, Kellye SoRelle. SoRelle also happens to be the attorney for the Oath Keepers. The alleged reason for the meeting was for SoRelle to offer Tarrio legal advice in relation to his arrest on Jan 4 in DC in relation to a Proud Boy attack on a historic DC-area Black church. That’s what we’re told. Except it doesn’t actually make sense. For starters, SoRelle herself tells reporters that that she doesn’t understand why that meeting was arranged, in part because she already told Tarrio that legal advice before the meeting. In addition, we’re told that SoRelle was brought to the parking garage by Garcia, and Tarrio and Rhodes were already there. In other words, Tarrio and Rhodes had an opportunity to have a mini-meeting of their own before SoRelle arrived.
But here’s perhaps the biggest mystery of this meeting: the attendees included a documentary filmmaker who had been following Tarrio around. Footage of the meeting has even shown up in a British Channel 4 documentary. Unfortunately, we’re told no audio of the meeting was captured. Adding to intrigue is the apparent fact that Rhodes kept this meeting secret from fellow Oath Keeper, Michael Simmons, who was present during part of Jan 6 with Rhodes. When Reuters told him of the meeting, Simmons said he was shocked and exclaimed, “Why would you meet Enrique in a fuc king parking garage?...It just blows my mind. That’s crazy!” So Rhodes was fine with a documentary film team recording the meeting but kept it secret from a fellow Oath Keeper. Again, you have to wonder just what they talked about given this weird context. Because if there’s been one common theme throughout the unfolding of the story of Jan 6, it’s the remarkable degree of coordination and compartmentalization that appears to have been utilized in carrying out this operation. Different teams seemingly operating independently yet also seemingly surreptitious coordinating.
It’s also worth recalling the story of the ‘burner phones’ utilized by the key figures involved with organizing the Jan 6 Ellipse rally that immediately preceded the insurrection. It’s a reminder that the various parties involved with this effort were in communication, but also intent on keeping that communication secret. So in this case we had a meeting that was in-person with no audio capture, making that communication lost forever. And yet a documentary film crew was there. It’s like they were creating footage that would have been celebrated as evidence of their revolutionary efforts had the insurrection worked. But it didn’t work, so now we’re being given an explanation for the meeting that even some of the meeting participants say don’t make sense:
“The meeting put the heads of the nation’s two best-known violent far-right pro-Trump groups in immediate proximity to each other 24 hours before the breach of the Capitol. Three attendees or their representatives contacted by Reuters say they did not discuss matters related to January 6.”
What a coincidence. The heads of the two best-known MAGA paramilitary organizations just happened to have a seemingly spontaneous meet up at a random parking garage on Jan 5. But it was all very innocent and completely unrelated to any planning at all in relation to Jan 6. At least that’s their story. A coincidental meeting involving Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. Along with Bianca Gracia, the head of Latinos for Trump, and Kellye SoRelle, a figure who happens to be the lawyer for both Latinos for Trump and the Oath Keepers. And it turns out that Tarrio was previously the Florida state director for Latinos for Trump. So while the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers aren’t the same group, their leadership does sort of share a lawyer. Tarrio insists the whole thing was “by coincidence” while SoRelle claims it was Gracia who invited her to the gathering, where they merely had a brief discussion about Tarrio’s need for a lawyer in a DC criminal case for which he had been arrested the previous day. The stories aren’t really adding up:
And then there’s the fact that the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy reportedly aren’t on the best terms with each other, but they ended up creating some sort of alliance in the lead up to Jan 6, making this meeting all the more curious. But by far the biggest red flag is the fact that SoRelle herself says it’s unclear to her why this meeting was necessary as she had already shared information about possible lawyers with Tarrio and others. Again, this story isn’t adding up. Even SoRelle herself isn’t buying it:
Finally, there’s the curious fact that the documentary film crew that was following Tarrio was there too. They didn’t actually capture any audio of what was discussed. But they were there to capture the fact that it happened. Why is that?
Keep in mind that these groups were presumably jointly planning on what would amount to a revolutionary event. So in that sense it may not be all that surprising a documentary film crew was allowed to capture the event. They were planning on making history. Glorious revolutionary history that ended up an inglorious riot no one wants to now own. Well, almost no one.
As more and more details of the January 6 Capitol insurrection plot have come out, one of the grimly fascinating questions that’s emerged is the question of whether or not then-President Donald Trump