Here’s a pair of arti­cles about the Hon­est Elec­tions Project that under­score how inter­twined the activ­i­ties of CNP mem­bers are with that of the Koch net­work of mega donors. Recall how we recent­ly learned about ongo­ing Repub­li­can efforts to push for stricter vot­ing laws being spear­head­ed by five lawyers, includ­ing Jason Snead, the head of the Hon­est Elec­tion Project. As we saw, three out of those five laway­ers were CNP mem­ber (Cle­ta Mitchell, J Chris­t­ian Adams, and Ken Black­well). And while Snead was not one of the CNP mem­bers, it was notable that the Hon­est Elec­tions Project was said to be found­ed by Leonard Leo, who is both a mem­ber of the CNP and Opus Dei.

We’re also going to learn about anoth­er CNP mem­ber involved with run­ning the Hon­est Elec­tion Project: Car­rie Sev­eri­no.

We’re going to take a clos­er look at who is actu­al­ly fund­ing the Hon­est Elec­tion Project. And it turns out, sur­prise!, we can’t actu­al­ly say who is ulti­mate­ly fund­ing it. Because it’s financed through DonorsTrust, the Koch net­work’s dark mon­ey vehi­cle of choice. So while Leonard Leo is part of the pub­lic face of the Hon­est Elec­tion Project, it’s still a mys­tery who is ulti­mate­ly financ­ing this activ­i­ty. The dark mon­ey sys­tem is work­ing as intend­ed.

As we’re also going to see, it appears that the Hon­est Elec­tion Project is basi­cal­ly try­ing to play ‘good cop’ in some sort of ‘good cop’/‘bad cop’ vot­er fraud the­atrics. The group is shy­ing away from endors­ing the spe­cif­ic vot­er fraud claims in rela­tion to Don­ald Trump’s 2020 elec­toral loss. It’s also brand­ing itself as the Repub­li­can estab­lish­men­t’s answer to the ques­tions about vot­er fraud swirling around the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s very core iden­ti­ty at this point. But it’s still ful­ly endors­ing the gen­er­al Repub­li­can nar­ra­tives about vot­er fraud, busi­ly fil­ing briefs with courts in favor or more restric­tive laws. And in that sense it is indeed a fit­ting estab­lish­ment response. Tox­i­cal­ly decep­tive to the end:

Asso­ci­at­ed Press

Con­ser­v­a­tive group push­es pro­pos­als to tight­en vot­ing laws

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI
March 2, 2021

As Don­ald Trump made false alle­ga­tions about vot­ing fraud and tried to over­turn the will of the peo­ple in last year’s elec­tion, one of his chief allies was con­spic­u­ous­ly silent. The Hon­est Elec­tions Project, a lead­ing advo­cate for more restric­tive vot­ing laws, stayed away from Trump’s doomed effort.

But now the group found­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive activist and infor­mal Trump advis­er Leonard Leo, is re-join­ing the debate with a new set of rec­om­men­da­tions like­ly to guide GOP law­mak­ers as they over­haul vot­ing sys­tems. The sug­ges­tions range from ones that are like­ly to be embraced by Democ­rats and vot­ing rights groups — allow­ing elec­tion offices to start pro­cess­ing mail bal­lots weeks before Elec­tion Day — to ones like­ly to spark fierce oppo­si­tion, such as manda­to­ry vot­er iden­ti­fi­ca­tion for both mail and in-per­son vot­ing, and cre­ation of a secure sys­tem that would link an absen­tee bal­lot to its vot­er.

The pro­pos­als come as the GOP remains divid­ed by Trump’s false claims. Repub­li­cans are wrestling with how far to go in over­haul­ing vot­ing laws with­out embrac­ing Trump’s con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries or dam­ag­ing Repub­li­cans’ polit­i­cal prospects. Hon­est Elec­tions’ push is essen­tial­ly an estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can answer to some of those ques­tions.

“There is much more to the elec­tion reform push than what hap­pened after the Novem­ber elec­tion,” said Jason Snead, the group’s exec­u­tive direc­tor.

Snead argued that the pro­pos­als are crit­i­cal to restore what he says is a slid­ing con­fi­dence in the country’s vot­ing sys­tem.

“A lot of vot­ers on both sides are primed to view the cred­i­bil­i­ty of elec­tions through a par­ti­san lens. They tend to view the valid­i­ty of an elec­tion through its out­comes,” Snead said. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons and we should be doing what we can to tight­en up the process.”

But Snead made a point to sep­a­rate his group from the post-elec­tion efforts — launched by Trump but embraced by many GOP groups and law­mak­ers — to reverse the out­come of the pres­i­den­tial vote.

The Hon­est Elec­tions Project was cre­at­ed in ear­ly 2020 to advo­cate for greater con­trols on elec­tions. The group has drawn scruti­ny in part because of Leo’s influ­ence in con­ser­v­a­tive legal cir­cles. As co-chair­man of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, Leo helped spear­head the effort to appoint con­ser­v­a­tive judges to the fed­er­al courts.

The group does not dis­close its donors and there will be no pub­lic report­ing of how it spends its mon­ey until lat­er this year, at the ear­li­est.

Last year, Hon­est Elec­tions was part of the GOP legal strat­e­gy to fight vot­ing changes, many of which were aimed at mak­ing vot­ing eas­i­er dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. It sued Michi­gan, forc­ing the state to clean up its list of reg­is­tered vot­ers, and blocked a set­tle­ment eas­ing absen­tee vot­ing rules in Min­neso­ta.

But the group, along with some oth­er GOP legal and elec­tion pol­i­cy experts, stayed away from Trump’s insis­tence the elec­tion had been stolen from him. Repeat­ed audits and reviews turned up no sig­nif­i­cant-scale fraud in the elec­tion and Trump and his allies lost more than 50 court cas­es try­ing to prove it.

“We looked very care­ful­ly at all the alle­ga­tions that were com­ing out after the elec­tion,” Snead said. “We con­clud­ed, as did a lot of oth­er folks, that there was no evi­dence of wide­spread fraud.”

The false claim of fraud drove Trump’s sup­port­ers’ assault on the U.S. Capi­tol on Jan. 6. It’s still an ani­mat­ing force for the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, as shown by last week’s Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence in Flori­da, where Trump false­ly claimed that ille­gal immi­grants and dead peo­ple vot­ed and the crowd chant­ed “You won!”

It’s also dri­ven Repub­li­can-con­trolled states to increase bar­ri­ers to vot­ing. In Iowa, the leg­is­la­ture has vot­ed to cut absen­tee and in-per­son ear­ly vot­ing and pre­vent local elec­tions offi­cials from set­ting up addi­tion­al loca­tions to make ear­ly vot­ing eas­i­er. In Geor­gia, the House on Mon­day vot­ed for a law to require iden­ti­fi­ca­tion to vote by mail and allow coun­ties to can­cel ear­ly in-per­son vot­ing on Sun­days, when many Black vot­ers cast bal­lots after church.

Snead says his group hasn’t weighed in on these pro­pos­als because it was busy research­ing its own rec­om­men­da­tions. Among them are ones that would like­ly find bipar­ti­san sup­port, such as extend­ing the time when elec­tion offices can per­form the time-con­sum­ing work of open­ing and sort­ing mail bal­lots to ready them for elec­tion night count­ing. The fail­ure of key swing states to per­mit this led to pro­longed vote counts that Trump used to false­ly claim fraud was occur­ring.

Oth­er rec­om­men­da­tions will find resis­tance, such as requir­ing a pho­to iden­ti­fi­ca­tion to vote by mail or paus­ing vot­er reg­is­tra­tion 30 days before Elec­tion Day. Per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant rec­om­men­da­tion is to cre­ate a sys­tem enabling elec­tion offices to tie a mail bal­lot back to the enve­lope in which it was sub­mit­ted. Trump demand­ed that elec­tion offi­cials do that, but they were unable to do so because it would have vio­lat­ed the secre­cy of the bal­lot.

Snead said that to pre­serve the prin­ci­ple of a secret bal­lot, elec­tion offices should use data ran­dom­iza­tion to keep vot­ers’ iden­ti­ties anony­mous dur­ing bal­lot count­ing.

...

———-

“Con­ser­v­a­tive group push­es pro­pos­als to tight­en vot­ing laws” by NICHOLAS RICCARDI; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 03/02/2021

“The pro­pos­als come as the GOP remains divid­ed by Trump’s false claims. Repub­li­cans are wrestling with how far to go in over­haul­ing vot­ing laws with­out embrac­ing Trump’s con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries or dam­ag­ing Repub­li­cans’ polit­i­cal prospects. Hon­est Elec­tions’ push is essen­tial­ly an estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can answer to some of those ques­tions.”

LOL! Hon­est Elec­tions’ push is essen­tial­ly an estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can answer to the ques­tion of how far to go in over­haul­ing vot­ing laws with­out embrac­ing Trump’s con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries or dam­ag­ing Repub­li­cans’ polit­i­cal prospects. That was the spin we were get­ting back in March of 2021. So the GOP estab­lish­ment appar­ent­ly felt like a cou­ple of months was enough time to wait after the insur­rec­tion to resume its sup­port for exact­ly the kind of mass vot­er fraud lies that the insur­rec­tion was pred­i­cat­ed on.

We see Jason Snead inter­viewed as the group’s exec­u­tive direc­tor and Leonard Leo list­ed as the founder. Snead was clear­ly try­ing to empha­size how the Hon­est Elec­tion Project was­n’t alleg­ing the kind of wide­spread fraud the Trump team and many of its allies — like Cle­ta Mitchell — were aggres­sive­ly alleg­ing. No, the Hon­est Elec­tion Project was focused on more gen­er­al vot­er fraud. At the same time, Snead falls back on the favored GOP argu­ment that the US should pass restric­tive new vot­er laws due to vot­er per­cep­tions that there’s a major prob­lem with vot­er fraud. It’s like Hon­est Elec­tions Project is play­ing the role of ‘good cop’ in a ‘good cop’/‘bad cop’ gaslight­ing schtick:

...
But now the group found­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive activist and infor­mal Trump advis­er Leonard Leo, is re-join­ing the debate with a new set of rec­om­men­da­tions like­ly to guide GOP law­mak­ers as they over­haul vot­ing sys­tems. The sug­ges­tions range from ones that are like­ly to be embraced by Democ­rats and vot­ing rights groups — allow­ing elec­tion offices to start pro­cess­ing mail bal­lots weeks before Elec­tion Day — to ones like­ly to spark fierce oppo­si­tion, such as manda­to­ry vot­er iden­ti­fi­ca­tion for both mail and in-per­son vot­ing, and cre­ation of a secure sys­tem that would link an absen­tee bal­lot to its vot­er.

...

“There is much more to the elec­tion reform push than what hap­pened after the Novem­ber elec­tion,” said Jason Snead, the group’s exec­u­tive direc­tor.

Snead argued that the pro­pos­als are crit­i­cal to restore what he says is a slid­ing con­fi­dence in the country’s vot­ing sys­tem.

“A lot of vot­ers on both sides are primed to view the cred­i­bil­i­ty of elec­tions through a par­ti­san lens. They tend to view the valid­i­ty of an elec­tion through its out­comes,” Snead said. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons and we should be doing what we can to tight­en up the process.”

But Snead made a point to sep­a­rate his group from the post-elec­tion efforts — launched by Trump but embraced by many GOP groups and law­mak­ers — to reverse the out­come of the pres­i­den­tial vote.

...

But the group, along with some oth­er GOP legal and elec­tion pol­i­cy experts, stayed away from Trump’s insis­tence the elec­tion had been stolen from him. Repeat­ed audits and reviews turned up no sig­nif­i­cant-scale fraud in the elec­tion and Trump and his allies lost more than 50 court cas­es try­ing to prove it.

“We looked very care­ful­ly at all the alle­ga­tions that were com­ing out after the elec­tion,” Snead said. “We con­clud­ed, as did a lot of oth­er folks, that there was no evi­dence of wide­spread fraud.”
...

And note how the Hon­est Elec­tions Project was act­ing in March of 2021 like it had noth­ing to do with those dis­taste­ful attempts to over­turn the 2020 vote after the elec­tion, a nar­ra­tive that con­ve­nient­ly ignores the real­i­ty that the project spent 2020 act­ing to make it hard­er to vot­er. Whether or not the group backed Trump’s stolen elec­tion nar­ra­tive after the elec­tion ignores the real­i­ty that the GOP and its allies were prepar­ing to steal the 2020 elec­tion for Trump long before the first votes were cast:

...
The Hon­est Elec­tions Project was cre­at­ed in ear­ly 2020 to advo­cate for greater con­trols on elec­tions. The group has drawn scruti­ny in part because of Leo’s influ­ence in con­ser­v­a­tive legal cir­cles. As co-chair­man of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, Leo helped spear­head the effort to appoint con­ser­v­a­tive judges to the fed­er­al courts.

The group does not dis­close its donors and there will be no pub­lic report­ing of how it spends its mon­ey until lat­er this year, at the ear­li­est.

Last year, Hon­est Elec­tions was part of the GOP legal strat­e­gy to fight vot­ing changes, many of which were aimed at mak­ing vot­ing eas­i­er dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. It sued Michi­gan, forc­ing the state to clean up its list of reg­is­tered vot­ers, and blocked a set­tle­ment eas­ing absen­tee vot­ing rules in Min­neso­ta.
...

Ok, and now here’s a Guardian arti­cle from back in May of 2020, cov­er­ing a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown group that seemed to sud­den­ly pop out of nowhere push­ing ques­tion­able claims about mas­sive vot­er fraud and the need for new vot­ing restric­tions. But it turns out this group, the Hon­est Elec­tion Project, isn’t quite is inde­pen­dent as it claims. Because it turns out the Hon­est Elec­tion Project goes by anoth­er name: The Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project, a group that has been almost entire­ly fund­ed for the last decade from the Kochs’ major dark mon­ey vehi­cle, DonorsTrust.

So weren’t we being told in March of 2021 that the Hon­est Elec­tions Project was found­ed by Leonard Leo? Well, it turns out The Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project is indeed one of Leo’s projects. So the Hon­est Elec­tions Project is, in real­i­ty, The Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project which has been led by Leo but financed by who­ev­er hap­pened to direct that mon­ey through DonorsTrust. But we don’t get to know who that ulti­mate­ly is. It could be Leo him­self. Maybe Charles Koch. Or Robert Mer­cer. Or Bet­sy DeVos. Or any of the oth­er right-wing mega-donors are use DonorsTrust to anony­mous dish out dona­tions.

And in addi­tion to Leonard Leo being an CNP, and we also learn about anoth­er CNP mem­ber involved with the Hon­est Elec­tions Project: Car­rie Sev­eri­no. So at this point, two out of the three peo­ple we know of who are involved with the Hon­est Elec­tion Project are mem­bers of the CNP:

The Guardian

Revealed: con­ser­v­a­tive group fight­ing to restrict vot­ing tied to pow­er­ful dark mon­ey net­work

Sam Levine and Anna Mas­soglia
Wed 27 May 2020 07.00 EDT
Last mod­i­fied on Tue 15 Dec 2020 09.32 EST

This sto­ry was report­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with OpenSe­crets.

A pow­er­ful new con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion fight­ing to restrict vot­ing in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is real­ly just a rebrand­ed group that is part of a dark mon­ey net­work already help­ing Don­ald Trump’s unprece­dent­ed effort to remake the US fed­er­al judi­cia­ry, the Guardian and OpenSe­crets reveal.

The orga­ni­za­tion, which calls itself the Hon­est Elec­tions Project, seemed to emerge out of nowhere a few months ago and start­ed stok­ing fears about vot­er fraud. Backed by a dark mon­ey group fund­ed by rightwing stal­warts like the Koch broth­ers and Bet­sy DeVos’ fam­i­ly, the Hon­est Elec­tions Project is part of the net­work that pushed the US supreme court picks Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gor­such, and is quick­ly becom­ing a jug­ger­naut in the esca­lat­ing fight over vot­ing rights.

The project announced it was spend­ing $250,000 in adver­tise­ments in April, warn­ing against vot­ing by mail and accus­ing Democ­rats of cheat­ing. It facil­i­tat­ed let­ters to elec­tion offi­cials in Col­orado, Flori­da and Michi­gan, using mis­lead­ing data to accuse juris­dic­tions of hav­ing bloat­ed vot­er rolls and threat­en­ing legal action.

Call­ing vot­er sup­pres­sion a “myth”, it has also been extreme­ly active in the courts, fil­ing briefs in favor of vot­ing restric­tions in Neva­da, Vir­ginia, Texas, Wis­con­sin and Min­neso­ta, among oth­er places, at times rep­re­sent­ed by lawyers from the same firm that rep­re­sents Trump. By hav­ing a hand in both vot­ing lit­i­ga­tion and the judges on the fed­er­al bench, this net­work could cre­ate a sys­tem where con­ser­v­a­tive donors have an avenue to both oppose vot­ing rights and appoint judges to back that effort.

Despite appear­ing to be a free-stand­ing new oper­a­tion, the Hon­est Elec­tions Project is just a legal alias for the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project, a well-financed non­prof­it con­nect­ed to a pow­er­ful net­work of dark mon­ey con­ser­v­a­tive groups, accord­ing to busi­ness records reviewed by the Guardian and OpenSe­crets.

“These are real­ly well-fund­ed groups that in the con­text of judi­cial nom­i­na­tions have been sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, over the long term but also the short term, kind of push­ing an agen­da to pack the courts with pret­ty extreme right wing nom­i­nees,” said Vani­ta Gup­ta, the pres­i­dent and CEO of the Lead­er­ship Con­fer­ence on Civ­il and Human Rights. “The infra­struc­ture that they’ve built over the years has been a real­ly impor­tant vehi­cle for them to do this.”

For near­ly a decade, the orga­ni­za­tion has been almost entire­ly fund­ed by DonorsTrust, known as a “dark mon­ey ATM” backed by the Koch net­work and oth­er promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive donors, accord­ing to data tracked by OpenSe­crets. In 2018, more than 99% of the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project’s fund­ing came from a sin­gle $7.8m dona­tion from DonorsTrust.

The Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project is also close­ly linked to Leonard Leo, one of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in Wash­ing­ton who has shaped Don­ald Trump’s unprece­dent­ed effort to remake the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry with con­ser­v­a­tive judges.

The orga­ni­za­tion has deft­ly hid­den the changes to its name from pub­lic view. In Decem­ber, the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project for­mal­ly changed its legal name to The 85 Fund, a group Leo backed to fun­nel “tens of mil­lions” of dol­lars into con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, accord­ing to Axios. The Hon­est Elec­tions Project is mere­ly a fic­ti­tious name – an alias – the fund legal­ly adopt­ed in Feb­ru­ary. The change was near­ly indis­cernible because The 85 Fund reg­is­tered two oth­er legal alias­es on the same day, includ­ing the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project, its old name. The legal maneu­ver allows it to oper­ate under four dif­fer­ent names with lit­tle pub­lic dis­clo­sure that it is the same group.

The Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project is close­ly aligned with the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work, a group with unmatched influ­ence in recent years in shap­ing the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry. The Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work spear­head­ed the cam­paigns to get Gor­such and Kavanaugh con­firmed to the US supreme court, spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars in each instance. It has also spent sig­nif­i­cant­ly on crit­i­cal state supreme court races across the coun­try.

There is a lot of over­lap between the Hon­est Elec­tions Project and the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work. Both groups share per­son­nel, includ­ing Car­rie Sev­eri­no, the influ­en­tial pres­i­dent of the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work. Both groups have been fund­ed by The Well­spring Com­mit­tee, a group Leo raised mon­ey for until it shut down in 2018. Both have also paid mon­ey to BH Group, an LLC Leo once dis­closed as his employ­er, that made a $1m mys­tery dona­tion to Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion.

“This is a small com­mu­ni­ty that is real­ly try­ing to push for­ward these more sup­pres­sive tac­tics that will be chal­lenged in court and hav­ing those judges on the bench, they’re real­ly hop­ing it’s going to con­tin­ue to rig the sys­tem in their favor,” said Lena Zwaren­steyn, who close­ly fol­lows judi­cial nom­i­na­tions at the Lead­er­ship Con­fer­ence. “By chang­ing the rules of the game and who the ref­er­ees are, they’re try­ing to change the land­scape.”

...

The Hon­est Elec­tions Project has become active as Repub­li­cans are scal­ing up their efforts to fight to keep vot­ing restric­tions in place ahead of the elec­tion. The Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee will spend at least $20m on lit­i­ga­tion over vot­ing rights and wants to recruit up to 50,000 peo­ple to help mon­i­tor the polls and oth­er elec­tion activ­i­ties.

...

———–

“Revealed: con­ser­v­a­tive group fight­ing to restrict vot­ing tied to pow­er­ful dark mon­ey net­work” by Sam Levine and Anna Mas­soglia; The Guardian; 05/27/2020

“The orga­ni­za­tion, which calls itself the Hon­est Elec­tions Project, seemed to emerge out of nowhere a few months ago and start­ed stok­ing fears about vot­er fraud. Backed by a dark mon­ey group fund­ed by rightwing stal­warts like the Koch broth­ers and Bet­sy DeVos’ fam­i­ly, the Hon­est Elec­tions Project is part of the net­work that pushed the US supreme court picks Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gor­such, and is quick­ly becom­ing a jug­ger­naut in the esca­lat­ing fight over vot­ing rights.”

The Hon­est Elec­tions Project just seemed to emerge out of nowhere back in May of 2020. A new dark­money group that sud­den­ly pops up, stok­ing fears about vot­er fraud, and call­ing vot­er sup­pres­sion a “myth” while it wages one legal brief­ing after anoth­er in favor of vot­ing restric­tions. The project was act­ing as a ‘friends-of-the-court’ mill, in keep­ing with the increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar dark mon­ey prac­tice. But it’s the fact that the peo­ple behind the Hon­est Elec­tion Project are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly behind the stack­ing of state and fed­er­al courts courts with right-wing judges that makes this a par­tic­u­lar­ly potent lob­by­ing net­work. They’re effec­tive­ly lob­by­ing their own plants:

...
Call­ing vot­er sup­pres­sion a “myth”, it has also been extreme­ly active in the courts, fil­ing briefs in favor of vot­ing restric­tions in Neva­da, Vir­ginia, Texas, Wis­con­sin and Min­neso­ta, among oth­er places, at times rep­re­sent­ed by lawyers from the same firm that rep­re­sents Trump. By hav­ing a hand in both vot­ing lit­i­ga­tion and the judges on the fed­er­al bench, this net­work could cre­ate a sys­tem where con­ser­v­a­tive donors have an avenue to both oppose vot­ing rights and appoint judges to back that effort.
...

But here’s where we get to see why the US’s dark mon­ey laws are so wild­ly con­ve­nient for oli­garchs inter­est­ed in secret­ly wield­ing influ­ence: it turns out the Hon­est Elec­tions Project is just a legal alias for a dif­fer­ent enti­ty. The Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project, which has long been almost entire­ly fund­ed by DonorsTrust, the main dark mon­ey vehi­cle favored by not just the Kochs but all sorts of oth­er right-wing mega-donors like Robert Mer­cers or Bet­sy DeVos. In 2018, 99% of the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Projects fund­ing came from a sin­gle $7.8 mil­lion dona­tion from DonorsTrust. So the Hon­est Elec­tions Project is basi­cal­ly just a new anony­mous front for an exist­ing anony­mous front. Then, in Decem­ber of 2020, the Judi­cial Elec­tions Project changed its name to The 85 Fund. As we’ve seen, while they may have changed the name to The 85 Fund, the under­ly­ing mes­sage was the same, with the group focused on push­ing bogus vot­er fraud claims in the weeks fol­low­ing the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. The 85 Fund then reg­is­tered two new names for itself on the same day, includ­ing the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project. In the end, the same enti­ty was legal­ly allowed to oper­ate under four dif­fer­ent names:

...
Despite appear­ing to be a free-stand­ing new oper­a­tion, the Hon­est Elec­tions Project is just a legal alias for the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project, a well-financed non­prof­it con­nect­ed to a pow­er­ful net­work of dark mon­ey con­ser­v­a­tive groups, accord­ing to busi­ness records reviewed by the Guardian and OpenSe­crets.

...

For near­ly a decade, the orga­ni­za­tion has been almost entire­ly fund­ed by DonorsTrust, known as a “dark mon­ey ATM” backed by the Koch net­work and oth­er promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive donors, accord­ing to data tracked by OpenSe­crets. In 2018, more than 99% of the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project’s fund­ing came from a sin­gle $7.8m dona­tion from DonorsTrust.

The Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project is also close­ly linked to Leonard Leo, one of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in Wash­ing­ton who has shaped Don­ald Trump’s unprece­dent­ed effort to remake the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry with con­ser­v­a­tive judges.

The orga­ni­za­tion has deft­ly hid­den the changes to its name from pub­lic view. In Decem­ber, the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project for­mal­ly changed its legal name to The 85 Fund, a group Leo backed to fun­nel “tens of mil­lions” of dol­lars into con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, accord­ing to Axios. The Hon­est Elec­tions Project is mere­ly a fic­ti­tious name – an alias – the fund legal­ly adopt­ed in Feb­ru­ary. The change was near­ly indis­cernible because The 85 Fund reg­is­tered two oth­er legal alias­es on the same day, includ­ing the Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project, its old name. The legal maneu­ver allows it to oper­ate under four dif­fer­ent names with lit­tle pub­lic dis­clo­sure that it is the same group.
...

Final­ly, note the shared per­son­nel between the Hon­st Elec­tions Project and the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work: both groups share Car­rie Sev­eri­no, pres­i­dent of the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work. And, yes, in addi­tion to Leonard Leo, Sev­eri­no is also a CNP mem­ber. You can’t real­ly sep­a­rate the Hon­est Elec­tions Project from the Koch net­work or the CNP. It’s a project of the oli­garchy:

...
The Judi­cial Edu­ca­tion Project is close­ly aligned with the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work, a group with unmatched influ­ence in recent years in shap­ing the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry. The Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work spear­head­ed the cam­paigns to get Gor­such and Kavanaugh con­firmed to the US supreme court, spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars in each instance. It has also spent sig­nif­i­cant­ly on crit­i­cal state supreme court races across the coun­try.

There is a lot of over­lap between the Hon­est Elec­tions Project and the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work. Both groups share per­son­nel, includ­ing Car­rie Sev­eri­no, the influ­en­tial pres­i­dent of the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work. Both groups have been fund­ed by The Well­spring Com­mit­tee, a group Leo raised mon­ey for until it shut down in 2018. Both have also paid mon­ey to BH Group, an LLC Leo once dis­closed as his employ­er, that made a $1m mys­tery dona­tion to Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion.
...

Also recall how the BH Group’s mys­tery dona­tion to the Trump inau­gur­al fund could be a lot more scan­dalous than present­ly rec­og­nized giv­en the pay-to-play cor­rup­tion bonan­za of that time. It’s a reminder of the extreme flex­i­bil­i­ty of these dark mon­ey laws.

So we’ll see what the Hon­est Elec­tion Project has planned for upcom­ing elec­tion cycles. Although we can be pret­ty con­fi­dent that it will involve more decep­tive yet reas­sur­ing calls for the need for new restric­tive vot­er laws. Pre­sum­ably along with anoth­er name change or two.

Here’s a piece pub­lished a few days ago, on the one year anniver­sary of the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, that is the per­fect exam­ple of the kind of dan­gers inher­ent in calls for spe­cial big­otry priv­i­leges just for con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. The piece is writ­ten by CNP mem­ber Daniel Suhr, the Man­ag­ing Attor­ney at the Lib­er­ty Jus­tice Cen­ter, one of the many right-wing ‘think tanks’ financed by the Koch net­work of meta-donors. Suhr was also the Chief of Staff of Wis­con­sin’s for­mer Lt. Gov­er­nor Rebec­ca Kleefisch. Kleefisch is run­ning for the gov­er­nor’s office in this year’s elec­tions. In oth­er words, Suhr appears to be posi­tioned to become the Chief of Staff of the next gov­er­nor of Wis­con­sin, should Kleefisch win.

So check out Suhr’s recent opin­ion piece pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 6, 2022. A piece that warns about the dan­gers of ‘wok­ism’ in the mil­i­tary. Dan­gers that were exac­er­bat­ed by all of the con­cern aroused by the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion and the large num­ber of cur­rent and for­mer mem­bers of the mil­i­tary and law enforce­ment involved with insur­rec­tion. First, Suhr makes the point of dis­tin­guish­ing between the peo­ple who actu­al­ly rushed the Capi­tol vs those who were mere­ly at the ral­ly at the Ellipse that imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ed and com­plains about the lat­ter group fac­ing pun­ish­ment for attend­ing a legal protest. This com­plaint was made despite the fact that no one is being pun­ished pure­ly for attend­ing hte Ellipse ral­ly.

But then Suhr goes on to tie in the renewed focus in the US mil­i­tary on root­ing out vio­lent extrem­ists with the dan­ger of pun­ish­ing pun­ish­ing Chris­tians mere­ly for uphold­ing Bib­li­cal teach­ings. Yep, that’s the spin. As Suhr puts it, “Jan. 6 is now claimed as the social­ly accept­able rea­son to tar­get “extrem­ism” and “domes­tic ter­ror­ism” and “hate,” lead­ing to poli­cies like this new one. But those words, like all oth­ers, require def­i­n­i­tion. Words like “extrem­ist” and “hate” are now applied to some Chris­tians in our cul­ture, mere­ly for uphold­ing Bib­li­cal teach­ings.” Suhr goes on to warn that con­ser­v­a­tives are right to wor­ry that the mil­i­tary’s diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion (DEI) agen­da is not a legit­i­mate exer­cise in main­tain­ing morale but rather a stalk­ing horse for an ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da creep­ing into the mil­i­tary. That ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da being crit­i­cal race the­o­ry. He also warns about trans­gen­dered troops, just for good mea­sure. Along with warn­ings about sol­diers being forced to take a COVID vac­cine despite their reli­gious objec­tions. All the great­est hits.

So that’s the mes­sage the like­ly future chief of staff of the next gov­er­nor of Wis­con­sin decid­ed to pub­lish on the one year anniver­sary of Capi­tol insur­rec­tion: a warn­ing to the pub­lic that mea­sures to root out extrem­ism in the mil­i­tary, ele­vat­ed in response to the insur­rec­tion, were actu­al­ly part of a sin­is­ter ide­o­log­i­cal attempt to oppress Chris­tians and pro­mote crit­i­cal race the­o­ry:

World News Group

The dan­ger of woke war­riors

New Pen­ta­gon pol­i­cy could mark anoth­er ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da in the nation’s mil­i­tary

by Daniel Suhr
Post Date:
Jan­u­ary 6, 2022

Late last month, buried in the slow news days of the hol­i­days, the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense issued new guide­lines on “com­bat­ting extrem­ist activ­i­ties” with­in the mil­i­tary. The doc­u­ment stems from a work­ing group set up to study par­tic­i­pa­tion by mem­bers of the U.S. mil­i­tary in the events in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. The guide­lines tar­get “advo­cat­ing, engag­ing in, or sup­port­ing” var­i­ous “extrem­ist activ­i­ties,” such as ter­ror­ism or the vio­lent over­throw of the gov­ern­ment. Note that the report also comes at a time when the U.S. Army now employs a “chief diver­si­ty offi­cer” who is “aggres­sive­ly work­ing to elim­i­nate extrem­ism” in the ranks, accord­ing to the U.S. Army News Ser­vice.

In prin­ci­ple, a pol­i­cy against extrem­ist activ­i­ties by mem­bers of the mil­i­tary is not inher­ent­ly wrong. Indeed, such poli­cies have been on the books for a while and make sense. The dead­liest mass shoot­ing on a mil­i­tary base in U.S. his­to­ry occurred in 2009, when an Army major rad­i­cal­ized by Islamist pro­pa­gan­da attacked fel­low sol­diers at Fort Hood in Texas. Uti­liz­ing intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary police tools to pre­vent attacks like that is appro­pri­ate.

But the con­text in which these new guide­lines arise is not intra-mil­i­tary vio­lence like Fort Hood but par­tic­i­pa­tion in the events of Jan. 6 by mem­bers of the mil­i­tary. Though what hap­pened a year ago at the U.S. Capi­tol was despi­ca­ble and ille­gal, what hap­pened on the Nation­al Mall that day was legal, a ral­ly in our nation’s pub­lic square enti­tled to the fullest pro­tec­tion of the First Amend­ment to the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion. Too few make that impor­tant dis­tinc­tion, and too many have been pun­ished for par­tic­i­pat­ing in a legit­i­mate protest.

But Jan. 6 is now claimed as the social­ly accept­able rea­son to tar­get “extrem­ism” and “domes­tic ter­ror­ism” and “hate,” lead­ing to poli­cies like this new one. But those words, like all oth­ers, require def­i­n­i­tion. Words like “extrem­ist” and “hate” are now applied to some Chris­tians in our cul­ture, mere­ly for uphold­ing Bib­li­cal teach­ings. The Defense Department’s new guide­lines apply to activ­i­ties like “Advo­cat­ing wide­spread unlaw­ful dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race, col­or, nation­al ori­gin, reli­gion, sex (includ­ing preg­nan­cy), gen­der iden­ti­ty, or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion” or “Advo­cat­ing or engag­ing in unlaw­ful force or vio­lence to achieve goals that are polit­i­cal, reli­gious, dis­crim­i­na­to­ry, or ide­o­log­i­cal in nature.”

Again, it’s nec­es­sary to have vig­i­lant safe­guards in place. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shoot­er, would have been guilty of engag­ing in vio­lence to achieve reli­gious and ide­o­log­i­cal goals. And though neo-Nazis had a right to march through Skok­ie, Ill., they have no right to wear the nation’s uni­form.

But con­ser­v­a­tives are right to wor­ry that these new reg­u­la­tions are not a legit­i­mate exer­cise in main­tain­ing morale but rather a stalk­ing horse for an ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da creep­ing into the mil­i­tary. Con­sid­er: In the last few years, the U.S. mil­i­tary has spent $8 mil­lion on hor­mone ther­a­py and surg­eries for trans­gen­der troops.

The mil­i­tary is increas­ing­ly in tune with the diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion (DEI) agen­da that can be a Tro­jan horse for crit­i­cal race the­o­ry. Again, a mil­i­tary that looks like Amer­i­ca is some­thing to be cel­e­brat­ed in the abstract, as the recent pass­ing of Col­in Pow­ell reminds us. But we can­not under­mine the prop­er patri­o­tism that moti­vates men to fight by attack­ing the nation we ask them to defend.

And in these days when COVID vac­cine man­dates are front and cen­ter, a fed­er­al judge is very con­cerned that mil­i­tary pol­i­cy­mak­ers are ignor­ing the legit­i­mate exemp­tion requests of ser­vice mem­bers with reli­gious objec­tions.

...

We will have to wait and see how the new guide­lines are enforced. But we should be wary, espe­cial­ly if we start see­ing DEI bureau­crats embed­ded in actu­al units.

Any­one who has seen the clas­sic movies about the Sovi­et era, such as The Hunt for Red Octo­ber or Ene­my at the Gates, knows that every Russ­ian mil­i­tary unit had a “polit­i­cal offi­cer” whose job was to spread regime pro­pa­gan­da and ensure ide­o­log­i­cal loy­al­ty among the troops, espe­cial­ly oth­er offi­cers.

Let’s hope we nev­er see a day when “polit­i­cal offi­cers” invade the U.S. mil­i­tary.

———

“The dan­ger of woke war­riors” by Daniel Suhr; World News Group; 01/06/2022

“But Jan. 6 is now claimed as the social­ly accept­able rea­son to tar­get “extrem­ism” and “domes­tic ter­ror­ism” and “hate,” lead­ing to poli­cies like this new one. But those words, like all oth­ers, require def­i­n­i­tion. Words like “extrem­ist” and “hate” are now applied to some Chris­tians in our cul­ture, mere­ly for uphold­ing Bib­li­cal teach­ings. The Defense Department’s new guide­lines apply to activ­i­ties like “Advo­cat­ing wide­spread unlaw­ful dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race, col­or, nation­al ori­gin, reli­gion, sex (includ­ing preg­nan­cy), gen­der iden­ti­ty, or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion” or “Advo­cat­ing or engag­ing in unlaw­ful force or vio­lence to achieve goals that are polit­i­cal, reli­gious, dis­crim­i­na­to­ry, or ide­o­log­i­cal in nature.””

The hor­ror of it all. Jan 6 is being used as the social­ly accept­able rea­son to tar­get “extrem­ism” and “domes­tic ter­ror­ism” and “hate”, a moral drag­net that could end up ensnar­ing inno­cent Chris­tians mere­ly fol­low­ing Bib­li­cal teach­ings. Sure, you can tar­get Islam­ic extrem­ists and neo-Nazis. Just be sure to not ensnare any Chris­tians who hap­pen to hold those same extrem­ist beliefs. Because those are pro­tect­ed tra­di­tion­al beliefs, or at least should be pro­tect­ed tra­di­tion­al beliefs. It’s the Project Blitz par­a­digm — of spe­cial pro­tec­tions for con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians alone — applied in the con­text of gov­ern­ment anti-extrem­ism actions:

...
Again, it’s nec­es­sary to have vig­i­lant safe­guards in place. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shoot­er, would have been guilty of engag­ing in vio­lence to achieve reli­gious and ide­o­log­i­cal goals. And though neo-Nazis had a right to march through Skok­ie, Ill., they have no right to wear the nation’s uni­form.

But con­ser­v­a­tives are right to wor­ry that these new reg­u­la­tions are not a legit­i­mate exer­cise in main­tain­ing morale but rather a stalk­ing horse for an ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da creep­ing into the mil­i­tary. Con­sid­er: In the last few years, the U.S. mil­i­tary has spent $8 mil­lion on hor­mone ther­a­py and surg­eries for trans­gen­der troops.

The mil­i­tary is increas­ing­ly in tune with the diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion (DEI) agen­da that can be a Tro­jan horse for crit­i­cal race the­o­ry. Again, a mil­i­tary that looks like Amer­i­ca is some­thing to be cel­e­brat­ed in the abstract, as the recent pass­ing of Col­in Pow­ell reminds us. But we can­not under­mine the prop­er patri­o­tism that moti­vates men to fight by attack­ing the nation we ask them to defend.
...

It’s also worth recall­ing the per­son­al his­to­ry of David Bar­ton, who was open­ly affil­i­at­ing with white suprema­cist Chris­t­ian Iden­ti­ty move­ment of Pete Peters’ Scrip­tures for Amer­i­ca in the ear­ly 90s before Bar­ton was embraced by the GOP. It’s an exam­ple of why Suhr’s insis­tence that we dis­tin­guish between the extrem­ist views of a Nazi and a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian does­n’t make sense. You can be a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Nazi. Plen­ty of such peo­ple unfor­tu­nate­ly exist. But if we lis­ten to Daniel Suhr, no, we need to carve out a spe­cial excep­tion for Chris­tians when car­ry­ing out anti-extrem­ism inves­ti­ga­tions.

And don’t for­get: Project Blitz is still going. The dri­ve to con­fer spe­cial pro­tec­tions to Bib­li­cal­ly-based extrem­ism isn’t going away. So just keep in mind that should Rebec­ca Kleefisch end up Wis­con­sin’s next gov­er­nor, extrem­ists will pre­sum­ably be wel­come to join her admin­is­tra­tion, but only as long as they’re also self-pro­fessed Chris­tians. So if you’re an extrem­ist in Wis­con­sin with polit­i­cal ambi­tions, now would be the right time to find a church that shares your extrem­ist beliefs. Specif­i­cal­ly a Chris­t­ian church, so your hate can get its extra God-giv­en con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tions.

Here’s a set of excerpts that under­score how incred­i­ble main­stream the CNP is with­in con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles. But also how remark­ably secre­tive the group is about that main­stream influ­ence. The first arti­cle, from Jason Wil­son at the Guardian, was pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber and based on a new­ly leaked list of CNP mem­bers. The arti­cle describes how the group is so secre­tive it not only instructs mem­bers to keep their mem­ber­ship secret but also instructs them to nev­er even name the group. The CNP is like Volde­mort. No one dare speak its name. Which all the more remark­able giv­en how many pow­er­ful and influ­en­tial peo­ple are mem­bers. Peo­ple in pol­i­tics and indus­try.

But as Hei­di Beirich puts it, “this new CNP list makes clear that the group still serves as a key venue where main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives and extrem­ists mix”, adding that CNP “clear­ly remains a crit­i­cal nexus for main­stream­ing extrem­ism from the far right into con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles”. And that’s the cru­cial aspect of the CNP’s extreme secre­cy that can’t be lost: the CNP’s extreme secre­cy cov­ers for fact that it acts as a vehi­cle for main­stream­ing right-wing extrem­ism.

We’re going to get a bet­ter sense of the reach of the CNP inside the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment with the sec­ond arti­cle excerpt, from Octo­ber 2017, when the Her­itage foun­da­tion was search for a replace­ment for then-for­mer pres­i­dent Jim DeMint. Yes, DeMint is a CNP mem­ber. As we’re going to see, of the four peo­ple Her­itage was look­ing at to replace DeMint, three of them were CNP mem­bers. Lisa B. Nel­son, David Trulio, and Kay Coles James. The only non-CNP mem­ber they were report­ed­ly inter­est­ed in at the time was Mike Pence’s then-chief of staff Marc Short. In the end, James got the job.

But there’s an inter­est­ing twist to all this in the third excerpt below. Her­itage has already select­ed its replace­ment for Kay Coles James as pres­i­dent. Dr. Kevin Roberts, cur­rent the CEO of the Texas Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Foun­da­tion (TPPF). Recall how the TPPF was found to be run­ning the “79 Days report” elec­tion sim­u­la­tions in the final weeks of the 2020 elec­tion in coor­di­na­tion with the Clare­mont Insti­tute. The Clare­mont Insti­tute hap­pens to have John East­man, one of the cen­tral fig­ures in devel­op­ing legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for the events that led up to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. So Roberts seems like an appro­pri­ate fit for the job. He’s got the rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence in try­ing to over­turn elec­tions.

Here’s the twist: while Roberts does NOT show up in the most recent­ly leaked list of CNP mem­bers, there’s one place where he is indeed list­ed as a CNP mem­ber. And it’s the kind of place that would appear to vio­late the CNP rules on not acknowl­edg­ing either his mem­ber­ship to the CNP or its very exis­tence: Roberts is list­ed as a CNP mem­ber in a Sep­tem­ber 1, 2021 news post on gov.texas.gov web­site, where Texas gov­er­nor Greg Abbott announced that Roberts was appoint­ed to the Texas 1836 Project Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee. They spell it out clear­ly in the pro­file:

Kevin Roberts, Ph.D. of Lib­er­ty Hill is the CEO of the Texas Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Foun­da­tion. Pre­vi­ous­ly, he served as Pres­i­dent of Wyoming Catholic Col­lege in Lan­der, WY, and as founder and head­mas­ter of John Paul the Great Acad­e­my in Lafayette, LA. He is a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy and the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Schol­ars. Roberts received a Bach­e­lor of Arts in His­to­ry from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisiana, a Mas­ter of Arts in His­to­ry from Vir­ginia Tech, and a Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy in Amer­i­can His­to­ry from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin.

Note that the Texas 1836 Project is just the lat­est right-wing attempt to rewrite his­to­ry. Start­ed in 2021 by Gov­er­nor Abbott, the project aims at pro­mot­ing “patri­ot­ic edu­ca­tion” to Texas res­i­dent, with echos of Pro­ject­Blitz. Roberts is clear­ly tick­ing off all the right wedge issues, and it land­ed him the pres­i­den­cy of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion.

And yet, what are we to make of the fact that Roberts does­n’t show up in the leaked CNP lists but open­ly touts his mem­bers in his pub­lic Texas pro­file? That’s the weird twist here. Per­haps Roberts is such a new mem­ber his mem­ber­ship has­n’t had a chance to get leaked. But if that’s not the case, you have to won­der if the CNP has decid­ed it’s eas­i­er to just come out of the shad­ows. Being a hyper-secre­tive hyper-pow­er­ful group isn’t exact­ly a great look, after all. Again, it’s a mys­tery.

Ok, first, here’s a Sept 2021 look at the recent­ly updat­ed leaked list of CNP mem­bers. Mem­bers that stretch across pol­i­tics, the media, and busi­ness. And mem­bers that high­light how the CNP real­ly is an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed allow­ing right-wing extrem­ists to cavort with the ‘main­stream’. Cavort­ing that’s sup­posed to all be done under the strictest secre­cy:

The Guardian

Top Repub­li­cans rub shoul­ders with extrem­ists in secre­tive rightwing group, leak reveals

Wealthy entre­pre­neurs and media moguls also named on mem­ber­ship list for influ­en­tial Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy

Jason Wil­son
Thu 30 Sep 2021 13.34 EDT
First pub­lished on Thu 30 Sep 2021 05.00 EDT

A leaked doc­u­ment has revealed the mem­ber­ship list of the secre­tive Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP), show­ing how it pro­vides oppor­tu­ni­ties for elite Repub­li­cans, wealthy entre­pre­neurs, media pro­pri­etors and pil­lars of the US con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment to rub shoul­ders with anti-abor­tion and anti-Islam­ic extrem­ists.

The South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter (SPLC), which mon­i­tors rightwing hate groups, describes the CNP as “a shad­owy and intense­ly secre­tive group [which] has oper­at­ed behind the scenes” in its efforts to “build the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment”.

The leaked mem­ber­ship list dates from Sep­tem­ber last year, and reveals the 40-year-old CNP put influ­en­tial Trump admin­is­tra­tion fig­ures along­side lead­ers of orga­ni­za­tions that have been cat­e­go­rized as hate groups.

The group was found­ed in 1981 by activists influ­en­tial in the Chris­t­ian right, includ­ing Tim LaHaye, Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich, who had also been involved in found­ing and lead­ing the Moral Major­i­ty. Ini­tial­ly they were seek­ing to max­i­mize their influ­ence on the new Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion. In sub­se­quent years, CNP meet­ings have played host to pres­i­den­tial aspi­rants like George W Bush in 1999 and Mitt Rom­ney in 2007, and sit­ting pres­i­dents includ­ing Don­ald Trump in 2020.

In videos obtained by the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2020, the CNP exec­u­tive com­mit­tee chair­man, Bill Wal­ton, told atten­dees of the upcom­ing elec­tion: “This is a spir­i­tu­al bat­tle we are in. This is good ver­sus evil.”

The CNP is so secre­tive, accord­ing to reports, that its mem­bers are instruct­ed not to reveal their affil­i­a­tion or even name the group.

Hei­di Beirich, of the Glob­al Project Against Hate and Extrem­ism, said in an email that “this new CNP list makes clear that the group still serves as a key venue where main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives and extrem­ists mix”, adding that CNP “clear­ly remains a crit­i­cal nexus for main­stream­ing extrem­ism from the far right into con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles”.

The doc­u­ment – which reveals email address­es and phone num­bers for most mem­bers – shows that the CNP includes mem­bers of SPLC-list­ed hate groups.

They include lead­ers of orga­ni­za­tions list­ed as anti-Mus­lim hate groups, includ­ing:

* Frank Gaffney, founder and exec­u­tive chair­man of the Cen­ter for Secu­ri­ty Pol­i­cy (CSP)

* Brigitte Gabriel, founder and chair­man of Act For Amer­i­ca (AFA)

They also include sev­er­al founders or lead­ers of groups list­ed as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups, such as:

* Michael P Far­ris, pres­i­dent and CEO of the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF)

* Brad Dacus, founder and pres­i­dent of the Pacif­ic Jus­tice Insti­tute

* Tony Perkins, pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil

* Matthew Staver, founder and chair­man of Lib­er­ty Coun­sel

* Tim Wild­mon, pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Fam­i­ly Asso­ci­a­tion

Also, there are mem­bers of orga­ni­za­tions list­ed as anti-immi­grant hate groups, includ­ing James and Amap­o­la Hans­berg­er, co-founders of Legal Immi­grants For Amer­i­ca (Lifa).

Addi­tion­al­ly, the list includes mem­bers of groups that have been accused of extrem­ist posi­tions on abor­tion. They include Mar­garet H Hartshorn, chair of the board of Heart­beat Inter­na­tion­al, which has report­ed­ly spread mis­in­for­ma­tion world­wide to preg­nant women.

Sev­er­al high-pro­file fig­ures asso­ci­at­ed with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, or con­spir­a­cy-mind­ed char­ac­ters in Trump’s orbit, are also on the list, such as Jerome R Cor­si, who has writ­ten con­spir­a­cy-mind­ed books about John Ker­ry, Barack Oba­ma and the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks. Cor­si is list­ed as a mem­ber of CNP’s board of gov­er­nors.

Along with these rep­re­sen­ta­tives of extrem­ist posi­tions, the CNP rolls include mem­bers of osten­si­bly more main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive groups, and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of major Amer­i­can cor­po­ra­tions. Still oth­ers come from the Repub­li­can par­ty, a net­work of rightwing activist orga­ni­za­tions, and the com­pa­nies and foun­da­tions that back them.

A new­com­er to the group since a pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the mem­ber list was exposed is Char­lie Kirk, founder and pres­i­dent of Turn­ing Point USA (TPUSA), a con­ser­v­a­tive youth orga­ni­za­tion.

Although TPUSA works hard to make inroads into main­stream cul­ture with stunts and on-cam­pus events, Kirk has recent­ly staked out more hard-right posi­tions, say­ing last week that Demo­c­ra­t­ic immi­gra­tion poli­cies were aimed at “dimin­ish­ing and decreas­ing white demo­graph­ics in Amer­i­ca”, a day after Tuck­er Carl­son ven­ti­lat­ed racist “great replace­ment” con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries on his Fox News pro­gram.

Con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment heavy­weights in the group include Lisa B Nel­son, chief exec­u­tive of the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil; Eugene May­er, pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety; Grover Norquist, pres­i­dent of Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform; Daniel Schnei­der, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive Union, which orga­nizes the CPac con­fer­ence; and L Brent Bozell III, the founder of the Media Research Cen­ter and a mem­ber of the Bozell and Buck­ley dynas­ties of con­ser­v­a­tive activists.

Oth­er mem­bers include pil­lars of the Repub­li­can polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment, includ­ing for­mer GOP con­gres­sion­al major­i­ty leader Tom DeLay; for­mer Wis­con­sin gov­er­nor Scott Walk­er; Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion attor­ney gen­er­al Edwin Meese III; and for­mer RNC chair and Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.

Their num­ber also includes sit­ting con­gress­men such as Bar­ry Lou­d­er­milk and influ­en­tial oper­a­tives like David Trulio, who was the senior advis­er and chief of staff to the under-sec­re­tary of defense in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

The mem­ber list also includes rep­re­sen­ta­tives of major US cor­po­ra­tions, such as Marc Johansen, vice-pres­i­dent for the satel­lites and intel­li­gence pro­gram for Boe­ing; Jef­frey Coors, of the Coors brew­ing fam­i­ly, who have exten­sive­ly spon­sored con­ser­v­a­tive groups; Lee Roy Mitchell, the founder and chair­man of the board for movie chain own­er Cin­e­mark Hold­ings; Steve Forbes, the founder and chief exec­u­tive of the Forbes busi­ness media empire; and Scott Brown, a senior vice-pres­i­dent at Mor­gan Stan­ley.

Oth­er mem­bers of the group rep­re­sent orga­ni­za­tions that oper­ate under a veil of secre­cy, with con­ser­v­a­tive “dark mon­ey” orga­ni­za­tions well rep­re­sent­ed.

One mem­ber, Law­son Bad­er, is the pres­i­dent of Donor’s Trust and Donors Cap­i­tal Fund, non­prof­its that dis­guise the iden­ti­ties of their own donors, and whose largesse to rightwing caus­es has earned them the rep­u­ta­tion as “the dark-mon­ey ATM of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment”.

Anoth­er mem­ber, Richard Graber, is the pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of the Lyn­de and Har­ry Bradley Foun­da­tion. The Bradley foun­da­tion has long bankrolled con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment caus­es, includ­ing Donors Trust, and has report­ed­ly spon­sored wide­spread efforts to dis­cred­it the elec­tion of Joe Biden in 2020.

Con­ser­v­a­tive media fig­ures are also on the list: Neil Patel, co-founder and pub­lish­er of the Dai­ly Caller; Lar­ry Beasley, chief exec­u­tive of the rightwing news­pa­per the Wash­ing­ton Times; and Floyd Brown, the founder of the Ari­zona-based West­ern Jour­nal and founder of the Cit­i­zens Unit­ed Pac.

Pro-gun groups are also rep­re­sent­ed, with NRA chief exec­u­tive Wayne LaPierre and Gun Own­ers of Amer­i­ca founder Tim Macy each list­ed as mem­bers.

The 220-page doc­u­ment – which includes a state­ment of prin­ci­ples and an indi­ca­tion of mem­bers’ pol­i­cy inter­ests along­side a com­plete mem­ber list – was leaked and pro­vid­ed to jour­nal­ists via a trans­paren­cy orga­ni­za­tion, Dis­trib­uted Denial of Secrets.

An ear­li­er, redact­ed ver­sion of the list was pub­lished along with report­ing by the Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy in late 2020. DDOSecret’s pub­li­ca­tion restored per­son­al infor­ma­tion, which allowed fur­ther report­ing and ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the list’s con­tents.

...

———

“Top Repub­li­cans rub shoul­ders with extrem­ists in secre­tive rightwing group, leak reveals” by Jason Wil­son; The Guardian; 09/30/2021

“The CNP is so secre­tive, accord­ing to reports, that its mem­bers are instruct­ed not to reveal their affil­i­a­tion or even name the group.”

Not only can mem­bers not reveal their affil­i­a­tion, they can’t even name the group. It’s hard to get more secre­tive than that. Under­stand­able secre­cy when we learn that one of the pri­ma­ry func­tions of the CNP has to act as a nexus for the main­stream­ing extrem­ism from the far right into the main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive mix. It’s why we should­n’t be at all sur­prised to see names like Jerome Cor­si
on the CNP list. Recall how Cor­si joined Alex Jone’s InfoWars pro­gram in 2017, act­ing as the head of the InfoWars DC bureau, although his ties to Jones frayed and even­tu­al­ly descend­ed into Cor­si suing Jones over defama­tion of char­ac­ter. Palling around with Alex Jones. These are the kinds of things CNP mem­bers have been up to:

...
Hei­di Beirich, of the Glob­al Project Against Hate and Extrem­ism, said in an email that “this new CNP list makes clear that the group still serves as a key venue where main­stream con­ser­v­a­tives and extrem­ists mix”, adding that CNP “clear­ly remains a crit­i­cal nexus for main­stream­ing extrem­ism from the far right into con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles”.

The doc­u­ment – which reveals email address­es and phone num­bers for most mem­bers – shows that the CNP includes mem­bers of SPLC-list­ed hate groups.

...

Sev­er­al high-pro­file fig­ures asso­ci­at­ed with the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, or con­spir­a­cy-mind­ed char­ac­ters in Trump’s orbit, are also on the list, such as Jerome R Cor­si, who has writ­ten con­spir­a­cy-mind­ed books about John Ker­ry, Barack Oba­ma and the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks. Cor­si is list­ed as a mem­ber of CNP’s board of gov­er­nors.
...

And inter­min­gled with the extrem­ists are the high-pro­file con­ser­v­a­tive fig­ures, like Lisa Nel­son of ALEC or Grover Norquist. Recall how Nel­son report­ed­ly informed the CNP in Feb­ru­ary of 2020 that ALEC was work­ing with Repub­li­can lawyers to strate­gize paths for win­ning the elec­tion by con­test­ing the valid­i­ty of the elec­tion. The CNP is the con­ser­v­a­tive main­stream. A super-secret main­stream:

...

Con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment heavy­weights in the group include Lisa B Nel­son, chief exec­u­tive of the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil; Eugene May­er, pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety; Grover Norquist, pres­i­dent of Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform; Daniel Schnei­der, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive Union, which orga­nizes the CPac con­fer­ence; and L Brent Bozell III, the founder of the Media Research Cen­ter and a mem­ber of the Bozell and Buck­ley dynas­ties of con­ser­v­a­tive activists.

...

Their num­ber also includes sit­ting con­gress­men such as Bar­ry Lou­d­er­milk and influ­en­tial oper­a­tives like David Trulio, who was the senior advis­er and chief of staff to the under-sec­re­tary of defense in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.
...

And when we see for­mer Wis­con­sin gov­ern­ment Scott Walk­er, it’s worth not­ing that fel­low Wis­con­si­nite CNP-mem­ber Dani­uel Suhr also has ties to Walk­er. Recall how Suhr has served as the chief of staff to for­mer Wis­con­sin Lt Gov­ern­ment Rebec­ca Kleefisch. Suhr then decid­ed to pub­lish an opin­ion piece in WORLD this Jan­u­ary 6 warn­ing about the inves­ti­ga­tion into the insur­rec­tion and a ‘woke mil­i­tary’ lead­ing to the per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians in the mil­i­tary who may hold views now deemed to be extrem­ist. Well, it also turns out that Scott Walk­er made Suhr his Pol­i­cy Direc­tor in Jan of 2018. Inter­est­ing­ly, War­ren C. Smith, the asso­ciate pub­lish­er of WORLD, is also a CNP mem­ber. This is what secret net­work­ing looks like:

...
Oth­er mem­bers include pil­lars of the Repub­li­can polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment, includ­ing for­mer GOP con­gres­sion­al major­i­ty leader Tom DeLay; for­mer Wis­con­sin gov­er­nor Scott Walk­er; Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion attor­ney gen­er­al Edwin Meese III; and for­mer RNC chair and Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.
...

The cor­po­rate exec­u­tives on the CNP are also quite notable. Marc Johansen, vice-pres­i­dent for the satel­lites and intel­li­gence pro­gram for Boe­ing. There’s Steve Forbes. And then there’s Jef­frey Coors of the Coors fam­i­ly dynasty, one of the most impor­tant fam­i­lies in fund­ing the con­tem­po­rary US con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. And this is just a sam­ple of the pow­er­ful peo­ple in the world of busi­ness:

...
The mem­ber list also includes rep­re­sen­ta­tives of major US cor­po­ra­tions, such as Marc Johansen, vice-pres­i­dent for the satel­lites and intel­li­gence pro­gram for Boe­ing; Jef­frey Coors, of the Coors brew­ing fam­i­ly, who have exten­sive­ly spon­sored con­ser­v­a­tive groups; Lee Roy Mitchell, the founder and chair­man of the board for movie chain own­er Cin­e­mark Hold­ings; Steve Forbes, the founder and chief exec­u­tive of the Forbes busi­ness media empire; and Scott Brown, a senior vice-pres­i­dent at Mor­gan Stan­ley.
...

As anoth­er exam­ple of how deeply inter­twined the CNP is with the Koch net­work of GOP mega-donors, we we find Law­son Bad­er, the pres­i­dent of Donor’s Trust and Donors Cap­i­tal Fund, the most impor­tant right-wing Dark Mon­ey group oper­at­ing today. And then we find Richard Graber, the pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of the Lyn­de and Har­ry Bradley Foun­da­tion. Recall that Repub­li­can lawyer Cle­ta Mitchell — who began strate­giz­ing in prepa­ra­tion for ques­tion­ing elec­tion results as ear­ly as August 2019 — sits on the board of direc­tors of the Bradley Foun­da­tion. Mitchell has been at the cen­ter of the con­ser­v­a­tive estab­lish­men­t’s efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion:

...
Oth­er mem­bers of the group rep­re­sent orga­ni­za­tions that oper­ate under a veil of secre­cy, with con­ser­v­a­tive “dark mon­ey” orga­ni­za­tions well rep­re­sent­ed.

One mem­ber, Law­son Bad­er, is the pres­i­dent of Donor’s Trust and Donors Cap­i­tal Fund, non­prof­its that dis­guise the iden­ti­ties of their own donors, and whose largesse to rightwing caus­es has earned them the rep­u­ta­tion as “the dark-mon­ey ATM of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment”.

Anoth­er mem­ber, Richard Graber, is the pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of the Lyn­de and Har­ry Bradley Foun­da­tion. The Bradley foun­da­tion has long bankrolled con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment caus­es, includ­ing Donors Trust, and has report­ed­ly spon­sored wide­spread efforts to dis­cred­it the elec­tion of Joe Biden in 2020.

...

Pro-gun groups are also rep­re­sent­ed, with NRA chief exec­u­tive Wayne LaPierre and Gun Own­ers of Amer­i­ca founder Tim Macy each list­ed as mem­bers.
...

You almost can’t get more main­stream inside the GOP than the CNP. It’s like almost any­body who’s any­body in the move­ment is a CNP mem­ber. To illus­trate the point, here’s an Octo­ber 2017 piece in the Wash­ing­ton Post about the spec­u­la­tion over whether or not Marc Short — then Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence’s chief of staff — was going to leave the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and take a job as the next head of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. As we saw, Short did NOT end up tak­ing the job and stuck with Mike Pence until the end...hence the poten­tial inter­est by House Jan 6 Insur­rec­tion inves­ti­ga­tors in talk­ing to Short.

Notably, Short does­n’t appear to show up on any CNP mem­ber­ship lists. Part of what makes that notable is look­ing at all the oth­er peo­ple who were on the Her­itage wish list for the job at the time. Vir­tu­al­ly all of them are known CNP mem­bers: Lisa B. Nel­son, David Trulio, and Kay Coles James. All three show up on the CNP mem­ber­ship list. And that’s to replace the then-for­mer head of Her­itage, Jim DeMint, anoth­er CNP mem­ber.

The arti­cle men­tions some oth­er CNP mem­bers who also affil­i­at­ed with Her­itage. CNP Mem­ber Steve Forbes also sits on the Her­itage board. And Kay Coles James was, at the time, already a Her­itage board mem­ber and close to Her­itage founder Edwin J. Feul­ner. Yes, Feul­ner is a CNP mem­ber too. Because of course he is.

So who ulti­mate­ly got the job? Kay Coles James. The CNP got to keep its hands on the Her­itage pres­i­den­cy, solid­i­fy­ing its secret grip on the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Her­itage Foun­da­tion con­sid­ers top White House aide, Cubs co-own­er as next leader

By Robert Cos­ta, Ash­ley Park­er and John Wag­n­er
Octo­ber 17, 2017

The Her­itage Foun­da­tion has nar­rowed its search for a new pres­i­dent down to a short­list of final­ists, a group that includes Todd Rick­etts, a co-own­er of the Chica­go Cubs, and Marc Short, a senior Trump White House offi­cial, accord­ing to three peo­ple famil­iar with the dis­cus­sions.

In addi­tion to Rick­etts and Short, Heritage’s board of trustees also has expressed inter­est in Lisa B. Nel­son, the chief exec­u­tive of the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil, and David Trulio, a vice pres­i­dent at Lock­heed Mar­tin, the peo­ple said on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss pri­vate delib­er­a­tions.

The con­ser­v­a­tive think tank’s trustees, how­ev­er, remain torn over their deci­sion. Kay Coles James — a Her­itage board mem­ber who served as the direc­tor of the U.S. Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and is close to Her­itage founder Edwin J. Feul­ner — has been men­tioned by sev­er­al asso­ciates as some­one who could serve in a tem­po­rary capac­i­ty if the board can­not set­tle on a can­di­date.

The group’s clout in Wash­ing­ton was under­scored by Pres­i­dent Trump’s appear­ance Tues­day night at a gath­er­ing of its President’s Club at a Wash­ing­ton hotel.

Her­itage’s board includes many wealthy right-wing fig­ures, includ­ing Steve Forbes, Rebekah A. Mer­cer and Thomas A. Saun­ders III.

The top job at the influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tive out­post has been open since May, when Jim DeMint, the Repub­li­can fire­brand and for­mer South Car­oli­na sen­a­tor, was pushed out, although Fuel­ner has been serv­ing as the inter­im pres­i­dent. The search process is still in flux, and it is not clear whether the lead­ing can­di­dates under con­sid­er­a­tion have for­mal­ly been con­tact­ed by the Her­itage board — or would accept the posi­tion.

For Rick­etts — a long­time Repub­li­can activist whose father, Joe, is the founder of TD Amer­i­trade and broth­er is Pete Rick­etts, the cur­rent Nebras­ka gov­er­nor — the post­ing would offer him and his fam­i­ly even greater influ­ence in help­ing to shape the direc­tion of the Repub­li­can Par­ty and the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.

Trump select­ed Rick­etts to serve as deputy com­merce sec­re­tary, but in April he with­drew his nom­i­na­tion from con­sid­er­a­tion, cit­ing an inabil­i­ty to untan­gle his finan­cial hold­ings to the sat­is­fac­tion of the Office of Gov­ern­ment Ethics.

Rick­etts’s father helped finance Future45, a super PAC that spent lav­ish­ly for Trump in the final weeks of the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, giv­ing the group at least $1 mil­lion through the end of Sep­tem­ber, Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion fil­ings show. Joe Rick­etts and his wife, Mar­lene, also con­tributed near­ly $344,000 to sup­port Trump’s cam­paign and the Repub­li­can Par­ty. The Rick­ettses’ finan­cial sup­port for Trump was a dra­mat­ic rever­sal from the pri­maries, when Joe and Mar­lene Rick­etts gave more than $5.5 mil­lion to Our Prin­ci­ples PAC, a super PAC that ran a slew of hard-hit­ting ads against Trump.

Short, the direc­tor of leg­isla­tive affairs at the White House, has strong con­ser­v­a­tive cre­den­tials, pre­vi­ous­ly lead­ing Free­dom Part­ners, the polit­i­cal oper­a­tion for bil­lion­aire broth­ers Charles and David Koch, and before that work­ing for Vice Pres­i­dent Pence when Pence was a ris­ing star on the right dur­ing his days in the U.S. House.

...

———–

“Her­itage Foun­da­tion con­sid­ers top White House aide, Cubs co-own­er as next leader” by Robert Cos­ta, Ash­ley Park­er and John Wag­n­er; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 10/17/2017

“The top job at the influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tive out­post has been open since May, when Jim DeMint, the Repub­li­can fire­brand and for­mer South Car­oli­na sen­a­tor, was pushed out, although Fuel­ner has been serv­ing as the inter­im pres­i­dent. The search process is still in flux, and it is not clear whether the lead­ing can­di­dates under con­sid­er­a­tion have for­mal­ly been con­tact­ed by the Her­itage board — or would accept the posi­tion.”

CNP mem­ber Jim DeMint was out as Her­itage’s pres­i­dent and they need­ed a replace­ment. Marc Short was one option, along with CNP mem­bers Lisa B. Nel­son, David Trulio, and Kay Coles James, who ulti­mate­ly got the job. Who knows whether or not fel­low CNP mem­bers Ed Feul­ner and Steve Forbes used their influ­ence to secure her the job. But the fact that all of the can­di­dates, oth­er than Marc Short, for this pow­er­ful posi­tion inside the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment were CNP mem­bers tells us some­thing about the lev­el of influ­ence the CNP wields. It’s like the ulti­mate club of DC power­bro­kers:

...
In addi­tion to Rick­etts and Short, Heritage’s board of trustees also has expressed inter­est in Lisa B. Nel­son, the chief exec­u­tive of the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil, and David Trulio, a vice pres­i­dent at Lock­heed Mar­tin, the peo­ple said on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss pri­vate delib­er­a­tions.

The con­ser­v­a­tive think tank’s trustees, how­ev­er, remain torn over their deci­sion. Kay Coles James — a Her­itage board mem­ber who served as the direc­tor of the U.S. Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and is close to Her­itage founder Edwin J. Feul­ner — has been men­tioned by sev­er­al asso­ciates as some­one who could serve in a tem­po­rary capac­i­ty if the board can­not set­tle on a can­di­date.

The group’s clout in Wash­ing­ton was under­scored by Pres­i­dent Trump’s appear­ance Tues­day night at a gath­er­ing of its President’s Club at a Wash­ing­ton hotel.

Her­itage’s board includes many wealthy right-wing fig­ures, includ­ing Steve Forbes, Rebekah A. Mer­cer and Thomas A. Saun­ders III.
...

And, in the end, Kay Coles James got the job. But her term is almost up and that job went to Dr. Kevin Roberts back in Octo­ber. The same Kevin Roberts who was pub­licly out­ing him­self as a CNP mem­ber just a month ear­li­er when he got appoint­ed to Abbot­t’s 1836 project:

Office of the Texas Gov­er­nor

Gov­er­nor Abbott Appoints Three to Texas 1836 Project Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee

Sep­tem­ber 1, 2021 | Austin, Texas

Gov­er­nor Greg Abbott has appoint­ed Car­oli­na Castil­lo Crimm, Ph.D., Don Fra­zier, Ph.D., and Kevin Roberts, Ph.D., who will serve as pre­sid­ing offi­cer, to the Texas 1836 Project Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee for terms set to expire on Sep­tem­ber 1, 2023. The Texas 1836 Project Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee was estab­lished by HB 2497 (87R) to pro­mote patri­ot­ic edu­ca­tion and increase aware­ness of the Texas val­ues that con­tin­ue to stim­u­late bound­less pros­per­i­ty across this state.

Car­oli­na Castil­lo Crimm, Ph.D. of Huntsville retired as Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus at Sam Hous­ton State Uni­ver­si­ty. She has over 30 years of expe­ri­ence in teach­ing, busi­ness, and gov­ern­ment. She has taught at ele­men­tary and high school lev­els in Flori­da and Texas and at col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty lev­els. She is a mem­ber of the Texas State His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, past mem­ber of Human­i­ties Texas, board mem­ber of the Walk­er Coun­ty His­tor­i­cal Com­mis­sion, Main Street Com­mis­sion, Cen­tral Texas His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, and the East Texas His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, she is a mem­ber of the League of Latin Amer­i­can Cit­i­zens, Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, and a board mem­ber of the Old Town The­ater in Huntsville. Crimm received a Bach­e­lor of Arts in His­to­ry and Social Stud­ies from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi, a Mas­ter of Arts in Archi­tec­ture Preser­va­tion from Texas Tech Uni­ver­si­ty, and a Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy in Latin Amer­i­can His­to­ry from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin.

Don Fra­zier, Ph.D. of Ker­rville is the Direc­tor of The Texas Cen­ter at Schrein­er Uni­ver­si­ty, and pre­vi­ous­ly was a Pro­fes­sor at McMur­ry Uni­ver­si­ty in Abi­lene for over 25 years. He is an elect­ed mem­ber of Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety of Texas, scholar/director of the Texas His­tor­i­cal Foun­da­tion, and a for­mer mem­ber of the Texas State His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, he is a board mem­ber of the Heart of the Hills Her­itage Cen­ter and is an advi­sor to The Alamo His­tor­i­cal Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee. Fra­zier received a Bach­e­lor of Arts in Com­mu­ni­ca­tion from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Arling­ton and a Mas­ter of Arts and a Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy in His­to­ry from Texas Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty.

Kevin Roberts, Ph.D. of Lib­er­ty Hill is the CEO of the Texas Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Foun­da­tion. Pre­vi­ous­ly, he served as Pres­i­dent of Wyoming Catholic Col­lege in Lan­der, WY, and as founder and head­mas­ter of John Paul the Great Acad­e­my in Lafayette, LA. He is a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy and the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Schol­ars. Roberts received a Bach­e­lor of Arts in His­to­ry from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisiana, a Mas­ter of Arts in His­to­ry from Vir­ginia Tech, and a Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy in Amer­i­can His­to­ry from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin.

———-

“Gov­er­nor Abbott Appoints Three to Texas 1836 Project Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee”; Office of the Texas Gov­er­nor; 09/01/2021

Roberts could­n’t be any more clear. He is a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. There it is.

Was Robert­s’s mem­ber­ship admis­sion a mis­take by a CNP-new­bie? Or a sign of things to come? We’ll get our answer even­tu­al­ly. An answer that is either deliv­ered in the form of hun­dreds of pub­lic mem­ber­ship admis­sions by many of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in the US. Or ongo­ing Volde­mort-ing silence.

Rolling Stone mag­a­zine has a new piece high­light­ing the con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor net­works’ financ­ing the Clare­mont Insti­tute. As we’ve seen, the Clare­mont Insti­tute has become one of the key right-wing enti­ties involved with the schem­ing focused on over­turn­ing the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results. In par­tic­u­lar, the key role played by con­sti­tu­tion­al lawyer John East­man in devel­op­ing the legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s attempts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results.

Recall how it was East­man who met with the Trump team in the days before the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, advo­cat­ing a plan where Mike Pence would uni­lat­er­al­ly assert the pow­er to reject the elec­toral vote, throw­ing the issue to the Supreme Court in the hopes of ulti­mate­ly hav­ing the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives choose the next pres­i­dent under a one-state-one-vote process. As we’ve seen, East­man has been ful­ly wel­comed back into con­ser­v­a­tive polite soci­ety and was event sched­ule to appear at a Clare­mont Insti­tute “Elec­tion Integri­ty and the Future of Amer­i­can Repub­li­can Gov­ern­ment” event last year. East­man actu­al­ly gave mul­ti­ple options for over­turn­ing the elec­tion, includ­ing one sce­nario where Pence reject­ed con­test­ed states entire­ly and award­ed Trump the pres­i­den­cy based on win­ning a major­i­ty of the remain­ing uncon­test­ed states.

Dur­ing the insur­rec­tion, East­man was there at Steve Ban­non’s and Rudy Giu­lian­i’s “war room” at the Willard Hotel. And Ban­non was­n’t the only known CNP mem­ber in that “war room”. CNP mem­bers Rus­sell J. Ram­s­land Jr. and J. Keet Lewis were also there. Also recall how it was the evening of Jan 5 when the Trump team learned that Mike Pence was unwill­ing to go along with any plans of reject­ing the elec­toral vote, mean­ing the plan­ning that took place in the “war room” that evening was like­ly plan­ning that includ­ed talk of using a mob of sup­port­ers to just open­ly block the vote by raid­ing the Capi­tol.

The sto­ry about the role John East­man played in schem­ing to over­turn the elec­tion does­n’t end on Jan 6. Recall how the con­ser­v­a­tive move­men­t’s ongo­ing defense of East­man’s actions include an attempt by the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety to pre­vent a Stan­ford law stu­dent from grad­u­at­ing after the stu­dent made joke fly­ers that made light of the many Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety mem­bers who con­tin­ue to sup­port the ‘stolen elec­tion’ Big Lie, includ­ing East­man.

But the sto­ry of East­man’s role in under­min­ing US elec­tions did­n’t start with the 2020 elec­tion either. This is a long-stand­ing project. Recall how the Clare­mont Insti­tute and ALEC held a work­shop in 2017 where East­man argued that the pow­er of the states had been erod­ed with the direct pop­u­lar elec­tion of Sen­a­tors and advo­cat­ed for the repeal of the 17th Amend­ment. Yep, the guy thinks the direct elec­tion of Sen­a­tors is appar­ent­ly too pop­ulist. As expect. Don’t for­get that the repeal of the 17th Amend­ment is on the Koch mega-donor net­work’s con­sti­tu­tion­al over­haul wish list.

So that’s all part of the con­text of how the sup­port for the Clare­mont Insti­tute became a top­i­cal issue. An enti­ty pre­vi­ous­ly asso­ci­at­ed with bland con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics is at the heart of a coup plot. A coup plot that’s arguably ongo­ing.

And as we’re going to see, while the Rolling Stone arti­cle does­n’t men­tion the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP), it’s filled with ref­er­ences to CNP mem­bers. Because of course it is. That’s the nature of the CNP. It’s like the con­ser­v­a­tive move­men­t’s fas­cist meta-lob­by. And that’s why why we should­n’t be at all sur­prised to learn that the Clare­mont Insti­tute has long been financed by three of the biggest names in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics: The DeVos­es, Scaifes, and Bradleys. All con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donors. And all fam­i­lies with long-stand­ing Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy con­nec­tion:

* The now-deceased Richard Mel­lon Scaife shows up on the CNP mem­ber­ship list.

* As we’ve seen, a num­ber of The Bradley Foun­da­tion board mem­bers have CNP ties. Richard Graber, the pres­i­dent and CEO of the foun­da­tion, is a CNP mem­ber. Bradley Foun­da­tion board board mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell is also a CNP mem­ber. Recall how Mitchell has played a cen­tral role in orches­trat­ing the con­ser­v­a­tive efforts to not just over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results but gen­er­al­ly under­mine vot­er pro­tec­tions. Ongo­ing efforts to under­mine vot­er pro­tec­tions.

* Dick DeVos, Father-in-law of Bet­sy DeVos, , was the pres­i­dent of the CNP from 1986–88 and 1990–93. Richard’s wife, Helen DeVos, was also a mem­ber.

It turns out those three fam­i­lies have been giv­ing heav­i­ly to the Clare­mont Insti­tute in recent years and those dona­tions only appear to be grow­ing. The Clare­mont Institute’s tax fil­ings show that its rev­enue rose from 2019 to 2020 by a half-mil­lion dol­lars to $6.2 mil­lion, one of the high­est sums since the orga­ni­za­tion was found­ed in 1979. Rev­enue for the 2021 fis­cal year had increased to $7.5 mil­lion accord­ing to recent esti­mates. The donors clear­ly approve of the insti­tute’s pro-insur­rec­tion work.

But it’s also worth not­ing the oth­er known CNP mem­bers with ties to the Clare­mont Insti­tute:

* Dr. Lar­ry P. Arnn — the Pres­i­dent of Hills­dale Col­lege, Her­itage Foun­da­tion trustee, and co-founder of the Clare­mont Insti­tute — is on the CNP mem­ber­ship list.

* Dou­glas A. Jef­frey — VP for Exter­nal Affairs and Hills­dale Col­lege, and for­mer exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of the Clare­mont Insti­tute — is also on the CNP mem­ber­ship list.

* Elsa Prince — moth­er of Bet­sy DeVos and Erik Prince — is anoth­er CNP mem­ber. It’s worth not­ing that Elsa also sits on the board of the Acton Insti­tute, which was also heav­i­ly patron­ized by the DeVos fam­i­ly and named for ultra-right­ist Lord Acton, a cel­e­brat­ed his­to­ri­an on the right who felt the wrong side won the US civ­il war. Recall how the Acton Insti­tute pub­lished an essay in the weeks fol­low­ing Don­ald Trump’s 2016 elec­tion vic­to­ry call­ing for the relax­ation of child-labor laws. It was par­tic­u­lar­ly notable at the time due to the fact that Bet­sy DeVos sat on the Acton Insti­tute’s board for a decade and was poised to join the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Also recall how the Acton Insti­tute has been work­ing with Steve Ban­non — anoth­er CNP mem­ber — in attempt­ing to open a “glad­i­a­tor school for cul­ture war­riors” in Italy.

The Rolling Stone arti­cle men­tions a cou­ple of the more con­tro­ver­sial new Clare­mont Insti­tute mem­bers in recent years: ‘Alt Right’ per­son­al­i­ty Jack Poso­biec and Char­lie Kirk of Turn­ing Point USA. Kirk is a CNP mem­ber.

So while the fol­low­ing arti­cle is focused on the impor­tant role these mega-donor fam­i­ly foun­da­tions are play­ing in the financ­ing of one of the key insti­tu­tions con­tin­u­ing to threat­en what’s left of the US’s democ­ra­cy, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that any sto­ry about the Clare­mont Insti­tute is also just a sub­chap­ter in the larg­er sto­ry of the CNP’s decades-long push to sub­vert Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy:

The Rolling Stone

Revealed: The Bil­lion­aires Fund­ing the Coup’s Brain Trust

Con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donors includ­ing the DeVos­es and Bradleys are pump­ing big mon­ey into the Clare­mont Insti­tute think tank that fueled Trump’s elec­tion-fraud fan­tasies

By Andy Kroll
Jan­u­ary 12, 2022 11:58AM ET

The Clare­mont Insti­tute, once a lit­tle-known think tank often con­fused with the lib­er­al-arts col­lege of the same name, has emerged as a dri­ving force in the con­ser­v­a­tive movement’s cru­sade to use bogus fraud claims about the 2020 elec­tion to rewrite vot­ing laws and remake the elec­tion sys­tem in time for the 2022 midterms and 2024 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Most infa­mous­ly, one of the group’s legal schol­ars craft­ed mem­os out­lin­ing a plan for how then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence could poten­tial­ly over­turn the last elec­tion.

Con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donors like what they see.

The biggest right-wing megadonors in Amer­i­ca made major con­tri­bu­tions to Clare­mont in 2020 and 2021, accord­ing to foun­da­tion finan­cial records obtained by Rolling Stone. The high-pro­file donors include sev­er­al of the most influ­en­tial fam­i­lies who fund con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics and pol­i­cy: the DeVos­es of West Michi­gan, the Bradleys of Mil­wau­kee, and the Scaifes of Pitts­burgh.

The Dick and Bet­sy DeVos Foun­da­tion donat­ed $240,000 to Clare­mont in 2020 and approved anoth­er $400,000 to be paid out in the future, tax records show. The Bradley Foun­da­tion donat­ed $100,000 to Clare­mont in 2020 and anoth­er $100,000 in 2021, accord­ing to tax records and a spokes­woman for the group. The Sarah Scaife Foun­da­tion, one of sev­er­al char­i­ties tied to the late right-wing bil­lion­aire Richard Mel­lon Scaife, sup­plied anoth­er $450,000 to Clare­mont in 2020, accord­ing to its lat­est tax fil­ings.

Claremont’s own tax fil­ings show that its rev­enue rose from 2019 to 2020 by a half-mil­lion dol­lars to $6.2 mil­lion, one of the high­est sums since the orga­ni­za­tion was found­ed in 1979, accord­ing to the most recent avail­able data. A Clare­mont spokesman said the group wouldn’t com­ment about its donors beyond pub­licly avail­able data but esti­mat­ed that Claremont’s rev­enue for the 2021 fis­cal year had increased to $7.5 mil­lion.

The DeVos­es, Bradleys, and Scaifes are among the most promi­nent donor fam­i­lies in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. For Bradley and Scaife, the giv­ing to Clare­mont tracks with a long his­to­ry of fund­ing right-wing caus­es and advo­ca­cy groups, from the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute think tank and the “bill mill” Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil, to anti-immi­gra­tion zealot David Horowitz’s Free­dom Cen­ter and the cli­mate-deny­ing Heart­land Insti­tute.

Bradley in par­tic­u­lar has giv­en heav­i­ly to groups that traf­fic in mis­lead­ing or base­less claims about “elec­tion integri­ty” or wide­spread “vot­er fraud.” Thanks to a $6.5 mil­lion infu­sion from the Bradley Impact Fund, a relat­ed non­prof­it, the under­cov­er-sting group Project Ver­i­tas near­ly dou­bled its rev­enue in 2020 to $22 mil­lion, accord­ing to the group’s tax fil­ing. Bradley is also a long-time fun­der of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, which helped archi­tect the wave of vot­er sup­pres­sion bills intro­duced in state leg­is­la­tures this year, and True the Vote, a con­ser­v­a­tive group that trains poll watch­ers and stokes fears of ram­pant vot­er fraud in the past.

The Bradley Foun­da­tion was found­ed in 1942 by the Bradley fam­i­ly. Broth­ers Har­ry and Lyn­de Bradley co-found­ed the Allen-Bradley com­pa­ny, which would lat­er pro­vide much of the fund­ing for the Bradley Foun­da­tion. The non­prof­it, which has giv­en out more than $1 bil­lion in its his­to­ry, no longer has any Bradley fam­i­ly mem­bers on its board.

But while the Bradley dona­tions are to be expect­ed, the con­tri­bu­tions from the Dick and Bet­sy DeVos Foun­da­tion to Clare­mont are per­haps more sur­pris­ing. Bet­sy DeVos, in one of her final acts as Trump’s edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary, con­demned the “angry mob” on Jan­u­ary 6 and said “the law must be upheld and the work of the peo­ple must go on.”

A spokesman for the DeVos­es, Nick Was­miller, said Bet­sy DeVos’s let­ter “speaks for itself.” He added: “Clare­mont does work in many areas. It would be base­less to assert the Foundation’s sup­port has any con­nec­tion to the one item you cite.” While the foundation’s 2020 tax fil­ing said its grants to Clare­mont were unre­strict­ed, Was­miller said the fil­ing was wrong and the mon­ey had been ear­marked. How­ev­er, he declined to say what it was ear­marked for.

The dona­tions flow­ing into Clare­mont illus­trate that although the group’s full-throat­ed sup­port for Trump and fix­a­tion on elec­tion crimes may be extreme, they’re not fringe views when they have the back­ing of influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tive fun­ders. “Were it not for the patron­age of bil­lion­aire con­ser­v­a­tives and their fam­i­ly foun­da­tions, the Clare­mont Insti­tute would like­ly be rel­e­gat­ed to scream­ing about its anti-gov­ern­ment agen­da on the street cor­ner,” says Kyle Her­rig, pres­i­dent of gov­ern­ment watch­dog group Accountable.US.

The Clare­mont spokesman respond­ed to Herrig’s com­ment by say­ing “We think the dark mon­ey behind Accountable.US, under left-wing umbrel­la groups like Ara­bel­la Advi­sors, are threats to democ­ra­cy and West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. We defer to Herrig’s exper­tise on street cor­ners.”

The Clare­mont Institute’s mis­sion, as its pres­i­dent, Ryan Williams, recent­ly put it, is to “save West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.” Since the 2016 pres­i­den­tial race, Clare­mont tried to give an intel­lec­tu­al veneer to the frothy mix of nativism and iso­la­tion­ism rep­re­sent­ed by can­di­date Don­ald Trump. The think tank was per­haps best known for its mag­a­zine, the Clare­mont Review of Books, and on the eve of the ’16 elec­tion, the Review pub­lished an essay called “The Flight 93 Elec­tion,” com­par­ing the choice fac­ing Repub­li­can vot­ers to that of the pas­sen­gers who ulti­mate­ly chose to bring down the fourth plane on Sep­tem­ber 11th. If con­ser­v­a­tives didn’t rush the prover­bial cock­pit, the author, iden­ti­fied by the pen name Pub­lius Decius Mus, “death is cer­tain. To com­pound the metaphor: a Hillary Clin­ton pres­i­den­cy is Russ­ian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylin­der and take your chances.”

The essay’s author, lat­er revealed to be a con­ser­v­a­tive writer named Michael Anton, went to work in the Trump White House, which made sense giv­en his descrip­tion in “Flight 93 Elec­tion” of “the cease­less impor­ta­tion of Third World for­eign­ers with no tra­di­tion of, taste for, or expe­ri­ence in lib­er­ty means that the elec­torate grows more left, more Demo­c­ra­t­ic, less Repub­li­can, less repub­li­can, and less tra­di­tion­al­ly Amer­i­can with every cycle.”

For­mer Clare­mont schol­ars said they were aghast by the think tank’s full-on embrace of Trump in 2016. “The Clare­mont Insti­tute spent 36 years as a res­olute­ly anti-pop­ulist insti­tu­tion, [and] preached right­ly that norms and insti­tu­tions were hard to build and easy to destroy, so to watch them sud­den­ly embrace Trump in May 2016 was like if PETA sud­den­ly pub­lished a bar­be­cue cook­book,” one for­mer fel­low told Vice News.

In recent years, the think tank court­ed con­tro­ver­sy when it award­ed paid fel­low­ships to Jack Poso­biec, a right-wing influ­encer who was an ear­ly pro­mot­er of the Seth Rich and Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, and Char­lie Kirk, head of the pro-Trump activist group Turn­ing Point USA who has pushed base­less elec­tion-fraud the­o­ries and vowed to defend young peo­ple who wouldn’t refused vac­ci­na­tion from what he called “med­ical apartheid.”

But Clare­mont wouldn’t ful­ly land in the spot­light until the end of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. On Jan. 6, John East­man, a law pro­fes­sor and Clare­mont schol­ar, spoke at the “Save Amer­i­ca” ral­ly on Jan. 6, 2021, that pre­ced­ed the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. East­man repeat­ed sev­er­al elec­tion-relat­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, alleg­ing that “machines con­tributed to that fraud” by “unload­ing the bal­lots from the secret fold­er,” a ver­sion of the ram­pant con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries spread by Trump cam­paign lawyers about the com­pa­ny Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems.

As would lat­er be revealed, East­man also wrote two mem­os out­lin­ing a plan for how then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence could over­turn the 2020 result on Jan­u­ary 6. “The main thing here is that Pence should do this with­out ask­ing for per­mis­sion — either from a vote of the joint ses­sion or from the Court,” East­man wrote. “Let the oth­er side chal­lenge his actions in court…” (Worth not­ing: The Clare­mont Review would lat­er pub­lish its own cri­tique of Eastman’s mem­os by a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment and ethics at Clare­mont McKen­na col­lege. After walk­ing through a key piece of Eastman’s argu­ment, the pro­fes­sor, Joseph Bes­sette, wrote: “One doesn’t have to be a schol­ar of the Amer­i­can Found­ing, a pro­fes­sor of con­sti­tu­tion­al law, or an expert in elec­tion law to know that this sim­ply can­not be right.”)

Clare­mont con­tin­ues to push the stolen-elec­tion myth and has appar­ent­ly helped state law­mak­ers draft leg­is­la­tion to make elec­tion laws more favor­able to the Repub­li­can Par­ty. In Octo­ber, Clare­mont Pres­i­dent Ryan Williams told an under­cov­er lib­er­al activist that East­man was “still very involved with a lot of the state leg­is­la­tors and advis­ing them on elec­tion integri­ty stuff.”

...

———–

“Revealed: The Bil­lion­aires Fund­ing the Coup’s Brain Trust” by Andy Kroll; The Rolling Stone; 01/12/2022

“The biggest right-wing megadonors in Amer­i­ca made major con­tri­bu­tions to Clare­mont in 2020 and 2021, accord­ing to foun­da­tion finan­cial records obtained by Rolling Stone. The high-pro­file donors include sev­er­al of the most influ­en­tial fam­i­lies who fund con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics and pol­i­cy: the DeVos­es of West Michi­gan, the Bradleys of Mil­wau­kee, and the Scaifes of Pitts­burgh.”

The DeVos­es, Scaifes, and Bradleys. All con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donors. And all fam­i­lies with long-stand­ing Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy con­nec­tions, along with new mem­ber Char­lie Kirk:

...
Bradley in par­tic­u­lar has giv­en heav­i­ly to groups that traf­fic in mis­lead­ing or base­less claims about “elec­tion integri­ty” or wide­spread “vot­er fraud.” Thanks to a $6.5 mil­lion infu­sion from the Bradley Impact Fund, a relat­ed non­prof­it, the under­cov­er-sting group Project Ver­i­tas near­ly dou­bled its rev­enue in 2020 to $22 mil­lion, accord­ing to the group’s tax fil­ing. Bradley is also a long-time fun­der of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, which helped archi­tect the wave of vot­er sup­pres­sion bills intro­duced in state leg­is­la­tures this year, and True the Vote, a con­ser­v­a­tive group that trains poll watch­ers and stokes fears of ram­pant vot­er fraud in the past.

The Bradley Foun­da­tion was found­ed in 1942 by the Bradley fam­i­ly. Broth­ers Har­ry and Lyn­de Bradley co-found­ed the Allen-Bradley com­pa­ny, which would lat­er pro­vide much of the fund­ing for the Bradley Foun­da­tion. The non­prof­it, which has giv­en out more than $1 bil­lion in its his­to­ry, no longer has any Bradley fam­i­ly mem­bers on its board.

...

In recent years, the think tank court­ed con­tro­ver­sy when it award­ed paid fel­low­ships to Jack Poso­biec, a right-wing influ­encer who was an ear­ly pro­mot­er of the Seth Rich and Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, and Char­lie Kirk, head of the pro-Trump activist group Turn­ing Point USA who has pushed base­less elec­tion-fraud the­o­ries and vowed to defend young peo­ple who wouldn’t refused vac­ci­na­tion from what he called “med­ical apartheid.”
...

Then there’s the infa­mous “The Flight 93 Elec­tion” essay pub­lished on the eve of the 2016 elec­tion by Michael Anton, essen­tial­ly mak­ing a kind of ‘red-pilled’ ratio­nale for why the risks of asso­ci­at­ed with Trump’s open fas­cism pale in com­par­i­son to the dan­gers of a Hillary Clin­ton pres­i­den­cy. The Clare­mont Insti­tute been fas­cism-friend­ly for years:

...
The Clare­mont Institute’s mis­sion, as its pres­i­dent, Ryan Williams, recent­ly put it, is to “save West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.” Since the 2016 pres­i­den­tial race, Clare­mont tried to give an intel­lec­tu­al veneer to the frothy mix of nativism and iso­la­tion­ism rep­re­sent­ed by can­di­date Don­ald Trump. The think tank was per­haps best known for its mag­a­zine, the Clare­mont Review of Books, and on the eve of the ’16 elec­tion, the Review pub­lished an essay called “The Flight 93 Elec­tion,” com­par­ing the choice fac­ing Repub­li­can vot­ers to that of the pas­sen­gers who ulti­mate­ly chose to bring down the fourth plane on Sep­tem­ber 11th. If con­ser­v­a­tives didn’t rush the prover­bial cock­pit, the author, iden­ti­fied by the pen name Pub­lius Decius Mus, “death is cer­tain. To com­pound the metaphor: a Hillary Clin­ton pres­i­den­cy is Russ­ian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylin­der and take your chances.”

The essay’s author, lat­er revealed to be a con­ser­v­a­tive writer named Michael Anton, went to work in the Trump White House, which made sense giv­en his descrip­tion in “Flight 93 Elec­tion” of “the cease­less impor­ta­tion of Third World for­eign­ers with no tra­di­tion of, taste for, or expe­ri­ence in lib­er­ty means that the elec­torate grows more left, more Demo­c­ra­t­ic, less Repub­li­can, less repub­li­can, and less tra­di­tion­al­ly Amer­i­can with every cycle.”
...

It’s worth not­ing that Anton pub­lished an essay in the Clare­mont Review of Books in the days fol­low­ing the insur­rec­tion where he lament­ed how the insur­rec­tion would be used to cur­tail civ­il lib­er­ties while mak­ing the case that there real­ly were mas­sive elec­tion anom­alies. In May of 2021, Anton held a two-hour pod­cast with ‘Alt Right’ per­son­al­i­ty Cur­tis Yarvin (a.k.a. Men­cius Mold­bug) on the top­ic of whether or not the US should have an ‘Amer­i­can Cae­sar’.

But it’s John East­man’s ongo­ing role as one of the lead­ing ‘con­sti­tu­tion­al schol­ars’ back­ing the ‘stolen elec­tion’ nar­ra­tive that makes this sto­ry a warn­ing of what’s to come. John East­man’s cred­i­bil­i­ty as a con­sti­tu­tion­al lawyer is root­ed in large part with his asso­ci­a­tion with insti­tu­tions like the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety and the Clare­mont Insti­tute. It’ an exam­ple of how the attempt to steal the 2020 elec­tion was for all prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es a Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment plan:

...
But Clare­mont wouldn’t ful­ly land in the spot­light until the end of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. On Jan. 6, John East­man, a law pro­fes­sor and Clare­mont schol­ar, spoke at the “Save Amer­i­ca” ral­ly on Jan. 6, 2021, that pre­ced­ed the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. East­man repeat­ed sev­er­al elec­tion-relat­ed con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, alleg­ing that “machines con­tributed to that fraud” by “unload­ing the bal­lots from the secret fold­er,” a ver­sion of the ram­pant con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries spread by Trump cam­paign lawyers about the com­pa­ny Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems.

As would lat­er be revealed, East­man also wrote two mem­os out­lin­ing a plan for how then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence could over­turn the 2020 result on Jan­u­ary 6. “The main thing here is that Pence should do this with­out ask­ing for per­mis­sion — either from a vote of the joint ses­sion or from the Court,” East­man wrote. “Let the oth­er side chal­lenge his actions in court…” (Worth not­ing: The Clare­mont Review would lat­er pub­lish its own cri­tique of Eastman’s mem­os by a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment and ethics at Clare­mont McKen­na col­lege. After walk­ing through a key piece of Eastman’s argu­ment, the pro­fes­sor, Joseph Bes­sette, wrote: “One doesn’t have to be a schol­ar of the Amer­i­can Found­ing, a pro­fes­sor of con­sti­tu­tion­al law, or an expert in elec­tion law to know that this sim­ply can­not be right.”)

Clare­mont con­tin­ues to push the stolen-elec­tion myth and has appar­ent­ly helped state law­mak­ers draft leg­is­la­tion to make elec­tion laws more favor­able to the Repub­li­can Par­ty. In Octo­ber, Clare­mont Pres­i­dent Ryan Williams told an under­cov­er lib­er­al activist that East­man was “still very involved with a lot of the state leg­is­la­tors and advis­ing them on elec­tion integri­ty stuff.”
...

So as we can see, if the Clare­mont Insti­tute learned any­thing from the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, it’s the les­son that there are no costs to wag­ing an insur­rec­tion. Sure, the rab­ble who stormed the Capi­tol might end up fac­ing con­se­quences. But the archi­tects and financiers will walk. And not only will they walk, but they’ll be wel­comed back into polite soci­ety and giv­en shov­els of cash to pre­pare for the next insur­rec­tion. Con­se­quences are for the poor. It’s not exact­ly a new les­son for the oli­garchy. Kind of the same les­son they just keep learn­ing over and over.

Great research! The White Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist move­ment was also fund­ed by HL Hunt start­ing in the 1950s. He was a Nazi sym­pethiz­er in WWII.

@Pterrafractyl and Mary Ben­ton–

Not a new con­cept:

Check out para­graph 10.

https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-497-nightmare/

Keep up the great work!

Dave Emory

@Dave: Relat­ed to the con­tents of para­graph 10 on FTR#497 and the warn­ings about Chris­t­ian Fun­da­men­tal­ist net­work­ing with Nazis before the near of WWII found in Curt Riess 1944 book The Nazis Go Under­ground, here’s an arti­cle from Reli­gions Dis­patch­es about anoth­er one of the extrem­ist ties of the net­work of “Prayer Cau­cus­es” oper­at­ing around the US. A pow­er­ful net­work that was already oper­a­tion at the end of WWII: The Fel­low­ship.

First, recall how Project Blitz is a project large­ly man­aged by the Con­gres­sion­al Prayer Cau­cus Foun­da­tion (CPCF). The CPCF, in turn, has a sin­gle paid employ­ee, CNP mem­ber Lea Carawan. The CPCF has clear CNP ties.

But as the fol­low­ing Feb­ru­ary 2021 piece points out, the CPCF also has close ties to anoth­er pow­er­ful insti­tu­tion: The Nation­al Prayer Break­fast (NPB). And as we’ve saw in FTR#697, the Nation­al Prayer Break­fast is a prod­uct of The Fel­low­ship (aka “The Fam­i­ly”). Also recall how the The Fel­low­ship was almost like an ear­li­er iter­a­tion of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, where the lead­ers in pol­i­tics, Fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tian­i­ty, and busi­ness cre­at­ed what amounts to a secret cult of pow­er. A secret reli­gious pow­er cult with a num­ber of fas­ci­nat­ing socio-the­o­log­i­cal par­al­lels with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.

In that sense, it’s not real­ly a stretch to view Project Blitz and the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy as just the mod­ern iter­a­tion of the same Nazi-lov­ing fas­cist cor­po­ratist reli­gious pow­er cult:

Reli­gions Dis­atch­es

2021 Nation­al Prayer Break­fast: A Kinder Gen­tler Chris­t­ian Cap­i­tal­ism

By Becky Gar­ri­son
Feb­ru­ary 8, 2021

The 2021 Nation­al Prayer Break­fast (NPB), held annu­al­ly the first Thurs­day in Feb­ru­ary and attend­ed by every sit­ting Pres­i­dent since its found­ing in 1953, revert­ed this year to dish­ing out their faith based pro­gram­ming on fine chi­na in lieu of the fast-food ver­sion served by the Trump White House. As expect­ed, media cov­er­age of NPB focused on Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s bipar­ti­san mes­sage of nation­al uni­ty and faith in light of the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, with even Fox News high­light­ing Biden’s call to end “polit­i­cal extrem­ism.”

Gone were the Trumpian out­ward dis­plays of a politi­cized ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty that con­tained a tox­ic mix­ture of con­ser­v­a­tive white evan­gel­i­cal­ism, pros­per­i­ty gospel preach­ing, and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism. Instead, all liv­ing for­mer Pres­i­dents sans Don­ald J. Trump joined Pres­i­dent Biden in pro­mot­ing a future filled with faith and for­give­ness. The Wash­ing­ton Post described the mood as a “return to the event’s his­tor­i­cal­ly lofty tone” that “high­light­ed the president’s effort to restore Washington’s insti­tu­tions to their tra­di­tion­al pre-Trump form.”

One can pre­sume that “tra­di­tion­al pre-Trump form,” rep­re­sents a dis­crete ref­er­ence to white-gloved back­door diplo­ma­cy prac­ticed by The Fam­i­ly that pro­motes their fun­da­men­tal­ist mix­ture of cap­i­tal­ism and Chris­tian­i­ty. Orga­niz­ers and speak­ers at this year’s NPB remained mum regard­ing the role The Fam­i­ly played behind the scenes in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion via foot sol­diers like for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, for­mer Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Bet­sy DeVos, and for­mer Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jeff Sessions—or The Family’s grow­ing rela­tion­ship with coun­tries like Rus­sia.

Even though Sen. Chris Coons (D‑DE) ref­er­enced peo­ple of all faiths in his intro­duc­tion of Pres­i­dent Biden, the NPB remains decid­ed­ly Chris­t­ian. In his decades of research into The Fam­i­ly, author and jour­nal­ist Jeff Sharlet observed how this secre­tive orga­ni­za­tion behind the NPB pro­motes a “spe­cif­ic vision of Jesus as the ide­al ‘strong­man’ [that] gov­erns their polit­i­cal the­ol­o­gy,” adding that they “found, in strong­man-sym­pa­thet­ic Trump, an ide­al ves­sel for their beliefs.”

As report­ed by The Young Turks, while Trump may be absent from this year’s NPB, Fam­i­ly lead­ers made cam­paign dona­tions after Elec­tion Day to Trump. Also, Con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans like Sen. James Lank­ford (R‑OK), the return­ing co-chair of this year’s NPB who runs the close­ly-aligned Con­gres­sion­al Prayer Cau­cus, con­tin­ued to sup­port the “Stop the Steal” cam­paign until pro­tes­tors stormed the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021.

Fur­ther­more, while the NPB remains large­ly Repub­li­can run, twelve cur­rent Demo­c­ra­t­ic mem­bers of Con­gress signed off on using their names as “hon­orary” rep­re­sen­ta­tives and sen­a­tors for this year’s break­fast.

In his best­selling book, The Fam­i­ly., and the Net­flix doc­u­men­tary of the same name, Sharlet detailed how by “intro­duc­ing pow­er­ful men to Jesus, the Fam­i­ly has man­aged to effect a num­ber of behind-the-scenes acts of diplo­ma­cy.” For exam­ple, when the Nation­al Prayer Break­fast is held in per­son, this event allows indi­vid­u­als access to the pres­i­dent with­out going through the usu­al vet­ting process by the State Depart­ment.

As antic­i­pat­ed, sec­u­lar groups con­tin­ue to express con­cern over the reli­gious rhetoric used dur­ing this year’s NPB with repeat­ed calls to end this annu­al tra­di­tion that pro­motes a politi­cized ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty. Mean­while, the Unit­ed States con­tin­ues to become increas­ing­ly plu­ral­is­tic with nones rep­re­sent­ing the largest reli­gious vot­ing block in the Unit­ed States. Rob Boston of Amer­i­cans Unit­ed for Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State opines, “While it was a relief this year not to see the break­fast descend into the kind of embar­rass­ment it often was dur­ing the Trump years, that hard­ly means the event is worth sav­ing. This year ought to be its last.”

...

———

“2021 Nation­al Prayer Break­fast: A Kinder Gen­tler Chris­t­ian Cap­i­tal­ism” By Becky Gar­ri­son; Reli­gions Dis­patch­es; 02/08/2021

“As report­ed by The Young Turks, while Trump may be absent from this year’s NPB, Fam­i­ly lead­ers made cam­paign dona­tions after Elec­tion Day to Trump. Also, Con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans like Sen. James Lank­ford (R‑OK), the return­ing co-chair of this year’s NPB who runs the close­ly-aligned Con­gres­sion­al Prayer Cau­cus, con­tin­ued to sup­port the “Stop the Steal” cam­paign until pro­tes­tors stormed the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021. ”

Yep, the return­ing co-chair of the 2021 NPB is Sen­a­tor James Lank­ford, the per­son also run­ning the close­ly-aligned Con­gres­sion­al Prayer Cau­cus. We’re look­ing at the same under­ly­ing net­work. A net­work that for decades pined for exact­ly the kind of strong-man author­i­tar­i­an leader Don­ald Trump rep­re­sent­ed:

...
Even though Sen. Chris Coons (D‑DE) ref­er­enced peo­ple of all faiths in his intro­duc­tion of Pres­i­dent Biden, the NPB remains decid­ed­ly Chris­t­ian. In his decades of research into The Fam­i­ly, author and jour­nal­ist Jeff Sharlet observed how this secre­tive orga­ni­za­tion behind the NPB pro­motes a “spe­cif­ic vision of Jesus as the ide­al ‘strong­man’ [that] gov­erns their polit­i­cal the­ol­o­gy,” adding that they “found, in strong­man-sym­pa­thet­ic Trump, an ide­al ves­sel for their beliefs.”

...

In his best­selling book, The Fam­i­ly., and the Net­flix doc­u­men­tary of the same name, Sharlet detailed how by “intro­duc­ing pow­er­ful men to Jesus, the Fam­i­ly has man­aged to effect a num­ber of behind-the-scenes acts of diplo­ma­cy.” For exam­ple, when the Nation­al Prayer Break­fast is held in per­son, this event allows indi­vid­u­als access to the pres­i­dent with­out going through the usu­al vet­ting process by the State Depart­ment.
...

So while the CNP’s fin­ger­prints are all over the 2020 efforts to over­turn the elec­tion results, this arti­cle is a reminder that the insti­tu­tion­al ori­gins of these efforts go, in part, back to the net­work­ing between Chris­t­ian Fun­da­men­tal­ism, cor­po­ratism, and fas­cism that Curt Riess was warn­ing us about back in 1944.

@Pterrafractyl–

Yeah, “Chris­tian­i­ty” is one of the most com­mon cov­ers for fas­cism: Ger­ald L.K. Smith’s Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist Cru­sade:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Nationalist_Crusade

It’s mag­a­zine “The Cross and the Flag” and many oth­ers.

Charles Willough­by’s Inter­na­tion­al Com­mit­tee for the Defense of Chris­t­ian Cul­ture is a real beau­ty.

Involved in vir­tu­al­ly every rot­ten thing in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

Best,

Dave

Remem­ber that pro­found­ly dis­turb­ing report we got back in 2018 about a Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can, Matt Shea, who had secret­ly penned a man­i­festo call­ing for the wag­ing of Bib­li­cal War to takeover the US in 2016? Recall how Shea’s man­i­festo called for the exe­cu­tion of any adult males who refused to sub­mit to the new theoc­ra­cy and he was even plot­ting with oth­er local mil­i­tants in com­ing up with a assas­si­na­tion list of left-wing lead­ers. The plan to was kill the Antifa lead­ers in their homes.

Well, here’s a pair of arti­cles that’s a reminder that Shea’s net­work of mil­i­tant extrem­ist theocrats is the exact same net­work behind Project Blitz. Yep, Matt Shea and theocrats in his orbit have been active­ly work­ing on devel­op­ing a nation­al net­work of “Prayer Cau­cus­es”. Shea him­self was the founder of the Wash­ing­ton State Prayer Cau­cus. Recall how the Con­gres­sion­al Prayer Cau­cus Foun­da­tion oper­ates as the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of Project Blitz.

Shea’s close asso­ciate, Tim Tay­lor, is also involved in these efforts. In keep­ing with the “Sev­en Moun­tains” theme of their shared form of Domin­ion­ist the­ol­o­gy, Tay­lor wrote about how he met with mem­bers of the Wash­ing­ton Leg­isla­tive Prayer Cau­cus where they agree to form an “apostolic/strategic coun­cil” for the ‘moun­tain’ of state gov­ern­ment.

Anoth­er asso­ciate of Shea’s, Ken Peters, recent­ly relo­cat­ed to Knoxville, TN, to set up a “Patri­ot Church”, one of a num­ber of “Patri­ot Church­es” being estab­lished by this net­work around the US. As we’re going to see, Peters was not only present at the Capi­tol on Jan 6, he actu­al­ly spoke at a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly there on Jan 5 thanks to the last-minute gen­eros­i­ty of Mike Lin­dell. After attend­ing a Jan 4 Trump ral­ly in Dal­ton, Geor­gia, Peters says he was invit­ed by the ral­ly orga­niz­ers to speak at the Jan 5 “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in DC. Peters explained how he would have to dri­ve their overnight to make it. That’s when Mike Lin­dell offered to fly Peters on his pri­vate plane and pay for his hotel fees. Shea end­ed up get­ting the final speak­ers slot at that ral­ly, which was described as a speech filled with rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vor. Fol­low­ing the insur­rec­tion, Peters blamed it all on Antifa provo­ca­teurs.

And where was Shea on Jan 6? He was at a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in North­ern Ida­ho, where he exhort­ed the crowd to “fight back in every sin­gle sphere we pos­si­bly can,” and to pre­pare for “total war.”

Oh, and there’s anoth­er notable con­nec­tion between Shea and the per­pe­tra­tors of the Jan 6 insur­rec­tion: Shea is quite close to the move­ment sur­round­ing the Oath Keep­ers. It turns out both Shea was at a 2013 found­ing meet­ing of the for the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Sher­iffs and Peace Offi­cers Asso­ci­a­tion (CSPOA). Recall how the CSPOA is close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the Oath Keep­ers and was a major backer of the Bundy fam­i­ly armed stand­offs, which is why we should­n’t be at all sur­prised to find Oath Keep­ers founder Stew­art Rhodes — who was recent­ly indict­ed for his role in the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion — was at that meet­ing too.

That’s the sad real­i­ty of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics: Matt Shea, a GOP politi­cians who was casu­al­ly dis­missed as a mil­i­tant extrem­ist unrep­re­sen­ta­tive of his par­ty, turns out to be a key play­er in the grow­ing theo­crat­ic move­ment that almost pulled off an insur­rec­tion. A grow­ing theo­crat­ic move­ment that is increas­ing­ly the main­stream inside the Repub­li­can Par­ty. In oth­er words, if you thought the GOP could­n’t get any worse after Trump, keep in mind that the era of Matt Shea-style GOP pol­i­tics is still dawn­ing:

Reli­gion Dis­patch­es

Con­ver­gence of Far-Right, Anti-Demo­c­ra­t­ic Fac­tions in the North­west Could Pro­vide a Mod­el for the Rest of the Nation

By Fred­er­ick Clark­son and Cloee Coop­er
May 25, 2021

The city of Spokane, Wash­ing­ton sits at the east­ern edge of the state—a moun­tain range and a cul­tur­al world away from the Pacif­ic coast. It looks east­ward to Ida­ho and Mon­tana, and south to East­ern Ore­gon, where far right seces­sion­ist move­ments have been orga­niz­ing for years. Seces­sion­ist ideas, while still not quite pop­u­lar, have gone main­stream enough that even a senior Repub­li­can, then-State Rep. Matt Shea (R‑Spokane Val­ley) had float­ed the idea of break­ing off East­ern Wash­ing­ton to form a 51st state called “Lib­er­ty.”

Unsur­pris­ing­ly per­haps, Shea and Patri­ot move­ment allies had been qui­et­ly also plan­ning to seize con­trol of the region after the out­break of a civ­il war, and the fall of the U.S. government—installing Shea as a region­al gov­ern­men­tal leader. The jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for this was to insti­tute unspec­i­fied “con­sti­tu­tion­al changes” and to “sanc­ti­fy to Jesus Christ” [sic].

Many lead­ers of the Chris­t­ian Right aren’t house­hold names. But some of them, work­ing in the shad­ows just beyond the nation­al lime­light, pro­vide glimpses into poten­tial reli­gious con­flict in the U.S. These include Shea and Apos­tle Tim Tay­lor of King­dom League Inter­na­tion­al in Wash­ing­ton State, whose sto­ries have con­verged in remark­able ways. Both are retired mil­i­tary com­bat offi­cers who have emerged as non-denom­i­na­tion­al reli­gious lead­ers, bring­ing a cer­tain oper­a­tional poten­tial to the grow­ing mil­i­ta­riza­tion of theo­crat­ic reli­gious visions of the Chris­t­ian Right.

Shea, 47, who served in the state’s House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from 2009 until this year, has nav­i­gat­ed the tumul­tuous far-right fac­tions of the West for more than 15 years. These include the up-and-com­ing New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, extreme ele­ments of the anti-abor­tion move­ment, and reli­gious­ly-ani­mat­ed parts of the Patri­ot move­ment.

He’s a for­mer offi­cer in the Army and the Nation­al Guard, who served in Bosnia and Iraq and has a remark­able post-mil­i­tary resume that estab­lished his cre­den­tials as a leader in both the Chris­t­ian Right and the Patri­ot move­ment. He was a cofounder of the state polit­i­cal affil­i­ate of Focus on the Fam­i­ly as well as founder of the Spokane chap­ter of the anti-Mus­lim group, ACT for Amer­i­ca.

In 2017 Shea was elect­ed chair of the Repub­li­can Cau­cus. A year lat­er, he became the found­ing chair­man of the Wash­ing­ton Leg­isla­tive Prayer Cau­cus, which is part of a nation­al net­work of state leg­isla­tive prayer cau­cus­es whose leg­isla­tive agen­da is called Project Blitz.

First report­ed by RD in 2018, Project Blitz pub­lish­es a man­u­al of Chris­t­ian Right mod­el bills for mem­bers of the prayer cau­cus­es. The bills range from requir­ing pub­lic schools to post In God We Trust dis­plays to allow­ing reli­gious exemp­tions for adop­tion and fos­ter care agen­cies opposed to serv­ing LGBTQ peo­ple. (Shea was list­ed as chair until 2019 when the spon­sor­ing nation­al orga­ni­za­tion, the Con­gres­sion­al Prayer Cau­cus Foun­da­tion (CPCF) scrubbed their site of ref­er­ences to Project Blitz in the face of intense pub­lic scruti­ny. The era­sure includ­ed the names of the chairs and mem­bers of the prayer cau­cus­es.)

Although CPCF is not as well known as Focus on the Fam­i­ly and the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, it’s led by for­mer eight-term mem­ber of Con­gress, Randy Forbes (R‑VA) and boasts, as Con­gres­sion­al Advi­sors, 22 sit­ting U.S. Sen­a­tors and Mem­bers of Con­gress.

Shea may be best known for his involve­ment in plan­ning and help­ing coor­di­nate the dra­mat­ic 2016 seizure and occu­pa­tion of the Mal­heur Nation­al Wildlife Refuge in Ore­gon by armed rightwing activists. For this, he was char­ac­ter­ized as a domes­tic ter­ror­ist in a well-doc­u­ment­ed Decem­ber 2019 inves­ti­ga­tion com­mis­sioned by the state House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. “Shea is an active and influ­en­tial leader of the Patri­ot Move­ment in the US,” the inves­ti­ga­tion con­clud­ed, who “presents a present and grow­ing threat of risk to oth­ers through polit­i­cal vio­lence.”

Pri­or to the Mal­heur occu­pa­tion, Shea was active­ly engaged in forg­ing rela­tion­ships between law enforce­ment and the Patri­ot Move­ment. In May of 2013, Shea spoke at a found­ing meet­ing of the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Sher­iffs and Peace Offi­cers Asso­ci­a­tion (CSPOA) along with promi­nent Patri­ot and far-right lead­ers includ­ing Stew­art Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keep­ers (one of the groups respon­si­ble for plan­ning the Capi­tol Insur­rec­tion); Bill Nor­ton of the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots; Lar­ry Pratt, the founder of Gun Own­ers of Amer­i­ca; and Joe Wolver­ton of The John Birch Soci­ety. The fol­low­ing year, he signed a CSPOA res­o­lu­tion vow­ing to not enforce fed­er­al gun restric­tions under the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.

Fol­low­ing the Decem­ber 2019 House report Shea was expelled from the GOP Cau­cus he had once chaired, although by no means did this put an end to his polit­i­cal activism.

While Shea didn’t file for reelec­tion in 2020, in May of that year, it was announced that he would become the pas­tor of the non-denom­i­na­tion­al Covenant Church in Spokane. Since then, his pre­de­ces­sor, Rev. Ken Peters, has launched a small start-up net­work of “Patri­ot Church­es.” These are intend­ed to oper­ate with­out the benefits—or indeed the restrictions—of a 501(c)(3) non-prof­it tax sta­tus.

Apos­tolic prayer coun­cils

Shea’s fel­low patri­ot Tim Tay­lor is an Apos­tle of the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion (NAR). A sel­dom report­ed-on move­ment of Pen­te­costal and charis­mat­ic evan­gel­i­cal­ism that’s play­ing a grow­ing role in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. NAR holds to a com­pre­hen­sive theo­nom­ic vision, pop­u­lar­ly described as Sev­en Moun­tains Domin­ion­ism, which calls for believ­ers to take con­trol over sev­en lead­ing aspects of soci­ety: fam­i­ly, gov­ern­ment, reli­gion, edu­ca­tion, media, arts and enter­tain­ment, and busi­ness. (The metaphor is some­times used inter­change­ably with spheres, pil­lars, and gates.) Most, but not all, hold to this view, and there’s room for dif­fer­ences because the move­ment seeks uni­ty over doc­tri­nal con­for­mi­ty.

NAR rejects such con­tem­po­rary denom­i­na­tion­al offices as popes and pres­i­dents, and rec­og­nizes those pre­scribed in the New Tes­ta­ment book of Eph­esians: apos­tle, prophet, teacher, evan­ge­list, and pastor—what they call “the five-fold min­istry.”

Some well-known Chris­t­ian Right fig­ures in the NAR camp include Don­ald Trump’s spir­i­tu­al advi­sor, Apos­tle Paula White; Texas-based Chris­t­ian Right strate­gist David Bar­ton; Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the Nation­al His­pan­ic Lead­er­ship Con­fer­ence; and Lt. Gen. William Boykin, (ret.) Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil.

Taylor’s King­dom League Inter­na­tion­al web­site declares, “We are a covenan­tal alliance of lead­ers, min­is­ters, church­es, min­istries and net­works col­lab­o­rat­ing togeth­er to mobi­lize the Church as the army of the Lord.” He fur­ther explains, “Our alliance is com­posed of lead­ers rep­re­sent­ing each of the sev­en spheres of soci­ety and the five-fold min­istry.”

Apos­tle Tay­lor envi­sions and seeks to form “apos­tolic prayer coun­cils” over the Sev­en Moun­tains. He wrote that in Feb­ru­ary 2019, he had met with mem­bers of the Wash­ing­ton Leg­isla­tive Prayer Cau­cus over din­ner at Daniel’s Prayer Min­istry, a block from the state capi­tol in Olympia. The Min­istry is led by Eliz­a­beth Soren­son who also serves as the State Direc­tor of the Prayer Cau­cus.

They agreed to form an “apostolic/strategic coun­cil” for the moun­tain of state gov­ern­ment. “Last night we made his­to­ry,” Tay­lor declared. Indeed, while such coun­cils exist in some cities and towns around the coun­try, this may be the first such state orga­ni­za­tion. He described the role of the Apos­tolic Coun­cil in a video, “made just for those who’re part of the Wash­ing­ton State Prayer Cau­cus.” It clos­es with a screen shot of Prayer Cau­cus Chair­man Shea tak­en from the Prayer Cau­cus web­site.

Orig­i­nal­ly they planned to noti­fy their net­work of prayer war­riors with leg­isla­tive prayer alerts via an app. But since the app hasn’t worked, Tay­lor pub­lish­es a list of the leg­is­la­tion they want peo­ple to sup­port or oppose, includ­ing talk­ing points on every­thing from abor­tion to edu­ca­tion to diver­si­ty train­ing for pub­lic employ­ees.

When war is not a metaphor

Shea and Tay­lor aren’t celebri­ty reli­gious lead­ers whose every utter­ance is not­ed by the media. And as tempt­ing as it might be to think of them as too fringey to be con­se­quen­tial, they may be bet­ter thought of as lead­ers in a grow­ing move­ment that’s not only greater than the sum of its parts—but one that has grown in both its capac­i­ty for and its inten­tions towards insur­rec­tionary vio­lence.

It’s tak­en gen­er­a­tions of the­o­log­i­cal change and polit­i­cal devel­op­ment for this evolv­ing move­ment to get this far. And they’re aware that there will be many bat­tles won and lost in the course of the war—a war that, to their strate­gic advan­tage, many peo­ple remain unaware has been long underway—and that it’s not just about cul­ture.

Apos­tle Tay­lor, who served in Desert Storm and then retired as a Com­man­der in the Naval Reserve in 2006, uses mil­i­tary terms to describe the end-times war with evil. In his 2008 book Oper­a­tion Rolling Thun­der (which was endorsed by lead­ing Apos­tles, includ­ing NAR founder C. Peter Wag­n­er) Tay­lor insist­ed, “through­out this book, you will find ref­er­ences to the army, war, bat­tles, etc… How­ev­er, scrip­ture is clear… that our war is not with flesh and blood. Our fight is with spir­i­tu­al armies of wicked­ness in heav­en­ly places.”

...

Tay­lor and fel­low NAR Apos­tles have estab­lished elab­o­rate prayer net­works to pray for gov­ern­ment offi­cials and to mobi­lize for their pre­ferred poli­cies and elec­toral engage­ments. But there can be an edge to their vision and their strat­e­gy of “spir­i­tu­al war­fare” via prayer to com­bat demons—an edge that could lead to phys­i­cal con­fronta­tion in the polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al bat­tles of our time.

For exam­ple, there was cer­tain­ly no ques­tion about what Matt Shea had in mind when he authored his 2016 man­i­festo on the Bib­li­cal Basis for War, which reads like a to-do list for reli­gious civ­il war. The inves­ti­ga­tors report­ed that Shea’s “spir­i­tu­al advi­sors,” Bar­ry and Anne Byrd of Mar­ble Com­mu­ni­ty Fel­low­ship, joined fel­low Patri­ots at the secret strat­e­gy meet­ing where Shea pre­sent­ed his man­i­festo, “that offered his view of God’s autho­riza­tion for war.” Shea’s man­i­festo, accord­ing to the report, “advo­cat­ed killing all males who did not yield to stop­ping all abor­tions, sup­port­ed same sex mar­riage, and did not obey Bib­li­cal law. He also assert­ed that ‘Assas­si­na­tion to remove tyrants is just, and is not mur­der.’” (Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal). Shea also dis­trib­uted a blue­print for rebuild­ing after the fall of the US Gov­ern­ment.

Jason Wil­son of The Guardian report­ed that Mar­ble Com­mu­ni­ty Fel­low­ship has “a com­pound on the Colum­bia Riv­er, not far from the Cana­di­an bor­der. It believes in rule by their inter­pre­ta­tions of bib­li­cal law.” There, they seek to train “young men in ‘bib­li­cal war­fare’ that includes how to use knives, pis­tols and rifles.” The pro­gram is called “Team Rugged.”

One aspect of Shea’s plan that was not dis­cussed in the report or sub­se­quent press cov­er­age about the 2016 Bib­li­cal Basis for War was his cryp­tic call for the for­ma­tion of “prayer coun­cils” to deter­mine whether God is call­ing them to war. Shea’s plan was exposed and promi­nent­ly cov­ered in the Wash­ing­ton state media in 2018. Apos­tle Tay­lor nev­er­the­less worked with then-Prayer Cau­cus Chair­man Shea to ini­ti­ate a state prayer coun­cil in Wash­ing­ton in Feb­ru­ary 2019.

In May, Tay­lor report­ed that the Wash­ing­ton State Apos­tolic Coun­cil prayed for gov­ern­ment offi­cials at all lev­els, but “the Gov­ern­ment Moun­tain” prayed, “LORD if they are not just, then we pray remove them (Psalm 109:8 – let their days be few and anoth­er take their office).”

This might seem benign to some, but con­text mat­ters. The bib­li­cal King David, the author of the impre­ca­to­ry prayer they invoked, is call­ing on God to destroy his ene­mies and their fam­i­lies. As has been wide­ly dis­cussed, the phrase “let their days be few” is a prayer against their lives, not just their tenure in office.

Wag­ing bib­li­cal war­fare against repro­duc­tive free­dom

When Rev. Ken Peters left Covenant Church and appoint­ed Shea as his suc­ces­sor in order to plant a Patri­ot Church in Knoxville, Ten­nessee, he explained, “This is God mov­ing gen­er­als around.” There are now Patri­ot church­es in Lynch­burg, VA and Spokane as well. Shea’s Covenant Church in Spokane is an “affil­i­ate.”

Peters pio­neered the tac­tic of stag­ing events they call The Church at Planned Par­ent­hood which takes the form of wor­ship ser­vices in front of the PP cen­ters that are obvi­ous­ly intend­ed to inter­fere with clin­ic patients and staff. The Patri­ot Church­es have con­tin­ued to orga­nize these dis­rup­tive actions and have made their inten­tions clear. “As we grow,” they declared, “the num­ber of ser­vices around the state and nation will con­tin­ue to grow.”

Peters and Shea both live in the small world of “abor­tion abo­li­tion­ists,” a move­ment that views any­thing short of crim­i­nal­iza­tion, such as restric­tions on access, as “reg­u­lat­ing mur­der.” This move­ment is grow­ing and get­ting noticed for the intro­duc­tion of abor­tion abo­li­tion leg­is­la­tion in six states. Shea was the spon­sor of a bill in 2019; it only had four co-spon­sors, but it epit­o­mizes the main­stream­ing of a new kind of antiabor­tion mil­i­tan­cy.

...

Just this past March, for exam­ple, Shea host­ed vet­er­an antiabor­tion (and now, abor­tion abo­li­tion­ist) leader Rev. Matthew Trewhel­la on his Patri­ot Radio pod­cast. Trewhel­la first came to nation­al atten­tion in the 1990s as one of three dozen sig­na­to­ries to a state­ment that declared that the mur­der of abor­tion providers is “jus­ti­fi­able homi­cide.” He lat­er became noto­ri­ous for his advo­ca­cy for the for­ma­tion of church-based mili­tias.

Trewhella’s son-in-law (a pas­tor at his church and a fel­low abor­tion abo­li­tion leader) Jason Storms, has been appoint­ed as the new Nation­al Direc­tor of Oper­a­tion Save Amer­i­ca. OSA was for­mer­ly led by Rev. Phillip (“Flip”) Ben­ham, and then Rev. Rusty Lee Thomas, under whose lead­er­ship it began to mobi­lize for abo­li­tion.

Storms was among the antiabor­tion lead­ers at the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6th. He called it a “rev­o­lu­tion.”

Occu­py the last days

Matt Shea hasn’t changed much since chang­ing jobs. On Insur­rec­tion day, Jan­u­ary 6, he urged peo­ple at a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in north­ern Ida­ho, to “fight back in every sin­gle sphere we pos­si­bly can,” and to pre­pare for “total war.”

Mean­while, Ken Peters also issued a bat­tle cry at a pre-insur­rec­tion ral­ly in DC. The Spokane Spokesman-Review report­ed that Mike Lin­dell, the CEO of My Pil­low flew him to DC with like-mind­ed pas­tors on his pri­vate jet and put them up at the Trump Inter­na­tion­al Hotel, a few blocks from the White House.

But like oth­ers whose rhetoric may have exceed­ed their readi­ness to be asso­ci­at­ed with the events at the capi­tol, Peters lat­er said he didn’t agree with the insur­rec­tion.

Nev­er­the­less, Peters’ church seems to be flour­ish­ing in the post-insur­rec­tion peri­od. They plan to open a school in the Fall (although they don’t yet have a build­ing) and cospon­sored a con­fer­ence on May 7–8. The event fea­tured such notable fig­ures as Rev. Scott Live­ly, per­haps best known as an advo­cate for the noto­ri­ous “Kill the Gays” leg­is­la­tion in Ugan­da, and retired Army Major, Stephen Cough­lin, a for­mer high lev­el mil­i­tary intel­li­gence ana­lyst and Fel­low at the White House Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

Their mate­ri­als are con­sid­ered required read­ing for a new pri­vate intel­li­gence and mili­tia for­ma­tion called, Amer­i­can Con­tin­gency. The pub­li­ca­tions of Coughlin’s think tank, Uncon­strained Ana­lyt­ics, argue that Black Lives Mat­ter in con­junc­tion with ISIS, Antifa, Neo-Marx­ists and Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty oper­a­tives are domes­tic threats. Their mate­ri­als are con­sid­ered required read­ing for a new pri­vate intel­li­gence and mili­tia for­ma­tion called, Amer­i­can Con­tin­gency.

“We are def­i­nite­ly liv­ing in the last days,” the Patri­ot Church con­fer­ence descrip­tion declared, “but yet we are called to occu­py until the Lord comes.”

It’s clear that if the occu­pa­tion comes, it will be the result of the con­ver­gence of far right fac­tions seek­ing to tear down the estab­lished insti­tu­tions of democ­ra­cy, what they call “tyran­ny.” The groups and indi­vid­u­als in this sto­ry are best under­stood less as region­al actors and more as epit­o­miz­ing the devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships between ele­ments of the Domin­ion­ist New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, the Chris­t­ian Right (as epit­o­mized by Project Blitz), mil­i­tant antiabor­tion­ism, and the insur­rec­tionary Patri­ot Movement—from Wash­ing­ton State to Wash­ing­ton, DC.

It’s a move­ment that’s always been with us to vary­ing degrees, but it is arguably broad­er and deep­er than at any point in mod­ern his­to­ry. Far out­side of the West­ern moun­tain range where these seces­sion­ist move­ments have become so famil­iar, these net­works are top­pling the bound­aries between main­stream pol­i­tics and reli­gion, tap­ping deep into mul­ti­ple far right net­works across the coun­try to do so. This began long before Jan­u­ary 6th and will con­tin­ue long after.

———-

“Con­ver­gence of Far-Right, Anti-Demo­c­ra­t­ic Fac­tions in the North­west Could Pro­vide a Mod­el for the Rest of the Nation” by Fred­er­ick Clark­son and Cloee Coop­er; Reli­gion Dis­patch­es; 05/25/2021

“It’s clear that if the occu­pa­tion comes, it will be the result of the con­ver­gence of far right fac­tions seek­ing to tear down the estab­lished insti­tu­tions of democ­ra­cy, what they call “tyran­ny.” The groups and indi­vid­u­als in this sto­ry are best under­stood less as region­al actors and more as epit­o­miz­ing the devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships between ele­ments of the Domin­ion­ist New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, the Chris­t­ian Right (as epit­o­mized by Project Blitz), mil­i­tant antiabor­tion­ism, and the insur­rec­tionary Patri­ot Movement—from Wash­ing­ton State to Wash­ing­ton, DC.”

Matt Shea and the large ‘Patri­ot Church’ move­ment aren’t just a region­al extrem­ist move­ment. They are part of a nation­al net­work of theo­crat­ic extrem­ists that is increas­ing­ly in con­trol of the GOP at both the state and nation­al lev­el. Matt Shea is just the Wash­ing­ton State leader inside this larg­er net­work. Except, as the arti­cle notes, Shea is more than just a region­al leader. Along with oth­er fig­ures in his orbit like Tim Tay­lor (Apos­tle Tay­lor) and Ken Peters, Matt Shea is oper­at­ing as a con­ser­v­a­tive thought-leader. Yeah, he’s fringe. Cut­ting-edge fringe:

...
Fol­low­ing the Decem­ber 2019 House report Shea was expelled from the GOP Cau­cus he had once chaired, although by no means did this put an end to his polit­i­cal activism.

While Shea didn’t file for reelec­tion in 2020, in May of that year, it was announced that he would become the pas­tor of the non-denom­i­na­tion­al Covenant Church in Spokane. Since then, his pre­de­ces­sor, Rev. Ken Peters, has launched a small start-up net­work of “Patri­ot Church­es.” These are intend­ed to oper­ate with­out the benefits—or indeed the restrictions—of a 501(c)(3) non-prof­it tax sta­tus.

Apos­tolic prayer coun­cils

Shea’s fel­low patri­ot Tim Tay­lor is an Apos­tle of the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion (NAR). A sel­dom report­ed-on move­ment of Pen­te­costal and charis­mat­ic evan­gel­i­cal­ism that’s play­ing a grow­ing role in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. NAR holds to a com­pre­hen­sive theo­nom­ic vision, pop­u­lar­ly described as Sev­en Moun­tains Domin­ion­ism, which calls for believ­ers to take con­trol over sev­en lead­ing aspects of soci­ety: fam­i­ly, gov­ern­ment, reli­gion, edu­ca­tion, media, arts and enter­tain­ment, and busi­ness. (The metaphor is some­times used inter­change­ably with spheres, pil­lars, and gates.) Most, but not all, hold to this view, and there’s room for dif­fer­ences because the move­ment seeks uni­ty over doc­tri­nal con­for­mi­ty.

NAR rejects such con­tem­po­rary denom­i­na­tion­al offices as popes and pres­i­dents, and rec­og­nizes those pre­scribed in the New Tes­ta­ment book of Eph­esians: apos­tle, prophet, teacher, evan­ge­list, and pastor—what they call “the five-fold min­istry.”

Some well-known Chris­t­ian Right fig­ures in the NAR camp include Don­ald Trump’s spir­i­tu­al advi­sor, Apos­tle Paula White; Texas-based Chris­t­ian Right strate­gist David Bar­ton; Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the Nation­al His­pan­ic Lead­er­ship Con­fer­ence; and Lt. Gen. William Boykin, (ret.) Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil.

...

Shea and Tay­lor aren’t celebri­ty reli­gious lead­ers whose every utter­ance is not­ed by the media. And as tempt­ing as it might be to think of them as too fringey to be con­se­quen­tial, they may be bet­ter thought of as lead­ers in a grow­ing move­ment that’s not only greater than the sum of its parts—but one that has grown in both its capac­i­ty for and its inten­tions towards insur­rec­tionary vio­lence.
...

And they aren’t just lead­ers in this move­ment. They’re bring­ing mil­i­tary oper­a­tional skills. Both Shea and Tay­lor have retired com­bat offi­cers. Beyond that, Shea was at a found­ing meet­ing in 2013 for the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Sher­iffs and Peace Offi­cers Asso­ci­a­tion (CSPOA). Recall how the CSPOA is close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the Oath Keep­ers and was a major backer of the Bundy fam­i­ly armed stand­offs, which is why we should­n’t be at all sur­prised to find Oath Keep­ers founder Stew­art Rhodes — who was recent­ly indict­ed for his role in the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion — also attend­ed that 2013 CSPOA found­ing meet­ing with Shea:

...
Many lead­ers of the Chris­t­ian Right aren’t house­hold names. But some of them, work­ing in the shad­ows just beyond the nation­al lime­light, pro­vide glimpses into poten­tial reli­gious con­flict in the U.S. These include Shea and Apos­tle Tim Tay­lor of King­dom League Inter­na­tion­al in Wash­ing­ton State, whose sto­ries have con­verged in remark­able ways. Both are retired mil­i­tary com­bat offi­cers who have emerged as non-denom­i­na­tion­al reli­gious lead­ers, bring­ing a cer­tain oper­a­tional poten­tial to the grow­ing mil­i­ta­riza­tion of theo­crat­ic reli­gious visions of the Chris­t­ian Right.

...

Shea may be best known for his involve­ment in plan­ning and help­ing coor­di­nate the dra­mat­ic 2016 seizure and occu­pa­tion of the Mal­heur Nation­al Wildlife Refuge in Ore­gon by armed rightwing activists. For this, he was char­ac­ter­ized as a domes­tic ter­ror­ist in a well-doc­u­ment­ed Decem­ber 2019 inves­ti­ga­tion com­mis­sioned by the state House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives. “Shea is an active and influ­en­tial leader of the Patri­ot Move­ment in the US,” the inves­ti­ga­tion con­clud­ed, who “presents a present and grow­ing threat of risk to oth­ers through polit­i­cal vio­lence.”

Pri­or to the Mal­heur occu­pa­tion, Shea was active­ly engaged in forg­ing rela­tion­ships between law enforce­ment and the Patri­ot Move­ment. In May of 2013, Shea spoke at a found­ing meet­ing of the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Sher­iffs and Peace Offi­cers Asso­ci­a­tion (CSPOA) along with promi­nent Patri­ot and far-right lead­ers includ­ing Stew­art Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keep­ers (one of the groups respon­si­ble for plan­ning the Capi­tol Insur­rec­tion); Bill Nor­ton of the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots; Lar­ry Pratt, the founder of Gun Own­ers of Amer­i­ca; and Joe Wolver­ton of The John Birch Soci­ety. The fol­low­ing year, he signed a CSPOA res­o­lu­tion vow­ing to not enforce fed­er­al gun restric­tions under the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.
...

But mil­i­tant orga­niz­ing is just one facet of this net­work. There’s also the grow­ing num­ber of Prayer Cau­cus focused on affect­ing pol­i­tics. Recall how the Con­gres­sion­al Prayer Cau­cus Foun­da­tion (CPCF) is the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion because Project Blitz. It turns out Shea was the found­ing chair­man of the Wash­ing­ton State branch of this net­work, the Wash­ing­ton Leg­isla­tive Prayer Cau­cus. Shea was still list­ed as the chair of the Wash­ing­ton Leg­isla­tive Prayer Cau­cus until 2019, when the CPCF scrubbed all ref­er­ences to Project Blitz-relat­ed activ­i­ties:

...
In 2017 Shea was elect­ed chair of the Repub­li­can Cau­cus. A year lat­er, he became the found­ing chair­man of the Wash­ing­ton Leg­isla­tive Prayer Cau­cus, which is part of a nation­al net­work of state leg­isla­tive prayer cau­cus­es whose leg­isla­tive agen­da is called Project Blitz.

First report­ed by RD in 2018, Project Blitz pub­lish­es a man­u­al of Chris­t­ian Right mod­el bills for mem­bers of the prayer cau­cus­es. The bills range from requir­ing pub­lic schools to post In God We Trust dis­plays to allow­ing reli­gious exemp­tions for adop­tion and fos­ter care agen­cies opposed to serv­ing LGBTQ peo­ple. (Shea was list­ed as chair until 2019 when the spon­sor­ing nation­al orga­ni­za­tion, the Con­gres­sion­al Prayer Cau­cus Foun­da­tion (CPCF) scrubbed their site of ref­er­ences to Project Blitz in the face of intense pub­lic scruti­ny. The era­sure includ­ed the names of the chairs and mem­bers of the prayer cau­cus­es.)
...

So Shea is close­ly tied to the CPCF nation­al net­work of Prayer Cau­cus­es at the same time he’s also inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed to the New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion (NAR) branch of Chris­t­ian Domin­ion­ism that calls for the church to take over the “Sev­en Moun­tains” of soci­ety. Because of course he is. As we’ve seen, Project Blitz is deeply moti­vat­ed by the NAR move­ment, includ­ing key GOP the­olo­gian and NAR fol­low­er David Bar­ton. It’s part of what makes the roles of fig­ures like Shea and Tay­lor in the move­ment dif­fi­cult to over­state: like David Bar­ton, they are the­o­log­i­cal lead­ers and not just polit­i­cal orga­niz­ers:

...
Taylor’s King­dom League Inter­na­tion­al web­site declares, “We are a covenan­tal alliance of lead­ers, min­is­ters, church­es, min­istries and net­works col­lab­o­rat­ing togeth­er to mobi­lize the Church as the army of the Lord.” He fur­ther explains, “Our alliance is com­posed of lead­ers rep­re­sent­ing each of the sev­en spheres of soci­ety and the five-fold min­istry.”

Apos­tle Tay­lor envi­sions and seeks to form “apos­tolic prayer coun­cils” over the Sev­en Moun­tains. He wrote that in Feb­ru­ary 2019, he had met with mem­bers of the Wash­ing­ton Leg­isla­tive Prayer Cau­cus over din­ner at Daniel’s Prayer Min­istry, a block from the state capi­tol in Olympia. The Min­istry is led by Eliz­a­beth Soren­son who also serves as the State Direc­tor of the Prayer Cau­cus.

They agreed to form an “apostolic/strategic coun­cil” for the moun­tain of state gov­ern­ment. “Last night we made his­to­ry,” Tay­lor declared. Indeed, while such coun­cils exist in some cities and towns around the coun­try, this may be the first such state orga­ni­za­tion. He described the role of the Apos­tolic Coun­cil in a video, “made just for those who’re part of the Wash­ing­ton State Prayer Cau­cus.” It clos­es with a screen shot of Prayer Cau­cus Chair­man Shea tak­en from the Prayer Cau­cus web­site.
...

And it’s that the­o­log­i­cal lead­er­ship Shea has been pro­vid­ing that’s the most dis­turb­ing. Recall the 2018 rev­e­la­tions about a 2016 man­i­festo authored by Shea lay­ing out a Bib­li­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for a Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist insur­rec­tion. An insur­rec­tion that would include the mass killings of all males unwill­ing to con­vert to the new offi­cial state reli­gion. But it was­n’t just a man­i­festo. It involved active plan­ning with a group of Repub­li­cans on how to sur­veil mem­bers of Antifa with the goal of car­ry­ing out a mass mur­der cam­paign of left­ists. Matt Shea’s thought-lead­er­ship in this move­ment has involved a lot of think­ing about blitzkrieg-style civ­il war sce­nar­ios:

...
Tay­lor and fel­low NAR Apos­tles have estab­lished elab­o­rate prayer net­works to pray for gov­ern­ment offi­cials and to mobi­lize for their pre­ferred poli­cies and elec­toral engage­ments. But there can be an edge to their vision and their strat­e­gy of “spir­i­tu­al war­fare” via prayer to com­bat demons—an edge that could lead to phys­i­cal con­fronta­tion in the polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al bat­tles of our time.

For exam­ple, there was cer­tain­ly no ques­tion about what Matt Shea had in mind when he authored his 2016 man­i­festo on the Bib­li­cal Basis for War, which reads like a to-do list for reli­gious civ­il war. The inves­ti­ga­tors report­ed that Shea’s “spir­i­tu­al advi­sors,” Bar­ry and Anne Byrd of Mar­ble Com­mu­ni­ty Fel­low­ship, joined fel­low Patri­ots at the secret strat­e­gy meet­ing where Shea pre­sent­ed his man­i­festo, “that offered his view of God’s autho­riza­tion for war.” Shea’s man­i­festo, accord­ing to the report, “advo­cat­ed killing all males who did not yield to stop­ping all abor­tions, sup­port­ed same sex mar­riage, and did not obey Bib­li­cal law. He also assert­ed that ‘Assas­si­na­tion to remove tyrants is just, and is not mur­der.’” (Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal). Shea also dis­trib­uted a blue­print for rebuild­ing after the fall of the US Gov­ern­ment.

...

One aspect of Shea’s plan that was not dis­cussed in the report or sub­se­quent press cov­er­age about the 2016 Bib­li­cal Basis for War was his cryp­tic call for the for­ma­tion of “prayer coun­cils” to deter­mine whether God is call­ing them to war. Shea’s plan was exposed and promi­nent­ly cov­ered in the Wash­ing­ton state media in 2018. Apos­tle Tay­lor nev­er­the­less worked with then-Prayer Cau­cus Chair­man Shea to ini­ti­ate a state prayer coun­cil in Wash­ing­ton in Feb­ru­ary 2019.

In May, Tay­lor report­ed that the Wash­ing­ton State Apos­tolic Coun­cil prayed for gov­ern­ment offi­cials at all lev­els, but “the Gov­ern­ment Moun­tain” prayed, “LORD if they are not just, then we pray remove them (Psalm 109:8 – let their days be few and anoth­er take their office).”

This might seem benign to some, but con­text mat­ters. The bib­li­cal King David, the author of the impre­ca­to­ry prayer they invoked, is call­ing on God to destroy his ene­mies and their fam­i­lies. As has been wide­ly dis­cussed, the phrase “let their days be few” is a prayer against their lives, not just their tenure in office.
...

It’s that back­ground of orga­nized polit­i­cal mil­i­tan­cy that should make it no sur­prise at all to learn that this net­work was­n’t just call­ing for a “rev­o­lu­tion” in the lead up to the Jan 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion but was actu­al­ly there. Shea him­self exhort­ed an audi­ence in Ida­ho at a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly to “fight back in every sin­gle sphere we pos­si­bly can,” and to pre­pare for “total war.” And Ken Peters actu­al­ly spoke at a ral­ly in DC on Jan 5. A ral­ly he was able to attend thanks to the gen­eros­i­ty of Mike Lin­dell, one of the core fig­ures behind the ‘stolen elec­tion’ Big Lie:

...
When Rev. Ken Peters left Covenant Church and appoint­ed Shea as his suc­ces­sor in order to plant a Patri­ot Church in Knoxville, Ten­nessee, he explained, “This is God mov­ing gen­er­als around.” There are now Patri­ot church­es in Lynch­burg, VA and Spokane as well. Shea’s Covenant Church in Spokane is an “affil­i­ate.”
...

Just this past March, for exam­ple, Shea host­ed vet­er­an antiabor­tion (and now, abor­tion abo­li­tion­ist) leader Rev. Matthew Trewhel­la on his Patri­ot Radio pod­cast. Trewhel­la first came to nation­al atten­tion in the 1990s as one of three dozen sig­na­to­ries to a state­ment that declared that the mur­der of abor­tion providers is “jus­ti­fi­able homi­cide.” He lat­er became noto­ri­ous for his advo­ca­cy for the for­ma­tion of church-based mili­tias.

Trewhella’s son-in-law (a pas­tor at his church and a fel­low abor­tion abo­li­tion leader) Jason Storms, has been appoint­ed as the new Nation­al Direc­tor of Oper­a­tion Save Amer­i­ca. OSA was for­mer­ly led by Rev. Phillip (“Flip”) Ben­ham, and then Rev. Rusty Lee Thomas, under whose lead­er­ship it began to mobi­lize for abo­li­tion.

Storms was among the antiabor­tion lead­ers at the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6th. He called it a “rev­o­lu­tion.”

Occu­py the last days

Matt Shea hasn’t changed much since chang­ing jobs. On Insur­rec­tion day, Jan­u­ary 6, he urged peo­ple at a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in north­ern Ida­ho, to “fight back in every sin­gle sphere we pos­si­bly can,” and to pre­pare for “total war.”

Mean­while, Ken Peters also issued a bat­tle cry at a pre-insur­rec­tion ral­ly in DC. The Spokane Spokesman-Review report­ed that Mike Lin­dell, the CEO of My Pil­low flew him to DC with like-mind­ed pas­tors on his pri­vate jet and put them up at the Trump Inter­na­tion­al Hotel, a few blocks from the White House.

But like oth­ers whose rhetoric may have exceed­ed their readi­ness to be asso­ci­at­ed with the events at the capi­tol, Peters lat­er said he didn’t agree with the insur­rec­tion.
...

Next, here’s a look at that Jan 2021 Spokesman Review arti­cle cov­er­ing the strange tale of how Matt Shea’s “Patri­ot Church” ally, Ken Peters, end­ed up speak­ing at a Jan 5 “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in DC thanks to Mike Lin­dell:

The Spokesman-Review

Shawn Vestal: Pas­tor who orga­nized anti-abor­tion ral­lies in Spokane helped ral­ly Trump sup­port­ers in D.C.

By Shawn Vestal
Wed., Jan. 13, 2021

The night before the Trump riot at the U.S. Capi­tol, a face that would be famil­iar to many in the Spokane area took the stage in Free­dom Plaza just east of the White House to ral­ly the crowd to rise up against Satan and a “stolen” elec­tion.

“We are not just up against politi­cians,” said the man, dressed in a ball­cap and sweat­shirt. “We are not just in a cul­ture war. We are in a king­dom war. This is the king­dom of dark­ness ver­sus the king­dom of light.”

The speak­er was Ken Peters, the for­mer pas­tor of Spokane’s Covenant Church and orga­niz­er of dis­rup­tive protests held out­side Planned Par­ent­hood over the past cou­ple of years. The con­flict over those protests result­ed in a judge order­ing mem­bers of the Church at Planned Par­ent­hood to keep their dis­tance when demon­strat­ing and stop inter­fer­ing with the oper­a­tion of the clin­ic.

Peters and his church became a locus for right-wing reli­gious polit­i­cal activism in Spokane. After Matt Shea announced he wouldn’t run for a new term in the Leg­is­la­ture, he became Covenant’s pas­tor. Peters has appar­ent­ly moved on to head a church in Knoxville, Ten­nessee, and is help­ing spread TCAPP protests to oth­er cities.

Many of the peo­ple affil­i­at­ed with the church appear at anti-mask ral­lies, pro-gun events and the recent “Stop the Steal” protests. In videos from the Capi­tol, Peters appears with anoth­er Spokane man who was a reg­u­lar at TCAPP events, Jon Schrock, the pas­tor at Hope Bap­tist in Air­way Heights, and with Joshua Feuer­stein, an incen­di­ary online pas­tor who once claimed Star­bucks was adding abort­ed fetus­es to its cof­fee. Feuer­stein attend­ed a TCAPP ral­ly in Spokane last March.

The tale of how Peters and his fel­low pas­tors wound up going to the Capi­tol on that vio­lent, trag­ic day is a strange one indeed. There is no rea­son to believe any of them entered the Capi­tol or were direct­ly involved in any vio­lence. Their social media posts open a win­dow on their jour­ney to the Capi­tol, start­ing with zeal­ous opti­mism and end­ing deflat­ed, blam­ing antifa and furi­ous at Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence for not block­ing the elec­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

At Peters’ speech on the night before the riot­ing, though, it was all rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vor.

“I see a bunch of peo­ple here who say, ‘No, no, we are not going to allow the ene­my to destroy this great land that our fore­fa­thers gave to us!’” he said.

He exhort­ed them to heed the call of a mod­ern-day Paul Revere: “The left­ists are com­ing! The left­ists are com­ing. The left­ists are com­ing!”

‘It’s like testos­terone‘

In a video post­ed the day after the riot, Peters told the unlike­ly sto­ry of how he end­ed up speak­ing in the nation’s cap­i­tal at the A Prayer to Save Amer­i­ca Ral­ly.

“Folks,” he said, “you can’t make this up.”

He attend­ed the Trump ral­ly in Dal­ton, Geor­gia, on Jan. 4, where he said he was invit­ed to speak the next day in D.C. by ral­ly orga­niz­ers. Peters had a prob­lem, though. He’d have to dri­ve all night to make it.

That was when the My Pil­low guy – CEO and diehard Trump backer Mike Lin­dell – offered to fly him up on his pri­vate plane, he said. Arriv­ing in the cap­i­tal with­out a hotel room, Lin­dell paid to put him up in a cor­ner suite at the Trump Hotel, he said.

“Unbe­liev­able guy,” Peters said. “He tells the hotel guy, ‘Put him on my tab.’ “

He told Peters, ” ‘Make sure you get room ser­vice. You bet­ter get room ser­vice.’ “

The next after­noon, Peters was the final speak­er on the agen­da, and end­ed up hav­ing to cut his remarks down to just a cou­ple of min­utes. But he said he didn’t mind, and was focused on the task at hand: ral­ly­ing peo­ple to resist a coup by left­ist bul­lies who have no morals or con­science.

“I lit­er­al­ly just asked the holy spir­it to guide me when I got up there,” he said. “I got up there and I was like, ‘Help me, Lord. Help me, Lord.’”

(A mes­sage sent to the My Pil­low media office in an attempt to con­firm the details of this account was not returned – though pro­mo­tion­al emails from the com­pa­ny have begun show­ing up. Peters also did not answer a mes­sage seek­ing con­fir­ma­tion and fur­ther com­ment.)

That night, he post­ed on Face­book: “Scared to go to sleep. Last time I did that, some­one stole the elec­tion like a thief in the night.”

Schrock post­ed his own video from his hotel room that night. He said he had spot­ted some antifa folks out and about in D.C.

The fol­low­ing morn­ing, Peters post­ed a video, wear­ing a TCAPP knit hat, while he and fel­low pas­tor Shahram Hadi­an got cof­fee before the president’s ral­ly. Hadi­an is a for­mer Mus­lim who has become a noto­ri­ous anti-Islam speak­er around the coun­try; he has appeared in var­i­ous events in this region, includ­ing one appear­ance in 2011 in Coeur d’Alene that left some Repub­li­cans uncom­fort­able with his rhetoric.

Hadi­an said, “Peo­ple are not just fired up. I think they sense the absolute urgency of the moment, and where the nation is at. … My hunch is the best thing we can hope for from Con­gress is for Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to push this back to the states.”

He com­pared their cold morn­ing get­ting cof­fee to Val­ley Forge.

...

Peters turned the cam­era over to Feuer­stein. Feuer­stein is known for a vari­ety of online provo­ca­tions. In 2015, he encour­aged fol­low­ers to harass a Flori­da bak­ery that wouldn’t make him an anti-gay cake. He has post­ed a false sto­ry about Black Lives Mat­ter pro­test­ers killing an elder­ly woman. He once said, “I think it’s time that abor­tion doc­tors should have to run and hide and be afraid for their life.”

In Peters’ video that morn­ing, he talked about the incred­i­ble “ener­gy” of those who had gath­ered.

“I feel like patri­ots are final­ly get­ting so irri­tat­ed and so upset that they’re moved to action,” he said. “We’re nev­er going to be able to do any­thing until we’re moved to action. And that’s what’s actu­al­ly tran­spir­ing now. You can feel the patri­o­tism. It’s like testos­terone flow­ing through the veins of an Amer­i­can red-blood­ed male.”

Peters panned the cam­era to show Schrock beside him, also in a TCAPP hat, and said, “Pray for Mike Pence, man.”

‘We’ve been played’

There aren’t any posts from the men of the ral­ly where the pres­i­dent, his son and oth­ers incit­ed pro­test­ers to head down to the Capi­tol, or from the sub­se­quent protest and riot itself. Peters said cell­phone cov­er­age would be dis­rupt­ed dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial ral­ly.

Around 1:25 p.m., after the out­er bar­ri­cades had been breached, Peters post­ed pho­tos of the crowds swarm­ing the steps of the Capi­tol.

“Wow!” he wrote.

Feuer­stein post­ed his own video to Face­book a few hours lat­er, from his hotel room. Peters was with him dur­ing the video, but said lit­tle.

This was after the mob had bro­ken into the Capi­tol and before the worst was known – a police offi­cer and four oth­ers dead, win­dows and doors smashed, feces smeared on the walls, a Capi­tol cop tak­ing self­ies with riot­ers, a grim silence from the White House.

Feuer­stein seemed pri­mar­i­ly furi­ous about the fact that Pence would not refuse to cer­ti­fy the elec­tion, “like the lit­tle cow­ard, the lit­tle swamp mon­ster, the lit­tle slime­ball he is.”

He had already locat­ed the cul­prits in the riot.

“I was giv­en intel by Trump’s team that antifa was going to be show­ing up but they were not going to be dressed in their nor­mal gear,” he said. “Because guess what? You’ve got a mil­lion Trump sup­port­ers there. Antifa’s not stu­pid enough to show up with a hun­dred or two hun­dred of them, or even three hun­dred or five hun­dred of them, because they’re going to be smoked.”

He said MAGA did not storm the Capi­tol. MAGA peo­ple were out­side pray­ing, hav­ing a “church ser­vice,” he said.

He added, “I do not con­done vio­lence, I do not con­done phys­i­cal vio­lence … I’m not for polit­i­cal vio­lence until there needs to be polit­i­cal vio­lence.”

He went on, “We do have to stand up. Pence has turned out to be a cow­ard­ly lit­tle back­stab­bing sis­sy. Pence is a lit­tle, just piece of trash, such a piece of trash. Ugh. So flip­ping frus­trat­ing to see that jack­wad pre­tend to be a con­ser­v­a­tive when it ben­e­fits him, and then he turns around and – it’s not just that he stabbed Trump in the back. He stabbed we the peo­ple in the back. … Man, Pence, you def­i­nite­ly are not the Chris­t­ian we thought you were. You’re not the con­ser­v­a­tive or the patri­ot we thought you were.”

That after­noon, Peters post­ed a video of the crowd bash­ing in a win­dow at the Capi­tol. In the video, you hear a voice shout­ing, “Antifa!”

“CAUGHT!!” Peters wrote. “Watch Antifa break­ing a win­dow while Trump Sup­port­ers … cheer when MAGA guy stops him. We’ve been played.”

A lat­er post: “If you think you saw evil today, just wait until you see the evil that a Left­ist Pres­i­dent, House and Sen­ate will unleash. Fight for Trump and Pray.”

Then anoth­er: “I blame Pence for a lot of things today.”

...

A few days lat­er, he post­ed a joke: “I had tick­ets for the big game in DC … The Patri­ots vs the Steal­ers. It was Epic.”

The day after the riots, Schrock post­ed, “Protests are meant to make peo­ple feel uncom­fort­able and pres­sured!!!”

Feuer­stein, mean­while, has been putting up con­tro­ver­sial tweets and tag­ging Twit­ter in an appar­ent effort to get him­self banned. He tweet­ed, “Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is a sin,” and called Muhammed a pedophile.

And this: “Mr. Pres­i­dent, you have near­ly 100 mil­lion armed patri­ots in your cor­ner. Say the word.”

———-

“Shawn Vestal: Pas­tor who orga­nized anti-abor­tion ral­lies in Spokane helped ral­ly Trump sup­port­ers in D.C.” by Shawn Vestal; The Spokesman-Review; 01/13/2021

“The speak­er was Ken Peters, the for­mer pas­tor of Spokane’s Covenant Church and orga­niz­er of dis­rup­tive protests held out­side Planned Par­ent­hood over the past cou­ple of years. The con­flict over those protests result­ed in a judge order­ing mem­bers of the Church at Planned Par­ent­hood to keep their dis­tance when demon­strat­ing and stop inter­fer­ing with the oper­a­tion of the clin­ic.”

A day before the insur­rec­tion, Ken Peters was in DC ral­ly­ing a crowd at a “Stop the Steal” protest, mak­ing a speech filled with rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vor:

...
“We are not just up against politi­cians,” said the man, dressed in a ball­cap and sweat­shirt. “We are not just in a cul­ture war. We are in a king­dom war. This is the king­dom of dark­ness ver­sus the king­dom of light.”

...

Many of the peo­ple affil­i­at­ed with the church appear at anti-mask ral­lies, pro-gun events and the recent “Stop the Steal” protests. In videos from the Capi­tol, Peters appears with anoth­er Spokane man who was a reg­u­lar at TCAPP events, Jon Schrock, the pas­tor at Hope Bap­tist in Air­way Heights, and with Joshua Feuer­stein, an incen­di­ary online pas­tor who once claimed Star­bucks was adding abort­ed fetus­es to its cof­fee. Feuer­stein attend­ed a TCAPP ral­ly in Spokane last March.

The tale of how Peters and his fel­low pas­tors wound up going to the Capi­tol on that vio­lent, trag­ic day is a strange one indeed. There is no rea­son to believe any of them entered the Capi­tol or were direct­ly involved in any vio­lence. Their social media posts open a win­dow on their jour­ney to the Capi­tol, start­ing with zeal­ous opti­mism and end­ing deflat­ed, blam­ing antifa and furi­ous at Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence for not block­ing the elec­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

At Peters’ speech on the night before the riot­ing, though, it was all rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vor.

“I see a bunch of peo­ple here who say, ‘No, no, we are not going to allow the ene­my to destroy this great land that our fore­fa­thers gave to us!’” he said.

He exhort­ed them to heed the call of a mod­ern-day Paul Revere: “The left­ists are com­ing! The left­ists are com­ing. The left­ists are com­ing!”
...

And if it had­n’t been for the seem­ing­ly spon­ta­neous gen­eros­i­ty of Mike Lin­dell, who offered to fly Peters up to DC on his pri­vate plane and put him up in a hotel in DC. Peters was even giv­en the final speak­ing slot on the agen­da, a sign that the “Stop the Steal” orga­niz­ers real­ly val­ued hav­ing him there:

...
He attend­ed the Trump ral­ly in Dal­ton, Geor­gia, on Jan. 4, where he said he was invit­ed to speak the next day in D.C. by ral­ly orga­niz­ers. Peters had a prob­lem, though. He’d have to dri­ve all night to make it.

That was when the My Pil­low guy – CEO and diehard Trump backer Mike Lin­dell – offered to fly him up on his pri­vate plane, he said. Arriv­ing in the cap­i­tal with­out a hotel room, Lin­dell paid to put him up in a cor­ner suite at the Trump Hotel, he said.

...

The next after­noon, Peters was the final speak­er on the agen­da, and end­ed up hav­ing to cut his remarks down to just a cou­ple of min­utes. But he said he didn’t mind, and was focused on the task at hand: ral­ly­ing peo­ple to resist a coup by left­ist bul­lies who have no morals or con­science.

“I lit­er­al­ly just asked the holy spir­it to guide me when I got up there,” he said. “I got up there and I was like, ‘Help me, Lord. Help me, Lord.’”
...

Again, don’t for­get about the ties between Matt Shea, the CSPOA, and the Oath Keep­ers. Giv­en the lead role the Oath Keep­ers played in the insur­rec­tion, it’s hard to imag­ine Shea was­n’t at least aware of what they had in mind.

And that’s all why the inves­ti­ga­tors of the Jan 6 insur­rec­tion should prob­a­bly be expand­ing their inves­tiga­tive net to include Matt Shea’s cell of mil­i­tant Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists. Again, Matt Shea may be on the GOP fringe, but it’s cut­ting-edge fringe. Yes, Shea may have been tech­ni­cal­ly kicked out of the GOP in 2019 over accu­sa­tions of plot­ting domes­tic ter­ror­ism, but let’s face it. That was 2019. Some­one with Shea’s domes­tic ter­ror­ist pedi­gree was prob­a­bly quite pop­u­lar in cer­tain cir­cles in the months lead­ing up to the Jan 6 insur­rec­tion. The GOP has a very dif­fer­ent atti­tude regard­ing domes­tic ter­ror­ism these days, after all. At least as long as it’s domes­tic ter­ror­ism that some­how leaves fas­cists in charge.

Did you know that the ear­ly bat­tles in the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War were almost all “noth­ing more than pas­tors lead­ing their church­es in the bat­tle.” No? Did you also know that the rea­son the US was cho­sen by God as a divine­ly ordained nation was due to its ded­i­ca­tion to free-mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism? Well, you would have known about these fun facts if it was­n’t for the ero­sion of the US pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem that offers AP US His­to­ry Cours­es obscur­ing the insep­a­ra­ble nature of the US Con­sti­tu­tion and the Bible.

These are the kinds of lessons that were being shared at a Chan­til­ly, Vir­ginia, Church in Fair­fax Coun­ty last Sep­tem­ber at the Com­mu­ni­ty Bap­tist Church. This was months before Repub­li­can Glenn Youngkin pulled off an upset vic­to­ry that relied heav­i­ly on exact­ly the kind of hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing about “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” and a per­ceived attack on white peo­ple that forms the core of the large “Project Blitz” nation­al strat­e­gy for fuel­ing and then weaponiz­ing Chris­t­ian griev­ances for polit­i­cal pur­pos­es.

But the audi­ence was­n’t reg­u­lar church goers. It was most­ly pas­tors, who were there to hear a series of speak­ers share their views on the urgent need for these pas­tors to do every­thing they can to ensure all of their mem­bers vote if pos­si­ble. An urgency dri­ven by...wait for it...the loom­ing takeover of the US by the god­less Left who stole the 2020 elec­tion from Don­ald Trump and are plan­ning on steal­ing it again. At least that was part of the mes­sage. There were also his­to­ry lessons, like the one from Tim Bar­ton — son of CNP mem­ber and key Repub­li­can theo­crat David Bar­ton — who shared with the audi­ence the appar­ent lead role church mili­tias played dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War.

Anoth­er speak­er at the even was CNP Mem­ber Chad Con­nel­ly, who is also the Founder & Pres­i­dent of Faith Wins, an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to orga­niz­ing con­ser­v­a­tive pas­tors to get out the vote for Trump in 2020. Key financ­ing for Faith Wins came from the Lind­sey Foun­da­tion, the fam­i­ly foun­da­tion for Joan Lind­sey and her hus­band, James B. Lind­sey, an heir to a Pep­si for­tune. Joan is also a CNP Mem­ber. Every year over the past decade, the Lind­sey Foun­da­tion has donat­ed hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to orga­ni­za­tions such as the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, Focus on the Fam­i­ly, David Bar­ton’s Wall­Builders, and a faith-based media com­pa­ny called Mas­ter­me­dia Inter­na­tion­al, and less­er amounts to oth­er groups like the CNP. In oth­er words, a Pep­si heir is a lead­ing financier of con­tem­po­rary Chris­t­ian fas­cism. Watch out Pub­lix, you have com­pe­ti­tion in the fas­cist-heir-coup-plot­ting depart­ment.

The last speak­er at this event was for­mer deputy press sec­re­tary in the Trump White House Hogan Gid­ley. Gid­ley pro­ceed­ed to use his time to reit­er­ate all of the fan­tasies about how, yes, there real­ly was com­pelling evi­dence of a mas­sive stolen elec­tion.

It’s just one ran­dom polit­i­cal event in Vir­ginia, a cou­ple months before an off-year elec­tion. But it was­n’t ran­dom. It was part of a larg­er nation­al strat­e­gy financed by groups like the Lind­sey Foun­da­tion with a mis­sion to rad­i­cal­ize the US’s con­ser­v­a­tive cler­gy and fuel them with a right­eous rage. The kind of right­eous rage that will leave these cler­gy ready to lead their flock in an bat­tle of Good and Evil. Specif­i­cal­ly, the bat­tle to get Trump reelect­ed in 2024 elec­tion. Church mili­tias might be need­ed in this upcom­ing bat­tle of Good and Evil, appar­ent­ly:

The New Repub­lic

The Shock Troops of the Next Big Lie
How the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist movement’s well-fund­ed strate­gists are aim­ing at vot­ers in Vir­ginia and beyond for 2024

Kather­ine Stew­art
Jan­u­ary 10, 2022

On a stretch of ver­dant land just north of Sycamore Canyon Road in Mon­tecito, Cal­i­for­nia, the homes of the mere­ly rich give way to the homes of the tru­ly rich. There, with­in shout­ing dis­tance of the 18,000-square-foot home that Prince Har­ry and Meghan Markle pur­chased from a vil­lain­ous Russ­ian oli­garch, you will find the res­i­dence of Joan Lind­sey and her hus­band, James B. Lind­sey, an heir to a Pep­si for­tune. “It’s part pri­vate park, part sanc­tu­ary,” a write-up in Forbes pants. “Alto­geth­er, it’s a com­pound for the ages.” Mira Vista—an estate of this cal­iber nat­u­ral­ly has a name—was recent­ly list­ed for sale at $72.5 mil­lion.

But Mira Vista is some­thing more than a home. It was also list­ed as the address of the James and Joan Lind­sey Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion. A search of the foundation’s pub­lic reports appears to turn up, pro­por­tion­al­ly speak­ing, lit­tle of the kind of com­mu­ni­ty-cen­tered phil­an­thropy char­ac­ter­is­tic of oth­er wealthy locals. Instead, the records show a vast and steady flow of con­tri­bu­tions to lead­ing orga­ni­za­tions in America’s Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment. Every year over the past decade, the Lind­sey Foun­da­tion has donat­ed hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to orga­ni­za­tions such as the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, Focus on the Fam­i­ly, Wall­Builders, and a faith-based media com­pa­ny called Mas­ter­me­dia Inter­na­tion­al, and less­er amounts to oth­er groups like the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, a net­work­ing group for move­ment lead­er­ship.

“We are a Chris­t­ian coun­try. And the Founders were—def­i­nite­ly—and our found­ing doc­u­ments were writ­ten under prayer each day of the writ­ing,” Joan Lind­sey has said. On the eve of the 2020 elec­tion, she announced that “this elec­tion will either pre­serve faith’s sacred place in our coun­try or destroy it.”

From 2019 to 2020, the Lind­sey Foun­da­tion fun­neled at least $500,000 to a new orga­ni­za­tion, Faith Wins, intend­ed to mobi­lize pas­tors at con­ser­v­a­tive church­es to bring out the pro-Trump Repub­li­can vote. Faith Wins is part of a Lind­sey-backed coali­tion called The Church Finds Its Voice. In many respects, the Lind­seys’ invest­ment in Faith Wins and The Church Finds Its Voice fol­lows a long-stand­ing pat­tern in the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment of back­ing projects to turn America’s net­work of tens of thou­sands of con­ser­v­a­tive church­es into a pow­er­ful par­ti­san polit­i­cal machine.

But there is also some­thing nov­el in the Faith Wins project, and it sheds much light on the direc­tion of the move­ment in the after­math of the Trump pres­i­den­cy. Unlike pre-Trump get-out-the-pas­tors projects, Faith Wins has made con­cerns about “elec­tions integri­ty” a cen­tral part of the mes­sage for its tar­get audi­ence. The pre­tense is that this is intend­ed to shore up pub­lic con­fi­dence in elec­tions. The real­i­ty is that the group is con­scious­ly help­ing to lay the foun­da­tions for the next iter­a­tion of the Big Lie. If Trump runs again, and if the Big Lie works next time around in secur­ing him the pres­i­den­cy, Faith Wins and its col­lab­o­ra­tors will have played a crit­i­cal role in mak­ing it hap­pen.

*****

Chan­til­ly, Vir­ginia, sits on the edge of Fair­fax Coun­ty, a pros­per­ous, D.C.-adjacent region pock­et­ed with res­i­den­tial sub­di­vi­sions. On a Thurs­day morn­ing in late Sep­tem­ber, at the Com­mu­ni­ty Bap­tist Church, a mid­size church built in the 1990s, a crowd of about 50 indi­vid­u­als, most­ly pas­tors, most of them men, break­fasts on Chick-fil‑A sand­wich­es. A Repub­li­can can­di­date for the Vir­ginia House of Del­e­gates is there to work the room, as is a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the cam­paign of Glenn Youngkin, the pre­vi­ous co-CEO of the Car­lyle Group who went on to upset Ter­ry McAu­li­ffe in the 2021 Vir­ginia guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion.

Chad Con­nel­ly bounds onto the stage burst­ing with ener­gy. “We are in the mid­dle of doing over 40 cities, just like this, in 16 states between Labor Day and Thanks­giv­ing,” he says breath­less­ly. He rat­tles off some sta­tis­tics from an ear­li­er leg of his “Amer­i­can Restora­tion Tour”: 89 meet­ings with 2,965 pas­tors across the coun­try who com­mand flocks total­ing 741,000 poten­tial vot­ers.

A for­mer chair of the South Car­oli­na Repub­li­can Par­ty and direc­tor of faith engage­ment under Reince Priebus at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee for four years, Con­nel­ly is both a polit­i­cal vet­er­an and a key play­er in the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment. He serves on the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, where he sits on the board of gov­er­nors, and where Joan Lind­sey is a Gold Cir­cle mem­ber. The coun­cil was found­ed by Paul Weyrich, Tim LaHaye, and oth­ers at the dawn of the Rea­gan era. Today, it is the appa­ra­tus con­nect­ing the “doers and the donors,” as the father of Bet­sy DeVos’s hus­band, Rich DeVos, put it, of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist and con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal machine.

“You’re about to hear a pre­sen­ta­tion that’s going to ele­vate your abil­i­ty to under­stand what’s going on, and it’s also going to inspire you to say, ‘I’m not doing enough,’” Con­nel­ly says, his voice cheer­ful but firm. “Every­body you know needs to have vot­ed. Every­body you know needs to go vote ear­ly. Every church you know needs to do vot­er reg­is­tra­tion. Every pas­tor you know needs to make sure 100 per­cent of the peo­ple in their pews are vot­ing and vot­ing bib­li­cal val­ues.” As in most Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist gath­er­ings, “vot­ing bib­li­cal val­ues” is a trans­par­ent euphemism for vot­ing Repub­li­can.

Con­nel­ly hap­pi­ly makes clear that his work owes much to the gen­eros­i­ty of Joan Lind­sey and her fam­i­ly foun­da­tion. “Joan Lind­sey just start­ed talk­ing to me about this,” Con­nel­ly tells the crowd. “So a cou­ple years ago we real­ly start­ed this thing called The Church Finds Its Voice.” He nods. “If y’all have ever seen Chris­t­ian lead­ers on tele­vi­sion, Joan Lindsey’s like­ly trained ’em. She’s a media guru. An expert.”

There is a part of Connelly’s mes­sage, both here and in his social media pres­ence, that will be famil­iar to any­one who has tak­en in a min­i­mum dose of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric. “This is a cru­cial time in our nation’s his­to­ry,” he says, strik­ing the first chord in a well-rehearsed song about the exis­ten­tial neces­si­ty of elec­toral vic­to­ry. “Is this our 1776 moment, or is it 1944?” he says. “I’ve nev­er vot­ed for a pro-death per­son. Nev­er vot­ed for any­body of any stripe that was OK with killing a baby in a mommy’s tum­my.” In Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist cir­cles today, every elec­tion is a con­test against absolute evil, and the con­se­quences of fail­ure almost too dire to imag­ine.

Inevitably, the per­se­cu­tion nar­ra­tive fol­lows close­ly on the apoc­a­lypse nar­ra­tive. At the height of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, Faith Wins wrote, “gov­ern­ment lead­ers decided—in their flawed wisdom—that church gath­er­ings were not ‘essen­tial’ to soci­ety. You heard that right.” In reli­gious right cir­cles, Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives are often cast as the most per­se­cut­ed group in Amer­i­can soci­ety and may soon be arrest­ed for their beliefs.

The refrain of this famil­iar song con­trasts dire cir­cum­stances in the present with the gold­en age of yore. “This place has been ordained by God,” Con­nel­ly said in a Sep­tem­ber 2020 pod­cast episode, “when the Founders deter­mined that of course they were read­ing the Bible and they were believ­ers of the word of God. And so Amer­i­ca became unique and spe­cial because the Founders under­stood that the found­ing had to tie into God.”

As in most ver­sions of the song, the tran­si­tion from the Chris­t­ian nation myth to rad­i­cal free-mar­ket doc­trine is seam­less. Accord­ing to Con­nel­ly, the sec­ond rea­son for America’s unique­ness and spe­cial­ness “is the free-mar­ket sys­tem, which of course is God’s bib­li­cal econ­o­my.” Next comes the fear and loathing. “There’s a far left now that doesn’t believe in God, they’re god­less com­plete­ly. They believe the state is the supreme being,” Con­nel­ly says on the pod­cast. “It’s actu­al­ly a god­less, com­mu­nis­tic, Marx­ist style of gov­ern­ment.”

With­in the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment in gen­er­al, there is lit­tle curios­i­ty about the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion, and still less effort to under­stand it on its own terms. Democ­rats are simply—and some­times literally—represented as demon­ic. “You are los­ing free­doms every day in this nation. They’re being tak­en away like crazy,” Con­nel­ly tells the Chan­til­ly crowd. “The Con­sti­tu­tion has been dis­card­ed and tossed aside very quick­ly. And when you lose the lit­tle free­doms, you already lost the big ones and didn’t even rec­og­nize it. And it’s hap­pen­ing at a record pace.”

The bot­tom line for Connelly—hardly sur­pris­ing giv­en his past as a Repub­li­can Par­ty operative—is to har­vest votes. More pre­cise­ly, his goal is to get the pas­tors present to har­vest the votes. The Faith Wins web­site encour­ages atten­dees of the events to take a “Faith Pledge,” which includes vot­ing in the upcom­ing elec­tion, and instructs its peo­ple to “inform fel­low Chris­tians about issues that impact our faith and fam­i­lies” and “encour­age fel­low Chris­tians to vote their val­ues on Elec­tion Day.” Pas­tors are giv­en a QR code, along with an online form, which lead to a suite of tools and mes­sag­ing mate­ri­als, includ­ing vot­er guides, vot­er reg­is­tra­tion resources, and videos they can use to acti­vate their con­gre­ga­tions.

Run­ning through Connelly’s Chan­til­ly pre­sen­ta­tion and his media appear­ances, how­ev­er, is the new defin­ing theme in the post-Trump era: “elec­tions integri­ty.” The point, of course, is to con­vey the fright­en­ing but entire­ly unsub­stan­ti­at­ed belief that vast plots are afoot to steal Repub­li­can votes. The same theme is also show­ing up in some of the new­er state-lev­el con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions such as the Vir­ginia Project, which describes its mis­sion as “lead­ing the charge to uncov­er evi­dence of elec­tion manip­u­la­tion, irreg­u­lar­i­ties, and vot­er fraud in Vir­ginia,” and has referred to Democ­rats as “rats.” Vote ear­ly, the group’s mail­ings insist—because that way “your name is marked as vot­ed and no one can claim to be you and steal your vote.”

Con­nel­ly hits all the key mes­sage points in his talk. “We can­not sit on the side­lines and let our­selves get kicked in the teeth, and guess what, it’s hap­pen­ing. Like Novem­ber the fourth,” he says in Chan­til­ly, allud­ing to the 2020 elec­tion. By “kicked in the teeth,” it is clear from his expres­sion that he doesn’t mean that Trump was defeat­ed; he means that Trump was cheat­ed.

**********

Fol­low­ing Con­nel­ly at the podi­um is Tim Bar­ton, son of David Bar­ton, founder of the Wall­Builders orga­ni­za­tion and one of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist movement’s most influ­en­tial activists. Wall­Builders presents itself as “ded­i­cat­ed to pre­sent­ing America’s for­got­ten his­to­ry and heroes, with an empha­sis on the moral, reli­gious, and con­sti­tu­tion­al foun­da­tion on which Amer­i­ca was built—a foun­da­tion which, in recent years, has been seri­ous­ly attacked and under­mined.”

In Chan­til­ly, we are told that David Bar­ton has tak­en ill, but his son Tim dis­pos­es him­self in a man­ner that would make his father proud, offer­ing the usu­al litany of Bar­tonesque half-truths and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of U.S. his­to­ry. America’s Founders were one and all “believ­ers,” accord­ing to Tim Bar­ton, and the Con­sti­tu­tion comes straight from the Bible. And an Advanced Place­ment U.S. his­to­ry course for high school stu­dents, Bar­ton adds for good mea­sure, is just lib­er­al pro­pa­gan­da aim­ing to under­mine America’s god­ly her­itage.

Tim Bar­ton is par­tic­u­lar­ly keen to empha­size a cer­tain, idio­syn­crat­ic aspect of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist mythol­o­gy. His father, David Bar­ton, has long been obsessed with the image of America’s Colo­nial-era priests tear­ing off their robes, becom­ing sol­diers, and lead­ing their con­gre­ga­tions out into mil­i­tary bat­tle. He and Wall­Builders cre­at­ed a group of activist con­ser­v­a­tive cler­gy called the Black Robe Reg­i­ment. “I can go down the list of dozens of pas­tors who led their con­gre­ga­tions to oppose the British because they open fired on us, they declared war on us,” Tim Bar­ton says. Refer­ring to the bat­tles of Lex­ing­ton, Bunker Hill, and Con­cord, he adds, “Almost every one of these ear­ly bat­tles, it was noth­ing more than pas­tors lead­ing their church­es in the bat­tle.”

The con­cern with mas­cu­line mil­i­tary virtue, though always a part of the move­ment, has become a sig­na­ture fea­ture of the Trump and post-Trump era. For exam­ple, Tony Perkins, head of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, has recent­ly formed a part­ner­ship with retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who for­mer­ly served at the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and has played a role in nur­tur­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist net­works in the mil­i­tary and among “dis­as­ter relief” NGOs abroad. The pair have helped lead a men’s min­istry called Stand Coura­geous to help men “make com­mit­ments that will move men clos­er to God’s good pur­pose and design—men who will Stand Coura­geous!” At Stand Coura­geous gath­er­ings across the coun­try, mas­culin­i­ty, patri­archy, and mil­i­tarism are the name of reli­gion itself. “We need men to be men, tough with com­pas­sion­ate strength, bent toward jus­tice with­out com­pro­mise, lock­ing arms and stand­ing,” the group’s mate­ri­als declare. “We need to be the men God cre­at­ed us to be; war­riors for all that is right, true, and just.”

In the pre-Trump era, report­ing on this kind of mil­i­tary rhetoric was inevitably greet­ed with a shrug and the excuse that it was, after all, mere­ly rhetoric. After Jan­u­ary 6, 2021, it’s dif­fi­cult to hear it in the same way.

********

Before intro­duc­ing the next speak­er, Con­nel­ly urges mem­bers to steep them­selves in Barton’s work and ideas, “So you can erase this non­sense we’re hear­ing out there from school boards, that nobody want God to be involved. That’s insane.” He con­tin­ues: “This time we can­not sit back. I know y’all are doing a phe­nom­e­nal job in Loudoun Coun­ty of say­ing to the school board ‘enough’s enough.’” No doubt, Con­nel­ly is refer­ring to the aggres­sion and chaos that right-wing activists have brought to school board meet­ings in Loudoun Coun­ty, Vir­ginia, and beyond—a con­tin­u­a­tion of the right’s long-stand­ing effort to under­mine pub­lic edu­ca­tion. “If you have not been to a school board meet­ing, you should be,” Con­nel­ly says.

Hogan Gid­ley, who worked as the deputy press sec­re­tary in the Trump White House and is rep­re­sent­ed as an “elec­tions expert,” is the final fea­tured speak­er of today’s pre­sen­ta­tion. It is his pres­ence on the agen­da that brings the sub­text of the meet­ing out into the open. “The Cen­ter for Elec­tion Integri­ty that Chad men­tioned, it’s non­par­ti­san,” Gid­ley announces. Then he prompt­ly offers the kind of mis­in­for­ma­tion that pass­es for wis­dom in the Trump­ist incar­na­tion of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. “You saw the stuff in Ari­zona, you’re going to see more stuff in Wis­con­sin; these are sig­nif­i­cant issues, and they can’t be dis­missed out of hand any­more, the facts are too glar­ing,” he says.

Remark­ably, he is refer­ring to the cir­cus­like, GOP-backed audit of votes in Arizona’s largest coun­ty, which, after dis­cred­it­ing itself with its bizarre antics, man­aged only to con­firm that Biden won Ari­zona by more votes than pre­vi­ous­ly thought. But the nar­ra­tive of per­se­cu­tion is too valu­able in acti­vat­ing the base to dis­card sim­ply because it’s not true. “Any office­hold­er who allows it to hap­pen should be held account­able, not to men­tion the fact that if we find some­one com­mit­ting fraud, they’ve bro­ken the law, and they have to face a penal­ty as well,” says Gid­ley. In time, he launch­es into a well-worn con­spir­a­cy about the so-called ceme­tery vote. He says: “About two mil­lion dead peo­ple are list­ed on vot­er rolls right now.... We saw some­thing new in this last elec­tion. Dead peo­ple didn’t just vote. They request­ed mail-in bal­lots, filled them out, and some­how got them into the drop box.”

Per­haps the most alarm­ing aspect of the Chan­til­ly expe­ri­ence is the crowd’s response. Mur­murs of out­rage punc­tu­ate the room as they seem to take in the mis­in­for­ma­tion. “This last year was rough … if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. You’ve got­ta be in the room,” Gid­ley says, wrap­ping up his talk. On the way out, he takes a swing at oth­er tar­gets of right-wing griev­ance and ties them to the elec­tion fraud myth. “We’ve seen this with crit­i­cal race the­o­ry,” he nods sage­ly. We are giv­en to under­stand that per­vert­ing the minds of school­child­ren comes just as nat­u­ral­ly to Democ­rats as steal­ing elec­tions. But Gid­ley choos­es to end on a high note: “I have nev­er seen peo­ple more engaged than they are right now.”

***********

The ques­tion that Trump’s attempt­ed coup rais­es is how such a seem­ing­ly improb­a­ble event was even pos­si­ble in the first place. Dur­ing the Water­gate cri­sis, after all, the coun­try and both major par­ties unit­ed against a pres­i­dent whose alleged crimes would hard­ly have made the news over the past five years. How is it that in 2020 a pres­i­dent could refuse to accept a clear elec­toral defeat and face no con­se­quences from his sup­port­ers, his par­ty, or the legal sys­tem? How could so many peo­ple embrace such a trans­par­ent lie in the face of so much pub­licly avail­able evi­dence? What could pos­si­bly moti­vate some mem­bers of Con­gress to exon­er­ate an attack that not only was insti­gat­ed to sub­vert the elec­toral process but also put some of their own lives in dan­ger?

There are of course many over­lap­ping expla­na­tions for the recent trans­for­ma­tion of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal life. But the one that remains under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed in the present moment is the role of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment in estab­lish­ing the nec­es­sary pre­con­di­tions for the kind of coup that Trump attempt­ed.

The essen­tial precondition—more impor­tant than mon­ey, more impor­tant than media, more impor­tant even than will­ing liars in high pub­lic office—is the exis­tence of a sub­stan­tial base of sup­port­ers primed to embrace a big lie. With­out lead­ers’ coor­di­nat­ed efforts to indoc­tri­nate such a base, no lie can take hold. To cre­ate such a base, four key steps are nec­es­sary.

Step one is to build an infor­ma­tion bub­ble with­in which the base may be main­tained in a state of fact-denial. Much atten­tion has cor­rect­ly been placed on right-wing media in cre­at­ing such a safe space for con­ser­v­a­tives, but not enough atten­tion has been paid to the con­ser­v­a­tive net­works that sup­ply the back­bone of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment. Orga­ni­za­tions like Faith Wins aim at pas­tors because they know that, for their tar­get vot­ers, pas­tors and reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties are often the most trust­ed sources of infor­ma­tion.

Step two is that this base must be con­di­tioned to expect an immi­nent, cat­a­clysmic event that will threat­en every­thing it val­ues. The apoc­a­lyp­ti­cism and the per­se­cu­tion com­plex of the move­ment are per­fect­ly suit­ed to the task.

A third step is to trans­fer the per­ceived source of polit­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy from demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es like elec­tions to “high­er” author­i­ties that alleged­ly rep­re­sent the “true” spir­it of the nation. This of course is the device through which a minor­i­ty of the coun­try can come to believe that it has a prov­i­den­tial role in rul­ing the whole. As Steve Ban­non said at a ral­ly in sup­port of Glenn Young­kin, which was held on Octo­ber 13 in Rich­mond, Vir­ginia, “We’re putting togeth­er a coali­tion that’s gonna gov­ern for 100 years.”

The final step is to do what Trump did start­ing in 2019: under­mine at every oppor­tu­ni­ty pub­lic con­fi­dence in the results of the next elec­tion. In a sense, the coup attempt began on nation­al tele­vi­sion dur­ing the first pres­i­den­tial debate, when Trump made clear that he would not accept the results of the elec­tion if he lost. At Bannon’s ral­ly for Youngkin, Trump called in and said, “We won in 2016. We won in 2020—the most cor­rupt elec­tion in the his­to­ry of our coun­try, prob­a­bly one of the most cor­rupt any­where. But we’re gonna win it again.”

In the imme­di­ate after­math of the coup attempt that began with Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in Novem­ber 2020, it appeared to many out­side observers that the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment faced a quandary. If they rec­og­nized the actu­al results of the elec­tion and sup­port­ed the order­ly trans­fer of pow­er in our con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy, they would also have to acknowl­edge that “God’s Pres­i­dent” was a liar and a plot­ter.

This proved to be a tough deci­sion for at least a few reli­gious right lead­ers, and the move­ment at first appeared to divide and waf­fle. The promi­nent evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor Robert Jef­fress, for instance, acknowl­edged in an opin­ion piece for Fox News that it appeared Joe Biden would become the forty-sixth pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States and urged his fol­low­ers to pray for him. A larg­er num­ber, how­ev­er, played along with the Big Lie.

Mat Staver, chair­man and founder of Lib­er­ty Coun­sel, said, “What we are wit­ness­ing only hap­pens in com­mu­nist or repres­sive regimes. We must not allow this fraud to hap­pen in Amer­i­ca.” Michele Bach­mann called Biden’s win a “delu­sion”; and Richard Antall, writ­ing for Cri­sis mag­a­zine, a con­ser­v­a­tive Roman Catholic pub­li­ca­tion, likened report­ing on Biden’s win to a “coup d’état.” In response to news of the elec­tion out­come, Ken­neth Copeland laughed deri­sive­ly. “Yeah, he’s going to be pres­i­dent, and Mick­ey Mouse is going to be king,” he said.

Trump’s attempt to sub­vert the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege results by incit­ing an attack on the U.S. Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6 at first appeared to ampli­fy the quandary. Right-wing preach­ers, such as Greg Locke and Ken Peters, played a sig­nif­i­cant role in ril­ing up the crowd in the days and hours pre­ced­ing the riot, and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist sym­bol­ism was all over the event. Move­ment lead­ers now had to decide whether their cause would get behind an armed attempt to over­throw the U.S. gov­ern­ment.

From a dis­tance of a year, though, it has become clear that the quandary was a mirage. Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist lead­ers are, if any­thing, even more com­mit­ted to Trump­ist pol­i­tics than they were in Jan­u­ary 2021. My Faith Votes, a faith-based vot­er mobi­liza­tion orga­ni­za­tion, for exam­ple, launched an ini­tia­tive called “Elec­tion Integri­ty Now.” The group issued a prayer guide with a sev­en-point plan for ask­ing God “to pro­tect Amer­i­can elec­tions and deliv­er trust­wor­thy results.”

At a min­i­mum, the lead­er­ship of the move­ment is com­mit­ted to denial­ism: There was no Big Lie, there was only hon­est con­cern for elec­tions integri­ty mis­rep­re­sent­ed by the lib­er­al media. This denial­ism, how­ev­er, has proved to be mere­ly a cov­er for the endorse­ment of Trump’s coup attempt and a com­mit­ment to anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics.

The more blunt-spo­ken lead­ers of the move­ment have not hes­i­tat­ed to make the posi­tion clear. At the June 2021 Road to Major­i­ty con­fer­ence in Kissim­mee, Flori­da, an annu­al gath­er­ing of the movement’s key activists, strate­gists, and politi­cians, move­ment thought leader Eric Metaxas let it be known that the real vic­tims of the Jan­u­ary 6 event were the good peo­ple who ran­sacked the Capi­tol. Speak­ing of GOP lead­ers, he fired, in his words, “an arrow across their bow”: “Any Repub­li­can that has not spo­ken in defense of the Jan­u­ary 6 peo­ple to me is dead. They’re dead.”

The right-wing polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor and activist Dinesh D’Souza echoed the sen­ti­ment. “The peo­ple who are real­ly get­ting shaft­ed right now are the Jan­u­ary 6 pro­test­ers,” he said in con­ver­sa­tion with vet­er­an reli­gious right strate­gist Ralph Reed. “We won’t defend our guys even when they’re good guys.”

At the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence that took place in Dal­las in July 2021, Jan­u­ary 6 was even recon­ceived as a pos­si­ble Demo­c­ra­t­ic plot. “[The Biden] admin­is­tra­tion is about tyran­ni­cal rule. They don’t want to fol­low the Con­sti­tu­tion,” said Allen West, for­mer chair­man of the Repub­li­can Par­ty of Texas, before he recast events dri­ven by far-right extrem­ists as bizarre and pos­si­bly Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­spir­a­cies. “On Jan­u­ary 6, the sergeant-at-arms had turned down, on behalf of the speak­er, hav­ing the Nation­al Guard there to help pro­tect the Capi­tol. Why did that hap­pen? You think they were set­ting things up? Well, I do.”

**********

The unspo­ken but oper­at­ing assump­tion among lead­ers of the reli­gious right at present seems to be that Don­ald Trump will run again for pres­i­dent in 2024. All appear to assume that, if he runs, he is like­ly to be the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee. They fur­ther seem to take for grant­ed that he will spend much of the 2024 cam­paign com­plain­ing that the 2020 elec­tion was stolen and that 2024 is at risk of being stolen, too. It fol­lows that his best shot at win­ning is to use that lie, if nec­es­sary, to steal the elec­tion for him­self. Since the alter­na­tive, in their view, is to turn the nation over to the demon­ic Democ­rats for per­ma­nent destruc­tion, these assump­tions have locked move­ment lead­er­ship into a straight­for­ward strat­e­gy in the run-up to 2024. They will pre­pare the rank and file to embrace the “Big Lie II,” as it were, in the hopes that this time it will work.

Will they suc­ceed? We can’t know for some time, of course, but we will be able to get a bet­ter sense of the direc­tion of our pol­i­tics if we pay atten­tion to the right sources. For most of the pub­lic, Big Lie II will play out in sound bites on right-wing tele­vi­sion, Twit­ter feeds, and Face­book posts. But the part of the oper­a­tion that mat­ters more will take place out of view of most media. Move­ment lead­ers will lever­age their orga­ni­za­tions to prime the base for the Big Lie. Work­ing through orga­ni­za­tions like Faith Wins and The Church Finds Its Voice; through mil­i­tant, often hyper­mas­cu­line groups like Stand Coura­geous; or through “par­ent activist” groups such as Moms for Lib­er­ty and Par­ents Defend­ing Edu­ca­tion, they are cul­ti­vat­ing a cadre of activists pre­pared to use the threat of dis­rup­tion, chaos, and per­haps even vio­lence to “pro­tect” the desired elec­tion results. Because if God tells you in advance who is sup­posed to win every election—and then the oth­er can­di­date wins—the only accept­able expla­na­tion is that the elec­tion was stolen, and stolen against the wish­es of God.

As the event winds down, Byron Foxx, one of the evan­ge­lists tour­ing with Chad Con­nel­ly, takes to the stage. “It is not time to be com­pla­cent,” he intones. “The church is not a cruise ship, the church is a bat­tle­ship.”

As far as can be deter­mined from her spo­radic posts and the let­ters she signs as a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, Joan Lind­sey is proud of the move­ment she has helped to finance. Con­ser­v­a­tive pas­tors, she wrote on the web­site for The Church Finds Its Voice, are “already lead­ing the way back to God’s way for us. A tremen­dous num­ber of you have led vot­er reg­is­tra­tions and are speak­ing truth about our duty as men and women of faith to sup­port God­ly gov­er­nance.”

...

———–

“The Shock Troops of the Next Big Lie” by Kather­ine Stew­art; The New Repub­lic; 01/10/2022

“As far as can be deter­mined from her spo­radic posts and the let­ters she signs as a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, Joan Lind­sey is proud of the move­ment she has helped to finance. Con­ser­v­a­tive pas­tors, she wrote on the web­site for The Church Finds Its Voice, are “already lead­ing the way back to God’s way for us. A tremen­dous num­ber of you have led vot­er reg­is­tra­tions and are speak­ing truth about our duty as men and women of faith to sup­port God­ly gov­er­nance.””

It’s just a Chris­t­ian-ori­ent­ed get-out-the-vote effort. That’s the pub­lic spin on the polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing car­ried out by the Lind­sey Foun­da­tion. And note that in addi­tion to Joan Lind­sey, Kielle C. Hor­ton, the Pres­i­dent of The Lind­sey Foun­da­tion, is also a CNP mem­ber. But upon clos­er exam­i­na­tion, we find that these faith-based GOTV groups are lit­tle more than just mega­phones for the pre­vail­ing Stolen Elec­tion nar­ra­tive:

...
From 2019 to 2020, the Lind­sey Foun­da­tion fun­neled at least $500,000 to a new orga­ni­za­tion, Faith Wins, intend­ed to mobi­lize pas­tors at con­ser­v­a­tive church­es to bring out the pro-Trump Repub­li­can vote. Faith Wins is part of a Lind­sey-backed coali­tion called The Church Finds Its Voice. In many respects, the Lind­seys’ invest­ment in Faith Wins and The Church Finds Its Voice fol­lows a long-stand­ing pat­tern in the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment of back­ing projects to turn America’s net­work of tens of thou­sands of con­ser­v­a­tive church­es into a pow­er­ful par­ti­san polit­i­cal machine.

But there is also some­thing nov­el in the Faith Wins project, and it sheds much light on the direc­tion of the move­ment in the after­math of the Trump pres­i­den­cy. Unlike pre-Trump get-out-the-pas­tors projects, Faith Wins has made con­cerns about “elec­tions integri­ty” a cen­tral part of the mes­sage for its tar­get audi­ence. The pre­tense is that this is intend­ed to shore up pub­lic con­fi­dence in elec­tions. The real­i­ty is that the group is con­scious­ly help­ing to lay the foun­da­tions for the next iter­a­tion of the Big Lie. If Trump runs again, and if the Big Lie works next time around in secur­ing him the pres­i­den­cy, Faith Wins and its col­lab­o­ra­tors will have played a crit­i­cal role in mak­ing it hap­pen.

...

From a dis­tance of a year, though, it has become clear that the quandary was a mirage. Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist lead­ers are, if any­thing, even more com­mit­ted to Trump­ist pol­i­tics than they were in Jan­u­ary 2021. My Faith Votes, a faith-based vot­er mobi­liza­tion orga­ni­za­tion, for exam­ple, launched an ini­tia­tive called “Elec­tion Integri­ty Now.” The group issued a prayer guide with a sev­en-point plan for ask­ing God “to pro­tect Amer­i­can elec­tions and deliv­er trust­wor­thy results.”
...

But that mes­sage about Stolen Elec­tions is just one part of a broad­er pro­pa­gan­da effort direct­ly tar­get­ing Chris­tians with a mes­sage. A dire mes­sage that Chris­tian­i­ty is fac­ing an exis­ten­tial threat. And that threat does­n’t just come from god­less athe­ism. As fel­low CNP mem­ber Chad Con­nel­ly described to a group of Vir­ginia pas­tors last fall, part of what makes the US a God-ordained coun­try is a ded­i­ca­tion to Cap­i­tal­ism and Free Mar­kets. It’s a reminder of the CNP’s roots going back to The Fam­i­ly and its mis­sion of spread­ing a fas­cist form of Chris­tian­i­ty to world lead­ers. It’s also a reminder of the pro­found philo­soph­i­cal par­al­lels between this net­work and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood’s eco­nom­ic-theo­crat­ic world­view. Because if there’s one thing that unites fas­cists theocrats of all stripes, it’s the fas­cism, of course:

...
Chan­til­ly, Vir­ginia, sits on the edge of Fair­fax Coun­ty, a pros­per­ous, D.C.-adjacent region pock­et­ed with res­i­den­tial sub­di­vi­sions. On a Thurs­day morn­ing in late Sep­tem­ber, at the Com­mu­ni­ty Bap­tist Church, a mid­size church built in the 1990s, a crowd of about 50 indi­vid­u­als, most­ly pas­tors, most of them men, break­fasts on Chick-fil‑A sand­wich­es. A Repub­li­can can­di­date for the Vir­ginia House of Del­e­gates is there to work the room, as is a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the cam­paign of Glenn Youngkin, the pre­vi­ous co-CEO of the Car­lyle Group who went on to upset Ter­ry McAu­li­ffe in the 2021 Vir­ginia guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion.

...

A for­mer chair of the South Car­oli­na Repub­li­can Par­ty and direc­tor of faith engage­ment under Reince Priebus at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee for four years, Con­nel­ly is both a polit­i­cal vet­er­an and a key play­er in the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment. He serves on the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, where he sits on the board of gov­er­nors, and where Joan Lind­sey is a Gold Cir­cle mem­ber. The coun­cil was found­ed by Paul Weyrich, Tim LaHaye, and oth­ers at the dawn of the Rea­gan era. Today, it is the appa­ra­tus con­nect­ing the “doers and the donors,” as the father of Bet­sy DeVos’s hus­band, Rich DeVos, put it, of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist and con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal machine.

...

Con­nel­ly hap­pi­ly makes clear that his work owes much to the gen­eros­i­ty of Joan Lind­sey and her fam­i­ly foun­da­tion. “Joan Lind­sey just start­ed talk­ing to me about this,” Con­nel­ly tells the crowd. “So a cou­ple years ago we real­ly start­ed this thing called The Church Finds Its Voice.” He nods. “If y’all have ever seen Chris­t­ian lead­ers on tele­vi­sion, Joan Lindsey’s like­ly trained ’em. She’s a media guru. An expert.”

There is a part of Connelly’s mes­sage, both here and in his social media pres­ence, that will be famil­iar to any­one who has tak­en in a min­i­mum dose of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric. “This is a cru­cial time in our nation’s his­to­ry,” he says, strik­ing the first chord in a well-rehearsed song about the exis­ten­tial neces­si­ty of elec­toral vic­to­ry. “Is this our 1776 moment, or is it 1944?” he says. “I’ve nev­er vot­ed for a pro-death per­son. Nev­er vot­ed for any­body of any stripe that was OK with killing a baby in a mommy’s tum­my.” In Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist cir­cles today, every elec­tion is a con­test against absolute evil, and the con­se­quences of fail­ure almost too dire to imag­ine.

...

The refrain of this famil­iar song con­trasts dire cir­cum­stances in the present with the gold­en age of yore. “This place has been ordained by God,” Con­nel­ly said in a Sep­tem­ber 2020 pod­cast episode, “when the Founders deter­mined that of course they were read­ing the Bible and they were believ­ers of the word of God. And so Amer­i­ca became unique and spe­cial because the Founders under­stood that the found­ing had to tie into God.”

As in most ver­sions of the song, the tran­si­tion from the Chris­t­ian nation myth to rad­i­cal free-mar­ket doc­trine is seam­less. Accord­ing to Con­nel­ly, the sec­ond rea­son for America’s unique­ness and spe­cial­ness “is the free-mar­ket sys­tem, which of course is God’s bib­li­cal econ­o­my.” Next comes the fear and loathing. “There’s a far left now that doesn’t believe in God, they’re god­less com­plete­ly. They believe the state is the supreme being,” Con­nel­ly says on the pod­cast. “It’s actu­al­ly a god­less, com­mu­nis­tic, Marx­ist style of gov­ern­ment.”
...

Fol­low­ing Con­nel­ly at this faith-based ‘get-out-the-vote’ gath­er­ing was Tim Bar­ton, son of key Project Blitz fig­ure David Bar­ton. As we should expect, Tim warned the audi­ence that AP US His­to­ry cours­es are just pro­pa­gan­da designed to obscure the US’s god­ly her­itage. But it’s the Bar­tons’ view on the role of church­es dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War that’s the most notable: they claim the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War was essen­tial­ly fought with church mili­tias. As Bar­ton put it, “Almost every one of these ear­ly bat­tles, it was noth­ing more than pas­tors lead­ing their church­es in the bat­tle”:

...
Fol­low­ing Con­nel­ly at the podi­um is Tim Bar­ton, son of David Bar­ton, founder of the Wall­Builders orga­ni­za­tion and one of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist movement’s most influ­en­tial activists. Wall­Builders presents itself as “ded­i­cat­ed to pre­sent­ing America’s for­got­ten his­to­ry and heroes, with an empha­sis on the moral, reli­gious, and con­sti­tu­tion­al foun­da­tion on which Amer­i­ca was built—a foun­da­tion which, in recent years, has been seri­ous­ly attacked and under­mined.”

In Chan­til­ly, we are told that David Bar­ton has tak­en ill, but his son Tim dis­pos­es him­self in a man­ner that would make his father proud, offer­ing the usu­al litany of Bar­tonesque half-truths and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions of U.S. his­to­ry. America’s Founders were one and all “believ­ers,” accord­ing to Tim Bar­ton, and the Con­sti­tu­tion comes straight from the Bible. And an Advanced Place­ment U.S. his­to­ry course for high school stu­dents, Bar­ton adds for good mea­sure, is just lib­er­al pro­pa­gan­da aim­ing to under­mine America’s god­ly her­itage.

Tim Bar­ton is par­tic­u­lar­ly keen to empha­size a cer­tain, idio­syn­crat­ic aspect of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist mythol­o­gy. His father, David Bar­ton, has long been obsessed with the image of America’s Colo­nial-era priests tear­ing off their robes, becom­ing sol­diers, and lead­ing their con­gre­ga­tions out into mil­i­tary bat­tle. He and Wall­Builders cre­at­ed a group of activist con­ser­v­a­tive cler­gy called the Black Robe Reg­i­ment. “I can go down the list of dozens of pas­tors who led their con­gre­ga­tions to oppose the British because they open fired on us, they declared war on us,” Tim Bar­ton says. Refer­ring to the bat­tles of Lex­ing­ton, Bunker Hill, and Con­cord, he adds, “Almost every one of these ear­ly bat­tles, it was noth­ing more than pas­tors lead­ing their church­es in the bat­tle.”
...

Now, regard­ing the overt mil­i­tarism of some­one like retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin — who infa­mous­ly declared in 2003 that “My God is big­ger than yours” and that the US was in a bat­tle with Satan — try not to be sur­prised to learn that Boykin is also a CNP mem­ber. The CNP clear­ly had zero prob­lems with Boykin­s’s state­ments. Oh, and Tony Perkins is a mem­ber too:

...
The con­cern with mas­cu­line mil­i­tary virtue, though always a part of the move­ment, has become a sig­na­ture fea­ture of the Trump and post-Trump era. For exam­ple, Tony Perkins, head of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, has recent­ly formed a part­ner­ship with retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who for­mer­ly served at the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and has played a role in nur­tur­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist net­works in the mil­i­tary and among “dis­as­ter relief” NGOs abroad. The pair have helped lead a men’s min­istry called Stand Coura­geous to help men “make com­mit­ments that will move men clos­er to God’s good pur­pose and design—men who will Stand Coura­geous!” At Stand Coura­geous gath­er­ings across the coun­try, mas­culin­i­ty, patri­archy, and mil­i­tarism are the name of reli­gion itself. “We need men to be men, tough with com­pas­sion­ate strength, bent toward jus­tice with­out com­pro­mise, lock­ing arms and stand­ing,” the group’s mate­ri­als declare. “We need to be the men God cre­at­ed us to be; war­riors for all that is right, true, and just.”
...

Then there’s the role played direct­ly by reli­gious lead­ers like Greb Lock and Ken Peters at the Capi­tol in the lead up to the insur­rec­tion, rul­ing up the crowd with rev­o­lu­tion­ary rhetoric. Recall how Peters works close­ly with mil­i­tary Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist Matt Shea, who advo­cates for the mass exe­cu­tion of all non-Chris­t­ian adult males. When Peters was call­ing upon the crowd at the Jan 5 Stop the Steal ral­ly at the Cap­i­tal to resist a left-wing coup, he was speak­ing the lan­guage of mil­i­tant Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism:

...
Trump’s attempt to sub­vert the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege results by incit­ing an attack on the U.S. Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6 at first appeared to ampli­fy the quandary. Right-wing preach­ers, such as Greg Locke and Ken Peters, played a sig­nif­i­cant role in ril­ing up the crowd in the days and hours pre­ced­ing the riot, and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist sym­bol­ism was all over the event. Move­ment lead­ers now had to decide whether their cause would get behind an armed attempt to over­throw the U.S. gov­ern­ment.
...

The final speak­er at this even was for­mer deputy press sec­re­tary in the Trump White House Hogan Gid­ley, who exem­pli­fied one of the core strate­gies of this move­ment. A strat­e­gy that exem­pli­fies just how bad-faithed it all ulti­mate­ly is: con­scious lying in order to pre­serve a nar­ra­tive. Just end­less­ly repeat­ing what they know to be the oppo­site of real­i­ty. A cyn­i­cal cun­ning strat­e­gy used by peo­ple who real­ize they are deceiv­ing their audi­ence and sim­ply don’t care about the ethics of it. And all done under the aus­pices of a moral cru­sade to renew the coun­try. It’s gross:

...
Hogan Gid­ley, who worked as the deputy press sec­re­tary in the Trump White House and is rep­re­sent­ed as an “elec­tions expert,” is the final fea­tured speak­er of today’s pre­sen­ta­tion. It is his pres­ence on the agen­da that brings the sub­text of the meet­ing out into the open. “The Cen­ter for Elec­tion Integri­ty that Chad men­tioned, it’s non­par­ti­san,” Gid­ley announces. Then he prompt­ly offers the kind of mis­in­for­ma­tion that pass­es for wis­dom in the Trump­ist incar­na­tion of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. “You saw the stuff in Ari­zona, you’re going to see more stuff in Wis­con­sin; these are sig­nif­i­cant issues, and they can’t be dis­missed out of hand any­more, the facts are too glar­ing,” he says.

Remark­ably, he is refer­ring to the cir­cus­like, GOP-backed audit of votes in Arizona’s largest coun­ty, which, after dis­cred­it­ing itself with its bizarre antics, man­aged only to con­firm that Biden won Ari­zona by more votes than pre­vi­ous­ly thought. But the nar­ra­tive of per­se­cu­tion is too valu­able in acti­vat­ing the base to dis­card sim­ply because it’s not true. “Any office­hold­er who allows it to hap­pen should be held account­able, not to men­tion the fact that if we find some­one com­mit­ting fraud, they’ve bro­ken the law, and they have to face a penal­ty as well,” says Gid­ley. In time, he launch­es into a well-worn con­spir­a­cy about the so-called ceme­tery vote. He says: “About two mil­lion dead peo­ple are list­ed on vot­er rolls right now.... We saw some­thing new in this last elec­tion. Dead peo­ple didn’t just vote. They request­ed mail-in bal­lots, filled them out, and some­how got them into the drop box.”

...

There are of course many over­lap­ping expla­na­tions for the recent trans­for­ma­tion of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal life. But the one that remains under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed in the present moment is the role of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment in estab­lish­ing the nec­es­sary pre­con­di­tions for the kind of coup that Trump attempt­ed.

The essen­tial precondition—more impor­tant than mon­ey, more impor­tant than media, more impor­tant even than will­ing liars in high pub­lic office—is the exis­tence of a sub­stan­tial base of sup­port­ers primed to embrace a big lie. With­out lead­ers’ coor­di­nat­ed efforts to indoc­tri­nate such a base, no lie can take hold. To cre­ate such a base, four key steps are nec­es­sary.

Step one is to build an infor­ma­tion bub­ble with­in which the base may be main­tained in a state of fact-denial. Much atten­tion has cor­rect­ly been placed on right-wing media in cre­at­ing such a safe space for con­ser­v­a­tives, but not enough atten­tion has been paid to the con­ser­v­a­tive net­works that sup­ply the back­bone of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment. Orga­ni­za­tions like Faith Wins aim at pas­tors because they know that, for their tar­get vot­ers, pas­tors and reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties are often the most trust­ed sources of infor­ma­tion.

Step two is that this base must be con­di­tioned to expect an immi­nent, cat­a­clysmic event that will threat­en every­thing it val­ues. The apoc­a­lyp­ti­cism and the per­se­cu­tion com­plex of the move­ment are per­fect­ly suit­ed to the task.

A third step is to trans­fer the per­ceived source of polit­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy from demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es like elec­tions to “high­er” author­i­ties that alleged­ly rep­re­sent the “true” spir­it of the nation. This of course is the device through which a minor­i­ty of the coun­try can come to believe that it has a prov­i­den­tial role in rul­ing the whole. As Steve Ban­non said at a ral­ly in sup­port of Glenn Young­kin, which was held on Octo­ber 13 in Rich­mond, Vir­ginia, “We’re putting togeth­er a coali­tion that’s gonna gov­ern for 100 years.”

The final step is to do what Trump did start­ing in 2019: under­mine at every oppor­tu­ni­ty pub­lic con­fi­dence in the results of the next elec­tion. In a sense, the coup attempt began on nation­al tele­vi­sion dur­ing the first pres­i­den­tial debate, when Trump made clear that he would not accept the results of the elec­tion if he lost. At Bannon’s ral­ly for Youngkin, Trump called in and said, “We won in 2016. We won in 2020—the most cor­rupt elec­tion in the his­to­ry of our coun­try, prob­a­bly one of the most cor­rupt any­where. But we’re gonna win it again.”
...

Democ­ra­cy in the US is being buried by a ‘faith-based’ move­ment led by peo­ple of pro­found­ly bad faith who have zero appar­ent prob­lem with com­plete­ly lying to their flock. It’s the kind of sit­u­a­tion that rais­es the implic­it ques­tion of whether or not there’s any line they would­n’t cross. After all, we’re wit­ness­es an onslaught of lies by a mil­i­tant move­ment ded­i­cat­ed to cap­tur­ing democ­ra­cy and replac­ing it with a theoc­ra­cy. Are there any lines at all that this move­ment would­n’t cross? It’s a hor­rif­ic ques­tion to ask, in part because that is lit­er­al­ly the mir­ror image of the same ques­tion these hor­ri­ble lead­ers are rou­tine­ly ask­ing their audi­ences to ask about the their polit­i­cal oppo­nents, only to fol­low it up with the answer that no, there is noth­ing the god­less athe­ist amoral Marx­ist satan­ic Left would­n’t do. A del­uge of pro­pa­gan­da designed to con­vinced its audi­ence that Chris­tian­i­ty is under assault and on the verge of being extin­guished. This is it. Every Chris­tian’s back is up against the wall in the face of this impend­ing threat. Now is the time to fight or all is lost. Vote Trump 2024. And after you vote, get ready to storm the Capi­tol again to made sure it hap­pens this time. That’s the mes­sage from the nation’s lead­ing crypto­fas­cist net­work of bad-faith ‘faith lead­ers’.

Are the walls final­ly clos­ing in on Don­ald Trump? We’ll see, but it would appear that the walls are at least inch­ing a lit­tle clos­er based on Trump’s open calls for a kind of Amer­i­can Maid­an mass-protest move­ment in cities across the US should he end up fac­ing jail time. And while it’s pos­si­ble that Trump and per­haps even some of the oth­er key mem­bers in his inner cir­cle could face some sort of pun­ish­ment over the role they played in plan­ning and exe­cut­ing a coup attempt, it’s also just a sad real­i­ty that there’s no real­is­tic chance of the broad­er net­work of fig­ures who clear­ly sup­port­ed the insur­rec­tion, and still ratio­nal­ize it to this day, ever fac­ing any real crim­i­nal penal­ties. This is despite the fact that more and more cir­cum­stan­tial flood­ing flesh­ing out the role mem­bers of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) played in ratio­nal­iz­ing and orga­niz­ing the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. In effect, the GOP as a par­ty has endorsed the insur­rec­tion and future ones. But beyond that, the dark mon­ey net­works of super-wealth donors who effec­tive­ly run the GOP appear to have ful­ly jumped on board the insur­rec­tion train. That’s why the sto­ry of the role CNP mem­bers played in the insur­rec­tion is so cru­cial. The insur­rec­tion was a group effort, includ­ing the group of super-wealthy crypto­fas­cists who are pulling all the strings.

So if the US is fac­ing a sit­u­a­tion where there’s no real­is­tic way to pun­ish­ing the pow­er­ful net­work behind the insur­rec­tion, it’s worth keep­ing in mind there’s a very obvi­ous form of pun­ish­ment avail­able: rescind the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts for the super-rich and big cor­po­ra­tions. After all, those tax cuts were the one sig­na­ture leg­isla­tive accom­plish­ment dur­ing Trump’s four years in office. An accom­plish­ment that helped almost no one in the long run oth­er than oli­garchs.

And that brings us to an inter­est­ing report out of the Guardian from back in Octo­ber about a cer­tain top­ic the CNP had start­ed brag­ging about in recent years: sell­ing Trump on the tax cuts. That was one of the mes­sages deliv­ered dur­ing a Feb 2019 CNP con­fer­ence dur­ing a pan­el dis­cus­sion that includ­ed CNP mem­bers Bill Wal­ton (the CNP pres­i­dent) and Trump’s eco­nom­ic advi­sor Stephen Moore.

Recall how Moore was open­ly brag­ging back in 2017 about how the tax cut was designed to specif­i­cal­ly harm Demo­c­rat-lean­ing ‘Blue’ states. “It’s death to Democrats...They go after state and local tax­es, which weak­ens pub­lic employ­ee unions. They go after uni­ver­si­ty endow­ments, and uni­ver­si­ties have become play pens of the left. And get­ting rid of the man­date is to even­tu­al­ly dis­man­tle Oba­macare,” Moore said in an inter­view, argu­ing that it would accel­er­ate “a death spi­ral” in the Oba­macare state mar­ket­places.

Also recall how it was Moore who pub­licly came to Trump’s defense fol­low­ing reports describ­ing how Trump did­n’t per­son­al­ly care at all that his tax cut was trig­ger­ing explod­ing deficits because “I won’t be here” when it blows up. And as we saw, while anony­mous sources inside the White House were leak­ing to reporters their con­cerns that Trump had aban­doned the tra­di­tion­al Repub­li­can stance of fret­ting about explod­ing deficits as an excuse for cut­ting spend­ing, there was one notable defend­er in the White House of Trump’s approach of allow­ing deficits to explode with­out fear: Stephen Moore, who coun­tered Trump’s crit­ics at the time by argu­ing high eco­nom­ic growth would alle­vi­ate the deficit prob­lems over time. It was a clas­sic cyn­i­cal sup­ply-side argu­ment that tax-cuts always grow the econ­o­my.

Accord­ing to Moore, it was he and Lar­ry Kud­low who con­vinced Trump to imple­ment the tax cut. These are the kinds of acco­lades the CNP gives itself dur­ing these secret meet­ings. And that’s why it’s worth keep­ing in mind that while direct pun­ish­ment of the CNP’s role in the insur­rec­tion is prob­a­bly not real­is­tic, there’s a very viable form of pun­ish­ment that’s just sit­ting there ready to go: reverse the CNP-engi­neered 2017 tax cuts for the super-rich and large cor­po­ra­tions:

The Guardian

How a secre­tive con­ser­v­a­tive group influ­enced ‘pop­ulist’ Trump’s tax cuts

Record­ings from a 2019 pan­el dis­cus­sion of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy reveal tax cuts were sparked by per­son­al con­ver­sa­tions

Jason Wil­son
Mon 25 Oct 2021 03.01 EDT

Doc­u­ments and record­ings obtained by the Guardian shed new light on a pow­er­ful and secre­tive rightwing net­work and the influ­ence it was able to exert on Trump admin­is­tra­tion poli­cies favor­ing the super-rich.

The record­ings include speech­es giv­en to the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) by con­ser­v­a­tive media stars includ­ing Den­nis Prager, emerg­ing Repub­li­can pow­er play­ers such as Char­lie Kirk, and close eco­nom­ic advis­ers to Don­ald Trump.

Some of the pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished record­ings appear to no longer be pub­licly avail­able.

The Guardian’s inde­pen­dent­ly sourced record­ings offer an insight into how con­ser­v­a­tive eco­nom­ic thinkers – from bod­ies rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of some of the rich­est indi­vid­u­als in the coun­try – were able to exert influ­ence on the sup­posed pop­ulist Trump.

In par­tic­u­lar, a pan­el dis­cus­sion at CNP’s Feb­ru­ary 2019 meet­ing sug­gests that Trump decid­ed one of his most far-reach­ing eco­nom­ic poli­cies on very lim­it­ed evi­dence – on the basis of a per­son­al con­ver­sa­tion.

The pan­el involved Bill Wal­ton, pres­i­dent of CNP; the Wash­ing­ton Times colum­nist and for­mer mem­ber of the Cay­man Islands Mon­e­tary Author­i­ty Richard Rahn; Jonathan Williams, chief econ­o­mist at the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (Alec); and Stephen Moore, a one-time Trump nom­i­nee for the Fed­er­al Reserve board, whose nom­i­na­tion was with­drawn fol­low­ing rev­e­la­tions in the Guardian that he had failed to pay his ex-wife hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars in alimo­ny.

The pan­elists offered a favor­able assess­ment of the Trump administration’s eco­nom­ic per­for­mance, but also used the plat­form to claim cred­it for push­ing the admin­is­tra­tion in the direc­tion of rad­i­cal free-mar­ket poli­cies.

Moore claimed that he, togeth­er with Lar­ry Kud­low, Trump’s direc­tor of the Nation­al Eco­nom­ic Coun­cil from 2018, had per­suad­ed the then­pres­i­dent to offer unprece­dent­ed cor­po­rate tax cuts.

He described a meet­ing with Trump where they argued that the US’s cor­po­rate tax rate, rel­a­tive to those among cer­tain Asian and Euro­pean com­peti­tors, was effec­tive­ly a penal­ty on US com­pa­nies, stat­ing: “Look, you know, we’re at 40% – they are 20%. This is a big prob­lem.”

Moore said that they explained these tax dif­fer­ences using charts, “because Don­ald Trump likes to look at pic­tures, he doesn’t like to read”.

Accord­ing to Moore: “Trump looked at this and he said: ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” instead propos­ing “not 20%. I want 15%,” with the num­ber com­ing back to an effec­tive 20% rate only after Sen­ate nego­ti­a­tions.

Trump’s tax cuts slashed effec­tive cor­po­rate tax rates in half, while pro­vid­ing oth­er mea­sures ben­e­fit­ing wealthy cor­po­ra­tions.

The cuts have been blamed for widen­ing inequal­i­ty, and wors­en­ing deficits, with a large amount of the sav­ings going to stock buy­backs, accord­ing to busi­ness reporters and econ­o­mists. The Con­gres­sion­al Research Ser­vice point­ed out that any pos­i­tive effects, like wage or GDP growth, were tran­sient, and had petered out by the end of the quar­ter in which the cuts were put into effect.

This reveals the pow­er of the CNP, a lit­tle known body whose mem­bers are deeply secre­tive about their meet­ings. CNP atten­dees’ access to this pic­ture of the inner work­ings of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, and the play­ers who helped set its course, is the result of adher­ence to a strict code of silence.

In intro­duc­ing the pan­el, the CNP con­fer­ence director,Mary Mar­garet Hath­away, enjoined par­tic­i­pants to secre­cy, remind­ing them to “not record any speak­er remarks”.

Hath­away con­tin­ued: “CNP meet­ings are off-lim­its to the press. So please be aware of who you’re talk­ing to.”

She added, “Don’t grant any inter­views and if you run into a reporter ask­ing ques­tions about the event, please let a mem­ber of the CNP staff or lead­er­ship team know.”

Despite her warn­ings, the orga­ni­za­tion itself made the record­ings obtained by the Guardian, and uploaded them on their web­site in a man­ner that made them acces­si­ble to any inter­net user.

Oth­er record­ings obtained by the Guardian include talks at 2018 and 2019 meet­ings by senior Repub­li­cans includ­ing Sen­a­tor Tom Cot­ton and the US con­gress­man Steve Scalise; and for­mer gov­er­nors includ­ing Scott Walk­er and Sam Brown­back.

...

————-

“How a secre­tive con­ser­v­a­tive group influ­enced ‘pop­ulist’ Trump’s tax cuts” by Jason Wil­son; The Guardian; 10/25/2021

“The cuts have been blamed for widen­ing inequal­i­ty, and wors­en­ing deficits, with a large amount of the sav­ings going to stock buy­backs, accord­ing to busi­ness reporters and econ­o­mists. The Con­gres­sion­al Research Ser­vice point­ed out that any pos­i­tive effects, like wage or GDP growth, were tran­sient, and had petered out by the end of the quar­ter in which the cuts were put into effect.”

The 2017 GOP tax law is already a dis­as­ter. An imme­di­ate fis­cal pop fol­lowed by years grow­ing deficits. Any pos­i­tive effects felt by the gen­er­al pub­lic have already been spent. It’s like planned nation­al divest­ment for the exclu­sive ben­e­fit of the inter­na­tion­al investor class.

And while Trump him­self is typ­i­cal­ly giv­en the cred­it for the bill, it was CNP mem­bers who appar­ent­ly shep­herd­ed the bill through the Trump White House. At least those were the claims made at the CNP’s Feb­ru­ary 2019 meet­ing dur­ing a pan­el that includ­ed CNP pres­i­dent Bill Wal­ton and CNP mem­ber Stephen Moore. Moore in par­tic­u­lar seemed to take per­son­al cred­it, along­side Lar­ry Kud­low, for guid­ing Trump down the path of extreme cuts:

...
In par­tic­u­lar, a pan­el dis­cus­sion at CNP’s Feb­ru­ary 2019 meet­ing sug­gests that Trump decid­ed one of his most far-reach­ing eco­nom­ic poli­cies on very lim­it­ed evi­dence – on the basis of a per­son­al con­ver­sa­tion.

The pan­el involved Bill Wal­ton, pres­i­dent of CNP; the Wash­ing­ton Times colum­nist and for­mer mem­ber of the Cay­man Islands Mon­e­tary Author­i­ty Richard Rahn; Jonathan Williams, chief econ­o­mist at the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (Alec); and Stephen Moore, a one-time Trump nom­i­nee for the Fed­er­al Reserve board, whose nom­i­na­tion was with­drawn fol­low­ing rev­e­la­tions in the Guardian that he had failed to pay his ex-wife hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars in alimo­ny.

...

The pan­elists offered a favor­able assess­ment of the Trump administration’s eco­nom­ic per­for­mance, but also used the plat­form to claim cred­it for push­ing the admin­is­tra­tion in the direc­tion of rad­i­cal free-mar­ket poli­cies.

Moore claimed that he, togeth­er with Lar­ry Kud­low, Trump’s direc­tor of the Nation­al Eco­nom­ic Coun­cil from 2018, had per­suad­ed the then­pres­i­dent to offer unprece­dent­ed cor­po­rate tax cuts.

He described a meet­ing with Trump where they argued that the US’s cor­po­rate tax rate, rel­a­tive to those among cer­tain Asian and Euro­pean com­peti­tors, was effec­tive­ly a penal­ty on US com­pa­nies, stat­ing: “Look, you know, we’re at 40% – they are 20%. This is a big prob­lem.”

Moore said that they explained these tax dif­fer­ences using charts, “because Don­ald Trump likes to look at pic­tures, he doesn’t like to read”.

Accord­ing to Moore: “Trump looked at this and he said: ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” instead propos­ing “not 20%. I want 15%,” with the num­ber com­ing back to an effec­tive 20% rate only after Sen­ate nego­ti­a­tions.
...

Now, it’s pret­ty obvi­ous that Moore and Kud­low can’t take all the cred­it here. Trump was going to pass a mas­sive tax cut one way or anoth­er. But there’s also no ques­tion Moore and Kud­low were in two of the best seats for influ­enc­ing the par­tic­u­lars of the bill. Would Trump have inten­tion­al­ly craft­ed a tax bill that pun­ished ‘Blue’ states if Moore had­n’t been push­ing for exact­ly that strat­e­gy? We don’t know, but it’s hard to imag­ine Moore was­n’t effec­tive­ly telling Trump what the bill should look like. It’s not like Trump, a man who does­n’t like the read, was going to design that pol­i­cy on his own

Also note that, while Lar­ry Kud­low may not appear on the leak CNP mem­ber lists, Kud­low appears to be a mem­ber of Opus Dei, along with fig­ures like Newt Gin­grich and Sam Brown­back. Also recall how Brown­back him­self is also a mem­ber of ‘The Fam­i­ly’, which itself is like the par­ent christo­fas­cist cryp­to-polit­i­cal enti­ty for the CNP.

It’s all one big over­lap­ping net­work. A net­work ded­i­cat­ed to seiz­ing polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic pow­er through any means nec­es­sary, from bud­get-bust­ing tax cuts to insur­rec­tions. And as of now, this net­work is still enjoy­ing its made-to-order tax cut and is pret­ty much the only part of soci­ety still ben­e­fit­ing from it. A tax-cut that was essen­tial­ly designed to fun­nel near­ly all of the ben­e­fits towards a high­ly tar­get­ed, and tiny, audi­ence. A tiny audi­ence who pro­ceed­ed to orga­nize a coup attempt. A while the coup attempt did­n’t work, that tax bill is still very much in effect. Per­haps a high­ly tar­get­ed “insur­rec­tion tax” could help rec­ti­fy the sit­u­a­tion.

Input the words “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” into a news search engine these days and it’s as if there’s a rag­ing pan­dem­ic of CRT threat­en­ing chil­dren across the US:

* Feb 9, 2022: “Edu­ca­tion com­mit­tee votes to lim­it crit­i­cal race the­o­ry instruc­tion in South Dako­ta’s pub­lic schools”

* Feb 11, 2022: “New doc­u­men­tary says crit­i­cal race the­o­ry is in Utah Schools”

* Feb 11, 2022: “Fam­i­ly that sued East Penn schools over lessons on white priv­i­lege, sys­temic racism, Black Lives Mat­ter could get $45,000 under set­tle­ment”

* Feb 13, 2022: “Ken­tucky law­mak­ers again take aim at ‘crit­i­cal race the­o­ry’ in new omnibus bill”

It’s the kind of pan­dem­ic that def­i­nite­ly isn’t get­ting addressed with a vac­cine. So with this pan­dem­ic rag­ing with no end in sight, here’s a reminder that the entire “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” freak­out real­ly was a man­u­fac­tured cri­sis. A joint pro­duc­tion by the Koch net­work and the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP). A coor­di­nat­ed effort start­ed seem­ing­ly out of nowhere in ear­ly 2021, right when the GOP des­per­ate­ly need­ed to move the nation­al con­ver­sa­tion away from the GOP’s sup­port for the Jan 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. It was a group effort. The kind of group effort that demon­strat­ed once again how these influ­ence net­work have the pow­er to effec­tive­ly cre­ate a cri­sis at will, effec­tive­ly in secret, and with vir­tu­al­ly no con­se­quences to this net­work:

The Wash­ing­ton Spec­ta­tor

Reli­gious Right Fuels Nation­al Attack On School Boards, Exploit­ing Parental Frus­tra­tion Over Covid Restraints

by Anne Nel­son
Nov 23, 2021

One of the few ques­tions that Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans can agree upon is the school board controversy’s out­sized role in the Repub­li­can vic­to­ry in Virginia’s recent guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion. Although much of the press cov­er­age sug­gest­ed that the protests involved a “grass­roots” move­ment, they have actu­al­ly includ­ed an elab­o­rate­ly orches­trat­ed oper­a­tion to exploit par­ents who are stressed by school dis­rup­tion and Covid-19 fatigue. Vir­ginia may have served as the lab­o­ra­to­ry for the project, but sim­i­lar efforts it will be vis­i­ble all over the elec­toral map in the peri­od lead­ing up to the 2022 midterms.

For many, the project first came to light last April, when a par­ent named Asra Nomani pub­lished a scathing cri­tique of her child’s school, the Thomas Jef­fer­son High School for Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy in Fair­fax Coun­ty, Vir­ginia. The arti­cle was pub­lished in The Fed­er­al­ist (a right-wing plat­form that has been sus­pend­ed from Twit­ter in the past for pub­lish­ing harm­ful Covid dis­in­for­ma­tion). Nomani, a for­mer Wall Street Jour­nal reporter, direct­ed her rage at a class­room screen­ing of Ava du Vernay’s award-win­ning Net­flix doc­u­men­tary, 13th, and the lesson’s cau­tion, “Racism is not a con­cept of the past.” Two days lat­er, Nomani’s sto­ry made Fox News, where the reporter added that the Jef­fer­son stu­dents were being “indoc­tri­nat­ed with crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.”

The sit­u­a­tion quick­ly mush­roomed. In June, a Jef­fer­son par­ent (name with­held for secu­ri­ty con­cerns), told the Spec­ta­tor, “Our PTA is col­laps­ing under pres­sure of hav­ing two inter­nal, high­ly polit­i­cal groups try­ing to do a hos­tile takeover.” The par­ents asso­ci­a­tion in their for­mer­ly polite sub­urb was unpre­pared for the tac­tics employed by the two linked edu­ca­tion­al “advo­ca­cy” groups, Coali­tion for TJ, a group of Thomas Jef­fer­son par­ents, and DefendingEd, a group with a nation­al pres­ence. “They call par­ents’ employ­ers and harass the employ­ers and par­ents. There are inci­dents where peo­ple who seem to have been rad­i­cal­ized are doing bizarre things.” In sub­ur­ban Vir­ginia, these actions include the van­dal­iza­tion of people’s homes and prop­er­ty.

But the activism of agi­tat­ed par­ents has tran­scend­ed the PTA board­room. On Novem­ber 5, Asra Nomani, billed as the “vice pres­i­dent of strat­e­gy and inves­ti­ga­tions” for DefendingEd, took cred­it in the Fair­fax Times for her organization’s role in Repub­li­can Glenn Youngkin’s vic­to­ry in the Vir­ginia governor’s race. “Lit­tle did Youngkin know but the ground­work for his vic­to­ry was actu­al­ly laid on June 7, 2020, months before he even decid­ed to run for office, with a moth­er who would become one of the many ‘hop­ping mad’ par­ents in a mama and papa bear move­ment that would bring him to office.”

This may have been an exaggeration—but giv­en the 64,000-vote mar­gin in the race, the PTA and school board bat­tles in the Wash­ing­ton sub­urbs made a dif­fer­ence. Fair­fax, with over a mil­lion res­i­dents, is the most pop­u­lous coun­ty in Vir­ginia, while adja­cent Loudoun Coun­ty, at 420,000, is the fourth-most pop­u­lous. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, they are also the homes of many of the con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal strate­gists and oper­a­tives involved in lever­ag­ing the cam­paign.

PTA and school board protests have erupt­ed across the coun­try. In Jef­fer­son Coun­ty, Col­orado, long­time school board mem­bers are sud­den­ly being called Nazis and child abusers. An Illi­nois school board mem­ber resigned after receiv­ing death threats and deposits of dead rodents on her doorstep. The local events are pub­li­cized as protests against mask require­ments and school cur­ric­u­la. But they also have a clear polit­i­cal agen­da: They are play­ing an expand­ing role in elec­toral pol­i­tics, lead­ing into next year’s cru­cial midterm elec­tions.

The web­site for DefendingEd (short­hand for Par­ents Defend­ing Edu­ca­tion) states, “Through net­work and coali­tion build­ing, inves­tiga­tive report­ing, lit­i­ga­tion, and engage­ment on local, state, and nation­al poli­cies, we are fight­ing indoc­tri­na­tion in the class­room.” Despite DefendingEd’s self-descrip­tion as a “nation­al grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion,” it is more accu­rate­ly described as an astro­turf oper­a­tion, orches­trat­ed and coor­di­nat­ed through a web of donors and strate­gists, many of them part­ners, via the reli­gious right, in the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (see Nel­son, Hold­ing Democ­ra­cy in the U. S. Hostage) and asso­ci­at­ed oper­a­tions of the Koch broth­ers’ empire.

These efforts have been woven through the right-wing ecos­phere. As not­ed, Asra Nomani gen­er­at­ed the Fed­er­al­ist and Fox News sto­ries, as well as the sto­ry claim­ing cred­it for the Youngkin vic­to­ry. DefendingEd’s found­ing pres­i­dent, Nicole Neily, came to her office with a long career in Koch-fund­ed oper­a­tions, includ­ing the Cato Insti­tute, the Inde­pen­dent Women’s Forum, Speech First, and the Franklin Cen­ter for Gov­ern­ment and Pub­lic Integri­ty.

Many par­ents and edu­ca­tors have tried in vain to con­test the premise of these attacks by point­ing out that crit­i­cal race the­o­ry—a core com­plaint of the movement—doesn’t even exist at the grade-school lev­el; it has been used as a frame­work for dis­cus­sions about struc­tur­al racism in law school over the past four decades. But the attacks are often root­ed in a time-worn play­book that the rad­i­cal right has used to gen­er­ate use­ful con­tro­ver­sies for decades. The tech­nique involves identifying—and in some cas­es, inventing—an inflam­ma­to­ry term that touch­es a nerve among the tar­get pop­u­la­tion, and pro­vok­ing con­flict through coor­di­nat­ed local orga­niz­ing with media ampli­fi­ca­tion.

The anti-abor­tion cam­paign offers one exam­ple of this. Abor­tion was not a par­tic­u­lar­ly fraught top­ic among Amer­i­can Protes­tants in the 1970s, but a net­work of reli­gious right orga­ni­za­tions con­nect­ed to the CNP dis­cov­ered that coin­ing and pro­mot­ing mis­lead­ing terms about abor­tion could acti­vate their intend­ed audi­ences. “Par­tial-birth abor­tion” and “birth-day abor­tion on demand” were man­u­fac­tured terms that had no mean­ing in med­i­cine or in law but became suc­cess­ful “brands” for per­sua­sion and mobi­liza­tion.

As they absorbed the loss of the 2020 elec­tions, the lead­er­ship of the reli­gious right saw signs they had begun to exhaust the avail­able sup­ply of new con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers in crit­i­cal dis­tricts. Polls also indi­cat­ed that a cru­cial bloc of swing vot­ers, col­lege-edu­cat­ed white sub­ur­ban women, were increas­ing­ly dis­af­fect­ed with Trump and were often unmoved by the anti-abor­tion mes­sage. But polling also showed that as the Covid-19 epi­dem­ic wore on, these vot­ers were increas­ing­ly anx­ious about their chil­dren, their pub­lic schools, and con­flict­ing pub­lic health poli­cies.

It was time for a new ini­tia­tive. The ques­tion was, what trig­ger­ing con­cept or term could chan­nel these anx­i­eties into a polit­i­cal response?

Par­ents Defend­ing Edu­ca­tion (or DefendingEd) was incor­po­rat­ed in Vir­ginia on Jan­u­ary 21, 2021. Unusu­al for a grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion, it was born ful­ly equipped with a Twit­ter account (Decem­ber 2020) and a Face­book account (Jan­u­ary 2020) and rapid­ly acquired a pub­lic rela­tions firm and a polling firm.

Around the same time, a new offen­sive around crit­i­cal race the­o­ry start­ed to gain trac­tion. On March 15, Christo­pher Rufo, a young polit­i­cal oper­a­tive with the con­ser­v­a­tive Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, post­ed two tweets aligned with pre­vi­ous ini­tia­tives that explained the strat­e­gy to har­ness new votes through mis­lead­ing ter­mi­nol­o­gy. Asra Nomani’s Fed­er­al­ist and Fox News “exposés” fol­lowed a month lat­er.

___

Christo­pher F. Rufo @realchrisrufo

Fol­low @realchrisrufo

We have suc­cess­ful­ly frozen their brand—“critical race theory”—into the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion and are steadi­ly dri­ving up neg­a­tive per­cep­tions. We will even­tu­al­ly turn it tox­ic, as we put all of the var­i­ous cul­tur­al insan­i­ties under that brand cat­e­go­ry.

Christo­pher F. Rufo @realchrisrufo

Fol­low @realchrisrufo

Reply­ing to @realchrisrufo @ConceptualJames

The goal is to have the pub­lic read some­thing crazy in the news­pa­per and imme­di­ate­ly think “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.” We have decod­i­fied the term and will recod­i­fy it to annex the entire range of cul­tur­al con­struc­tions that are unpop­u­lar with Amer­i­cans.

12:17 PM – 15 Mar 2021

___

By mid­sum­mer, the com­bined crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and school board cam­paigns were not only under­way, they were embraced by mul­ti­ple lead­ers and media plat­forms through­out the CNP net­work. A June 15 inves­ti­ga­tion by NBC News described state-lev­el school board ini­tia­tives, quot­ing Karen Eng­land, a mem­ber of the CNP’s board of gov­er­nors.

“This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty for what I feel like I’ve been scream­ing from the rooftops about,” Eng­land told NBC, speak­ing as exec­u­tive direc­tor for Neva­da Fam­i­ly Alliance, known for its efforts to end Drag Queen Sto­ry Hour at local libraries; the group recent­ly pro­posed plac­ing body cam­eras on teach­ers sus­pect­ed of teach­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.

On June 24, Pat Robert­son, a past pres­i­dent of the CNP, fol­lowed suit on his Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Network’s 700 Club, describ­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry as “a mon­strous evil” used by “Com­mu­nists” to “destroy chil­dren.”

The short-term impact of these ini­tia­tives was easy to dis­cern. They attacked the school boards, dis­rupt­ing a foun­da­tion of local demo­c­ra­t­ic prac­tice, and they derailed edu­ca­tors’ efforts to address issues of inequal­i­ty and racism that gained promi­nence in the wake of the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment.

But they also served to orga­nize par­ents into a new polit­i­cal cohort, as evi­denced on June 29 with the stag­ing of a “boot camp” to train par­ents for school board takeovers, held by Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil Action. The pro­gram was led by FRC pres­i­dent Tony Perkins, a stan­dard-bear­er of the reli­gious right and long­time pres­i­dent of the CNP. The train­ing ses­sion fea­tured Eliz­a­beth Schultz—a “senior fel­low” for DefendingEd from Fair­fax Coun­ty who worked under Bet­sy DeVos, the for­mer sec­re­tary of edu­ca­tion in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

On June 30, the FRC web­site post­ed:

Yes­ter­day, FRC Action host­ed a very suc­cess­ful School Board Boot Camp. In response to the repeat­ed requests of part­ners across the coun­try, the four-hour train­ing ses­sion pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion on what you need to know about run­ning for school board or sup­port­ing peo­ple who answer the call to pub­lic ser­vice. At the end of the day, we learned that 97 per­cent of par­tic­i­pants said they would def­i­nite­ly or prob­a­bly rec­om­mend this event to oth­ers, and 66 per­cent said they would def­i­nite­ly be inter­est­ed in one specif­i­cal­ly for their state.

Links between the school board cam­paign and GOP par­ty pol­i­tics became clear­er by the week. August 6 brought a mass email from the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, run by Mor­ton Black­well, a co-founder and exec­u­tive com­mit­tee mem­ber of the CNP. (His group claims to have trained and net­worked over 200,000 con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­dates and elec­tion work­ers in the use of data and polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The Institute’s senior direc­tor Bob Arnakis has claimed cred­it for pop­u­lar­iz­ing the term “par­tial-birth abor­tion.”)

The Lead­er­ship Institute’s email blast pro­mot­ed a series of new train­ing ses­sions, stat­ing, “Con­ser­v­a­tives are prepar­ing a school board takeover and you can get involved. . . . The best way to fight crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and left­ist indoc­tri­na­tion in America’s schools is to elect more school boards across the coun­try.”

...

Oth­er CNP affil­i­ates stepped in. In Octo­ber, Judi­cial Watch, head­ed by Tom Fit­ton, anoth­er mem­ber of the CNP exec­u­tive com­mit­tee, post­ed an attack against a Rhode Island school district’s teacher train­ing mate­ri­als. Judi­cial Watch object­ed to teach­ing the con­cepts of “anti-racism” and “equi­ty” (while acknowl­edg­ing that crit­i­cal race the­o­ry doesn’t appear in grade-school cur­ric­u­la).

As explained a gazil­lion times, you will not find a third-grade book called Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry. Instead, you find the race-focused prin­ci­ples of CRT under oth­er names, such as “antiracism,” “equi­ty,” and “cul­tur­al­ly respon­sive learn­ing.”

* The train­ing course claims that there are “unfor­tu­nate truths” about the his­to­ry of Rhode Island and the Unit­ed States.

(Editor’s note: Rhode Island was a major cen­ter of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and dis­patched some 2,000 voy­ages to enslave Africans.)

Yet anoth­er part­ner in the cam­paign is Turn­ing Point USA, head­ed by CNP mem­ber Char­lie Kirk. In part­ner­ship with the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, TPUSA has cre­at­ed a “School Board Watch­list,” a com­pan­ion site to its McCarthyite “Pro­fes­sor Watch­list.” There it posts cri­tiques of school boards linked to their sup­port for LGBT-friend­ly poli­cies and require­ments for vac­cines and mask­ing. Notably, TPUSA posts the names and pic­tures of school board mem­bers in dis­tricts where threats and harass­ment are mount­ing. Fair­fax Coun­ty is promi­nent­ly list­ed; so are Nor­man, Okla­homa; Lin­coln, Nebras­ka; and scores of oth­er com­mu­ni­ties. Like the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute and the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil ini­tia­tives, TPUSA’s school board cam­paign includes a fundrais­ing func­tion on its web­site.

Hard­wired into the school board cam­paigns are the stan­dard ele­ments of the strat­e­gy: mon­ey, media, and a secret hub to coor­di­nate efforts to dis­rupt Amer­i­can pol­i­tics on both a nation­al and a local lev­el. To be sure, Par­ents Defend­ing Edu­ca­tion is only one of sev­er­al major orga­ni­za­tions in the field, and the CNP is only one of the coor­di­nat­ing bod­ies. Defin­ing the broad­er field won’t be easy; giv­en the role of dark mon­ey and the snail’s pace of tax and fed­er­al elec­tion fil­ings, the threads con­nect­ing their financ­ing, data, and polit­i­cal engage­ment will take months, if not years, to trace. But all indi­ca­tions are that these efforts are direct­ed at the 2022 midterms, and they are well under­way now.

————

“Reli­gious Right Fuels Nation­al Attack On School Boards, Exploit­ing Parental Frus­tra­tion Over Covid Restraints” by Anne Nel­son; The Wash­ing­ton Spec­ta­tor; 11/23/2021

“PTA and school board protests have erupt­ed across the coun­try. In Jef­fer­son Coun­ty, Col­orado, long­time school board mem­bers are sud­den­ly being called Nazis and child abusers. An Illi­nois school board mem­ber resigned after receiv­ing death threats and deposits of dead rodents on her doorstep. The local events are pub­li­cized as protests against mask require­ments and school cur­ric­u­la. But they also have a clear polit­i­cal agen­da: They are play­ing an expand­ing role in elec­toral pol­i­tics, lead­ing into next year’s cru­cial midterm elec­tions.”

It’s quite of remark­able coin­ci­dence how school boards all around the US were sud­den­ly inun­dat­ed with parental com­plaints about ‘crit­i­cal race the­o­ry’ in ear­ly 2021. It was out of the blue. Like some­one flipped a switch. But of course it was­n’t just a big coin­ci­dence. It was a pro­duc­tion of the Koch net­work and the CNP. It seem­ing­ly start­ed in April 2021 when Asra Nomani, a Vir­ginia par­ent, pub­lished a scathing cri­tique describ­ing how her child was being “indoc­tri­nat­ed with crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.” Soon after, two ‘par­ent advo­ca­cy’ groups descend­ed on the school dis­trict. One group, “Coali­tion for TJ” appears to be a local group. But then there’s the oth­er group, DefendingEd. And not only is DefendingEd a prod­uct of the CNP and Koch net­works, but it turns out Nomani her­self served as DefendingEd’s “vice pres­i­dent of strat­e­gy and inves­ti­ga­tion”. This was a CNP/Koch oper­a­tion from the out­set:

...
For many, the project first came to light last April, when a par­ent named Asra Nomani pub­lished a scathing cri­tique of her child’s school, the Thomas Jef­fer­son High School for Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy in Fair­fax Coun­ty, Vir­ginia. The arti­cle was pub­lished in The Fed­er­al­ist (a right-wing plat­form that has been sus­pend­ed from Twit­ter in the past for pub­lish­ing harm­ful Covid dis­in­for­ma­tion). Nomani, a for­mer Wall Street Jour­nal reporter, direct­ed her rage at a class­room screen­ing of Ava du Vernay’s award-win­ning Net­flix doc­u­men­tary, 13th, and the lesson’s cau­tion, “Racism is not a con­cept of the past.” Two days lat­er, Nomani’s sto­ry made Fox News, where the reporter added that the Jef­fer­son stu­dents were being “indoc­tri­nat­ed with crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.”

The sit­u­a­tion quick­ly mush­roomed. In June, a Jef­fer­son par­ent (name with­held for secu­ri­ty con­cerns), told the Spec­ta­tor, “Our PTA is col­laps­ing under pres­sure of hav­ing two inter­nal, high­ly polit­i­cal groups try­ing to do a hos­tile takeover.” The par­ents asso­ci­a­tion in their for­mer­ly polite sub­urb was unpre­pared for the tac­tics employed by the two linked edu­ca­tion­al “advo­ca­cy” groups, Coali­tion for TJ, a group of Thomas Jef­fer­son par­ents, and DefendingEd, a group with a nation­al pres­ence. “They call par­ents’ employ­ers and harass the employ­ers and par­ents. There are inci­dents where peo­ple who seem to have been rad­i­cal­ized are doing bizarre things.” In sub­ur­ban Vir­ginia, these actions include the van­dal­iza­tion of people’s homes and prop­er­ty.

But the activism of agi­tat­ed par­ents has tran­scend­ed the PTA board­room. On Novem­ber 5, Asra Nomani, billed as the “vice pres­i­dent of strat­e­gy and inves­ti­ga­tions” for DefendingEd, took cred­it in the Fair­fax Times for her organization’s role in Repub­li­can Glenn Youngkin’s vic­to­ry in the Vir­ginia governor’s race. “Lit­tle did Youngkin know but the ground­work for his vic­to­ry was actu­al­ly laid on June 7, 2020, months before he even decid­ed to run for office, with a moth­er who would become one of the many ‘hop­ping mad’ par­ents in a mama and papa bear move­ment that would bring him to office.”

This may have been an exaggeration—but giv­en the 64,000-vote mar­gin in the race, the PTA and school board bat­tles in the Wash­ing­ton sub­urbs made a dif­fer­ence. Fair­fax, with over a mil­lion res­i­dents, is the most pop­u­lous coun­ty in Vir­ginia, while adja­cent Loudoun Coun­ty, at 420,000, is the fourth-most pop­u­lous. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, they are also the homes of many of the con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal strate­gists and oper­a­tives involved in lever­ag­ing the cam­paign.

...

The web­site for DefendingEd (short­hand for Par­ents Defend­ing Edu­ca­tion) states, “Through net­work and coali­tion build­ing, inves­tiga­tive report­ing, lit­i­ga­tion, and engage­ment on local, state, and nation­al poli­cies, we are fight­ing indoc­tri­na­tion in the class­room.” Despite DefendingEd’s self-descrip­tion as a “nation­al grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion,” it is more accu­rate­ly described as an astro­turf oper­a­tion, orches­trat­ed and coor­di­nat­ed through a web of donors and strate­gists, many of them part­ners, via the reli­gious right, in the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (see Nel­son, Hold­ing Democ­ra­cy in the U. S. Hostage) and asso­ci­at­ed oper­a­tions of the Koch broth­ers’ empire.

These efforts have been woven through the right-wing ecos­phere. As not­ed, Asra Nomani gen­er­at­ed the Fed­er­al­ist and Fox News sto­ries, as well as the sto­ry claim­ing cred­it for the Youngkin vic­to­ry. DefendingEd’s found­ing pres­i­dent, Nicole Neily, came to her office with a long career in Koch-fund­ed oper­a­tions, includ­ing the Cato Insti­tute, the Inde­pen­dent Women’s Forum, Speech First, and the Franklin Cen­ter for Gov­ern­ment and Pub­lic Integri­ty.
...

Recall how an analy­sis of the emer­gence of “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” as a hot top­ic on the right in 2021 found it was a net­work of Koch-financed groups that appears to all sud­den­ly start push­ing CRT seem­ing­ly simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. It’s a man­u­fac­tured ‘cri­sis’ brought to us by the CNP and the Koch net­work:

...
Par­ents Defend­ing Edu­ca­tion (or DefendingEd) was incor­po­rat­ed in Vir­ginia on Jan­u­ary 21, 2021. Unusu­al for a grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion, it was born ful­ly equipped with a Twit­ter account (Decem­ber 2020) and a Face­book account (Jan­u­ary 2020) and rapid­ly acquired a pub­lic rela­tions firm and a polling firm.

Around the same time, a new offen­sive around crit­i­cal race the­o­ry start­ed to gain trac­tion. On March 15, Christo­pher Rufo, a young polit­i­cal oper­a­tive with the con­ser­v­a­tive Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, post­ed two tweets aligned with pre­vi­ous ini­tia­tives that explained the strat­e­gy to har­ness new votes through mis­lead­ing ter­mi­nol­o­gy. Asra Nomani’s Fed­er­al­ist and Fox News “exposés” fol­lowed a month lat­er.

...

By mid­sum­mer, the com­bined crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and school board cam­paigns were not only under­way, they were embraced by mul­ti­ple lead­ers and media plat­forms through­out the CNP net­work. A June 15 inves­ti­ga­tion by NBC News described state-lev­el school board ini­tia­tives, quot­ing Karen Eng­land, a mem­ber of the CNP’s board of gov­er­nors.

...

On June 24, Pat Robert­son, a past pres­i­dent of the CNP, fol­lowed suit on his Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Network’s 700 Club, describ­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry as “a mon­strous evil” used by “Com­mu­nists” to “destroy chil­dren.”

...

But they also served to orga­nize par­ents into a new polit­i­cal cohort, as evi­denced on June 29 with the stag­ing of a “boot camp” to train par­ents for school board takeovers, held by Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil Action. The pro­gram was led by FRC pres­i­dent Tony Perkins, a stan­dard-bear­er of the reli­gious right and long­time pres­i­dent of the CNP. The train­ing ses­sion fea­tured Eliz­a­beth Schultz—a “senior fel­low” for DefendingEd from Fair­fax Coun­ty who worked under Bet­sy DeVos, the for­mer sec­re­tary of edu­ca­tion in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

...

Links between the school board cam­paign and GOP par­ty pol­i­tics became clear­er by the week. August 6 brought a mass email from the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, run by Mor­ton Black­well, a co-founder and exec­u­tive com­mit­tee mem­ber of the CNP. (His group claims to have trained and net­worked over 200,000 con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­dates and elec­tion work­ers in the use of data and polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The Institute’s senior direc­tor Bob Arnakis has claimed cred­it for pop­u­lar­iz­ing the term “par­tial-birth abor­tion.”)

...

Oth­er CNP affil­i­ates stepped in. In Octo­ber, Judi­cial Watch, head­ed by Tom Fit­ton, anoth­er mem­ber of the CNP exec­u­tive com­mit­tee, post­ed an attack against a Rhode Island school district’s teacher train­ing mate­ri­als. Judi­cial Watch object­ed to teach­ing the con­cepts of “anti-racism” and “equi­ty” (while acknowl­edg­ing that crit­i­cal race the­o­ry doesn’t appear in grade-school cur­ric­u­la).

...

Yet anoth­er part­ner in the cam­paign is Turn­ing Point USA, head­ed by CNP mem­ber Char­lie Kirk. In part­ner­ship with the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute, TPUSA has cre­at­ed a “School Board Watch­list,” a com­pan­ion site to its McCarthyite “Pro­fes­sor Watch­list.” There it posts cri­tiques of school boards linked to their sup­port for LGBT-friend­ly poli­cies and require­ments for vac­cines and mask­ing. Notably, TPUSA posts the names and pic­tures of school board mem­bers in dis­tricts where threats and harass­ment are mount­ing. Fair­fax Coun­ty is promi­nent­ly list­ed; so are Nor­man, Okla­homa; Lin­coln, Nebras­ka; and scores of oth­er com­mu­ni­ties. Like the Lead­er­ship Insti­tute and the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil ini­tia­tives, TPUSA’s school board cam­paign includes a fundrais­ing func­tion on its web­site.
...

And as the arti­cle points out, this is kind of orga­nized sus­tained propaganda/gaslighting is a tem­plate of action this net­work is extreme­ly famil­iar with. The decades-long fix­a­tion on abor­tion in the US was in many respects the result of the wild suc­cess of the far right’s abil­i­ty to warp the abor­tion debate into a wedge issue between good and evil:

...
Many par­ents and edu­ca­tors have tried in vain to con­test the premise of these attacks by point­ing out that crit­i­cal race the­o­ry—a core com­plaint of the movement—doesn’t even exist at the grade-school lev­el; it has been used as a frame­work for dis­cus­sions about struc­tur­al racism in law school over the past four decades. But the attacks are often root­ed in a time-worn play­book that the rad­i­cal right has used to gen­er­ate use­ful con­tro­ver­sies for decades. The tech­nique involves identifying—and in some cas­es, inventing—an inflam­ma­to­ry term that touch­es a nerve among the tar­get pop­u­la­tion, and pro­vok­ing con­flict through coor­di­nat­ed local orga­niz­ing with media amplification.</i

The anti-abor­tion cam­paign offers one exam­ple of this. Abor­tion was not a par­tic­u­lar­ly fraught top­ic among Amer­i­can Protes­tants in the 1970s, but a net­work of reli­gious right orga­ni­za­tions con­nect­ed to the CNP dis­cov­ered that coin­ing and pro­mot­ing mis­lead­ing terms about abor­tion could acti­vate their intend­ed audi­ences. “Par­tial-birth abor­tion” and “birth-day abor­tion on demand” were man­u­fac­tured terms that had no mean­ing in med­i­cine or in law but became suc­cess­ful “brands” for per­sua­sion and mobi­liza­tion.
...

And as the GOP has made clear, the man­u­fac­tured hys­te­ria of CNP isn’t going to be lim­it­ed to Vir­ginia. Fol­low­ing Glenn Youngk­in’s guber­na­to­r­i­al vic­to­ry this has become a nation­al gaslight­ing effort. In oth­er words, some­times the term ‘out­side agi­ta­tors’ is actu­al­ly an appro­pri­ate term. Not usu­al­ly, but some­times.

What exact­ly was the CNP’s “not so secret weapon” up to in the months lead­ing up to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion? It’s a ques­tion that has long loomed in the back­ground of the inves­ti­ga­tion that day that became much more top­i­cal this week fol­low­ing the rev­e­la­tions that Gin­ni Thomas — wife of Supreme Court jus­tice Clarence Thomas and the per­son pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed as being the CNP’s “not so secret weapon” dur­ing this peri­od and work­ing close­ly with fel­low CNP mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell — was exten­sive­ly mes­sag­ing then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows and encour­ag­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to adopt exact­ly the strat­e­gy that ulti­mate­ly led up to the insur­rec­tion. Mes­sages like repeat­ed­ly encour­ag­ing the Trump White House to make Sid­ney Pow­ell the ‘face’ of the effort. Thomas even encour­aged the White House to ‘release the Krak­en’ at one point. And when Mead­ows even­tu­al­ly told her that Pow­ell nev­er actu­al­ly pre­sent­ed any real evi­dence of fraud, Thomas remained res­olute­ly behind the effort, even attend­ing the Jan 6 ‘Stop the Steal” ral­ly at the Ellipse.

So the wife of one of the most far right judges on the court was not only work­ing close­ly with Cle­ta Mitchell and pro­mot­ing Sid­ney Pow­ell, but she was also in pre­vi­ous­ly-secret reg­u­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Trump’s Chief of Staff. It rais­es quite a few ques­tions. Ques­tions that include whether or not Gin­ni Thomas was also in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with John East­man, the oth­er ‘respectable’ con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer who was furi­ous­ly con­coct­ing legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions to over­turn the elec­tion. And as we’re going to see the sec­ond arti­cle below, while there’s no direct evi­dence that Gin­ni Thomas was in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with East­man, there’s plen­ty of indi­rect evi­dence point­ing in that direc­tion, most notably that East­man appeared to be con­fi­dent that Clarence Thomas would rule in their favor if then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence went through the plans to block the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the elec­tion on Jan 6. East­man and Pence’s legal coun­sel, Greg Jacobs, we’re report­ed­ly argu­ing with each oth­er about the prospects of any such scheme sur­viv­ing the inevitable legal chal­lenge before the Supreme Court, with Jacobs con­fi­dent that the court would rule 9–0 against them, while East­man was appar­ent­ly con­vinced that they could get two jus­tices to vote in their favor: Clarence Thomas and, like­ly, Samuel Ali­to.

And that brings us to per­haps the biggest open ques­tion about the actu­al plan to legal­ly keep Trump in office? Because it does­n’t actu­al­ly appear to be the case that East­man, the cham­pi­on of this scheme, actu­al­ly felt like it would win a legal chal­lenge. Two jus­tices isn’t enough. So what was the actu­al plan to legal­ly keep Trump in office? Cre­ate a giant sys­temic cri­sis and declare mar­tial law? Who knows, but it remains an open ques­tion. An open ques­tion that now direct­ly involves the actions and intent of the CNP’s ‘not so secret weapon’ Gin­ni Thomas:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Vir­ginia Thomas urged White House chief to pur­sue unre­lent­ing efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion, texts show

In mes­sages to Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows in the weeks after Elec­tion Day, the wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas called Biden’s vic­to­ry “the great­est Heist of our His­to­ry” and told him that Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump should not con­cede.

By Bob Wood­ward and Robert Cos­ta
March 24, 2022 at 5:15 p.m. EDT

Vir­ginia Thomas, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist mar­ried to Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, repeat­ed­ly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows to pur­sue unre­lent­ing efforts to over­turn the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in a series of urgent text exchanges in the crit­i­cal weeks after the vote, accord­ing to copies of the mes­sages obtained by The Wash­ing­ton Post and CBS News.

The mes­sages — 29 in all — reveal an extra­or­di­nary pipeline between Vir­ginia Thomas, who goes by Gin­ni, and Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s top aide dur­ing a peri­od when Trump and his allies were vow­ing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the elec­tion results.

On Nov. 10, after news orga­ni­za­tions had pro­ject­ed Joe Biden the win­ner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Mead­ows: “Help This Great Pres­i­dent stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is stand­ing for America’s con­sti­tu­tion­al gov­er­nance at the precipice. The major­i­ty knows Biden and the Left is attempt­ing the great­est Heist of our His­to­ry.”

When Mead­ows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to over­turn the elec­tion. “This is a fight of good ver­sus evil,” Mead­ows wrote. “Evil always looks like the vic­tor until the King of Kings tri­umphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight con­tin­ues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Need­ed that! This plus a con­ver­sa­tion with my best friend just now… I will try to keep hold­ing on. Amer­i­ca is worth it!”

It is unclear to whom Thomas was refer­ring.

The mes­sages, which do not direct­ly ref­er­ence Jus­tice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Gin­ni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner cir­cle to pro­mote and seek to guide the president’s strat­e­gy to over­turn the elec­tion results — and how recep­tive and grate­ful Mead­ows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stat­ed goals in the mes­sages was for lawyer Sid­ney Pow­ell, who pro­mot­ed incen­di­ary and unsup­port­ed claims about the elec­tion, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

The text mes­sages were among 2,320 that Mead­ows pro­vid­ed to the House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capi­tol. The con­tent of mes­sages between Thomas and Mead­ows — 21 sent by her, eight by him – has not pre­vi­ous­ly been report­ed. They were reviewed by The Post and CBS News and then con­firmed by five peo­ple who have seen the committee’s doc­u­ments.

Meadows’s attor­ney, George Ter­williger III, con­firmed the exis­tence of the 29 mes­sages between his client and Thomas. In review­ing the sub­stance of the mes­sages Wednes­day, he said that nei­ther he nor Mead­ows would com­ment on indi­vid­ual texts. But, Ter­williger added, “noth­ing about the text mes­sages presents any legal issues.”

...

It is unknown whether Gin­ni Thomas and Mead­ows exchanged addi­tion­al mes­sages between the elec­tion and Biden’s inau­gu­ra­tion beyond the 29 received by the com­mit­tee. Short­ly after pro­vid­ing the 2,320 mes­sages, Mead­ows ceased coop­er­at­ing with the com­mit­tee, argu­ing that any fur­ther engage­ment could vio­late Trump’s claims of exec­u­tive priv­i­lege. Com­mit­tee mem­bers and aides said they believe the mes­sages may be just a por­tion of the pair’s total exchanges.

A spokesman for the com­mit­tee declined to com­ment. The rev­e­la­tion of Thomas’s mes­sages with Mead­ows comes three weeks after lawyers for the com­mit­tee said in a court fil­ing that the pan­el has “a good-faith basis for con­clud­ing that the Pres­i­dent and mem­bers of his Cam­paign engaged in a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy to defraud the Unit­ed States” and obstruct the count­ing of elec­toral votes by Con­gress.

Trump spoke pub­licly dur­ing this peri­od about his intent to con­test the elec­tion results in the Supreme Court. “This is a major fraud on our nation,” the pres­i­dent said in a speech at 2:30 the morn­ing after the elec­tion. “We want the law to be used in a prop­er man­ner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Thomas has pub­licly denied any con­flict of inter­est between her activism and her husband’s work on the Supreme Court. “Clarence doesn’t dis­cuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she said in an inter­view with the Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con, a con­ser­v­a­tive out­let, for an arti­cle pub­lished March 14.

Gin­ni Thomas, in that inter­view, also acknowl­edged that she had attend­ed Trump’s “Stop the Steal” ral­ly at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6, but said that she left ear­ly because it was too cold and that she did not have any role in plan­ning the event.

Jus­tice Thomas, 73, is the Supreme Court’s longest-serv­ing cur­rent jus­tice and has missed oral argu­ments this week because of his hos­pi­tal­iza­tion. He has made few pub­lic com­ments about the 2020 elec­tion. In Feb­ru­ary 2021, when the Supreme Court reject­ed elec­tion chal­lenges filed by Trump and his allies, Thomas wrote in a dis­sent that it was “baf­fling” and “inex­plic­a­ble” that the major­i­ty had decid­ed against hear­ing the cas­es because he believed the Supreme Court should pro­vide states with guid­ance for future elec­tions.

In her text mes­sages to Mead­ows, Gin­ni Thomas spread false the­o­ries, com­ment­ed on cable news seg­ments and advo­cat­ed with urgency and fer­vor that the pres­i­dent and his team take action to reverse the out­come of the elec­tion. She urged that they take a hard line with Trump staffers and con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans who had resist­ed argu­ments that the elec­tion was stolen.

In the mes­sages, Thomas and Mead­ows each assert a belief that the elec­tion was stolen and seem to share a sol­i­dar­i­ty of pur­pose and faith, though they occa­sion­al­ly express dif­fer­ences on tac­tics.

“The intense pres­sures you and our Pres­i­dent are now expe­ri­enc­ing are more intense than Any­thing Expe­ri­enced (but I only felt a frac­tion of it in 1991),” Thomas wrote to Mead­ows on Nov. 19, an appar­ent ref­er­ence to Jus­tice Thomas’s 1991 con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings in which lawyer Ani­ta Hill tes­ti­fied that he had made unwant­ed sex­u­al com­ments when he was her boss. Thomas strong­ly denied the accu­sa­tions.

The first of the 29 mes­sages between Gin­ni Thomas and Mead­ows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the elec­tion. She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Direc­tor Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Elec­tion Sto­ry in His­to­ry, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

Pieczenik, a for­mer State Depart­ment offi­cial, is a far-right com­men­ta­tor who has false­ly claimed that the 2012 mas­sacre at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School in New­town, Conn., was a “false-flag” oper­a­tion to push a gun-con­trol agen­da.

The video Thomas shared with Mead­ows is no longer avail­able on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Mead­ows, “I hope this is true; nev­er heard any­thing like this before, or even a hint of it. Pos­si­ble???”

“Water­marked bal­lots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & mil­i­tary white hat sting oper­a­tion in 12 key bat­tle­ground states,” she wrote.

Dur­ing that peri­od, sup­port­ers of the QAnon extrem­ist ide­ol­o­gy embraced a false the­o­ry that Trump had water­marked mail-in bal­lots so he could track poten­tial fraud. “Watch the water” was a refrain in QAnon cir­cles at the time.

In the Nov. 5 mes­sage to Mead­ows, Thomas went on to quote a pas­sage that had cir­cu­lat­ed on right-wing web­sites: “Biden crime fam­i­ly & bal­lot fraud co-con­spir­a­tors (elect­ed offi­cials, bureau­crats, social media cen­sor­ship mon­gers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrest­ed & detained for bal­lot fraud right now & over com­ing days, & will be liv­ing in barges off GITMO to face mil­i­tary tri­bunals for sedi­tion.”

The text mes­sages received by the House select com­mit­tee do not include a response from Mead­ows.

The next day, Nov. 6, Thomas sent a fol­low-up to Mead­ows: “Do not con­cede. It takes time for the army who is gath­er­ing for his back.”

It is unclear if Mead­ows respond­ed.

On Nov. 10, Thomas drew a reply from Mead­ows. She wrote, “Mark, I want­ed to text you and tell you for days you are in my prayers!!” She con­tin­ued by urg­ing him to “Help This Great Pres­i­dent stand firm” and invok­ing “the great­est Heist of our His­to­ry.”

Thomas added in the mes­sage that Mead­ows should “Lis­ten to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongi­no, Cle­ta” — appear­ing to refer to con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tors Rush Lim­baugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongi­no, as well as lawyer Cle­ta Mitchell, who was involved in Trump’s push to claim vic­to­ry in Geor­gia despite Biden’s cer­ti­fied win there.

One minute lat­er, Mead­ows respond­ed: “I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our coun­try is too pre­cious to give up on. Thanks for all you do.”

Nine min­utes after that, Thomas replied, “Tear­ing up and pray­ing for you guys!!!!! So proud to know you!!”

Lat­er that night, Gin­ni Thomas mes­saged Mead­ows seem­ing to react to a cable news seg­ment. “Van Jones spins inter­est­ing­ly, but shows us the balls being jug­gled too,” Thomas said, refer­ring to the promi­nent CNN com­men­ta­tor.

Thomas then turned to her frus­tra­tions with con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans and said she wished more of them were ral­ly­ing behind Trump and being more active with his base vot­ers, who were furi­ous about the elec­tion.

She wrote, “House and Sen­ate guys are pathet­ic too... only 4 GOP House mem­bers seen out in street ral­lies with grass­roots... Gohmert, Jor­dan, Gosar, and Roy.” She appeared to be refer­ring to Repub­li­can House mem­bers Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jim Jor­dan of Ohio, Paul A. Gosar of Ari­zona and Chip Roy of Texas.

This was a trou­bled time for Trump. News orga­ni­za­tions had declared Biden the win­ner on Nov. 7, after a review of vote totals in each state and the elec­toral count. Trump’s legal oper­a­tion was divid­ed between his campaign’s offi­cial lawyers and Rudolph W. Giu­liani, Trump’s con­fi­dant and per­son­al attor­ney who was fast assert­ing con­trol of his campaign’s legal strat­e­gy. While many Repub­li­cans sup­port­ed Trump’s fil­ing of legal chal­lenges in sev­er­al states, his lawyers stum­bled in court and many allies by mid-Novem­ber were pri­vate­ly con­fid­ing that Trump’s legal bat­tle would be short-lived.

Yet Thomas urged Mead­ows to plow ahead, ral­ly Repub­li­cans around Trump and remind them of his endur­ing polit­i­cal cap­i­tal.

“Where the heck are all those who ben­e­fit­ed by Pres­i­dents coat­tails?!!!” she wrote in her text mes­sage to him late on Nov. 10. She then told him to watch a YouTube video about the pow­er of nev­er con­ced­ing.

Mead­ows might not have been Thomas’s only con­tact inside the Trump White House that week. On Nov. 13, she texted Mead­ows about her out­reach to “Jared,” poten­tial­ly a ref­er­ence to Jared Kush­n­er, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House advis­er. She wrote, “Just for­ward­ed to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sid­ney Pow­ell & improved coor­di­na­tion now will help the cav­al­ry come and Fraud exposed and Amer­i­ca saved.” The mes­sages pro­vid­ed to the House select com­mit­tee do not show a response by Mead­ows.

Kush­n­er did not respond to a request for com­ment.

Pow­ell was becom­ing ubiq­ui­tous on tele­vi­sion — and win­ning the president’s favor, accord­ing to sev­er­al Trump advis­ers — as she claimed with­out evi­dence that elec­tron­ic vot­ing sys­tems had stolen the elec­tion from Trump by switch­ing mil­lions of bal­lots in Biden’s favor. She claimed, again with­out evi­dence, that hun­dreds of thou­sands of bal­lots were appear­ing out of nowhere and that a glob­al com­mu­nist con­spir­a­cy was afoot involv­ing Venezuela, Cuba, and prob­a­bly Chi­na.

Still, while Trump cheered some of Powell’s com­men­tary, she was a polar­iz­ing fig­ure in his orbit. Her views were con­sid­ered so extreme and unsup­port­ed by evi­dence that David Bossie, a long­time Trump sup­port­er, told oth­ers that she was ped­dling “con­coct­ed B.S.” After Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son con­tact­ed Pow­ell about her claim that elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines had switched bal­lots to Biden, he told his view­ers that he found her answers eva­sive and that she had shown no evi­dence to sup­port her asser­tion. He stopped hav­ing her on his pro­gram.

Gin­ni Thomas stood by her. “Don’t let her and your assets be mar­gin­al­ized instead...help her be the lead and the face,” she wrote to Mead­ows on Nov. 13.

The fol­low­ing day, Nov. 14, Thomas sent Mead­ows mate­r­i­al she said was from Con­nie Hair, chief of staff to Gohmert. It is not clear if she was pass­ing on a mes­sage from Hair or shar­ing Hair’s per­spec­tive as guid­ance for Mead­ows. The text mes­sage seems to quote Hair’s belief that “the most impor­tant thing you can real­ize right now is that there are no rules in war.”

“This war is psy­cho­log­i­cal. PSYOP,” the text from Thomas states.

Hair said Thurs­day that she did not have any spe­cif­ic rec­ol­lec­tion of that text mes­sage.

On Nov. 19, which would be a cru­cial day for Pow­ell as she spoke at a news con­fer­ence at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, Thomas con­tin­ued to bol­ster Powell’s stand­ing in a text to Mead­ows.

“Mark (don’t want to wake you)… ” Thomas wrote. “Sounds like Sid­ney and her team are get­ting inun­dat­ed with evi­dence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Krak­en and save us from the left tak­ing Amer­i­ca down.”

“Release the Krak­en” had become a catch­phrase on the far right after the elec­tion, used as short­hand for the antic­i­pat­ed expo­sure of a vot­er fraud con­spir­a­cy that would upend Biden’s vic­to­ry with the same force as a “Krak­en,” a myth­i­cal giant sea mon­ster.

In that same exchange, Thomas also at one point offered Mead­ows advice on man­ag­ing the West Wing staff.

“Sug­ges­tion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark,” Thomas wrote. “The low­er lev­el insid­ers are scared, fear­ful or send­ing out sig­nals of hope­less­ness vs an aware­ness of the exis­ten­tial threat to Amer­i­ca right now. You can buck them up, strength­en their spir­its.”

“Mon­i­ca Crow­ley,” Thomas said, refer­ring to the con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor, “may have a sense of this [from] her Nixon days.” Crow­ley, a top offi­cial in Trump’s Trea­sury Depart­ment, had been an aide to for­mer pres­i­dent Richard M. Nixon years after he resigned from office in 1974 because of the Water­gate scan­dal.

Thomas then wrote, “You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down under­neath you all. Lots of inten­si­fy­ing threats com­ing to ACB and oth­ers.” Jus­tice Amy Coney Bar­rett, some­times called “ACB” by her sup­port­ers, had joined the Supreme Court in Octo­ber, short­ly before the elec­tion. It is unclear to what threats Thomas was refer­ring.

Lat­er on Nov. 19, Mead­ows replied to Thomas’s long text mes­sage by say­ing, “Thanks so much.”

But Thomas’s high aspi­ra­tions for Pow­ell quick­ly col­lapsed that after­noon. Instead of cap­tur­ing the nation’s atten­tion at the RNC news con­fer­ence, where she spoke along­side Giu­liani and oth­er Trump advis­ers, Pow­ell was crit­i­cized for spread­ing a false the­o­ry about elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines as a tool for com­mu­nists. Some Trump aides were hor­ri­fied by her and Giuliani’s per­for­mances and felt they had embar­rassed the pres­i­dent by becom­ing a par­o­dy of his post-elec­tion fight.

As Giu­liani spoke, a dark brown liq­uid mixed with beads of sweat rolled down his cheek. “Did you watch ‘My Cousin Vin­ny?’ ” he asked reporters, tying a legal ref­er­ence to the 1992 com­e­dy.

Thomas wrote to Mead­ows, “Tears are flow­ing at what Rudy is doing right now!!!!”

“Glad to help,” Mead­ows replied.

By Nov. 22, Trump gave his bless­ing for Giu­liani and anoth­er Trump lawyer, Jen­na Ellis, to issue a state­ment claim­ing that Pow­ell “is not a mem­ber of the Trump Legal Team.”

Thomas reached out to Mead­ows that day with con­cern. “Try­ing to under­stand the Sid­ney Pow­ell dis­tanc­ing,” she wrote.

“She doesn’t have any­thing or at least she won’t share it if she does,” Mead­ows texted back.

“Wow!” Thomas replied.

Mead­ows did not respond.

On Nov. 24, Thomas engaged Mead­ows again by shar­ing a video from Par­ler, a con­ser­v­a­tive social media web­site, that appeared to refer to con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Glenn Beck.

“If you all cave to the elites, you have to know that many of your 73 mil­lion feel like what Glenn is express­ing,” Thomas wrote.

She said Trump risked his sup­port­ers grow­ing dis­en­chant­ed to the point of walk­ing away from pol­i­tics. “Me includ­ed,” she wrote. “I think I am done with pol­i­tics, and I don’t think I am alone, Mark.”

Mead­ows replied three min­utes lat­er: “I don’t know what you mean by cav­ing to the elites.”

Thomas respond­ed: “I can’t see Amer­i­cans swal­low­ing the obvi­ous fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin con­se­quences... the whole coup and now this... we just cave to peo­ple want­i­ng Biden to be anoint­ed? Many of us can’t con­tin­ue the GOP cha­rade.”

After con­tin­ued back-and-forth, Mead­ows wrote, “You’re preach­ing to the choir. Very demor­al­iz­ing.”

The text exchanges with Thomas that Mead­ows pro­vid­ed to the House select com­mit­tee pause after Nov. 24, 2020, with an unex­plained gap in cor­re­spon­dence. The com­mit­tee received one addi­tion­al mes­sage sent by Thomas to Mead­ows, on Jan. 10, four days after the “Stop the Steal” ral­ly Thomas said she attend­ed and the dead­ly attack on the Capi­tol.

In that mes­sage, Thomas express­es sup­port for Mead­ows and Trump — and direct­ed anger at Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, who had refused Trump’s wish­es to block the con­gres­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden’s elec­toral col­lege vic­to­ry.

“We are liv­ing through what feels like the end of Amer­i­ca,” Thomas wrote to Mead­ows. “Most of us are dis­gust­ed with the VP and are in lis­ten­ing mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capi­tol are not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of our great teams of patri­ots for DJT!!”

“Amaz­ing times,” she added. “The end of Lib­er­ty.”

————–

“Vir­ginia Thomas urged White House chief to pur­sue unre­lent­ing efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion, texts show” by Bob Wood­ward and Robert Cos­ta; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 03/24/2022

“The mes­sages, which do not direct­ly ref­er­ence Jus­tice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Gin­ni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner cir­cle to pro­mote and seek to guide the president’s strat­e­gy to over­turn the elec­tion results — and how recep­tive and grate­ful Mead­ows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stat­ed goals in the mes­sages was for lawyer Sid­ney Pow­ell, who pro­mot­ed incen­di­ary and unsup­port­ed claims about the elec­tion, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.”

Make Sid­ney Pow­ell the “face” of Trump’s legal team. That was the big idea Gin­ni Thomas was push­ing almost imme­di­ate­ly in the wake of Trump’s loss. Lit­er­al­ly the first of the 29 text mes­sages sent to Mark Mead­ows was a link to a QAnon-friend­ly video along with rumors that the Biden fam­i­ly and oth­er mem­bers of the vast con­spir­a­cy to steal the elec­tion from Trump were being arrest­ed and sent off to GITMO. It’s the right-wing oli­garchic ver­sion of ‘get­ting high on your own sup­ply’, which rais­es the ques­tion of just how many mem­bers of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy end­ed up get­ting rad­i­cal­ized by QAnon nar­ra­tives that they gen­uine­ly believe over the past few years:

...
The first of the 29 mes­sages between Gin­ni Thomas and Mead­ows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the elec­tion. She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Direc­tor Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Elec­tion Sto­ry in His­to­ry, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

Pieczenik, a for­mer State Depart­ment offi­cial, is a far-right com­men­ta­tor who has false­ly claimed that the 2012 mas­sacre at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School in New­town, Conn., was a “false-flag” oper­a­tion to push a gun-con­trol agen­da.

The video Thomas shared with Mead­ows is no longer avail­able on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Mead­ows, “I hope this is true; nev­er heard any­thing like this before, or even a hint of it. Pos­si­ble???”

“Water­marked bal­lots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & mil­i­tary white hat sting oper­a­tion in 12 key bat­tle­ground states,” she wrote.

Dur­ing that peri­od, sup­port­ers of the QAnon extrem­ist ide­ol­o­gy embraced a false the­o­ry that Trump had water­marked mail-in bal­lots so he could track poten­tial fraud. “Watch the water” was a refrain in QAnon cir­cles at the time.

In the Nov. 5 mes­sage to Mead­ows, Thomas went on to quote a pas­sage that had cir­cu­lat­ed on right-wing web­sites: “Biden crime fam­i­ly & bal­lot fraud co-con­spir­a­tors (elect­ed offi­cials, bureau­crats, social media cen­sor­ship mon­gers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrest­ed & detained for bal­lot fraud right now & over com­ing days, & will be liv­ing in barges off GITMO to face mil­i­tary tri­bunals for sedi­tion.”

The text mes­sages received by the House select com­mit­tee do not include a response from Mead­ows.

The next day, Nov. 6, Thomas sent a fol­low-up to Mead­ows: “Do not con­cede. It takes time for the army who is gath­er­ing for his back.”

...

Mead­ows might not have been Thomas’s only con­tact inside the Trump White House that week. On Nov. 13, she texted Mead­ows about her out­reach to “Jared,” poten­tial­ly a ref­er­ence to Jared Kush­n­er, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House advis­er. She wrote, “Just for­ward­ed to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am. Sid­ney Pow­ell & improved coor­di­na­tion now will help the cav­al­ry come and Fraud exposed and Amer­i­ca saved.” The mes­sages pro­vid­ed to the House select com­mit­tee do not show a response by Mead­ows.
...

Thomas even stood by Pow­ell after Tuck­er Carl­son, of all peo­ple, began dis­tanc­ing him­self from the Pow­ell nar­ra­tive. Thomas was absolute­ly ded­i­cat­ed to Sid­ney Pow­ell and the broad­er QAnon-inspired nar­ra­tive she was lead­ing. From Thomas’s per­spec­tive, they were wag­ing a war. A war with out rules and includ­ing the deploy­ment of psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions:

...
Still, while Trump cheered some of Powell’s com­men­tary, she was a polar­iz­ing fig­ure in his orbit. Her views were con­sid­ered so extreme and unsup­port­ed by evi­dence that David Bossie, a long­time Trump sup­port­er, told oth­ers that she was ped­dling “con­coct­ed B.S.” After Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son con­tact­ed Pow­ell about her claim that elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines had switched bal­lots to Biden, he told his view­ers that he found her answers eva­sive and that she had shown no evi­dence to sup­port her asser­tion. He stopped hav­ing her on his pro­gram.

Gin­ni Thomas stood by her. “Don’t let her and your assets be mar­gin­al­ized instead...help her be the lead and the face,” she wrote to Mead­ows on Nov. 13.

The fol­low­ing day, Nov. 14, Thomas sent Mead­ows mate­r­i­al she said was from Con­nie Hair, chief of staff to Gohmert. It is not clear if she was pass­ing on a mes­sage from Hair or shar­ing Hair’s per­spec­tive as guid­ance for Mead­ows. The text mes­sage seems to quote Hair’s belief that “the most impor­tant thing you can real­ize right now is that there are no rules in war.”

“This war is psy­cho­log­i­cal. PSYOP,” the text from Thomas states.

Hair said Thurs­day that she did not have any spe­cif­ic rec­ol­lec­tion of that text mes­sage.

On Nov. 19, which would be a cru­cial day for Pow­ell as she spoke at a news con­fer­ence at the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, Thomas con­tin­ued to bol­ster Powell’s stand­ing in a text to Mead­ows.

“Mark (don’t want to wake you)… ” Thomas wrote. “Sounds like Sid­ney and her team are get­ting inun­dat­ed with evi­dence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Krak­en and save us from the left tak­ing Amer­i­ca down.”

“Release the Krak­en” had become a catch­phrase on the far right after the elec­tion, used as short­hand for the antic­i­pat­ed expo­sure of a vot­er fraud con­spir­a­cy that would upend Biden’s vic­to­ry with the same force as a “Krak­en,” a myth­i­cal giant sea mon­ster.
...

Thomas even stood by Pow­ell after the Trump admin­is­tra­tion for­mal­ly dis­tanced itself from Pow­ell based in large part on the fact that Pow­ell clear­ly had no real evi­dence behind her claims. Thomas con­tin­ued express­ing an exas­per­at­ed sense that a mas­sive fraud had tran­spired even after Mead­ows informed her that Pow­ell nev­er actu­al­ly pro­vid­ed any evi­dence for her claims. It’s the kind of behav­ior that’s so lack­ing in integri­ty that it rais­es ques­tions as to whether or not Thomas ever tru­ly believed the stolen elec­tion nar­ra­tive or was just cyn­i­cal­ly using it as a con­ve­nient excuse to back a coup. Its the class ‘stu­pid or evil?’ conun­drum:

...
By Nov. 22, Trump gave his bless­ing for Giu­liani and anoth­er Trump lawyer, Jen­na Ellis, to issue a state­ment claim­ing that Pow­ell “is not a mem­ber of the Trump Legal Team.”

Thomas reached out to Mead­ows that day with con­cern. “Try­ing to under­stand the Sid­ney Pow­ell dis­tanc­ing,” she wrote.

“She doesn’t have any­thing or at least she won’t share it if she does,” Mead­ows texted back.

“Wow!” Thomas replied.

Mead­ows did not respond.

On Nov. 24, Thomas engaged Mead­ows again by shar­ing a video from Par­ler, a con­ser­v­a­tive social media web­site, that appeared to refer to con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Glenn Beck.

“If you all cave to the elites, you have to know that many of your 73 mil­lion feel like what Glenn is express­ing,” Thomas wrote.

She said Trump risked his sup­port­ers grow­ing dis­en­chant­ed to the point of walk­ing away from pol­i­tics. “Me includ­ed,” she wrote. “I think I am done with pol­i­tics, and I don’t think I am alone, Mark.”

Mead­ows replied three min­utes lat­er: “I don’t know what you mean by cav­ing to the elites.”

Thomas respond­ed: “I can’t see Amer­i­cans swal­low­ing the obvi­ous fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin con­se­quences... the whole coup and now this... we just cave to peo­ple want­i­ng Biden to be anoint­ed? Many of us can’t con­tin­ue the GOP cha­rade.”
...

But, of course, Gin­ni isn’t just an key orga­niz­ing fig­ure in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment and mem­ber of the CNP. She’s the wife of a sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice. And despite her absurd claims to the con­trary, it’s pret­ty damn obvi­ous she had a mas­sive con­flict of inter­est when send­ing those texts to Mead­ows. A mas­sive con­flict of inter­est that was then passed along to her hus­band on any rul­ings involv­ing the elec­tion:

...
On Nov. 10, after news orga­ni­za­tions had pro­ject­ed Joe Biden the win­ner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Mead­ows: “Help This Great Pres­i­dent stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is stand­ing for America’s con­sti­tu­tion­al gov­er­nance at the precipice. The major­i­ty knows Biden and the Left is attempt­ing the great­est Heist of our His­to­ry.”

When Mead­ows wrote to Thomas on Nov. 24, the White House chief of staff invoked God to describe the effort to over­turn the elec­tion. “This is a fight of good ver­sus evil,” Mead­ows wrote. “Evil always looks like the vic­tor until the King of Kings tri­umphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight con­tin­ues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Need­ed that! This plus a con­ver­sa­tion with my best friend just now… I will try to keep hold­ing on. Amer­i­ca is worth it!”

It is unclear to whom Thomas was refer­ring.

...

Trump spoke pub­licly dur­ing this peri­od about his intent to con­test the elec­tion results in the Supreme Court. “This is a major fraud on our nation,” the pres­i­dent said in a speech at 2:30 the morn­ing after the elec­tion. “We want the law to be used in a prop­er man­ner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Thomas has pub­licly denied any con­flict of inter­est between her activism and her husband’s work on the Supreme Court. “Clarence doesn’t dis­cuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work,” she said in an inter­view with the Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con, a con­ser­v­a­tive out­let, for an arti­cle pub­lished March 14.

Gin­ni Thomas, in that inter­view, also acknowl­edged that she had attend­ed Trump’s “Stop the Steal” ral­ly at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6, but said that she left ear­ly because it was too cold and that she did not have any role in plan­ning the event.

Jus­tice Thomas, 73, is the Supreme Court’s longest-serv­ing cur­rent jus­tice and has missed oral argu­ments this week because of his hos­pi­tal­iza­tion. He has made few pub­lic com­ments about the 2020 elec­tion. In Feb­ru­ary 2021, when the Supreme Court reject­ed elec­tion chal­lenges filed by Trump and his allies, Thomas wrote in a dis­sent that it was “baf­fling” and “inex­plic­a­ble” that the major­i­ty had decid­ed against hear­ing the cas­es because he believed the Supreme Court should pro­vide states with guid­ance for future elec­tions.
...

And note the oth­er CNP mem­ber Thomas was also pro­mot­ing at this time: Cle­ta Mitchell, one of the lead­ing fig­ures pro­mot­ing legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for over­turn­ing the elec­tion results. As we’re pre­vi­ous­ly seen, Mitchell and Thomas were known to be work­ing close­ly dur­ing this time. It’s just one more piece of evi­dence point­ing towards the CNP play­ing a key orga­ni­za­tion­al role in devis­ing the strate­gies for over­turn­ing elec­tions:

...
On Nov. 10, Thomas drew a reply from Mead­ows. She wrote, “Mark, I want­ed to text you and tell you for days you are in my prayers!!” She con­tin­ued by urg­ing him to “Help This Great Pres­i­dent stand firm” and invok­ing “the great­est Heist of our His­to­ry.”

Thomas added in the mes­sage that Mead­ows should “Lis­ten to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongi­no, Cle­ta” — appear­ing to refer to con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tors Rush Lim­baugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongi­no, as well as lawyer Cle­ta Mitchell, who was involved in Trump’s push to claim vic­to­ry in Geor­gia despite Biden’s cer­ti­fied win there.
...

But as we’ve also seen, Cle­ta Mitchell was just one of the ‘respectable’ con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers pro­mot­ing these schemes, with John East­man of the Clare­mont Insti­tute play­ing a major role. So was there any known con­tact between East­man and Gin­ni Thomas dur­ing this same peri­od? No direct evi­dence has emerged. But as the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, there’s plen­ty of indi­rect evi­dence point­ing in that direc­tion.

But there’s anoth­er mys­tery raised in the fol­low­ing arti­cle involv­ing East­man’s poten­tial com­mu­ni­ca­tions with both Gin­ni and Clarence Thomas: The schemes East­man was push­ing all involv­ing Mike Pence refus­ing to cer­ti­fy the elec­tion results on Jan 6, guar­an­tee­ing a Supreme Court chal­lenge. And while East­man appeared to be con­fi­dent that Clarence Thomas, and maybe one oth­er Supreme Court Jus­tice, would ulti­mate­ly side with them, that was it. Even East­man only expect a max­i­mum of two of the nine Supreme Court jus­tices rul­ing in their favor. At least that’s the pic­ture that emerges from the com­mu­ni­ca­tions between East­man and Pence’s legal coun­sel, Greg Jacobs, dur­ing the days lead­ing up to Jan 6. Jacobs viewed East­man’s schemes as guar­an­teed to bring a 9–0 rul­ing against them, while East­man felt that it might be a 7–2 rul­ing, with Clarence Thomas mak­ing up one of the two dis­sent­ing votes (and Jus­tice Ali­to like­ly being the oth­er one). So even the legal ‘schol­ar’ who devised the scheme at the heart of Jan 6 did­n’t believe he could win in the courts. Which rais­es the obvi­ous ques­tion of how exact­ly East­man was envi­sion­ing Trump ulti­mate­ly win­ning:

Politi­co

Gin­ni Thomas’ West Wing con­tacts raise new ques­tions for anoth­er Trump ally: John East­man

The Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee has evi­dence that East­man expect­ed Jus­tice Clarence Thomas to back his dubi­ous legal the­o­ry to block Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry.

By Kyle Cheney
03/26/2022 04:34 PM EDT

Gin­ni Thomas’ unfet­tered access to Don­ald Trump’s chief of staff — and poten­tial­ly oth­ers in his West Wing — rais­es new ques­tions about anoth­er fig­ure at the cen­ter of Trump’s gam­bit to sub­vert the 2020 elec­tion: attor­ney John East­man.

East­man spent the final weeks of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy dri­ving a strat­e­gy to pres­sure then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to stop Con­gress from cer­ti­fy­ing Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry, a plan that relied on legal the­o­ries so extreme the Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee says they could amount to crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy and fraud.

The select com­mit­tee has evi­dence that when a top Pence aide chal­lenged Eastman’s plan on Jan. 4, 2021, East­man ini­tial­ly told him he believed two Supreme Court jus­tices would back him up. One of them was Gin­ni Thomas’ hus­band, Jus­tice Clarence Thomas.

Eastman’s asser­tion, described by Pence’s coun­sel Greg Jacob to the select com­mit­tee ear­li­er this year, appeared to be a guess based on analy­sis of Thomas’ long legal career. East­man had rea­son to know Thomas’ views well: He clerked for the George H.W. Bush appointee in the 1990s before becom­ing a main­stay in deeply con­ser­v­a­tive legal cir­cles.

But the rev­e­la­tion that Thomas’ wife kept in con­tact with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Mead­ows in the weeks after Trump’s defeat — press­ing him to keep try­ing to over­turn the elec­tion — adds a new wrin­kle to the time­line. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D‑Md.) told POLITICO that the new details raise impor­tant ques­tions about whether East­man had a spe­cif­ic rea­son to believe Jus­tice Thomas would sup­port his rad­i­cal gam­bit, or if he was sim­ply voic­ing a hunch.

Eastman’s attor­ney Charles Burn­ham did not respond to ques­tions about whether East­man main­tained ties to the Thomases or com­mu­ni­cat­ed with either of them in the after­math of Trump’s 2020 defeat. There’s no known evi­dence that East­man was direct­ly in touch with either of the Thomases dur­ing his cam­paign to pres­sure Pence to sub­vert the results.

But the con­ser­v­a­tive legal schol­ar has tak­en pains to avoid reveal­ing his inter­ac­tions in that time­frame.

East­man has sued the Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee to pre­vent them from enforc­ing a sub­poe­na for his records and tes­ti­mo­ny. He’s also sued his for­mer employ­er, Chap­man Uni­ver­si­ty, to pre­vent the school from turn­ing over thou­sands of pages of his emails to the select com­mit­tee. And when East­man appeared before the com­mit­tee last year, he embraced a blan­ket strat­e­gy to resist their ques­tions: plead­ing the Fifth.

...

Oth­er than Trump, East­man has proven to be the most sig­nif­i­cant fig­ure in the select committee’s inves­ti­ga­tion, one the panel’s top lawyer — House Gen­er­al Coun­sel Dou­glas Let­ter — called the “cen­tral play­er in the devel­op­ment of a legal strat­e­gy to jus­ti­fy a coup.”

The pan­el is engaged in exten­sive, hard-fought lit­i­ga­tion to obtain Eastman’s Chap­man Uni­ver­si­ty emails, and it is await­ing a fed­er­al judge’s deci­sion about whether East­man can con­tin­ue to shield them behind claims of attor­ney-client priv­i­lege. While the pan­el says it has put some of its legal fights on the back burn­er, Let­ter has remained fixed on win­ning the bat­tle against East­man. And the select com­mit­tee used the fight to pub­licly unload some of its key evi­dence, includ­ing excerpts of inter­view tran­scripts with East­man and Jacob, Pence’s coun­sel.

The com­mit­tee says East­man has failed to show he had a legit­i­mate attor­ney-client rela­tion­ship with Trump, and that even if he did, the House’s need for the doc­u­ments requires waiv­ing the priv­i­lege. House lawyers argued in court papers that East­man may have con­spired with Trump to com­mit mul­ti­ple crimes — includ­ing felony obstruc­tion of Con­gress — in the after­math of the elec­tion.

Eastman’s the­o­ry cen­tered on Pence, who was required by the Con­sti­tu­tion to pre­side over a joint ses­sion of Con­gress to count the votes cast by the Elec­toral Col­lege. Though it’s typ­i­cal­ly a cer­e­mo­ni­al event, East­man devel­oped a the­o­ry — and con­vinced Trump to back him — that Pence could sim­ply refuse to count the votes of sev­er­al key states Biden won. The most extreme ver­sion of his plan called for Pence to sim­ply declare Trump the win­ner on the spot. The ver­sion East­man sug­gest­ed would have buy-in from Thomas, accord­ing to Jacob, would have had Pence post­pone the count and ask GOP state leg­is­la­tures in Biden-won states to con­sid­er replac­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tors with Trump loy­al­ists.

Jacob told the select com­mit­tee that when East­man pushed this idea, he replied, “If this case got to the Supreme Court, we’d lose 9–0, wouldn’t we, if we actu­al­ly took your posi­tion and it got up there?”

East­man said he actu­al­ly believed the court would vote 7–2, Jacob recalled.

“And I said, ‘Who are the two?’ And he said, ‘Well, I think maybe Clarence Thomas.’ And I said, ‘Real­ly? Clarence Thomas?’ And so we went through a few Thomas opin­ions and, final­ly, he acknowl­edged, ‘yeah, all right, it would be 9–0.’”

Jacob told the com­mit­tee he couldn’t remem­ber the oth­er jus­tice East­man had men­tioned as a poten­tial vote in Trump’s favor.

How­ev­er, in a Dec. 11 rul­ing, Jus­tice Samuel Ali­to joined Thomas, split­ting from the rest of the court, to say they would have dock­et­ed a chal­lenge some con­ser­v­a­tive states brought against elec­tion pro­ce­dures in more lib­er­al ones. Both jus­tices indi­cat­ed, though, that they wouldn’t have stepped in to grant the emer­gency relief the red states sought.

Thomas’ more recent vote against the select committee’s effort to obtain Trump-relat­ed records through the Nation­al Archives — he was the lone dis­sent — has sparked renewed con­tro­ver­sy in light of the emer­gence of his wife’s mes­sages with Mead­ows. Though it’s not clear any of her cor­re­spon­dence were, or should have been, includ­ed in the Archives files, it has sparked ques­tions about whether Thomas should have recused from the mat­ter.

When East­man appeared before the com­mit­tee to plead the Fifth, com­mit­tee coun­sel John Wood asked him about Jacob’s view that not a sin­gle Supreme Court jus­tice would have sup­port­ed Eastman’s plan.

“Dr. East­man, did you, in fact, agree with Mr. Jacob that not a sin­gle mem­ber of the Supreme Court would sup­port your posi­tion?” Wood asked.

“Fifth,” East­man replied

“And, Dr. East­man, which posi­tion was that that Mr. Jacobs said not a sin­gle mem­ber of the Supreme Court would sup­port?” Wood asked.

“Fifth,” East­man said again.

On Jan. 6, as riot­ers bore down on the Capi­tol, East­man and Jacob engaged in a tense email exchange, in which Jacob accused East­man of being a “ser­pent in the ear” of the pres­i­dent and encour­ag­ing him to embrace unsup­port­able legal the­o­ries. He reit­er­at­ed his belief that no jus­tice of the Supreme Court or appeals court judge would have agreed with Eastman’s strat­e­gy.

East­man replied that he dis­agreed, argu­ing that if Pence had post­poned the ses­sion and called on the state leg­is­la­tures to act, the courts may have demurred.

“I remain of the view not only would that have been the most pru­dent course … but also had a fair chance of being approved (or at least not enjoined) by the courts,” East­man wrote.

After anoth­er brief dis­agree­ment, East­man closed his email exchange with Jacob: “When this is over, we should have a good bot­tle of wine over a nice din­ner some­place.”

———–

“Gin­ni Thomas’ West Wing con­tacts raise new ques­tions for anoth­er Trump ally: John East­man” by Kyle Cheney; Politi­co; 03/26/2022

“East­man spent the final weeks of Trump’s pres­i­den­cy dri­ving a strat­e­gy to pres­sure then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to stop Con­gress from cer­ti­fy­ing Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry, a plan that relied on legal the­o­ries so extreme the Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee says they could amount to crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy and fraud.”

East­man’s plan has so lit­tle real legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tion behind it that it could amount to a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy and fraud. Did that crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy include active col­lu­sion with Gin­ni Thomas? HOw about Clarence Thomas? These are some of the ques­tions raised by the rev­e­la­tions about Gin­ni Thomas’s exten­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Mark Mead­ows pro­mot­ing legal strate­gies that were more or less in line with what East­man was advis­ing. And while there’s no avail­able evi­dence indi­cat­ing that Gin­ni Thomas was direct­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing with East­man, the facts are that East­man has been block­ing the release of his com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Clarence Thomas appears to be the most sym­pa­thet­ic jus­tice towards those efforts to block doc­u­ments from inves­ti­ga­tors. It’s more than a lit­tle sus­pi­cious:

...
Eastman’s asser­tion, described by Pence’s coun­sel Greg Jacob to the select com­mit­tee ear­li­er this year, appeared to be a guess based on analy­sis of Thomas’ long legal career. East­man had rea­son to know Thomas’ views well: He clerked for the George H.W. Bush appointee in the 1990s before becom­ing a main­stay in deeply con­ser­v­a­tive legal cir­cles.

But the rev­e­la­tion that Thomas’ wife kept in con­tact with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Mead­ows in the weeks after Trump’s defeat — press­ing him to keep try­ing to over­turn the elec­tion — adds a new wrin­kle to the time­line. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D‑Md.) told POLITICO that the new details raise impor­tant ques­tions about whether East­man had a spe­cif­ic rea­son to believe Jus­tice Thomas would sup­port his rad­i­cal gam­bit, or if he was sim­ply voic­ing a hunch.

Eastman’s attor­ney Charles Burn­ham did not respond to ques­tions about whether East­man main­tained ties to the Thomases or com­mu­ni­cat­ed with either of them in the after­math of Trump’s 2020 defeat. There’s no known evi­dence that East­man was direct­ly in touch with either of the Thomases dur­ing his cam­paign to pres­sure Pence to sub­vert the results.

But the con­ser­v­a­tive legal schol­ar has tak­en pains to avoid reveal­ing his inter­ac­tions in that time­frame.

East­man has sued the Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee to pre­vent them from enforc­ing a sub­poe­na for his records and tes­ti­mo­ny. He’s also sued his for­mer employ­er, Chap­man Uni­ver­si­ty, to pre­vent the school from turn­ing over thou­sands of pages of his emails to the select com­mit­tee. And when East­man appeared before the com­mit­tee last year, he embraced a blan­ket strat­e­gy to resist their ques­tions: plead­ing the Fifth.

...

Thomas’ more recent vote against the select committee’s effort to obtain Trump-relat­ed records through the Nation­al Archives — he was the lone dis­sent — has sparked renewed con­tro­ver­sy in light of the emer­gence of his wife’s mes­sages with Mead­ows. Though it’s not clear any of her cor­re­spon­dence were, or should have been, includ­ed in the Archives files, it has sparked ques­tions about whether Thomas should have recused from the mat­ter.
...

But per­haps the biggest mys­tery in this sto­ry is what exact­ly was East­man hop­ing to accom­plish even if he did man­aged to secure Clarence Thomas’s sup­port in any legal chal­lenges for the court? It would still just be one vote. Not remote­ly enough to win the case. And yet when we hear about the con­tentious meet­ing between East­man and Mike Pence’s legal coun­sel, it was an argu­ment over whether or not it was be a 9–0 or 7–2 rul­ing against East­man’s side should Pence go along with East­man’s plans of refus­ing to cer­ti­fy the elec­tion results on Jan 6:

...
Eastman’s the­o­ry cen­tered on Pence, who was required by the Con­sti­tu­tion to pre­side over a joint ses­sion of Con­gress to count the votes cast by the Elec­toral Col­lege. Though it’s typ­i­cal­ly a cer­e­mo­ni­al event, East­man devel­oped a the­o­ry — and con­vinced Trump to back him — that Pence could sim­ply refuse to count the votes of sev­er­al key states Biden won. The most extreme ver­sion of his plan called for Pence to sim­ply declare Trump the win­ner on the spot. The ver­sion East­man sug­gest­ed would have buy-in from Thomas, accord­ing to Jacob, would have had Pence post­pone the count and ask GOP state leg­is­la­tures in Biden-won states to con­sid­er replac­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tors with Trump loy­al­ists.

Jacob told the select com­mit­tee that when East­man pushed this idea, he replied, “If this case got to the Supreme Court, we’d lose 9–0, wouldn’t we, if we actu­al­ly took your posi­tion and it got up there?”

East­man said he actu­al­ly believed the court would vote 7–2, Jacob recalled.

“And I said, ‘Who are the two?’ And he said, ‘Well, I think maybe Clarence Thomas.’ And I said, ‘Real­ly? Clarence Thomas?’ And so we went through a few Thomas opin­ions and, final­ly, he acknowl­edged, ‘yeah, all right, it would be 9–0.’”

...

On Jan. 6, as riot­ers bore down on the Capi­tol, East­man and Jacob engaged in a tense email exchange, in which Jacob accused East­man of being a “ser­pent in the ear” of the pres­i­dent and encour­ag­ing him to embrace unsup­port­able legal the­o­ries. He reit­er­at­ed his belief that no jus­tice of the Supreme Court or appeals court judge would have agreed with Eastman’s strat­e­gy.

East­man replied that he dis­agreed, argu­ing that if Pence had post­poned the ses­sion and called on the state leg­is­la­tures to act, the courts may have demurred.

“I remain of the view not only would that have been the most pru­dent course … but also had a fair chance of being approved (or at least not enjoined) by the courts,” East­man wrote.

After anoth­er brief dis­agree­ment, East­man closed his email exchange with Jacob: “When this is over, we should have a good bot­tle of wine over a nice din­ner some­place.”
...

So what was the rest of the plan for over­turn­ing the elec­tion results if the plan includ­ed ulti­mate­ly los­ing 7–2 at the Supreme Court? It’s the kind of mys­tery that sug­gests far more rad­i­cal post-Jan 6 plans were already envi­sioned. Mar­tial law? Oath Keep­ers and Proud Boys tak­ing to the streets to impose order? Now that we’re learn­ing that even John East­man did­n’t expect his schemes to pass legal muster, it’s clear that East­man’s scheme to have Mike Pence refuse the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the vote on Jan 6 was just one more step in an effort to buy time. But if they had no real legal back­ing, for what were they try­ing to buy time? Let’s hope inves­ti­ga­tors can even­tu­al­ly deter­mine an answer to that ques­tion. In the mean time, it’s hard to ignore Gin­ni Thomas’s Nov 6 text to Mead­ows: “Do not con­cede. It takes time for the army who is gath­er­ing for his back.”

How much more bla­tant will the coverup get? That’s the over­ar­ch­ing ques­tion raised by a pair of recent reports on the sta­tus of the inves­ti­ga­tion into the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. Because each time it seems like it can’t get any more bla­tant, we get a new report that dumps even more cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence in our laps point­ing towards a plan to not only White House block records from inves­ti­ga­tors but pre­vent the cre­ation of those records in the first place. You almost could­n’t ask for more com­pelling cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence of a pre­med­i­tat­ed plot:

First, there was a report out the Wash­ing­ton Post about a sev­en hour gap in the Jan 6 White House call logs. A sev­en hour gap that starts at 11:17 am and goes until 6:54 pm. So the gap basi­cal­ly cov­ers the peri­od of time right before the start of the insur­rec­tion until not long after it was over. It’s about as sus­pi­cious a gap in the logs as you could get.

Adding to the sus­pi­cions is the fact the 11:17am call was to a still unknown per­son, which is part of why inves­ti­ga­tors are tak­ing a clos­er took at the use of untrace­able “burn­er” phones. Recall how we learned back in Decem­ber how three burn­er phones pur­chased by the two key orga­niz­ers of the “Stop the Steal” ral­ly at the Ellipse on Jan­u­ary 6: CNP mem­ber Amy Kre­mer and her daugh­ter Kylie Kre­mer. Accord­ing to those reports, one phone was used by Kylie to com­mu­ni­cate with fig­ures in the White House like Eric Trump, Mark Mead­ows, and Kat­ri­na Pier­son. The sec­ond phone was used by Amy Kre­mer and anoth­er ral­ly orga­niz­er. It’s not known who received the third burn­er phone. True to form, Trump respond­ed to the report by assert­ing that he’s nev­er heard of a “burn­er” phone and has no idea what that even is, a claim John Bolton has already debunked. Accord­ing to Bolton, Trump has spo­ken with him per­son­al­ly about how burn­er phones can be used to avoid hav­ing your calls scru­ti­nized.

And then a few days lat­er we got report out of CNN about the White House diarist inform­ing inves­ti­ga­tors that there was a “dra­mat­ic depar­ture” in the White House­’s will­ing­ness to present the diarist about Pres­i­dent Trump’s activ­i­ties start­ing on Jan 5. They were effec­tive “iced out” at that point, receiv­ing almost no infor­ma­tion about what the pres­i­dent was doing.

We’re also told in this report that Trump start­ed spend­ing much more in the White House res­i­den­cy dur­ing this time. This relates back to those ear­li­er reports about secret off-the-books meet­ings held in the White House res­i­den­cy in the weeks and days lead­ing up to Jan 6, most­ly orga­nized by Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows. Addi­tion­al­ly, we’ve learned that the Nation­al Archiv­ing ser­vice only archived calls make from the White House­’s West Wing, but not calls made from the White House res­i­den­cy. And Trump was known to have made calls in the days lead­ing up to the insur­rec­tion from both the West West and the res­i­den­cy.

So over­all, we’ve learned that the Trump White House appar­ent­ly took pre­emp­tive steps to cov­er its tracks. Bla­tant pre­emp­tive steps that have now pro­duced call records with an absurd sev­en hour gap and an “iced out” White House diarist.

There was anoth­er inter­est­ing wrin­kle to pop up in the Wash­ing­ton Post report: While the sev­en hour gap leaves a mys­tery as to who Trump spoke with dur­ing the insur­rec­tion, the avail­able call logs tell us a least a bit about about who he was call­ing that day. Many of them are fig­ures we would prob­a­bly expect giv­en the cir­cum­stances, like CNP-mem­ber Steve Ban­non, Fox New host Sean Han­ni­ty, and then-Geor­gia Sen­a­tor David Per­due. But there was anoth­er rather sur­pris­ing name that comes up: con­ser­v­a­tive pun­dit Bill Ben­nett. It rais­es the ques­tion of why Ben­nett? Of all the ran­dom peo­ple to call on that day, of what val­ue is there is con­tact­ing some­one like Ben­nett who is best known as a con­ser­v­a­tive theo­crat hyper-focused on the main­tain­ing a dom­i­nant role for con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tian­i­ty in Amer­i­ca.

Why would Trump con­tact Bill Ben­nett on that day? Was Ben­nett a con­duit of some sort? Giv­en the enor­mous pres­ence of CNP mem­bers in this entire scheme, and the close ide­o­log­i­cal align­ment between Ben­nett and the CNP, it’s worth not­ing that while Ben­nett isn’t on the leaked list of CNP mem­bers, Rush Lim­baugh claimed dur­ing an inter­view of then-Pres­i­dent Trump in August of 2020 to have seen Ben­nett at a CNP event. And real­ly, giv­en his back­ground, it would be kind of shock­ing if Ben­nett was­n’t at least affil­i­at­ed with the group. But the fact that Trump was speak­ing with Ben­nett on Jan 6 real­ly rais­es the ques­tion of why him? Those ques­tions, and the fact that so many oth­er CNP mem­bers are involved with this scheme, are part of why Ben­net­t’s affil­i­a­tion with the CNP are rel­e­vant to this inves­ti­ga­tion and why the broad­er net­work of theocrats asso­ci­at­ed with the CNP should remain a prime sus­pect in this entire affair.

Ok, first, here’s the Wash­ing­ton Post piece about the mys­te­ri­ous sev­en hour gap in the White House call logs and the renewed inter­est in the pos­si­ble use of “burn­er” phones. A sev­en hour gap that starts with the 11:17 am call to a still unknown indi­vid­ual and does­n’t end until after the insur­rec­tion is final­ly over:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Jan. 6 White House logs giv­en to House show 7‑hour gap in Trump calls
The House select com­mit­tee is now inves­ti­gat­ing whether it has the full record and whether Trump com­mu­ni­cat­ed that day through back chan­nels, phones of aides or per­son­al dis­pos­able phones, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the probe

By Bob Wood­ward and Robert Cos­ta
March 29, 2022|Updated March 29, 2022 at 3:42 p.m. EDT

Inter­nal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capi­tol that were turned over to the House select com­mit­tee show a gap in Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s phone logs of sev­en hours and 37 min­utes, includ­ing the peri­od when the build­ing was being vio­lent­ly assault­ed, accord­ing to doc­u­ments obtained by The Wash­ing­ton Post and CBS News.

The lack of an offi­cial White House nota­tion of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 min­utes on Jan. 6, 2021 — from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. — means the com­mit­tee has no record of his phone con­ver­sa­tions as his sup­port­ers descend­ed on the Capi­tol, bat­tled over­whelmed police and forcibly entered the build­ing, prompt­ing law­mak­ers and Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to flee for safe­ty.

The 11 pages of records, which con­sist of the president’s offi­cial dai­ly diary and the White House switch­board call logs, were turned over by the Nation­al Archives ear­li­er this year to the House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6 attack.

The records show that Trump was active on the phone for part of the day, doc­u­ment­ing con­ver­sa­tions that he had with at least eight peo­ple in the morn­ing and 11 peo­ple that evening. The sev­en-hour gap also stands in stark con­trast to the exten­sive pub­lic report­ing about phone con­ver­sa­tions he had with allies dur­ing the attack, such as a call Trump made to Sen. Mike Lee (R‑Utah) — seek­ing to talk to Sen. Tom­my Tuberville (R‑Ala.) — and a phone con­ver­sa­tion he had with House Minor­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.).

The House pan­el is now inves­ti­gat­ing whether Trump com­mu­ni­cat­ed that day through back chan­nels, phones of aides or per­son­al dis­pos­able phones, known as “burn­er phones,” accord­ing to two peo­ple with knowl­edge of the probe, who, like oth­ers inter­viewed for this report, spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion. The com­mit­tee is also scru­ti­niz­ing whether it received the full logs from that day.

One law­mak­er on the pan­el said the com­mit­tee is inves­ti­gat­ing a “pos­si­ble coverup” of the offi­cial White House record from that day. Anoth­er per­son close to the com­mit­tee said the large gap in the records is of “intense inter­est” to some law­mak­ers on the com­mit­tee, many of whom have reviewed copies of the doc­u­ments. Both spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because they were not autho­rized to dis­cuss inter­nal com­mit­tee delib­er­a­tions.

[see Page 3 of 5 from the White House Dai­ly Diary of Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump]

[see Page 4 of 5 from the White House Dai­ly Diary of Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump]

The records show that for­mer White House chief strate­gist Stephen K. Ban­non — who said on his Jan. 5 pod­cast that “all hell is going to break loose tomor­row” — spoke with Trump twice on Jan. 6. In a call that morn­ing, Ban­non urged Trump to con­tin­ue to pres­sure Pence to block con­gres­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the exchange.

Trump was known for using dif­fer­ent phones when he was in the White House, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with his activ­i­ties. Occa­sion­al­ly, when he made out­bound calls, the num­ber would show up as the White House switchboard’s num­ber, accord­ing to a for­mer Trump Cab­i­net offi­cial. Oth­er times, he would call from dif­fer­ent num­bers — or no num­ber would appear on the recipient’s phone, the offi­cial said.

...

A Trump spokes­woman said that Trump had noth­ing to do with the records and had assumed any and all of his phone calls were record­ed and pre­served.

In a state­ment Mon­day night, Trump said, “I have no idea what a burn­er phone is, to the best of my knowl­edge I have nev­er even heard the term.”

One for­mer Trump White House offi­cial dis­put­ed that. In an inter­view Tues­day after­noon, for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er John Bolton said that he recalls Trump using the term “burn­er phones” in sev­er­al dis­cus­sions and that Trump was aware of its mean­ing. Bolton said he and Trump have spo­ken about how peo­ple have used burn­er phones to avoid hav­ing their calls scru­ti­nized.

In a recent court fil­ing, the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee assert­ed it has “a good-faith basis for con­clud­ing that the Pres­i­dent and mem­bers of his Cam­paign engaged in a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy to defraud the Unit­ed States” and obstruct the count­ing of elec­toral votes by Con­gress.

A fed­er­al judge said in a rul­ing Mon­day that Trump “more like­ly than not” com­mit­ted a fed­er­al crime in try­ing to obstruct the con­gres­sion­al count of elec­toral col­lege votes on Jan. 6. The rul­ing was regard­ing emails that con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer John East­man, a Trump ally, had resist­ed turn­ing over to the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee.

A Trump spokesman called the rul­ing “absurd and base­less.”

Five of the pages in the White House records obtained by the House com­mit­tee are titled “The Dai­ly Diary of Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump” and detail some of Trump’s phone calls and move­ments on Jan. 6. The remain­ing six pages are titled “Pres­i­den­tial Call Log” and have infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by the White House switch­board and aides, includ­ing phone num­bers and notes on the time and dura­tion of some calls.

Those records were giv­en to the com­mit­tee by the Nation­al Archives ear­li­er this year after the Supreme Court reject­ed Trump’s request for the court to block the com­mit­tee from obtain­ing White House doc­u­ments from Jan. 6.

The Pres­i­den­tial Records Act requires the preser­va­tion of mem­os, let­ters, notes, emails, fax­es and oth­er writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions relat­ed to a president’s offi­cial duties. The Nation­al Archives web­site states the pres­i­den­tial diary should be a “chrono­log­i­cal record of the President’s move­ments, phone calls, trips” and meet­ings.

In Jan­u­ary, The Post first report­ed that some of the Trump White House records turned over to the com­mit­tee were poten­tial­ly incom­plete, includ­ing records that had been ripped up and taped back togeth­er. The New York Times first report­ed in Feb­ru­ary on the committee’s dis­cov­ery of gaps in the White House phone logs from Jan. 6, but it did not spec­i­fy when or for how long on that day. CNN first report­ed that “sev­er­al hours” in Trump’s records pro­vid­ed to the com­mit­tee lacked any nota­tion of phone calls.

The doc­u­ments obtained by the com­mit­tee show Trump hav­ing sev­er­al pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed exchanges on Jan. 6, includ­ing brief calls with Ban­non and per­son­al lawyer Rudy Giu­liani that morn­ing, before Trump had a final call with Pence, in which the vice pres­i­dent told him he was not going to block Con­gress from for­mal­iz­ing Biden’s vic­to­ry. The call to the vice pres­i­dent was part of Trump’s attempt to put into motion a plan, advo­cat­ed by Ban­non and out­lined in a memo writ­ten by con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer John East­man, that would enable Trump to hold on to the pres­i­den­cy, as first report­ed in the book “Per­il.”

[see Excerpt from the Pres­i­den­tial Call Log of Jan. 6, 2021]

[see Excerpt from the Pres­i­den­tial Call Log of Jan. 6, 2021]

Accord­ing to White House records, Ban­non and Trump spoke at 8:37 a.m. on Jan. 6. Trump spoke with Giu­liani around 8:45 a.m. At 8:56 a.m., Trump asked the White House switch­board to call Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows. Then, at 9:02 a.m., Trump asked the oper­a­tor to place a call to Pence. The oper­a­tor informed him that a mes­sage was left for the vice pres­i­dent.

Bannon’s first Jan. 6 call with Trump last­ed for about one minute, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments. Dur­ing that con­ver­sa­tion, Ban­non asked Trump whether Pence was com­ing over for a break­fast meet­ing, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the exchange. Ban­non hoped Trump could pres­sure the vice pres­i­dent over break­fast to agree to thwart the con­gres­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden’s vic­to­ry, the peo­ple said.

But Trump told Ban­non that Pence was not sched­uled to come to the White House fol­low­ing a heat­ed meet­ing Trump and Pence had the pre­vi­ous evening, Jan. 5, in the Oval Office. Ban­non quick­ly pressed Trump that he need­ed to call Pence and tell him again to hold off on doing any­thing that would enable cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Trump agreed, the peo­ple said.

Accord­ing to the White House phone logs, Ban­non and Trump spoke again late on Jan. 6 in a call that began at 10:19 p.m. and end­ed at 10:26 p.m.

...

Ban­non, a cen­tral play­er in a group of Trump allies who met at the Willard hotel near the White House on Jan. 5 to dis­cuss their strat­e­gy for Jan. 6, was indict­ed last year by the Jus­tice Depart­ment for refus­ing to coop­er­ate with the House com­mit­tee, which is seek­ing more doc­u­ments and tes­ti­mo­ny about his con­ver­sa­tions with Trump.

Trump’s final call with Pence is not list­ed in the call logs, even though mul­ti­ple peo­ple close to both men said that call occurred some­time in the late morn­ing before Trump head­ed to the “Save Amer­i­ca” ral­ly at the Ellipse.

Dur­ing their con­ver­sa­tion, Pence told Trump, “When I go to the Capi­tol, I’ll do my job” and not block Biden’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, enrag­ing Trump, accord­ing to “Per­il.”

Trump said, “Mike you can do this. I’m count­ing on you to do it. If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago,” he added, accord­ing to the book. “You’re going to wimp out!”

Pence lat­er released a let­ter say­ing he did not, as vice pres­i­dent, have “uni­lat­er­al author­i­ty to decide pres­i­den­tial con­tests,” and said he would “keep the oath” he made when he was sworn into office.

The White House logs also show that Trump had con­ver­sa­tions on Jan. 6 with elec­tion lawyers and White House offi­cials, as well as out­side allies such as then-sen­a­tor David Per­due (R‑Ga.), con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor William J. Ben­nett and Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty.

Han­ni­ty and Per­due did not respond to requests for com­ment. Ben­nett, in a brief inter­view on Tues­day, said he did not recall the con­ver­sa­tion.

Accord­ing to the doc­u­ments, Trump spoke with oth­er con­fi­dants and polit­i­cal advis­ers that morn­ing ahead of the ral­ly. At 8:34 a.m., he spoke with Kurt Olsen, who was advis­ing Trump on legal chal­lenges to the elec­tion.

Trump then placed calls to Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the Repub­li­can leader, and Sen. Josh Haw­ley (Mo.), accord­ing to the doc­u­ments. Haw­ley, a Trump ally, was the first sen­a­tor to declare he would object to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, a deci­sion that sparked oth­er GOP sen­a­tors to say they too would object.

A McConnell aide said Mon­day that McConnell declined Trump’s call on Jan. 6. Haw­ley told reporters Tues­day that he missed Trump’s call that day and that the two did not speak on Jan. 6.

The records show that Trump had a 10-minute call start­ing at 9:24 a.m. with Rep. Jim Jor­dan, an Ohio Repub­li­can who worked close­ly with the Trump White House and was a key fig­ure in push­ing fel­low GOP law­mak­ers to object to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden’s elec­tion.

Jor­dan has declined to coop­er­ate with the House com­mit­tee. The 10-minute call Trump had with Jor­dan was first report­ed by CNN.

Giu­liani and Trump spoke on Jan. 6 at 9:41 a.m. for six min­utes, and at 8:39 p.m. for nine min­utes, accord­ing to the White House logs. Accord­ing to the doc­u­ments, Giu­liani called from dif­fer­ent phone num­bers.

...

Trump senior advis­er Stephen Miller — who told Fox News in Decem­ber 2020 that an “alter­nate slate of elec­tors in the con­test­ed states is going to vote” — spoke with Trump for 26 min­utes on the morn­ing of Jan. 6, the records show. That call start­ed at 9:52 a.m. and end­ed at 10:18 a.m.

...

At 11:17 a.m., the White House dai­ly diary states, “The Pres­i­dent talked on a phone call to an uniden­ti­fied per­son.” That vague call list­ing, with no notes on dura­tion, is the last offi­cial record of a phone con­ver­sa­tion that Trump had until the evening of Jan. 6.

The records of Trump’s activ­i­ty through­out the day are very lim­it­ed. The dai­ly diary notes that he addressed sup­port­ers at a ral­ly at the Ellipse mid­day and returned to the south grounds of the White House at 1:19 p.m.

“The Pres­i­dent met with his Valet,” the records note of Trump’s activ­i­ty at 1:21 p.m. on Jan. 6.

Trump’s sup­port­ers breached the Capi­tol build­ing short­ly after 2 p.m.

The next doc­u­ment­ed event in the president’s diary comes at 4:03 p.m., when “The Pres­i­dent went to the Rose Gar­den” to record, for four min­utes, a video mes­sage for the pro-Trump mob that had stormed the Capi­tol. The video, post­ed on Twit­ter at 4:17 p.m., begins with Trump false­ly claim­ing the 2020 elec­tion was stolen, then asks the riot­ers to “go home.” He added, “We love you. You’re very spe­cial.”

“The Pres­i­dent returned to the Oval Office” at 4:07 p.m., the records state. The next list­ed action comes at 6:27 p.m.: “The Pres­i­dent went to the Sec­ond Floor Res­i­dence.”

Accord­ing to the logs, Trump made his first phone call in more than sev­en hours at 6:54 p.m., when he instruct­ed the oper­a­tor to call aide Daniel Scav­i­no Jr.

At 7:01 p.m., the records show, Trump spoke with Pat Cipol­lone, the White House coun­sel, for six min­utes, and lat­er spoke with press sec­re­tary Kayleigh McE­nany.

At 9:23 p.m., Trump spoke with polit­i­cal advis­er Jason Miller for 18 min­utes. Miller has engaged with the com­mit­tee and sat for a depo­si­tion, parts of which were excerpt­ed in the committee’s fil­ing alleg­ing a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy was advanced by Trump and his allies.

...

That night, Trump also spoke with lawyers sup­port­ing his elec­tion fight, such as for­mer North Car­oli­na Supreme Court chief jus­tice Mark Mar­tin and Cle­ta Mitchell, a vet­er­an con­ser­v­a­tive Wash­ing­ton attor­ney who worked close­ly with Trump on con­test­ing Biden’s vic­to­ry in Geor­gia, accord­ing to the records.

His final list­ed call came at 11:23 p.m. and last­ed 18 min­utes. It was with John McEn­tee, then the direc­tor of pres­i­den­tial per­son­nel.

Ear­li­er this year, the Supreme Court, in an unsigned order, reject­ed Trump’s request to block the release of some White House records, which have been stored by the Nation­al Archives, to the com­mit­tee. The Supreme Court’s order in Jan­u­ary includ­ed a dis­sent from Jus­tice Clarence Thomas.

Last week, The Post and CBS News report­ed the com­mit­tee has obtained 29 text mes­sages from the post-elec­tion peri­od between Mead­ows and Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas, Clarence Thomas’s wife and a long­time con­ser­v­a­tive activist.

The mes­sages, which do not direct­ly ref­er­ence Jus­tice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show how Gin­ni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner cir­cle to pro­mote and seek to guide the president’s strat­e­gy to over­turn the elec­tion results — and how recep­tive and grate­ful Mead­ows said he was to receive her advice. Clarence Thomas and Gin­ni Thomas have not respond­ed to mul­ti­ple requests for com­ment. She has long main­tained that there is no con­flict of inter­est between her activism and her husband’s work.

———–

“Jan. 6 White House logs giv­en to House show 7‑hour gap in Trump calls” by Bob Wood­ward and Robert Cos­ta; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 03/29/2022

“The lack of an offi­cial White House nota­tion of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 min­utes on Jan. 6, 2021 — from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. — means the com­mit­tee has no record of his phone con­ver­sa­tions as his sup­port­ers descend­ed on the Capi­tol, bat­tled over­whelmed police and forcibly entered the build­ing, prompt­ing law­mak­ers and Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to flee for safe­ty.”

Who did Trump talk to and what were they talk­ing about dur­ing that sev­en hour gap in the White House call records? Those ques­tions are now at the heart of the inves­ti­ga­tion of what is increas­ing­ly look­ing like a crim­i­nal coverup. A coverup star­ing us all in the face in the form of White House call records with a sev­en hour gap dur­ing time the time that we know Don­ald Trump was mak­ing mul­ti­ple calls in his last-ditch effort to block the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the vote. When Trump absurd­ly claims he has no idea what a burn­er phone even is and has nev­er heard of one before, that’s a clue:

...
The 11 pages of records, which con­sist of the president’s offi­cial dai­ly diary and the White House switch­board call logs, were turned over by the Nation­al Archives ear­li­er this year to the House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6 attack.

The records show that Trump was active on the phone for part of the day, doc­u­ment­ing con­ver­sa­tions that he had with at least eight peo­ple in the morn­ing and 11 peo­ple that evening. The sev­en-hour gap also stands in stark con­trast to the exten­sive pub­lic report­ing about phone con­ver­sa­tions he had with allies dur­ing the attack, such as a call Trump made to Sen. Mike Lee (R‑Utah) — seek­ing to talk to Sen. Tom­my Tuberville (R‑Ala.) — and a phone con­ver­sa­tion he had with House Minor­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.).

The House pan­el is now inves­ti­gat­ing whether Trump com­mu­ni­cat­ed that day through back chan­nels, phones of aides or per­son­al dis­pos­able phones, known as “burn­er phones,” accord­ing to two peo­ple with knowl­edge of the probe, who, like oth­ers inter­viewed for this report, spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion. The com­mit­tee is also scru­ti­niz­ing whether it received the full logs from that day.

One law­mak­er on the pan­el said the com­mit­tee is inves­ti­gat­ing a “pos­si­ble coverup” of the offi­cial White House record from that day. Anoth­er per­son close to the com­mit­tee said the large gap in the records is of “intense inter­est” to some law­mak­ers on the com­mit­tee, many of whom have reviewed copies of the doc­u­ments. Both spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because they were not autho­rized to dis­cuss inter­nal com­mit­tee delib­er­a­tions.

...

Trump was known for using dif­fer­ent phones when he was in the White House, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with his activ­i­ties. Occa­sion­al­ly, when he made out­bound calls, the num­ber would show up as the White House switchboard’s num­ber, accord­ing to a for­mer Trump Cab­i­net offi­cial. Oth­er times, he would call from dif­fer­ent num­bers — or no num­ber would appear on the recipient’s phone, the offi­cial said.

...

A Trump spokes­woman said that Trump had noth­ing to do with the records and had assumed any and all of his phone calls were record­ed and pre­served.

In a state­ment Mon­day night, Trump said, “I have no idea what a burn­er phone is, to the best of my knowl­edge I have nev­er even heard the term.”

One for­mer Trump White House offi­cial dis­put­ed that. In an inter­view Tues­day after­noon, for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er John Bolton said that he recalls Trump using the term “burn­er phones” in sev­er­al dis­cus­sions and that Trump was aware of its mean­ing. Bolton said he and Trump have spo­ken about how peo­ple have used burn­er phones to avoid hav­ing their calls scru­ti­nized.

...

A fed­er­al judge said in a rul­ing Mon­day that Trump “more like­ly than not” com­mit­ted a fed­er­al crime in try­ing to obstruct the con­gres­sion­al count of elec­toral col­lege votes on Jan. 6. The rul­ing was regard­ing emails that con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer John East­man, a Trump ally, had resist­ed turn­ing over to the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee.

...

In Jan­u­ary, The Post first report­ed that some of the Trump White House records turned over to the com­mit­tee were poten­tial­ly incom­plete, includ­ing records that had been ripped up and taped back togeth­er. The New York Times first report­ed in Feb­ru­ary on the committee’s dis­cov­ery of gaps in the White House phone logs from Jan. 6, but it did not spec­i­fy when or for how long on that day. CNN first report­ed that “sev­er­al hours” in Trump’s records pro­vid­ed to the com­mit­tee lacked any nota­tion of phone calls.
...

But it’s not just the sev­en hour cap in the White House call records that’s so sus­pi­cious. It’s the fact that Trump’s last call to Mike Pence that morn­ing, when he report­ed­ly plead­ed with Pence to go along with the scheme to no avail, isn’t even list­ed on the records while the last call made before the start of that gap was at 11:17 am to an “uniden­ti­fied per­son”. So right around the time we know that Trump effec­tive­ly failed in his last ditch attempt to per­suade Mike Pence, there’s a call to an uniden­ti­fied per­son and then the start of the sev­en hour gap:

...
Trump’s final call with Pence is not list­ed in the call logs, even though mul­ti­ple peo­ple close to both men said that call occurred some­time in the late morn­ing before Trump head­ed to the “Save Amer­i­ca” ral­ly at the Ellipse.

Dur­ing their con­ver­sa­tion, Pence told Trump, “When I go to the Capi­tol, I’ll do my job” and not block Biden’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, enrag­ing Trump, accord­ing to “Per­il.”

Trump said, “Mike you can do this. I’m count­ing on you to do it. If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago,” he added, accord­ing to the book. “You’re going to wimp out!”

...

At 11:17 a.m., the White House dai­ly diary states, “The Pres­i­dent talked on a phone call to an uniden­ti­fied per­son.” That vague call list­ing, with no notes on dura­tion, is the last offi­cial record of a phone con­ver­sa­tion that Trump had until the evening of Jan. 6.
...

Who is this mys­tery per­son Trump called at 11:17am? We don’t know, but it would­n’t be sur­pris­ing if they were in pos­ses­sion of one of burn­er phones used in this oper­a­tion. And it’s hard to imag­ine that the White House would both­er not iden­ti­fy­ing Kylie or Amy Kre­mer, the two peo­ple known to be in pos­ses­sion of the three burn­er phones. But there was that mys­tery third per­son who got one of those phones. Did Trump call that mys­tery per­son right before the sev­en hour gap? If so, based on the cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence, we prob­a­bly should­n’t be sur­prised if it turns out this mys­tery per­son is an asso­ciate of Steve Ban­non:

...
The records show that for­mer White House chief strate­gist Stephen K. Ban­non — who said on his Jan. 5 pod­cast that “all hell is going to break loose tomor­row” — spoke with Trump twice on Jan. 6. In a call that morn­ing, Ban­non urged Trump to con­tin­ue to pres­sure Pence to block con­gres­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the exchange.

...

The doc­u­ments obtained by the com­mit­tee show Trump hav­ing sev­er­al pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed exchanges on Jan. 6, includ­ing brief calls with Ban­non and per­son­al lawyer Rudy Giu­liani that morn­ing, before Trump had a final call with Pence, in which the vice pres­i­dent told him he was not going to block Con­gress from for­mal­iz­ing Biden’s vic­to­ry. The call to the vice pres­i­dent was part of Trump’s attempt to put into motion a plan, advo­cat­ed by Ban­non and out­lined in a memo writ­ten by con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer John East­man, that would enable Trump to hold on to the pres­i­den­cy, as first report­ed in the book “Per­il.”

...

Bannon’s first Jan. 6 call with Trump last­ed for about one minute, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments. Dur­ing that con­ver­sa­tion, Ban­non asked Trump whether Pence was com­ing over for a break­fast meet­ing, accord­ing to two peo­ple famil­iar with the exchange. Ban­non hoped Trump could pres­sure the vice pres­i­dent over break­fast to agree to thwart the con­gres­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden’s vic­to­ry, the peo­ple said.

But Trump told Ban­non that Pence was not sched­uled to come to the White House fol­low­ing a heat­ed meet­ing Trump and Pence had the pre­vi­ous evening, Jan. 5, in the Oval Office. Ban­non quick­ly pressed Trump that he need­ed to call Pence and tell him again to hold off on doing any­thing that would enable cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Trump agreed, the peo­ple said.

Accord­ing to the White House phone logs, Ban­non and Trump spoke again late on Jan. 6 in a call that began at 10:19 p.m. and end­ed at 10:26 p.m.
...

Also note how the one mem­ber of the Supreme Court who dis­sent­ed in the rul­ing order­ing the han­dover of White House records to House inves­ti­ga­tors, Clarence Thomas, hap­pens to be the hus­band CNP-mem­ber Gin­ni Thomas. And as was recent­ly report­ed, Gin­ni was in reg­u­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion with White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows, implor­ing him to fol­low Sid­ney Pow­ell’s luna­cy and take steps like ‘releas­ing the Krak­en’. The CNP con­nec­tion just keeps pop­ping up in this sto­ry:

...
Ear­li­er this year, the Supreme Court, in an unsigned order, reject­ed Trump’s request to block the release of some White House records, which have been stored by the Nation­al Archives, to the com­mit­tee. The Supreme Court’s order in Jan­u­ary includ­ed a dis­sent from Jus­tice Clarence Thomas.
...

Final­ly, note the oth­er fig­ures with CNP ties Trump report­ed­ly spoke with that day, beyond CNP mem­ber Steve Ban­non. There was CNP-mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell who was deeply involved in the var­i­ous legal chal­lenges employed in this effort. And then there’s But also con­ser­v­a­tive per­son­al­i­ty Bill Ben­nett. Some­one who alleged­ly attend­ed a 2020 CNP event accord­ing to Rush Lim­baugh. So why Ben­nett, of all peo­ple? Was it his deep ties to the US’s dom­i­nant theo­crat­ic pow­er net­work?

...
The White House logs also show that Trump had con­ver­sa­tions on Jan. 6 with elec­tion lawyers and White House offi­cials, as well as out­side allies such as then-sen­a­tor David Per­due (R‑Ga.), con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor William J. Ben­nett and Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty.

Han­ni­ty and Per­due did not respond to requests for com­ment. Ben­nett, in a brief inter­view on Tues­day, said he did not recall the con­ver­sa­tion.

...

That night, Trump also spoke with lawyers sup­port­ing his elec­tion fight, such as for­mer North Car­oli­na Supreme Court chief jus­tice Mark Mar­tin and Cle­ta Mitchell, a vet­er­an con­ser­v­a­tive Wash­ing­ton attor­ney who worked close­ly with Trump on con­test­ing Biden’s vic­to­ry in Geor­gia, accord­ing to the records.
...

And as we learned a few days after this report, the appar­ent coverup is even larg­er and more bla­tant the pre­vi­ous­ly rec­og­nized. Because it turns out that the White House diarist told inves­ti­ga­tors that they were “iced out” in the days lead­ing up to Jan 6. Accord­ing to one source, “So, start­ing the 5th, the diarist did­n’t receive the anno­tat­ed calls and notes. This was a dra­mat­ic depar­ture. That is all out of the ordi­nary.” The tim­ing it quite remark­able.

It’s not know who ordered this dra­mat­ic depar­ture from the record-keep­ing rules, but what is per­haps even more remark­able is the fact that, while the destruc­tion of gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments is a crime, there does­n’t appear to be law against the pre­ven­tion of the cre­ation of those archives in the first place.

But there’s anoth­er legal loop­hole at work here: the loop­hole where class made from the White House res­i­den­cy don’t need to be archived. And accord­ing to this report, Trump was indeed spend­ing more time ‘work­ing’ out of the White House res­i­den­cy dur­ing this peri­od. So at this point in the inves­ti­ga­tion, it’s not real­ly a ques­tion of whether or not there was a coverup. The coverup grows more bla­tant by the day. It’s a ques­tion of whether or not there will be any legal reper­cus­sions for this bla­tant coverup. A ques­tion that remains very open at this point:

CNN

Trump’s pres­i­den­tial diarist tells Jan. 6 com­mit­tee White House offi­cials pro­vid­ed less detail about his activ­i­ties days before riot

By Zachary Cohen, Jamie Gan­gel, Ryan Nobles, Annie Gray­er and Paula Reid, CNN
Updat­ed 8:56 AM ET, Sat April 2, 2022

Wash­ing­ton (CNN)Just days before the US Capi­tol riot, White House offi­cials start­ed pro­vid­ing few­er details about then-Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s calls and vis­its, the per­son in charge of com­pil­ing those activ­i­ties for the offi­cial record told the House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing Jan­u­ary 6, 2021, accord­ing to two sources with knowl­edge of the probe.

The com­mit­tee inter­viewed Trump’s pres­i­den­tial diarist rough­ly two weeks ago. That inter­view has not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed, nor has the tes­ti­mo­ny describ­ing a notice­able drop-off in infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by Oval Office staff lead­ing up to Jan­u­ary 6.

Oth­er wit­ness­es also have told the pan­el there was sig­nif­i­cant­ly less infor­ma­tion being shared with those involved in White House record-keep­ing dur­ing the same time peri­od, accord­ing to three sources famil­iar with the inves­ti­ga­tion.

One source described how White House record-keep­ers appeared to be “iced out” in the days lead­ing up to Jan­u­ary 6.

“The last day that nor­mal infor­ma­tion was sent was the 4th,” said anoth­er source famil­iar with the inves­ti­ga­tion. “So, start­ing the 5th, the diarist did­n’t receive the anno­tat­ed calls and notes. This was a dra­mat­ic depar­ture. That is all out of the ordi­nary.”

The White House diarist nor­mal­ly receives many streams of infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the phone logs from the switch­board, the pres­i­den­t’s move­ments from the US Secret Ser­vice and, crit­i­cal­ly, the notes from Oval Office oper­a­tions, which detail calls, guests and activ­i­ties.

But sources close to the pan­el’s inves­ti­ga­tion do not seem to know yet who, if any­one, direct­ed a change in record-keep­ing or what the moti­va­tion behind that change was, rais­ing ques­tions about whether the lack of infor­ma­tion was inten­tion­al or for staffing issues.

“It’s tough to know what that change was. Was it inten­tion­al?” one source said. “You can only keep track of some­thing when you know what’s going on. When peo­ple don’t share things with you, whether that was inten­tion­al and who decid­ed that, I think it’s a lit­tle murky at this point.”

...

These rev­e­la­tions come as the House select com­mit­tee is try­ing to under­stand what Trump was doing (and not doing) dur­ing a a sev­en-hour gap that exists in the White House call log and the pres­i­den­tial diary from Jan­u­ary 6, 2021. The recent­ly revealed switch­board call log and the pres­i­den­tial diary for the day con­tain no infor­ma­tion about the then-Pres­i­den­t’s actions dur­ing the riot, includ­ing phone calls that are known to have occurred and should have been doc­u­ment­ed in the diary.

CNN pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed that a like­ly expla­na­tion for the gap in the phone log is that Trump used cell phones, direct land­lines or aides’ phones that bypassed the White House switch­board. An offi­cial review of the call logs found no miss­ing pages.

While the select com­mit­tee does not have detailed notes about the com­ings and goings into the Oval Office on Jan­u­ary 6, they have received tes­ti­mo­ny that has helped fill in some of the gaps, accord­ing to a source famil­iar with the inves­ti­ga­tion. That includes calls Trump made and received, as well as who was with him in the pri­vate din­ing room off the Oval Office as he report­ed­ly watched the riot unfold on tele­vi­sion.

The pres­i­den­tial diary that was gen­er­at­ed for Jan­u­ary 6 con­tains scant details. It lists infor­ma­tion from the switch­board call logs and Trump’s pub­lic sched­ule but lit­tle else besides a phone call the for­mer Pres­i­dent had with an “uniden­ti­fied indi­vid­ual” at 11:17 a.m. And there are no entries in the diary for rough­ly three hours, from 1:21 p.m. to 4:03 p.m.

The Pres­i­den­tial Records Act out­lines that the office of the pres­i­den­cy has an oblig­a­tion to ade­quate­ly doc­u­ment activ­i­ties of the pres­i­dent. But there is lit­tle to no enforce­ment mech­a­nism to ensure the law is fol­lowed. While there are crim­i­nal con­se­quences for the destruc­tion of gov­ern­ment records, there are none that penal­ize the fail­ure to cre­ate them in the first place.

No expla­na­tion has been giv­en so far as to why calls known to have been made in the hours Trump was in the Oval Office are not doc­u­ment­ed in the pres­i­den­tial diary. But around that time, a num­ber of fac­tors could have reduced the flow of infor­ma­tion into the offi­cial record.

For one, sources told CNN that ear­ly Jan­u­ary was a chaot­ic time inside the White House and that Trump was spend­ing more time in the res­i­dence and con­duct­ing less offi­cial busi­ness.

Accord­ing to one for­mer Trump offi­cial, “all sense of nor­mal order start­ed to break down” and around ear­ly Jan­u­ary, “the cracks were show­ing.” While some peo­ple had been look­ing to find oth­er jobs, oth­ers had been con­fused and it became “every man for him­self,” the for­mer offi­cial added.

...

————

“Trump’s pres­i­den­tial diarist tells Jan. 6 com­mit­tee White House offi­cials pro­vid­ed less detail about his activ­i­ties days before riot” by Zachary Cohen, Jamie Gan­gel, Ryan Nobles, Annie Gray­er and Paula Reid; CNN; 04/02/2022

““The last day that nor­mal infor­ma­tion was sent was the 4th,” said anoth­er source famil­iar with the inves­ti­ga­tion. “So, start­ing the 5th, the diarist did­n’t receive the anno­tat­ed calls and notes. This was a dra­mat­ic depar­ture. That is all out of the ordi­nary.””

Start­ing on Jan 5, the White House diarist sud­den­ly got “iced out” in what was described as a “dra­mat­ic depar­ture” from what had been the norm. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that no one seems to know who ordered this dra­mat­ic shift in the record-keep­ing pol­i­cy. But per­haps the most absurd part of this sto­ry is that, while the destruc­tion of gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments is a crime, it’s appar­ent­ly not a crime to pre­vent the cre­ation of those doc­u­ments in the first place. So at least that aspect of this coverup might be entire­ly legal:

...
But sources close to the pan­el’s inves­ti­ga­tion do not seem to know yet who, if any­one, direct­ed a change in record-keep­ing or what the moti­va­tion behind that change was, rais­ing ques­tions about whether the lack of infor­ma­tion was inten­tion­al or for staffing issues.

“It’s tough to know what that change was. Was it inten­tion­al?” one source said. “You can only keep track of some­thing when you know what’s going on. When peo­ple don’t share things with you, whether that was inten­tion­al and who decid­ed that, I think it’s a lit­tle murky at this point.”

...

The pres­i­den­tial diary that was gen­er­at­ed for Jan­u­ary 6 con­tains scant details. It lists infor­ma­tion from the switch­board call logs and Trump’s pub­lic sched­ule but lit­tle else besides a phone call the for­mer Pres­i­dent had with an “uniden­ti­fied indi­vid­ual” at 11:17 a.m. And there are no entries in the diary for rough­ly three hours, from 1:21 p.m. to 4:03 p.m.

The Pres­i­den­tial Records Act out­lines that the office of the pres­i­den­cy has an oblig­a­tion to ade­quate­ly doc­u­ment activ­i­ties of the pres­i­dent. But there is lit­tle to no enforce­ment mech­a­nism to ensure the law is fol­lowed. While there are crim­i­nal con­se­quences for the destruc­tion of gov­ern­ment records, there are none that penal­ize the fail­ure to cre­ate them in the first place.
...

And relat­ing back to the archive rules that only require calls from the West Wing to get archives, but not calls from the White House res­i­den­cy, note how we are told that Trump was spend­ing more time in the res­i­den­cy dur­ing this peri­od, con­duct­ing ‘less offi­cial busi­ness’:

...
No expla­na­tion has been giv­en so far as to why calls known to have been made in the hours Trump was in the Oval Office are not doc­u­ment­ed in the pres­i­den­tial diary. But around that time, a num­ber of fac­tors could have reduced the flow of infor­ma­tion into the offi­cial record.

For one, sources told CNN that ear­ly Jan­u­ary was a chaot­ic time inside the White House and that Trump was spend­ing more time in the res­i­dence and con­duct­ing less offi­cial busi­ness.
...

“Less offi­cial busi­ness” is one way to describe plot­ting a coup. How many calls did Trump make to fel­low plot­ters in ear­ly Jan­u­ary? We’ll pre­sum­ably nev­er know since it was­n’t archived. And it’s that mys­tery of how many un-archived calls did Trump make from the White House res­i­den­cy that makes all the oth­er ques­tions swirling around the sev­en hour call gap and use of burn­er phones all the more intrigu­ing. Because if Trump had a read­i­ly avail­able option for mak­ing off-the-record calls by just mak­ing them out of the White House res­i­den­cy and he still had to engage in the kind of bla­tant coverup that pro­duced a sev­en hour call gap and an “iced out” White House diarist, that sug­gests Trump was mak­ing A LOT of incrim­i­nat­ing phone calls from all sorts of dif­fer­ent phones dur­ing this peri­od. Which of course he was doing. This is Don­ald Trump we’re talk­ing about. The real ques­tion is who was he talk­ing to in these incrim­i­nat­ing phone calls and what incrim­i­nat­ing details were they dis­cussing. There’s also the grow­ing ques­tion of how many of these fel­low plot­ters are mem­bers or affil­i­ates of the CNP. Although at this point it’s real­ly more of a ques­tion of how many of these fel­low plot­ters aren’t part of that theo­crat­ic pow­er net­work.

That’s cute: Ali Alexan­der is doing a “I’m total­ly coop­er­a­tive (and also total­ly inno­cent)!” song and dance with the press fol­low­ing reports that he was just sub­poe­naed by a grand jury in rela­tion to the con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tion into the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. He’s let­ting reporters know that he’s ful­ly coop­er­at­ing with inves­ti­ga­tors but does­n’t actu­al­ly know about any wrong­do­ing. Lol.

First, recall how Alexan­der — a some­what sur­pris­ing mem­ber of the CNP giv­en his back­ground as a far right inter­net troll — is so close to Roger Stone that his actions in rela­tion to Jan 6 led to spec­u­la­tion that the insur­rec­tion was a Roger Stone pro­duc­tion. Don’t for­get that, beyond Stone’s lead role in the 2000 “Brooks Broth­ers Riot”, the whole “Stop the Steal” slo­gan was in fact orig­i­nal­ly a Roger Stone cre­ation to help Trump win the 2016 GOP pri­ma­ry. The CNP isn’t exclu­sive to allow pro­fes­sion­al dirty-trick­sters into their ranks.

Also recall how Alexan­der was work­ing close­ly with Alex Jones in a joint “Stop the Steal” effort. And as we’ve seen, 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.”

Jones went on to dou­ble down on the claim that Trump gave him the impres­sion that Trump him­self was going to join the sec­ond ‘wild’ ral­ly Alexan­der was orga­nized planned for Jan­u­ary 6. A claim that Trump him­self appeared to recent­ly val­i­date with his recent state­ments about how he real­ly did want to join the march to the Capi­tol but the Secret Ser­vice pre­vent­ed him. Yes, the sto­ries being ped­dled by Jones and Trump are con­cur­ring with each oth­er. And not con­cur­ring in a way that absolves any of them of any guilt. Quite the oppo­site. Instead, the sto­ry that’s been emerg­ing over the months, on report at a time, is the sto­ry of a sec­ond “Stop the Steal” ral­ly that was planned to get extra “wild”. Wild in more or less the exact man­ner that the insur­rec­tion played out.

Anoth­er aspect to Ali Alexan­der’s involve­ment in Jan 6 that remains an open ques­tion is the extent of his coor­di­nat­ing with mili­tia groups like the Oath Keep­ers or the Proud Boys. Open ques­tions that include unre­solved ques­tions about the “Quick Reac­tion Force” (QRF) the Oath Keep­ers had set up to deliv­er heavy weapons to the insur­rec­tion­ists if the call was made. A call they thought was going to come from Trump. As we saw, one of the most incrim­i­nat­ing details in the entire affair is the fact that the group of Oath Keep­ers who noto­ri­ous­ly breached the Capi­tol in a “stack” for­ma­tion were led by Jes­si­ca Watkins, the same fig­ure who was report­ed­ly pro­vid­ing VIP pro­tec­tion ser­vices for Roger Stone back­stage at the “Stop the Steal” ral­ly at the Ellipse on Jan 6. Watkins claimed she was coor­di­nat­ing her VIP pro­tec­tion ser­vices with the Secret Ser­vice. Inter­est­ing­ly, one of the Oath Keep­ers who was act­ing as Roger Stone’s body guard that day, Joshua James, is now a coop­er­at­ing wit­ness. As we’re going to see, Alexan­der now asserts that “Any mili­tia work­ing secu­ri­ty at the Ellipse belonged to “Women for Amer­i­ca First,” not us,””. The mutu­al fin­ger-point­ing is in full effect.

That attempt to lay the blame for any mili­tia coor­di­nat­ing at the feet of “Women for Amer­i­ca First” — led by CNP mem­ber Amy Kre­mer and her daugh­ter Kylie — is also a reminder of the report­ed ten­sions between the ral­ly plans at the Ellipse, which the Trump White House was offi­cial­ly coor­di­nat­ing with, and the sec­ond ral­ly planned at the Capi­tol by Alexan­der and Jones that was ulti­mate­ly eclipsed by the insur­rec­tion. As we saw, these were far from inde­pen­dent­ly-orga­nized affairs. 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 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.

Those ques­tions of the degree of secret coor­di­na­tion between the ‘offi­cial’ Stop the Steal ral­ly at the Ellipse being coor­di­nat­ed by the Kre­mers and the ‘wild’ ral­ly planned after­wards by Alexan­der and Jones have been fur­ther height­ened by all the emerg­ing ques­tions about secret meet­ings at the White House and the Kre­mers’ use of three known ‘burn­er’ phones, with two phones going to Amy and Kylie and one of the three hav­ing been giv­en to a still unknown per­son.

But there’s anoth­er major angle to the sto­ry of the Ali Alexander/Alex Jones schemes: the net­work­ing Alexan­der was doing with a group of far right mem­bers of con­gress — Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lau­ren Boe­bert, Mo Brooks, Madi­son Cawthorn, Andy Big­gs, and Louie Gohmert — who were alleged­ly ped­dling blan­ket par­don offers on behalf of the White House.

That’s all part of the con­text of the pre­pos­ter­ous sto­ry­line being fed to the press by Alexan­der regard­ing the grand jury sub­poe­na. a sto­ry­line about how he’s going to ful­ly coop­er­ate and tell inves­ti­ga­tors every­thing he knows. Which is noth­ing:

Politi­co

‘Stop the Steal’ orga­niz­er says he received a grand jury sub­poe­na for Jan. 6 probe

Ali Alexan­der has pre­vi­ous­ly tes­ti­fied to the Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee.

By Kyle Cheney
04/08/2022 09:15 PM EDT

Ali Alexan­der, the founder of the Stop the Steal orga­ni­za­tion that helped pro­mote Don­ald Trump’s false claims of elec­tion fraud, said Fri­day he received a grand jury sub­poe­na from the Jus­tice Depart­ment and intends to coop­er­ate with the inves­ti­ga­tion.

In a lengthy state­ment, Alexan­der denied any wrong­do­ing and said he is not a tar­get of the inves­ti­ga­tion, which he said was more clear­ly aimed at orga­niz­ers of a Jan. 6 ral­ly near the White House. That event was run by “Women for Amer­i­ca First.”

Alexander’s con­fir­ma­tion of a grand jury sub­poe­na is the first pub­lic acknowl­edg­ment that the Jus­tice Department’s probe of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capi­tol has expand­ed to include orga­niz­ers of the events that pre­ced­ed the attack, includ­ing some fig­ures adja­cent to Trump him­self. The issuance of a grand jury sub­poe­na sug­gests pros­e­cu­tors believe crimes may have been com­mit­ted in con­nec­tion with those events.

Alexan­der has pre­vi­ous­ly tes­ti­fied to the Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee, where he talked about his con­tacts with Repub­li­can mem­bers of Con­gress. His coop­er­a­tion with the Jus­tice Depart­ment was first report­ed by the New York Times.

Alexan­der said in a since-delet­ed video that he worked with GOP Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Big­gs and Mo Brooks to attempt to use Con­gress’ Jan. 6 ses­sion cer­ti­fy­ing Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry as a chance to pres­sure law­mak­ers to over­turn the elec­toral results.

“We four schemed up to put max­i­mum pres­sure on Con­gress while they were vot­ing,” Alexan­der said in the video.

Big­gs and Brooks have denied any sub­stan­tive rela­tion­ship with Alexan­der. Gosar has declined to address their con­tacts.

Alexan­der is also fight­ing in court to block a sub­poe­na from the select com­mit­tee for his phone records.

In his law­suit to block the sub­poe­na, Alexan­der revealed he had con­tact on the morn­ing of Jan. 6 with Kim­ber­ly Guil­foyle, the fiancée of Don­ald Trump Jr. who played a role in secur­ing financ­ing for the ellipse ral­ly.

...

In his state­ment, Alexan­der sought to sep­a­rate him­self from the sub­stance of the inves­ti­ga­tion, say­ing he did not coor­di­nate with the Proud Boys and sug­gest­ing his con­tact with the Oath Keep­ers was lim­it­ed to accept­ing an offer for them to act as ush­ers at an event that nev­er took place: his own per­mit­ted event near the Capi­tol, which didn’t occur because of the mob attack on the Capi­tol. The Oath Keep­ers are the sub­ject of con­spir­a­cy charges for their roles in breach­ing the Capi­tol that day.

“I did not finance the Ellipse equip­ment. I did not ever talk with the White House about secu­ri­ty groups. Any mili­tia work­ing secu­ri­ty at the Ellipse belonged to “Women for Amer­i­ca First,” not us,” Alexan­der said. “I did not coor­di­nate any move­ments with the Proud Boys or even see them that day. I did take Oath Keep­ers offer to act as ush­ers for the Area 8 event but all of that was lost in the chaos. I wasn’t in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with any of the afore­men­tioned groups while I was near the Capi­tol work­ing to get peo­ple away from the build­ing. Last­ly, I’m not will­ing to pre­sume anyone’s guilt.”

“I did noth­ing wrong and I am not in pos­ses­sion of evi­dence that any­one else had plans to com­mit unlaw­ful acts,” Alexan­der said. “I denounce any­one who planned to sub­vert my per­mit­ted event and the oth­er per­mit­ted events of that day on Capi­tol grounds to stage any coun­ter­pro­duc­tive activ­i­ties.”

Despite his dis­avow­al of oth­er extrem­ist groups that par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Jan. 6 attack, CNN pre­vi­ous­ly unearthed video of Alexan­der say­ing he intend­ed to reach out to the Proud Boys and Oath Keep­ers about doing secu­ri­ty for his event.

————

“ ‘Stop the Steal’ orga­niz­er says he received a grand jury sub­poe­na for Jan. 6 probe” by Kyle Cheney; Politi­co; 04/08/2022

“Alexander’s con­fir­ma­tion of a grand jury sub­poe­na is the first pub­lic acknowl­edg­ment that the Jus­tice Department’s probe of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capi­tol has expand­ed to include orga­niz­ers of the events that pre­ced­ed the attack, includ­ing some fig­ures adja­cent to Trump him­self. The issuance of a grand jury sub­poe­na sug­gests pros­e­cu­tors believe crimes may have been com­mit­ted in con­nec­tion with those events.”

Were any crimes com­mit­ted by Ali Alexan­der and the fig­ures he was coor­di­nat­ing with in orga­niz­ing his “Stop the Steal” ral­lies dur­ing the build up to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion? If any crimes were com­mit­ted, the cer­tain­ly weren’t com­mit­ted by Alexan­der, who had hard­ly any­thing at all to do with the events of Jan­u­ary 6. His “Stop the Steal” ral­ly sched­uled out­side the Capi­tol nev­er even hap­pened, after all. The insur­rec­tion effec­tive­ly can­celled it. So any use­ful infor­ma­tion Alexan­der might pro­vide inves­ti­ga­tors is real­ly just going to be about what the oth­er groups may have been involved with, like “Women for Amer­i­ca First”. At least that’s the nar­ra­tive Alexan­der is now push­ing fol­low­ing the reports of his grand jury sub­poe­na. He was just an inno­cent bystander. An inno­cent bystander who does­n’t actu­al­ly have any real evi­dence of crim­i­nal wrong­do­ing to pro­vide to inves­ti­ga­tors any­way:

...
In a lengthy state­ment, Alexan­der denied any wrong­do­ing and said he is not a tar­get of the inves­ti­ga­tion, which he said was more clear­ly aimed at orga­niz­ers of a Jan. 6 ral­ly near the White House. That event was run by “Women for Amer­i­ca First.”

...

Alexan­der said in a since-delet­ed video that he worked with GOP Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Big­gs and Mo Brooks to attempt to use Con­gress’ Jan. 6 ses­sion cer­ti­fy­ing Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry as a chance to pres­sure law­mak­ers to over­turn the elec­toral results.

“We four schemed up to put max­i­mum pres­sure on Con­gress while they were vot­ing,” Alexan­der said in the video.

Big­gs and Brooks have denied any sub­stan­tive rela­tion­ship with Alexan­der. Gosar has declined to address their con­tacts.

...

“I did noth­ing wrong and I am not in pos­ses­sion of evi­dence that any­one else had plans to com­mit unlaw­ful acts,” Alexan­der said. “I denounce any­one who planned to sub­vert my per­mit­ted event and the oth­er per­mit­ted events of that day on Capi­tol grounds to stage any coun­ter­pro­duc­tive activ­i­ties.”

Despite his dis­avow­al of oth­er extrem­ist groups that par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Jan. 6 attack, CNN pre­vi­ous­ly unearthed video of Alexan­der say­ing he intend­ed to reach out to the Proud Boys and Oath Keep­ers about doing secu­ri­ty for his event.
...

Alexan­der is not only inno­cent but obliv­i­ous of any wrong­do­ing that may have hap­pened. It’s quite a con­ve­nient nar­ra­tive. A nar­ra­tive that does­n’t explain why Alexan­der is simul­ta­ne­ous fight­ing to block the release of his phone records. Phone records that include phone calls on the morn­ing of Jan­u­ary 6 to Don Jr.‘s fiance Kim­ber­ly Guil­foyle. Don’t for­get that Guil­foyle and her for­mer deputy Car­o­line Wren 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. And that’s what Alexan­der revealed in his law­suit to keep those records sealed. You whave to won­der about the phone records he did­n’t dis­close in that law­suit. We also have to won­der how many of those phone records include calls to the mili­tia groups that Alexan­der is now say­ing were the sole respon­si­bil­i­ty of the Kre­mers’ oper­a­tion:

...
Alexan­der is also fight­ing in court to block a sub­poe­na from the select com­mit­tee for his phone records.

In his law­suit to block the sub­poe­na, Alexan­der revealed he had con­tact on the morn­ing of Jan. 6 with Kim­ber­ly Guil­foyle, the fiancée of Don­ald Trump Jr. who played a role in secur­ing financ­ing for the ellipse ral­ly.

...

In his state­ment, Alexan­der sought to sep­a­rate him­self from the sub­stance of the inves­ti­ga­tion, say­ing he did not coor­di­nate with the Proud Boys and sug­gest­ing his con­tact with the Oath Keep­ers was lim­it­ed to accept­ing an offer for them to act as ush­ers at an event that nev­er took place: his own per­mit­ted event near the Capi­tol, which didn’t occur because of the mob attack on the Capi­tol. The Oath Keep­ers are the sub­ject of con­spir­a­cy charges for their roles in breach­ing the Capi­tol that day.

“I did not finance the Ellipse equip­ment. I did not ever talk with the White House about secu­ri­ty groups. Any mili­tia work­ing secu­ri­ty at the Ellipse belonged to “Women for Amer­i­ca First,” not us,” Alexan­der said. “I did not coor­di­nate any move­ments with the Proud Boys or even see them that day. I did take Oath Keep­ers offer to act as ush­ers for the Area 8 event but all of that was lost in the chaos. I wasn’t in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with any of the afore­men­tioned groups while I was near the Capi­tol work­ing to get peo­ple away from the build­ing. Last­ly, I’m not will­ing to pre­sume anyone’s guilt.”
...

But per­haps the biggest fact relat­ed to this inves­ti­ga­tion that makes Alexan­der’s denials so laugh­able is the fact that Alexan­der was open­ly denounce Con­gress­man Mo Brooks for his trai­tor­ous actions just two weeks ago fol­low­ing reports that Don­ald Trump was with­draw­ing his endorse­ment of Brooks after Brooks voiced skep­ti­cism about a stolen 2020 elec­tion. As the fol­low­ing piece describes, Alexan­der seemed almost glee­ful in now being able to dish on Brooks for be a real trai­tor to the “Elec­tion Integri­ty” cause. It was­n’t exact­ly the kind of talk you would expect from some­one who knows appar­ent­ly noth­ing about any plans to over­turn the elec­tion:

Salon

MAGA purge: Jan. 6 orga­niz­er labels for­mer ally Rep. Mo Brooks as “LOSER” and “piece of crap”

Ali Alexan­der, sup­posed “Stop the Steal” founder, mocks “de-endorsed” con­gress­man as trai­tor to Trump’s Big Lie

By Kathryn Joyce
Pub­lished March 25, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)

On Wednes­day, short­ly after news broke that Don­ald Trump had rescind­ed his endorse­ment of Alaba­ma Rep. Mo Brooks, a right-wing Repub­li­can cur­rent­ly run­ning for Sen­ate, one of Brooks’ for­mer allies denounced him force­ful­ly across right-wing social media. In what amount­ed to a MAGA excom­mu­ni­ca­tion, Ali Alexan­der, the self-pro­claimed founder of the 2020 “Stop the Steal” move­ment and a key plan­ner of the Jan. 6, 2021, protests, cel­e­brat­ed the “de-endorse­ment” on mul­ti­ple con­ser­v­a­tive social media sites, writ­ing on Telegram, “MO BROOKS is a LOSER.”

“I haven’t told the sto­ry to any­one except the Pres­i­den­t’s team and my lawyers or how Mo Brooks and HIS STAFF betrayed our elec­tion integri­ty move­ment before he did so pub­licly,” Alexan­der con­tin­ued. “With Pres­i­dent Trump with­draw­ing his endorse­ment, I can final­ly be pub­lic about what a piece of crap Mo actu­al­ly is. He’s no longer on the team. And his staff is worse and smells worse. I hope they did­n’t lie under oath to the J6 Com­mit­tee like they lied to Mo in pri­vate. Stay tuned!”

In anoth­er mes­sage on the site, Alexan­der wrote, “This is what Mo does­n’t get... the vot­ers already left him. And keep leav­ing him. Trump is fol­low­ing what many of us in pri­vate and pub­lic have said. Mo Brooks has the dumb­est staff on the hill and every­one knows it.”

On the com­pet­ing right-wing social media site Gab, Alexan­der con­tin­ued, writ­ing, “I’m proud to announce that @realdonaldtrump has WITHDRAWN his endorse­ment of Mo Brooks. I can now go on the record about him and his office and their attempts to BETRAY the Elec­tion Integri­ty move­ment.”

Alexan­der weighed in on Get­tr as well, direct­ing a mes­sage at Brooks: “Change your pro­file, @MoBrooks” (refer­ring to Brooks’ pro­file ban­ner tout­ing Trump’s endorse­ment). “You betrayed our Elec­tion Integri­ty move­ment. We’re done here. You’ve been reject­ed by #StopTheSteal and now Trump. Tell your staff to nev­er come for me again.”

Brooks cer­tain­ly isn’t the first Repub­li­can to be cast out of Trump World as an apos­tate. But this rep­re­sents a strik­ing depar­ture from the way Alexan­der used to talk about Brooks.

At the Dec. 12, 2020, “Jeri­cho March,” a pro-Trump reli­gious ral­ly to protest the elec­tion results, Alexan­der appeared on stage to tell the crowd about Stop the Steal and to urge them to return to the cap­i­tal in Jan­u­ary to “occu­py D.C. full of patri­ots.” (Alexan­der, who was then in the process of con­vert­ing to a right-wing ver­sion of Catholi­cism, promised the audi­ence that they had “God’s favor,” and ral­lied them to fight “for God and coun­try!”)

At that event, Alexan­der praised Mo Brooks specif­i­cal­ly as the first Repub­li­can mem­ber of Con­gress to vow he would object to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of elec­toral votes on Jan. 6. “Thank God for Con­gress­man Mo Brooks,” Alexan­der said. “He’s said he’ll object to the House cer­ti­fi­ca­tion on Jan. 6. We need some of his col­leagues to join him. We expect them to join him — or we will throw them out of office.”

He con­tin­ued, “I want to tell the Repub­li­can Par­ty that if one of these sen­a­tors does­n’t join Mo Brooks, we will burn the Repub­li­can Par­ty down. We will make some­thing new.”

In a now-delet­ed Periscope video post­ed in Decem­ber 2020, Alexan­der also claimed that Brooks was one of three mem­bers of Con­gress — along with Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Big­gs, both of Ari­zona — who had helped plan the activ­i­ties of Jan. 6. In the noto­ri­ous video, Alexan­der said, “We four schemed up putting max­i­mum pres­sure on Con­gress while they were vot­ing” in order to “change the hearts and minds of Repub­li­cans who were in that body, hear­ing our loud roar from out­side.”

...

At the pro-Trump ral­ly on the morn­ing of Jan. 6, Brooks deliv­ered a vit­ri­olic call to action, telling the crowd on the Wash­ing­ton Ellipse, “Today is the day Amer­i­can patri­ots start tak­ing down names and kick­ing ass.”

As a Feb­ru­ary 2022 report not­ed, Brooks’ speech that day also delved into Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric. “Today, Repub­li­can sen­a­tors and con­gress­men will either vote to turn Amer­i­ca into a god­less, amoral, dic­ta­to­r­i­al, oppressed, and social­ist nation on the decline,” he said, “or they will join us, and they will fight and vote against vot­er fraud and elec­tion theft and vote for keep­ing Amer­i­ca great.”

Brooks lat­er protest­ed that he was only try­ing to rouse the audi­ence to keep track of Repub­li­cans who failed to sup­port Trump’s efforts to over­turn the elec­tion, and had no inten­tion of pro­mot­ing lit­er­al “ass-kick­ing.” But that claim seemed dubi­ous in light of Brooks’ lat­er state­ment that he had worn body armor on Jan. 6, after receiv­ing warn­ings about poten­tial vio­lence.

Last Decem­ber, after fac­ing sub­poe­nas from the House Select Com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capi­tol, Alexan­der hand­ed over some 1,500 text mes­sages and oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Repub­li­can mem­bers of Con­gress and Trump White House aides. Among them were com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Gosar and Brooks.

In response, a spokesper­son for Brooks released a state­ment claim­ing that Brooks’ inter­ac­tion with Alexan­der had been lim­it­ed to receiv­ing one text from the Stop the Steal orga­niz­er in Decem­ber 2020. The state­ment read, “The insin­u­a­tion that this sin­gle text to Con­gress­man Brooks from an unknown num­ber by some­one claim­ing to be ‘Ali Alexan­der’ some­how sug­gests Con­gress­man Brooks in any way helped plan the Capi­tol attack is absurd, out­ra­geous and defam­a­to­ry.”

But accord­ing to a fil­ing from Alexan­der’s legal rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Alexan­der told the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee that he’d had phone con­ver­sa­tions with Brooks’ staff. An Octo­ber sto­ry in Rolling Stone fur­ther report­ed that two unnamed sources involved in plan­ning Jan. 6 claimed that they’d had “dozens” of con­ver­sa­tions with the offices of six mem­bers of Con­gress, includ­ing Brooks.

At that time, Brooks told Alaba­ma jour­nal­ists that while he had­n’t helped plan the Jan. 6 ral­ly, if his staff had, “Quite frankly, I’d be proud of them.”

Despite Brooks’ stal­wart sup­port of Trump, his poor show­ing in polls — and the sub­se­quent impli­ca­tion that Trump’s endorse­ments are los­ing their poten­cy, even in a deep red South­ern state — seem­ing­ly led the ex-pres­i­dent to announce on Wednes­day that he was with­draw­ing his endorse­ment. Trump accused Brooks of going “woke” by fail­ing to cam­paign on Trump’s stolen elec­tion nar­ra­tive.

In response, Brooks made the star­tling but entire­ly plau­si­ble claim that Trump had repeat­ed­ly asked him to “rescind the 2020 elec­tion, imme­di­ate­ly remove Joe Biden from the White House, imme­di­ate­ly put Pres­i­dent Trump back in the White House, and hold a new spe­cial elec­tion for the pres­i­den­cy.” Brooks said he’d told Trump that Jan. 6, 2021, had rep­re­sent­ed the final chance to con­test the elec­tion, and that “nei­ther the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion nor the U.S. Code per­mit what Pres­i­dent Trump asks.”

———–

“MAGA purge: Jan. 6 orga­niz­er labels for­mer ally Rep. Mo Brooks as “LOSER” and “piece of crap”” by Kathryn Joyce; Salon; 03/25/2022

“On the com­pet­ing right-wing social media site Gab, Alexan­der con­tin­ued, writ­ing, “I’m proud to announce that @realdonaldtrump has WITHDRAWN his endorse­ment of Mo Brooks. I can now go on the record about him and his office and their attempts to BETRAY the Elec­tion Integri­ty move­ment.””

Oh the bre­tray­al. The betray­al of the Elec­tion Integri­ty move­ment that Mo Brooks appar­ent­ly com­mit­ted when he expressed doubts about the stolen elec­tion. Ali Alexan­der sure did­n’t sound like some­one who know noth­ing about the efforts to over­turn the elec­tion when he was trash­ing Brooks.

And note Brook­s’s response to Trump’s endorse­ment with­draw­al: he’s now claim­ing that Trump had repeat­ed­ly asked him to “rescind the 2020 elec­tion, imme­di­ate­ly remove Joe Biden from the White House, imme­di­ate­ly put Pres­i­dent Trump back in the White House, and hold a new spe­cial elec­tion for the pres­i­den­cy.” Is this true? Well, don’t for­get that Brooks was just one of a group of far right House GOP­ers who was part of this effort...and work­ing close­ly with Alexan­der the whole time. It will be inter­est­ing to see if any of those oth­er GOP­ers end up earn­ing Alexan­der’s scorn by reveal­ing more tid­bits like this:

...
Despite Brooks’ stal­wart sup­port of Trump, his poor show­ing in polls — and the sub­se­quent impli­ca­tion that Trump’s endorse­ments are los­ing their poten­cy, even in a deep red South­ern state — seem­ing­ly led the ex-pres­i­dent to announce on Wednes­day that he was with­draw­ing his endorse­ment. Trump accused Brooks of going “woke” by fail­ing to cam­paign on Trump’s stolen elec­tion nar­ra­tive.

In response, Brooks made the star­tling but entire­ly plau­si­ble claim that Trump had repeat­ed­ly asked him to “rescind the 2020 elec­tion, imme­di­ate­ly remove Joe Biden from the White House, imme­di­ate­ly put Pres­i­dent Trump back in the White House, and hold a new spe­cial elec­tion for the pres­i­den­cy.” Brooks said he’d told Trump that Jan. 6, 2021, had rep­re­sent­ed the final chance to con­test the elec­tion, and that “nei­ther the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion nor the U.S. Code per­mit what Pres­i­dent Trump asks.”
...

And note how Brooks has already denied have any sub­stan­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Alexan­der, only to have it revealed that Alexan­der appar­ent­ly talked with this group of GOP­ers “dozens” of times about their plans. It’s pre­sum­ably part of the rea­son Alexan­der is so pissed about Brooks get­ting chat­ty about what hap­pened. Brooks knows what Alexan­der was up to because they were part­ners in crime:

...
In a now-delet­ed Periscope video post­ed in Decem­ber 2020, Alexan­der also claimed that Brooks was one of three mem­bers of Con­gress — along with Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Big­gs, both of Ari­zona — who had helped plan the activ­i­ties of Jan. 6. In the noto­ri­ous video, Alexan­der said, “We four schemed up putting max­i­mum pres­sure on Con­gress while they were vot­ing” in order to “change the hearts and minds of Repub­li­cans who were in that body, hear­ing our loud roar from out­side.”

...

Last Decem­ber, after fac­ing sub­poe­nas from the House Select Com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capi­tol, Alexan­der hand­ed over some 1,500 text mes­sages and oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Repub­li­can mem­bers of Con­gress and Trump White House aides. Among them were com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Gosar and Brooks.

In response, a spokesper­son for Brooks released a state­ment claim­ing that Brooks’ inter­ac­tion with Alexan­der had been lim­it­ed to receiv­ing one text from the Stop the Steal orga­niz­er in Decem­ber 2020. The state­ment read, “The insin­u­a­tion that this sin­gle text to Con­gress­man Brooks from an unknown num­ber by some­one claim­ing to be ‘Ali Alexan­der’ some­how sug­gests Con­gress­man Brooks in any way helped plan the Capi­tol attack is absurd, out­ra­geous and defam­a­to­ry.”

But accord­ing to a fil­ing from Alexan­der’s legal rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Alexan­der told the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee that he’d had phone con­ver­sa­tions with Brooks’ staff. An Octo­ber sto­ry in Rolling Stone fur­ther report­ed that two unnamed sources involved in plan­ning Jan. 6 claimed that they’d had “dozens” of con­ver­sa­tions with the offices of six mem­bers of Con­gress, includ­ing Brooks.

At that time, Brooks told Alaba­ma jour­nal­ists that while he had­n’t helped plan the Jan. 6 ral­ly, if his staff had, “Quite frankly, I’d be proud of them.”
...

Final­ly, note now Alexan­der appeared to be under­go­ing some sort of reli­gious con­ver­sion in Decem­ber of 2020 to Catholi­cism. Giv­en his unex­pect­ed mem­ber­ship in the CNP — the guy is a pro­fes­sion­al troll — and the myr­i­ad of oth­er CNP fin­ger­prints we find on the insur­rec­tion, you have to won­der what if any role that reli­gious con­ver­sion had in cement­ing Alexan­der’s sta­tus as one of the ring-lead­ers in a very seri­ous coup attempt involv­ing the most pow­er­ful theo­crat­ic polit­i­cal force in the US:

...
Brooks cer­tain­ly isn’t the first Repub­li­can to be cast out of Trump World as an apos­tate. But this rep­re­sents a strik­ing depar­ture from the way Alexan­der used to talk about Brooks.

At the Dec. 12, 2020, “Jeri­cho March,” a pro-Trump reli­gious ral­ly to protest the elec­tion results, Alexan­der appeared on stage to tell the crowd about Stop the Steal and to urge them to return to the cap­i­tal in Jan­u­ary to “occu­py D.C. full of patri­ots.” (Alexan­der, who was then in the process of con­vert­ing to a right-wing ver­sion of Catholi­cism, promised the audi­ence that they had “God’s favor,” and ral­lied them to fight “for God and coun­try!”)

At that event, Alexan­der praised Mo Brooks specif­i­cal­ly as the first Repub­li­can mem­ber of Con­gress to vow he would object to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of elec­toral votes on Jan. 6. “Thank God for Con­gress­man Mo Brooks,” Alexan­der said. “He’s said he’ll object to the House cer­ti­fi­ca­tion on Jan. 6. We need some of his col­leagues to join him. We expect them to join him — or we will throw them out of office.”

He con­tin­ued, “I want to tell the Repub­li­can Par­ty that if one of these sen­a­tors does­n’t join Mo Brooks, we will burn the Repub­li­can Par­ty down. We will make some­thing new.”

...

At the pro-Trump ral­ly on the morn­ing of Jan. 6, Brooks deliv­ered a vit­ri­olic call to action, telling the crowd on the Wash­ing­ton Ellipse, “Today is the day Amer­i­can patri­ots start tak­ing down names and kick­ing ass.”

As a Feb­ru­ary 2022 report not­ed, Brooks’ speech that day also delved into Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist rhetoric. “Today, Repub­li­can sen­a­tors and con­gress­men will either vote to turn Amer­i­ca into a god­less, amoral, dic­ta­to­r­i­al, oppressed, and social­ist nation on the decline,” he said, “or they will join us, and they will fight and vote against vot­er fraud and elec­tion theft and vote for keep­ing Amer­i­ca great.”
...

And that brings us to a pro­found­ly dis­turb­ing Salon arti­cle from a few months ago about a new trend on the Chris­t­ian Right: ‘Alt Right’ con­verts look­ing to ‘main­stream’ them­selves after flirt­ing too heav­i­ly with overt fas­cism. It’s not just Ali Alexan­der. Fig­ures like Faith Goldy, Milo Yiannop­u­lous, Jack Poso­biec, and Nick Fuentes have all sud­den­ly because Catholic over the year or so. 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. He was basi­cal­ly part­ner of the “Stop the Steal” move­ment. And like Ali Alexan­der, Nick Fuentes sud­den­ly recent­ly found Jesus in a big way. Along with a bunch of oth­er ‘Alt Right’ per­son­al­i­ties push­ing the kinds of ideas that would be very appeal­ing to a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist author­i­tar­i­an agen­da:

Salon

Right-wing Catholic boom­let grows: “Gun Girl” signs up with Moth­er Church
Ludi­crous for­mer Kent State stu­dent joins Milo Yiannopou­los, Ali Alexan­der in embrace of “trad-Cath” reli­gion

By Kathryn Joyce
Pub­lished Jan­u­ary 8, 2022 12:00PM (EST)

In ear­ly Decem­ber, Kaitlin Ben­nett, the 20-some­thing far-right provo­ca­teur known as “Kent State Gun Girl,” who has made a career out of record­ing her­self antag­o­niz­ing lib­er­al col­lege stu­dents, issued a new set of self-mythol­o­giz­ing images. In a word­less four-minute video that begins with the sound of a fetal heart­beat, a series of slow-motion shots jux­ta­pose Catholic iconog­ra­phy with a preg­nant Ben­nett caress­ing her bel­ly in front of altars, sit­ting in pews, hold­ing rosary beads, and smil­ing gen­tly at the cam­era. The final shot pans slow­ly up Ben­net­t’s body — from feet to form-fit­ting dress to waist-length blond hair — before ascend­ing into an iden­ti­cal pan over a stat­ue of the Vir­gin Mary.

The preg­nan­cy announce­ment video was post­ed on Lib­er­ty Hang­outs, a right-wing web­site and YouTube chan­nel found­ed by Ben­net­t’s hus­band, which bills itself as “the offi­cial home of Kaitlin Ben­nett.” But this was just part two of anoth­er big reveal sev­er­al days ear­li­er, when Ben­nett announced she was no longer an athe­ist, but had con­vert­ed to Roman Catholi­cism, thanks to var­i­ous fac­tors: her hus­band’s devout belief, her cat get­ting sick, and a lib­er­al pro­test­er she tan­gled with who expressed hos­til­i­ty toward reli­gion.

Days lat­er, a pop-reli­gion web­site owned by Catholic media giant EWTN, the largest reli­gious media net­work world­wide, cov­ered the news like a breath­less tabloid “baby bump” watch. Ben­nett began appear­ing on right-wing Catholic shows, like that of Life­Site­News, to dis­cuss her con­ver­sion and her con­vic­tion that LGBTQ Pride Month was a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the worst of the sev­en dead­ly sins. She tweet­ed a pic­ture of her­self in a white lace man­til­la after attend­ing her first Tra­di­tion­al Latin Mass, and her hus­band, Justin Moldow, told Catholic-right YouTu­ber Tim­o­thy Gor­don that film­ing his wife being jeered off col­lege cam­pus­es had “tru­ly felt like I was wit­ness­ing the Pas­sion of the Christ in that moment.”

In an era of deeply sil­ly fame-seek­ing inter­net per­sonas, Ben­net­t’s per­for­mance as a stunt­woman of the far right man­ages to stand out. As pres­i­dent of Kent State’s Turn­ing Point USA chap­ter in 2017, she over­saw a “dia­per protest” mock­ing the notion of cam­pus “safe spaces” that man­aged to embar­rass the nation­al TPUSA, ulti­mate­ly end­ing her rela­tion­ship with the group. The next year, she became inter­net-famous for post­ing a grad­u­a­tion pic­ture of her­self wear­ing a short dress, heels and an AR-10. She briefly worked with Alex Jones’s con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry out­fit Infowars, shot up a paper sign read­ing “Hap­py Hol­i­days,” and mar­ket­ed an end­less array of “gun girl” merch. (As Ruth Gra­ham not­ed in a Slate pro­file after Ben­nett was run off Ohio Uni­ver­si­ty’s Athens cam­pus, Ben­net­t’s own social media accounts declare her intent to “mon­e­tize the haters.”)

But beneath the lib-trolling spec­ta­cle, there’s a deep­er pat­tern at work. For one thing, Lib­er­ty Hang­out, run by Ben­nett and Moldow, has a long his­to­ry of hard-right pol­i­tics, advanc­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries like “White geno­cide,” mak­ing ref­er­ence to the white suprema­cist “14 words,” and polling its read­er­ship on whether the Holo­caust real­ly hap­pened quite the way they were taught in school. (“It does­n’t seem pos­si­ble six mil­lion were killed,” the group’s Twit­ter account argued.) On its pod­cast through­out the ear­ly years of the Trump pres­i­den­cy, the group host­ed a string of “alt-right” celebri­ties, includ­ing some of the peo­ple found liable this past Novem­ber for incit­ing vio­lence at the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia. But over the last cou­ple of months the account has trans­formed into such a uni­form stream of Catholic imagery that fol­low­ers com­plained they’d gone “from being all about Amer­i­ca and lib­er­ty to being all about the Vat­i­can and Mex­i­cans” (the lat­ter appar­ent­ly in response to a post fea­tur­ing a Mex­i­can saint).

In this, Lib­er­ty Hang­out and its com­bat­ive star were retrac­ing a path tak­en by a num­ber of oth­er far-right activists asso­ci­at­ed with rem­nants of the alt-right and the move­ments jock­ey­ing to take its place. After Cana­di­an white suprema­cist per­son­al­i­ty Faith Goldy was fired from her posi­tion at the right-wing out­let Rebel News for appear­ing on a pod­cast of the neo-Nazi Dai­ly Stormer, she made a very vis­i­ble return to Catholi­cism, and has found a warm wel­come in some cor­ners of the Catholic right. A year ago, Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexan­der made a splashy announce­ment of his own con­ver­sion to the Catholic Church only days before he helped direct a mob of pro­test­ers to the U.S. Capi­tol. Sev­er­al months lat­er, in mid-March, dis­graced for­mer Bre­it­bart writer and alt-right star Milo Yiannopou­los told Life­Site­News that return­ing to the Catholic Church had helped him become “ex-gay.”

They were join­ing a num­ber of oth­er far-right fig­ures who have con­spic­u­ous­ly inter­twined their polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy with right-wing Catholi­cism, includ­ing Jack Poso­biec, the Piz­za­gate pro­mot­er turned right-wing com­men­ta­tor, and Nicholas Fuentes, the youth­ful founder of the Amer­i­ca First or “groyper” move­ment, who has built a mas­sive online fol­low­ing. When the var­i­ous fac­tions of the alt-right decid­ed to gath­er in Char­lottesville in the sum­mer of 2017, they did most of their pre-ral­ly orga­niz­ing in chat rooms online. One of the most pop­u­lar, named the “Nick Fuentes Serv­er,” was ded­i­cat­ed to Catholics seek­ing “to explore the con­nec­tions between their church” and Unite the Right. Hun­dreds of posters in that room talked about tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholi­cism and post­ed memes with Cru­sades-era imagery and rhetoric along­side overt­ly anti­se­mit­ic and pro-Nazi posts.

“Once the alt-right dis­in­te­grat­ed in 2018 and 2019, a num­ber of them turned inward, toward reli­gion, now that they’ve been de-plat­formed and their first attempts to change soci­ety have been rebuffed,” said Ben Lor­ber, a research ana­lyst at Polit­i­cal Research Asso­ciates who has stud­ied Fuentes’ move­ment. “It seems like a way to get a foot back into the main­stream for peo­ple like [Yian­napou­los] who were exclud­ed dur­ing the years of the alt-right.”

For mod­er­ate or lib­er­al Catholics con­cerned about the extreme polit­i­cal divides with­in their church, these were wor­ry­ing devel­op­ments — part of the increas­ing entan­gle­ment of Amer­i­can Catholi­cism with ever-more right-wing U.S. pol­i­tics, which over the last five years has includ­ed large swaths of the far right using Catholic imagery or append­ing phras­es like “Deus Vult” and “Viva Cristo Rey” to their tweets.

To Tablet Vat­i­can cor­re­spon­dent Christo­pher Lamb, author of a papal biog­ra­phy, “The Out­sider: Pope Fran­cis and His Bat­tle to Reform the Church,” which details the grow­ing polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion with­in the world’s largest reli­gious denom­i­na­tion, this was evi­dence of the far right’s efforts to infuse their move­ment with spir­i­tu­al pur­pose. When you already trade in the pol­i­tics of iden­ti­ty, Lamb asked, “How do you deep­en that trib­al­ism? You do it through reli­gious imagery. In a sense, you emp­ty the con­tent of the reli­gious and use the exter­nals — the rosary beads, the cru­ci­fix, some words, per­haps some prayers — but you use it as an iden­ti­ty mark­er to give your move­ment a sense that it has a soul or deep­er inten­si­ty at a moral lev­el.”

David Laf­fer­ty, a writer at Where Peter Is, a mod­er­ate Catholic web­site that tracks the influ­ence of the Catholic right with­in the church. offered a sim­i­lar analy­sis. “I think there’s a broad­er pat­tern here, where a lot of peo­ple who are part of the larg­er pop­ulist right, or MAGA move­ment, or what used to be called the alt-right, are will­ing to use any oppor­tu­ni­ty to find a new audi­ence,” he said. “When you tap into the ecosys­tem of online Catholi­cism, you’ve got a built-in audi­ence with big tra­di­tion­al­ist or ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Catholic sites, all of which have very devot­ed fol­low­ers and fan bases. If you’re com­ing from the pop­ulist right into the church, you’re going to be able to walk right into that world and become a sort of instant celebri­ty.”

...

“I pray that maybe there’s some­thing gen­uine in there, and she’ll drop off the radar and become a hum­ble per­son try­ing to be a good Catholic,” Laf­fer­ty said of Ben­net­t’s con­ver­sion, and oth­ers by promi­nent far-right fig­ures. “Some­how, I doubt that. I think there are larg­er forces here, ready to use any­thing that’s avail­able to spread the right-wing pop­ulist mes­sage, gain more fol­low­ers, cause more con­tro­ver­sy.”

————-

“Right-wing Catholic boom­let grows: “Gun Girl” signs up with Moth­er Church” by Kathryn Joyce; Salon; 01/08/2022

“David Laf­fer­ty, a writer at Where Peter Is, a mod­er­ate Catholic web­site that tracks the influ­ence of the Catholic right with­in the church. offered a sim­i­lar analy­sis. “I think there’s a broad­er pat­tern here, where a lot of peo­ple who are part of the larg­er pop­ulist right, or MAGA move­ment, or what used to be called the alt-right, are will­ing to use any oppor­tu­ni­ty to find a new audi­ence,” he said. “When you tap into the ecosys­tem of online Catholi­cism, you’ve got a built-in audi­ence with big tra­di­tion­al­ist or ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Catholic sites, all of which have very devot­ed fol­low­ers and fan bases. If you’re com­ing from the pop­ulist right into the church, you’re going to be able to walk right into that world and become a sort of instant celebri­ty.””

If you’re look­ing, the broad­er pat­tern is there to see: a bunch of celebri­ty fas­cists have sud­den­ly found Jesus. And been warm­ly wel­comed by the Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty it appears. It’s been such a warm wel­come that you could call it a fusion. A Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist fusion move­ment:

...
But beneath the lib-trolling spec­ta­cle, there’s a deep­er pat­tern at work. For one thing, Lib­er­ty Hang­out, run by Ben­nett and Moldow, has a long his­to­ry of hard-right pol­i­tics, advanc­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries like “White geno­cide,” mak­ing ref­er­ence to the white suprema­cist “14 words,” and polling its read­er­ship on whether the Holo­caust real­ly hap­pened quite the way they were taught in school. (“It does­n’t seem pos­si­ble six mil­lion were killed,” the group’s Twit­ter account argued.) On its pod­cast through­out the ear­ly years of the Trump pres­i­den­cy, the group host­ed a string of “alt-right” celebri­ties, includ­ing some of the peo­ple found liable this past Novem­ber for incit­ing vio­lence at the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia. But over the last cou­ple of months the account has trans­formed into such a uni­form stream of Catholic imagery that fol­low­ers com­plained they’d gone “from being all about Amer­i­ca and lib­er­ty to being all about the Vat­i­can and Mex­i­cans” (the lat­ter appar­ent­ly in response to a post fea­tur­ing a Mex­i­can saint).

In this, Lib­er­ty Hang­out and its com­bat­ive star were retrac­ing a path tak­en by a num­ber of oth­er far-right activists asso­ci­at­ed with rem­nants of the alt-right and the move­ments jock­ey­ing to take its place. After Cana­di­an white suprema­cist per­son­al­i­ty Faith Goldy was fired from her posi­tion at the right-wing out­let Rebel News for appear­ing on a pod­cast of the neo-Nazi Dai­ly Stormer, she made a very vis­i­ble return to Catholi­cism, and has found a warm wel­come in some cor­ners of the Catholic right. A year ago, Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexan­der made a splashy announce­ment of his own con­ver­sion to the Catholic Church only days before he helped direct a mob of pro­test­ers to the U.S. Capi­tol. Sev­er­al months lat­er, in mid-March, dis­graced for­mer Bre­it­bart writer and alt-right star Milo Yiannopou­los told Life­Site­News that return­ing to the Catholic Church had helped him become “ex-gay.”

They were join­ing a num­ber of oth­er far-right fig­ures who have con­spic­u­ous­ly inter­twined their polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy with right-wing Catholi­cism, includ­ing Jack Poso­biec, the Piz­za­gate pro­mot­er turned right-wing com­men­ta­tor, and Nicholas Fuentes, the youth­ful founder of the Amer­i­ca First or “groyper” move­ment, who has built a mas­sive online fol­low­ing. When the var­i­ous fac­tions of the alt-right decid­ed to gath­er in Char­lottesville in the sum­mer of 2017, they did most of their pre-ral­ly orga­niz­ing in chat rooms online. One of the most pop­u­lar, named the “Nick Fuentes Serv­er,” was ded­i­cat­ed to Catholics seek­ing “to explore the con­nec­tions between their church” and Unite the Right. Hun­dreds of posters in that room talked about tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholi­cism and post­ed memes with Cru­sades-era imagery and rhetoric along­side overt­ly anti­se­mit­ic and pro-Nazi posts.
...

It’s that broad­er rela­tion­ship between far right and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism that makes Alexan­der’s sud­den claims about not know­ing any­thing about any­thing so intrigu­ing with­in the con­text of the broad­er sto­ry of what led up to Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. Ali Alexan­der real­ly is like the liv­ing embod­i­ment of the fusion of fas­cist pol­i­tics, GOP dirty trick­ster­ism, and Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism. The guy is oper­at­ing at a nexus of dark pol­i­tics. He was clear­ly play­ing a sig­nif­i­cant role in the orga­niz­ing that led up to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. He was rail­ing about Mo Brook­s’s ‘betray­al’ just two weeks ago. And now he’s play­ing dumb after being sub­poe­naed by a grand jury.

But who knows, maybe Ali Alexan­der real­ly does­n’t know about any of the crim­i­nal schem­ing involved with the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. It’s pos­si­ble. About as pos­si­ble as any of these unre­pen­tant fas­cists hav­ing actu­al­ly ‘found Jesus’ all of a sud­den.

Ques­tions are swirling with grow­ing inten­si­ty about the role(s) Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Gin­ni, played in the events lead­ing up to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion fol­low­ing reports that she was in fre­quent con­tact with White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows in the days fol­low­ing the 2020 elec­tion, push­ing all sorts of aggres­sive non­sense legal strate­gies. Not only was she coor­di­nat­ing with fel­low CNP-mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell, but also John East­man. As the fol­low­ing exhaus­tive piece on Gin­ni Thomas in the New York Times describes, East­man was a for­mer clerk of Clarence Thomas and close friends with the cou­ple to this day.

It’s one of the myr­i­ad of facts about Gin­ni and Clarence Thomas in the arti­cle that demon­strates their sta­tus as a major con­ser­v­a­tive pow­er cou­ple wag­ing a decades long and pro­found­ly impact­ful cru­sade to shape the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment in a hard right direc­tion, with Clarence play­ing very pub­lic if qui­et role as the once lone voice for a judi­cial phi­los­o­phy that is now cement­ed as the major­i­ty and Gin­ni play­ing a high­ly active behind-the-scenes role. A role that includes team­ing up with fel­low CNP-mem­ber Steve Ban­non back in 2013 to cre­ate the Groundswell group, designed to com­pete with Grover Norquist’s ‘Wednes­day meet­ings’ as a key con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­ing tool. As we’re going to see when we look at the range ear­ly Groundswell fig­ures, it was basi­cal­ly a CNP oper­a­tion.

Groundswell’s influ­ence swelled dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion after Trump began try­ing to court Clarence Thomas fol­low­ing rumors Thomas was con­sid­er­ing retir­ing. Trump asked for a pri­vate meet­ing with Thomas, but he showed up with Gin­ni. That led to her direct rela­tion­ship with Trump that some­how got her in a role to advise on Trump staffing deci­sions. She appar­ent­ly did­n’t think the Trump staff was MAGA enough. She also report­ed­ly kept try­ing to get peo­ple who can’t pass a back­ground check hired. And she also would bring in entire groups of Groundswell peo­ple to lead these efforts, to the appar­ent sur­prise and dis­gruntle­ment of White House staff.

In 2019, Gin­ni joined the advi­so­ry board of the C.N.P. Action group, the CNP’s main polit­i­cal action tool. As we’re going to see, C.N.P. Action did­n’t waste time get­ting active fol­low­ing Trump’s Novem­ber 2020, secret­ly dis­trib­ut­ing mem­os to Repub­li­can law­mak­ers encour­ag­ing them to chal­lenge the elec­tion results in swings states and elect alter­nate slates of elec­tors. Which is of course what hap­pened. The CNP real­ly was a key orga­niz­ing force for the ‘Stop the Steal’ effort from the begin­ning. They were writ­ing the script!

Oh, and inter­est­ing­ly, it sounds like Gin­ni was play­ing impor­tant ‘uni­ty’ roles in smooth­ing over rival ‘Stop the Steal’ fac­tions. Specif­i­cal­ly, Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin of Tea Par­ty Patri­ots and Amy Kre­mer of Women for Amer­i­ca First were appar­ent­ly feud­ing, but Gin­ni knows both of them from their time as Tea Par­ty activists. Also, the fact that all three are CNP mem­bers may have played a role. And that also rais­es obvi­ous ques­tions about what pos­si­ble ‘uni­fy­ing’ role Gin­ni may have been play­ing with the oth­er known rival­ry between the ‘Stop the Steal’ fac­tions: the appar­ent rival­ry between the ‘offi­cial’ Women for Trump ral­ly at the Ellipse and the ‘wild’ Stop the Steal ral­ly orga­nized by Alex Jones and fel­low CNP-mem­ber Ali Alexan­der. Was there any CNP uni­ty between Ali and Gin­ni? It’s actu­al­ly a very rel­e­vant ques­tion in this inves­ti­ga­tion. Gin­ni real­ly does appear to have played a key orga­niz­ing role. As we might expect from the board mem­ber of C.N.P. Action. And don’t for­get that C.N.P. Action is still active today, work­ing on the next elec­tion. That’s all part of why the ques­tions swirling around Gin­ni Thomas’s role in the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion are swirling with such inten­si­ty. Gin­ni is like the liv­ing embod­i­ment of the CNP’s pro­found role in the insur­rec­tion. And pos­si­bly a key play­er in the whole thing:

The New York Times

The Long Cru­sade of Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas

The Supreme Court jus­tice and his wife bat­tled for years for a more con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­i­ca. New report­ing shows how far she was will­ing to go after Don­ald Trump’s 2020 elec­tion loss.

By Dan­ny Hakim and Jo Beck­er
Pub­lished Feb. 22, 2022 Updat­ed Feb. 23, 2022

The call to action was titled “Elec­tion Results and Legal Bat­tles: What Now?” Shared in the days after the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, it urged the mem­bers of an influ­en­tial if secre­tive right-wing group to con­tact leg­is­la­tors in three of the swing states that tipped the bal­ance for Joe Biden — Ari­zona, Geor­gia and Penn­syl­va­nia. The aim was auda­cious: Keep Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump in pow­er.

The group, the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, brings togeth­er old-school Repub­li­can lumi­nar­ies, Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives, Tea Par­ty activists and MAGA oper­a­tives, with more than 400 mem­bers who include lead­ers of orga­ni­za­tions like the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion and the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil. Found­ed in 1981 as a coun­ter­weight to lib­er­al­ism, the group was hailed by Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan as seek­ing the “return of right­eous­ness, jus­tice and truth” to Amer­i­ca.

As Trump insist­ed, with­out evi­dence, that fraud had cheat­ed him of vic­to­ry, con­ser­v­a­tive groups rushed to ral­ly behind him. The coun­cil stood out, how­ev­er, not only because of its pedi­gree but also because one of its newest lead­ers was Vir­ginia Thomas, the wife of Jus­tice Clarence Thomas and a long­time activist in right-wing cir­cles. She had tak­en on a promi­nent role at the coun­cil dur­ing the Trump years and by 2019 had joined the nine-mem­ber board of C.N.P. Action, an arm of the coun­cil orga­nized as a 501©4 under a pro­vi­sion of the tax code that allows for direct polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy. It was C.N.P. Action that cir­cu­lat­ed the Novem­ber “action steps” doc­u­ment, the exis­tence of which has not been wide­ly known. It instruct­ed mem­bers to pres­sure Repub­li­can law­mak­ers into chal­leng­ing the elec­tion results and appoint­ing alter­nate slates of elec­tors: “Demand that they not aban­don their Con­sti­tu­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ties dur­ing a time such as this.”

Such a plan, if car­ried out suc­cess­ful­ly, would have almost cer­tain­ly land­ed before the Supreme Court — and Gin­ni Thomas’s hus­band. In fact, Trump was already call­ing for that to hap­pen. In a Dec. 2 speech at the White House, the pres­i­dent false­ly claimed that “mil­lions of votes were cast ille­gal­ly in swing states alone” and said he hoped “the Supreme Court of the Unit­ed States will see it” and “will do what’s right for our coun­try, because our coun­try can­not live with this kind of an elec­tion.”

The Thomases have long posed a unique quandary in Wash­ing­ton. Because Supreme Court jus­tices do not want to be per­ceived as par­ti­san, they tend to avoid polit­i­cal events and entan­gle­ments, and their spous­es often keep low pro­files. But the Thomases have defied such norms. Since the found­ing of the nation, no spouse of a sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice has been as overt a polit­i­cal activist as Gin­ni Thomas. In addi­tion to her perch at the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, she found­ed a group called Groundswell with the sup­port of Stephen K. Ban­non, the hard-line nation­al­ist and for­mer Trump advis­er. It holds a week­ly meet­ing of influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tives, many of whom work direct­ly on issues that have come before the court.

Gin­ni Thomas insists, in her coun­cil biog­ra­phy, that she and her hus­band oper­ate in “sep­a­rate pro­fes­sion­al lanes,” but those lanes in fact merge with notable fre­quen­cy. For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tan­dem from the bench and the polit­i­cal trench­es to take aim at tar­gets like Roe v. Wade and affir­ma­tive action. Togeth­er they believe that “Amer­i­ca is in a vicious bat­tle for its found­ing prin­ci­ples,” as Gin­ni Thomas has put it. Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dom­i­nate the Repub­li­can Par­ty. And with Trump’s three appoint­ments reshap­ing the Supreme Court, her hus­band finds him­self at the cen­ter of a new con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty poised to shake the foun­da­tions of set­tled law. In a nation freight­ed with divi­sion and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.

This arti­cle draws on hours of record­ings and inter­nal doc­u­ments from groups affil­i­at­ed with the Thomases; dozens of inter­views with the Thomases’ class­mates, friends, col­leagues and crit­ics, as well as more than a dozen Trump White House aides and sup­port­ers and some of Jus­tice Thomas’s for­mer clerks; and an archive of Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy videos and inter­nal doc­u­ments pro­vid­ed by an aca­d­e­m­ic researcher in Aus­tralia, Brent All­press.

The report­ing uncov­ered new details on the Thomases’ ascent: how Trump court­ed Jus­tice Thomas; how Gin­ni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office, where her insis­tent pol­i­cy and per­son­nel sug­ges­tions so aggra­vat­ed aides that one called her a “wreck­ing ball” while oth­ers put togeth­er an oppo­si­tion-research-style report on her that was obtained by The Times; and the extent to which Jus­tice Thomas flout­ed judi­cial-ethics guid­ance by par­tic­i­pat­ing in events host­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions with mat­ters before the court. Those orga­ni­za­tions show­ered the cou­ple with acco­lades and, in at least one case, used their appear­ances to attract event fees, dona­tions and new mem­bers.

New report­ing also shows just how blurred the lines between the couple’s inter­ests became dur­ing the effort to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion, which cul­mi­nat­ed in the ral­ly held at the Ellipse, just out­side the White House grounds, aimed at stop­ping Con­gress from cer­ti­fy­ing the state votes that gave Joe Biden his vic­to­ry. Many of the ral­ly orga­niz­ers and those advis­ing Trump had con­nec­tions to the Thomases, but lit­tle has been known about what role, if any, Gin­ni Thomas played, beyond the fact that on the morn­ing of the March to Save Amer­i­ca, as the ral­ly was called, she urged her Face­book fol­low­ers to watch how the day unfold­ed. “LOVE MAGA peo­ple!!!!” she post­ed before the march turned vio­lent. “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”

But her role went deep­er, and beyond C.N.P. Action. Dustin Stock­ton, an orga­niz­er who worked with Women for Amer­i­ca First, which held the per­mit for the Ellipse ral­ly, said he was told that Gin­ni Thomas played a peace­mak­ing role between feud­ing fac­tions of ral­ly orga­niz­ers “so that there wouldn’t be any divi­sion around Jan­u­ary 6.”

“The way it was pre­sent­ed to me was that Gin­ni was unit­ing these dif­fer­ent fac­tions around a sin­gu­lar mis­sion on Jan­u­ary 6,” said Stock­ton, who pre­vi­ous­ly worked for Ban­non. “That Gin­ni was involved made sense — she’s pret­ty neu­tral, and she doesn’t have a lot of ene­mies in the move­ment.”

Gin­ni Thomas, who turns 65 on April 25, did not respond to requests for com­ment, and Jus­tice Thomas, who is 73, declined to com­ment through a court spokesper­son. In a post­ing on a pri­vate Face­book group for her high school class­mates, Gin­ni Thomas wrote that “a NYT reporter” might have “con­tact­ed you look­ing for sto­ries, etc on me. This reporter seems to have been told to write a hit piece” and “has knocked on many doors and writ­ten many emails. They all con­tact me and are not respond­ing. ??” she wrote. “What­ev­er. ?????” (The mes­sage was for­ward­ed by one of those class­mates to the reporter in ques­tion.)

In the weeks that fol­lowed Jan. 6, as pub­lic con­dem­na­tion of the insur­rec­tion grew to include some Repub­li­can lead­ers like Sen­a­tor Mitch McConnell, the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy cir­cu­lat­ed in its newslet­ter anoth­er pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed memo, writ­ten by one of its mem­bers, that out­lined strate­gies to make the Capi­tol riot seem more palat­able. “Dri­ve the nar­ra­tive that it was most­ly peace­ful protests,” a lead­ing mem­ber of the group advised, accord­ing to a copy reviewed by The Times. “Ampli­fy the con­cerns of the pro­tes­tors and give them legit­i­ma­cy.”

In the year since the insur­rec­tion, a num­ber of friends and allies of the Thomases, and even a for­mer Thomas clerk, have received sub­poe­nas from the con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the events of Jan. 6. Gin­ni Thomas co-signed a let­ter in Decem­ber call­ing for House Repub­li­cans to expel Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their con­fer­ence for join­ing the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee. Thomas and her co-authors said the inves­ti­ga­tion “brings dis­re­spect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harass­ment to pri­vate cit­i­zens who have done noth­ing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nation­wide move­ment to add cit­i­zens’ voic­es to this effort.”

A few weeks lat­er, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House relat­ed to the Jan. 6 attack. Jus­tice Thomas was the sole dis­senter.

Near­ly 10 months after the dra­mat­ic events at the Capi­tol, Gin­ni Thomas ven­tured out onto a small bal­cony inside the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, the con­ser­v­a­tive redoubt that stands on Mass­a­chu­setts Avenue a few blocks from the Capi­tol. In a bright red dress, she beamed and waved to friends in the crowd who gath­ered last Octo­ber to cel­e­brate her husband’s three decades on the Supreme Court. Beyond a sweep­ing bank of win­dows, the sun had sunk to just above the hori­zon, next to the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment.

The atten­dees rep­re­sent­ed the cream of Washington’s Repub­li­can legal estab­lish­ment, “real­ly a who’s who of all-stars,” as one of them, Don­ald F. McGahn II, the first White House coun­sel under Trump, would say when the speech­es start­ed. Many had clerked for Jus­tice Thomas, includ­ing a num­ber of Trump-appoint­ed judges who are them­selves touch­stones on the right, like Neo­mi Rao and James Ho. Oth­ers were activists who had worked along­side Gin­ni Thomas, a Tea Par­ty vet­er­an.

Though efforts to over­turn the elec­tion had failed and Joe Biden was deep into his first year as pres­i­dent, the mood in the room was buoy­ant, even tri­umphal. Jus­tice Thomas, who for years labored at the mar­gins of the court, now found him­self with a new 6‑to‑3 con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty. At the Her­itage trib­ute, Mitch McConnell, the Sen­ate Repub­li­can leader, called Thomas “a legal titan” and “the bright­est pos­si­ble north star.” Play­ing to the crowd of near­ly 250 of his party’s elite, he dry­ly asked: “What could I, Mitch McConnell, pos­si­bly know about a notable leader who is par­si­mo­nious with his pub­lic state­ments? Who shuns the per­for­ma­tive aspect of pub­lic life? And who is viewed as a boogey­man by the rad­i­cal left? What would I know about that?” Among the crowd’s laugh­ter, Thomas’s deep bari­tone was most audi­ble.

...

Three decades into his life­time term, Thomas has not built his rep­u­ta­tion by writ­ing land­mark major­i­ty rul­ings. Instead, he has been set­ting the stage for a shift in influ­ence, writ­ing solo opin­ions on issues like free speech, guns and abor­tion that are now poised to become major­i­ty opin­ions. “Take his jurispru­dence on unborn life,” McConnell told the Her­itage Foun­da­tion crowd. “Every time, with­out fail, Jus­tice Thomas writes a sep­a­rate, con­cise opin­ion to cut through the 50-year tan­gle of made-up tests and shift­ing stan­dards and calm­ly reminds every­body that the whole house of cards lacks a con­sti­tu­tion­al foun­da­tion.”

“Jus­tice Thomas does not break, or bend, or bow,” he said. “We need a fed­er­al judi­cia­ry full of men and women who are as bright as Jus­tice Thomas, as expert­ly trained as Jus­tice Thomas, but most impor­tant­ly, most impor­tant­ly, as com­mit­ted to total unflinch­ing judi­cial inde­pen­dence.” But in Thomas’s own remarks, he allud­ed to the shared pur­pose of those gath­ered. “It is a joy, an absolute joy, to be able to stand here and cel­e­brate this moment,” he said, “not because of me but because of you all and what we’re try­ing to defend in this great coun­try.”

If Thomas has been lay­ing the ground­work for a con­ser­v­a­tive rev­o­lu­tion, so has his wife, who once worked at Her­itage her­self. Groundswell, the group she found­ed, plot­ted what it called a “30-front war” on hot-but­ton issues and seed­ed talk­ing points through­out the right-wing media, includ­ing with Bannon’s own pub­li­ca­tion at the time, Bre­it­bart News. “She’s an oper­a­tor; she stays behind the scenes,” Ban­non said in an inter­view. “Unlike a lot of peo­ple who just talk, she gets shit done.”

The Thomases have long empha­sized how lit­tle dis­tance there is between them. As Jus­tice Thomas once wrote, his sear­ing 1991 con­fir­ma­tion, buf­fet­ed by sex­u­al-harass­ment alle­ga­tions, brought them clos­er togeth­er: “The fiery tri­al through which we passed had the effect of meld­ing us into one being — an amal­gam, as we like to say.” At the Her­itage Foun­da­tion cel­e­bra­tion, he made it clear that bruised feel­ings about the “very, very dark time” of his con­fir­ma­tion have lin­gered, thank­ing “the sen­a­tors who vot­ed for me, all 52 of them.” He named sup­port­ers who had stuck by him, includ­ing Heritage’s pres­i­dent at the time, Kay Coles James, who he said was “among my prayer part­ners 30 years ago.” And he called his wife “the rock of my life.”

...

“He has chart­ed a very rad­i­cal approach to judg­ing — it’s sur­pris­ing, actu­al­ly, how far the court has moved in his direc­tion,” John Yoo, a law pro­fes­sor at U.C.-Berkeley and for­mer Thomas clerk known for draft­ing some of the “tor­ture mem­os” under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, said dur­ing a dis­cus­sion at the Her­itage event. (Yoo also advised for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence that he did not have the author­i­ty to reject elec­toral votes on Jan. 6.) “What do you think is going to hap­pen in the next 10 years when he might have a work­able major­i­ty of orig­i­nal­ists? I think we’re going to see the fruition of the last 30 years in the next 10.”

The founders saw the courts as the guardians of the Con­sti­tu­tion. In Fed­er­al­ist No. 78, which laid out the role of Amer­i­can courts, Alexan­der Hamil­ton wrote that they “were designed to be an inter­me­di­ate body between the peo­ple and the leg­is­la­ture” and “keep the lat­ter with­in the lim­its assigned to their author­i­ty.” But at the same time, he wrote, the judi­cia­ry would be the weak­est of the new government’s three branch­es. While the exec­u­tive “holds the sword” and the leg­is­la­ture “com­mands the purse,” the judi­cia­ry “will always be the least dan­ger­ous to the polit­i­cal rights of the Con­sti­tu­tion; because it will be least in a capac­i­ty to annoy or injure them.”

The Supreme Court must rely on pub­lic accep­tance of its deci­sions. For decades, the desire to shield the court from charges of par­ti­san­ship has giv­en rise to insti­tu­tion­al­ist jus­tices who uphold cer­tain norms. They avoid opin­ions that get too far out ahead of pub­lic opin­ion or too blithe­ly over­turn prece­dents. Instead they adhere to the doc­trine of stare deci­sis, for the most part treat­ing pri­or deci­sions as set­tled law, and pre­fer to rule in ways that win broad sup­port. They also steer clear of attend­ing open­ly par­ti­san events.

But as the court has tak­en a hard right turn with Trump’s appoint­ments, it is also increas­ing­ly seen as com­posed of clash­ing ide­o­logues, both lib­er­al and con­ser­v­a­tive, rather than inde­pen­dent jurists. Even the court’s newest jus­tice, Amy Coney Bar­rett, is sen­si­tive to the charge. “My goal today is to con­vince you that this court is not com­prised of a bunch of par­ti­san hacks,” she said dur­ing a speech last year, accom­pa­ny­ing Mitch McConnell at a cen­ter named for him at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Louisville. And as the court sig­nals an appetite to take up cas­es that may well over­turn set­tled law, includ­ing Roe v. Wade, more Amer­i­cans view it as increas­ing­ly politi­cized, with a steep decline over the past year to a 40 per­cent approval rat­ing, a new low in Gallup polling.

This dynam­ic has left Chief Jus­tice John Roberts in an increas­ing­ly iso­lat­ed posi­tion as the Supreme Court’s lead­ing insti­tu­tion­al­ist. He refrains from attend­ing par­ti­san legal forums, like those at the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety. And his wife, Jane, stepped down as a lit­i­ga­tor at her law firm after his appoint­ment. Jus­tice Thomas, how­ev­er, “believes that human beings have free will to chart our own course,” said Hel­gi Walk­er, a for­mer Thomas clerk and a part­ner at Gib­son Dunn. “And I have no doubt that applies, per­haps espe­cial­ly so, to his wife.” That said, she added, he “takes direc­tion from no one but the law.”

Thomas has also reject­ed the insti­tu­tion­al­ist approach when it comes to the doc­trine of stare deci­sis. “When faced with a demon­stra­bly erro­neous prece­dent, my rule is sim­ple,” he wrote in a 2019 opin­ion. “We should not fol­low it.” When he has cit­ed Fed­er­al­ist No. 78, he has under­scored Hamilton’s com­ment that judges “would require an uncom­mon por­tion of for­ti­tude” to defend con­sti­tu­tion­al prin­ci­ples when they are unpop­u­lar. “The trait that Hamil­ton sin­gles out — for­ti­tude — is fun­da­men­tal to my phi­los­o­phy of life,” Thomas said in a 2001 speech to the con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute.

He has said the route to safe­guard­ing the Supreme Court is sim­ply through stricter adher­ence to the Con­sti­tu­tion, and he warned at a recent speech at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame that judges have been exceed­ing their author­i­ty. “There’s always a temp­ta­tion, I think, to go beyond,” he said, adding that when judges “begin to ven­ture into polit­i­cal, leg­isla­tive or exec­u­tive-branch lanes,” they “are ask­ing for trou­ble.” He laid out the con­se­quences: “I think the court was thought to be the least dan­ger­ous branch, and we may have become the most dan­ger­ous.”

But more than any oth­er sit­ting jus­tice, Thomas has stoked con­cerns of a hyper­par­ti­san court. He has fre­quent­ly appeared at high­ly polit­i­cal events host­ed by advo­cates hop­ing to sway the court. He and his wife some­times appear togeth­er at such events, and their appeal is appar­ent: He ful­fills the hard right’s long­ing for a judge — and espe­cial­ly a Black judge — obliv­i­ous to the howls of the left, while she serves up the red meat the base wants to hear in her speech­es. They often por­tray them­selves as stand­ing in the breach amid a crum­bling soci­ety. “It’s very excit­ing,” Gin­ni Thomas said dur­ing a 2018 Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy meet­ing, “the fact that there’s a resis­tance on our side to their side.”

Her role became increas­ing­ly pub­lic in the Trump era, when she start­ed emcee­ing an annu­al awards cer­e­mo­ny cel­e­brat­ing some of the best-known Trump allies. The awards are hand­ed out in con­junc­tion with Unit­ed in Pur­pose, a group cre­at­ed by Bill Dal­las, an evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal activist. Some recip­i­ents lead orga­ni­za­tions that have busi­ness before the Supreme Court.

“When the Bat­phone rings and it’s Com­mis­sion­er Gin­ni Gor­don, oth­er­wise known as Gin­ni Thomas, of course you have to show up,” said Dan Bongi­no, a for­mer Secret Ser­vice agent turned pop­u­lar pro-Trump radio host, after receiv­ing one of Thomas’s Impact Awards in 2017. “I can’t say enough about Gin­ni,” Bongi­no told the audi­ence at the event, which includ­ed the Fox News pun­dit Sean Han­ni­ty and Ed Meese, a Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion attor­ney gen­er­al. “I idol­ize her hus­band — he’s an icon to me,” Bongi­no said, but added that it was Gin­ni Thomas who con­nect­ed him with right-wing lead­ers when he was mak­ing sev­er­al unsuc­cess­ful con­gres­sion­al bids. “I think in the long run, when you look at the impact on the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment and the prin­ci­ples we hold dear, I think her and her hus­band stand toe to toe.”

The fed­er­al judi­cial code of con­duct, adopt­ed in 1973, restricts judges from being “a speak­er, a guest of hon­or or fea­tured on the pro­gram” at fund-rais­ing events. While the code doesn’t offi­cial­ly apply to the nine jus­tices, Roberts said in a 2011 report that the jus­tices “do in fact con­sult” it when “assess­ing their eth­i­cal oblig­a­tions” — a state­ment reit­er­at­ed by a spokes­woman for the court when we asked for com­ment. But accord­ing to doc­u­ments and record­ings of such events reviewed by The Times, Jus­tice Thomas has at least twice head­lined annu­al con­fer­ences at the Eagle Forum, a con­ser­v­a­tive grass-roots group opposed to abor­tion and mod­ern fem­i­nism. The first was in 1996 when he received an Eagle award. “He’s bet­ter than Rehn­quist, he’s bet­ter than Scalia, he’s just won­der­ful,” Phyl­lis Schlafly, the founder of the Eagle Forum and one of the most influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tive activists of her gen­er­a­tion, told the audi­ence, accord­ing to a cas­sette record­ing of the speech. She even recit­ed a poem in his hon­or, which began: “No high court jus­tice shows such promise/As our favorite, Clarence Thomas/You’re a jurist for the ages/Who sends lib­er­als into rages.”

The cou­ple returned to the Eagle Forum years lat­er, in 2017; this time his wife received the Eagle award. It was the year after Schlafly died, and the orga­ni­za­tion, which is depen­dent on mem­ber and con­fer­ence fees, was strug­gling. They were fea­tured on the event pro­gram, and doc­u­ments show that Gin­ni Thomas urged atten­dees to come hear her and “my amaz­ing hus­band” in a per­son­al let­ter that was part of the event’s pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als, adding, “God can use such an occa­sion for encour­age­ment and insights!” (Full reg­is­tra­tion for the group’s annu­al con­fer­ence cost $350 as of 2019.) After­ward, the orga­ni­za­tion tweet­ed a pro­mo­tion­al video aimed at prospec­tive mem­bers that includ­ed footage of the couple’s appear­ance.

In 2008, Jus­tice Thomas deliv­ered a keynote speech to donors to the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute and spoke at a secre­tive polit­i­cal retreat host­ed by the bil­lion­aire Charles Koch. And he has had a long rela­tion­ship with the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, which employed his wife as a liai­son to the George W. Bush White House. The group once invoked Jus­tice Thomas’s speech at one of its Lead­er­ship for Amer­i­ca fund-rais­ers in a direct appeal that it sent to Philip Mor­ris seek­ing a $50,000 con­tri­bu­tion. And in 2020, he object­ed to an ethics pro­pos­al cir­cu­lat­ed by the pol­i­cy­mak­ing body of the fed­er­al court sys­tem that would have barred judges from mem­ber­ship in ide­o­log­i­cal legal groups like the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, while he was speak­ing at the group’s con­ven­tion. “I think they’re about to silence the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety,” he said. “So I guess I can’t come back.”

Per­haps most impor­tant in under­stand­ing the couple’s far-reach­ing phi­los­o­phy and project is their long rela­tion­ship with the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, aspects of which have not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed. Jus­tice Thomas head­lined an event for the group in 2002, and in 2008 he attend­ed one of its meet­ings and was pho­tographed with a gav­el behind a lectern bear­ing the group’s name.

Just over a decade lat­er, Gin­ni Thomas would join the board of the council’s action arm. Dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion in 2019, she warned that “con­ser­v­a­tives and Repub­li­cans are tired of being the oppressed minor­i­ty,” adding that they were being “false­ly vil­i­fied, slan­dered and defamed as extrem­ists and big­ots and haters.” The left, she said, was “mak­ing it jus­ti­fi­able and nor­mal­ized to fight us, to hurt us, to kill us even.” For her, this was a fight decades in the mak­ing.

Before intro­duc­ing Jus­tice Thomas at the Eagle Forum in 1996, Schlafly spoke about his moth­er-in-law. “Now, first I want to present the wife of our dis­tin­guished speak­er, Gin­ni Thomas, and I want to tell you that she is, I’m very proud to say, a sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion Eagle,” she said. “It was back in 1973 that a lit­tle group in Oma­ha, Nebras­ka, decid­ed that they would rescind Nebraska’s rat­i­fi­ca­tion of the Equal Rights Amend­ment, and it was just about half a dozen of them, but Ginni’s moth­er was in that group,” she added, call­ing it “a real turn­ing point in our long bat­tle” against the amend­ment, which the forum said would not “cel­e­brate wom­an­hood” but “erase it.”

“And then lat­er on,” Schlafly con­tin­ued, “after the fem­i­nists moved on to anoth­er goal, after we beat them on E.R.A., they took up the goal of com­pa­ra­ble worth” — a ref­er­ence to a large­ly unsuc­cess­ful move­ment in the 1980s to require equal pay for men and women, which Schlafly called “an effort to give us wage and price con­trol.”

“Gin­ni was then with the Cham­ber of Com­merce, and she was a great help in that, and now she is a major assis­tant for our good friend Dick Armey,” Schlafly said, refer­ring to the Repub­li­can con­gress­man from Texas who was then the House major­i­ty leader. “So, Gin­ni, stand up. We appre­ci­ate your being with us tonight.”

Vir­ginia Thomas is the daugh­ter of a pres­i­dent of a Nebras­ka archi­tec­ture firm; the well-to-do fam­i­ly had two hous­es, one in Oma­ha and one in a near­by lake­side devel­op­ment called Gin­ger Cove that her father built. Gin­ni Lamp, as she was known then, was on a cheer squad for taller girls known as the Squires, bran­dish­ing a sword and a shield before foot­ball games. “She would march in front with that; she loved doing that,” said Sue Nor­by, a class­mate. “My oth­er friends were on the pom­pom squad because they were so short, but Gin­ni was on a dif­fer­ent squad because she was tall, with oth­er tall girls. She was the war­rior woman.”

Ginni’s moth­er, Mar­jorie Lamp, was an out­spo­ken Repub­li­can activist and became a tow­er­ing fig­ure in her daughter’s life. When Schlafly lost a bid to become pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Fed­er­a­tion of Repub­li­can Women in 1967, Mar­jorie Lamp with­drew from the orga­ni­za­tion and called the vot­ing “rigged.” She ran unsuc­cess­ful­ly for the Nebras­ka Leg­is­la­ture in 1972 and was a 1976 Rea­gan del­e­gate, rail­ing against Ger­ald Ford’s lack of lead­er­ship; “Rea­gan peo­ple are more hard-core,” she once said. She warned in a local paper that if Jim­my Carter was elect­ed, “we’d be head­ing toward social­ism.” Democ­rats, she wrote in a 1983 let­ter to The Lin­coln Jour­nal Star, “almost brought our great coun­try to its knees with their wild spend­ing poli­cies.”

Gin­ni Thomas has under­scored her par­ents’ resolve in her own remarks. “Our fam­i­ly didn’t believe Nixon did any­thing wrong in Water­gate until way after he admit­ted guilt,” she once said. “We believed any Repub­li­can until all the evi­dence was in, and then a lit­tle more.” She joined her high school’s Repub­li­can club in 1974, the year it start­ed, and she and her moth­er attend­ed the 1976 Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion togeth­er. It was her moth­er, she would lat­er say, who “mod­eled con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal fem­i­nism for her daugh­ters.” She attend­ed Creighton Uni­ver­si­ty in Oma­ha and earned her law degree there while work­ing for a Nebras­ka con­gress­man, Hal Daub, the first of a string of polit­i­cal jobs that took her far from Oma­ha.

Clarence Thomas’s jour­ney to Wash­ing­ton was far dif­fer­ent. He grew up in pover­ty, first in Pin Point, Ga., a tiny enclave, now part of Savan­nah, that was estab­lished by for­mer­ly enslaved Black peo­ple after the Civ­il War. He and his moth­er and broth­er then moved to Savan­nah itself — his father left the fam­i­ly when he was 2 — and he was large­ly raised by an exceed­ing­ly strict and tem­pera­men­tal grand­fa­ther.

For the future jus­tice, con­ser­vatism was part of an ide­o­log­i­cal jour­ney, much of it forged at Col­lege of the Holy Cross in Worces­ter, Mass., where he was among a small group of Black men that did the dif­fi­cult work of inte­grat­ing the insti­tu­tion in the late 1960s and ear­ly 1970s. He and oth­er stu­dents, includ­ing the promi­nent defense attor­ney Ted Wells, start­ed a Black Stu­dent Union, and for a time Thomas protest­ed the Viet­nam War. A piv­otal moment came after a demon­stra­tion in Cam­bridge, Mass., turned into “a full-scale riot,” he wrote in his mem­oir. “Hor­ri­fied,” he reject­ed what he saw as a pos­ture of anger and resent­ment and threw him­self into his stud­ies.

“Just about every evening, a few min­utes after 11, there Clarence would be com­ing through the door from the library, every sin­gle evening,” recalled Edward P. Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning fic­tion writer known for his work chron­i­cling Black lives in Wash­ing­ton, who lived down the hall from Thomas as a sopho­more. “There was a fierce deter­mi­na­tion I sensed from him, that he was going to get as much as he could and get as far, ulti­mate­ly, as he could.”

Thomas got his law degree from Yale but stuck a 15-cent cig­ar stick­er to the frame of his diplo­ma after fail­ing to get a big law job — such firms, he would write, attrib­uted his aca­d­e­m­ic pedi­gree to pref­er­en­tial treat­ment. Instead, he took the only job offer he received and went to work for Missouri’s Repub­li­can attor­ney gen­er­al, John Dan­forth, and dis­cov­ered the writ­ings of the Black con­ser­v­a­tive Thomas Sow­ell, who assailed affir­ma­tive action as under­cut­ting self-reliance; Thomas wrote that he “felt like a thirsty man gulp­ing down a glass of cool water” to see his own beliefs artic­u­lat­ed. A few years lat­er, after he was appoint­ed by Rea­gan to head the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion, he would com­plain that Black civ­il rights lead­ers “bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine.”

Thomas ven­er­at­ed his grand­fa­ther, Myers Ander­son, who was as influ­en­tial in his life as his wife’s moth­er was in hers, and titled his mem­oir “My Grandfather’s Son.” But the rela­tion­ship was often frac­tious. Ander­son, who donat­ed to the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Col­ored Peo­ple, “wasn’t hap­py with his grandson’s choic­es,” Kevin Meri­da, now the exec­u­tive edi­tor of The Los Ange­les Times, and Michael A. Fletch­er wrote in a 2007 biog­ra­phy, “Supreme Dis­com­fort.” The authors quot­ed Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son, a Black for­mer clerk for Jus­tice Stephen Brey­er whom Biden is now con­sid­er­ing for the vacan­cy being cre­at­ed by Breyer’s retire­ment. She remem­bered sit­ting across from Thomas at lunch and think­ing: “ ‘I don’t under­stand you. You sound like my par­ents. You sound like peo­ple I grew up with.’ But the lessons he tend­ed to draw from the expe­ri­ences of the seg­re­gat­ed South seemed to be dif­fer­ent than those of every­body I know.”

Clarence and Gin­ni met in 1986 at a con­fer­ence on affir­ma­tive action, which they both opposed. After a stint at the civ­il rights office of the Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment, he was run­ning the E.E.O.C.; she was an attor­ney at the U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce and mused that year to Good House­keep­ing about some­day run­ning for Con­gress. She had extract­ed her­self from a New Age‑y self-help group called Life­spring, which she would denounce as a cult, but was still attend­ing meet­ings held by a cult-depro­gram­ming orga­ni­za­tion, and she took him along to one. He would describe her as a “gift from God,” and they mar­ried in 1987 at a Methodist church in Oma­ha; it was her first mar­riage, his sec­ond. “There’s no oth­er way to polite­ly say this, but the fact she mar­ried a Black man must’ve caused an uproar in that fam­i­ly, I can’t even imag­ine,” said Scott Bange, who dat­ed Gin­ni in high school. In 1991, one of Gin­ni Thomas’s aunts told The Wash­ing­ton Post that the future jus­tice “was so nice, we for­got he was Black,” adding, “He treat­ed her so well, all of his oth­er qual­i­ties made up for his being Black.”

...

Clarence Thomas has always main­tained that he had to be talked into accept­ing an appoint­ment to the Court of Appeals for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia Cir­cuit when he was nom­i­nat­ed as a fed­er­al judge in 1989. “I was mind­ing my busi­ness,” he said, recount­ing the sto­ry in his remarks at the Her­itage cel­e­bra­tion. He was cham­pi­oned by Dan­forth, by then a sen­a­tor, who said on the Sen­ate floor: “I hope that peo­ple would not attack Clarence Thomas because of some stereo­type of what they think a Black lawyer should believe.”

Thur­good Mar­shall announced his retire­ment from the Supreme Court in 1991, and Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush turned to Thomas. His con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings, presided over by Joe Biden, then the chair­man of the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, began with an attempt to deter­mine his views on Roe v. Wade. Then, after an F.B.I. report was leaked, Ani­ta Hill, a law pro­fes­sor who worked under Thomas at the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion and the E.E.O.C., tes­ti­fied that he made numer­ous unwel­come advances, per­sist­ed in work­place con­ver­sa­tions about his “sex­u­al prowess,” described graph­ic pornog­ra­phy and said he found a pubic hair on a cola can and asked who had put it there. The future jus­tice flat­ly reject­ed the alle­ga­tions, call­ing the pub­lic inquiry “a high-tech lynch­ing for uppi­ty Blacks who in any way deign to think for them­selves, to do for them­selves, to have dif­fer­ent ideas.”

Asked dur­ing the hear­ing whether he want­ed to with­draw, he said, “I’d rather die.” He did not watch Hill’s tes­ti­mo­ny. “I was the one that tried to watch what was going on for as long as I could,” Gin­ni Thomas said in a 2020 doc­u­men­tary on Jus­tice Thomas’s life and legal phi­los­o­phy, “Cre­at­ed Equal,” made with the Thomases’ par­tic­i­pa­tion and fund­ed by the far-right Charles Koch and Bradley Foun­da­tions. “It was all so wrong,” she con­tin­ued. “It was so untrue.” When Biden informed Thomas in a phone call that he would vote against him, he tried to reas­sure him about the process. As she lis­tened in, Gin­ni Thomas took a spoon from a kitchen draw­er and pre­tend­ed to gag her­self, her hus­band lat­er recount­ed. (Biden was also crit­i­cized for exclud­ing tes­ti­mo­ny favor­able to Hill and, much lat­er, expressed regret.) Friends and asso­ciates said that the couple’s rage over the con­fir­ma­tion bat­tle came to both define and uni­fy them.

“He was in a state of shock,” said Arm­strong Williams, a Black con­ser­v­a­tive pun­dit and long­time friend of Jus­tice Thomas’s, who worked for him at the E.E.O.C. and served as an advis­er dur­ing the hear­ings. “Every­thing that he ever worked so hard for, every­thing that his grand­par­ents and his moth­er were proud of him for, was reduced to sex­u­al innu­en­dos. And no one knew any­thing about his career except for those innu­en­dos. The first time peo­ple were hear­ing about him were these sala­cious alle­ga­tions.” And so, Williams said, “he threw him­self into the court and becom­ing the best jus­tice he could be, and that still remains his refuge.”

Thomas’s ear­ly years on the court were dis­tin­guished by vig­or­ous dis­sents and icon­o­clas­tic opin­ions. While some jus­tices seek a nar­row enough argu­ment to gar­ner five votes, he often staked out a lone­li­er, more oppo­si­tion­al role as a dis­senter. In a 1997 Sec­ond Amend­ment case, he opened the door for future chal­lenges to local gun laws. In a 2000 Nebras­ka abor­tion case, he assailed Roe v. Wade, which he called “griev­ous­ly wrong.”

“He was till­ing the ground,” said Leonard Leo, a for­mer exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, a Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy mem­ber and a close fam­i­ly friend of the couple’s. “In oth­er words, the field’s not ready for things to blos­som or flour­ish, but he’s doing what he can to pre­pare it. And that’s what he’s been doing.”

Leo, a Catholic like the jus­tice, first met him when he was clerk­ing on the Dis­trict of Colum­bia Cir­cuit. Thomas, then a judge on that court, became a men­tor. The jus­tice has spent time at Leo’s New Eng­land vaca­tion home, is god­fa­ther to one of his chil­dren and has sup­port­ed him through hard­ships, includ­ing the death of his 14-year-old daugh­ter from spina bifi­da. The two men often dis­cussed reli­gion — Thomas once rec­om­mend­ed he read “A His­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty” by Paul John­son — and Leo says Jus­tice Thomas saw par­al­lels between how the church grew and how to build a body of con­ser­v­a­tive jurispru­dence.

“It’s very sim­i­lar to what hap­pened with the Catholic Church in the Mid­dle Ages,” he said of the justice’s approach, adding that the church and its insti­tu­tions “did their work dur­ing that time, lay­ing the foun­da­tions for future Catholic think­ing and Catholic thought to sort of grow the church and pre­serve its tra­di­tions. It hap­pened qui­et­ly; it did not hap­pen in the grand cham­bers of the Vat­i­can, but it hap­pened.”

Thomas has described his judi­cial phi­los­o­phy as one of nat­ur­al law, in which lib­er­ty and equal­i­ty are endowed by God. In the Thomas view, slav­ery and Jim Crow seg­re­ga­tion were betray­als of the ideals enshrined in the nation’s found­ing doc­u­ments — and so are pro­gres­sive pro­grams like affir­ma­tive action: He is equal­ly opposed to gov­ern­ment impos­ing obsta­cles or pro­vid­ing spe­cial pro­tec­tions. “Whether deemed infe­ri­or by the crud­est big­ots or con­sid­ered a vic­tim by the most edu­cat­ed elites, being dis­missed as any­thing oth­er than inher­ent­ly equal is still, at bot­tom, a reduc­tion of our human worth,” he said in a recent speech. In an essay called “Clarence X?” Stephen F. Smith, a Notre Dame pro­fes­sor and for­mer Thomas clerk who is also Black, argues that his for­mer boss “fre­quent­ly (if not invari­ably) seeks to demon­strate that his con­ser­v­a­tive posi­tions on mat­ters of race are ben­e­fi­cial for Black Amer­i­cans, as well as legal­ly required.”

But those posi­tions are often out of step with a major­i­ty of Black Amer­i­cans, and in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Thomas laments being “brand­ed a trai­tor to my race” for “dar­ing to reject the ide­o­log­i­cal ortho­doxy that was pre­scribed for blacks by lib­er­al whites.” Such rejec­tion of ortho­doxy was evi­dent in a 1995 con­cur­ring opin­ion on deseg­re­ga­tion, when he ques­tioned why major­i­ty-Black schools were nec­es­sar­i­ly a prob­lem: “It nev­er ceas­es to amaze me that the courts are so will­ing to assume that any­thing that is pre­dom­i­nant­ly black must be infe­ri­or,” he wrote.

Dur­ing these years, the cou­ple were embraced on the right; they even host­ed Rush Limbaugh’s third wed­ding at their Vir­ginia home in 1994, with Jus­tice Thomas offi­ci­at­ing. Gin­ni Thomas was labor­ing in estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can cir­cles, but an ide­o­log­i­cal feroc­i­ty akin to her mother’s sim­mered. “I’ve been on a mis­sion for a long time,” she told U.S. News & World Report in 1995. “I wouldn’t be in this town if I wasn’t on a mis­sion.” By the time the Tea Par­ty move­ment arose in oppo­si­tion to the Oba­ma pres­i­den­cy, her sense of mis­sion was redou­bled. “Over the last 30 years, I have worked and strug­gled inside this Belt­way, wait­ing for you peo­ple to show up,” she told Tea Par­ty activists in a 2010 speech at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence. “I adore all of the new cit­i­zen patri­ots who are ris­ing up across this coun­try, and I am hap­py to help show you the ropes in the Wash­ing­ton area, ’cause we need help.”

New­ly embold­ened, that same year Gin­ni Thomas called Ani­ta Hill, leav­ing a voice mail mes­sage on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing. “I just want­ed to reach across the air­waves and the years and ask you to con­sid­er some­thing. I would love you to con­sid­er an apol­o­gy some­time and some full expla­na­tion of why you did what you did with my hus­band,” she said. “So give it some thought. And cer­tain­ly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us under­stand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.” (Gin­ni Thomas char­ac­ter­ized the call by say­ing she was “extend­ing an olive branch.”)

When asked if Jus­tice Thomas agreed with mak­ing the call, Arm­strong Williams was quick to answer. “Of course not! But he had to deal with it,” he said. “It’s his wife, it’s his best friend, his most trust­ed con­fi­dante, and he loves her uncon­di­tion­al­ly. He doesn’t agree with every­thing, but they work it out pri­vate­ly.”

Hill was tak­en aback and made the call pub­lic: “She can’t ask for an apol­o­gy with­out sug­gest­ing that I did some­thing wrong, and that is offen­sive.” Hill had not been the only woman to lev­el accu­sa­tions against Clarence Thomas: At the time of his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing, anoth­er for­mer E.E.O.C. employ­ee, Angela Wright, who was fired by him, detailed inap­pro­pri­ate sex­u­al com­ments she said he made, includ­ing remark­ing on her bra size. A third for­mer agency employ­ee said, “If you were young, Black, female and rea­son­ably attrac­tive, you knew full well you were being inspect­ed and audi­tioned as a female.” Nei­ther was called to tes­ti­fy.

In 2010, short­ly after news broke of Gin­ni Thomas’s call to Hill, Lil­lian McEwen, a for­mer assis­tant U.S. attor­ney who dat­ed Clarence Thomas for sev­er­al years after his sep­a­ra­tion from his first wife, spoke out: “He was always active­ly watch­ing the women he worked with to see if they could be poten­tial part­ners,” she told The Wash­ing­ton Post in sup­port of Hill’s account. “I have no hos­til­i­ty toward him,” she said. “It is just that he has man­u­fac­tured a dif­fer­ent real­i­ty over time.” In 2016, Moira Smith, the gen­er­al coun­sel at an Alas­ka nat­ur­al-gas com­pa­ny, said she was groped in 1999 by Jus­tice Thomas while she was a 23-year-old Tru­man Foun­da­tion schol­ar, eight years after he joined the court.

The Thomases have reject­ed all such alle­ga­tions. “I think, and I’ve said this only a few times pub­licly, one of the best things that could have hap­pened to me was to have gone through the kind of con­fir­ma­tion I went through,” he told the con­ser­v­a­tive activists at the Eagle Forum in 1996. “I am the freest per­son on the court. I have no illu­sions, no desires for acco­lades, no desires for praise. I’m there to do a job. I will do it, and I will go home.”

A few weeks after Mitt Rom­ney lost the 2012 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Gin­ni Thomas called Steve Ban­non, then the chair­man of Bre­it­bart, and they had lunch at the Wash­ing­ton town­house that was both Bannon’s res­i­dence and Breitbart’s head­quar­ters. Romney’s loss pre­saged a bat­tle for the Repub­li­can Party’s direc­tion, and Thomas want­ed to start a hard-right round table to serve as an alter­na­tive to an estab­lish­ment meet­ing run on Wednes­days by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax cru­sad­er. “She had the idea, ‘I think we need some­thing to counter Grover’s Wednes­day meet­ing,’” recalled Ban­non, who didn’t know her well at the time. “And I said, ‘That’s a bril­liant idea.’”

The pre­vi­ous year, Thomas’s activism drew scruti­ny of her and her hus­band, when Com­mon Cause, an advo­ca­cy group, reviewed I.R.S. fil­ings and crit­i­cized Jus­tice Thomas for fail­ing to dis­close his wife’s income — near­ly $700,000 over five years from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion — as required by fed­er­al law. He sub­se­quent­ly amend­ed 20 years of fil­ings. After her stint at Her­itage, Gin­ni Thomas ran a Wash­ing­ton-based con­sti­tu­tion­al stud­ies cen­ter for Michigan’s Hills­dale Col­lege, a con­ser­v­a­tive bas­tion that her hus­band has called “a shin­ing city on a hill.” She also briefly ran her own advo­ca­cy group called Lib­er­ty Cen­tral, which cam­paigned against a planned Islam­ic com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter and mosque in Low­er Man­hat­tan near ground zero; that group was fund­ed in large mea­sure by Har­lan Crow, a friend of the Thomases’ and board mem­ber of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank whose work Jus­tice Thomas has cit­ed. Crow, a major Repub­li­can donor, gave $500,000 to Lib­er­ty Cen­tral. (Gin­ni Thomas’s 2010 pay of $120,511 was near­ly 13 per­cent of the organization’s rev­enue that year, tax records show.) In the wake of the finan­cial dis­clo­sures, more than 70 House Democ­rats asked the jus­tice to recuse him­self from delib­er­a­tions about Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s Afford­able Care Act, which Gin­ni Thomas lob­bied against. He declined.

Now her new group, Groundswell, took shape, cou­pling a the­atri­cal cloak-and-dag­ger sen­si­bil­i­ty with an inabil­i­ty to keep secrets. Ear­ly par­tic­i­pants drew from a num­ber of hard-line inter­est groups, includ­ing Frank Gaffney of the Cen­ter for Secu­ri­ty Pol­i­cy, Tom Fit­ton of Judi­cial Watch and Ken Black­well of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, as well as Leonard Leo and Allen West, an out­spo­ken for­mer Flori­da con­gress­man, and a num­ber of right-wing jour­nal­ists, includ­ing Mark Tap­scott, then the exec­u­tive edi­tor of The Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er. A trove of inter­nal emails was prompt­ly leaked to Moth­er Jones mag­a­zine, high­light­ing the group’s use of tac­ti­cal terms like “OpSec” (“oper­a­tions secu­ri­ty”) and its hatred of estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can fig­ures, in par­tic­u­lar Karl Rove, whom they reviled as a mod­er­at­ing influ­ence on the par­ty.

Gin­ni Thomas over­saw the group’s plan for its “30-front war” as Groundswell became a plat­form for far-right lead­ers, donors and media fig­ures — the peo­ple Ban­non called the “hon­ey bad­gers” of the move­ment — to exchange and ampli­fy hard-line posi­tions on immi­gra­tion, abor­tion and gun con­trol. It was, as Ban­non put it, “all the stuff that became the foun­da­tion­al stuff of the Trump move­ment.”

Vot­ing was an ear­ly focus. Among the ear­ly Groundswell par­tic­i­pants was Rus­sell J. Ram­s­land Jr., an influ­en­tial Texas-based backer of evi­dence-free vot­ing-fraud claims who would make a failed con­gres­sion­al run. So was James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Ver­i­tas, a right-wing group that has used decep­tion and hid­den cam­eras to try to but­tress claims of vot­er fraud. Anoth­er par­tic­i­pant was Cather­ine Engle­brecht, a Texas activist who in 2009 found­ed True the Vote, a group that says it is bat­tling “groups who sub­vert our elec­tions to serve their own pur­pos­es” and has pushed for vot­ing restric­tions.

The activists were par­tic­u­lar­ly inflamed after Oba­ma signed an exec­u­tive order on March 28, 2013, that cre­at­ed a com­mis­sion to study elec­tions. “OBAMA TAKES TOTAL CONTROL OF ELECTIONS,” one Groundswell mem­ber wrote in an email to the group. Engle­brecht warned in response that the com­mis­sion, which had no author­i­ty beyond writ­ing a report and mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions, “has the capac­i­ty to wipe out fair elec­tions.”

Bongi­no, anoth­er Groundswell mem­ber, wrote: “We need to reframe this. The nar­ra­tive of the Left has already tak­en hold.” He added, “The words ‘Vot­er ID’ are already lost & equat­ed with racism.” Thomas weighed in, list­ing key House staff mem­bers work­ing on elec­tions mat­ters, and asked, “Who else are key work­ing group mem­bers on ELECTION LAW, ELECTION REFORM and THE LEFT’S NARRATIVES, Groundswell???”

Three months after the email exchange, Jus­tice Thomas pro­vid­ed a crit­i­cal vote in the court’s 5‑to‑4 Shel­by Coun­ty v. Hold­er deci­sion, which effec­tive­ly stripped the Vot­ing Rights Act of lan­guage that pro­tect­ed vot­ers in places that had his­tor­i­cal­ly dis­en­fran­chised them on the basis of race. The act had required states and coun­ties with a his­to­ry of dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices, most­ly in the South, to get fed­er­al pre­clear­ance of such mea­sures. The case was led in part by one of Thomas’s own for­mer clerks, William Consovoy, whose argu­ments echoed the justice’s views. In fact, Thomas had advanced the argu­ment for Shel­by four years ear­li­er, when he raised con­cerns about the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of pre­clear­ance in a case from Texas, argu­ing that there was no longer “a sys­tem­at­ic cam­paign to deny black cit­i­zens access to the bal­lot through intim­i­da­tion and vio­lence.” Four years lat­er, in his con­cur­ring opin­ion in Shel­by, he wrote, “Our Nation has changed.”

The rul­ing was cheered on the right, with The Wall Street Journal’s edi­to­r­i­al board call­ing it “a tri­umph of racial progress.” Civ­il rights groups were dis­mayed. “The Shel­by deci­sion is one of the biggest affronts to our democ­ra­cy in mod­ern his­to­ry,” said Janai Nel­son, asso­ciate direc­tor of the NAACP Legal Defense and Edu­ca­tion­al Fund, argu­ing that it “unleashed a wave of vot­er sup­pres­sion that is like what we wit­nessed in the Jim Crow era.” The deci­sion freed states to enact restric­tive laws, she added, that were “often based on myth­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions” of sup­posed vot­er fraud and “by no coin­ci­dence dis­en­fran­chise minor­i­ty vot­ers at alarm­ing­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate rates.”

That same year, Gin­ni Thomas turned her atten­tion to inter­nal bat­tles on the right. In 2013, the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee came out with a report after Romney’s loss that was known as the “autop­sy” of the party’s fail­ures. But its pre­scrip­tions — to broad­en the base and appeal to minori­ties and gay peo­ple — were round­ly reject­ed by Gin­ni Thomas and Ban­non. “It’s a joke, and it has noth­ing to do with what hap­pened,” Ban­non said in an inter­view, recall­ing how he react­ed to the report. “We have to have some­thing to counter it.”

Groundswell, in a mes­sage cir­cu­lat­ed among its mem­bers after the autop­sy, said that “Priebus is send­ing mes­sages to the par­ty,” refer­ring to Reince Priebus, the R.N.C. chair­man at the time. It con­tin­ued: “If we were all gay ille­gal aliens, the par­ty likes us. He is prepar­ing the way for a change on social issues by giv­ing a warn­ing, ‘don’t go Old Tes­ta­ment.’”

The Thomases faced oth­er head­winds. In addi­tion to Groundswell, Gin­ni Thomas had start­ed her own small firm, Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing, but was often rel­e­gat­ed to sym­bol­ic ges­tures, as when she wrote to the I.R.S. in 2014 protest­ing that the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion was “attempt­ing to force the dis­clo­sure of donors to con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions,” amid crit­i­cism from the right that the agency was sin­gling out con­ser­v­a­tive groups for scruti­ny. Jus­tice Thomas, mean­while, wrote vig­or­ous dis­sents from what seemed to be a nar­row­ing con­ser­v­a­tive posi­tion; in 2015, he was the only jus­tice to back Aber­crom­bie & Fitch’s dress code, which pre­vent­ed the hir­ing of a woman who wore a head scarf. (He said the store was not inten­tion­al­ly dis­crim­i­nat­ing but sim­ply refus­ing “to cre­ate an excep­tion.”)

For their 28th wed­ding anniver­sary in May 2015, Jus­tice Thomas bought his wife a charm bracelet. It had knots and ropes and a pix­ie, because, as she lat­er recount­ed, he thinks of her as a pix­ieish trou­ble­mak­er. But there was anoth­er charm too. “I said: ‘Wait, there’s a wind­mill here. What’s that mean?’” She was, after all, a for­mer attor­ney for the U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce, a bas­tion of Big Oil, and has fumed aloud that kids are being turned into “robots for cli­mate change.” But her hus­band had an expla­na­tion, she said: “He goes, ‘We both tilt at wind­mills.’”

The death of Antonin Scalia in Feb­ru­ary 2016 left a void on the court and for Jus­tice Thomas. He deliv­ered an emo­tion­al eulo­gy for his friend, a long­time ide­o­log­i­cal ally, even if Scalia had once referred to his own brand of orig­i­nal­ism as “faint­heart­ed.” “For this, I feel quite inad­e­quate to the task,” Thomas said, adding that the two had “many buck-each-oth­er-up vis­its, too many to count.” He recount­ed glee­ful­ly chid­ing Scalia for exco­ri­at­ing an opin­ion he came across: “Nino, you wrote it.” For years, Thomas was over­shad­owed by his more vol­u­ble col­league, but a recon­sid­er­a­tion fol­lowed. “For the first year or two, Jus­tice Thomas was seen as Jus­tice Scalia’s lap dog by some, which was wild­ly den­i­grat­ing,” said John Mal­colm, vice pres­i­dent of the Her­itage Foundation’s Insti­tute for Con­sti­tu­tion­al Gov­ern­ment. “Now, in books and notes that have been released, it seems that Jus­tice Scalia was just as influ­enced by Jus­tice Thomas as Jus­tice Thomas was by Jus­tice Scalia.”

Thomas has warm rela­tion­ships with many of his court col­leagues; he called Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg “sim­ply a joy to work with” and was often seen help­ing her nav­i­gate the courtroom’s steps. But after Scalia’s death, it seemed as if he might become even more ide­o­log­i­cal­ly iso­lat­ed. Mitch McConnell made it clear that Scalia’s suc­ces­sor would be left to the next pres­i­dent, even though near­ly a year remained in the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. But with Hillary Clin­ton lead­ing in the polls, it seemed that the court could soon see its “first lib­er­al major­i­ty in near­ly 50 years,” USA Today wrote in Octo­ber 2016.

Gin­ni Thomas attend­ed the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion as a Vir­ginia del­e­gate, this time on behalf of Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz. There, she backed a con­ven­tion-floor effort to over­turn the will of Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers by award­ing Trump’s del­e­gates to Cruz. After the plot failed, Thomas expressed her dis­ap­proval of the party’s nom­i­nee in Face­book posts lat­er com­piled by Trump aides. “Don­ald Trump will have to WIN my vote, along with many oth­ers in the Cruz move­ment,” she wrote. “We were dev­as­tat­ed at how he treat­ed Ted” (Trump had lobbed insults and insin­u­a­tions at Cruz’s wife and father), adding that it “does not bode well for a Pres­i­dent wor­thy to lead this nation.”

But like many oth­ers on the right who opposed Trump’s can­di­da­cy, she would become a believ­er. Thomas and her col­leagues at the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy had for years pushed for the appoint­ment of “con­sti­tu­tion­al­ist” judges in her husband’s image, with some even advo­cat­ing the impeach­ment of judges who did not meet that def­i­n­i­tion. Few things were more impor­tant to the con­ser­v­a­tive base than reshap­ing the close­ly divid­ed Supreme Court, and Trump did not dis­ap­point. First he replaced Scalia with anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive, Neil Gor­such. Then, in July 2018, Trump nom­i­nat­ed Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia Cir­cuit, to suc­ceed Jus­tice Antho­ny M. Kennedy, the court’s swing vote, who was retir­ing. The court’s bal­ance of pow­er was poised to shift. It was the moment both Thomases had await­ed.

The Kavanaugh nom­i­na­tion, how­ev­er, was soon imper­iled amid unex­pect­ed sex­u­al assault and harass­ment alle­ga­tions rem­i­nis­cent of Thomas’s own con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings. With the nom­i­na­tion in the bal­ance, Gin­ni Thomas addressed the Coun­cil for Nation­al Policy’s mem­ber­ship, men­tion­ing her hus­band no less than four times. Before intro­duc­ing an off-the-record ses­sion at a coun­cil con­fer­ence in Octo­ber 2018, Jer­ry John­son, a mem­ber of the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee, remind­ed atten­dees to turn their cell­phones off and “do not record.” (A video of the event lat­er sur­faced.)

Gin­ni Thomas invoked the shoot­ing of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Steve Scalise at a char­i­ty base­ball prac­tice and the Kavanaugh nom­i­na­tion fight to make a larg­er claim that con­ser­v­a­tives were under attack. “May we all have guns and con­cealed car­ry to han­dle what’s com­ing,” she said. “And what they’ve done to Brett Kavanaugh,” she con­tin­ued, “I’m feel­ing the pain, Clarence is feel­ing the pain of going through false charges against a good man, and what they’re doing is unbe­liev­able. I thought it couldn’t get worse than Clarence’s, but it did.”

Her anger build­ing, she told the audi­ence that there were signs all around them of exis­ten­tial threats. “You see rain­bow flags through­out busi­ness­es, send­ing pow­er­ful, sub­tle mes­sages to all the cus­tomers that ‘We’re the kind, decent, com­pas­sion­ate, tol­er­ant peo­ple, until the Repub­li­can evil con­ser­v­a­tives show up, and those are all auto­mat­i­cal­ly hate­ful peo­ple,’” she said. “I see things in my vet­eri­nar­i­an: ‘Spread Kind­ness,’ ‘Build Com­mu­ni­ty,’ ‘Hate Is Not Wel­come Here,’” she con­tin­ued. “Look how defen­sive we are, because they have these cul­tur­al foun­da­tions.” Return­ing to the bat­tle at hand, the Kavanaugh fight, she said, “Even if he gets in — I believe he’ll get in, I’m hop­ing he gets in, but they’re not going to leave him alone.” It was clear it was per­son­al: “They’re try­ing to impeach him. They’re com­ing for my hus­band. They’re com­ing for Pres­i­dent Trump!”

The invi­ta­tion went out in the weeks fol­low­ing Kavanaugh’s con­fir­ma­tion. Would Jus­tice Thomas care to join the pres­i­dent for what one for­mer Trump aide described as a “work­ing lunch”? Kavanaugh’s ele­va­tion had cre­at­ed an open­ing on the Court of Appeals for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia Cir­cuit, con­sid­ered a prime step­ping­stone to the Supreme Court. The top con­tender for the post, Neo­mi Rao, then serv­ing as the admin­is­tra­tor of the White House Office of Infor­ma­tion and Reg­u­la­to­ry Affairs, had been a Thomas clerk.

Trump had long been intrigued by Jus­tice Thomas. Dur­ing the tran­si­tion, in a meet­ing to dis­cuss the court with Leonard Leo, he expressed an inter­est in learn­ing more about the jus­tice. “At one point dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, he said to me, ‘You know, when I was out on the cam­paign trail, you know, when I men­tioned Clarence Thomas, his name, some­times the guy would get more applause than I did,’” Leo recalled. “ ‘What was that all about?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, he’s a hero to a lot of peo­ple.’”

A court­ing of Thomas fol­lowed, prompt­ed as well by rumors that he might retire. His ros­ter of for­mer clerks became a go-to list for Trump judi­cial picks. (“You did appoint a lot of my kids,” the jus­tice would lat­er thank McGahn, Trump’s first White House coun­sel, in his Her­itage speech.) Ear­ly on, there was also a pho­to-op with Thomas and his clerks, who went to the White House. And lat­er, there was an invi­ta­tion for the jus­tice, along with his wife, to join the pres­i­dent and first lady for din­ner.

The lunch fol­low­ing the Kavanaugh bat­tle, how­ev­er, was sup­posed to be a pri­vate affair between the jus­tice and the pres­i­dent. But when Thomas arrived, Trump aides said, they were sur­prised to see that he had brought an unin­vit­ed guest — his wife. Trump world was learn­ing, as oth­ers have, that the two are a pack­age deal.

The accounts of the Thomases’ meet­ings and con­ver­sa­tions with the White House are based on inter­views with nine for­mer Trump aides and advis­ers, most of whom request­ed anonymi­ty in order to speak frankly about how the courtship of Thomas cre­at­ed an open­ing for his wife. (One said he didn’t want “the Gin­ni prayer war­riors com­ing after me.”) Sev­er­al said they were nev­er clear as to whether she was there as an activist or a paid con­sul­tant. They recount­ed how she aggres­sive­ly pushed far-right can­di­dates for var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tion jobs and posi­tioned her­self as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base. “Here’s what the peeps think,” she would say, accord­ing to one of the aides. “We have to lis­ten to the peeps.”

Short­ly after the lunch meet­ing with her hus­band, she got a meet­ing of her own with the pres­i­dent, at her request, arriv­ing in the Roo­sevelt Room on Jan. 25, 2019, with a del­e­ga­tion that includ­ed mem­bers of Groundswell in tow. “It was the cra­zi­est meet­ing I’ve ever been to,” said a Trump aide who attend­ed. “She start­ed by lead­ing the prayer.” When oth­ers began speak­ing, the aide remem­bers talk of “the trans­sex­u­al agen­da” and par­ents “chop­ping off their children’s breasts.” He said the pres­i­dent “tried to rein it in — it was hard to hear though,” because through­out the meet­ing atten­dees were audi­bly pray­ing.

It was an event with no prece­dent, and some of the details of what tran­spired soon leaked: the wife of a sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice lob­by­ing a pres­i­dent when sev­er­al cas­es involv­ing trans­gen­der rights were mak­ing their way through the fed­er­al courts. (The fol­low­ing year, Jus­tice Thomas would join a dis­sent that assert­ed that the Civ­il Rights Act did not cov­er peo­ple on the basis of sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion or gen­der iden­ti­ty.) The meet­ing grew chaot­ic. Gin­ni Thomas and oth­er atten­dees com­plained to the pres­i­dent that their favored hard-line job can­di­dates were being blocked and that his own per­son­nel office should be purged, depict­ing some of his aides as clos­et lib­er­als and Nev­er Trumpers.

Before the meet­ing, Trump’s aides assem­bled the research doc­u­ment out­lin­ing con­cerns with Gin­ni Thomas and some of her pre­ferred job can­di­dates, the con­tents of which they shared with the pres­i­dent.

The doc­u­ment, obtained by The Times, detailed how Crys­tal Clan­ton, a friend of Gin­ni Thomas’s whose name had been advanced, had been forced out from Turn­ing Point USA, a con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dent group on whose advi­so­ry board Gin­ni Thomas once served, after The New York­er report­ed that she wrote in a text: “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like [exple­tive] them all. … I hate blacks. End of sto­ry.” (Gin­ni Thomas sub­se­quent­ly hired Clan­ton, and Jus­tice Thomas, who has called the alle­ga­tions against Clan­ton unfound­ed, helped her get a fed­er­al clerk­ship and wrote in a let­ter of sup­port that he would con­sid­er her for a Supreme Court clerk­ship.) Oth­er names advanced by Gin­ni Thomas includ­ed Bongi­no, whom she rec­om­mend­ed for a coun­tert­er­ror­ism posi­tion, and David A. Clarke, a Black for­mer Mil­wau­kee Coun­ty sher­iff whose over­sight of a local jail was the sub­ject of mul­ti­ple inves­ti­ga­tions and law­suits, whom she sup­port­ed for a top post at the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty.

The report remind­ed the pres­i­dent that Gin­ni Thomas had once called him “a non­con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­date” whose pop­ulism was “unteth­ered and dan­ger­ous” and whose tac­tics did “not bode well for a Pres­i­dent wor­thy to lead this nation.” It even includ­ed a pho­to of her at the 2016 Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion, where she sup­port­ed the effort to strip Trump of his del­e­gates, hold­ing her del­e­gate badge, which was dec­o­rat­ed with a yel­low rib­bon embla­zoned with the words “trou­ble mak­er.”

“In the White House, she was out of bounds many times,” one of Trump’s senior aides said. “It was always: ‘We need more MAGA peo­ple in gov­ern­ment. We’re try­ing to get these résumés through, and we’re being blocked.’ I appre­ci­at­ed her ener­gy, but a lot of these peo­ple couldn’t pass back­ground checks.” Many of the peo­ple she pushed, anoth­er for­mer Trump aide said, “had legit­i­mate back­ground issues, secu­ri­ty-clear­ance issues or had done a lot of busi­ness over­seas.”

The pres­i­dent con­tin­ued to allow Gin­ni Thomas access, telling aides that if she were in the White House vis­it­ing with oth­er offi­cials, she was wel­come to drop by to see him. And she did on sev­er­al occa­sions, while also pass­ing notes on her pri­or­i­ties through inter­me­di­aries, mul­ti­ple aides said. With her hus­band, she also attend­ed a state din­ner for the Aus­tralian prime min­is­ter, and she went to the White House when her hus­band admin­is­tered the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Oath to Amy Coney Bar­rett, Trump’s third appoint­ment to the Supreme Court, as guests includ­ing Lau­ra Ingra­ham, the Fox News host and for­mer Thomas clerk, cel­e­brat­ed.

With her place in the pres­i­den­tial orbit secure, Thomas became even more out­spo­ken. In posts on Face­book, she shared a George Soros con­spir­a­cy-the­o­ry meme and crit­i­cized the teenage sur­vivors of the school mas­sacre in Park­land, Fla., for sup­port­ing gun con­trol. She com­plained when a town near her Vir­ginia home put up a ban­ner in sup­port of Black Lives Mat­ter, say­ing the group was filled with extrem­ists “seek­ing to foment a cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion,” and trad­ed barbs on her pub­lic Face­book page. “Hey, are you aware you mar­ried a black man?” one com­menter wrote, to which she replied: “news tip, whitey, all blacks don’t think alike!”

By 2019, her influ­ence in Repub­li­can cir­cles was grow­ing. She took on a lead­er­ship role at the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, join­ing the board of C.N.P. Action, which had become a key cog in the Trump mes­sag­ing machine. (The coun­cil declined to com­ment.) The board holds break­out ses­sions on “press­ing issues,” then pub­lish­es “action steps” for mem­bers. That year, she and her friend Cle­ta Mitchell, a coun­cil mem­ber and Repub­li­can elec­tions lawyer, con­duct­ed a joint ses­sion at which Mitchell dis­cussed har­ness­ing char­i­ta­ble dol­lars for polit­i­cal pur­pos­es and Thomas spoke on the cul­ture war. Thomas told her lis­ten­ers that soci­etal forces were arrayed against them, while flash­ing a slide depict­ing the left as black snakes coiled around cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions. “Our house is on fire,” she declared, “and we are stomp­ing ants in the dri­ve­way.”

Dur­ing Trump’s pres­i­den­cy, doc­u­ments obtained by The Times show, the coun­cil and its affil­i­ates rou­tine­ly took on issues that were like­ly to go before the Supreme Court. Gin­ni Thomas per­son­al­ly co-mod­er­at­ed a pan­el called “The Pro-Life Move­ment on Offense” that laid out strate­gies to ener­gize “low turnout pro-life vot­ers” and “per­suad­able Democ­rats and His­pan­ics” by talk­ing to them “about late-term abor­tion, tax­pay­er fund­ing of abor­tion, and the Supreme Court,” one of the slides in the pre­sen­ta­tion read. Amid the pan­dem­ic and legal chal­lenges to lock­down restric­tions, the orga­ni­za­tion urged mem­bers to “pray for our church­es to rise up.” The scope of poten­tial con­flicts has lit­tle prece­dent beyond nar­row­er episodes on low­er fed­er­al courts, as when the wife of Judge Stephen Rein­hardt was an A.C.L.U. exec­u­tive but he did not always recuse him­self from cas­es in which the A.C.L.U. had an inter­est. But unlike the Supreme Court, lit­i­gants there had the right to appeal.

As the 2020 elec­tion neared, C.N.P. Action meet­ings and doc­u­ments tar­get­ed Demo­c­ra­t­ic strate­gies that make it eas­i­er to vote, includ­ing the prac­tice of civic groups’ gath­er­ing bal­lot appli­ca­tions, derid­ed by many on the right as “bal­lot har­vest­ing.” Months lat­er, the Supreme Court upheld an Ari­zona ban on the prac­tice, with Thomas in the 6‑to‑3 major­i­ty. C.N.P. Action also pressed for manda­to­ry vot­er-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion laws and even float­ed the idea of using for­mer Navy SEALs to mon­i­tor polls.

Thomas was also busy with dis­plays of devo­tion: She boast­ed in an online biog­ra­phy that she “set agen­das with Pres­i­dent Trump’s White House for quar­ter­ly con­ser­v­a­tive leader brief­in­gs” and start­ed a group of Trump sup­port­ers called the North­ern Vir­ginia Deplorables. But it was after Trump’s Novem­ber loss that she would prove her loy­al­ty beyond doubt, when she and her group urged on efforts to over­turn the elec­tion.

In the weeks after Trump’s loss, court chal­lenges began to pile up from his team, his allies and even Repub­li­can law­mak­ers. They echoed the call put out by C.N.P. Action to chal­lenge swing-state out­comes, with one Repub­li­can con­gress­man, Mike Kel­ly of Penn­syl­va­nia, fil­ing a law­suit against his own state to try to stop the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of its votes. On Dec. 8, the Supreme Court refused a request to hear that case before the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion date in a one-sen­tence state­ment. It remains unknown whether the jus­tices were unan­i­mous in their deci­sion.

By then, the net­work around the Thomases was light­ing up. On Dec. 10, a for­mer Thomas clerk and close friend of the couple’s, John C. East­man, went on “War Room,” a pod­cast and radio show host­ed by Ban­non. East­man argued that the coun­try was already at the point of a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis — and he urged the Supreme Court to inter­vene. Ban­non eager­ly agreed. Behind the scenes, East­man was advis­ing Trump and his cam­paign on a new pro­pos­al to change the out­come of the elec­tion: Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, he assert­ed, could refuse to accept swing-state votes and send them back to the state leg­is­la­tures when he presided over the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the elec­tion in a joint ses­sion of Con­gress on Jan. 6.

As the Trump court chal­lenges to the elec­tion mul­ti­plied, C.N.P. Action took up the charge once more, train­ing its sights on the Jan. 6 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. In Decem­ber, it cir­cu­lat­ed a newslet­ter that includ­ed a report titled “Five States and the Elec­tion Irreg­u­lar­i­ties and Issues,” tar­get­ing five swing states where Trump and his allies were already press­ing lit­i­ga­tion. But time was run­ning out for the courts to “declare the elec­tions null and void,” the report warned. The newslet­ter advised: “There is his­tor­i­cal, legal prece­dent for Con­gress to count a slate of elec­tors dif­fer­ent from that cer­ti­fied by the Gov­er­nor of the state.” One co-author of the “Five States” report was Cle­ta Mitchell, who by that time was among the lawyers advis­ing Trump.

Soon a num­ber of long­time friends and asso­ciates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to over­turn the elec­tion results, or help­ing plan the Jan. 6 ral­lies. Besides East­man and Ban­non, there was Mitchell, who took part in Trump’s Jan. 2 call in which he exhort­ed Georgia’s sec­re­tary of state to “find” the votes he need­ed to claim a vic­to­ry. Turn­ing Point USA, on whose advi­so­ry board Gin­ni Thomas had served, was a spon­sor of the Jan. 6 event and pro­vid­ed bus­es for atten­dees. (An ear­ly rumor sug­gest­ing that she paid for the bus­es was debunked.)

Oth­er spon­sors includ­ed two more groups with which Gin­ni Thomas had long ties. One was the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots, head­ed by Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin, a fel­low Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy activist. The oth­er was Women for Amer­i­ca First, which held the per­mit for the ral­ly at the Ellipse and was run by Amy Kre­mer. The two women, and Gin­ni Thomas, had all been ear­ly Tea Par­ty activists, though Kre­mer and Mar­tin had been engaged for years in a bit­ter legal dis­pute. “That’s why it was inter­est­ing when I learned that they’d been work­ing togeth­er on the Jan­u­ary 6 coor­di­na­tion,” Dustin Stock­ton said, adding that he had been told by anoth­er orga­niz­er, Car­o­line Wren, on Jan. 5 that it was Gin­ni Thomas who worked to bring uni­ty ahead of the ral­ly. (Asked about Thomas’s medi­at­ing role, Kremer’s daugh­ter Kylie Jane Kre­mer, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Women for Amer­i­ca First, did not answer that ques­tion, instead paint­ing Stock­ton as some­one who makes “inac­cu­rate and atten­tion-seek­ing state­ments.” Mar­tin sim­i­lar­ly avoid­ed the ques­tion, issu­ing a state­ment that con­demned the vio­lence at the Capi­tol. Wren dis­put­ed Stockton’s account but declined to elab­o­rate.)

The spec­ta­cle of a Supreme Court justice’s spouse tak­ing to Face­book to cham­pi­on the attempt of a defeat­ed pres­i­dent to stay in pow­er, as Gin­ni Thomas did on the morn­ing of Jan. 6, crossed a line for sev­er­al peo­ple in the Thomases’ cir­cle who talked to The Times. “That’s what she does — it has noth­ing to do with him,” said Arm­strong Williams, Jus­tice Thomas’s long­time friend. “Should she use bet­ter judg­ment? Yes. You can quote me on that.”

Gin­ni Thomas post­ed a dis­claimer after the protests devolved into an insur­rec­tion — “[Note: writ­ten before vio­lence in US Capi­tol]” — but she had also lament­ed Trump’s loss in a mes­sage to “Thomas Clerk World,” a pri­vate email group used by Gin­ni Thomas and for­mer clerks and their spous­es that is typ­i­cal­ly reserved for more ano­dyne pleas­antries. Her use of the forum prompt­ed a bit­ter debate among the for­mer clerks that soon leaked. It start­ed on Jan. 17, when Smith, the Notre Dame pro­fes­sor, shared an arti­cle from Chris­tian­i­ty Today denounc­ing the Jan. 6 vio­lence. Among those who weighed in was East­man, who was a speak­er at the ral­ly. “Rest assured that those of us involved in this are work­ing dili­gent­ly to ascer­tain the truth,” he wrote.

East­man then used the Thomas email group to invite “those of you inter­est­ed in more infor­ma­tion” to get in touch, prompt­ing Smith to reply that he hoped every­one agreed “that the search for truth doesn’t in any way jus­ti­fy insur­rec­tion, try­ing to kid­nap and assas­si­nate elect­ed offi­cials, attack­ing police offi­cers, or mak­ing com­mon cause with racists and anti-Semi­tes” because “such things are flat­ly con­trary to authen­tic Chris­t­ian faith.” (Details of Eastman’s role con­tin­ue to emerge, includ­ing a mes­sage he sent to Pence’s top lawyer dur­ing the Capi­tol attack blam­ing the vice pres­i­dent for refus­ing to over­turn the elec­tion; he repeat­ed­ly cit­ed the Fifth Amend­ment in refus­ing to answer ques­tions from the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee.)

By Jan. 18, Gin­ni Thomas felt com­pelled to issue a semi-apol­o­gy on the forum, which also leaked. “I have like­ly imposed on you my life­time pas­sions,” she wrote. “My pas­sions and beliefs are like­ly shared with the bulk of you, but cer­tain­ly not all. And some­times the small­est mat­ters can divide loved ones for too long. Let’s pledge to not let pol­i­tics divide THIS fam­i­ly, and learn to speak more gen­tly and know­ing­ly across the divide,” adding, “I am cer­tain­ly on the hum­ble side of aware­ness here. ????”

In the year that has passed, Gin­ni Thomas has delet­ed one of her two Face­book accounts and has tak­en a low­er pro­file. But she remains active. Last year, she invit­ed Gov. Ron DeSan­tis of Flori­da to join a Groundswell call, describ­ing her group as a “cone-of-silence coali­tion” in an email to his staff that was obtained by Amer­i­can Over­sight, a non­par­ti­san watch­dog group. She invoked her hus­band, telling DeSantis’s aides that the jus­tice had been in con­tact with the gov­er­nor “on var­i­ous things of late.” (DeSan­tis, who did not respond to requests for com­ment, was in the midst of a num­ber of high-pro­file fed­er­al court bat­tles at the time.)

The bat­tle over the elec­tion did not land before the court as Bush v. Gore did in 2000. But in Feb­ru­ary 2021, as Trump and his asso­ciates con­tin­ued press­ing for state law­mak­ers to audit — and reverse — the 2020 elec­tion, Jus­tice Thomas sharply dis­sent­ed when a 6‑to‑3 major­i­ty reject­ed the case brought by Penn­syl­va­nia Repub­li­cans that the court had refused to take up in Decem­ber. Echo­ing the argu­ments advanced by C.N.P. Action, he wrote that leg­is­la­tures have the con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty to deter­mine how fed­er­al elec­tions are held, yet in 2020, “non­leg­isla­tive offi­cials in var­i­ous States took it upon them­selves to set the rules instead.”

He called the refusal by his col­leagues to hear the case “inex­plic­a­ble,” argu­ing that “alle­ga­tions of sys­temic mal­ad­min­is­tra­tion, vot­er sup­pres­sion, or fraud” go “to the heart of pub­lic con­fi­dence in elec­tion results. That is obvi­ous­ly prob­lem­at­ic for alle­ga­tions backed by sub­stan­tial evi­dence. But the same is true where alle­ga­tions are incor­rect.” In oth­er words, elec­tion dis­putes and claims of fraud car­ried as much weight — and should lead to court hear­ings, just as Trump and his sup­port­ers had wished — whether they were true or not. “By doing noth­ing,” Thomas con­tin­ued, “we invite fur­ther con­fu­sion and ero­sion of vot­er con­fi­dence.” He did con­cede in a foot­note that the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion had been “free from strong evi­dence of sys­temic fraud.”

Though the bat­tle for the pres­i­den­cy is over, the Thomases are win­ning in the war for the courts — and, some would argue, the coun­try. Some of the most impor­tant issues Gin­ni Thomas has worked for are now bar­rel­ing toward a Supreme Court rede­fined by Trump, where her hus­band is ascen­dant. Land­mark cas­es loom.

One major test will be elec­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly after Biden’s Jus­tice Depart­ment sued Geor­gia over a new vot­ing law that the depart­ment said dis­crim­i­nates against peo­ple of col­or. The Supreme Court has already agreed to review race-con­scious admis­sions pro­grams at Har­vard and the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na, set­ting the stage for a dra­mat­ic rever­sal on affir­ma­tive action, as Jus­tice Thomas has long sought. And Roe v. Wade appears like­ly to be hol­lowed out, if not over­turned: The court, with Thomas as the lone dis­senter, recent­ly allowed abor­tion providers the right to chal­lenge a Texas anti-abor­tion law, though a con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty, joined by Thomas, declined to block the law’s enforce­ment in the mean­time. And oral argu­ments in anoth­er recent case sug­gest that there may be enough votes to uphold a Mis­sis­sip­pi law ban­ning abor­tion after 15 weeks. Jus­tice Thomas seem­ing­ly used his ques­tions to press for a full rever­sal of Roe v. Wade, demand­ing: “If I were to ask you what con­sti­tu­tion­al right pro­tects the right to abor­tion, is it pri­va­cy? Is it auton­o­my? What would it be?”

Such per­for­mances have made him a hero to many on the right. Brigitte Gabriel, a Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy stal­wart who once said that “every prac­tic­ing Mus­lim is a rad­i­cal Mus­lim” — and whose activism Gin­ni Thomas once praised in a glow­ing Dai­ly Caller col­umn — called Jus­tice Thomas “the real chief jus­tice” dur­ing Decem­ber oral argu­ments and tweet­ed a doc­tored pho­to in which every jus­tice had his face with the cap­tion: “This would be a Supreme Court with Courage.”

“I love call­ing it the Thomas court,” said Hel­gi Walk­er, the for­mer Thomas clerk. “He didn’t change. That’s why it’s been won­der­ful to watch this arc. The influ­ence he exerts comes from the pow­er of his ideas,” she con­tin­ued. “That’s what his lega­cy is built on.”

...

———-

“The Long Cru­sade of Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas” by Dan­ny Hakim and Jo Beck­er; The New York Times; 02/22/2022

““He has chart­ed a very rad­i­cal approach to judg­ing — it’s sur­pris­ing, actu­al­ly, how far the court has moved in his direc­tion,” John Yoo, a law pro­fes­sor at U.C.-Berkeley and for­mer Thomas clerk known for draft­ing some of the “tor­ture mem­os” under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, said dur­ing a dis­cus­sion at the Her­itage event. (Yoo also advised for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence that he did not have the author­i­ty to reject elec­toral votes on Jan. 6.) “What do you think is going to hap­pen in the next 10 years when he might have a work­able major­i­ty of orig­i­nal­ists? I think we’re going to see the fruition of the last 30 years in the next 10.””

As painful as it may be, we have to acknowl­edge that “tor­ture mem­os” lawyer has a point: the next decade real­ly is like­ly going to be a decade of fruition for Clarence Thomas. 30 years lat­er, it’s his court and it’s clear he’s not feel­ing any rea­son for restraint at this moment. The US is poised to expe­ri­ence the fruition of Clarence Thomas’s three decades of work in reshap­ing the courts.

But of course it was­n’t real­ly Thomas who did all that reshap­ing. It was the wild suc­cess of the orga­nized con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment over the past three decades in win­ning the White House — with or with­out a major­i­ty of the nation­al vote — and stack­ing the court with an unstop­pable far right major­i­ty com­prised of jus­tices all derived from the exact same legal net­work. A legal net­work that has the CNP at its orga­niz­ing core. Clarence Thomas is real­ly just the old­est of the CNP’s Supreme Court jus­tices. Six and count­ing.

But it’s still quite notable that Thomas was appar­ent­ly play­ing a men­tor-like role for CNP-mem­ber Leonard Leo. As we’ve seen, Don­ald Trump lit­er­al­ly out­sourced his Supreme Court nom­i­nee to Leo in his role as the exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, the orga­ni­za­tion that has arguably had more influ­ence than any­one else over the Repub­li­can pres­i­dents’ selec­tions for the Supreme Court over the last four decades. Thomas real­ly has had very real influ­ence both in front of con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ences but also behind the scene in build­ing this tight-knit elite con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. A move­ment that appears to heav­i­ly be a prod­uct of the CNP’s efforts. Efforts that include years of fix­at­ing on vot­ing restric­tions — includ­ing the CNP-heavy Hon­est Elec­tions Project led by Leo — all the way up through the CNP’s pro­found role in the lead up to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. The incred­i­ble arc of Clarence Thomas’s qui­et decades long ascen­sion to the heights of judi­cial influ­ence real­ly is just part of the this broad­er CNP ascen­dance. Its been a joint effort all along:

...
Thomas’s ear­ly years on the court were dis­tin­guished by vig­or­ous dis­sents and icon­o­clas­tic opin­ions. While some jus­tices seek a nar­row enough argu­ment to gar­ner five votes, he often staked out a lone­li­er, more oppo­si­tion­al role as a dis­senter. In a 1997 Sec­ond Amend­ment case, he opened the door for future chal­lenges to local gun laws. In a 2000 Nebras­ka abor­tion case, he assailed Roe v. Wade, which he called “griev­ous­ly wrong.”

“He was till­ing the ground,” said Leonard Leo, a for­mer exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, a Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy mem­ber and a close fam­i­ly friend of the couple’s. “In oth­er words, the field’s not ready for things to blos­som or flour­ish, but he’s doing what he can to pre­pare it. And that’s what he’s been doing.”

Leo, a Catholic like the jus­tice, first met him when he was clerk­ing on the Dis­trict of Colum­bia Cir­cuit. Thomas, then a judge on that court, became a men­tor. The jus­tice has spent time at Leo’s New Eng­land vaca­tion home, is god­fa­ther to one of his chil­dren and has sup­port­ed him through hard­ships, includ­ing the death of his 14-year-old daugh­ter from spina bifi­da. The two men often dis­cussed reli­gion — Thomas once rec­om­mend­ed he read “A His­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty” by Paul John­son — and Leo says Jus­tice Thomas saw par­al­lels between how the church grew and how to build a body of con­ser­v­a­tive jurispru­dence.
...

But as this mas­sive NY Times arti­cle made clear, Clarence Thomas role in build­ing this move­ment is triv­ial com­pared to the direct role his wife Gin­ni has been play­ing for decades too. A role that has includ­ed join­ing the board of “C.N.P. Action” in 2019. This is the action “C.N.P. Action” that start­ed cir­cu­lat­ed an “action steps” doc­u­ment back in Novem­ber of 2020 instruct­ing GOP law­mak­ers to chal­lenge the elec­tion results and appoint alter­nate slates of elec­tors. Instruc­tions for a coup:

...
As Trump insist­ed, with­out evi­dence, that fraud had cheat­ed him of vic­to­ry, con­ser­v­a­tive groups rushed to ral­ly behind him. The coun­cil stood out, how­ev­er, not only because of its pedi­gree but also because one of its newest lead­ers was Vir­ginia Thomas, the wife of Jus­tice Clarence Thomas and a long­time activist in right-wing cir­cles. She had tak­en on a promi­nent role at the coun­cil dur­ing the Trump years and by 2019 had joined the nine-mem­ber board of C.N.P. Action, an arm of the coun­cil orga­nized as a 501©4 under a pro­vi­sion of the tax code that allows for direct polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy. It was C.N.P. Action that cir­cu­lat­ed the Novem­ber “action steps” doc­u­ment, the exis­tence of which has not been wide­ly known. It instruct­ed mem­bers to pres­sure Repub­li­can law­mak­ers into chal­leng­ing the elec­tion results and appoint­ing alter­nate slates of elec­tors: “Demand that they not aban­don their Con­sti­tu­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ties dur­ing a time such as this.”

Such a plan, if car­ried out suc­cess­ful­ly, would have almost cer­tain­ly land­ed before the Supreme Court — and Gin­ni Thomas’s hus­band. In fact, Trump was already call­ing for that to hap­pen. In a Dec. 2 speech at the White House, the pres­i­dent false­ly claimed that “mil­lions of votes were cast ille­gal­ly in swing states alone” and said he hoped “the Supreme Court of the Unit­ed States will see it” and “will do what’s right for our coun­try, because our coun­try can­not live with this kind of an elec­tion.”

...

Per­haps most impor­tant in under­stand­ing the couple’s far-reach­ing phi­los­o­phy and project is their long rela­tion­ship with the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, aspects of which have not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed. Jus­tice Thomas head­lined an event for the group in 2002, and in 2008 he attend­ed one of its meet­ings and was pho­tographed with a gav­el behind a lectern bear­ing the group’s name.

Just over a decade lat­er, Gin­ni Thomas would join the board of the council’s action arm. Dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion in 2019, she warned that “con­ser­v­a­tives and Repub­li­cans are tired of being the oppressed minor­i­ty,” adding that they were being “false­ly vil­i­fied, slan­dered and defamed as extrem­ists and big­ots and haters.” The left, she said, was “mak­ing it jus­ti­fi­able and nor­mal­ized to fight us, to hurt us, to kill us even.” For her, this was a fight decades in the mak­ing.

...

By 2019, her influ­ence in Repub­li­can cir­cles was grow­ing. She took on a lead­er­ship role at the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, join­ing the board of C.N.P. Action, which had become a key cog in the Trump mes­sag­ing machine. (The coun­cil declined to com­ment.) The board holds break­out ses­sions on “press­ing issues,” then pub­lish­es “action steps” for mem­bers. That year, she and her friend Cle­ta Mitchell, a coun­cil mem­ber and Repub­li­can elec­tions lawyer, con­duct­ed a joint ses­sion at which Mitchell dis­cussed har­ness­ing char­i­ta­ble dol­lars for polit­i­cal pur­pos­es and Thomas spoke on the cul­ture war. Thomas told her lis­ten­ers that soci­etal forces were arrayed against them, while flash­ing a slide depict­ing the left as black snakes coiled around cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions. “Our house is on fire,” she declared, “and we are stomp­ing ants in the dri­ve­way.”

Dur­ing Trump’s pres­i­den­cy, doc­u­ments obtained by The Times show, the coun­cil and its affil­i­ates rou­tine­ly took on issues that were like­ly to go before the Supreme Court. Gin­ni Thomas per­son­al­ly co-mod­er­at­ed a pan­el called “The Pro-Life Move­ment on Offense” that laid out strate­gies to ener­gize “low turnout pro-life vot­ers” and “per­suad­able Democ­rats and His­pan­ics” by talk­ing to them “about late-term abor­tion, tax­pay­er fund­ing of abor­tion, and the Supreme Court,” one of the slides in the pre­sen­ta­tion read. Amid the pan­dem­ic and legal chal­lenges to lock­down restric­tions, the orga­ni­za­tion urged mem­bers to “pray for our church­es to rise up.” The scope of poten­tial con­flicts has lit­tle prece­dent beyond nar­row­er episodes on low­er fed­er­al courts, as when the wife of Judge Stephen Rein­hardt was an A.C.L.U. exec­u­tive but he did not always recuse him­self from cas­es in which the A.C.L.U. had an inter­est. But unlike the Supreme Court, lit­i­gants there had the right to appeal.

As the 2020 elec­tion neared, C.N.P. Action meet­ings and doc­u­ments tar­get­ed Demo­c­ra­t­ic strate­gies that make it eas­i­er to vote, includ­ing the prac­tice of civic groups’ gath­er­ing bal­lot appli­ca­tions, derid­ed by many on the right as “bal­lot har­vest­ing.” Months lat­er, the Supreme Court upheld an Ari­zona ban on the prac­tice, with Thomas in the 6‑to‑3 major­i­ty. C.N.P. Action also pressed for manda­to­ry vot­er-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion laws and even float­ed the idea of using for­mer Navy SEALs to mon­i­tor polls.
...

But Gin­ni’s ties to the CNP clear­ly start­ed long before that 2019 appoint­ment to the CNP Action board. The ‘Groundswell’ group that she start­ed with fel­low CNP-mem­ber Steve Ban­non back in 2013 as a rival to Grover Norquist’s “Wednes­day Meet­ing” was almost all oth­er CNP peo­ple. As we saw back in 2013, the Groundswell atten­dees includ­ed John Bolton, Frank Gaffney, Ken Black­well, Jer­ry Boykin, Tom Fit­ton, and Diana Ban­is­ter. All of them show up on the leaked CNP mem­ber­ship list. Also list­ed in this NY Times arti­cle are Leonard Leo and Rus­sell J. Ram­s­land Jr. Recall the crit­i­cal role CNP mem­bers Ram­s­land and J. Keet Lewis played in the lead up to the insur­rec­tion. 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. Start­ing in 2018, Ram­s­land became a lead­ing GOP pur­vey­or of mass vot­er fraud alle­ga­tions. And in the days lead­ing up to the insur­rec­tion, Ram­s­land was joined by retired Army colonel and psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare expert Phil Wal­dron as they oper­at­ed in Steve Bannon’s and Rudy Giuliani’s “war room” oper­at­ing out of the Willard Hotel.

Anoth­er ear­ly Groundswell fig­ure who does­n’t show up on CNP mem­ber­ship lists is Cather­ine Engel­brecht. Recall how Engel­brecht was mak­ing her vot­er fraud claims back in 2012 at a num­ber of Koch-financed Amer­i­cans For Pros­per­i­ty events. It’s a reminder that while the effort lead­ing up to the insur­rec­tion very much a CNP effort, it was­n’t exclu­sive­ly. The Koch net­work, for exam­ple, has been busi­ly at work:

...
The Thomases have long posed a unique quandary in Wash­ing­ton. Because Supreme Court jus­tices do not want to be per­ceived as par­ti­san, they tend to avoid polit­i­cal events and entan­gle­ments, and their spous­es often keep low pro­files. But the Thomases have defied such norms. Since the found­ing of the nation, no spouse of a sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice has been as overt a polit­i­cal activist as Gin­ni Thomas. In addi­tion to her perch at the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, she found­ed a group called Groundswell with the sup­port of Stephen K. Ban­non, the hard-line nation­al­ist and for­mer Trump advis­er. It holds a week­ly meet­ing of influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tives, many of whom work direct­ly on issues that have come before the court.

...

A few weeks after Mitt Rom­ney lost the 2012 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Gin­ni Thomas called Steve Ban­non, then the chair­man of Bre­it­bart, and they had lunch at the Wash­ing­ton town­house that was both Bannon’s res­i­dence and Breitbart’s head­quar­ters. Romney’s loss pre­saged a bat­tle for the Repub­li­can Party’s direc­tion, and Thomas want­ed to start a hard-right round table to serve as an alter­na­tive to an estab­lish­ment meet­ing run on Wednes­days by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax cru­sad­er. “She had the idea, ‘I think we need some­thing to counter Grover’s Wednes­day meet­ing,’” recalled Ban­non, who didn’t know her well at the time. “And I said, ‘That’s a bril­liant idea.’”

The pre­vi­ous year, Thomas’s activism drew scruti­ny of her and her hus­band, when Com­mon Cause, an advo­ca­cy group, reviewed I.R.S. fil­ings and crit­i­cized Jus­tice Thomas for fail­ing to dis­close his wife’s income — near­ly $700,000 over five years from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion — as required by fed­er­al law. He sub­se­quent­ly amend­ed 20 years of fil­ings. After her stint at Her­itage, Gin­ni Thomas ran a Wash­ing­ton-based con­sti­tu­tion­al stud­ies cen­ter for Michigan’s Hills­dale Col­lege, a con­ser­v­a­tive bas­tion that her hus­band has called “a shin­ing city on a hill.” She also briefly ran her own advo­ca­cy group called Lib­er­ty Cen­tral, which cam­paigned against a planned Islam­ic com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter and mosque in Low­er Man­hat­tan near ground zero; that group was fund­ed in large mea­sure by Har­lan Crow, a friend of the Thomases’ and board mem­ber of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank whose work Jus­tice Thomas has cit­ed. Crow, a major Repub­li­can donor, gave $500,000 to Lib­er­ty Cen­tral. (Gin­ni Thomas’s 2010 pay of $120,511 was near­ly 13 per­cent of the organization’s rev­enue that year, tax records show.) In the wake of the finan­cial dis­clo­sures, more than 70 House Democ­rats asked the jus­tice to recuse him­self from delib­er­a­tions about Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s Afford­able Care Act, which Gin­ni Thomas lob­bied against. He declined.

Now her new group, Groundswell, took shape, cou­pling a the­atri­cal cloak-and-dag­ger sen­si­bil­i­ty with an inabil­i­ty to keep secrets. Ear­ly par­tic­i­pants drew from a num­ber of hard-line inter­est groups, includ­ing Frank Gaffney of the Cen­ter for Secu­ri­ty Pol­i­cy, Tom Fit­ton of Judi­cial Watch and Ken Black­well of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, as well as Leonard Leo and Allen West, an out­spo­ken for­mer Flori­da con­gress­man, and a num­ber of right-wing jour­nal­ists, includ­ing Mark Tap­scott, then the exec­u­tive edi­tor of The Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er. A trove of inter­nal emails was prompt­ly leaked to Moth­er Jones mag­a­zine, high­light­ing the group’s use of tac­ti­cal terms like “OpSec” (“oper­a­tions secu­ri­ty”) and its hatred of estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can fig­ures, in par­tic­u­lar Karl Rove, whom they reviled as a mod­er­at­ing influ­ence on the par­ty.

Gin­ni Thomas over­saw the group’s plan for its “30-front war” as Groundswell became a plat­form for far-right lead­ers, donors and media fig­ures — the peo­ple Ban­non called the “hon­ey bad­gers” of the move­ment — to exchange and ampli­fy hard-line posi­tions on immi­gra­tion, abor­tion and gun con­trol. It was, as Ban­non put it, “all the stuff that became the foun­da­tion­al stuff of the Trump move­ment.”

Vot­ing was an ear­ly focus. Among the ear­ly Groundswell par­tic­i­pants was Rus­sell J. Ram­s­land Jr., an influ­en­tial Texas-based backer of evi­dence-free vot­ing-fraud claims who would make a failed con­gres­sion­al run. So was James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Ver­i­tas, a right-wing group that has used decep­tion and hid­den cam­eras to try to but­tress claims of vot­er fraud. Anoth­er par­tic­i­pant was Cather­ine Engle­brecht, a Texas activist who in 2009 found­ed True the Vote, a group that says it is bat­tling “groups who sub­vert our elec­tions to serve their own pur­pos­es” and has pushed for vot­ing restric­tions.

The activists were par­tic­u­lar­ly inflamed after Oba­ma signed an exec­u­tive order on March 28, 2013, that cre­at­ed a com­mis­sion to study elec­tions. “OBAMA TAKES TOTAL CONTROL OF ELECTIONS,” one Groundswell mem­ber wrote in an email to the group. Engle­brecht warned in response that the com­mis­sion, which had no author­i­ty beyond writ­ing a report and mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions, “has the capac­i­ty to wipe out fair elec­tions.”

Bongi­no, anoth­er Groundswell mem­ber, wrote: “We need to reframe this. The nar­ra­tive of the Left has already tak­en hold.” He added, “The words ‘Vot­er ID’ are already lost & equat­ed with racism.” Thomas weighed in, list­ing key House staff mem­bers work­ing on elec­tions mat­ters, and asked, “Who else are key work­ing group mem­bers on ELECTION LAW, ELECTION REFORM and THE LEFT’S NARRATIVES, Groundswell???”

Three months after the email exchange, Jus­tice Thomas pro­vid­ed a crit­i­cal vote in the court’s 5‑to‑4 Shel­by Coun­ty v. Hold­er deci­sion, which effec­tive­ly stripped the Vot­ing Rights Act of lan­guage that pro­tect­ed vot­ers in places that had his­tor­i­cal­ly dis­en­fran­chised them on the basis of race. The act had required states and coun­ties with a his­to­ry of dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices, most­ly in the South, to get fed­er­al pre­clear­ance of such mea­sures. The case was led in part by one of Thomas’s own for­mer clerks, William Consovoy, whose argu­ments echoed the justice’s views. In fact, Thomas had advanced the argu­ment for Shel­by four years ear­li­er, when he raised con­cerns about the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of pre­clear­ance in a case from Texas, argu­ing that there was no longer “a sys­tem­at­ic cam­paign to deny black cit­i­zens access to the bal­lot through intim­i­da­tion and vio­lence.” Four years lat­er, in his con­cur­ring opin­ion in Shel­by, he wrote, “Our Nation has changed.”

The rul­ing was cheered on the right, with The Wall Street Journal’s edi­to­r­i­al board call­ing it “a tri­umph of racial progress.” Civ­il rights groups were dis­mayed. “The Shel­by deci­sion is one of the biggest affronts to our democ­ra­cy in mod­ern his­to­ry,” said Janai Nel­son, asso­ciate direc­tor of the NAACP Legal Defense and Edu­ca­tion­al Fund, argu­ing that it “unleashed a wave of vot­er sup­pres­sion that is like what we wit­nessed in the Jim Crow era.” The deci­sion freed states to enact restric­tive laws, she added, that were “often based on myth­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions” of sup­posed vot­er fraud and “by no coin­ci­dence dis­en­fran­chise minor­i­ty vot­ers at alarm­ing­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate rates.”
...

Flash for­ward to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and we learn that Gin­ni was appar­ent­ly lead­ing a Groundswell lob­by­ing effort to staff the Trump admin­is­tra­tion with their pre­ferred peo­ple. The only prob­lem was many of them could­n’t pass a secu­ri­ty check. Beyond that, she passed her­self off as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base. From elite cryp­to-theo­crat pow­er orga­niz­er to ‘voice of the peo­ple’, Gin­ni has worn a lot of hats over the years. Some­times simul­ta­ne­ous­ly:

...
Trump had long been intrigued by Jus­tice Thomas. Dur­ing the tran­si­tion, in a meet­ing to dis­cuss the court with Leonard Leo, he expressed an inter­est in learn­ing more about the jus­tice. “At one point dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, he said to me, ‘You know, when I was out on the cam­paign trail, you know, when I men­tioned Clarence Thomas, his name, some­times the guy would get more applause than I did,’” Leo recalled. “ ‘What was that all about?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, he’s a hero to a lot of peo­ple.’”

A court­ing of Thomas fol­lowed, prompt­ed as well by rumors that he might retire. His ros­ter of for­mer clerks became a go-to list for Trump judi­cial picks. (“You did appoint a lot of my kids,” the jus­tice would lat­er thank McGahn, Trump’s first White House coun­sel, in his Her­itage speech.) Ear­ly on, there was also a pho­to-op with Thomas and his clerks, who went to the White House. And lat­er, there was an invi­ta­tion for the jus­tice, along with his wife, to join the pres­i­dent and first lady for din­ner.

The lunch fol­low­ing the Kavanaugh bat­tle, how­ev­er, was sup­posed to be a pri­vate affair between the jus­tice and the pres­i­dent. But when Thomas arrived, Trump aides said, they were sur­prised to see that he had brought an unin­vit­ed guest — his wife. Trump world was learn­ing, as oth­ers have, that the two are a pack­age deal.

The accounts of the Thomases’ meet­ings and con­ver­sa­tions with the White House are based on inter­views with nine for­mer Trump aides and advis­ers, most of whom request­ed anonymi­ty in order to speak frankly about how the courtship of Thomas cre­at­ed an open­ing for his wife. (One said he didn’t want “the Gin­ni prayer war­riors com­ing after me.”) Sev­er­al said they were nev­er clear as to whether she was there as an activist or a paid con­sul­tant. They recount­ed how she aggres­sive­ly pushed far-right can­di­dates for var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tion jobs and posi­tioned her­self as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base. “Here’s what the peeps think,” she would say, accord­ing to one of the aides. “We have to lis­ten to the peeps.”

Short­ly after the lunch meet­ing with her hus­band, she got a meet­ing of her own with the pres­i­dent, at her request, arriv­ing in the Roo­sevelt Room on Jan. 25, 2019, with a del­e­ga­tion that includ­ed mem­bers of Groundswell in tow. “It was the cra­zi­est meet­ing I’ve ever been to,” said a Trump aide who attend­ed. “She start­ed by lead­ing the prayer.” When oth­ers began speak­ing, the aide remem­bers talk of “the trans­sex­u­al agen­da” and par­ents “chop­ping off their children’s breasts.” He said the pres­i­dent “tried to rein it in — it was hard to hear though,” because through­out the meet­ing atten­dees were audi­bly pray­ing.

t was an event with no prece­dent, and some of the details of what tran­spired soon leaked: the wife of a sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice lob­by­ing a pres­i­dent when sev­er­al cas­es involv­ing trans­gen­der rights were mak­ing their way through the fed­er­al courts. (The fol­low­ing year, Jus­tice Thomas would join a dis­sent that assert­ed that the Civ­il Rights Act did not cov­er peo­ple on the basis of sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion or gen­der iden­ti­ty.) The meet­ing grew chaot­ic. Gin­ni Thomas and oth­er atten­dees com­plained to the pres­i­dent that their favored hard-line job can­di­dates were being blocked and that his own per­son­nel office should be purged, depict­ing some of his aides as clos­et lib­er­als and Nev­er Trumpers.

...

“In the White House, she was out of bounds many times,” one of Trump’s senior aides said. “It was always: ‘We need more MAGA peo­ple in gov­ern­ment. We’re try­ing to get these résumés through, and we’re being blocked.’ I appre­ci­at­ed her ener­gy, but a lot of these peo­ple couldn’t pass back­ground checks.” Many of the peo­ple she pushed, anoth­er for­mer Trump aide said, “had legit­i­mate back­ground issues, secu­ri­ty-clear­ance issues or had done a lot of busi­ness over­seas.”
...

But it’s Gin­ni’s actions in the months fol­low­ing the 2020 elec­tion lead­ing up to the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion that are of imme­di­ate inter­est. As we saw, CNP Action imme­di­ate­ly sprung into action advis­ing law­mak­ers to chal­lenge the elec­tion results and file alter­na­tive elec­tors. Which is basi­cal­ly what hap­pened. CNP mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchel was fever­ish­ly work­ing on legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions to over­turn the elec­tion. And as we’ve seen, Gin­ni was report­ed­ly work­ing close­ly with Cle­ta dur­ing this peri­od. But it’s quite notable that the oth­er ‘respectable’ con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer seek­ing out a legal path to chal­lenge the elec­tion was John East, who is a for­mer clerk for Thomas and a close friend of the cou­ple.

Regard­ing Gin­ni’s seat on the advi­so­ry board of Turn­ing Point USA and its spon­sor­ship of the Jan 6 ral­ly, also recall how Turn­ing Point’s founder and pres­i­dent is CNP mem­ber Char­lie Kirk.

Now, regard­ing the shared his­to­ry as ear­ly sig­nif­i­cant Tea Par­ty activist that Gin­ni had with Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin and Amy Kre­mer, don’t for­get that both Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin and Amy Kre­mer are list­ed as CNP mem­bers. It would­n’t be that sur­pris­ing if Gin­ni real­ly did bring ‘uni­ty’ to the ral­ly orga­niz­ers as we are told. She real­ly appar­ent­ly was act­ing as kind of CNP fix­er in the mid­dle of it all, and well posi­tioned to play that role:

...
In the weeks after Trump’s loss, court chal­lenges began to pile up from his team, his allies and even Repub­li­can law­mak­ers. They echoed the call put out by C.N.P. Action to chal­lenge swing-state out­comes, with one Repub­li­can con­gress­man, Mike Kel­ly of Penn­syl­va­nia, fil­ing a law­suit against his own state to try to stop the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of its votes. On Dec. 8, the Supreme Court refused a request to hear that case before the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion date in a one-sen­tence state­ment. It remains unknown whether the jus­tices were unan­i­mous in their deci­sion.

By then, the net­work around the Thomases was light­ing up. On Dec. 10, a for­mer Thomas clerk and close friend of the couple’s, John C. East­man, went on “War Room,” a pod­cast and radio show host­ed by Ban­non. East­man argued that the coun­try was already at the point of a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis — and he urged the Supreme Court to inter­vene. Ban­non eager­ly agreed. Behind the scenes, East­man was advis­ing Trump and his cam­paign on a new pro­pos­al to change the out­come of the elec­tion: Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, he assert­ed, could refuse to accept swing-state votes and send them back to the state leg­is­la­tures when he presided over the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the elec­tion in a joint ses­sion of Con­gress on Jan. 6.

As the Trump court chal­lenges to the elec­tion mul­ti­plied, C.N.P. Action took up the charge once more, train­ing its sights on the Jan. 6 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. In Decem­ber, it cir­cu­lat­ed a newslet­ter that includ­ed a report titled “Five States and the Elec­tion Irreg­u­lar­i­ties and Issues,” tar­get­ing five swing states where Trump and his allies were already press­ing lit­i­ga­tion. But time was run­ning out for the courts to “declare the elec­tions null and void,” the report warned. The newslet­ter advised: “There is his­tor­i­cal, legal prece­dent for Con­gress to count a slate of elec­tors dif­fer­ent from that cer­ti­fied by the Gov­er­nor of the state.” One co-author of the “Five States” report was Cle­ta Mitchell, who by that time was among the lawyers advis­ing Trump.

Soon a num­ber of long­time friends and asso­ciates of the Thomases were involved in efforts to over­turn the elec­tion results, or help­ing plan the Jan. 6 ral­lies. Besides East­man and Ban­non, there was Mitchell, who took part in Trump’s Jan. 2 call in which he exhort­ed Georgia’s sec­re­tary of state to “find” the votes he need­ed to claim a vic­to­ry. Turn­ing Point USA, on whose advi­so­ry board Gin­ni Thomas had served, was a spon­sor of the Jan. 6 event and pro­vid­ed bus­es for atten­dees. (An ear­ly rumor sug­gest­ing that she paid for the bus­es was debunked.)

Oth­er spon­sors includ­ed two more groups with which Gin­ni Thomas had long ties. One was the Tea Par­ty Patri­ots, head­ed by Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin, a fel­low Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy activist. The oth­er was Women for Amer­i­ca First, which held the per­mit for the ral­ly at the Ellipse and was run by Amy Kre­mer. The two women, and Gin­ni Thomas, had all been ear­ly Tea Par­ty activists, though Kre­mer and Mar­tin had been engaged for years in a bit­ter legal dis­pute. “That’s why it was inter­est­ing when I learned that they’d been work­ing togeth­er on the Jan­u­ary 6 coor­di­na­tion,” Dustin Stock­ton said, adding that he had been told by anoth­er orga­niz­er, Car­o­line Wren, on Jan. 5 that it was Gin­ni Thomas who worked to bring uni­ty ahead of the ral­ly. (Asked about Thomas’s medi­at­ing role, Kremer’s daugh­ter Kylie Jane Kre­mer, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Women for Amer­i­ca First, did not answer that ques­tion, instead paint­ing Stock­ton as some­one who makes “inac­cu­rate and atten­tion-seek­ing state­ments.” Mar­tin sim­i­lar­ly avoid­ed the ques­tion, issu­ing a state­ment that con­demned the vio­lence at the Capi­tol. Wren dis­put­ed Stockton’s account but declined to elab­o­rate.)

...

The bat­tle over the elec­tion did not land before the court as Bush v. Gore did in 2000. But in Feb­ru­ary 2021, as Trump and his asso­ciates con­tin­ued press­ing for state law­mak­ers to audit — and reverse — the 2020 elec­tion, Jus­tice Thomas sharply dis­sent­ed when a 6‑to‑3 major­i­ty reject­ed the case brought by Penn­syl­va­nia Repub­li­cans that the court had refused to take up in Decem­ber. Echo­ing the argu­ments advanced by C.N.P. Action, he wrote that leg­is­la­tures have the con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty to deter­mine how fed­er­al elec­tions are held, yet in 2020, “non­leg­isla­tive offi­cials in var­i­ous States took it upon them­selves to set the rules instead.”

He called the refusal by his col­leagues to hear the case “inex­plic­a­ble,” argu­ing that “alle­ga­tions of sys­temic mal­ad­min­is­tra­tion, vot­er sup­pres­sion, or fraud” go “to the heart of pub­lic con­fi­dence in elec­tion results. That is obvi­ous­ly prob­lem­at­ic for alle­ga­tions backed by sub­stan­tial evi­dence. But the same is true where alle­ga­tions are incor­rect.” In oth­er words, elec­tion dis­putes and claims of fraud car­ried as much weight — and should lead to court hear­ings, just as Trump and his sup­port­ers had wished — whether they were true or not. “By doing noth­ing,” Thomas con­tin­ued, “we invite fur­ther con­fu­sion and ero­sion of vot­er con­fi­dence.” He did con­cede in a foot­note that the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion had been “free from strong evi­dence of sys­temic fraud.”

Though the bat­tle for the pres­i­den­cy is over, the Thomases are win­ning in the war for the courts — and, some would argue, the coun­try. Some of the most impor­tant issues Gin­ni Thomas has worked for are now bar­rel­ing toward a Supreme Court rede­fined by Trump, where her hus­band is ascen­dant. Land­mark cas­es loom.
...

But while the uni­fy­ing role Gin­ni may have played between Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin and Amy Kre­mer is indeed inter­est­ing. Far more inter­est­ing is the pos­si­ble role she may have played in smooth­ing over the feuds between the “Women for Amer­i­ca First” ral­ly at the Ellipse being led by Kre­mer and the ‘wild’ “Stop the Steal” ral­ly planned by CNP-mem­ber Ali Alexan­der and Alex Jones at the Capi­tol lat­er that after­noon. A ral­ly that nev­er hap­pened because the insur­rec­tion broke out as peo­ple were march­ing on the way there from the Ellipse. Major ques­tions about whether or not that insur­rec­tion just ‘spon­ta­neous­ly’ broke out between ral­lies — leav­ing nei­ther ral­ly orga­niz­er as direct­ly cul­pa­ble — remain unan­swered. Did Gin­ni Thomas play any addi­tion CNP fix­er roles behind the scenes in rela­tion to the alleged ten­sions between the two ral­lies? It’s a high­ly intrigu­ing ques­tion giv­en the time­line of how the events of that day played out:

...
New report­ing also shows just how blurred the lines between the couple’s inter­ests became dur­ing the effort to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion, which cul­mi­nat­ed in the ral­ly held at the Ellipse, just out­side the White House grounds, aimed at stop­ping Con­gress from cer­ti­fy­ing the state votes that gave Joe Biden his vic­to­ry. Many of the ral­ly orga­niz­ers and those advis­ing Trump had con­nec­tions to the Thomases, but lit­tle has been known about what role, if any, Gin­ni Thomas played, beyond the fact that on the morn­ing of the March to Save Amer­i­ca, as the ral­ly was called, she urged her Face­book fol­low­ers to watch how the day unfold­ed. “LOVE MAGA peo­ple!!!!” she post­ed before the march turned vio­lent. “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”

But her role went deep­er, and beyond C.N.P. Action. Dustin Stock­ton, an orga­niz­er who worked with Women for Amer­i­ca First, which held the per­mit for the Ellipse ral­ly, said he was told that Gin­ni Thomas played a peace­mak­ing role between feud­ing fac­tions of ral­ly orga­niz­ers “so that there wouldn’t be any divi­sion around Jan­u­ary 6.”

“The way it was pre­sent­ed to me was that Gin­ni was unit­ing these dif­fer­ent fac­tions around a sin­gu­lar mis­sion on Jan­u­ary 6,” said Stock­ton, who pre­vi­ous­ly worked for Ban­non. “That Gin­ni was involved made sense — she’s pret­ty neu­tral, and she doesn’t have a lot of ene­mies in the move­ment.”

...

In the weeks that fol­lowed Jan. 6, as pub­lic con­dem­na­tion of the insur­rec­tion grew to include some Repub­li­can lead­ers like Sen­a­tor Mitch McConnell, the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy cir­cu­lat­ed in its newslet­ter anoth­er pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed memo, writ­ten by one of its mem­bers, that out­lined strate­gies to make the Capi­tol riot seem more palat­able. “Dri­ve the nar­ra­tive that it was most­ly peace­ful protests,” a lead­ing mem­ber of the group advised, accord­ing to a copy reviewed by The Times. “Ampli­fy the con­cerns of the pro­tes­tors and give them legit­i­ma­cy.”

In the year since the insur­rec­tion, a num­ber of friends and allies of the Thomases, and even a for­mer Thomas clerk, have received sub­poe­nas from the con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the events of Jan. 6. Gin­ni Thomas co-signed a let­ter in Decem­ber call­ing for House Repub­li­cans to expel Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their con­fer­ence for join­ing the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee. Thomas and her co-authors said the inves­ti­ga­tion “brings dis­re­spect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harass­ment to pri­vate cit­i­zens who have done noth­ing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nation­wide move­ment to add cit­i­zens’ voic­es to this effort.”

A few weeks lat­er, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House relat­ed to the Jan. 6 attack. Jus­tice Thomas was the sole dis­senter.
...

At this point, it’s almost hard to imag­ine Gin­ni and Ali weren’t in some kind of secret com­mu­ni­ca­tion with each oth­er. Did it per­haps involve the mys­te­ri­ous third ‘burn­er’ phone. Recall how Amy and Kylie Kre­mer got three burn­er phones and we still don’t know who got the third. Was it Gin­ni? She’s a very plau­si­ble can­di­date. She’s a log­i­cal can­di­date from a con­spir­a­cy logis­tics stand­point. Ali Alexan­der? Also quite plau­si­ble, espe­cial­ly giv­en his CNP mem­ber­ship. Who knows, but the CNP’s fin­ger­prints real­ly are all over this entire sto­ry. It’s just kind of amaz­ing how many of those CNP fin­ger­prints come from the wife of the leader of the Supreme Court’s CNP Major­i­ty.

A lot of swirling ques­tions about all that. Swirling ques­tions that will like­ly con­tin­ue swirling for the fore­see­able future. At least in most cas­es. Swirling ques­tions are kind of a CNP spe­cial­ty.

What has John East­man been up to? It’s not a hypo­thet­i­cal. The Con­sti­tu­tion­al lawyer lead­ing the legal bat­tle to jus­ti­fy Don­ald Trump’s attempts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion has been quite busy over the past year being large­ly wel­comed back into ‘polite soci­ety’. But as the fol­low set of arti­cles describes, John East­man has also been quite busy work­ing on an old project: over­turn­ing the 2020 elec­tion.

Yep, East­man is still at it. He attend­ed a closed door meet­ing with Wis­con­sin Repub­li­cans on March 16 where he encour­aged them to decer­ti­fy the 2020 elec­tion results and send a new slate of elec­tors. For real. Soon after the meet­ing, Don­ald Trump again pub­licly implored the Wis­con­sin GOP to over­turn the elec­tion results.

But it’s not like this was a pure­ly sym­bol­ic ges­ture. While Repub­li­can Wis­con­sin Assem­bly Speak­er Robin Vos reit­er­at­ed his posi­tion that the 2020 elec­tion can’t be decer­ti­fied fol­low­ing the meet­ing, keep in mind that Vos was held in con­tempt by a judge last month for fail­ing to turn over doc­u­ments relat­ed to the GOP inves­ti­ga­tion he had launched him­self in May 2021 into the 2020 elec­tion and has repeat­ed­ly alleged wide­spread vot­er fraud. So when we learn that East­man has been lob­by­ing Vos behind closed doors to con­tin­ue his quest to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results, we real­ly do have to ask what East­man is up to. And what the Wis­con­sin GOP is up to. They aren’t done try­ing to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. Or rather, they aren’t done try­ing to inval­i­date and dele­git­imize the 2020 elec­tion

And that brings us to the oth­er rather odd area of activ­i­ty for John East­man late­ly. It turns out a group he involved with, Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group, has a new client: Repub­li­can House Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene (MTG). Recall how Greene was part of that group of House GOP­ers — Greene, Paul Gosar, Lau­ren Boe­bert, Mo Brooks, Madi­son Cawthorn, Andy Big­gs, and Louie Gohmert — who were report­ed­ly involved with “dozens” of meet­ings with fig­ures like Ali Alexan­der in the lead up to the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion.

East­man’s “Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group” has appar­ent­ly been pro­vid­ing a vari­ety of ser­vices for Greene. For starters, a joint fundrais­ing com­mit­tee run by Greene and Rep. Matt Gaetz, Put Amer­i­ca First, paid East­man’s Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group $15,000 for ser­vices between Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber 2021. Then on Jan­u­ary 14, the MTG reelec­tion cam­paign paid the group anoth­er $10k.

What are these MTG enti­ties pay­ing for? That’s anoth­er big ques­tion about what John East­man has been up to post-insur­rec­tion. Anoth­er big ques­tion that we don’t real­ly have an answer for. But we do have clues. For starters, a law­suit was filed against MTG over her sup­port for the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion to block her from run­ning for reelec­tion. That does actu­al­ly sound like the kind of legal conun­drum a con­sti­tu­tion­al lawyer like John East­man might be use­ful for address­ing. Was that the ser­vice MTG hired him to pro­vide? Maybe, but let’s not for­get that the MTG/Gaetz joint fundrais­ing oper­a­tion appar­ent­ly hired his ser­vices the month before that law­suit was filed. There were pre­sum­ably oth­er ser­vices of inter­est.

And then there’s the inci­dent that took place days before the Jan­u­ary 14th $10k pay­ment by MTG’s reelec­tion cam­paign to East­man’s Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group: MTG went on the radio show of pro­to-fas­cist Sebas­t­ian Gorka’s radio show and made the fol­low­ing state­ment:

“Ulti­mate­ly, the truth is it’s our Sec­ond Amend­ment rights, our right to bear arms, that pro­tects Amer­i­cans and gives us the abil­i­ty to defend our­selves from a tyran­ni­cal gov­ern­ment,” Greene told right-wing talk host Seb Gor­ka on Jan. 11. “And I hate to use this lan­guage, but Democ­rats, they’re exact­ly ... they’re doing exact­ly what our Founders talked about when they gave us the pre­cious rights that we have.”

It was a pret­ty unam­bigu­ous call for a sec­ond insur­rec­tion. On the radio. And it was made three days before the $10k pay­ment to East­man’s group. And about three months after a law­suit was opened against MTG to block her from run­ning for reelec­tion over her sup­port for the insur­rec­tion. So was that what MTG’s reelec­tion cam­paign was pay­ing for? Advice over how to fend off a law­suit over her suit­abil­i­ty for office as a pro-insur­rec­tion can­di­date?

Per­haps. But as we’re going to see in the third arti­cle except below from the Dai­ly Beast, there’s anoth­er rather inter­est­ing quirk in MTG’s recent spend­ing pat­terns that should kept in mind when pars­ing this sit­u­a­tion: MTG’s spend­ing on per­son­al secu­ri­ty jumped more than 10 fold between the last quar­ter of 2021 and the first quar­ter of 2022, with almost all of the new spend­ing going towards a Knoxville-based exec­u­tive secu­ri­ty firm. Is MTG real­ly sud­den­ly super con­cerned about her secu­ri­ty? If not, why the secu­ri­ty surge? And why did MTG’s cam­paign first hire East­man’s firm back in Sep­tem­ber and then dou­ble down in Jan­u­ary days after her over threat against Democ­rats?

These are just some of the unset­tling ques­tions raised by MTG’s hir­ing of John East­man’s ser­vices a year after an East­man-guid­ed insur­rec­tion. On top of the ques­tions raised by the Wis­con­sin GOP’s closed door meet­ing last month where East­man implored than to for­mal­ly dele­git­imize Wis­con­sin’s 2020 elec­tion results. And on top of the gener­ic ques­tion of what the GOP has in mind now that it’s large­ly aligned itself with the MTG wing of the par­ty and embraced the pol­i­tics of insur­rec­tion:

ABC News

For­mer Trump lawyer, amid clash with Jan. 6 com­mit­tee, push­ing to decer­ti­fy 2020 elec­tion

Trump has been watch­ing the decer­ti­fi­ca­tion push close­ly

By Will Steakin, Kather­ine Faul­ders, and Lau­ra Romero
April 11, 2022, 4:38 PM

Just as he was emerg­ing as a top tar­get of the House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Capi­tol attack, for­mer Trump lawyer John East­man took a trip to Wis­con­sin.

East­man, a right-wing lawyer who draft­ed a plan for for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump to cling to pow­er by false­ly claim­ing then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence could reject legit­i­mate elec­tors dur­ing the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, was part of a small group of Trump allies who secured a pri­vate meet­ing last month to try and con­vince the Repub­li­can leader of the Wis­con­sin state Assem­bly to decer­ti­fy Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s win, mul­ti­ple sources famil­iar with the meet­ing told ABC.

On March 16, East­man and oth­ers spent near­ly two hours behind closed doors pres­sur­ing Repub­li­can Wis­con­sin Assem­bly Speak­er Robin Vos to nul­li­fy the 2020 elec­tion and reclaim the elec­tors award­ed to Biden, the sources said, which legal experts say is impos­si­ble.

...

East­man in the meet­ing urged Vos to decer­ti­fy the elec­tion, sources famil­iar with the meet­ing said. Accord­ing to Jef­fer­son Davis, a Wis­con­sin activist push­ing to reverse Biden’s vic­to­ry who was also in the meet­ing, Trump’s for­mer lawyer pushed Vos to start “reclaim­ing the elec­tors” and move for­ward with “either a do over or hav­ing a new slate of elec­tors seat­ed that would declare some­one else the win­ner.”

Fol­low­ing pub­li­ca­tion, Davis called to clar­i­fy part of his com­ments, telling ABC News in new state­ment that “John East­man has nev­er sug­gest­ed a do-over and did not say so in the closed meet­ing with Speak­er Vos.”

When reached for com­ment, East­man said in a state­ment to ABC News, “By explic­it request from Speak­er Vos, that meet­ing was con­fi­den­tial, so I am not able to make any com­ment.”

Fol­low­ing the meet­ing, Vos reit­er­at­ed his posi­tion that the 2020 elec­tion can’t be decer­ti­fied. Vos, how­ev­er, has pushed claims of wide­spread elec­tion fraud and was held in con­tempt by a judge last month for fail­ing to turn over doc­u­ments relat­ed to a Repub­li­can-led inves­ti­ga­tion he had launched him­self in May 2021 into the 2020 elec­tion.

...

The Wis­con­sin meet­ing is just one instance among many in an ongo­ing effort by East­man and oth­er Trump allies who, even 15 months into Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s tenure, have con­tin­ued to push for the results of the 2020 elec­tion to be over­turned despite no evi­dence of wide­spread vot­er fraud.

In Feb­ru­ary, East­man also joined lead­ers of Colorado’s elec­tion denial cam­paign, hold­ing an “emer­gency town hall meet­ing” in Cas­tle Rock. The meet­ing, orga­nized by FEC Unit­ed founder Joe Olt­man, ral­lied the crowd against Sec­re­tary of State Jen­na Gris­wold, false­ly accus­ing her of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an elec­tion fraud con­spir­a­cy.

Dur­ing the meet­ing, East­man boast­ed about his involve­ment in elec­tion law­suits in Texas, Penn­syl­va­nia, Geor­gia and Wis­con­sin and decried the “attacks” that he and oth­ers who push elec­tion con­spir­a­cies have expe­ri­enced, call­ing it “pure evil,” accord­ing to a video of the meet­ing post­ed by FEC Unit­ed.

East­man has said he attend­ed a gath­er­ing of Trump sup­port­ers at the Willard Hotel on Jan. 5, 2021 and spoke before Trump at the “Save Amer­i­ca” ral­ly the next day. East­man also has said pub­licly that he, along with oth­er Trump allies, had a so-called “war room” set up at the hotel for sev­er­al days pre­ced­ing and on Jan. 6.

Trump has been watch­ing the decer­ti­fi­ca­tion push close­ly, say­ing in a state­ment last month fol­low­ing the Wis­con­sin meet­ing that “Speak­er Vos should do the right thing and cor­rect the Crime of the Century—immediately! It is my opin­ion that oth­er states will be doing this, Wis­con­sin should lead the way!”

The for­mer pres­i­dent has been in con­tact with mul­ti­ple peo­ple in Wis­con­sin work­ing on the effort and has received reg­u­lar updates from MyP­il­low CEO Mike Lin­dell, sources said, who has spread wild and base­less con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the 2020 vote count.

Lin­dell, who remains a close con­fi­dant of the for­mer pres­i­dent, has par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Wis­con­sin pres­sure cam­paign with his own team of peo­ple includ­ing Dou­glas Frank, who was promi­nent­ly fea­tured at the My Pil­low CEO’s con­spir­a­cy-filled “Cyber Sym­po­sium” last August, Army Reserve Lt. Colonel Ivan Raik­lin, who has also worked close­ly with for­mer Lt. Gen. Michael Fly­nn to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion and Shawn Smith, a Col­orado-based activist who has called Lin­dell an “angel investor” in her orga­ni­za­tion devot­ed to “elec­tion integri­ty.”

While Lin­dell was absent from the March 16 meet­ing, Frank, Raik­lin and Smith attend­ed with East­man, accord­ing to sources famil­iar with the meet­ing.

Lin­dell is cur­rent­ly fac­ing a $1.3 bil­lion law­suit from Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems for pro­mot­ing false claims about their vot­ing machines. He trav­eled to Mar-a-Lago last Thurs­day to attend a fundrais­er for Ari­zona guber­na­to­r­i­al can­di­date Kari Lake that fea­tured the for­mer pres­i­dent.

As East­man con­tin­ues his cam­paign to over­turn the elec­tion, he has become of greater inter­est to inves­ti­ga­tors on the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee, the pan­el has pub­licly indi­cat­ed.

Last month, a fed­er­al judge ruled that East­man must turn over most of the doc­u­ments he has been with­hold­ing from the com­mit­tee. The pan­el has begun receiv­ing and review­ing the doc­u­ments, accord­ing to sources.

The judge, who reviewed the doc­u­ments pri­vate­ly, said that Trump “more like­ly than not” com­mit­ted felony obstruc­tion in the effort to over­turn the elec­tion.

East­man and oth­ers con­tin­ue to push to decer­ti­fy Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s 2020 vic­to­ry in Wis­con­sin despite mul­ti­ple recounts, court fil­ings and audits fail­ing to iden­ti­fy any wide­spread fraud in the bat­tle­ground state.

Last month, a review by The Asso­ci­at­ed Press found that only 24 peo­ple out of 3.3 mil­lion who cast bal­lots in the 2020 elec­tion have been charged with elec­tion fraud in the state.

Sim­i­lar reviews and audits in oth­er states includ­ing Geor­gia and Ari­zona have also failed to sub­stan­ti­ate claims about wide­spread elec­tion fraud.

———-

“For­mer Trump lawyer, amid clash with Jan. 6 com­mit­tee, push­ing to decer­ti­fy 2020 elec­tion” by Will Steakin, Kather­ine Faul­ders, and Lau­ra Romero; ABC News; 04/11/2022

“On March 16, East­man and oth­ers spent near­ly two hours behind closed doors pres­sur­ing Repub­li­can Wis­con­sin Assem­bly Speak­er Robin Vos to nul­li­fy the 2020 elec­tion and reclaim the elec­tors award­ed to Biden, the sources said, which legal experts say is impos­si­ble.”

A two hour long closed door meet­ing pres­sur­ing the Wis­con­sin GOP to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. That actu­al­ly hap­pened less than a month ago. The lie can­not be allowed to die:

...
East­man in the meet­ing urged Vos to decer­ti­fy the elec­tion, sources famil­iar with the meet­ing said. Accord­ing to Jef­fer­son Davis, a Wis­con­sin activist push­ing to reverse Biden’s vic­to­ry who was also in the meet­ing, Trump’s for­mer lawyer pushed Vos to start “reclaim­ing the elec­tors” and move for­ward with “either a do over or hav­ing a new slate of elec­tors seat­ed that would declare some­one else the win­ner.”

Fol­low­ing pub­li­ca­tion, Davis called to clar­i­fy part of his com­ments, telling ABC News in new state­ment that “John East­man has nev­er sug­gest­ed a do-over and did not say so in the closed meet­ing with Speak­er Vos.”

When reached for com­ment, East­man said in a state­ment to ABC News, “By explic­it request from Speak­er Vos, that meet­ing was con­fi­den­tial, so I am not able to make any com­ment.”

Fol­low­ing the meet­ing, Vos reit­er­at­ed his posi­tion that the 2020 elec­tion can’t be decer­ti­fied. Vos, how­ev­er, has pushed claims of wide­spread elec­tion fraud and was held in con­tempt by a judge last month for fail­ing to turn over doc­u­ments relat­ed to a Repub­li­can-led inves­ti­ga­tion he had launched him­self in May 2021 into the 2020 elec­tion.
...

And this Wis­con­sin meet­ing was just one of the states that’s invit­ed East­man to give them a ‘Stop the Steal’ pep talk. A month ear­li­er, East­man was in Col­orado giv­ing a sim­i­lar talk:

...
The Wis­con­sin meet­ing is just one instance among many in an ongo­ing effort by East­man and oth­er Trump allies who, even 15 months into Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s tenure, have con­tin­ued to push for the results of the 2020 elec­tion to be over­turned despite no evi­dence of wide­spread vot­er fraud.

In Feb­ru­ary, East­man also joined lead­ers of Colorado’s elec­tion denial cam­paign, hold­ing an “emer­gency town hall meet­ing” in Cas­tle Rock. The meet­ing, orga­nized by FEC Unit­ed founder Joe Olt­man, ral­lied the crowd against Sec­re­tary of State Jen­na Gris­wold, false­ly accus­ing her of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an elec­tion fraud con­spir­a­cy.

Dur­ing the meet­ing, East­man boast­ed about his involve­ment in elec­tion law­suits in Texas, Penn­syl­va­nia, Geor­gia and Wis­con­sin and decried the “attacks” that he and oth­ers who push elec­tion con­spir­a­cies have expe­ri­enced, call­ing it “pure evil,” accord­ing to a video of the meet­ing post­ed by FEC Unit­ed.
...

And East­man’s ‘Stop the Steal’ effort obvi­ous­ly isn’t some solo effort. Don­ald Trump has appar­ent­ly been close­ly fol­low­ing Wis­con­sin’s ongo­ing efforts to over­turn the elec­tion and lit­er­al­ly issued a pub­lic state­ment in sup­port of East­man’s calls for the Wis­con­sin GOP to over­turn the elec­tion right after that closed door meet­ing:

...
Trump has been watch­ing the decer­ti­fi­ca­tion push close­ly, say­ing in a state­ment last month fol­low­ing the Wis­con­sin meet­ing that “Speak­er Vos should do the right thing and cor­rect the Crime of the Century—immediately! It is my opin­ion that oth­er states will be doing this, Wis­con­sin should lead the way!”

The for­mer pres­i­dent has been in con­tact with mul­ti­ple peo­ple in Wis­con­sin work­ing on the effort and has received reg­u­lar updates from MyP­il­low CEO Mike Lin­dell, sources said, who has spread wild and base­less con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the 2020 vote count.

Lin­dell, who remains a close con­fi­dant of the for­mer pres­i­dent, has par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Wis­con­sin pres­sure cam­paign with his own team of peo­ple includ­ing Dou­glas Frank, who was promi­nent­ly fea­tured at the My Pil­low CEO’s con­spir­a­cy-filled “Cyber Sym­po­sium” last August, Army Reserve Lt. Colonel Ivan Raik­lin, who has also worked close­ly with for­mer Lt. Gen. Michael Fly­nn to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion and Shawn Smith, a Col­orado-based activist who has called Lin­dell an “angel investor” in her orga­ni­za­tion devot­ed to “elec­tion integri­ty.”

While Lin­dell was absent from the March 16 meet­ing, Frank, Raik­lin and Smith attend­ed with East­man, accord­ing to sources famil­iar with the meet­ing.
...

East­man clear­ly has­n’t had trou­ble keep busy. But don’t assume he’s spend­ing all his tim­ing exclu­sive­ly focused on still try­ing to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. AS the fol­low­ing Busi­ness Insid­er arti­cle describes, East­man has been involved in anoth­er mys­tery project. And unlike the mys­tery project in Wis­con­sin, which was­n’t actu­al­ly much of a mys­tery, this lat­est project is much more of a gen­uine mys­tery. It turns out one of East­man’s groups, the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group, was paid $10,000 by Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene’s (MTG) reelec­tion cam­paign on Jan­u­ary 14 of this year.

For what ser­vices was MTG’s reelec­tion cam­paign pay­ing East­man’s group $10k? They aren’t say­ing, but the fact that a law­suit was start­ed against MTG back in Octo­ber of 2021 to bar her from run­ning for reelec­tion over her involve­ment in the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion gives us a hint. Then again, it also turns out that a joint fundrais­ing group put togeth­er by MTG an GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz gave this same group more than $15k between Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber of 2021. So MTG’s pay­ment for ser­vices pro­vid­ed by East­man’s Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group actu­al­ly start­ed in the month before the law­suit was start­ed to pre­vent her reelec­tion. In oth­er words, despite all of the clues as to what ser­vices MTG hired East­man to pro­vide, it’s still a real mys­tery:

Busi­ness Insid­er

A firm tied to Trump lawyer John East­man received $10,000 from Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene’s cam­paign

C. Ryan Bar­ber
Apr 16, 2022, 02:45 IST

* Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene’s cam­paign paid John East­man in Jan­u­ary for unspec­i­fied “legal ser­vices.”
* The pay­ment was made to Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group, a firm found­ed by the Trump lawyer.

Cam­paign groups affil­i­at­ed with Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene have paid thou­sands of dol­lars in recent months to the firm of John East­man, a lawyer who played a lead­ing role in for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion.

Greene’s reelec­tion com­mit­tee paid $10,000 in Jan­u­ary to the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group, accord­ing to a recent fed­er­al cam­paign finance dis­clo­sure. East­man lists the Ana­heim, Cal­i­for­nia address of the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group in state bar records.

In a dis­clo­sure with the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion, Greene’s cam­paign com­mit­tee said it paid the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group on Jan­u­ary 14 for “legal ser­vices.” But it was not the first pay­ment to East­man’s firm from a com­mit­tee tied to Greene, a Geor­gia Repub­li­can known for her incen­di­ary style and embrace of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

Put Amer­i­ca First, a joint fundrais­ing com­mit­tee run by Greene and Rep. Matt Gaetz, had pre­vi­ous­ly paid Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group more than $15,000 between Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber 2021, accord­ing to Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion records.

Accord­ing to those records, he remains admit­ted to the Cal­i­for­nia bar, in spite of calls for him to lose his law license over his past work for Trump. Ahead of Con­gress’ cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the 2020 elec­tion results, East­man advised then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence that he could uni­lat­er­al­ly throw out states’ elec­toral counts, a move that would have blocked Pres­i­dent-elect Joe Biden’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of vic­to­ry and like­ly trig­gered a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis.

...

He stepped down as a law pro­fes­sor in the face of stu­dent protests that were fol­lowed by calls for dis­bar­ment. He came under scruti­ny from the House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan­u­ary 6 attack on the Capi­tol, land­ing in lit­i­ga­tion with the con­gres­sion­al pan­el that result­ed last month in a fed­er­al judge sum­ma­riz­ing Trump’s post-elec­tion efforts as a “coup in search of a legal the­o­ry.”

A for­mer Supreme Court clerk for Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, East­man invoked his Fifth Amend­ment right against self-incrim­i­na­tion in response to a sub­poe­na from the spe­cial House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing Jan­u­ary 6. East­man lat­er sued the com­mit­tee in an attempt to shield emails relat­ed to his work for Trump, argu­ing they were priv­i­leged com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

The case has since pro­vid­ed a forum for the House com­mit­tee to make some of its strongest pro­nounce­ments about Trump’s poten­tial legal lia­bil­i­ty. In a court fil­ing last month, House lawyers said the com­mit­tee had enough evi­dence to con­clude that Trump and his allies might have con­spired to com­mit fraud and obstruc­tion in their efforts to over­turn the for­mer pres­i­den­t’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 elec­tion.

The House said East­man’s “legal assis­tance was used in fur­ther­ance of those activ­i­ties.”

The fed­er­al judge over­see­ing that case lat­er said Trump “like­ly” obstruct­ed Con­gress, in a rul­ing that also ordered East­man to turn over emails to the House com­mit­tee.

“Dr. East­man and Pres­i­dent Trump launched a cam­paign to over­turn a demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tion, an action unprece­dent­ed in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Their cam­paign was not con­fined to the ivory tower—it was a coup in search of a legal the­o­ry,” wrote Judge David Carter. “The plan spurred vio­lent attacks on the seat of our nation’s gov­ern­ment, led to the deaths of sev­er­al law enforce­ment offi­cers, and deep­ened pub­lic dis­trust in our polit­i­cal process.”

It is unclear what legal ser­vices East­man’s firm pro­vid­ed to Greene’s cam­paign. But Greene has found her­self in polit­i­cal and legal per­il of late.

In Octo­ber, the pro­gres­sive watch­dog group End Cit­i­zens Unit­ed filed com­plaints with the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion and the Office of Con­gres­sion­al Ethics alleg­ing that she engages in “uneth­i­cal and ille­gal” cam­paign spend­ing and “self-serv­ing and shady prac­tices.”

In Geor­gia, a group of vot­ers filed a con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge to keep Greene from run­ning for reelec­tion on the grounds that she aid­ed the Jan­u­ary 6 insur­rec­tion. Greene respond­ed in ear­ly April with a law­suit ask­ing a fed­er­al judge to shut down the state pro­ceed­ings.

At a recent hear­ing, Judge Amy Toten­berg said she would like­ly allow the group of Geor­gia vot­ers to move for­ward with their effort to keep Greene off the bal­lot.

A lawyer rep­re­sent­ing Greene in that case, James Bopp Jr., told Insid­er that East­man was not involved in the mat­ter.

Of East­man, Bopp said, “I don’t know what he’s doing.”

———–

“A firm tied to Trump lawyer John East­man received $10,000 from Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene’s cam­paign” by C. Ryan Bar­ber; Busi­ness Insid­er; 04/16/2022

“Greene’s reelec­tion com­mit­tee paid $10,000 in Jan­u­ary to the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group, accord­ing to a recent fed­er­al cam­paign finance dis­clo­sure. East­man lists the Ana­heim, Cal­i­for­nia address of the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group in state bar records.”

Why did Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene’s reelec­tion com­mit­tee pay John East­man’s Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group $10,000 just three months ago? Her cam­paign isn’t say­ing. But the fact that Greene is fac­ing a legal chal­lenge filed in Octo­ber over whether or not she is even eli­gi­ble to run for reelec­tion over her sup­port for the same Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion that John East­man helped mas­ter­mind seems like a plau­si­ble expla­na­tion:

...
It is unclear what legal ser­vices East­man’s firm pro­vid­ed to Greene’s cam­paign. But Greene has found her­self in polit­i­cal and legal per­il of late.

In Octo­ber, the pro­gres­sive watch­dog group End Cit­i­zens Unit­ed filed com­plaints with the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion and the Office of Con­gres­sion­al Ethics alleg­ing that she engages in “uneth­i­cal and ille­gal” cam­paign spend­ing and “self-serv­ing and shady prac­tices.”

In Geor­gia, a group of vot­ers filed a con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge to keep Greene from run­ning for reelec­tion on the grounds that she aid­ed the Jan­u­ary 6 insur­rec­tion. Greene respond­ed in ear­ly April with a law­suit ask­ing a fed­er­al judge to shut down the state pro­ceed­ings.
...

But the sit­u­a­tion isn’t that sim­ple. It was­n’t the first pay­ment to East­man’s group from an MTG-affil­i­at­ed enti­ty. The Put Amer­i­ca First joint fundrais­ing com­mit­tee run by Green and Matt Gaetz paid $15,000 to East­man’s group between Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber of 2021. So a month before that law­suit was filed to pre­vent MTG from run­ning for reelec­tion, she and Gaetz were already pay­ing East­man for some sort of ser­vices:

...
In a dis­clo­sure with the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion, Greene’s cam­paign com­mit­tee said it paid the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group on Jan­u­ary 14 for “legal ser­vices.” But it was not the first pay­ment to East­man’s firm from a com­mit­tee tied to Greene, a Geor­gia Repub­li­can known for her incen­di­ary style and embrace of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

Put Amer­i­ca First, a joint fundrais­ing com­mit­tee run by Greene and Rep. Matt Gaetz, had pre­vi­ous­ly paid Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group more than $15,000 between Sep­tem­ber and Decem­ber 2021, accord­ing to Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion records.
...

It’s a mys­tery. But as the fol­low­ing Dai­ly Beast arti­cle points out, that $10k pay­ment to East­man’s group on Jan 14 did­n’t hap­pen in vac­u­um. Just three days ear­li­er, MTG went on the radio show of Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka and explained to the audi­ence how Democ­rats were doing “exact­ly” the things that the Found­ing Fathers felt would jus­ti­fy an armed insur­rec­tion. Keep in mind that she made these com­ments three months after the law­suit over her sup­port for Jan 6 was filed. So three days after MTG goes on a far right radio show to make a pro-insur­rec­tion state­ment, her reelec­tion cam­paign pays East­man’s group $10k for mys­tery ser­vices.

But there’s anoth­er mys­tery described in the arti­cle: the mys­tery of MTG’s explod­ing per­son­al secu­ri­ty costs. Costs that were essen­tial­ly free in 2020 thanks to the Oath Keep­ers. It does­n’t sound like those free Oath Keep­er ser­vices were still being offered in 2021, and yet it does­n’t sound like MTG had enor­mous secu­ri­ty needs, hav­ing aid just $12k in the fall of 2021. And then, in the first three months of 2022, MTG sud­den­ly start­ed pay­ing Knoxville-based exec­u­tive secu­ri­ty firm KaJor Group $140k. Why the dra­mat­ic surge in secu­ri­ty? MTG’s cam­paign sug­gests it’s relat­ed to increased secu­ri­ty threats but it’s hard to see why those con­cerns jumped 10 fold all of a sud­den. And that’s why the mys­tery over that $10k pay­ment to East­man’s Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group is part of a larg­er mys­tery of what exact­ly MTG is up to now that she’s being sued over her insur­rec­tionary activ­i­ties:

The Dai­ly Beast

Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene Reports Her First Fundrais­ing Loss

Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene (R‑GA) has been one of the biggest fundrais­ers for Repub­li­cans in the House. But to kick off 2022, she actu­al­ly spent more than she took in.

Roger Sol­len­berg­er
Polit­i­cal Reporter
Pub­lished Apr. 15, 2022 11:13PM ET

The cam­paign com­mit­tee for Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene (R‑GA) report­ed its first-ever net loss on Fri­day, post­ing a $314,000 deficit over the first three months of 2022 while addi­tion­al­ly revis­ing pre­vi­ous con­tri­bu­tion totals down by more than $100,000.

About half of that loss is rep­re­sent­ed in fees to Don­ald Trump’s top Jan. 6 attor­ney and a secu­ri­ty detail that pro­tect­ed Kyle Rit­ten­house dur­ing his tri­al last year.

While Greene has always trad­ed steep fees for slight­ly high­er returns, she’s always man­aged to come out on top—until now.

Last quar­ter she sprung a hole in the buck­et, as her cam­paign com­mit­tee, Greene for Con­gress, spent about $1.38 mil­lion while tak­ing in only $1.06 mil­lion in dona­tions. Fundrais­ing costs alone wiped out three-quar­ters of those receipts.

Greene has deployed expen­sive dig­i­tal fundrais­ing oper­a­tions in the past, and reports have dinged her for it, point­ing out that the fees give the lie to an inflat­ed small-dol­lar con­tri­bu­tion stream.

Last quar­ter, how­ev­er, MAGAworld’s lead­ing lady bet big on direct mail, sink­ing more than $400,000 into print­ing, postage, and asso­ci­at­ed expens­es. When that mon­ey was added to con­sult­ing, list rental, and dig­i­tal fees, Greene for Con­gress spent more than $735,000 on its fundrais­ing efforts.

To make mat­ters worse, the same day the cam­paign filed its new report, it also filed three amend­ed ver­sions of pre­vi­ous reports from last year, admit­ting that the com­mit­tee had over­stat­ed con­tri­bu­tions by more than $100,000. The cam­paign cur­rent­ly holds about $3 mil­lion in cash on hand, which rep­re­sents a net gain of about $900,000 over the last 12 months.

Greene also spent big else­where this year, most specif­i­cal­ly for per­son­al secu­ri­ty, rack­ing up about $140,000 in expens­es. Almost all of that went in three month­ly pay­ments to a Knoxville-based exec­u­tive pro­tec­tion com­pa­ny called the KaJor Group, which also han­dled secu­ri­ty for Kenosha shoot­er Kyle Rit­ten­house dur­ing his tri­al last year.

For Greene, who pri­or to the 2020 elec­tion had received pro­tec­tion free of charge from mem­bers of the Oath Keep­ers anti-gov­ern­ment mili­tia group, this is an extra­or­di­nary surge in secu­ri­ty costs.

Last year, it was most­ly Democ­rats who took advan­tage of the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Commission’s post-insur­rec­tion rul­ing that elect­ed offi­cials can hire body­guards with cam­paign funds. That year, Sens. Raphael Warnock, Jon Ossoff, and Mark Kel­ly shelled out hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars for per­son­al pro­tec­tion, while Greene for Con­gress report­ed pro­tec­tive expens­es just north of $12,000, near­ly half of it for an elec­tron­ic secu­ri­ty sys­tem. That’s less than 10 per­cent of what she paid the Kajor Group last quar­ter.

It’s not imme­di­ate­ly clear why Greene hired the new firm. Asked about the expens­es, which first appeared in late Jan­u­ary, a cam­paign spokesper­son told The Dai­ly Beast, “I’m not going to get into details about her secu­ri­ty due to the sen­si­tive nature of it.”

The spokesper­son did, how­ev­er, cite an uptick in threats to the con­gress­woman, includ­ing the arrest last month of a New York man who had made threat­en­ing calls to Greene’s D.C. office.

“Our staff has report­ed over 20 threats to Capi­tol Police in the past week,” the spokesper­son said in a text mes­sage, along with a link to Greene’s response to a con­tro­ver­sial recent seg­ment on Jim­my Kim­mel Live.

The spokesper­son added that Greene also received “a sig­nif­i­cant amount” of threats in Jan­u­ary, sur­round­ing the one-year anniver­sary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capi­tol.

Iron­i­cal­ly enough, many of Greene’s own col­leagues blame that attack par­tial­ly on her rhetoric, which they say empow­ers vio­lent ele­ments of the right wing.

A few days after the Jan. 6 anniver­sary, Greene sug­gest­ed using guns to defend against Democ­rats.

“Ulti­mate­ly, the truth is it’s our Sec­ond Amend­ment rights, our right to bear arms, that pro­tects Amer­i­cans and gives us the abil­i­ty to defend our­selves from a tyran­ni­cal gov­ern­ment,” Greene told right-wing talk host Seb Gor­ka on Jan. 11. “And I hate to use this lan­guage, but Democ­rats, they’re exact­ly ... they’re doing exact­ly what our Founders talked about when they gave us the pre­cious rights that we have.”

Rita Katz, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the SITE Intel­li­gence Group, which tracks extrem­ist groups, told The Hill that those com­ments car­ry weight.

“Some law­mak­ers are indeed a source of threats. Com­ments from fig­ures like Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene are reg­u­lar­ly shared and con­vert­ed into ral­ly­ing cries for some seg­ments of the far-right,” Katz said.

Greene appears to have extend­ed her ties to Jan. 6 in more ways than one.

Three days after her Sec­ond Amend­ment remarks, the Greene cam­paign hired Trump legal advis­er John East­man, lay­ing down a $10,000 retain­er for his firm, the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group, on Jan. 14.

...

—————

“Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene Reports Her First Fundrais­ing Loss” by Roger Sol­len­berg­er; The Dai­ly Beast; 04/15/2022

“Three days after her Sec­ond Amend­ment remarks, the Greene cam­paign hired Trump legal advis­er John East­man, lay­ing down a $10,000 retain­er for his firm, the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Coun­sel Group, on Jan. 14.”

It’s quite a coin­ci­dence: just days after the 1 year anniver­sary of the Jan 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, MTG goes on Sebas­t­ian Gorka’s radio show and alludes to the need to shoot Democ­rats. And it was­n’t like a round­about allu­sion to shoot­ing Democ­rats. As MTG put it, “they’re doing exact­ly what our Founders talked about when they gave us the pre­cious rights that we have.” She did­n’t mince words. Three days lat­er, she pays $10k to East­man’s group. And this was all three months after the fil­ing of a law­suit to stop her reelec­tion bid on the grounds that she sup­port­ed the insur­rec­tion:

...
Iron­i­cal­ly enough, many of Greene’s own col­leagues blame that attack par­tial­ly on her rhetoric, which they say empow­ers vio­lent ele­ments of the right wing.

A few days after the Jan. 6 anniver­sary, Greene sug­gest­ed using guns to defend against Democ­rats.

“Ulti­mate­ly, the truth is it’s our Sec­ond Amend­ment rights, our right to bear arms, that pro­tects Amer­i­cans and gives us the abil­i­ty to defend our­selves from a tyran­ni­cal gov­ern­ment,” Greene told right-wing talk host Seb Gor­ka on Jan. 11. “And I hate to use this lan­guage, but Democ­rats, they’re exact­ly ... they’re doing exact­ly what our Founders talked about when they gave us the pre­cious rights that we have.”

Rita Katz, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the SITE Intel­li­gence Group, which tracks extrem­ist groups, told The Hill that those com­ments car­ry weight.

“Some law­mak­ers are indeed a source of threats. Com­ments from fig­ures like Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene are reg­u­lar­ly shared and con­vert­ed into ral­ly­ing cries for some seg­ments of the far-right,” Katz said.
...

And right around this time, MTG’s per­son­al secu­ri­ty expen­di­tures sud­den­ly explod­ed, with near­ly $140k spent on the ser­vices of a Knoxville-based exec­u­tive pro­tec­tion com­pa­ny. That’s more than 10 times than the $12k her cam­paign spent ser­vices in the pri­or quar­ter. Part of that sud­den explo­sion in secu­ri­ty costs can be explained by the fact that MTG was get­ting pro­tec­tion free of charge from the Oath Keep­ers dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion. Recall the appar­ent cen­tral role the Oath Keep­ers played in the insur­rec­tionary coup plot, with a “Quick Reac­tion Force” wait­ing for the orders to deliv­er heavy weapons to the insur­rec­tion­ists at the Capi­tol.

But even if MTG was get­ting free Oath Keep­er pro­tec­tion in 2020, that still does­n’t quite explain the sud­den surge in secu­ri­ty costs that took place between the last quar­ter of 2021 and the first quar­ter of 2022. Based on these reports it sounds like MTG has already lost her free Oath Keep­er pro­tec­tion in 2021 and yet was only pay­ing $12k for secu­ri­ty ser­vices in the last quar­ter of 2021. So why did the costs of those ser­vices sud­den­ly jump for than 10-fold between the last quar­ter of 2021 and the first quar­ter of 2022?

...
Greene also spent big else­where this year, most specif­i­cal­ly for per­son­al secu­ri­ty, rack­ing up about $140,000 in expens­es. Almost all of that went in three month­ly pay­ments to a Knoxville-based exec­u­tive pro­tec­tion com­pa­ny called the KaJor Group, which also han­dled secu­ri­ty for Kenosha shoot­er Kyle Rit­ten­house dur­ing his tri­al last year.

For Greene, who pri­or to the 2020 elec­tion had received pro­tec­tion free of charge from mem­bers of the Oath Keep­ers anti-gov­ern­ment mili­tia group, this is an extra­or­di­nary surge in secu­ri­ty costs.

Last year, it was most­ly Democ­rats who took advan­tage of the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Commission’s post-insur­rec­tion rul­ing that elect­ed offi­cials can hire body­guards with cam­paign funds. That year, Sens. Raphael Warnock, Jon Ossoff, and Mark Kel­ly shelled out hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars for per­son­al pro­tec­tion, while Greene for Con­gress report­ed pro­tec­tive expens­es just north of $12,000, near­ly half of it for an elec­tron­ic secu­ri­ty sys­tem. That’s less than 10 per­cent of what she paid the Kajor Group last quar­ter.
...

An explo­sion of secu­ri­ty spend­ing along with $10k to John East­man’s group months after MTG is sued over her sup­port of the insur­rec­tion. Are they con­nect­ed? MTG’s cam­paign isn’t say­ing. Nei­ther is East­man. But it’s sure hard to avoid sus­pi­cions. Espe­cial­ly now that we know John East­man is still attempt­ing to foment a new GOP con­sti­tu­tion­al rebel­lion in states like Wis­con­sin at the same time MTG con­tin­ues to appeal to con­ser­v­a­tive audi­ences for a sec­ond insur­rec­tion. There’s no short­age of ques­tions loom­ing over John East­man’s activ­i­ties. Ques­tions like to whom is he advis­ing about the next insur­rec­tion and what exact­ly is that advice? Ques­tions that we might get answer to even­tu­al­ly, whether we like it or not.

Just how slimy is the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy’s slime machine? That’s the big ques­tion raised by the fol­low­ing pair of arti­cles about two dif­fer­ent CNP ‘oppo­si­tion research’ oper­a­tions. One report­ed on a cou­ple of weeks ago and the oth­er a cou­ple years ago. And both with a track record of ped­dling bogus and rather cru­el smears against nom­i­nees and cur­rent staffers in gov­ern­ment posi­tions.

And, intrigu­ing­ly, both of these CNP-asso­ci­at­ed ‘oppo­si­tion research’ oper­a­tions involve the oppo­si­tion research teams that were work­ing for the Ted Cruz cam­paign in 2016. Recall how one of the most mys­te­ri­ous ‘oppo­si­tion research’ activ­i­ties dur­ing 2015–2016 was all the dif­fer­ent GOP-affil­i­at­ed teams search­ing for Hillary Clin­ton’s hacked emails. We were told they believed the emails had already been hacked and were float­ing around on the dark web, although it was nev­er clear if that was just a pre­text for hir­ing some­one to do the hack­ing.

It turns out one of those teams search­ing for Hillary’s emails — the team involv­ing Bar­bara Ledeen, Newt Gin­grich, and Judi­cial Watch — has quite a bit of over­lap with one of these CNP-dom­i­nat­ed oppo­si­tion research projects, first report­ed on back in Feb­ru­ary of 2020. Recall how Judi­cial Watch’s Pres­i­dent, Tom Fit­ton, is a mem­ber of the CNP. As we’ll see, while Bar­bara Ledeen and her hus­band Michael Ledeen aren’t one the CNP’s mem­ber­ship list, Bar­bara is a mem­ber of the Groundswell week­ly meet­ing group and she was very much a part of this Groundswell ‘oppo­si­tion research’ oper­a­tion. Recall how Gin­ni Thomas — con­ser­v­a­tive activist, CNP mem­ber, and wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas — co-found­ed the Groundswell group along with fel­low CNP mem­ber Steve Ban­non back in 2013 — and packed it with CNP mem­bers — to serv­er as a com­peti­tor to Grover Norquist’s influ­en­tial Wednes­day meet­ings as a key con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­ing tool.

The Feb­ru­ary 2020 NY Times report is an exam­ple of just how suc­cess­ful those influ­ence ped­dling efforts ulti­mate­ly were. The ‘oper­a­tion research’ project was led by Gin­ni Thomas and tar­get­ing Trump White House staffers the net­work has iden­ti­fied as need­ing to be replaced. Trump staffers grum­bled in the report that the net­work seemed to be most­ly just inter­est­ed in get­ting admin­is­tra­tion jobs for its mem­bers. Thomas had been oper­at­ing as a kind of ves­sel for Groundswell through­out the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, but it was after the first impeach­ment of Trump in the Sen­ate that Trump start­ed tak­ing Groundswell’s staffing deci­sion very seri­ous­ly, includ­ing send­ing White House staff to the week­ly Groundswell meet­ings which where host­ed by Judi­cial Watch.

Bar­bara Ledeen’s role in this oper­a­tion involved pass­ing ‘oppo­si­tion research’ on the tar­get­ed staffers to the Trump White House. Research that was demon­stra­bly bogus in many cas­es. This turns out to be a major theme in these reports.

The oth­er CNP-led ‘oppo­si­tion research’ project was just cov­ered in a recent New York­er piece by Jane May­er involv­ing a shad­ow­ing new orga­ni­za­tion called the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion (AAF). The group claims non-prof­it char­i­ta­ble sta­tus, assert­ing that it will only engage in non-par­ti­san oppo­si­tion research in order to keep this sta­tus. As a results, the donors are kept anony­mous under the US’s dark mon­ey laws.

What we do know about the AAF is that it was co-found­ed by a well known fig­ure in the con­ser­v­a­tive oppo­si­tion research com­mu­ni­ty: Tom Jones. Jones’s past work includes serv­ing on the staff of CNP mem­ber Jim DeMint. In 2016, Jones worked on oppo­si­tion research for Ted Cruz’s cam­paign. Keep in mind that Bar­bara and Michael Ledeen were Ted Cruz back­ers in 2016 dur­ing the GOP pri­ma­ry. Both were list­ed on Cruz’s Jew­ish lead­er­ship team back in Feb­ru­ary 2016. It rais­ing the obvi­ous ques­tion: Was Jones aware of the ‘oppo­si­tion research’ being done by Ledeen and Judi­cial Watch on the dark web at the time? How about the ear­ly Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca work done for the Cruz cam­paign? That’s cer­tain­ly oppo­si­tion-research-relat­ed. Was Jones aware of it? It’s just one of the many intrigu­ing ques­tions involv­ing this net­work that we’ll prob­a­bly nev­er get answered.

The AAF co-founder, Math­ew Buck­ham, worked for the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. His father, Ed Buck­ham, is Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene’s Chief of Staff. Yep.

Here’s the CNP con­nec­tion to the AAF: in its 2021 IRS fil­ings done to get tax exempt sta­tus, the AAF states that its exist­ing “in care of” a dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tion: The Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI). As we’ve seen, the CPI is not just the employ­er of Cle­ta Mitchell — the CNP mem­ber who has long played a key role in for­mu­lat­ing the GOP’s anti-vot­ing rights legal the­o­ries and was instru­men­tal in Trump’s efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion — but it’s also now the employ­er of Trump’s final Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows and con­tin­ues to push anti-vot­ing ini­tia­tives along with CNP mem­bers J Chris­t­ian Adams and Ken­neth Black­well. Mead­ow’s son Blake also has CPI ties. The CPI also list­ed the AAF on its IRS forms, but when reporters went to the CPI’s address and request­ed the finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms on the AAF that non-prof­it enti­ties are required to pro­duce, the CPI claimed it knew noth­ing about the AAF. So it’s just the kind of gaslight­ing dark mon­ey bad faith song and dance we’ve come to expect from this net­work.

But that gaslight­ing is being tak­en to new lev­els of cru­el­ty in the ‘oppo­si­tion research’ being lev­eled against vir­tu­al­ly every Biden nom­i­nee as part of the AAF mis­sion. It real­ly is every nom­i­nee. And we got a big exam­ple of the AAF’s pow­er to gin up ‘oppo­si­tion research’ when the AAF spear­head­ed the right-wing smear cam­paign against Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nom­i­nee Judge Kitan­ji Jack­son Brown, absurd­ly por­tray­ing her as an ally of child sex offend­ers. It was gross, and as Jane Mey­er reports, it was typ­i­cal for the kind of smear tac­tics the AAF has been using against Biden nom­i­nees.

And as we’re going to see, while the AAF’s smears may be base­less, they’ve suc­ceed­ed in block­ing a num­ber of nom­i­nees, in part by pro­vid­ing a bogus pre­text for mem­bers of con­gress to with­hold their sup­port. Which is a reminder that the big les­son here is that the CNP keeps con­struct­ing these shad­owy smear net­works that prop­a­gate mali­cious lies with impuni­ty because it works. For­tune favors the shame­less­ly ruth­less in con­tem­po­rary US pol­i­tics:

The New York­er

The Slime Machine Tar­get­ing Dozens of Biden Nom­i­nees

In an esca­la­tion of par­ti­san war­fare, a lit­tle-known dark-mon­ey group is try­ing to thwart the President’s entire slate.

By Jane May­er
April 16, 2022

Dur­ing the autos-da-fé that now pass for Supreme Court con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings in the U.S. Sen­ate, it’s com­mon for sup­port­ers of a nom­i­nee to dis­miss attacks from the oppos­ing par­ty as mere par­ti­san­ship. But, dur­ing the recent hear­ings for Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son, Andrew C. McCarthy—a Repub­li­can for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor and a promi­nent legal com­men­ta­tor at Nation­al Review—took the unusu­al step of denounc­ing an attack from his own side. When Repub­li­can sen­a­tors, includ­ing Josh Haw­ley and Mar­sha Black­burn, began accus­ing Jack­son of hav­ing been a dan­ger­ous­ly lenient judge toward sex offend­ers, McCarthy wrote a col­umn call­ing the charge “mer­it­less to the point of dem­a­goguery.” He didn’t like Jackson’s judi­cial phi­los­o­phy, but “the impli­ca­tion that she has a soft spot for ‘sex offend­ers’ who ‘prey on chil­dren’ . . . is a smear.”

In the end, the attacks failed to dimin­ish pub­lic sup­port for Jack­son, and her poised respons­es to ques­tion­ing helped secure her nom­i­na­tion, by a vote of 53–47. But the fierce cam­paign against her was con­cern­ing, in part because it was spear­head­ed by a new con­ser­v­a­tive dark-mon­ey group that was cre­at­ed in 2020: the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion. An explic­it pur­pose of the A.A.F.—a polit­i­cal­ly active, tax-exempt non­prof­it char­i­ty that doesn’t dis­close its backers—is to pre­vent the approval of all Biden Admin­is­tra­tion nom­i­nees.

While the hear­ings were tak­ing place, the A.A.F. pub­licly took cred­it for uncov­er­ing a note in the Har­vard Law Review in which, they claimed, Jack­son had “argued that America’s judi­cial sys­tem is too hard on sex­u­al offend­ers.” The group also tweet­ed that she had a “soft-on-sex-offend­er” record dur­ing her eight years as a judge on the Unit­ed States Dis­trict Court for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia. As the Wash­ing­ton Post and oth­er out­lets stat­ed, Jackson’s sen­tenc­ing his­to­ry on such cas­es was well with­in the judi­cial main­stream, and in line with a half-dozen judges appoint­ed by the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion. When Jack­son defend­ed her­self on this point dur­ing the hear­ings, the A.A.F. said, on Twit­ter, that she was “lying.” The group’s allegation—reminiscent of the QAnon con­spir­a­cy, which claims that lib­er­al élites are abus­ing and traf­fick­ing children—rippled through con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles. Tuck­er Carl­son repeat­ed the accu­sa­tion on his Fox News pro­gram while a chy­ron declared “jack­son lenient in child sex cas­es.” Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, the extrem­ist rep­re­sen­ta­tive from Geor­gia, called Jack­son “pro-pedophile.”

Mud­sling­ing is hard­ly new to Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. In 1800, a cam­paign sur­ro­gate for Thomas Jef­fer­son called Jefferson’s oppo­nent, John Adams, “her­maph­ro­dit­i­cal”; Adams’s sup­port­ers pre­dict­ed that if Jef­fer­son were elect­ed Pres­i­dent he would unleash a reign of “mur­der, rob­bery, rape, adul­tery and incest.” Nei­ther the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nor Repub­li­can Par­ty is above reproach when it comes to engag­ing in calum­ny, and since at least 1987, when Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan unsuc­cess­ful­ly nom­i­nat­ed Robert Bork to be a Jus­tice, the fights over Supreme Court nom­i­nees have been espe­cial­ly nasty. Yet the A.A.F.’s approach rep­re­sents a new esca­la­tion in par­ti­san war­fare, and under­scores the grow­ing role that secret spend­ing has played in deep­en­ing the polar­iza­tion in Wash­ing­ton.

Rather than attack a sin­gle can­di­date or nom­i­nee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstruc­tion­ism, like the Repub­li­can block­ade of Biden’s leg­isla­tive agen­da in Con­gress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, bidennoms.com, that dis­plays the pho­tographs of Admin­is­tra­tion nom­i­nees it has tar­get­ed, as though they were hunt­ing tro­phies. And the A.A.F. hasn’t just under­mined nom­i­nees for Cab­i­net and Court seats—the kinds of promi­nent peo­ple whose records are usu­al­ly well known and well defend­ed. It’s also gone after rel­a­tive­ly obscure, sub-Cab­i­net-lev­el polit­i­cal appointees, whose pub­lic pro­files can be eas­i­ly dis­tort­ed and who have lit­tle entrenched sup­port. The A.A.F., which is run by con­ser­v­a­tive white men, has par­tic­u­lar­ly focussed on block­ing women and peo­ple of col­or. As of last month, more than a third of the twen­ty-nine can­di­dates it had pub­licly attacked were peo­ple of col­or, and near­ly six­ty per cent were women.

Among the nom­i­nees the group boasts of hav­ing suc­cess­ful­ly derailed are Saule Omaro­va, a nom­i­nee for Comp­trol­ler of the Cur­ren­cy, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Biden named to be the vice-chair for super­vi­sion of the Fed­er­al Reserve Board. David Chip­man, whom the Pres­i­dent want­ed to run the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobac­co, Firearms and Explo­sives, and David Weil, Biden’s choice for the Wage and Hour Divi­sion of the Depart­ment of Labor, both saw their nom­i­na­tions founder in the wake of A.A.F. attacks. Cur­rent­ly, the group is wag­ing a neg­a­tive cam­paign against Lisa Cook, who, if con­firmed, would become the first Black woman to serve on the Fed­er­al Reserve’s Board of Gov­er­nors.

Tom Jones, the A.A.F.’s founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor, is a long­time Belt­way oper­a­tive spe­cial­iz­ing in oppo­si­tion research. Records show that over the years he has worked for sev­er­al of the most con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans to have served in the Sen­ate, includ­ing Ron John­son, of Wis­con­sin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Car­oli­na; and John Ensign, of Neva­da, for whom Jones was briefly a leg­isla­tive direc­tor. In 2016, Jones ran the oppo­si­tion-research effort for Cruz’s failed Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. When I asked Jones for an inter­view, through the A.A.F.’s online por­tal, he replied, “Ms. Mey­ers . . . Go pound sand.” Cit­ing an arti­cle that I had writ­ten debunk­ing attacks on Bloom Raskin from mon­eyed inter­ests, includ­ing the A.A.F., he said, “You are a lib­er­al hack mas­querad­ing as an inves­tiga­tive journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones sub­se­quent­ly post­ed this com­ment on his group’s Twit­ter account, along with my e‑mail address and cell-phone num­ber.

...

In inter­views with right-wing media out­lets, Jones hasn’t been shy about his inten­tions. Last April, he told Fox News, which called A.A.F.’s tac­tics “con­tro­ver­sial,” that his group wants to “take a big hand­ful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion,” mak­ing it “as dif­fi­cult as pos­si­ble” for the Pres­i­dent and his allies on Capi­tol Hill “to imple­ment their agen­da.” When asked why his group was both­er­ing to attack sub-Cab­i­net-lev­el appointees, he explained that peo­ple in “that sec­ond tier are real­ly the folks who are going to do the day-to-day work imple­ment­ing the agen­da.”

Last year, an A.A.F. mem­ber infil­trat­ed a Zoom train­ing ses­sion for con­gres­sion­al staffers about the ethics rules sur­round­ing earmarks—pet spend­ing projects that law­mak­ers write into the fed­er­al bud­get. The infil­tra­tor asked lead­ing ques­tions dur­ing the meet­ing and then post­ed a record­ing of it online. The attempt­ed sting back­fired: noth­ing incrim­i­nat­ing was said, and the A.A.F.’s under­hand­ed tac­tics became the sto­ry. Evan Hol­lan­der, then the spokesman for the House Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee, told The Hill that, “for a group that pur­ports to con­cern itself with ethics, using fake iden­ti­ties, mis­rep­re­sent­ing them­selves as Con­gres­sion­al staff and sur­rep­ti­tious­ly record­ing meet­ings is hyp­o­crit­i­cal in the extreme.”

Jones made no apolo­gies. He told Fox News, “I’m nev­er doing any­thing ille­gal. But just because it’s impo­lite to log into an ear­mark-train­ing sem­i­nar and offend the morals of Capi­tol Hill staff, that’s not going to stop me from doing it.” He added, “If I’ve got to trail some­one on the ground to find out what they’re doing, I’m total­ly going to do it. Because peo­ple who are mak­ing deci­sions need to have this information—they need to under­stand who they are trust­ing with the reins of gov­ern­ment. And some­times that means we will use unortho­dox meth­ods.”

Lib­er­al and con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal groups habit­u­al­ly scru­ti­nize a promi­nent nominee’s record or per­son­al life in search of dis­qual­i­fy­ing faults. But the A.A.F. has tak­en the prac­tice to extremes, repeat­ed­ly spin­ning neg­li­gi­ble tid­bits or dubi­ous hearsay into damn­ing nar­ra­tives. The group recent­ly deployed its unortho­dox meth­ods, Politi­co has report­ed, while “des­per­ate­ly pur­su­ing dirt” on Lisa Cook, the nom­i­nee for the Fed­er­al Reserve. Cook, who has been a tenured pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics and inter­na­tion­al rela­tions at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty since 2013, has attract­ed bipar­ti­san sup­port. Glenn Hub­bard, the chair of the Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers dur­ing the George W. Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, has said, “Cook’s tal­ents as an eco­nom­ic researcher and teacher make her a good nom­i­nee for the Fed, adding to diver­si­ty of per­spec­tives about pol­i­cy.” In col­lege, Cook won a Mar­shall Schol­ar­ship. She sub­se­quent­ly obtained a Ph.D. in eco­nom­ics from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment, and served as a staff econ­o­mist on Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers. She also held appoint­ments at the Nation­al Bureau of Eco­nom­ic Research and at var­i­ous region­al Fed­er­al Reserve banks. The A.A.F., though, has por­trayed her as unqual­i­fied, and sug­gest­ed that her tenure at Michi­gan State is unde­served.

On April 13th, Jones sent out the lat­est of at least three e‑mail blasts from the A.A.F. to about fifty of Cook’s col­leagues at Michi­gan State. In the most recent of these mes­sages, which were obtained by The New York­er, Jones said that Cook “did not war­rant” tenure. Through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request, the A.A.F. obtained records show­ing that the school’s provost had grant­ed Cook full pro­fes­sor­ship in 2020, over­rul­ing a deci­sion not to give her that title the pre­vi­ous year. Jones sent these per­son­nel records to dozens of Cook’s col­leagues, and asked, “Are any of you con­cerned that . . . she’s not good enough to sit on the Fed­er­al Reserve Board?” He urged any detrac­tors to “not hes­i­tate to” con­tact him. Mean­while, Jones fished for fur­ther infor­ma­tion by post­ing a mes­sage on an anony­mous online gos­sip forum, Eco­nom­ics Job Mar­ket Rumors, which has been decried by one promi­nent econ­o­mist as “a cesspool of misog­y­ny.”

Some of the A.A.F.’s attacks on Cook car­ried racial over­tones. Cook had made dona­tions to bail funds for impov­er­ished crim­i­nal defen­dants, includ­ing racial-jus­tice pro­test­ers who had been arrest­ed; she was fol­low­ing a tra­di­tion of activist lawyers in her fam­i­ly, and con­sid­ered it a form of char­i­ty. The A.A.F. argued on Twit­ter that she had made “racist com­ments” and “even bailed out riot­ers who burned down Amer­i­can cities.” Cook’s rep­u­ta­tion was sul­lied enough that the Sen­ate Bank­ing Com­mit­tee vote on her nom­i­na­tion result­ed in a tie, with no Repub­li­cans sup­port­ing her. Cook’s nom­i­na­tion can still pro­ceed to the Sen­ate floor, but her con­fir­ma­tion remains in lim­bo, as one con­ser­v­a­tive news out­let after anoth­er repeats the A.A.F.’s talk­ing points. A writer for the Dai­ly Caller, Chris Brunet, said in a Sub­stack col­umn that Cook is a “ran­dom econ­o­mist at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty who has shame­less­ly lever­aged her skin col­or and gen­i­talia into gain­ing the back­ing of sev­er­al key White House offi­cials.” Brunet tweet­ed proud­ly that his cri­tique had been pro­mot­ed on Fox News by Tuck­er Carl­son.

The A.A.F.’s treat­ment of Cook has been mild com­pared with what sev­er­al oth­er Biden nom­i­nees have gone through. Late last year, Saule Omarova—a lead­ing aca­d­e­m­ic in the field of finan­cial reg­u­la­tion, who is a law pro­fes­sor at Cor­nell and holds doc­tor­ates in law and polit­i­cal science—withdrew her name from con­sid­er­a­tion as Biden’s Comp­trol­ler of the Cur­ren­cy. She did so, she told me, because an oppo­si­tion-research cam­paign against her, which the A.A.F. took cred­it for, had, among oth­er things, false­ly por­trayed her as a secret com­mu­nist.

Born in Kaza­khstan, in what was then the Sovi­et Union, Omaro­va received an under­grad­u­ate degree from Moscow State Uni­ver­si­ty, but she became a nat­u­ral­ized Amer­i­can cit­i­zen in 2005. Yet, dur­ing her con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing, in a moment rem­i­nis­cent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor John Kennedy, of Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her “pro­fes­sor or com­rade.” Omaro­va replied, “Sen­a­tor, I am not a com­mu­nist. I do not sub­scribe to that ide­ol­o­gy. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hard­ly anti-cap­i­tal­ist: she worked at the cor­po­rate law firm Davis Polk & Ward­well and served in George W. Bush’s Trea­sury Depart­ment.

Omaro­va told me, “There were so many accu­sa­tions. A.A.F. was at the fore­front of mak­ing my life extreme­ly and unnec­es­sar­i­ly dif­fi­cult.” The group dis­cov­ered that Omaro­va, after she’d read an arti­cle in The Econ­o­mist about pota­toes, had tweet­ed fond­ly about a time she helped farm­ers har­vest pota­toes out­side Moscow. The A.A.F. pro­claimed that the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion had “nom­i­nat­ed a woman who wax­es nos­tal­gic for the good ole days of pover­ty, hunger, and forced labor in com­mu­nist Rus­sia.” Con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets pounced on sim­i­lar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make Amer­i­ca into the Sovi­et Union.’ It was a com­plete absur­di­ty. But peo­ple who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, ‘Go back to the Sovi­et Union!’ ”

Dig­ging into a person’s past—especially some­one who isn’t that well known—takes time and mon­ey. “Some­body must have paid them a lot,” Omaro­va said, of the A.A.F. “They went through all my pub­lic speech­es and aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ings to find any kind of phrase they could use against me.” She’d been fea­tured, along with oth­er pro­fes­sors, in an obscure 2019 doc­u­men­tary based on “Ass­holes: A The­o­ry,” a whim­si­cal trea­tise by Aaron James, a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Irvine. The A.A.F., with­out acknowl­edg­ing the film’s satir­i­cal tone, pro­mot­ed a snip­pet of Omaro­va call­ing the finan­cial-ser­vices indus­try “the quin­tes­sen­tial ass­hole indus­try.” She told me, “They didn’t cite the film. It made me sound unhinged, nasty, and, like, a rude per­son.” A com­pi­la­tion of clips from the doc­u­men­tary had been tak­en off YouTube owing to copy­right vio­la­tions; dur­ing the pre-hear­ing process for Omarova’s nom­i­na­tion, Repub­li­can staffers insin­u­at­ed that she’d per­son­al­ly con­cealed the footage. “I don’t know what kind of rela­tion­ship those sen­a­tors had with A.A.F.,” she told me. “But clear­ly they knew of that clip.”

Omaro­va told me that some­one went to Moscow to “try to dig up” an under­grad­u­ate paper that she’d writ­ten on Karl Marx. Oppo­nents also cir­cu­lat­ed an ele­men­tary-school pho­to­graph of her wear­ing the oblig­a­tory red ker­chief of the Young Pio­neers. “They used it to say ‘Look at her, she’s such a devout Com­mu­nist!’ They were going through my whole life, look­ing for any­thing they could smear or fright­en me with.”

Omaro­va dis­closed reams of per­son­al infor­ma­tion to the Sen­ate, includ­ing her com­pen­sa­tion as a law pro­fes­sor. Jones then e‑mailed her col­leagues at Cor­nell about what he por­trayed as her annu­al salary—but the fig­ure he cit­ed rep­re­sent­ed near­ly two years of pay. In the e‑mail, which was obtained by The New York­er, Jones asks, “Do you think it is appro­pri­ate for the uni­ver­si­ty to pro­vide such a large salary to Dr. Omaro­va?” He invit­ed her col­leagues “to share” their “thoughts” with him.

While the hear­ings were ongo­ing, the A.A.F. trum­pet­ed a dis­missed shoplift­ing charge against Omarova—omitting the fact that she’d dis­closed it her­self. She told me that the inci­dent, which came about from a mis­un­der­stand­ing with a secu­ri­ty guard, had occurred not long after she had emi­grat­ed from Russia—and had led her to become a lawyer. The A.A.F. also accused her of belong­ing to a Marx­ist group on Face­book that she was unaware of and had nev­er par­tic­i­pat­ed in, and mis­lead­ing­ly edit­ed a com­ment she’d made about the need to insure eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty for laid-off fos­sil-fuel work­ers so that it sound­ed like an attack on those work­ers and the indus­try. “They were say­ing that I want­ed to kill oil-and-gas work­ers,” she told me. “That’s exact­ly the oppo­site of what I was say­ing.”

Omaro­va had sug­gest­ed that it would be good for the envi­ron­ment if Amer­i­ca tran­si­tioned away from fos­sil fuels, even if some com­pa­nies end­ed up going out of busi­ness. She had also called for tougher reg­u­la­tions on banks. These two points like­ly con­sti­tut­ed the true moti­va­tion for the oppo­si­tion she encoun­tered from the Repub­li­cans on the Sen­ate Bank­ing Com­mit­tee. Omaro­va was soon opposed by every Repub­li­can sen­a­tor, and also five Democrats—led by Jon Tester, of Mon­tana, who has been a major recip­i­ent of bank­ing-indus­try dona­tions. Her nom­i­na­tion was doomed. The A.A.F.’s Web site cel­e­brat­ed the news with the head­line “a.a.f. research tanks saule omaro­va.”

Omaro­va described the con­fir­ma­tion expe­ri­ence as “soul-crush­ing.” She went on, “You feel stripped down. You feel your house has been destroyed, and you are stand­ing there in front of every­one look­ing at you, and they have dis­tort­ed and twist­ed every­thing.” She expressed sur­prise that, in the Unit­ed States, spu­ri­ous con­tro­ver­sies could be so eas­i­ly “man­u­fac­tured out of noth­ing.” She added, “I’m a nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zen. I put so much effort to be here, and I embraced this coun­try with all my heart. I came from a place that didn’t have free­dom of speech or thought. But this made so per­son­al­ly clear to me how frag­ile our democ­ra­cy is.”

Three months after Omaro­va with­drew her nom­i­na­tion, Sarah Bloom Raskin endured a sim­i­lar char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion. Bloom Raskin, a law pro­fes­sor at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, was not a new or untest­ed fig­ure. After grad­u­at­ing from Har­vard Law School, she worked as a staffer on the Sen­ate Bank­ing Com­mit­tee, and she twice won con­fir­ma­tion from the Sen­ate to top eco­nom­ic posi­tions: between 2010 and 2014, she was a mem­ber of the Fed­er­al Reserve’s Board of Gov­er­nors, and dur­ing the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion she served as the Deputy Sec­re­tary of the Treasury—becoming, at the time, the high­est-rank­ing woman in the department’s his­to­ry. Her hus­band, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jamie Raskin, of Mary­land, is a pro­gres­sive fire­brand, but Bloom Raskin is regard­ed as a mod­er­ate in busi­ness cir­cles, and has wide sup­port from the bank­ing indus­try. But, like Omaro­va, Bloom Raskin offend­ed fos­sil-fuel companies—in her case, by sug­gest­ing that cli­mate change posed a poten­tial eco­nom­ic risk that the Fed­er­al Reserve need­ed to con­sid­er.

Rather than debat­ing the mer­its of such views, the A.A.F. ques­tioned Bloom Raskin’s pro­bity. In Feb­ru­ary, it filed a com­plaint to the Office of Con­gres­sion­al Ethics against Jamie Raskin, accus­ing him of being late in fil­ing a finan­cial report dis­clos­ing one and a half mil­lion dol­lars in income that he and his wife had received from her sale of stock. In 2017, Bloom Raskin had been grant­ed stock in a small Col­orado trust com­pa­ny found­ed by a friend; she served on its board after leav­ing the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion. Three years lat­er, after Bloom Raskin had left the board, she sold her stock at mar­ket price.

Con­gres­sion­al rules require such sales to be dis­closed with­in thir­ty to forty-five days. The Rask­ins took eight months. Nonethe­less, they had vol­un­tar­i­ly dis­closed the trans­ac­tion months before Biden nom­i­nat­ed Bloom Raskin to the Fed. And they had explained that in Decem­ber, 2020, two weeks after the stock sale, their son had died, by sui­cide. “We were comatose, bare­ly func­tion­ing, so of course Jamie didn’t remem­ber to file,” Bloom Raskin told me. “I don’t ask for spe­cial treat­ment, but do these peo­ple have no heart?”

Bloom Raskin was tak­en aback by an A.A.F. state­ment that cast her and her hus­band as “career politi­cians who have used the sys­tem to enrich them­selves” with “shady” deals. She told me, “When these smears start­ed, they seemed so incon­se­quen­tial. It didn’t occur to me they’d start man­u­fac­tur­ing things.” But, Bloom Raskin said, “I began to get calls from peo­ple say­ing, ‘Some­one named Tom Jones, who rep­re­sent­ed him­self as work­ing for a good-gov­ern­ment group, was clear­ly look­ing for dirt.’ ” A source knowl­edge­able about the A.A.F.’s out­reach, who asked not to be iden­ti­fied, told me Jones was push­ing the base­less nar­ra­tive that Bloom Raskin had abused her access as a for­mer Fed gov­er­nor to obtain a spe­cial “mas­ter account” for the Col­orado trust com­pa­ny. The source debunked the claim: all trusts in Col­orado that meet cer­tain cri­te­ria are eli­gi­ble for mas­ter accounts, which enable speed­i­er finan­cial trans­ac­tions. “While it’s often true that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, in this case there was an arson­ist,” the source told me. Den­nis Gin­gold, a lawyer who co-found­ed the Col­orado trust com­pa­ny, agreed. He called the attacks on Bloom Raskin’s ethics “a pre­text,” adding, “It’s one thing to oppose Sarah. It’s anoth­er thing to slan­der her. But they didn’t care.”

The A.A.F. had pipelines to the Repub­li­cans on the Bank­ing Com­mit­tee, and also to con­ser­v­a­tive media out­lets, where attacks on Bloom Raskin began to appear. Sen­a­tor Pat Toomey, the rank­ing Repub­li­can on the Bank­ing Com­mit­tee, demand­ed that she answer more than a hun­dred ques­tions in writ­ing, many of them about whether she’d made a phone call to Fed offi­cials to push for the “mas­ter account” for the Col­orado trust com­pa­ny. If she had made such a call, it would have been mun­dane, but she couldn’t remem­ber if she had, and said so. Toomey pro­claimed that her answer was “eva­sive.” Bloom Raskin told me, “I was telling the truth at all times. I could have lied and said that I did—the call wouldn’t have been any­thing wrong. But I just couldn’t remem­ber.” (Though Toomey’s attacks echoed A.A.F. research, a spokesper­son for the sen­a­tor said that any sug­ges­tion of coör­di­na­tion was “para­noid con­jec­ture.”)

Bloom Raskin offered to sit down with the Repub­li­cans on the Bank­ing Com­mit­tee, so that she could defuse any out­stand­ing ques­tions. The Democ­rats also offered to bring in bank­ing reg­u­la­tors who had dealt with the Col­orado trust, to clear up any mis­con­cep­tions. But the Repub­li­cans refused to meet with her or the bank­ing reg­u­la­tors. “They wouldn’t let me explain,” Bloom Raskin said. “I real­ized they want­ed me to seem eva­sive.” At that point, the Repub­li­cans had staged a boy­cott of com­mit­tee meet­ings, so that there could be no votes on Bloom Raskin or on Biden’s oth­er nom­i­nees to the Fed—including its chair, Jerome Powell—leaving vacan­cies at the top of the most pow­er­ful cen­tral bank in the world.

Just as the Democ­rats on the Bank­ing Com­mit­tee were prepar­ing to con­front the A.A.F.’s claims about Bloom Raskin, West Virginia’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tor, Joe Manchin, announced that he, too, would not vote for her, effec­tive­ly cap­siz­ing her nom­i­na­tion. In a phone call, Manchin—who has grown rich from the coal indus­try, and who dur­ing the cur­rent elec­tion cycle has tak­en more dona­tions from fos­sil-fuel inter­ests than any oth­er senator—admitted to Bloom Raskin that her posi­tion on cli­mate change had turned him against her. She recalls Manchin telling her, “Don’t take it personally—it’s the indus­try.” (A spokesper­son for Manchin declined to com­ment on the senator’s “pri­vate dis­cus­sions.”) Pres­i­dent Biden called Bloom Raskin, too, and described the attacks on her as unfair.

Bloom Raskin told me, “When some­thing like this first hap­pens, you won­der, Did I do some­thing wrong? And then you real­ize, Of course, you didn’t. But you won­der, Do oth­er peo­ple think I did? It’s so dis­gust­ing.” She con­tin­ued, “I think they were afraid I could be effec­tive. I def­i­nite­ly was going to hit the ground run­ning. I knew what I was doing.”

The A.A.F. also claims to have sab­o­taged the nom­i­na­tion of David Chip­man, Biden’s choice to lead the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobac­co, Firearms and Explo­sives. In the face of strong oppo­si­tion from gun-rights activists, he with­drew his nom­i­na­tion last Sep­tem­ber, leav­ing the agency that reg­u­lates guns with­out a direc­tor. (The posi­tion has been unfilled for all but two years since 2006, when Sen­ate con­fir­ma­tion for the posi­tion became a require­ment.) The A.A.F. com­piled for the Sen­ate a twen­ty-four-page dossier that inco­her­ent­ly accused Chip­man, a twen­ty-five-year vet­er­an of the A.T.F., of being both a racist and a rad­i­cal social-jus­tice war­rior con­sumed by “wok­e­ness.” The alle­ga­tions came from anony­mous sources. Accord­ing to Jones, an uniden­ti­fied A.T.F. agent had report­ed hear­ing Chip­man say that so many Black can­di­dates had passed an A.T.F. exam that they must have cheat­ed. Ted Cruz—Jones’s for­mer boss—took up the cam­paign against Chip­man. He and the A.A.F. demand­ed to see two com­plaints that had been filed against Chip­man with the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion, even though both had been resolved with­out dis­ci­pli­nary action. At the same time, the A.A.F.’s dossier con­tained anony­mous alle­ga­tions claim­ing that Chip­man was a rad­i­cal “anti-racist” who favored destroy­ing Con­fed­er­ate memo­ri­als and want­ed to “use fight­er jets to bomb” Mount Rush­more and Stone Moun­tain “into rub­ble,” because they offend­ed peo­ple of col­or. The A.A.F. even con­tact­ed Chipman’s ex-wife in search of evi­dence against him, but she declined to coöper­ate.

Chip­man told me that the A.A.F.’s modus operan­di is to make claims that are “adja­cent” to the facts and then “turn them around com­plete­ly.” Although he had once accused a Black can­di­date of cheat­ing on an A.T.F. exam that he had proc­tored, Chip­man raised no ques­tions about sev­er­al oth­er Black can­di­dates who’d passed the same exam. The two dis­missed E.E.O.C. com­plaints were the only ones that had ever been filed against him, he said, and in both cas­es he’d mere­ly insist­ed that two sub­or­di­nates be present for their reg­u­lar work hours. He did say, on Face­book, that he opposed nam­ing Army bases after Con­fed­er­ate sol­diers, and he believes that mon­u­ments cel­e­brat­ing them are inap­pro­pri­ate and racial­ly insen­si­tive. But “it was char­ac­ter­ized as if I was call­ing for vio­lence,” he told me, adding, “I nev­er advo­cat­ed vio­lence or called for any­one to blow up any­thing. I spent twen­ty-five years inves­ti­gat­ing bomb­ings!” Chip­man said, “The racial things they used were huge­ly ugly,” and not­ed that “the facts don’t mat­ter to these people—they’re just used as weapons.” A pro­test­er appeared out­side his house; on Twit­ter, users called for his death. Chipman’s wife, who had worked at the A.T.F. for decades, felt so unsafe at her job that she quit.

Race is also a theme of attacks that the A.A.F. has direct­ed at Carl­ton Water­house, a Black envi­ron­men­tal lawyer whom Biden has nom­i­nat­ed to become an assis­tant admin­is­tra­tor in the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, over­see­ing envi­ron­men­tal-jus­tice efforts for under­served com­mu­ni­ties. Waterhouse’s résumé is strong: he stud­ied engi­neer­ing at Penn State, and has a doc­tor­ate in ethics from Emory and a law degree from Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, where he helped devel­op the school’s Envi­ron­men­tal Jus­tice Cen­ter. On Fox News, how­ev­er, Jones dis­missed Water­house as “a racist” who is “obsessed with push­ing racial­ly divi­sive rhetoric and poli­cies into every aspect of pub­lic life.” A dossier that the A.A.F. com­piled on Water­house states that he “wants to reseg­re­gate America’s schools ... by estab­lish­ing schools explic­it­ly for Black stu­dents.” Yet, in an arti­cle the dossier cites as evi­dence, Water­house actu­al­ly writes that such schools should be “open to all chil­dren.” The A.A.F.’s dossier also claims that Water­house was “so rad­i­cal he oppos­es the Civ­il Rights Leg­is­la­tion of the 1960’s and 1970’s.” Water­house told me that this was a dis­tor­tion “intend­ed to stir up dis­ap­proval.” His crit­i­cism of the civ­il-rights move­ment was only that it hadn’t gone far enough to estab­lish a frame­work for repa­ra­tions. “It’s hate­ful, and a gross mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” he said. Water­house has yet to be con­firmed, leav­ing a top envi­ron­men­tal-jus­tice job at the agency vacant. The block­ing of so many Biden nom­i­nees has made it sig­nif­i­cant­ly hard­er for the Pres­i­dent and his Admin­is­tra­tion to enact poli­cies that they were elect­ed to imple­ment. Water­house said that he was hope­ful and excit­ed about the prospect of get­ting to work, but added that the A.A.F.’s cam­paigns were hav­ing a chill­ing effect: “Peo­ple won’t want to serve, because your name will be dragged through the mud.”

As Jones has por­trayed it, his group is mere­ly catch­ing up with the sleazy tac­tics of pro­gres­sive dark-mon­ey groups—which, he claims, went to great lengths to try to block Cab­i­net nom­i­nees dur­ing the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion, not to men­tion con­ser­v­a­tive Supreme Court nom­i­nees such as Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. Of course, nei­ther Thomas nor Kavanaugh were felled by anony­mous slurs dur­ing their nom­i­na­tion hear­ings; they were cred­i­bly and direct­ly con­front­ed by female vic­tims who accused them, in sworn tes­ti­mo­ny, of sex­u­al mis­con­duct. Nan Aron, the for­mer head of Alliance for Jus­tice, a pro­gres­sive group that led the charge against both Thomas and Kavanaugh, acknowl­edged that, over the years, her group had scoured the records, finances, and per­son­al lives of nom­i­nees it opposed. The cru­cial dif­fer­ence, she said, was that “it wasn’t the groups that were man­u­fac­tur­ing” the scan­dals which plagued the nom­i­nees. As she put it, “None of the groups were look­ing for Chris­tine Blasey Ford—no one made phone calls to find her.”

...

Bri­an Fal­lon, the co-founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of Demand Justice—a pro­gres­sive non­prof­it dark-mon­ey group that has become a tar­get of con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics, because it scru­ti­nizes the records of right-lean­ing judi­cial nominees—told me, “It sounds as if this group is reverse-engi­neer­ing the process. It’s almost like they’re try­ing to cre­ate the sto­ry line as opposed to find­ing a dry fact”—and then “try­ing to get peo­ple to give voice to the nar­ra­tive.” His group con­ducts oppo­si­tion research, too, but he said that it was “ham-fist­ed and slop­py” to post requests for dirt on anony­mous mes­sage boards or to send mass e‑mails to a nominee’s col­leagues. “Most oppo­si­tion researchers on our side would wor­ry about using such tac­tics,” he said. “Because peo­ple are so quick to play the vic­tim, they’d wor­ry about becom­ing the sto­ry.”

Fal­lon said that crumbs of neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion about high-pro­file nom­i­nees can always be found, but unless the facts pass “the smell test of being in good faith,” and can hold up under the scruti­ny of experts and the press, they aren’t worth much. Dur­ing the close­ly watched con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings of Jack­son, he argued, the mud stained main­ly those who threw it; the sen­a­tors who lobbed the sex-offend­er accu­sa­tions “oozed bad faith, and were lam­bast­ed” to the point that the cri­tique “wasn’t adopt­ed by the Repub­li­can Par­ty at large.” In the end, Jack­son secured three Repub­li­can votes and “emerged from the hear­ings with high­er approval rat­ings.” He said, of the A.A.F., “They may be tak­ing a vic­to­ry lap, but their oppo­si­tion research back­fired.” The A.A.F.’s strat­e­gy, how­ev­er, has proved more dam­ag­ing when deployed on nom­i­nees whose hear­ings receive less atten­tion. Such peo­ple are eas­i­er to smear because charges against them are often not prop­er­ly scru­ti­nized.

The A.A.F. describes itself as a cham­pi­on of trans­paren­cy, but it declines to reveal the sources of its fund­ing. Its offi­cial mail­ing address is a hand­some his­toric build­ing a few blocks from the U.S. Capi­tol. But when I stopped by there recent­ly, to ask for the group’s basic finan­cial records—which all tax-exempt non­prof­its are legal­ly required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the build­ing is occu­pied by a dif­fer­ent non­prof­it group: the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loy­al­ists in exile. It has become the employ­er of Trump’s for­mer chief of staff Mark Mead­ows and of Trump’s for­mer ad-hoc legal advis­er Cle­ta Mitchell, both of whom are fight­ing sub­poe­nas from the House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan­u­ary 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capi­tol.

Cameron Seward, the gen­er­al coun­sel of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, appeared in the lob­by and assured me that there was no rela­tion­ship between his group and the A.A.F. Yet doc­u­ments that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to secure its tax-exempt sta­tus, describe the group as exist­ing “in care of” C.P.I. More­over, C.P.I.’s 2021 annu­al report notes that it launched the A.A.F. because “con­ser­v­a­tives didn’t have a group per­form­ing research on Biden’s woke nominees—even though plen­ty of lib­er­al groups were dig­ging up (or man­u­fac­tur­ing) dirt on our side.” The groups have sev­er­al over­lap­ping direc­tors, includ­ing Jones, who sits on both boards. The A.A.F. told the I.R.S. that its mis­sion is to con­duct non­par­ti­san research, but it is curi­ous that the largest con­tri­bu­tion by far to its par­ent group, C.P.I., is a mil­lion-dol­lar “char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tion” from Save America—Trump’s polit­i­cal-action com­mit­tee. Trump report­ed­ly raised much of the PAC’s mon­ey from sup­port­ers after his 2020 defeat, and his cam­paign has called the group an “elec­tion defense fund.”

Save Amer­i­ca made its con­tri­bu­tion to C.P.I. a few months after Mead­ows joined the group. Meadows’s son, Blake, an asso­ciate attor­ney at the Geor­gia law firm Fos­ter, Fos­ter, & Smith, appears to be involved with C.P.I., too: his name appears in a law­suit filed last month on behalf of the A.A.F. against the U.S. Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Matthew Buck­ham, the A.A.F. co-founder, also has a Trump con­nec­tion: he worked at the White House dur­ing his Admin­is­tra­tion, in the per­son­nel office. (His father, Ed Buck­ham, is chief of staff to Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene.)

It’s a great advan­tage to be able to treat oppo­si­tion research as a tax-exempt char­i­ta­ble expense rather than as, say, a cam­paign cost. On March 21st, Paul Teller, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of an advo­ca­cy group that serves as for­mer Vice-Pres­i­dent Mike Pence’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion, gave a lec­ture to Chris­t­ian pas­tors in which he said, of the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!” Teller enthused, “They are just tak­ing it to every Biden-Har­ris nom­i­nee that comes across to Con­gress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re fight­ing with the Supreme Court nom­i­nee Jack­son came from our friends at the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion.” He went on, “We’re part­ner­ing, we’re col­lab­o­rat­ing.” Teller’s group is wide­ly seen as pro­mot­ing a poten­tial Pence cam­paign for Pres­i­dent in 2024..

When the A.A.F. applied for its tax-exempt sta­tus, it por­trayed itself, under penal­ty of per­jury, as a non­par­ti­san char­i­ty that would nei­ther par­tic­i­pate in polit­i­cal cam­paigns nor try to influ­ence leg­is­la­tion. As a tax-exempt non­prof­it dark-mon­ey orga­ni­za­tion, Jones’s group isn’t required to pub­licly dis­close its donors, so it’s impos­si­ble to know all the sources of its fund­ing. Clear­ly, though, it has big ambi­tions. In its I.R.S. fil­ing, the A.A.F. sub­mit­ted rev­enue pro­jec­tions that pre­dict its bud­get as six hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars in 2021, a mil­lion dol­lars in 2022, and one and a half mil­lion dol­lars in 2023.

Nor­man Orn­stein, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist and Trump crit­ic at the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute, a right-lean­ing think tank, believes that the A.A.F. is doing “fright­en­ing, sleazy stuff” with seri­ous impli­ca­tions. Not only is the group cre­at­ing need­less vacan­cies in impor­tant Admin­is­tra­tion posi­tions; it is intim­i­dat­ing well-qual­i­fied peo­ple from want­i­ng to under­go the nom­i­na­tion process. “It’s tough enough to get top-flight peo­ple in gov­ern­ment,” Orn­stein said. “But, if you also have to go through a well-fund­ed, well-oiled slime machine, it’s real­ly an attack on gov­ern­ment.”

———-

“The Slime Machine Tar­get­ing Dozens of Biden Nom­i­nees” by Jane May­er; The New York­er; 04/16/2022

“In the end, the attacks failed to dimin­ish pub­lic sup­port for Jack­son, and her poised respons­es to ques­tion­ing helped secure her nom­i­na­tion, by a vote of 53–47. But the fierce cam­paign against her was con­cern­ing, in part because it was spear­head­ed by a new con­ser­v­a­tive dark-mon­ey group that was cre­at­ed in 2020: the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion. An explic­it pur­pose of the A.A.F.—a polit­i­cal­ly active, tax-exempt non­prof­it char­i­ty that doesn’t dis­close its backers—is to pre­vent the approval of all Biden Admin­is­tra­tion nom­i­nees.”

Oh look, a ‘new’ con­ser­v­a­tive group was just cre­at­ed with the mis­sion of smear­ing all of the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion’s nomi­ness. Who is fund­ing the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion (AAF)? We don’t get to know because the AAF claims to be a ‘non­prof­it char­i­ty’ that pledges not to get involved in pol­i­tics, giv­ing the group and all its donors the ‘dark mon­ey’ shield under US law.

But while the AAF may be allowed to legal­ly shield its donors from the pub­lic, that does­n’t mean there are clues. Clues that just keep point­ing in the direc­tion of the broad­er con­ser­v­a­tive shad­ow net­work cen­tered around the CNP. For starters, the AAF told the IRS that its being man­aged “in care of” the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI). Recall the aggres­sive work the CPI has done in recent years on the GOP’s vot­ing restric­tion agen­da. A CPI cam­paign led by CNP mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell in con­junc­tion with fel­low CNP mem­bers J Chris­t­ian Adams and Ken­neth Black­well. The CPI’s own annu­al report also acknowl­edged start­ing the AAF. And yet, when pressed for doc­u­ments relat­ed to the AFF’s finan­cial records that a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion is legal­ly oblig­at­ed to pro­vide upon request, the CPI laugh­ably denies hav­ing any­thing to do with the AAF. It’s either con­scious­ness of guilty or gaslight­ing behav­ior. Prob­a­bly a bit of both:

...
The A.A.F. describes itself as a cham­pi­on of trans­paren­cy, but it declines to reveal the sources of its fund­ing. Its offi­cial mail­ing address is a hand­some his­toric build­ing a few blocks from the U.S. Capi­tol. But when I stopped by there recent­ly, to ask for the group’s basic finan­cial records—which all tax-exempt non­prof­its are legal­ly required to produce—a woman at the lobby’s front desk said there was no such group at that address. Instead, the build­ing is occu­pied by a dif­fer­ent non­prof­it group: the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, which serves as a kind of Isle of Elba for Trump loy­al­ists in exile. It has become the employ­er of Trump’s for­mer chief of staff Mark Mead­ows and of Trump’s for­mer ad-hoc legal advis­er Cle­ta Mitchell, both of whom are fight­ing sub­poe­nas from the House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan­u­ary 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capi­tol.

Cameron Seward, the gen­er­al coun­sel of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, appeared in the lob­by and assured me that there was no rela­tion­ship between his group and the A.A.F. Yet doc­u­ments that the A.A.F. filed with the I.R.S. in 2021, to secure its tax-exempt sta­tus, describe the group as exist­ing “in care of” C.P.I. More­over, C.P.I.’s 2021 annu­al report notes that it launched the A.A.F. because “con­ser­v­a­tives didn’t have a group per­form­ing research on Biden’s woke nominees—even though plen­ty of lib­er­al groups were dig­ging up (or man­u­fac­tur­ing) dirt on our side.” The groups have sev­er­al over­lap­ping direc­tors, includ­ing Jones, who sits on both boards. The A.A.F. told the I.R.S. that its mis­sion is to con­duct non­par­ti­san research, but it is curi­ous that the largest con­tri­bu­tion by far to its par­ent group, C.P.I., is a mil­lion-dol­lar “char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tion” from Save America—Trump’s polit­i­cal-action com­mit­tee. Trump report­ed­ly raised much of the PAC’s mon­ey from sup­port­ers after his 2020 defeat, and his cam­paign has called the group an “elec­tion defense fund.”

Save Amer­i­ca made its con­tri­bu­tion to C.P.I. a few months after Mead­ows joined the group. Meadows’s son, Blake, an asso­ciate attor­ney at the Geor­gia law firm Fos­ter, Fos­ter, & Smith, appears to be involved with C.P.I., too: his name appears in a law­suit filed last month on behalf of the A.A.F. against the U.S. Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Matthew Buck­ham, the A.A.F. co-founder, also has a Trump con­nec­tion: he worked at the White House dur­ing his Admin­is­tra­tion, in the per­son­nel office. (His father, Ed Buck­ham, is chief of staff to Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene.)

It’s a great advan­tage to be able to treat oppo­si­tion research as a tax-exempt char­i­ta­ble expense rather than as, say, a cam­paign cost. On March 21st, Paul Teller, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of an advo­ca­cy group that serves as for­mer Vice-Pres­i­dent Mike Pence’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion, gave a lec­ture to Chris­t­ian pas­tors in which he said, of the A.A.F., “I’m just in love with these guys!” Teller enthused, “They are just tak­ing it to every Biden-Har­ris nom­i­nee that comes across to Con­gress,” adding, “Some of the stuff that we’re fight­ing with the Supreme Court nom­i­nee Jack­son came from our friends at the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion.” He went on, “We’re part­ner­ing, we’re col­lab­o­rat­ing.” Teller’s group is wide­ly seen as pro­mot­ing a poten­tial Pence cam­paign for Pres­i­dent in 2024..
...

Note that the Paul Teller list­ed above who is “just in love with these guys!” and col­lab­o­rat­ing with the AAF is him­self a CNP mem­ber.

And note how, in addi­tion to his past work for CNP-mem­ber Jim DeMint, AAF’s founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor Tom Jones ran the oppo­si­tion research for Ted Cruz’s 2016 cam­paign. That’s the kind of resume item that rais­es quite a ques­tions. Don’t for­get that the whole Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca project start­ed as part of Ted Cruz’s 2016 cam­paign as part of the effort to help Ted Cruz secure the GOP nom­i­na­tion. It only jumped over to Don­ald Trump’s cam­paign after Trump secured the nom­i­na­tion. Did any of Jones’s oppo­si­tion research activ­i­ties involve the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca affair?

Also recall how there were mul­ti­ple GOP-affil­i­at­ed teams ded­i­cat­ed to scour­ing the Dark Web in search of Hillary Clin­ton’s emails that they alleged­ly believed were float­ing around. That sure sounds like oppo­si­tion research. So were any of those GOP teams work­ing for Ted Cruz’s cam­paign? Well, it turns out Bar­bara and Michael Ledeen were both list­ed in Feb­ru­ary 2016 as being mem­bers of Ted Cruz’s Jew­ish lead­er­ship team. Don’t for­get that Bar­bara was a mem­ber of one of those teams, along­side Newt Gin­grich and Judi­cial Watch. Note that Judi­cial Watch’s long-time pres­i­dent Tom Fit­ton is also a CNP mem­ber. So we have to ask, was Tom Jones aware of Bar­bara’s extreme­ly inter­est­ing oppo­si­tion research side-project? It’s one of the many high­ly rel­e­vant ques­tions swirling around the GOP’s efforts to obtain Hillary Clin­ton’s emails through any means nec­es­sary in 2016 that will pre­sum­ably remain unan­swered:

...
Tom Jones, the A.A.F.’s founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor, is a long­time Belt­way oper­a­tive spe­cial­iz­ing in oppo­si­tion research. Records show that over the years he has worked for sev­er­al of the most con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans to have served in the Sen­ate, includ­ing Ron John­son, of Wis­con­sin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Car­oli­na; and John Ensign, of Neva­da, for whom Jones was briefly a leg­isla­tive direc­tor. In 2016, Jones ran the oppo­si­tion-research effort for Cruz’s failed Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. When I asked Jones for an inter­view, through the A.A.F.’s online por­tal, he replied, “Ms. Mey­ers ... Go pound sand.” Cit­ing an arti­cle that I had writ­ten debunk­ing attacks on Bloom Raskin from mon­eyed inter­ests, includ­ing the A.A.F., he said, “You are a lib­er­al hack mas­querad­ing as an inves­tiga­tive journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones sub­se­quent­ly post­ed this com­ment on his group’s Twit­ter account, along with my e‑mail address and cell-phone num­ber.
...

But while many ques­tions remain unan­swered about who exact­ly is behind the AFF, the ques­tion of why this group would want to be so hyper-secre­tive in the first place is large­ly answered by the atro­cious­ness of their own behav­ior. For exam­ple, there was their dri­ve to get Biden nom­i­nee Lisa Cook’s tenured pulled. They real­ly have set out to absolute­ly destroy every sin­gle one of Biden’s nom­i­nees, seem­ing­ly with­out a hint of remorse. No remorse, but a lot of secre­cy:

...
Lib­er­al and con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal groups habit­u­al­ly scru­ti­nize a promi­nent nominee’s record or per­son­al life in search of dis­qual­i­fy­ing faults. But the A.A.F. has tak­en the prac­tice to extremes, repeat­ed­ly spin­ning neg­li­gi­ble tid­bits or dubi­ous hearsay into damn­ing nar­ra­tives. The group recent­ly deployed its unortho­dox meth­ods, Politi­co has report­ed, while “des­per­ate­ly pur­su­ing dirt” on Lisa Cook, the nom­i­nee for the Fed­er­al Reserve. Cook, who has been a tenured pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics and inter­na­tion­al rela­tions at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty since 2013, has attract­ed bipar­ti­san sup­port. Glenn Hub­bard, the chair of the Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers dur­ing the George W. Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, has said, “Cook’s tal­ents as an eco­nom­ic researcher and teacher make her a good nom­i­nee for the Fed, adding to diver­si­ty of per­spec­tives about pol­i­cy.” In col­lege, Cook won a Mar­shall Schol­ar­ship. She sub­se­quent­ly obtained a Ph.D. in eco­nom­ics from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment, and served as a staff econ­o­mist on Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers. She also held appoint­ments at the Nation­al Bureau of Eco­nom­ic Research and at var­i­ous region­al Fed­er­al Reserve banks. The A.A.F., though, has por­trayed her as unqual­i­fied, and sug­gest­ed that her tenure at Michi­gan State is unde­served.

On April 13th, Jones sent out the lat­est of at least three e‑mail blasts from the A.A.F. to about fifty of Cook’s col­leagues at Michi­gan State. In the most recent of these mes­sages, which were obtained by The New York­er, Jones said that Cook “did not war­rant” tenure. Through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request, the A.A.F. obtained records show­ing that the school’s provost had grant­ed Cook full pro­fes­sor­ship in 2020, over­rul­ing a deci­sion not to give her that title the pre­vi­ous year. Jones sent these per­son­nel records to dozens of Cook’s col­leagues, and asked, “Are any of you con­cerned that . . . she’s not good enough to sit on the Fed­er­al Reserve Board?” He urged any detrac­tors to “not hes­i­tate to” con­tact him. Mean­while, Jones fished for fur­ther infor­ma­tion by post­ing a mes­sage on an anony­mous online gos­sip forum, Eco­nom­ics Job Mar­ket Rumors, which has been decried by one promi­nent econ­o­mist as “a cesspool of misog­y­ny.”

Some of the A.A.F.’s attacks on Cook car­ried racial over­tones. Cook had made dona­tions to bail funds for impov­er­ished crim­i­nal defen­dants, includ­ing racial-jus­tice pro­test­ers who had been arrest­ed; she was fol­low­ing a tra­di­tion of activist lawyers in her fam­i­ly, and con­sid­ered it a form of char­i­ty. The A.A.F. argued on Twit­ter that she had made “racist com­ments” and “even bailed out riot­ers who burned down Amer­i­can cities.” Cook’s rep­u­ta­tion was sul­lied enough that the Sen­ate Bank­ing Com­mit­tee vote on her nom­i­na­tion result­ed in a tie, with no Repub­li­cans sup­port­ing her. Cook’s nom­i­na­tion can still pro­ceed to the Sen­ate floor, but her con­fir­ma­tion remains in lim­bo, as one con­ser­v­a­tive news out­let after anoth­er repeats the A.A.F.’s talk­ing points. A writer for the Dai­ly Caller, Chris Brunet, said in a Sub­stack col­umn that Cook is a “ran­dom econ­o­mist at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty who has shame­less­ly lever­aged her skin col­or and gen­i­talia into gain­ing the back­ing of sev­er­al key White House offi­cials.” Brunet tweet­ed proud­ly that his cri­tique had been pro­mot­ed on Fox News by Tuck­er Carl­son.
...

But arguably worse than the AFF’s treat­ment of Lisa Cook was the utter­ly ruth­less way they smeared Sarah Bloom Raskin for a bureau­crat­ic over­sight com­mit­tee in the wake of her son’s sui­cide. You can see why the AAF’s donors might want to keep anony­mous when this is the ser­vice they’re pay­ing for:

...
The A.A.F.’s treat­ment of Cook has been mild com­pared with what sev­er­al oth­er Biden nom­i­nees have gone through. Late last year, Saule Omarova—a lead­ing aca­d­e­m­ic in the field of finan­cial reg­u­la­tion, who is a law pro­fes­sor at Cor­nell and holds doc­tor­ates in law and polit­i­cal science—withdrew her name from con­sid­er­a­tion as Biden’s Comp­trol­ler of the Cur­ren­cy. She did so, she told me, because an oppo­si­tion-research cam­paign against her, which the A.A.F. took cred­it for, had, among oth­er things, false­ly por­trayed her as a secret com­mu­nist.

...

Three months after Omaro­va with­drew her nom­i­na­tion, Sarah Bloom Raskin endured a sim­i­lar char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion. Bloom Raskin, a law pro­fes­sor at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, was not a new or untest­ed fig­ure. After grad­u­at­ing from Har­vard Law School, she worked as a staffer on the Sen­ate Bank­ing Com­mit­tee, and she twice won con­fir­ma­tion from the Sen­ate to top eco­nom­ic posi­tions: between 2010 and 2014, she was a mem­ber of the Fed­er­al Reserve’s Board of Gov­er­nors, and dur­ing the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion she served as the Deputy Sec­re­tary of the Treasury—becoming, at the time, the high­est-rank­ing woman in the department’s his­to­ry. Her hus­band, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jamie Raskin, of Mary­land, is a pro­gres­sive fire­brand, but Bloom Raskin is regard­ed as a mod­er­ate in busi­ness cir­cles, and has wide sup­port from the bank­ing indus­try. But, like Omaro­va, Bloom Raskin offend­ed fos­sil-fuel companies—in her case, by sug­gest­ing that cli­mate change posed a poten­tial eco­nom­ic risk that the Fed­er­al Reserve need­ed to con­sid­er.

Rather than debat­ing the mer­its of such views, the A.A.F. ques­tioned Bloom Raskin’s pro­bity. In Feb­ru­ary, it filed a com­plaint to the Office of Con­gres­sion­al Ethics against Jamie Raskin, accus­ing him of being late in fil­ing a finan­cial report dis­clos­ing one and a half mil­lion dol­lars in income that he and his wife had received from her sale of stock. In 2017, Bloom Raskin had been grant­ed stock in a small Col­orado trust com­pa­ny found­ed by a friend; she served on its board after leav­ing the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion. Three years lat­er, after Bloom Raskin had left the board, she sold her stock at mar­ket price.

Con­gres­sion­al rules require such sales to be dis­closed with­in thir­ty to forty-five days. The Rask­ins took eight months. Nonethe­less, they had vol­un­tar­i­ly dis­closed the trans­ac­tion months before Biden nom­i­nat­ed Bloom Raskin to the Fed. And they had explained that in Decem­ber, 2020, two weeks after the stock sale, their son had died, by sui­cide. “We were comatose, bare­ly func­tion­ing, so of course Jamie didn’t remem­ber to file,” Bloom Raskin told me. “I don’t ask for spe­cial treat­ment, but do these peo­ple have no heart?”

Bloom Raskin was tak­en aback by an A.A.F. state­ment that cast her and her hus­band as “career politi­cians who have used the sys­tem to enrich them­selves” with “shady” deals. She told me, “When these smears start­ed, they seemed so incon­se­quen­tial. It didn’t occur to me they’d start man­u­fac­tur­ing things.” But, Bloom Raskin said, “I began to get calls from peo­ple say­ing, ‘Some­one named Tom Jones, who rep­re­sent­ed him­self as work­ing for a good-gov­ern­ment group, was clear­ly look­ing for dirt.’ ” A source knowl­edge­able about the A.A.F.’s out­reach, who asked not to be iden­ti­fied, told me Jones was push­ing the base­less nar­ra­tive that Bloom Raskin had abused her access as a for­mer Fed gov­er­nor to obtain a spe­cial “mas­ter account” for the Col­orado trust com­pa­ny. The source debunked the claim: all trusts in Col­orado that meet cer­tain cri­te­ria are eli­gi­ble for mas­ter accounts, which enable speed­i­er finan­cial trans­ac­tions. “While it’s often true that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, in this case there was an arson­ist,” the source told me. Den­nis Gin­gold, a lawyer who co-found­ed the Col­orado trust com­pa­ny, agreed. He called the attacks on Bloom Raskin’s ethics “a pre­text,” adding, “It’s one thing to oppose Sarah. It’s anoth­er thing to slan­der her. But they didn’t care.”
...

And now here’s the Feb­ru­ary 2020 NY Times arti­cle describ­ing an effort to purge the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. The purge appeared to be led by CNP mem­ber Gin­ni Thomas, who was send­ing mem­os to the Trump White House of rec­om­mend­ing peo­ple to fire and replace them with. Thomas was just the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the larg­er CNP-dom­i­nat­ed net­work of fig­ures asso­ci­at­ed with the Groundswell week­ly meet­ings and Trump was report­ed­ly send­ing admin­is­tra­tion staff to these week­ly meet­ings where the Groundswell folks told them who to hire and fire. The meet­ings were host­ing by Judi­cial Watch, head­ed by CNP mem­ber Tom Fit­ton.

But this staffer purge did­n’t just involve send­ing Trump White House staffers to Groundswell. It also involved dig­ging up oppo­si­tion research on the staffers they want­ed to see fired. Oppo­si­tion research that sound­ed pret­ty sim­i­lar to the kinds of smears ped­dled by the AAF in that they tend­ed to be both mean and bogus. And it was Groundswell mem­ber Bar­bara Ledeen who was report­ed­ly pass­ing this oppo­si­tion research to the Trump White House in her capac­i­ty as a Sen­ate staffer. While Bar­bara Ledeen may not show up on the CNP mem­ber­ship lists, she’s pret­ty clear­ly a close affil­i­ate to shares its agen­da.

So Ledeen and Judi­cial Watch once again show up engaged in a high­ly sleazy behind-the-scenes oppo­si­tion research oper­a­tion. But unlike the 2015 hunt to find Hillary Clin­ton’s emails, this 2020 oper­a­tion was tar­get­ing the Trump White House­’s own staffers.

It was like a CNP takeover of the Trump White House, report­ed­ly invit­ed by Trump him­self fol­low­ing his first Sen­ate impeach­ment. So when we read about AAF’s mali­cious shad­ow ‘oppo­si­tion research’ smear cam­paign and all of its ties to the CNP, and all we know about the peo­ple behind it are that it’s led by Tom Jones — a well known GOP oppo­si­tion researcher who worked for Ted Cruz’s cam­paign in 2016 — it’s hard not to notice that the peo­ple behind this Trump White House CNP-led staffer purge were Bar­bara Ledeen and Tom Fit­ton of Judi­cial Watch, who were both deeply involved in the pro-Cruz ‘oppo­si­tion research’ shad­ow oper­a­tions back in 2015–2016. It’s all part of the gross con­text of this shad­ow ‘oppo­si­tion research’ CNP-dom­i­nat­ed smear machine:

The New York Times

Among Those Press­ing Trump to Weed Out Dis­loy­al­ty: Clarence Thomas’s Wife

A group led by Gin­ni Thomas has tar­get­ed offi­cials in the admin­is­tra­tion, and lob­bied for its own pre­ferred choic­es. As the president’s dis­trust in those serv­ing him has grown, so has its sway.

By Mag­gie Haber­man
Pub­lished Feb. 24, 2020
Updat­ed May 3, 2021

For the past 18 months, Gin­ni Thomas, the wife of Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives have plied the White House with mem­os and sug­ges­tions about which peo­ple to fire — and who should replace them.

Pres­i­dent Trump has gen­er­al­ly treat­ed Ms. Thomas’s sug­ges­tions cool­ly, pass­ing them off to advis­ers, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with Ms. Thomas’s efforts. But since the end of the Sen­ate impeach­ment tri­al, the pres­i­dent has become more dis­trust­ful of the peo­ple fill­ing the ranks of gov­ern­ment and has been giv­ing those rec­om­men­da­tions a clos­er look.

The mem­os from Ms. Thomas were first report­ed by Axios.

Among Ms. Thomas’s top tar­gets have been offi­cials at the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, the for­mer head of the White House per­son­nel office, Sean Doocey, and oth­er top White House aides. Anoth­er tar­get was Jessie K. Liu, who recent­ly left her job as the U.S. attor­ney for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia for a job in the Trea­sury Depart­ment that was lat­er with­drawn by the White House.

Ms. Thomas, a polit­i­cal­ly active con­ser­v­a­tive who for near­ly sev­en years has led a group called Groundswell, also suc­cess­ful­ly lob­bied for a role for Ken­neth T. Cuc­cinel­li II, the for­mer attor­ney gen­er­al of Vir­ginia who is now the act­ing deputy sec­re­tary of home­land secu­ri­ty.

Anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive, Becky Nor­ton Dun­lop, an offi­cial at the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, has also repeat­ed­ly passed names of pos­si­ble appoint­ments to per­son­nel offi­cials, admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials said.

Mr. Trump recent­ly shook up the per­son­nel office, replac­ing Mr. Doocey with John McEn­tee, who was fired from his pre­vi­ous job at the White House, with a man­date to look for “bad” peo­ple, accord­ing to mul­ti­ple admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials.

Some admin­is­tra­tion aides have long been sus­pi­cious that peo­ple like Ms. Thomas and Ms. Dun­lop are less inter­est­ed in pro-Trump puri­ty than in appoint­ments for their own net­works of friends. White House offi­cials have pri­vate­ly ques­tioned Ms. Thomas’s lob­by­ing on per­son­nel, and have said Mr. Trump — who is fac­ing sev­er­al deci­sions before the Supreme Court per­son­al­ly and in terms of admin­is­tra­tion pol­i­cy — has made clear he is con­scious of whom she is mar­ried to.

Still, in the last year, as Mr. Trump has grown more mis­trust­ful of his gov­ern­ment, the sway held by Ms. Thomas and her group has increased. Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have rou­tine­ly sent aides to attend week­ly Groundswell meet­ings held at the offices of Judi­cial Watch, anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive group led by a vocal defend­er of the pres­i­dent, Tom Fit­ton.

Mr. Trump was also giv­en a memo about Ms. Liu that offi­cials attrib­uted to a Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee staff mem­ber named Bar­bara Ledeen, anoth­er mem­ber of Groundswell, though it was draft­ed with input from oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives. The memo men­tioned the fail­ure to pros­e­cute Andrew G. McCabe, a for­mer F.B.I. offi­cial whom Mr. Trump has repeat­ed­ly attacked, as a strike against Ms. Liu, as well as her sign­ing the sen­tenc­ing memo of Michael T. Fly­nn, a friend of Ms. Ledeen’s.

...

Ms. Ledeen also raised con­cerns with the staff of Sen­a­tor Mike Lee, a Utah Repub­li­can, about Ms. Liu when she was nom­i­nat­ed for the No. 3 job at the Jus­tice Depart­ment in March 2019, accord­ing to three peo­ple famil­iar with the dis­cus­sion. After Mr. Lee and oth­ers object­ed to Ms. Liu’s appoint­ment, the White House with­drew her nom­i­na­tion.

Ms. Liu became a flash point again when she was nom­i­nat­ed to the Trea­sury Depart­ment post. Some­one pro­vid­ed Mr. Trump with a fresh copy of the memo attrib­uted to Ms. Ledeen, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the events.

And anoth­er memo Ms. Thomas passed along accused Mr. Doocey of obstruc­tion relat­ed to State Depart­ment jobs, and claimed that he had sur­rep­ti­tious­ly switched one appointee for anoth­er for a for­eign aid agency. That par­tic­u­lar claim was demon­stra­bly false, accord­ing to three peo­ple famil­iar with the memo.

The New York Times report­ed in Jan­u­ary 2019 that Mr. Trump met that month with Ms. Thomas and a half-dozen of her mem­bers at what was at times a con­tentious meet­ing in the Roo­sevelt Room of the White House. At that meet­ing, Ms. Thomas insist­ed that White House per­son­nel were block­ing appoint­ments of sup­port­ers of the pres­i­dent, and hand­ed him a list of sug­gest­ed appointees.

Since the meet­ing, Ms. Thomas and her group have been press­ing Mr. Trump to replace job hold­ers they did not con­sid­er reli­ably con­ser­v­a­tive and have com­plained to White House staff that they were not get­ting enough atten­tion from the per­son­nel office.

Pri­vate­ly, offi­cials in that office told asso­ciates that Ms. Thomas’s sug­gest­ed hires could nev­er sur­vive prop­er vet­ting, includ­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties such as David A. Clarke, the for­mer sher­iff of Mil­wau­kee Coun­ty for a home­land secu­ri­ty role, or the Fox News guest Dan Bongi­no for a coun­tert­er­ror­ism post.

Despite her own his­to­ry of sup­port­ing Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz of Texas for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion and of try­ing to stop Mr. Trump at the 2016 Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion, Ms. Thomas has pre­sent­ed her­self to the White House as a barom­e­ter of who is suf­fi­cient­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and sup­port­ive of the Trump agen­da, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials.

Mr. Trump has alter­nate­ly lis­tened to and been dis­mis­sive of Ms. Thomas’s entreaties, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with his think­ing. But the White House has fre­quent­ly sent admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials to meet with mem­bers of Groundswell.

A per­son close to Ms. Thomas said she did not intend for Groundswell to be her alter ego, and that she mere­ly saw her­self as a launch­ing point for con­ser­v­a­tive input at the White House.

...

———-

“Among Those Press­ing Trump to Weed Out Dis­loy­al­ty: Clarence Thomas’s Wife” by Mag­gie Haber­man; The New York Times; 02/24/2020

“Pres­i­dent Trump has gen­er­al­ly treat­ed Ms. Thomas’s sug­ges­tions cool­ly, pass­ing them off to advis­ers, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with Ms. Thomas’s efforts. But since the end of the Sen­ate impeach­ment tri­al, the pres­i­dent has become more dis­trust­ful of the peo­ple fill­ing the ranks of gov­ern­ment and has been giv­ing those rec­om­men­da­tions a clos­er look.”

By the time Trump reached his fourth year in office, it was Gin­ni Thomas and her fel­low CNP asso­ciates who were appar­ent­ly mak­ing staffing deci­sions for the White House. Well, not so much mak­ing the staffing deci­sions direct­ly. Instead, they were just launch­ing smear cam­paigns based on bogus oppo­si­tion research against any­one they did­n’t like. But the fact that Trump was send­ing White House staffers to attend the week­ly Groundswell meet­ings and then act­ing on the Groundswell net­work’s rec­om­men­da­tions more or less tells us who was ulti­mate­ly mak­ing these deci­sions. Trump had farmed out the White House staffing to the same CNP-dom­i­nat­ed net­work he was already using to select his Supreme Court nom­i­nees.

And note it those Groundswell meet­ings were being host­ed by Judi­cial Watch, head­ing by CNP mem­ber Tom Fit­ton. Again, recall how Judi­cial Watch was part of one of the right-wing teams that was search­ing for Hillary Clin­ton’s emails back in 2015 — teamed up with Bar­bara Ledeen and Newt Gin­grich — which was clear­ly an oppo­si­tion research oper­a­tion. So we can see how the range of oppo­si­tion research ser­vices offered by Judi­cial Watch range from hunt­ing the dark web for hacked emails to run­ning sleazy smear cam­paigns against the ran­dom peo­ple they want replaced with their own net­work:

...
Mr. Trump recent­ly shook up the per­son­nel office, replac­ing Mr. Doocey with John McEn­tee, who was fired from his pre­vi­ous job at the White House, with a man­date to look for “bad” peo­ple, accord­ing to mul­ti­ple admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials.

Some admin­is­tra­tion aides have long been sus­pi­cious that peo­ple like Ms. Thomas and Ms. Dun­lop are less inter­est­ed in pro-Trump puri­ty than in appoint­ments for their own net­works of friends. White House offi­cials have pri­vate­ly ques­tioned Ms. Thomas’s lob­by­ing on per­son­nel, and have said Mr. Trump — who is fac­ing sev­er­al deci­sions before the Supreme Court per­son­al­ly and in terms of admin­is­tra­tion pol­i­cy — has made clear he is con­scious of whom she is mar­ried to.

Still, in the last year, as Mr. Trump has grown more mis­trust­ful of his gov­ern­ment, the sway held by Ms. Thomas and her group has increased. Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have rou­tine­ly sent aides to attend week­ly Groundswell meet­ings held at the offices of Judi­cial Watch, anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive group led by a vocal defend­er of the pres­i­dent, Tom Fit­ton.
...

And that’s all part of what makes Bar­bara Ledeen’s involve­ment in this so fas­ci­nat­ing. She’s not on the CNP mem­ber­ship lists. But she’s very clear­ly been deeply involved in the GOP’;s oppo­si­tion research efforts for years and a mem­ber of Groundswell. She’s clear­ly been deeply involved with this net­work. Which makes that email-hunt­ing effort with Judi­cial Watch and Gin­grich back in 2015 even more of a CNP effort. Was Ton Jones aware of their side project? Again, we’ll prob­a­bly nev­er know but it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tion in the con­text of this sto­ry. One of many involv­ing Bar­bara Ledeen:

...
Mr. Trump was also giv­en a memo about Ms. Liu that offi­cials attrib­uted to a Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee staff mem­ber named Bar­bara Ledeen, anoth­er mem­ber of Groundswell, though it was draft­ed with input from oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives. The memo men­tioned the fail­ure to pros­e­cute Andrew G. McCabe, a for­mer F.B.I. offi­cial whom Mr. Trump has repeat­ed­ly attacked, as a strike against Ms. Liu, as well as her sign­ing the sen­tenc­ing memo of Michael T. Fly­nn, a friend of Ms. Ledeen’s.

...

Ms. Ledeen also raised con­cerns with the staff of Sen­a­tor Mike Lee, a Utah Repub­li­can, about Ms. Liu when she was nom­i­nat­ed for the No. 3 job at the Jus­tice Depart­ment in March 2019, accord­ing to three peo­ple famil­iar with the dis­cus­sion. After Mr. Lee and oth­ers object­ed to Ms. Liu’s appoint­ment, the White House with­drew her nom­i­na­tion.

...

Pri­vate­ly, offi­cials in that office told asso­ciates that Ms. Thomas’s sug­gest­ed hires could nev­er sur­vive prop­er vet­ting, includ­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties such as David A. Clarke, the for­mer sher­iff of Mil­wau­kee Coun­ty for a home­land secu­ri­ty role, or the Fox News guest Dan Bongi­no for a coun­tert­er­ror­ism post.

Despite her own his­to­ry of sup­port­ing Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz of Texas for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion and of try­ing to stop Mr. Trump at the 2016 Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion, Ms. Thomas has pre­sent­ed her­self to the White House as a barom­e­ter of who is suf­fi­cient­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and sup­port­ive of the Trump agen­da, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials.

Mr. Trump has alter­nate­ly lis­tened to and been dis­mis­sive of Ms. Thomas’s entreaties, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with his think­ing. But the White House has fre­quent­ly sent admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials to meet with mem­bers of Groundswell.

A per­son close to Ms. Thomas said she did not intend for Groundswell to be her alter ego, and that she mere­ly saw her­self as a launch­ing point for con­ser­v­a­tive input at the White House.
...

Who will the CNP smear next? We’ll see, although maybe not. The CNP has built itself quite a few options for get­ting its mes­sage out with­out leav­ing a clear trace. And yet the more we look, the more CNP fin­ger­prints we find. CNP fin­ger­prints espe­cial­ly around where there’s some scum­my slime smeared. They just keep show­ing up.

The gen­er­al ques­tion of ‘what’s next?’ from the reli­gious right in the US looms larg­er than it has in decades fol­low­ing the leak of the draft Supreme Court opin­ion strik­ing down Roe v Wade in a man­ner that does­n’t just call into ques­tion access to birth con­trol in the US in the future but was writ­ten in a way that could allow for the over­turn­ing of a num­ber of oth­er pro­gres­sive court vic­to­ries of years past.

So giv­en that we just had a num­ber of local elec­tions in towns across the US that includ­ed obscure school board elec­tions, here’s a set of arti­cles about a school board takeover that took place back in the fall of last in the Col­orado town of Wood­land Park. Four out of five of the school board seats were up for elec­tion. And as we’ll see, all four were won by can­di­dates recruit­ed and trained by a local min­is­ter deeply tied to a nation­al CNP ini­tia­tive to takeover school boards with Domin­ion­ists push­ing the Project Blitz agen­da of fix­at­ing on CRT and the LGBT agen­da in schools. As we’re going to see, the polit­i­cal oper­a­tion found­ed by this min­is­ter, Andrew Wom­mack, was co-found­ed by CNP mem­bers David Bar­ton and William Fed­er­er. A num­ber of oth­er high lev­el CNP mem­bers like Tony Perkins attend­ing the group’s events. And boy did these activ­i­ties pay off. They took over Wood­land Park’s school board with 4–1 major­i­ty and and are now imple­ment­ing an agen­da that’s sold as ’empow­er­ing to the par­ents’. As we’re going to see, it seems to be designed to empow­er par­ents to force the teach­ers to remove any con­tent they find objec­tion­able if you can get a vocal enough minor­i­ty of par­ents to demand it. Intro­duc­ing the cur­ricu­lum of the ultra-right-wing Hills­dale Col­lege into the pub­lic school cur­ricu­lum is also on the agen­da. Along with char­ter schools. New fast tracked char­ter schools.

So while we’re going to have to wait and see in terms of ‘what’s next’ from the hard right Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty that now has dom­i­nant con­trol of the Supreme Court. But we don’t have to wait and see in terms of intent for the the same deeply pow­er­ful forces that are on the cusp of win­ning this decades long mega-fight over abor­tion in the US. They’re show­ing us ‘what’s next’ all the time. Espe­cial­ly at the local lev­el, with the next gen­er­a­tion of polit­i­cal foots sol­diers are being field­ed.

Ok, first, here’s an Octo­ber 2021 sto­ry from Fred­er­ick Clark­son about Andrew Wom­mack­’s Domin­ion­ist Col­orado reli­gious polit­i­cal church/Bible college/political train­ing group and the (soon to be very suc­cess­ful) plans to take over the Wood­land Park school board and imple­ment the full Project Blitz agen­da of purg­ing pub­lic schools of any­thing that devi­ates from the Domin­ion­ist world­view:

Reli­gion Dis­patch­es

“If Every Church Said, ‘We Will Take Over Our Com­mu­ni­ty’”: The (Chris­t­ian Right) Rev­o­lu­tion Starts Small and Local

By Fred­er­ick Clark­son
Octo­ber 26, 2021

One of the fea­tures of the rise of the Chris­t­ian Right has been the devel­op­ment of insti­tu­tion­al infra­struc­ture. From the rise of tel­e­van­ge­lism and con­ser­v­a­tive think tanks in the 1970s and 80s, to the cre­ation of nation­al polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions begin­ning in the 1980s and 90s, to a large array of alter­na­tive edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions from ele­men­tary schools to law schools, there are rea­sons why the Chris­t­ian Right has become a for­mi­da­ble cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal force.

Far from being deflat­ed by the defeat of Don­ald Trump in 2020, the Chris­t­ian Right is seek­ing to ignite a grass­roots polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion begin­ning with local offices. It’s been wide­ly report­ed that the mas­sive appa­ra­tus of the Chris­t­ian Right is tar­get­ing school boards and oth­er local races in 2021.

This trend is epit­o­mized by the emer­gence of the Domin­ion­ist empire of the Wood­land Park, Col­orado-based Andrew Wom­mack, who has moved beyond his epony­mous Andrew Wom­mack Min­istries and built the unac­cred­it­ed Charis Bible Col­lege along with his own polit­i­cal and broad­cast oper­a­tion, the Truth and Lib­er­ty Coali­tion, which he found­ed in 2017. This year the Coali­tion has held a series of con­fer­ences or “acad­e­mies” at the Col­lege to encour­age, recruit and train can­di­dates seek­ing local office.

The Wom­mack empire is one piece of a new wave of Chris­t­ian Right insti­tu­tions backed by move­ment lead­ers. The Coalition’s founders and board, in addi­tion to Wom­mack, include 7 Moun­tains Man­date the­o­rist Lance Wal­nau, along with Domin­ion­ists (and Chris­t­ian his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ists) David Bar­ton and William Fed­er­er. Illus­tra­tive of the nature of the Charis Bible Col­lege pro­gram in “Prac­ti­cal Gov­ern­ment” (orig­i­nal­ly the David Bar­ton School of Gov­ern­ment), the website’s Admis­sions page proud­ly declares that:

“The school uti­lizes mate­ri­als pre­pared by pre­em­i­nent his­to­ri­an David Bar­ton and oth­er high­ly esteemed authors.”

The Coalition’s week­ly broad­cast, which is avail­able on a num­ber of cable chan­nels, is almost always deeply polit­i­cal, and has fea­tured such guests as the afore­men­tioned Lance Wal­nau; Tony Perkins and Jer­ry Boykin, pres­i­dent and exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent respec­tive­ly of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil; Bob McEwen, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (a secre­tive con­ser­v­a­tive lead­er­ship group); and of course David Bar­ton, his son Tim, and Fed­er­er.

Take your moun­tain

Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, Womack’s empire open­ly pro­motes the Domin­ion­ist notion of the Sev­en Moun­tain Man­date, defined by Charis’s web­site as “a pow­er­ful, trans­for­ma­tive cam­paign intend­ed to bring about social trans­for­ma­tion.” The web­site states, fur­ther­more, that the goal is,

“To deliv­er the truth of God’s King­dom and unite the Body of Christ with the world at large, [because] we believe we have a man­date to bring God­ly change to our world, through the sev­en spheres of soci­etal influ­ence.”

As not­ed above, to accom­plish this, the Truth and Lib­er­ty Coali­tion has held sev­er­al polit­i­cal train­ing events this year at the small Charis Bible Col­lege (which urges stu­dents to “take your moun­tain.”

The Pike’s Peak Couri­er report­ed that Wom­mack told atten­dees, dur­ing a “Citizen’s Acad­e­my” in April,

“Man, as many peo­ple as we have in this school here [Charis Bible Col­lege] we ought to take over Wood­land Park.”

Sun­day before Tues­day

As per the Chris­t­ian Right modus operan­di, polit­i­cal resources pro­mot­ed by the Coali­tion include vot­er tools and vot­er guides for tar­get­ed school boards in 17 Col­orado com­mu­ni­ties. One of these, for their home town of Wood­land Park (near Col­orado Springs) includes a slate of four con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­dates in a field of nine, all vying for four open seats on a five-mem­ber board. If three of them win, they would gain con­trol of the board. The vot­er guides are avail­able in both Eng­lish and Span­ish.

The vot­er guide fea­tures just five issues: “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry,” “Parental Rights,” “Boys Play­ing Girl’s Sports,” “Sex Edu­ca­tion,” and “Gen­der Iden­ti­ty Pro­nouns.” The guide, like those pio­neered by Pat Robertson’s Chris­t­ian Coali­tion in the 1990s, are intend­ed for dis­tri­b­u­tion in church­es on the Sun­day before the Tues­day elec­tion.

Charis held anoth­er acad­e­my in May to pre­pare Chris­tians to run for office, par­tic­u­lar­ly school board races, and per­haps to par­tic­i­pate in the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Chris­t­ian Law­mak­ers, a new nation­al Chris­t­ian Right bill mill and leg­isla­tive net­work that Wom­mack helped to found, which was designed to “bring law­mak­ers togeth­er in sup­port of clear bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples.”

The Coali­tion held a large two-day con­fer­ence in Sep­tem­ber which sought to “empow­er cit­i­zens” to change the coun­try with bib­li­cal val­ues and “to edu­cate, uni­fy and mobi­lize Chris­tians to stand for bib­li­cal truth in the pub­lic square.”

This event fea­tured Wom­mack, Repub­li­can U.S. Reps. Doug Lam­born and Lau­ren Boe­bert (who has, just this week, been iden­ti­fied as a liai­son with the orga­niz­ers of the Jan­u­ary 6 assault on the US Capi­tol); evan­ge­list Mario Muril­lo, Pas­tor Duane Sher­iff, Chris­t­ian Right activist Bish­op E.W. Jack­son and Coali­tion exec­u­tive direc­tor, Richard Har­ris. (Videos of their pre­sen­ta­tions are avail­able here.)

About a thou­sand atten­dees, includ­ing many stu­dents, par­tic­i­pat­ed in train­ing work­shops on such Chris­t­ian Right pri­or­i­ties as “reach­ing eth­nic com­mu­ni­ties” (which has been a key part of the strat­e­gy of the Chris­t­ian Right and the GOP for more than a decade, includ­ing in 2020); how to start a Cul­ture Impact Team (church-based polit­i­cal com­mit­tees of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil and its state affil­i­ates); and “elec­tion integri­ty,” based on the con­spir­acist notion that there’s wide­spread elec­tion fraud. (For those more pro­fes­sion­al­ly inclined, they rec­om­mend an online course pro­duced by for­mer Rep. Bill Red­mond (R‑NM), a for­mer top offi­cial of Cit­i­zen Link, now called the Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance).

...

Wom­mack sees it as part of a Third Great Awak­en­ing that’s already under­way. But it will be a bat­tle.

“What we see hap­pen­ing in our schools today is no acci­dent,” Har­ris declared. “This is a result of, lit­er­al­ly, over a hun­dred years of plan­ning, and activism and orga­ni­za­tion by ungod­ly peo­ple. And if I could just be frank, it’s by athe­ists, and com­mu­nists, and sec­u­lar human­ists. OK? I’m just going to call a spade a spade here.”

Tim Bar­ton empha­sized that, as impor­tant as nation­al pol­i­tics is,

“There’s church­es in every com­mu­ni­ty. If every church said, ‘we will take over our com­mu­ni­ty,’ all of a sud­den, every com­mu­ni­ty is tak­en care of. And all of a sud­den what was a nation­al issue has just been solved, because we solved it local­ly.”

Of course, the school board elec­tions of 2021 are just the begin­ning. At least, that’s the plan.

———-

““If Every Church Said, ‘We Will Take Over Our Com­mu­ni­ty’”: The (Chris­t­ian Right) Rev­o­lu­tion Starts Small and Local” by Fred­er­ick Clark­son; Reli­gion Dis­patch­es; 10/26/2021

“This trend is epit­o­mized by the emer­gence of the Domin­ion­ist empire of the Wood­land Park, Col­orado-based Andrew Wom­mack, who has moved beyond his epony­mous Andrew Wom­mack Min­istries and built the unac­cred­it­ed Charis Bible Col­lege along with his own polit­i­cal and broad­cast oper­a­tion, the Truth and Lib­er­ty Coali­tion, which he found­ed in 2017. This year the Coali­tion has held a series of con­fer­ences or “acad­e­mies” at the Col­lege to encour­age, recruit and train can­di­dates seek­ing local office.”

A Domin­ion­ist preach­er who starts an epony­mous min­istry, builds an unac­cred­it­ed Bible col­lege, starts his own polit­i­cal and broad­cast­ing oper­a­tion, and then has the col­lege host the polit­i­cal group’s cours­es on how fel­low Domin­ion­ists can take over school boards and impose a theo­crat­ic agen­da. There’s some­thing very meta about the sto­ry. But it’s also quite real. Andrew Wom­mack isn’t hid­ing his agen­da. His min­istry and col­lege and polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing activ­i­ties are all part of the Sev­en Moun­tains Domin­ion­ist agen­da that has been qui­et­ly spear­head­ing Project Blitz and much of the rest of the orga­nized nation­al right-wing freak­out over LGBT issues. In oth­er words, Wom­mack is a cog of what is arguably the most seri­ous polit­i­cal machine on the Amer­i­can scene today.

And note the num­ber of known CNP mem­bers who co-found­ed Wom­mack­’s Truth and Lib­er­ty Coali­tion: David Bar­ton and William Fed­er­er. CNP mem­bers Tony Perkins, William Boykin, and Bob McEwen have all spo­ken on the Coali­tion’s week broad­casts. This is basi­cal­ly a CNP oper­a­tion. An oper­a­tion that involves a net­work CNP fig­ures lead­ing a nation­al cap­ture of gov­ern­ment at the local lev­el by a nation­al net­work of con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian church­es:

...
The Wom­mack empire is one piece of a new wave of Chris­t­ian Right insti­tu­tions backed by move­ment lead­ers. The Coalition’s founders and board, in addi­tion to Wom­mack, include 7 Moun­tains Man­date the­o­rist Lance Wal­nau, along with Domin­ion­ists (and Chris­t­ian his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ists) David Bar­ton and William Fed­er­er. Illus­tra­tive of the nature of the Charis Bible Col­lege pro­gram in “Prac­ti­cal Gov­ern­ment” (orig­i­nal­ly the David Bar­ton School of Gov­ern­ment), the website’s Admis­sions page proud­ly declares that:

“The school uti­lizes mate­ri­als pre­pared by pre­em­i­nent his­to­ri­an David Bar­ton and oth­er high­ly esteemed authors.”

The Coalition’s week­ly broad­cast, which is avail­able on a num­ber of cable chan­nels, is almost always deeply polit­i­cal, and has fea­tured such guests as the afore­men­tioned Lance Wal­nau; Tony Perkins and Jer­ry Boykin, pres­i­dent and exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent respec­tive­ly of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil; Bob McEwen, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (a secre­tive con­ser­v­a­tive lead­er­ship group); and of course David Bar­ton, his son Tim, and Fed­er­er.

...

Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, Womack’s empire open­ly pro­motes the Domin­ion­ist notion of the Sev­en Moun­tain Man­date, defined by Charis’s web­site as “a pow­er­ful, trans­for­ma­tive cam­paign intend­ed to bring about social trans­for­ma­tion.” The web­site states, fur­ther­more, that the goal is,

“To deliv­er the truth of God’s King­dom and unite the Body of Christ with the world at large, [because] we believe we have a man­date to bring God­ly change to our world, through the sev­en spheres of soci­etal influ­ence.”

...

Charis held anoth­er acad­e­my in May to pre­pare Chris­tians to run for office, par­tic­u­lar­ly school board races, and per­haps to par­tic­i­pate in the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Chris­t­ian Law­mak­ers, a new nation­al Chris­t­ian Right bill mill and leg­isla­tive net­work that Wom­mack helped to found, which was designed to “bring law­mak­ers togeth­er in sup­port of clear bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples.”

...

Tim Bar­ton empha­sized that, as impor­tant as nation­al pol­i­tics is,

“There’s church­es in every com­mu­ni­ty. If every church said, ‘we will take over our com­mu­ni­ty,’ all of a sud­den, every com­mu­ni­ty is tak­en care of. And all of a sud­den what was a nation­al issue has just been solved, because we solved it local­ly.”

Of course, the school board elec­tions of 2021 are just the begin­ning. At least, that’s the plan.
...

So how did the four can­di­dates field­ed by Wom­mack­’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion in the Wood­land Park School Dis­trict school board elec­tions go? All four can­di­dates won, giv­ing Wom­mack­s’s church a 4–1 con­trol over the board. Because of course that’s what hap­pened. And now Wood­land Park is becom­ing the lat­est show­case for CNP-style Domin­ion­ist rule.

As you can imag­ine, they haven’t wast­ed time with their 4–1 major­i­ty. Here’s an exam­ple of what’s hap­pen­ing in Wood­land Park school dis­trict: Back in Feb­ru­ary, the new school board announced a new set of rules ‘Opt out’ rules intend­ed to ’empow­er par­ents’. Which it did do. As Wood­land Park’s super­in­ten­dent points out in the arti­cle, the dis­trict already had these opt out rules for par­ents. Just noth­ing close to this expan­sive. Par­ents can now opt their kind out of any les­son plan that includes sex­u­al con­duct, graph­ic vio­lence, pro­fan­i­ty, and any ‘mate­r­i­al that may be polar­iz­ing or like­ly to divide the com­mu­ni­ty along racial, eth­nic, or reli­gious lines.’ ‘Alter­na­tive learn­ing’ will be offered instead.

Keep in mind that while these ‘opt out’ rules may seem like they only impact one kid at a time, they are being imple­ment­ed in the con­text of these orga­nized polit­i­cal ‘LGBT groom­ing agen­da’ Project Blitz witch hunt led by the CNP. In oth­er words, the school board is cre­at­ing a sys­tem that will allow large groups of con­ser­v­a­tive par­ents to effec­tive over­rule the cur­ricu­lum. They may not be able to do that direct­ly by opt­ing their kids out, but if enough par­ents do it that could effec­tive force the teacher to drop the con­tent. So any les­son in his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, and social stud­ies that right-wing evan­gel­i­cal par­ents dis­like can be effec­tive­ly expunged from the con­tent for all the kids. Mis­sion accom­plished.

But there is a loop­hole under the new rules for allow­ing the teacher to dis­cuss sen­si­tive con­tent (which is almost every­thing at this point): they can get per­mis­sion from the super­in­ten­dent. Or in some cas­es the par­ents. It’s not clear what deter­mines if the super­in­ten­dent or par­ents will be the deciders. We’ll find out next year when the rules actu­al­ly get imple­ment­ed. Pre­sum­ably with a wave of sto­ries about how a group of deter­mined par­ents are pan­ning almost all of the rel­e­vant con­tent in one class after anoth­er:

KRDO

Wood­land Park School Dis­trict set to adopt new pol­i­cy giv­ing par­ents more say in cur­ricu­lum

By Dan Beed­ie
Feb­ru­ary 1, 2022 5:13 PM
Pub­lished Feb­ru­ary 1, 2022 6:39 PM

WOODLAND PARK, Colo. (KRDO) — Wood­land Park School Dis­trict Re‑2 is in the process of adopt­ing new poli­cies when it comes to ‘con­tro­ver­sial’ top­ics in the class­room. The dis­trict says they want to accom­mo­date par­ents while pro­tect­ing teach­ers at the same time.

At the school board­’s direc­tion, Wood­land Park’s Super­in­ten­dent and oth­er staff were tasked with updat­ing the Dis­tric­t’s poli­cies when it comes to ‘con­tro­ver­sial’ top­ics.

Accord­ing to a draft of the poten­tial pol­i­cy, the dis­tric­t’s def­i­n­i­tion for con­tro­ver­sial mate­r­i­al can include sex­u­al con­duct, graph­ic vio­lence, pro­fan­i­ty, and any ‘mate­r­i­al that may be polar­iz­ing or like­ly to divide the com­mu­ni­ty along racial, eth­nic, or reli­gious lines.’

The dis­trict plans to adopt a new ‘opt-in/opt out’ plan for par­ents when con­tro­ver­sial top­ics are includ­ed in the cur­ricu­lum. Wood­land Park’s Super­in­ten­dent Dr. Math­ew Neal says the dis­trict already had a ver­sion of this pol­i­cy, but it was nev­er this “expan­sive.”

...

“We have an opt-out option that par­ents can choose out of that (con­tro­ver­sial) sub­ject, and an alter­na­tive learn­ing task can be giv­en to each stu­dent in that process,” Dr. Neal said. “Par­ents can make the choice if that is a top­ic they con­sid­er to be sen­si­tive or not.”

Wood­land Park’s new­ly elect­ed School Board Pres­i­dent David Ruster­holtz said updat­ing the school dis­tric­t’s poli­cies for sen­si­tive sub­jects is a top pri­or­i­ty for him.

“The pri­ma­ry things par­ents are con­cerned about is what is being taught in school,” Ruster­holtz told 13 Inves­ti­gates when asked about what sparked the desire for a new pol­i­cy.

Some par­ents, how­ev­er, tell 13 Inves­ti­gates they fear the dis­trict is under­cut­ting their own stu­den­t’s edu­ca­tion.

“Every­thing can be con­tro­ver­sial. If a teacher, stu­dent, or a school has to address every­thing that is con­tro­ver­sial there will nev­er be any teach­ing done,” said Erin O’Con­nell, a moth­er of three Wood­land Park School Dis­trict stu­dents.

O’Con­nell fears the school board­’s new pol­i­cy will only serve to box in teach­ers and sub­se­quent­ly hurt her chil­dren’s edu­ca­tion.

“The board is say­ing they want to review any­thing that can be con­tro­ver­sial, which puts a huge bur­den on the teach­ers, and what that shows is they have no faith in their teach­ing staff,” O’Con­nell said.

Dr. Neal claims the new pol­i­cy had input from teach­ers and Wood­land Park edu­ca­tors and is designed to pro­tect teach­ers. Under the new pol­i­cy, Neal says teach­ers are still per­mit­ted to bring forth sen­si­tive top­ics in the class­room with approval from their prin­ci­pals or in cer­tain cas­es the par­ents.

“A teacher does have the auton­o­my to speak their mind. They have the right to give their polit­i­cal opin­ion,” Neal said. “They do not have the right to con­vince a stu­dent of that opin­ion.”

Neal plans to pub­lish the new pol­i­cy in the com­ing days, but it won’t be imple­ment­ed until the fol­low­ing school year.

———-

“Wood­land Park School Dis­trict set to adopt new pol­i­cy giv­ing par­ents more say in cur­ricu­lum” by Dan Beed­ie; KRDO; 02/01/2022

“The dis­trict plans to adopt a new ‘opt-in/opt out’ plan for par­ents when con­tro­ver­sial top­ics are includ­ed in the cur­ricu­lum. Wood­land Park’s Super­in­ten­dent Dr. Math­ew Neal says the dis­trict already had a ver­sion of this pol­i­cy, but it was nev­er this “expan­sive.””

Par­ents could already opt their kids out of spe­cif­ic con­tent. They could­n’t opt it out enough, accord­ing to the new Domin­ion­ist Wood­land Park school board:

...
“We have an opt-out option that par­ents can choose out of that (con­tro­ver­sial) sub­ject, and an alter­na­tive learn­ing task can be giv­en to each stu­dent in that process,” Dr. Neal said. “Par­ents can make the choice if that is a top­ic they con­sid­er to be sen­si­tive or not.”

...

Dr. Neal claims the new pol­i­cy had input from teach­ers and Wood­land Park edu­ca­tors and is designed to pro­tect teach­ers. Under the new pol­i­cy, Neal says teach­ers are still per­mit­ted to bring forth sen­si­tive top­ics in the class­room with approval from their prin­ci­pals or in cer­tain cas­es the par­ents.

...

Neal plans to pub­lish the new pol­i­cy in the com­ing days, but it won’t be imple­ment­ed until the fol­low­ing school year.
...

That’s what the news com­ing out of the Wood­land Park school board at the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary. Two weeks lat­er, and let’s just say the mask was dropped some more when one of the new ultra-right coun­cil mem­bers, Gary Brovet­to, came under scruti­ny for going to a school and giv­ing a speech that insult­ed Mid­dle East­ern and Asian kids and kids with ADD or Autism. Brovet­to did­n’t mak­ing the com­ments but explained that he grew up in the tough neigh­bor­hood in the Bronx just blocks from Don­ald Trump and that’s just the kind of non-PC guy he is. And aside from insult­ing kinds, he also wants to get the con­tent of the ultra-right Hills­dale Col­lege inject­ed into the pub­lic schools and fast track the set­up of char­ter schools which will pre­sum­ably have even cra­zier con­tent:

Pikes Peak Couri­er

Wood­land Park school board mem­ber under fire for ‘deroga­to­ry’ com­ments about stu­dents

By NORMA ENGELBERG
Feb 16, 2022 Updat­ed Feb 16, 2022

At the Feb. 9 Wood­land Park School Dis­trict RE‑2 Board of Edu­ca­tion meet­ing, Direc­tor Gary Brovet­to pre­sent­ed a draft of revised dis­trict vision and mis­sion state­ments. How­ev­er, before he could make his pre­sen­ta­tion, he defend­ed him­self against accu­sa­tions made dur­ing pub­lic com­ment.

Sev­er­al par­ents assert­ed that ear­li­er in the month, while Brovet­to was sup­posed to be talk­ing to mid­dle school stu­dents about gov­ern­ment and the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, he spent most of his time talk­ing about the district’s Sum­mit Learn­ing Plat­form. They also accused him of mak­ing deroga­to­ry remarks about stu­dents who have atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der, are on the Autism Spec­trum or are from the Mid­dle East and Asia.

Brovet­to didn’t deny mak­ing the deroga­to­ry remarks and said he spoke about the learn­ing plat­form because the stu­dents were ask­ing ques­tions.

“I’m from Queens, just two blocks from where Pres­i­dent Trump lived,” he said. “I’m com­pet­i­tive and not polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect. … I say what I mean, but my mind can be changed.”

About an hour lat­er, dur­ing the final pub­lic com­ment peri­od, Savan­nah Roshek, who serves on stu­dent coun­cil and was in the class­room dur­ing Brovetto’s talk, said he is “not trust­wor­thy,” that he twist­ed what stu­dents were say­ing and that he made rude and neg­a­tive com­ments about stu­dents.

Final com­ments were made by Lau­ra O’Connell, who teach­es spe­cial-needs stu­dents. She said the stu­dents Brovet­to alleged­ly insult­ed have fought against prej­u­dice and mis­un­der­stand­ing all their lives and words can hurt.

“I can’t believe some­one was able to walk into a build­ing and say the things you said,” she said, address­ing Brovet­to. “Are you ashamed that hap­pened? Just because you’re elect­ed that doesn’t make you an expert. Please don’t come to our schools and dam­age our stu­dents.”

Get­ting back to his pre­sen­ta­tion, Brovet­to said that because of his back­ground in busi­ness, he wants to focus on the school district’s prod­uct.

“The dis­trict pro­duces a prod­uct that will help the com­mu­ni­ty improve its qual­i­ty of life,” he said. “Our prod­uct is edu­ca­tion, and our cus­tomers are par­ents. … Our prod­uct is stu­dents who are pro­duc­tive and inde­pen­dent cit­i­zens.”

His goals include giv­ing par­ents an aca­d­e­m­ic road map at the begin­ning of each year, cov­er­ing what their stu­dents will be learn­ing through the year as they get ready for the next year.

Anoth­er goal is to add the 1776 Cur­ricu­lum, also known as the Hills­dale 1776 Cur­ricu­lum, to the district’s les­son plans.

“We want our kids to know what it means to be an Amer­i­can,” Brovet­to said.

The 1776 Cur­ricu­lum is described on the Hills­dale Col­lege web­site, dc.hillsdale.edu, as “a com­plete col­lec­tion of les­son plans for teach­ing Amer­i­can his­to­ry, civics, and gov­ern­ment to K‑12 stu­dents.”

It was released last sum­mer by the col­lege as a result of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s 1776 Com­mis­sion. Hills­dale Col­lege was found­ed by an abo­li­tion­ist in 1844 in Hills­dale, Mich. and has a cam­pus in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

Sev­er­al pub­li­ca­tions praise the cur­ricu­lum as clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion and deeply Amer­i­can. Oth­ers see it as a counter to Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry and the 1619 Project, which asserts that from its very begin­ning Amer­i­ca was built on the backs of slaves.

A third goal, Brovet­to said, is to increase WPSD teacher salaries, which he said are $7,000 below the state’s aver­age annu­al teacher salaries.

Pub­lic com­ment wasn’t all neg­a­tive. Some who com­ment­ed praised the school board for its work. Gary Gon­za­les said before teach­ers are allowed to teach the Con­sti­tu­tion, they should read it and be test­ed on their knowl­edge.

Sev­er­al also com­ment­ed favor­ably on Super­in­ten­dent Math­ew Neal’s Feb. 3 appear­ance on “Fox&Friends FIRST” to explain a pol­i­cy he and the board are work­ing on, with input from teach­ers, par­ents and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, that would allow par­ents to opt their stu­dents out of learn­ing about con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects such as sex­u­al con­duct, graph­ic vio­lence, pro­fan­i­ty, drug use and “mate­ri­als that may be polar­iz­ing along racial, eth­nic or reli­gious lines.”

If approved, the pol­i­cy would roll out next school year.

The board’s one action item was the reap­proval of the same Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing between the dis­trict and Mer­it Acad­e­my that was approved at a spe­cial meet­ing Jan. 26.

Neal said most of the con­cerns mem­ber of the pre­vi­ous school board had about the orig­i­nal char­ter-school appli­ca­tion, which led them to deny it, can be addressed dur­ing con­tract nego­ti­a­tions.

The MOU will stream­line the process, but doesn’t oblig­ate the board to approve the con­tract to bring Mer­it Acad­e­my into the dis­trict as a char­ter school. It does allow the acad­e­my to seek grants.

...

——–

“Wood­land Park school board mem­ber under fire for ‘deroga­to­ry’ com­ments about stu­dents” by NORMA ENGELBERG; Pikes Peak Couri­er; 02/16/2022

“Sev­er­al par­ents assert­ed that ear­li­er in the month, while Brovet­to was sup­posed to be talk­ing to mid­dle school stu­dents about gov­ern­ment and the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, he spent most of his time talk­ing about the district’s Sum­mit Learn­ing Plat­form. They also accused him of mak­ing deroga­to­ry remarks about stu­dents who have atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der, are on the Autism Spec­trum or are from the Mid­dle East and Asia.”

He showed up and insult­ed kids, and made a ref­er­ence to Trump and Bronx tough­ness while mak­ing his ‘sor­ry, not sor­ry’ response to the out­rage. Gary Brovet­to did­n’t waste any time show­ing the vot­ers of Wood­land Park just who they vot­ed for:

...
Brovet­to didn’t deny mak­ing the deroga­to­ry remarks and said he spoke about the learn­ing plat­form because the stu­dents were ask­ing ques­tions.

“I’m from Queens, just two blocks from where Pres­i­dent Trump lived,” he said. “I’m com­pet­i­tive and not polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect. … I say what I mean, but my mind can be changed.”
...

And note how one of Brovet­to’s goals is for par­ents to receive an ‘aca­d­e­m­ic road map’ from teach­ers about the con­tent they’re going to be teach­ing. This will of course be play­ing direct­ly into the new­ly expand­ed ‘opt out’ sys­tem. An aca­d­e­m­ic road map is turned into a Rorschach test, with par­ents scry­ing for poten­tial con­tro­ver­sy and opt­ing their kids of of this or that les­son plan. If enough par­ents do it, a teacher is effec­tive­ly forced to switch to the ‘less con­tro­ver­sial’ alter­na­tive les­son plan:

...
His goals include giv­ing par­ents an aca­d­e­m­ic road map at the begin­ning of each year, cov­er­ing what their stu­dents will be learn­ing through the year as they get ready for the next year.

...

Sev­er­al also com­ment­ed favor­ably on Super­in­ten­dent Math­ew Neal’s Feb. 3 appear­ance on “Fox&Friends FIRST” to explain a pol­i­cy he and the board are work­ing on, with input from teach­ers, par­ents and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, that would allow par­ents to opt their stu­dents out of learn­ing about con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects such as sex­u­al con­duct, graph­ic vio­lence, pro­fan­i­ty, drug use and “mate­ri­als that may be polar­iz­ing along racial, eth­nic or reli­gious lines.”

If approved, the pol­i­cy would roll out next school year.
...

But the ‘opt out’ expan­sion is only one part of the big cur­ricu­lum over­haul plans. The oth­er part is all the con­tent this move­ment is try­ing to get incor­po­rat­ed into pub­lic school’s offi­cial con­tent. Con­tent like Hills­dale Col­lege’s 1776 Cur­ricu­lum, which is about what you can expect from a tiny super-right-wing col­lege deeply inter­twined with this move­ment. Recall how the pres­i­dent and VP for Exter­nal Affairs at Hills­dale Col­lege, Dr. Lar­ry P. Arnn and Dou­glas A. Jef­frey, were both on the CNP mem­ber­ship list. Deep insti­tu­tion­al net­work­ing is at work here:

...
Anoth­er goal is to add the 1776 Cur­ricu­lum, also known as the Hills­dale 1776 Cur­ricu­lum, to the district’s les­son plans.

“We want our kids to know what it means to be an Amer­i­can,” Brovet­to said.

The 1776 Cur­ricu­lum is described on the Hills­dale Col­lege web­site, dc.hillsdale.edu, as “a com­plete col­lec­tion of les­son plans for teach­ing Amer­i­can his­to­ry, civics, and gov­ern­ment to K‑12 stu­dents.”

It was released last sum­mer by the col­lege as a result of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s 1776 Com­mis­sion. Hills­dale Col­lege was found­ed by an abo­li­tion­ist in 1844 in Hills­dale, Mich. and has a cam­pus in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

Sev­er­al pub­li­ca­tions praise the cur­ricu­lum as clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion and deeply Amer­i­can. Oth­ers see it as a counter to Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry and the 1619 Project, which asserts that from its very begin­ning Amer­i­ca was built on the backs of slaves.
...

But, of course, it’s not just the cen­sor­ing and replac­ing of pub­lic school con­tent that’s on the agen­da. Char­ter schools are sud­den­ly get­ting rushed through. Again, the Domin­ion­ists from the Wom­mack school of pol­i­tics did­n’t waste any time show­ing the vot­ers of Wood­land Park just who they vot­ed for. They vot­ed for a Domin­ion­ist wreck­ing ball to small local school sys­tem, whether they real­ized it or not:

...
The board’s one action item was the reap­proval of the same Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing between the dis­trict and Mer­it Acad­e­my that was approved at a spe­cial meet­ing Jan. 26.

Neal said most of the con­cerns mem­ber of the pre­vi­ous school board had about the orig­i­nal char­ter-school appli­ca­tion, which led them to deny it, can be addressed dur­ing con­tract nego­ti­a­tions.

The MOU will stream­line the process, but doesn’t oblig­ate the board to approve the con­tract to bring Mer­it Acad­e­my into the dis­trict as a char­ter school. It does allow the acad­e­my to seek grants.
...

So how many more kids to Brovet­to insult since that inci­dent? Well, he resigned last month, so the kids are safe from ver­bal assault from their school board for now. But they aren’t safe from Brovet­to’s poli­cies. The there’s still a 3–1 Domin­ion­ist major­i­ty ready to let the wreck­ing ball go for anoth­er swing.

Cap­tur­ing con­trol of gov­ern­ment and impos­ing a deeply unpop­u­lar agen­da can be a tricky feat to sus­tain in a democ­ra­cy. And yet there’s no deny­ing that at least one branch of the US gov­ern­ment, the Judi­cia­ry Branch, has been thor­ough­ly cap­tured by the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. The CNP can more or less do what it wants right now in the realm of judi­cial rul­ings and it’s not afraid of the con­se­quences of using that pow­er. That much is clear from the leaked draft rul­ing that promis­es to over­turn Roe v Wade next month. After all, over­turn­ing Roe is opposed 2–1 by US vot­ers. Polit­i­cal­ly speak­ing it’s mad­ness. Not only that, but over­turn­ing Roe is clear­ly just the first step in what is expect­ed to be a wave of far right rul­ings in com­ing years. We’re in store for a far right era of the Supreme Court thanks to the over­whelm­ing 6–3 hard right major­i­ty. The US’s judi­cia­ry is going to be a CNP tool for decades to come. Over­turn­ing Roe is just the appe­tiz­er.

So giv­en that the CNP has long played the role of for­mu­lat­ing the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s long-term polit­i­cal strate­gies — wild­ly suc­cess­ful long-term polit­i­cal strate­gies — we have to ask: so what’s the long-term strat­e­gy for deal­ing wit the inevitable polit­i­cal blow­back that’s going to emerge from an extend­ed peri­od of one deeply unpop­u­lar Supreme Court deci­sion after anoth­er? Of course, we already have the answer to that ques­tion. We got that answer dur­ing the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, an event that was heav­i­ly orches­trat­ed by the CNP and which the CNP con­tin­ues to defend.

So with that con­text in mind, here’s a post by the Cen­ter for Media Democ­ra­cy from back in March about the leaked notes from the CNP’s Feb­ru­ary 2022 meet­ing. A meet­ing where the upcom­ing over­turn­ing of Roe was pre­dict­ed and cel­e­brat­ed. But the CNP was­n’t pre­dict­ing Roe would be the only upcom­ing rul­ing to rat­tle the US’s judi­cial foun­da­tions. As the meet­ing notes put it, “This term of the Supreme Court could be one of the most con­se­quen­tial ever, and CNP Mem­bers have been cen­tral to some of the land­mark cas­es being decid­ed.” In oth­er words, while we don’t know what exact­ly the CNP has in mind for endur­ing the inevitable polit­i­cal blow­back that’s going to come from its con­trol of the Supreme Court, we can be con­fi­dent the CNP is work­ing on those plans. Plans that will pre­sum­ably be cen­tered around the fur­ther ero­sion of the US’s demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions:

Exposed by the Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy

Revealed: New Lead­ers of Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy Set Extrem­ist Agen­da

By David Armi­ak
March 11th, 2022 at 10:49 AM (CST)

At its first meet­ing of 2022, the secre­tive Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) laid out its plans for influ­enc­ing this year’s midterm elec­tions, abol­ish­ing abor­tion rights, defund­ing the left, lim­it­ing China’s influ­ence, and coun­ter­ing a top­ic of great con­cern to Repub­li­cans: “wok­e­ness.”

Accord­ing to an agen­da obtained by the Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy (CMD), the CNP meet­ing took place the last week­end in Feb­ru­ary at the posh Ritz-Carl­ton in Dana Point, Cal­i­for­nia. The agen­da reveals changes in lead­er­ship and cur­rent pri­or­i­ties of the influ­en­tial group, which is close­ly tied to Trump and the Repub­li­can Par­ty.

Kevin Roberts, a CNP board mem­ber and pres­i­dent of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, kicked the event off with a speech on “how the Con­ser­v­a­tive Move­ment can go on the offense to pro­mote America’s found­ing prin­ci­ples across the coun­try.”

CNP is known for “con­nect­ing the man­pow­er and media of the Chris­t­ian right with the finances of West­ern plu­to­crats and the strat­e­gy of right-wing Repub­li­can polit­i­cal oper­a­tives,” as Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor Anne Nel­son describes the group in her defin­i­tive book Shad­ow Net­work: Media, Mon­ey, and the Secret Hub of the Rad­i­cal Right.

Lead­er­ship Changes Ele­vate Vot­er Sup­pres­sion Advo­cates

The pro­gram for the Feb­ru­ary meet­ing offers the first glimpse of the secre­tive group’s high-lev­el mem­bers and lead­ers since CMD pub­lished its Sep­tem­ber 2020 Mem­ber­ship Direc­to­ry, pro­vid­ed by open source intel­li­gence researcher Brent All­press.

The group’s Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee is head­ed by Judi­cial Watch Pres­i­dent Tom Fit­ton, who has tak­en over from William Wal­ton as CNP’s pres­i­dent. Judi­cial Watch’s “Elec­tion Integri­ty Project” has pushed for vot­er roll purges and pro­motes the myth that vot­er fraud is wide­spread in the U.S.

At the August 2020 CNP meet­ing, Fit­ton facil­i­tat­ed two pan­els on “elec­tion integri­ty,” CMD report­ed. “We need to stop those [vote-by-mail] bal­lots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fit­ton told meet­ing atten­dees, accord­ing to videos obtained by The Wash­ing­ton Post.

Anoth­er life­long advo­cate of vot­er sup­pres­sion now serves as CNP’s vice pres­i­dent: J. Ken­neth Black­well, a for­mer sec­re­tary of state in Ohio and mem­ber of Trump’s failed vot­er fraud pan­el, the Pres­i­den­tial Advi­so­ry Com­mis­sion on Elec­tion Integri­ty. He cur­rent­ly chairs the Cen­ter for Elec­tion Integri­ty at the Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (AFPI), a non­prof­it spin-off of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

In May 2021, Black­well facil­i­tat­ed an “Action Ses­sion” at CNP’s 40th anniver­sary meet­ing on how to com­bat the nation­al vot­ing rights effort, fea­tur­ing U.S. Rep. Byron Don­alds (R‑FL), who vot­ed against cer­ti­fy­ing the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­toral col­lege results, and GOP lawyer Cle­ta Mitchell, who has pro­mot­ed Trump’s Big Lie and advised him on his infa­mous call pres­sur­ing Georgia’s sec­re­tary of state to “find” enough votes for the for­mer pres­i­dent to win the state.

At its Feb­ru­ary meet­ing, CNP host­ed a screen­ing of the film Capi­tol Pun­ish­ment with direc­tor Chris Bur­gard, which pro­motes the claim that, “Every­thing that we are being told [about the insur­rec­tion] is a lie and Amer­i­cans are being per­se­cut­ed to sup­port that lie.” CNP has exten­sive ties to #StoptheSteal and the vio­lent insur­rec­tion at the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, CMD report­ed.

Oth­ers join­ing the CNP exec­u­tive com­mit­tee this year include Jer­ry A. John­son (trea­sur­er), for­mer pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Reli­gious Broad­cast­ers; William G. Boykin, retired Army lieu­tenant gen­er­al and exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil; Chad Con­nel­ly, pres­i­dent of Faith Wins; and Mil­lie Hal­low, man­ag­ing direc­tor of exec­u­tive oper­a­tions at the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion.

Black­well is also list­ed as pres­i­dent of the board of direc­tors for CNP Action, and Fit­ton is a new direc­tor of the affil­i­ate.

The Gold Cir­cle Mem­bers list is large­ly sim­i­lar to the Sep­tem­ber 2020 direc­to­ry, with many of the new addi­tions rep­re­sent­ing shifts from low­er mem­ber­ship tiers. Notable new mem­bers include Ash­land Uni­ver­si­ty Pres­i­dent Car­los Cam­po; Lynn Friess, wid­ow of GOP megadonor Fos­ter Friess; and Ryan Helfen­bein, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Stand­ing for Free­dom Cen­ter and a vice pres­i­dent at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty.

Politi­ciz­ing Covid

“The pan­dem­ic led to unprece­dent­ed gov­ern­ment man­dates, the ero­sion of civ­il lib­er­ties, and an out­right assault on free­dom,” CNP’s agen­da book­let argues. “Amer­i­cans have seen and expe­ri­enced what unchecked gov­ern­ment pow­er can do, and they have had enough.”

CNP has been instru­men­tal in the relent­less push from the right to ignore pub­lic health guide­lines from the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC) dur­ing the dead­ly Covid-19 pan­dem­ic. It played a lead­ing role in the anti-lock­down coali­tion known as “Save Our Coun­try,” with mem­bers mak­ing up half of its lead­er­ship coun­cil and orga­niz­ing week­ly con­fer­ence calls to coor­di­nate response tac­tics.

In May 2020, CMD also revealed that CNP Action, CNP’s 501(c)(4) affil­i­ate, orga­nized a call to dis­cuss a plan for recruit­ing “extreme­ly pro-Trump” doc­tors to cam­paign against Covid pub­lic health restric­tions.

CNP’s Feb­ru­ary meet­ing fea­tured a gen­er­al ses­sion on the state of the pan­dem­ic in the U.S. led by Dr. Jay Bhat­tacharya, a lead­ing advo­cate for herd immu­ni­ty who has advised Flori­da Gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis ® on his con­tro­ver­sial anti-mask poli­cies.

Focus on Elec­tions

Despite being a tax-exempt orga­ni­za­tion barred from engag­ing in elec­toral pol­i­tics, CNP is focus­ing heav­i­ly on elec­tions this year, accord­ing to the agen­da for its Feb­ru­ary meet­ing.

Dave Bossie, pres­i­dent of Cit­i­zens Unit­ed, led things off at the Gold Cir­cle Din­ner with a pre­sen­ta­tion on “the most press­ing polit­i­cal bat­tles in DC and their impact on the Con­ser­v­a­tive Move­ment.”

A gen­er­al ses­sion titled “Vir­ginia 2021: Lessons Learned” fea­tured Chad Con­nel­ly, founder and pres­i­dent of Faith Wins; Mark Camp­bell, cam­paign man­ag­er for Glenn Youngkin, the Repub­li­can who won the 2021 governor’s race in Vir­ginia; Vic­to­ria Cobb, pres­i­dent of The Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion of Vir­ginia; and Chris Wil­son, CEO of WPA Intel­li­gence shar­ing “their analy­ses of the Vir­ginia race” and “what it means for 2022.”

After not win­ning a statewide race in more than a decade, in 2021 Repub­li­cans in Vir­ginia won the offices of gov­er­nor, lieu­tenant gov­er­nor, and attor­ney gen­er­al, while also recap­tur­ing the major­i­ty in the state House.

For­mer Vir­ginia Sec­re­tary of Nat­ur­al Resources Becky Nor­ton Dun­lop, a past pres­i­dent of CNP, joined the four “Lessons Learned” pan­elists for a CNP Action ses­sion “to chart the course to suc­cess nation­wide in Novem­ber.”

...

Supreme Court Takes Cen­ter Stage

“This term of the Supreme Court could be one of the most con­se­quen­tial ever, and CNP Mem­bers have been cen­tral to some of the land­mark cas­es being decid­ed,” the CNP’s Feb­ru­ary meet­ing pro­gram notes. Speak­ers at a gen­er­al ses­sion on the sub­ject includ­ed Alan Sears, founder of the Chris­t­ian right lit­i­ga­tion pow­er­house Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom; Susan B. Antho­ny List Pres­i­dent Mar­jorie Dan­nen­felser; and First Lib­er­ty Pres­i­dent Kel­ly Shack­elford.

“CNP has been strate­giz­ing to dom­i­nate the Supreme Court for decades,” CNP expert Anne Nel­son told the Asso­ci­at­ed Press in Oct 2020. “They have worked through the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, and the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, all run by mem­bers of the CNP.”

Dan­nen­felser was among 14 oth­er CNP mem­bers to attend the Sept. 26, 2020, Rose Gar­den cer­e­mo­ny at the White House where Amy Coney Bar­rett accept­ed the nom­i­na­tion for the Supreme Court, solid­i­fy­ing the far-right’s hold on the nation’s high­est court.

The agen­da notes that Dan­nen­felser “will pro­vide an update on the Dobbs v. Jack­son Women’s Health Orga­ni­za­tion case that could result in com­plete­ly gut­ting or over­turn­ing Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 Supreme Court deci­sion guar­an­tee­ing women in Amer­i­ca the con­sti­tu­tion­al right to an abor­tion.

Mississippi’s Speak­er of the House Phillip Gunn (R‑Miss.), the 2020 chair of the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (ALEC), tout­ed the Dobbs v. Jack­son case and its prospects for lead­ing to a deci­sion to over­turn Roe v. Wade dur­ing a pan­el at the CNP meet­ing last May, CMD report­ed.

“We think that’s going to be a land­mark case. All of us know that the Unit­ed States Supreme Court com­po­si­tion has changed… in a way that is more pro-life,” Gunn told meet­ing atten­dees last spring. “They say that Amy Coney Bar­rett is one of the most active, pro-life peo­ple in Amer­i­ca, so we believe that she brings a new dynam­ic to that court. We think our case, our law that we passed in 2018, will be trans­for­ma­tive in the are­na in abor­tion. We’re proud of that.”

Dan­nen­felser then led a CNP Action pan­el “on how the Con­ser­v­a­tive Move­ment can be best equipped for the impend­ing Supreme Court deci­sion on Dobbs” and to “strate­gize on mes­sag­ing, state leg­is­la­tion, and more with atten­dees.”

One of the pan­elists, Mike Thomp­son, is a senior vice pres­i­dent with CRC Advi­sors. Leonard Leo, who played an inte­gral role in Trump’s effort to pack the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry with right-wing judges, found­ed CRC Advi­sors in 2020 with Greg Mueller to “fun­nel big mon­ey and exper­tise across the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment.” As of Sep­tem­ber 2020, Leo was a Board of Gov­er­nors mem­ber of CNP.

Push­ing Back Against Chi­na, the Left, and a “Woke” Mil­i­tary

Plac­ing Chi­na “at the heart of the great­est chal­lenges fac­ing the Unit­ed States in recent years”—from Covid to cur­ren­cy manip­u­la­tion, cli­mate poli­cies, and “undue influ­ence over Amer­i­can cor­po­ra­tions”—Eco­nom­ic War Room host Kevin Free­man led a dis­cus­sion titled “The 21st: An Amer­i­can or Chi­nese Cen­tu­ry?”

Free­man was joined in the pan­el by Beau Brun­son, Con­sumers’ Research Direc­tor of Pol­i­cy and Reg­u­la­to­ry Affairs. Con­sumers’ Research has com­mit­ted mil­lions in dark mon­ey to fight envi­ron­men­tal, social, and cor­po­rate gov­er­nance con­cerns (ESG) and “woke” cap­i­tal­ism, where Black­Rock has emerged as a top tar­get of its cam­paign for its “hyp­o­crit­i­cal” invest­ments in Chi­na.

CMD recent­ly exposed Con­sumers’ Research as one of the largest spon­sors of the State Finan­cial Offi­cers Foun­da­tion, a group of Repub­li­can trea­sur­ers, audi­tors, and staff from 16 states, which has also pri­or­i­tized fight­ing the ESG move­ment and “woke” cap­i­tal­ism.

Also on the pan­el were Pete Hoek­stra, for­mer ambas­sador to the Nether­lands under Trump, and Steve Mil­loy, a FoxNews con­trib­u­tor and paid advo­cate for Phillip Mor­ris, Exxon­Mo­bil, and oth­er cor­po­ra­tions.

The three also par­tic­i­pat­ed in a CNP Action pan­el on “Coun­ter­ing Chi­na,” where they col­lec­tive­ly worked “on ways to com­bat the increas­ing and per­va­sive threat Chi­na pos­es to the Unit­ed States and Amer­i­can life.”

Lead­ing an CNP Action pan­el dis­cus­sion on “Defund­ing the Left,” Buck­eye Insti­tute Pres­i­dent and CEO Robert Alt facil­i­tat­ed a tuto­r­i­al on how to cut off con­tri­bu­tions to “left-wing caus­es” by tar­get­ing pub­lic employ­ee unions, tri­al lawyers, and invest­ment man­age­ment firms. O.H. Skin­ner, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Alliance for Con­sumers, and Brid­gett Wag­n­er, vice pres­i­dent of pol­i­cy pro­mo­tion at the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, joined the dis­cus­sion.

New CNP Exec­u­tive Mem­ber Boykin led a pan­el dis­cus­sion focused on the ques­tion: “Can a Woke Mil­i­tary Address Future Threats?” with Mike Berry, First Liberty’s gen­er­al coun­sel, and Kei­th Kel­logg, retired Army lieu­tenant gen­er­al and co-chair of AFPI’s Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty. The three talked about “extreme poli­cies [that] have been imple­ment­ed through the Depart­ment of Defense” and “how woke ide­olo­gies have influ­enced our armed ser­vices.”

...

———-
“Revealed: New Lead­ers of Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy Set Extrem­ist Agen­da” by David Armi­ak; Expose by the Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy; 03/11/2022

““This term of the Supreme Court could be one of the most con­se­quen­tial ever, and CNP Mem­bers have been cen­tral to some of the land­mark cas­es being decid­ed,” the CNP’s Feb­ru­ary meet­ing pro­gram notes. Speak­ers at a gen­er­al ses­sion on the sub­ject includ­ed Alan Sears, founder of the Chris­t­ian right lit­i­ga­tion pow­er­house Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom; Susan B. Antho­ny List Pres­i­dent Mar­jorie Dan­nen­felser; and First Lib­er­ty Pres­i­dent Kel­ly Shack­elford.”

One of the most con­se­quen­tial Supreme Court terms ever. Those were the CNP’s expec­ta­tions back in Feb­ru­ary for this year’s Supreme Court rul­ings. And the CNP should know. It’s had more influ­ence over the shape of the Supreme Court than any oth­er orga­ni­za­tions. The CNP’s influ­ence runs so deep it works through oth­er orga­ni­za­tions like the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, and the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, all run by mem­bers of the CNP. So when the CNP informed its mem­bers that this was shap­ing up to be one of the most con­se­quen­tial terms in his­to­ry, it’s not just express­ing the group’s aspi­ra­tions. This is effec­tive­ly the CNP-run Supreme Court right now. And the CNP has clear­ly giv­en the Supreme Court major­i­ty the green light to pro­ceed with an array of polit­i­cal tox­ic rul­ings. The over­turn­ing of Roe is just the warm up act:

...
“CNP has been strate­giz­ing to dom­i­nate the Supreme Court for decades,” CNP expert Anne Nel­son told the Asso­ci­at­ed Press in Oct 2020. “They have worked through the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, and the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, all run by mem­bers of the CNP.”

Dan­nen­felser was among 14 oth­er CNP mem­bers to attend the Sept. 26, 2020, Rose Gar­den cer­e­mo­ny at the White House where Amy Coney Bar­rett accept­ed the nom­i­na­tion for the Supreme Court, solid­i­fy­ing the far-right’s hold on the nation’s high­est court.

The agen­da notes that Dan­nen­felser “will pro­vide an update on the Dobbs v. Jack­son Women’s Health Orga­ni­za­tion case that could result in com­plete­ly gut­ting or over­turn­ing Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 Supreme Court deci­sion guar­an­tee­ing women in Amer­i­ca the con­sti­tu­tion­al right to an abor­tion.

Mississippi’s Speak­er of the House Phillip Gunn (R‑Miss.), the 2020 chair of the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (ALEC), tout­ed the Dobbs v. Jack­son case and its prospects for lead­ing to a deci­sion to over­turn Roe v. Wade dur­ing a pan­el at the CNP meet­ing last May, CMD report­ed.

“We think that’s going to be a land­mark case. All of us know that the Unit­ed States Supreme Court com­po­si­tion has changed… in a way that is more pro-life,” Gunn told meet­ing atten­dees last spring. “They say that Amy Coney Bar­rett is one of the most active, pro-life peo­ple in Amer­i­ca, so we believe that she brings a new dynam­ic to that court. We think our case, our law that we passed in 2018, will be trans­for­ma­tive in the are­na in abor­tion. We’re proud of that.”

Dan­nen­felser then led a CNP Action pan­el “on how the Con­ser­v­a­tive Move­ment can be best equipped for the impend­ing Supreme Court deci­sion on Dobbs” and to “strate­gize on mes­sag­ing, state leg­is­la­tion, and more with atten­dees.”
...

So how is this pow­er­ful orga­ni­za­tion plan­ning on nav­i­gat­ing the polit­i­cal fall­out of this planned wave of tox­ic Supreme Court rul­ings that threat­en to erode the pub­lic’s con­fi­dent in US insti­tu­tions even more than they’ve already been erod­ed? We got out answer an Jan 6, 2021. Well, not just on Jan 6. The cen­tral role played by the CNP in the months lead­ing up to the insur­rec­tion and coverup role it’s played ever since giv­en us our answer. The CNP’s long-term plans for this CNP-run Supreme Court major­i­ty is quite sim­ply going to be com­plet­ing insur­rec­tion and solid­i­fy­ing per­ma­nent far right rule. So it should be no sur­prise to find two of the fig­ures who have been lead­ing the CNP’s anti-vot­ing efforts assum­ing the top lead­er­ship roles in the orga­ni­za­tion: Again, over­turn­ing Roe is just the warm up act. Just like Jan 6:

...
The group’s Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee is head­ed by Judi­cial Watch Pres­i­dent Tom Fit­ton, who has tak­en over from William Wal­ton as CNP’s pres­i­dent. Judi­cial Watch’s “Elec­tion Integri­ty Project” has pushed for vot­er roll purges and pro­motes the myth that vot­er fraud is wide­spread in the U.S.

At the August 2020 CNP meet­ing, Fit­ton facil­i­tat­ed two pan­els on “elec­tion integri­ty,” CMD report­ed. “We need to stop those [vote-by-mail] bal­lots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fit­ton told meet­ing atten­dees, accord­ing to videos obtained by The Wash­ing­ton Post.

Anoth­er life­long advo­cate of vot­er sup­pres­sion now serves as CNP’s vice pres­i­dent: J. Ken­neth Black­well, a for­mer sec­re­tary of state in Ohio and mem­ber of Trump’s failed vot­er fraud pan­el, the Pres­i­den­tial Advi­so­ry Com­mis­sion on Elec­tion Integri­ty. He cur­rent­ly chairs the Cen­ter for Elec­tion Integri­ty at the Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (AFPI), a non­prof­it spin-off of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

In May 2021, Black­well facil­i­tat­ed an “Action Ses­sion” at CNP’s 40th anniver­sary meet­ing on how to com­bat the nation­al vot­ing rights effort, fea­tur­ing U.S. Rep. Byron Don­alds (R‑FL), who vot­ed against cer­ti­fy­ing the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­toral col­lege results, and GOP lawyer Cle­ta Mitchell, who has pro­mot­ed Trump’s Big Lie and advised him on his infa­mous call pres­sur­ing Georgia’s sec­re­tary of state to “find” enough votes for the for­mer pres­i­dent to win the state.

At its Feb­ru­ary meet­ing, CNP host­ed a screen­ing of the film Capi­tol Pun­ish­ment with direc­tor Chris Bur­gard, which pro­motes the claim that, “Every­thing that we are being told [about the insur­rec­tion] is a lie and Amer­i­cans are being per­se­cut­ed to sup­port that lie.” CNP has exten­sive ties to #StoptheSteal and the vio­lent insur­rec­tion at the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, CMD report­ed.
...

“Every­thing that we are being told [about the insur­rec­tion] is a lie and Amer­i­cans are being per­se­cut­ed to sup­port that lie.” Spo­ken like an orga­ni­za­tion that ful­ly intends on foment­ing more insur­rec­tions in the future. And if those insur­rec­tionary plans involve the schem­ing of a com­pli­ant CNP-con­trolled Supreme Court, all the bet­ter.

As ques­tions con­tin­ue to grow around Gin­ni Thomas’s “Not So Secret” role in the CNP’s efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion, the biggest ques­tion around Thomas at this point is the ques­tion of what aspect of the efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results was she not involved with? Although maybe a big­ger ques­tion is whether or not it will ever be tak­en seri­ous­ly from a legal per­spec­tive that a Supreme Court Jus­tice’s spouse was lead­ing the efforts to over­turn the elec­tion. Either way, big ques­tions con­tin­ue to loom ever larg­er around Gin­ni. Ques­tions about cul­pa­bil­i­ty and impuni­ty. So it should come as no sur­prise that Gin­ni Thomas was just impli­cat­ed in anoth­er aspect of the CNP’s post-elec­tion efforts:

It turns out Gin­ni Thomas was email­ing state leg­is­la­tors in swing states in the peri­od between the Novem­ber elec­tion and Jan 6, encour­ag­ing them to select their own slates of elec­tors. Thomas’s emails were sent to Rus­sell “Rusty” Bow­ers, the speak­er of the Ari­zona House, and Shawn­na Bol­ick, who served on the Ari­zona House Elec­tions Com­mit­tee dur­ing the 2020 ses­sion. Impor­tant­ly, Shawn­na Bol­ick is also the wife of Clint Bol­ick, a jus­tice of the Ari­zona Supreme Court who pre­vi­ous­ly worked with Clarence Thomas and has stat­ed he con­sid­ers Thomas a men­tor. So when Gin­ni just hap­pened to reach out to Shawn­na Bol­ick with a let­ter seem­ing­ly pro­vid­ing legal guid­ance sug­gest­ing that its fine for state leg­is­la­tors to select their own slates of elec­tors, she was­n’t just send­ing that Shawn­na. Her hus­band Clint sit­ting on Ari­zon­a’s Supreme Court implic­it­ly got the mes­sage.

And in case it was­n’t clear that Shawn­na saw the mes­sage, it’s clear. Shawn­na respond­ed direct­ly to Gin­ni’s email say­ing “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” and gave guid­ance on how to sub­mit com­plaints about any of her expe­ri­ences with vot­er fraud in Ari­zona.

Gin­ni’s emails argu­ing that it is right for state leg­is­la­tors to select pro-Trump elec­tors were sent using the form let­ters cre­at­ed at the freeroots.com web­site. And while that might make it seem like Thomas was just fill­ing out a gener­ic polit­i­cal form let­ter, it turns out freeroots.com has mul­ti­ple CNP con­nec­tions. For starters, it appears to be owned by Eric Berg­er who is described as a CNP oper­a­tive. It also ran a cam­paign by Act for Amer­i­ca, which was found­ed and chaired by CNP mem­ber Brigitte Gabriel. Also recall how Christo­fas­cist Matt Shea — who has plot­ted for the vio­lent over­throw of the gov­ern­ment and impo­si­tion of strict Chris­t­ian Domin­ion­sm — is the founder of the Spokane chap­ter of ACT for Amer­i­ca.

On Novem­ber 13, 2020, the CNP’s polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee (PAC), CNP Action, held a work­shop on how to deal with the elec­tion results. Recall how Gin­ni Thomas sat on the board of CNP Action dur­ing this peri­od. After the work­shop, CNP Action issued guidance,which includ­ed vis­it­ing the web­site everylegalvote.com “to report fraud and take action.” That web­site, everlegalvote.com, links back to a page on freeroots.com to email state leg­is­la­tors.

That web­site, everylegalvote.com, is no longer online. But based on inter­net archives, it ini­tial­ly claimed to be pro­duced in part­ner­ship with Unit­ed in Pur­pose, a non­prof­it group known for gath­er­ing and deploy­ing data to gal­va­nize con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian vot­ers and has host­ed the lun­cheons where Thomas presents her “Impact Awards.” But with­in days, the web­site dropped its asso­ci­a­tion with Unit­ed with Pur­pose and added a “Found­ing Spon­sors” sec­tions with three spon­sors: the Texas non­prof­it group Lib­er­ty Cen­ter for God and Coun­try, the online talk show “Eco­nom­ic War Room”, and Allied Secu­ri­ty Oper­a­tions Group (ASOG). Recall the crit­i­cal role CNP mem­bers Rus­sell J. Ram­s­land and J. Keet Lewis played in the lead up to the insur­rec­tion. Ramsland’s pri­vate intel­li­gence com­pa­ny, ASOG, was start­ed in June 2017 by Adam T. Kraft, a for­mer senior offi­cial at the Defense Intel­li­gence Agency. Start­ing in 2018, Ram­s­land became a lead­ing GOP pur­vey­or of mass vot­er fraud alle­ga­tions. And in the days lead­ing up to the insur­rec­tion, Ram­s­land was joined by retired Army colonel and psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare expert Phil Wal­dron as they oper­at­ed in Steve Bannon’s and Rudy Giuliani’s “war room” oper­at­ing out of the Willard Hotel. So giv­en the avail­able evi­dence it sure looks like both everylegalvote.com and freeroots.com are part of the same CNP efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results.

Thomas’s first freeroots.com emails implor­ing Bol­ick and Bow­ers to select a pro-Trump slate of elec­tors were sent on Novem­ber 9, 2020, days after the elec­tion. A sec­ond round of emails were sent on Decem­ber 13, 2020, also using freeroots.com. The elec­tion results were cer­ti­fied by Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sec­re­tary of State Katie Hobbs and Repub­li­can Gov. Doug Ducey the next day. On that day, Bol­ick was among dozens of Ari­zona law­mak­ers who signed a let­ter to Con­gress call­ing for the state’s elec­toral votes to go to Trump or “be nul­li­fied com­plete­ly until a full foren­sic audit can be con­duct­ed.”

So on one lev­el, this is just a sto­ry about Gin­ni Thomas send­ing a cou­ple of blah form let­ters. But on anoth­er lev­el, its the sto­ry of Gin­ni Thomas — long­time con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­er, CNP Action board mem­ber, and wife of a Supreme Court Jus­tice — send­ing a let­ter from a CNP front group giv­ing legal advice to close fam­i­ly friends in a posi­tions to chal­lenge the Ari­zona elec­tion results that doing so is legal­ly jus­ti­fied. Con­flicts of inter­est are rarely this pal­pa­ble.

Now, it’s impor­tant to point out that it’s not clear if Gin­ni Thomas sent that freeroots.com form let­ter to a much larg­er num­ber of elect­ed offi­cials in swing states or if it was just Bow­ers and Bol­ick. If it was just those two that would obvi­ous­ly look awful giv­en the fam­i­ly con­nec­tions between the Bol­icks and Thomases. But if she sent that let­ter to all the Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors in Ari­zona that’s not exact­ly great either. She is Gin­ni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas. We don’t know how many oth­er peo­ple received Gin­ni Thomas’s emails craft­ed by CNP-affil­i­at­ed enti­ties in the days and weeks fol­low­ing the 2020 elec­tion filled with instruc­tions to hand Trump the vic­to­ry. But we know she at least sent it to Bow­ers and Bol­ick, which is scan­dalous enough:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Gin­ni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court jus­tice, pressed Ariz. law­mak­ers to help reverse Trump’s loss, emails show

By Emma Brown
Updat­ed May 20, 2022 at 2:36 p.m. EDT|
Pub­lished May 20, 2022 at 11:52 a.m. EDT

Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas, the con­ser­v­a­tive activist and wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, pressed Ari­zona law­mak­ers after the 2020 elec­tion to set aside Joe Biden’s pop­u­lar-vote vic­to­ry and choose “a clean slate of Elec­tors,” accord­ing to emails obtained by The Wash­ing­ton Post.

The emails, sent by Gin­ni Thomas to a pair of law­mak­ers on Nov. 9, 2020, argued that leg­is­la­tors need­ed to inter­vene because the vote had been marred by fraud. Though she did not men­tion either can­di­date by name, the con­text was clear.

Just days after media orga­ni­za­tions called the race for Biden in Ari­zona and nation­wide, Thomas urged the law­mak­ers to “stand strong in the face of polit­i­cal and media pres­sure.” She told the law­mak­ers that the respon­si­bil­i­ty to choose elec­tors was “yours and yours alone” and said they had “pow­er to fight back against fraud.”

Thomas sent the mes­sages via an online plat­form designed to make it easy to send prewrit­ten form emails to mul­ti­ple elect­ed offi­cials, accord­ing to a review of the emails, obtained under the state’s pub­lic-records law.

The mes­sages show that Thomas, a staunch sup­port­er of Don­ald Trump, was more deeply involved in the effort to over­turn Biden’s win than has been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed. In send­ing the emails, Thomas played a role in the extra­or­di­nary scheme to keep Trump in office by sub­sti­tut­ing the will of leg­is­la­tures for the will of vot­ers.

Thomas’s actions also under­line con­cerns about poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est that her hus­band has already faced — and may face in the future — in decid­ing cas­es relat­ed to attempts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. Those ques­tions inten­si­fied in March, when The Post and CBS News obtained text mes­sages that Thomas sent in late 2020 to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Mead­ows, press­ing him to help reverse the elec­tion.

The emails were sent to Rus­sell “Rusty” Bow­ers, a vet­er­an leg­is­la­tor and speak­er of the Ari­zona House, and Shawn­na Bol­ick, who was first elect­ed to the cham­ber in 2018 and served on the House Elec­tions Com­mit­tee dur­ing the 2020 ses­sion.

“Arti­cle II of the Unit­ed States Con­sti­tu­tion gives you an awe­some respon­si­bil­i­ty: to choose our state’s Elec­tors,” read the Nov. 9 email. “… [P]lease take action to ensure that a clean slate of Elec­tors is cho­sen.”

Thomas’s name also appears on an email to the two rep­re­sen­ta­tives on Dec. 13, the day before mem­bers of the elec­toral col­lege met to cast their votes and seal Biden’s vic­to­ry. “Before you choose your state’s Elec­tors … con­sid­er what will hap­pen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said.

It includ­ed a link to a video of a man deliv­er­ing a mes­sage meant for swing-state law­mak­ers, urg­ing them to “put things right” and “not give in to cow­ardice.”

“You have only hours to act,” said the speak­er, who is not iden­ti­fied in the video.

By Decem­ber, the claim that leg­is­la­tors should over­ride the pop­u­lar vote in key states and appoint Trump’s elec­tors was also being pushed pub­licly by John C. East­man, a for­mer law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and Rudy Giu­liani, Trump’s per­son­al lawyer.

Trump allies argued that pan­dem­ic-era changes in elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion and sup­pos­ed­ly wide­spread fraud meant that elec­tions had not been con­duct­ed in accor­dance with state leg­is­la­tures’ direc­tions and that, under the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, the results there­fore could be cast aside. Many legal experts have called those argu­ments unper­sua­sive and anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic, and no state leg­is­la­ture com­plied. Efforts to per­suade state law­mak­ers to name new elec­tors are among the issues under exam­i­na­tion by the con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6, 2021, insur­rec­tion.

Courts turned back dozens of law­suits filed by Trump and his allies in an attempt to chal­lenge the 2020 elec­tion out­come, and there is no evi­dence of vot­ing machine manip­u­la­tion or oth­er wide­spread fraud.

...

Gin­ni Thomas has insist­ed that she and her hus­band have kept their work sep­a­rate, but her polit­i­cal activism has set her apart from oth­er Supreme Court spous­es. About a decade ago, she and Stephen K. Ban­non — who lat­er became chief strate­gist in the Trump White House — were among the orga­niz­ers of Groundswell, a group formed to bat­tle lib­er­als and estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans. Groundswell ded­i­cat­ed itself to “a 30 front war seek­ing to fun­da­men­tal­ly trans­form the nation,” accord­ing to emails uncov­ered by Moth­er Jones at the time. “Elec­tion integri­ty” was among the top­ics dis­cussed in the group’s first months, the emails show.

Thomas’s influ­ence in Wash­ing­ton grew dur­ing the Trump pres­i­den­cy as her views moved into the GOP main­stream. Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas had lunch with Trump at the White House in 2018, then attend­ed a state din­ner the fol­low­ing year. Also in 2019, she and fel­low right-wing activists attend­ed a White House lun­cheon, where the New York Times report­ed that they told Trump his aides were block­ing their pre­ferred can­di­dates for admin­is­tra­tion appoint­ments.

Over those same years, at annu­al lun­cheons, Thomas hand­ed out “Impact Awards” to right-wing fig­ures. Recip­i­ents have includ­ed Mead­ows, then a con­gress­man chair­ing the hard-right Free­dom Cau­cus; Project Ver­i­tas founder James O’Keefe; and Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty.

Thomas is a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, a net­work of promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive activists, some of whom helped press claims of elec­tion fraud. She recent­ly said she attend­ed the pro-Trump ral­ly at the Ellipse in Wash­ing­ton on Jan. 6, 2021.

Thomas sent the emails via freeroots.com, a web­site meant to give polit­i­cal orga­niz­ers an effi­cient means of con­duct­ing email cam­paigns. The email address of the sender in Thomas’s emails is dis­played as “Gin­ni Thomas.”

...

The Nov. 9 email car­ried the sub­ject line, “Please do your Con­sti­tu­tion­al duty!” In addi­tion to push­ing the law­mak­ers to appoint elec­tors, the email asked for a meet­ing to dis­cuss pur­su­ing an “audit” of the vote.

Under the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, states appoint pres­i­den­tial elec­tors “in such man­ner” as the leg­is­la­tures direct. His­tor­i­cal­ly, some state leg­is­la­tures appoint­ed elec­tors direct­ly, but in the mod­ern era states have del­e­gat­ed that respon­si­bil­i­ty to vot­ers. In urg­ing Ari­zona law­mak­ers to “choose” elec­tors after Biden had already pre­vailed, Thomas’s mes­sages claimed law­mak­ers could inter­vene in that process.

The records obtained by The Post do not show any response from Bow­ers, whose refusal to help over­turn Biden’s vic­to­ry in Ari­zona made him the tar­get of a recall cam­paign. When Trump’s legal team pressed to replace Biden elec­tors with Trump elec­tors, Bow­ers released a pub­lic state­ment explain­ing that they were ask­ing leg­is­la­tors to do some­thing for­bid­den by state law.

“As a con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can, I don’t like the results of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. I vot­ed for Pres­i­dent Trump and worked hard to reelect him,” it said. “But I can­not and will not enter­tain a sug­ges­tion that we vio­late cur­rent law to change the out­come of a cer­ti­fied elec­tion.”

A spokesman for Bow­ers told The Post that hun­dreds of thou­sands of mes­sages were sent to the speaker’s office in the post-elec­tion peri­od. “Speak­er Bow­ers did not see, much less read, the vast major­i­ty of those mes­sages, includ­ing the form email sent by Mrs. Thomas,” said the spokesman, Andrew Wilder.

Bol­ick is mar­ried to Clint Bol­ick, an asso­ciate jus­tice of the Ari­zona Supreme Court, who worked with Clarence Thomas ear­ly in his career and has said he con­sid­ers the jus­tice a men­tor.

Shawn­na Bol­ick wrote back to Gin­ni Thomas on Nov. 10, 2020, “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” She gave Thomas guid­ance on how to sub­mit com­plaints about any of her expe­ri­ences with vot­er fraud in Ari­zona.

Bol­ick, who is now seek­ing the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion to be Arizona’s sec­re­tary of state, told The Post that she received tens of thou­sands of emails in the months after the elec­tion and respond­ed to Thomas in the same way she respond­ed to every­one else.

Thomas replied: “Fun that this came to you! Just part of our cam­paign to help states feel America’s eyes!!!”

In the reply, Thomas’s per­son­al email address is vis­i­ble, and it match­es an address she has used pre­vi­ous­ly, The Post con­firmed. Under her mes­sage is an unusu­al tag line that has appeared in oth­er emails that are con­firmed to have been sent by Thomas, includ­ing in 2021 to the staff of Flori­da Gov. Ron DeSan­tis ®: “Sent from Ginni’s iPhone, a by-prod­uct of entre­pre­neur­ial free mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism. Com­pe­ti­tion, hard work, inno­va­tions and lack of gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence make great things pos­si­ble! God bless Amer­i­ca!”

Thomas was then serv­ing on the board of CNP Action, the polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy arm of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. CNP Action was using its influ­ence in Repub­li­can cir­cles at the time to try to keep Trump in office. On Nov. 13, 2020, CNP Action held a work­shop titled “Elec­tion Results and Legal Bat­tles: What Now?” fea­tur­ing, among oth­er speak­ers, Cle­ta Mitchell, accord­ing to an agen­da that researcher Brent All­press pro­vid­ed to the left-lean­ing watch­dog group Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy, which pub­lished it that same month. Mitchell, a lawyer, assist­ed Trump in his efforts to over­turn Biden’s vic­to­ry in Geor­gia.

After that work­shop, the group cir­cu­lat­ed guid­ance to focus efforts on leg­is­la­tors in Penn­syl­va­nia, Geor­gia and Ari­zona. “Demand that they not aban­don their Con­sti­tu­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ties at a time such as this,” read the guid­ance, which was also obtained by All­press and first pub­lished by the Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy. It said to push for new elec­tors “in states where con­sti­tu­tion­al rights have been vio­lat­ed and evi­dence of sub­stan­tial fraud has been estab­lished.”

The guid­ance advised vis­it­ing the web­site everylegalvote.com “to report fraud and take action.”

Vis­i­tors to the site could click a but­ton and be tak­en to freeroots.com, accord­ing to web­pages pre­served by the Inter­net Archive’s Way­back Machine. That land­ing page urged vis­i­tors to press the “take action” but­ton to “email every swing House and Sen­ate leader in one easy click.”

Because that land­ing page is no longer online, it is no longer pos­si­ble to click through on the link. But lan­guage in Thomas’s first email aligns close­ly with lan­guage that appears in a pre­view when a Free­Roots link that was archived sev­er­al days after that email is shared on mes­sag­ing plat­forms.

The site everylegalvote.com ini­tial­ly said that it was pro­duced in part­ner­ship with Unit­ed in Pur­pose, a non­prof­it group known for gath­er­ing and deploy­ing data to gal­va­nize con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian vot­ers. That orga­ni­za­tion has host­ed the lun­cheons where Thomas presents her “Impact Awards.”

But the ref­er­ence to Unit­ed in Pur­pose was delet­ed with­in days. It was replaced with lan­guage iden­ti­fy­ing three “Found­ing Spon­sors”: the Texas secu­ri­ty firm Allied Secu­ri­ty Oper­a­tions Group, the Texas non­prof­it group Lib­er­ty Cen­ter for God and Coun­try, and the online talk show “Eco­nom­ic War Room.”

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Unit­ed in Pur­pose and the three spon­sors of everylegalvote.com did not respond to mes­sages seek­ing com­ment. All three spon­sors have pro­mot­ed elec­tion-fraud claims, accord­ing to pre­vi­ous Post reports.

In the month after the elec­tion, the Trump cam­paign and oth­er Repub­li­cans filed dozens of law­suits chal­leng­ing the out­come. By ear­ly Decem­ber, East­man and Giu­liani were telling law­mak­ers in key swing states won by Biden that they had the author­i­ty and even the oblig­a­tion to dis­re­gard the vote and select their own elec­tors.

“Your argu­ment is that essen­tial­ly we have a failed elec­tion that would require the leg­is­la­ture to step in and assign elec­tors. Am I cor­rect?” a Geor­gia sen­a­tor asked East­man dur­ing a Dec. 3 hear­ing.

“Yes,” East­man said.

The Dec. 13 emails repeat­ed the claim that leg­is­la­tors could “choose” elec­tors.

“As state law­mak­ers, you have the Con­sti­tu­tion­al pow­er and author­i­ty to pro­tect the integri­ty of our elec­tions — and we need you to exer­cise that pow­er now!” the email said. “Nev­er before in our nation’s his­to­ry have our elec­tions been so threat­ened by fraud and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al pro­ce­dures.”

The two-minute video it linked to, titled “A Word To Hero­ic Leg­is­la­tors,” has since been removed from YouTube for vio­lat­ing com­mu­ni­ty guide­lines. The video’s Web address, which is vis­i­ble in the email, was includ­ed in a Decem­ber 2020 newslet­ter writ­ten by activist Geof­frey Botkin, who appears to be the per­son fea­tured in the video.

Botkin, who has pub­lished numer­ous pod­casts and videos about the elec­tion and oth­er mat­ters, wrote in the newslet­ter that he had uploaded “A Word To Hero­ic Leg­is­la­tors” to anoth­er video host­ing ser­vice. The video remains vis­i­ble there.

“I’m ask­ing you to stand up and lead hero­ical­ly,” Botkin says in the video, urg­ing law­mak­ers to appoint elec­tors.

“We have to admit, legal­ly and polit­i­cal­ly it’s way too late for oth­er peo­ple to do it. Clever lawyers or the Supreme Court, they can­not now come to the res­cue,” he con­tin­ues. “This is a moment, a unique moment in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, demand­ing that state leg­is­la­tors set Amer­i­ca back on her foun­da­tions by using a pow­er that you may nev­er have known that you had — but you do have it.”

...

The video link and some of the lan­guage in the email match lan­guage that appears in an archived ver­sion of the land­ing page for a freeroots.com email cam­paign orga­nized by Act for Amer­i­ca, a group that has accused U.S. Mus­lim orga­ni­za­tions of sup­port­ing ter­ror­ism and of try­ing to impose Islam­ic law across the coun­try.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Act for Amer­i­ca did not respond to requests for com­ment.

On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden elec­tors in Ari­zona cast their votes, after the elec­tion results were cer­ti­fied by Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sec­re­tary of State Katie Hobbs and Repub­li­can Gov. Doug Ducey. On that same day, Bol­ick was among dozens of Ari­zona law­mak­ers who signed on to a let­ter to Con­gress call­ing for the state’s elec­toral votes to go to Trump or “be nul­li­fied com­plete­ly until a full foren­sic audit can be con­duct­ed.”

Bol­ick told The Post she signed on to that effort because she backed the idea of an audit, not because of any com­mu­ni­ca­tion she received from Thomas.

———-

“Gin­ni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court jus­tice, pressed Ariz. law­mak­ers to help reverse Trump’s loss, emails show” by Emma Brown; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 05/20/2022

“The mes­sages show that Thomas, a staunch sup­port­er of Don­ald Trump, was more deeply involved in the effort to over­turn Biden’s win than has been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed. In send­ing the emails, Thomas played a role in the extra­or­di­nary scheme to keep Trump in office by sub­sti­tut­ing the will of leg­is­la­tures for the will of vot­ers.”

The more we look, the more evi­dence of Gin­ni Thomas’s involve­ment in the efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion that we dis­cov­er. But, of course, as we’ve seen, Gin­ni Thomas isn’t just Clarence Thomas’s polit­i­cal active wife. She’s been a CNP mem­ber and cru­cial orga­niz­er for the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment over the past decade, hav­ing co-found­ed the Groundswell meet­ings with Steve Ban­non back in 2013. So when we’re talk­ing about the poten­tial role Gin­ni Thomas played in these mat­ters, it’s not real­ly just about Gin­ni Thomas. Or just about Gin­ni and Clarence Thomas. It’s about the broad­er hyper-influ­en­tial net­work Gin­ni Thomas was act­ing on behalf of as she was engaged in these efforts:

...
Thomas’s actions also under­line con­cerns about poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est that her hus­band has already faced — and may face in the future — in decid­ing cas­es relat­ed to attempts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. Those ques­tions inten­si­fied in March, when The Post and CBS News obtained text mes­sages that Thomas sent in late 2020 to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Mead­ows, press­ing him to help reverse the elec­tion.

...

Gin­ni Thomas has insist­ed that she and her hus­band have kept their work sep­a­rate, but her polit­i­cal activism has set her apart from oth­er Supreme Court spous­es. About a decade ago, she and Stephen K. Ban­non — who lat­er became chief strate­gist in the Trump White House — were among the orga­niz­ers of Groundswell, a group formed to bat­tle lib­er­als and estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans. Groundswell ded­i­cat­ed itself to “a 30 front war seek­ing to fun­da­men­tal­ly trans­form the nation,” accord­ing to emails uncov­ered by Moth­er Jones at the time. “Elec­tion integri­ty” was among the top­ics dis­cussed in the group’s first months, the emails show.

Thomas’s influ­ence in Wash­ing­ton grew dur­ing the Trump pres­i­den­cy as her views moved into the GOP main­stream. Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas had lunch with Trump at the White House in 2018, then attend­ed a state din­ner the fol­low­ing year. Also in 2019, she and fel­low right-wing activists attend­ed a White House lun­cheon, where the New York Times report­ed that they told Trump his aides were block­ing their pre­ferred can­di­dates for admin­is­tra­tion appoint­ments.
...

It’s also rather notable that Thomas’s email out­reach to these swing state leg­is­la­tors first hap­pened in the days fol­low­ing the 2020 elec­tion, and then was fol­lowed up on Decem­ber 13 echo­ing the exact mes­sage that CNP mem­ber John East­man and Rudy Giu­liani were push­ing: that state leg­is­la­tor has the pow­er to choos­er their own slates of elec­tors. It’s part of the con­text of Thomas’s efforts. Gin­ni Thomas’s efforts can’t real­ly be sep­a­rat­ed from John East­man’s. So when we learn that Thomas sent out her sec­ond round of emails appeal­ing to state leg­is­la­tors that basi­cal­ly echoes the guid­ance that Rudy Giu­liani and John East­man were already giv­ing, that should be entire­ly expect­ed. This was a group effort:

...
Just days after media orga­ni­za­tions called the race for Biden in Ari­zona and nation­wide, Thomas urged the law­mak­ers to “stand strong in the face of polit­i­cal and media pres­sure.” She told the law­mak­ers that the respon­si­bil­i­ty to choose elec­tors was “yours and yours alone” and said they had “pow­er to fight back against fraud.”

...

Thomas’s name also appears on an email to the two rep­re­sen­ta­tives on Dec. 13, the day before mem­bers of the elec­toral col­lege met to cast their votes and seal Biden’s vic­to­ry. “Before you choose your state’s Elec­tors … con­sid­er what will hap­pen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said.

...

By Decem­ber, the claim that leg­is­la­tors should over­ride the pop­u­lar vote in key states and appoint Trump’s elec­tors was also being pushed pub­licly by John C. East­man, a for­mer law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and Rudy Giu­liani, Trump’s per­son­al lawyer.

...

In the month after the elec­tion, the Trump cam­paign and oth­er Repub­li­cans filed dozens of law­suits chal­leng­ing the out­come. By ear­ly Decem­ber, East­man and Giu­liani were telling law­mak­ers in key swing states won by Biden that they had the author­i­ty and even the oblig­a­tion to dis­re­gard the vote and select their own elec­tors.

“Your argu­ment is that essen­tial­ly we have a failed elec­tion that would require the leg­is­la­ture to step in and assign elec­tors. Am I cor­rect?” a Geor­gia sen­a­tor asked East­man dur­ing a Dec. 3 hear­ing.

“Yes,” East­man said.

The Dec. 13 emails repeat­ed the claim that leg­is­la­tors could “choose” elec­tors.

“As state law­mak­ers, you have the Con­sti­tu­tion­al pow­er and author­i­ty to pro­tect the integri­ty of our elec­tions — and we need you to exer­cise that pow­er now!” the email said. “Nev­er before in our nation’s his­to­ry have our elec­tions been so threat­ened by fraud and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al pro­ce­dures.”
...

It’s also impor­tant to note how Thomas’s entreaties to these Ari­zona leg­is­la­tors basi­cal­ly worked, at least when it came to Shawn­na Bol­ick, who was among the dozens of Ari­zona law­mak­ers who signed a let­ter call­ing for Con­gress to flip the state’s vote to Trump. It rais­es the ques­tion of how many of these oth­er leg­is­la­tor were the tar­get of Thomas’s behind-the-scenes lob­by­ing. But, again, this was a group effort. So we should­n’t just be ask­ing how many of these oth­er leg­is­la­tor were the tar­get of Thomas’s behind-the-scenes lob­by­ing. We also have to ask who else was lob­by­ing these leg­is­la­tors as part of this larg­er orga­nized group effort:

...
The Nov. 9 email car­ried the sub­ject line, “Please do your Con­sti­tu­tion­al duty!” In addi­tion to push­ing the law­mak­ers to appoint elec­tors, the email asked for a meet­ing to dis­cuss pur­su­ing an “audit” of the vote.

...

Bol­ick is mar­ried to Clint Bol­ick, an asso­ciate jus­tice of the Ari­zona Supreme Court, who worked with Clarence Thomas ear­ly in his career and has said he con­sid­ers the jus­tice a men­tor.

Shawn­na Bol­ick wrote back to Gin­ni Thomas on Nov. 10, 2020, “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” She gave Thomas guid­ance on how to sub­mit com­plaints about any of her expe­ri­ences with vot­er fraud in Ari­zona.

Bol­ick, who is now seek­ing the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion to be Arizona’s sec­re­tary of state, told The Post that she received tens of thou­sands of emails in the months after the elec­tion and respond­ed to Thomas in the same way she respond­ed to every­one else.

Thomas replied: “Fun that this came to you! Just part of our cam­paign to help states feel America’s eyes!!!”

...

On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden elec­tors in Ari­zona cast their votes, after the elec­tion results were cer­ti­fied by Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sec­re­tary of State Katie Hobbs and Repub­li­can Gov. Doug Ducey. On that same day, Bol­ick was among dozens of Ari­zona law­mak­ers who signed on to a let­ter to Con­gress call­ing for the state’s elec­toral votes to go to Trump or “be nul­li­fied com­plete­ly until a full foren­sic audit can be con­duct­ed.”

Bol­ick told The Post she signed on to that effort because she backed the idea of an audit, not because of any com­mu­ni­ca­tion she received from Thomas.
...

So who else in this CNP-cen­tric net­work was work­ing with Thomas on this lob­by­ing effort? Well, we have clues: around a week and a half after the elec­tion, the CNP’s PAC, CNP Action, cir­cu­lat­ed “guid­ance” to swing state leg­is­la­tors. That guid­ance advised vis­it­ing a par­tic­u­lar web­site “to report fraud and take action.” The site, everylegalvote.com, in turn took vis­i­tors to the freeroots.com web­page, which is the same site Gin­ni used to send her emails to no longer online. So who’s behind everylegalvote.com? We don’t know for sure, but the web­site ini­tial­ly claimed it was pro­duced in part­ner­ship with Unit­ed in Pur­pose, an orga­ni­za­tion that has host­ed the lun­cheon were Gin­ni Thomas presents her “Impact Awards”. But that claimed part­ner­ship with Unit­ed in Pur­pose only seemed to last a few days based on inter­net archives, to be replaced with a “Founders” sec­tion list­ing three enti­ties. And one of those enti­ties just hap­pens to be CNP mem­ber Rus­sell Ram­s­land’s Allied Secu­ri­ty Oper­a­tions Group (ASOG), which was ulti­mate­ly cen­tral to the orga­ni­za­tion­al efforts that result­ed in the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. Yes, everylegalvote.com ini­tial­ly claimed to be affil­i­at­ed with Unit­ed in Pur­pose, which appears to be affil­i­at­ed with CNP mem­ber Gin­ni Thomas but then decid­ed to affil­i­ate itself with CNP mem­ber Rus­sell Ram­s­land’s ASOG. And both Thomas and Ram­s­land were cen­tral to the CNP’s efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. So while it’s not entire­ly clear who exact­ly is behind everylegalvote.com, it’s pret­ty clear which shad­ow net­work is behind it:

...
Thomas sent the emails via freeroots.com, a web­site meant to give polit­i­cal orga­niz­ers an effi­cient means of con­duct­ing email cam­paigns. The email address of the sender in Thomas’s emails is dis­played as “Gin­ni Thomas.”

...

Thomas was then serv­ing on the board of CNP Action, the polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy arm of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. CNP Action was using its influ­ence in Repub­li­can cir­cles at the time to try to keep Trump in office. On Nov. 13, 2020, CNP Action held a work­shop titled “Elec­tion Results and Legal Bat­tles: What Now?” fea­tur­ing, among oth­er speak­ers, Cle­ta Mitchell, accord­ing to an agen­da that researcher Brent All­press pro­vid­ed to the left-lean­ing watch­dog group Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy, which pub­lished it that same month. Mitchell, a lawyer, assist­ed Trump in his efforts to over­turn Biden’s vic­to­ry in Geor­gia.

After that work­shop, the group cir­cu­lat­ed guid­ance to focus efforts on leg­is­la­tors in Penn­syl­va­nia, Geor­gia and Ari­zona. “Demand that they not aban­don their Con­sti­tu­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ties at a time such as this,” read the guid­ance, which was also obtained by All­press and first pub­lished by the Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy. It said to push for new elec­tors “in states where con­sti­tu­tion­al rights have been vio­lat­ed and evi­dence of sub­stan­tial fraud has been estab­lished.”

The guid­ance advised vis­it­ing the web­site everylegalvote.com “to report fraud and take action.”

Vis­i­tors to the site could click a but­ton and be tak­en to freeroots.com, accord­ing to web­pages pre­served by the Inter­net Archive’s Way­back Machine. That land­ing page urged vis­i­tors to press the “take action” but­ton to “email every swing House and Sen­ate leader in one easy click.”

Because that land­ing page is no longer online, it is no longer pos­si­ble to click through on the link. But lan­guage in Thomas’s first email aligns close­ly with lan­guage that appears in a pre­view when a Free­Roots link that was archived sev­er­al days after that email is shared on mes­sag­ing plat­forms.

The site everylegalvote.com ini­tial­ly said that it was pro­duced in part­ner­ship with Unit­ed in Pur­pose, a non­prof­it group known for gath­er­ing and deploy­ing data to gal­va­nize con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian vot­ers. That orga­ni­za­tion has host­ed the lun­cheons where Thomas presents her “Impact Awards.”

But the ref­er­ence to Unit­ed in Pur­pose was delet­ed with­in days. It was replaced with lan­guage iden­ti­fy­ing three “Found­ing Spon­sors”: the Texas secu­ri­ty firm Allied Secu­ri­ty Oper­a­tions Group, the Texas non­prof­it group Lib­er­ty Cen­ter for God and Coun­try, and the online talk show “Eco­nom­ic War Room.”
...

Sim­i­lar­ly, note the CNP ties to the freeroots.com site that everylegalvote.com direct­ed peo­ple to: FreeRoots.com appears to be owned by Eric Berg­er who is described as a CNP oper­a­tive. Plus, its email cam­paign was orga­nized by Act for Amer­i­ca. Recall how ACT for Amer­i­ca found and Chair­man Brigitte Gabriel is a CNP mem­ber. Also recall how Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist extrem­ist Matt Shea — who has a track record of plot­ting for mass vio­lence against Democ­rats and the impo­si­tion of a Domin­ion­ist theoc­ra­cy — is the founder of the Spokane chap­ter of ACT for Amer­i­ca. All signs are point­ing towards everylegalvote.com being just anoth­er exten­sion of the CNP’s exten­sive efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion:

...
The two-minute video it linked to, titled “A Word To Hero­ic Leg­is­la­tors,” has since been removed from YouTube for vio­lat­ing com­mu­ni­ty guide­lines. The video’s Web address, which is vis­i­ble in the email, was includ­ed in a Decem­ber 2020 newslet­ter writ­ten by activist Geof­frey Botkin, who appears to be the per­son fea­tured in the video.

Botkin, who has pub­lished numer­ous pod­casts and videos about the elec­tion and oth­er mat­ters, wrote in the newslet­ter that he had uploaded “A Word To Hero­ic Leg­is­la­tors” to anoth­er video host­ing ser­vice. The video remains vis­i­ble there.

...

The video link and some of the lan­guage in the email match lan­guage that appears in an archived ver­sion of the land­ing page for a freeroots.com email cam­paign orga­nized by Act for Amer­i­ca, a group that has accused U.S. Mus­lim orga­ni­za­tions of sup­port­ing ter­ror­ism and of try­ing to impose Islam­ic law across the coun­try.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Act for Amer­i­ca did not respond to requests for com­ment.
...

Yes, while it is true that Gin­ni Thomas sim­ply sent a pair of Ari­zona law­mak­ers a pair of form let­ters about the elec­tion results, it’s also true that the form let­ters were cre­at­ed the same CNP shad­ow net­work that Gin­ni Thomas held a lead­er­ship role it. It’s also true that she was speak­ing as the wife of sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice. And it’s also true that Gin­ni Thomas will like­ly expe­ri­ence absolute­ly no seri­ous reper­cus­sions for her seri­ous con­flicts of inter­est or any­thing else asso­ci­at­ed with her exten­sive efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results. So if there’s repeat of a ‘stolen elec­tion’ in 2024, watch out for Gin­ni Thomas and the anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic CNP form let­ters designed to per­suade offi­cials to over­turn the results. She clear­ly knows how to use those things.

The annu­al con­ven­tion of the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion (NRA) is gen­er­al­ly a gross affair. But this year’s gath­er­ing in Hous­ton took on an extra gross fla­vor com­ing just days after the ele­men­tary school mas­sacre in Uvalde, Texas, car­ried out by an 18 year old gun­man who rushed out to buy the weapons used in the attack on his 18th birth­day, in accor­dance with Texas state law where 18 year olds can pur­chase an AR-15 with basi­cal­ly no restric­tions or train­ing. Ques­tions about the NRA’s moral com­pass and whose agen­da it serves have long been part of the US’s post-mass shoot­ing rit­u­al, along with all the ‘thoughts and prayers’ from the vic­tims. Ques­tions that hap­pened to coin­cide with this year’s NRA con­ven­tion.

So in light of the many ques­tions raised about what is moti­vat­ing the NRA’s agen­da, here’s a pair of arti­cle excerpts that help answer that ques­tion. Sur­prise! It’s the CNP behind the scenes. Again. As always.

Yes, that’s the unde­ni­able pic­ture that emerges when we make a few sim­ple obser­va­tions about the remark­able num­ber of CNP mem­bers and affil­i­ates involved with the NRA. And in par­tic­u­lar the reli­gious lead­ers who active­ly cul­ti­vate a kind of warped form of Chris­tian­i­ty that has effec­tive­ly turned the gun in the new Gold­en Calf. A form of Chris­tian­i­ty that is put on dis­play for the pub­lic at every NRA con­fer­ence in the form of a prayer break­fast. As we’ll see, hav­ing a CNP mem­ber speak at this NRA prayer break­fast appears to have been part of this annu­al rit­u­al too.

For exam­ple:

* Jonathan Fal­well, son of found­ing CNP mem­ber Jer­ry Fal­well, spoke at the prayer break­fast in 2010 and 2015.

* CNP mem­ber Oliv­er North spoke in 2011 and 2018.

* CNP mem­ber Gen­er­al Jer­ry Boykin spoke in 2012.

* Chris­t­ian Leader and for­mer CNP excec­u­tive direc­tor Bob Rec­cord spoke in 2013.

* Franklin Gra­ham spoke in 2014. While Franklin Gra­ham, who spoke in 2014, isn’t list­ed as a CNP mem­ber, the VP of the Bil­ly Gra­ham Evan­ge­lis­tic Asso­ci­a­tion, Tom Phillips, is on the list.

* James Dob­son, is anoth­er long­stand­ing CNP mem­ber, spoke in 2016.

* CNP mem­ber Ken Black­well spoke in 2019.

As we can see, the NRA’s annu­al prayer break­fast is a CNP-blessed event. But there’s anoth­er major CNP con­nec­tion to the NRA: Long-time NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre is also a lead­ing CNP mem­ber. The NRA real­ly is an exten­sion of the CNP. So when we’re forced to once against ques­tion the basic moral com­pass of the peo­ple run­ning the NRA, it’s worth keep­ing in mind that this is effec­tive­ly the same as ques­tion the moral com­pass of the peo­ple behind the shad­ow net­work that brought us the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion and is still ded­i­cat­ed to achiev­ing pow­er through any means nec­es­sary. Includ­ing vio­lence, obvi­ous­ly:

Word & Way

The NRA’s Thoughts & Prayers

May 26, 2022
author: Bri­an Kay­lor & Beau Under­wood, Word&Way

“I’m not going to talk about bas­ket­ball.”

Steve Kerr, head coach of the Gold­en State War­riors, had a dif­fer­ent top­ic on his mind than the NBA play­offs when he sat down for his pregame press con­fer­ence on Tues­day (May 24).

“When are we going to do some­thing?” he asked angri­ly before turn­ing his ire to Sen. Mitch McConnell and oth­er U.S. Sen­a­tors opposed to leg­is­la­tion to reduce gun vio­lence. “Are you going to put your own desire for pow­er ahead of the lives of our chil­dren, and our elder­ly, and our church­go­ers? Because that’s what it looks like.”

In Dal­las for a game with the Mav­er­icks, the mass killing of 19 chil­dren and two teach­ers at a Uvalde, Texas, ele­men­tary school ear­li­er that day prompt­ed Kerr’s out­rage. The mur­der­ous ram­page by an 18-year-old using legal­ly-pur­chased guns was the worst school shoot­ing since the 2012 mas­sacre at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School in New­town, Con­necti­cut.

As Kerr not­ed, the Texas mas­sacre did not occur in iso­la­tion. It came just days after a racist shoot­ing spree in a Buf­fa­lo, New York, gro­cery store by anoth­er 18-year-old that left 10 peo­ple dead. The White shoot­er tar­get­ed a Black com­mu­ni­ty and cit­ed as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion the “great replace­ment the­o­ry” (a White Suprema­cist idea once on the fringe but now espoused by right-wing media fig­ures and con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal lead­ers).

Kerr’s dia­tribe also fol­lowed a shoot­ing at the Irvine Tai­wanese Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Lagu­na Woods, Cal­i­for­nia, where a man moti­vat­ed by polit­i­cal hatred opened fire into a large crowd, killing one and wound­ing oth­ers before atten­dees sub­dued him.

While each event con­tains unique hor­rors, the fre­quen­cy of such occur­rences risks a col­lec­tive accep­tance of these episodes as an inevitable, even nor­mal, part of life. As Kerr cau­tioned, “We can’t get numb to this.”

Many on social media right­ful­ly denounce the blithe offer­ings of “thoughts and prayers” by elect­ed offi­cials as excus­ing inac­tion. Yet, even after years of crit­i­cism about that phrase — and years of politi­cians doing noth­ing to lessen gun vio­lence — many politi­cians use the phrase and then do noth­ing. The book of James reminds us that “faith with­out works is dead,” but there’s actu­al­ly some­thing worse than prayers with­out action. Some offer prayers of sup­port for the very groups con­tribut­ing to the dead­ly inac­tion.

In this edi­tion of A Pub­lic Wit­ness, we look at the prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers pre­vent­ing us from doing some­thing about gun vio­lence, along with the Chris­t­ian lead­ers aid­ing and abet­ting their cause. Then we denounce the idol­a­try that demands we sac­ri­fice our chil­dren.

Switch­ing Off the Safe­ty

More restric­tive gun laws that would make our com­mu­ni­ties safer are wild­ly pop­u­lar with Amer­i­cans. A 2021 poll by Pew and Gallup found 85% of Repub­li­cans and 90% of Democ­rats believed that those with men­tal ill­ness shouldn’t be allowed to pur­chase firearms. In that same sur­vey, 70% of Repub­li­cans and 92% of Democ­rats sup­port­ed requir­ing back­ground checks as part of a gun sale. With so much obvi­ous com­mon ground to be found, what’s stop­ping pol­i­cy­mak­ers from act­ing?

Any answer to that ques­tion must begin with the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, which active­ly lob­bies against back­ground checks and under­mines efforts to keep firearms away from those with men­tal ill­ness. Over the last 25 years, the orga­ni­za­tion has spent hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars influ­enc­ing elec­tions, leg­is­la­tion, and reg­u­la­tions to advance its pro-gun agen­da. (And it also finds itself under legal inves­ti­ga­tion for finan­cial mis­con­duct and cor­rup­tion.)

The NRA wasn’t always this way. Orig­i­nal­ly formed after the Civ­il War to improve marks­man­ship among north­ern­ers (who, appar­ent­ly, had worse aim than their south­ern coun­ter­parts — but still won) and pro­mote firearms safe­ty, the orga­ni­za­tion spent much of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry lob­by­ing for gun con­trol. Tes­ti­fy­ing before Con­gress in 1939, the organization’s pres­i­dent told law­mak­ers, “I have nev­er believed in the gen­er­al prac­tice of car­ry­ing weapons. I do not believe in the gen­er­al promis­cu­ous tot­ing of guns. I think it should be sharply restrict­ed and only under licens­es.”

Even as recent­ly as the late 1980s, the NRA accept­ed a ban on ful­ly-auto­mat­ic weapons as a com­pro­mise in advanc­ing its oth­er pri­or­i­ties through Con­gress. That moment hints at two forces today pres­sur­ing the NRA towards a less con­cil­ia­to­ry approach. The first is pres­sure from the NRA’s most extreme mem­bers. Indeed, more extreme gun rights groups use any per­ceived dis­play of weak­ness by the NRA in response to mass shoot­ings to steal mem­bers. This threat cre­ates an incen­tive for the NRA to oppose any restric­tion on gun own­er­ship.

The sec­ond force is the finan­cial sup­port pro­vid­ed by the gun indus­try itself. The Vio­lence Pol­i­cy Cen­ter exten­sive­ly doc­u­ment­ed how gun man­u­fac­tur­ers, sell­ers, and oth­er “cor­po­rate part­ners” help under­write the NRA’s oper­a­tional and leg­isla­tive activ­i­ties. These enti­ties have a vest­ed inter­est in loos­en­ing and pre­vent­ing restric­tions on gun sales.

“Today’s Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion is essen­tial­ly a de fac­to trade asso­ci­a­tion mas­querad­ing as a shoot­ing sports foun­da­tion,” VPC Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Josh Sug­ar­mann told NPR in 2018. “So, it’s very impor­tant to under­stand the polit­i­cal bat­tle in terms of the inter­ests of the indus­try and in terms of mar­ket­ing.”

Sug­ar­mann added that instead of acknowl­edg­ing their cyn­i­cal moti­va­tions, the NRA por­trays its efforts “in terms of free­dom and his­to­ry and, you know, sort of the sacred nature of firearms.”

Bless­ing the NRA

In a macabre coin­ci­dence, the NRA will hold its annu­al con­ven­tion this week­end in Hous­ton, just hours from Uvalde. While some politi­cians may decide not to par­tic­i­pate and more pro­test­ers than nor­mal might gath­er out­side, the show will go on. The fes­tiv­i­ties include a prayer break­fast, an annu­al part of meet­ings for more than two decades.

For $45, one can attend the prayer break­fast spon­sored by Tri­ji­con (an arms man­u­fac­tur­er that sparked con­tro­ver­sy in 2010 for putting Bible verse ref­er­ences on gun sights sold to the U.S. mil­i­tary), Kel-Tec (a gun man­u­fac­tur­er whose prod­ucts include semi-auto­mat­ic guns), and Uni­ver­sal Coin & Bul­lion (that sells sil­ver coins hon­or­ing the NRA and Don­ald Trump). The fea­tured speak­ers will be Bap­tist evan­ge­list Tim Lee and North Car­oli­na Lt. Gov. Mark Robin­son.

Lee, who serves as chair of the board of trustees at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty in Lynch­burg, Vir­ginia, describes him­self on Twit­ter as “Chris­t­ian, Hus­band, Father, Papaw, Evan­ge­list, Marine, NRA, Pro­Life, Patri­ot, VietVet, #Pur­ple­Heart.” After Tuesday’s dead­ly shoot­ing, he tweet­ed that the “heart­break­ing” shoot­ing occurred because our soci­ety allows abor­tion: “When kids hear adults say that it’s ok to kill babies (abor­tion) then all respect for human lives is gone. #Ulvade #Prayers­ForU­valde”

Robin­son, who is already run­ning for gov­er­nor in 2024, gar­nered nation­al atten­tion last year for anti-LGBTQ com­ments he made at a Bap­tist church. His polit­i­cal career launched with a 2018 speech made before a city coun­cil meet­ing against can­cel­ing a gun show after the dead­ly shoot­ing at Stone­man Dou­glas High School in Park­land, Flori­da, where 14 stu­dents and three staff were killed. Now his cam­paign web­site lists his top two issues as “2nd Amend­ment” and “Pro-Life.”

Over the years, sev­er­al sig­nif­i­cant Chris­t­ian fig­ures have also giv­en their bless­ing — and claimed to bestow God’s as well — on this annu­al cel­e­bra­tion of killing machines. So, we looked through the records to find those who, since 2008, par­tic­i­pat­ed in an event to, as the prophet Isa­iah com­plained, “call evil good and good evil.”

Jonathan Fal­well, senior pas­tor of the Bap­tist church his father found­ed in Lynch­burg, Vir­ginia, pro­vid­ed the prayer break­fast keynote remarks in 2010 and 2015. Accord­ing to the NRA’s brief report in 2015, “Rev. Fal­well drew on the firearms indus­try to pro­vide a life les­son: Just as gun com­pa­nies con­stant­ly strive to make bet­ter prod­ucts, he said, peo­ple should con­tin­u­al­ly try to improve their lives by serv­ing oth­ers. He urged atten­dees to live with com­pas­sion, to be respect­ful, to inter­vene when friends and strangers alike need help, and to seek the absolute truth. In a lighter moment, he admit­ted to stretch­ing the truth a bit when it comes to inform­ing his wife of addi­tions to his gun col­lec­tion.”

In 2016, James Dob­son focused his remarks on the need for fathers to spend time with their sons, which could par­tic­u­lar­ly be done by teach­ing boys to hunt and fish. Dob­son had pre­vi­ous­ly blamed the 2012 shoot­ing at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School on God’s wrath over abor­tion and same-sex mar­riage. Guns, on the oth­er hand, war­rant­ed Dobson’s sup­port and prayers. Tim Clin­ton, who co-hosts “Dr. James Dobson’s Fam­i­ly Talk” (the show Dob­son cre­at­ed after leav­ing Focus on the Fam­i­ly), spoke at the break­fast in 2009 and 2014.

Franklin Gra­ham, who spoke in 2014, joked he was “help­ing to spon­sor the break­fast because of all the ACOGs and oth­er sights I have bought from Tri­ji­con.” Gra­ham deliv­ered an evan­ge­lis­tic address about “the wages of sin” and how “Jesus is com­ing back,” but appar­ent­ly saw no dis­con­nect between the NRA and real­iz­ing the peace­able king­dom. Instead of see­ing guns as the prob­lem, Gra­ham had pre­vi­ous­ly blamed the Sandy Hook shoot­ing on vio­lent video games and for the nation hav­ing “tak­en God out of our school” (by which he means no longer coerc­ing kids to recite gov­ern­ment prayers). He again blamed the “enter­tain­ment indus­try” and defend­ed guns after the Uvalde shoot­ing.

Oth­er min­is­ters at the events have includ­ed South­ern Bap­tist pas­tor Ike Reighard in 2011 and Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy head Bob Rec­cord in 2013.

Repub­li­cans who run on their Chris­t­ian faith have also been top choic­es for NRA prayer break­fasts, which fits with the par­ti­san gospel on dis­play. For instance, Allen West, a con­tro­ver­sial for­mer U.S. con­gress­man from Flori­da (and poten­tial future NRA leader), spoke dur­ing the 2017 and 2019 events. He argued in 2019 that to prac­tice their reli­gion, they need­ed guns: “Our found­ing fathers wrote, the very first free­dom we have, is free­dom of reli­gion. And then they backed that up with anoth­er free­dom.” He also drew from Judges 7 to urge NRA atten­dees to fight for God even when they seem out­num­bered.

“God ordered Gideon to send all but 300 of them home,” West said. “You have to trust God, even when it seems God is being unfair. Test­ing of faith reveals you have more … faith. We walk by faith, not by sight, because the vic­to­ry has been won by our Lord and Sav­ior.”

For­mer Ohio Sec­re­tary of State Ken Black­well (and Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil senior fel­low) insist­ed in 2019 that Sec­ond Amend­ment rights didn’t come from gov­ern­ment but God. Urg­ing NRA mem­bers to “be engaged both offen­sive­ly and defen­sive­ly” in fight­ing for lib­er­ties, he invoked Eph­esians 6: “My clar­i­on call is to put on the armor [of God] and pre­pare to do bat­tle.” Black­well also ref­er­enced Jesus’s words in John 3 about “those who would do us evil, love the dark­ness.”

“Broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ,” he added, “now is the time to engage and punch holes in the dark­ness.”

This effort to take spir­i­tu­al metaphors lit­er­al­ly occurs through­out the events. Such as from Iran-con­tra fig­ure Oliv­er North in 2018 as he talked about “four Chris­t­ian virtues impor­tant to NRA and to all of us.” After allud­ing to Paul about need­ing to “fight the good fight,” North added, “You see, that’s the most impor­tant les­son of all: We’re in a fight. We’re in a bru­tal bat­tle to pre­serve the lib­er­ties that the good Lord presents us.” North also spoke at the 2011 break­fast along with U.S. Rep. Adri­an Smith of Nebras­ka. Jer­ry Boykin, a for­mer mil­i­tary offi­cial who is now exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, spoke in 2012.

The spon­sors also often speak at the break­fasts, mean­ing the events have includ­ed tes­ti­monies and devo­tion­als from gun man­u­fac­tur­ers. Like in 2014 when Tom Mun­son from Tri­ji­con said the “prayer break­fast is the high­light of the NRA con­ven­tion for us.” He added, “The very con­cept of free­dom comes from the divine hand of God.”

Help­ing sanc­ti­fy the NRA gath­er­ings, the break­fasts also include Chris­t­ian wor­ship by well-known musi­cians. For instance, Scot­ty Wilbanks of Third Day sang in 2017 and 2018, Charles Billings­ley in 2010 and 2015, Mered­ith Andrews in 2014, and Bryan White in 2012.

While the reli­gious rhetoric at NRA con­ven­tions is usu­al­ly over­looked, Bob­by Ross Jr. cov­ered it for the Wash­ing­ton Post in 2018. He not­ed how for­mer base­ball play­er Adam LaRoche paused dur­ing his tes­ti­mo­ny at the prayer break­fast to take off a sweater and reveal a T‑shirt that drew applause: “Jesus loves me and my guns” (since appar­ent­ly he’s “read­ing” this “Bible”).

“Jesus always was and always will be a badass,” LaRoche said. “Jesus is humanity’s great­est war­rior and is call­ing us to fol­low.”

But a quote from an attendee Ross spoke to might best cap­ture this effort to spir­i­tu­al­ize gun rights and espouse a Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism that con­flates Amer­i­can and Chris­t­ian iden­ti­ties.

“It’s about God, coun­try, and the pro­tec­tion of our free­doms,” one attendee said. “We don’t think we can be good Amer­i­cans with­out this core val­ue of Chris­t­ian faith in Christ that gives us our free­doms of every­thing, and that’s what the NRA is.”

The NRA’s Hell

As the blood of more slaugh­tered chil­dren cries out from the ground, prepa­ra­tions con­tin­ue for this weekend’s NRA con­ven­tion. We reached out to Tim Lee and Mark Robin­son to see if they planned to still speak at the NRA’s prayer break­fast in light of the school mas­sacre. While Robinson’s office sent a gener­ic state­ment about the shoot­ing that didn’t answer our ques­tion, Lee told us, “If they still have the event I’ll speak and address what has hap­pened. A sad day for Texas and a sad day for Amer­i­ca.”

We agree it’s a sad day. But it’s also a sad state for Chris­tian­i­ty. Even after Sandy Hook, Stone­man Dou­glas, and now Robb Ele­men­tary — not to men­tion the numer­ous oth­er mass shoot­ings at church­es, the­aters, con­certs, restau­rants, gro­cery stores, homes, and basi­cal­ly any oth­er place in our soci­ety — some Chris­t­ian lead­ers still try to bap­tize the death cult that will gath­er in Texas this week­end.

After Tuesday’s shoot­ing, we talked to Shane Clai­borne, co-author of Beat­ing Guns: Hope for Peo­ple Who Are Weary of Vio­lence. He crit­i­cized “the pas­tors that bless this group that is lit­er­al­ly con­tra­dict­ing near­ly every word of the Ser­mon on the Mount.”

“I’m going to go straight to Jesus and say we can­not serve two mas­ters,” he told us. “And we real­ly are at a cross­roads where we’ve got to choose: Are we going to fol­low Jesus or the NRA? And lit­er­al­ly, you couldn’t come up with much more con­trast­ing mes­sages. The gospel of Jesus — turn the oth­er cheek, love our ene­mies — stands in direct oppo­si­tion to the rhetoric of the NRA — stand your ground. The gun and the cross give us two very dif­fer­ent ver­sions of pow­er.”

That’s why Obery Hen­dricks, a vis­it­ing research schol­ar at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, wrote in Chris­tians Against Chris­tian­i­ty about “the unholy alliance between right-wing evan­gel­i­cals and the NRA.” He com­plained that the annu­al prayer break­fast tries to add “a veneer of Chris­t­ian reli­gios­i­ty” to the NRA’s dead­ly agen­da.

Clai­borne sees this as more than just a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the­ol­o­gy but even an prob­lem of idol­a­try. He point­ed to the words of J. War­ren Cas­sidy, a for­mer NRA exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, who said, “You would get a far bet­ter under­stand­ing if you approached us [the NRA] as if you were approach­ing one of the great reli­gions of the world.” Thus, Clai­borne crit­i­cized the “idol­a­try of the NRA.”

“Idols are things that we put our trust in. They’re not God, but we treat them like they are,” Clai­borne told us. “We put this sort of sacred rev­er­ence into things that should only be giv­en to God. And it’s been said that idols are things that we are will­ing to die for, kill for, and sac­ri­fice our chil­dren for. And lit­er­al­ly, by that def­i­n­i­tion, I think guns would have that sort of unrea­son­able ded­i­ca­tion.”

“Guns are not made in the image of God but chil­dren are,” he added.

...

———–

“The NRA’s Thoughts & Prayers” by Bri­an Kay­lor and Beau Under­wood; Word & Way; 05/26/2022

“In a macabre coin­ci­dence, the NRA will hold its annu­al con­ven­tion this week­end in Hous­ton, just hours from Uvalde. While some politi­cians may decide not to par­tic­i­pate and more pro­test­ers than nor­mal might gath­er out­side, the show will go on. The fes­tiv­i­ties include a prayer break­fast, an annu­al part of meet­ings for more than two decades.”

Macabre indeed. The NRA’s Memo­r­i­al Day week­end con­ven­tion just hap­pened to be held in Hous­ton, hours from the site of the Uvalde mas­sacre. And it’s even going to include an annu­al prayer break­fast. Like a macabre cher­ry on top, where we find one major con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian fig­ure after anoth­er giv­ing speech­es over the years. Fig­ures with exten­sive ties to the CNP. For exam­ple, there’s Jonathan Fal­well, who spoke in 2010 and 2015. His father Jer­ry Fal­well was a found­ing CNP mem­ber. James Dob­son is anoth­er long­stand­ing CNP mem­ber, spoke in 2016. And while Franklin Gra­ham, who spoke in 2014, isn’t list­ed as a CNP mem­ber, the VP of the Bil­ly Gra­ham Evan­ge­lis­tic Asso­ci­a­tion, Tom Phillips, is on the list. And then there’s Chris­t­ian leader Bob Rec­cord, the for­mer CNP Exec­u­tive Direc­tor (2010) who spoke a the 2013 prayer break­fast. The NRA’s prayer break­fast real­ly is a CNP event too. A CNP sanc­tioned prayer-focused event designed to give the NRA’s amoral agen­da a pati­na of decen­cy:

...
Over the years, sev­er­al sig­nif­i­cant Chris­t­ian fig­ures have also giv­en their bless­ing — and claimed to bestow God’s as well — on this annu­al cel­e­bra­tion of killing machines. So, we looked through the records to find those who, since 2008, par­tic­i­pat­ed in an event to, as the prophet Isa­iah com­plained, “call evil good and good evil.”

Jonathan Fal­well, senior pas­tor of the Bap­tist church his father found­ed in Lynch­burg, Vir­ginia, pro­vid­ed the prayer break­fast keynote remarks in 2010 and 2015. Accord­ing to the NRA’s brief report in 2015, “Rev. Fal­well drew on the firearms indus­try to pro­vide a life les­son: Just as gun com­pa­nies con­stant­ly strive to make bet­ter prod­ucts, he said, peo­ple should con­tin­u­al­ly try to improve their lives by serv­ing oth­ers. He urged atten­dees to live with com­pas­sion, to be respect­ful, to inter­vene when friends and strangers alike need help, and to seek the absolute truth. In a lighter moment, he admit­ted to stretch­ing the truth a bit when it comes to inform­ing his wife of addi­tions to his gun col­lec­tion.”

In 2016, James Dob­son focused his remarks on the need for fathers to spend time with their sons, which could par­tic­u­lar­ly be done by teach­ing boys to hunt and fish. Dob­son had pre­vi­ous­ly blamed the 2012 shoot­ing at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School on God’s wrath over abor­tion and same-sex mar­riage. Guns, on the oth­er hand, war­rant­ed Dobson’s sup­port and prayers. Tim Clin­ton, who co-hosts “Dr. James Dobson’s Fam­i­ly Talk” (the show Dob­son cre­at­ed after leav­ing Focus on the Fam­i­ly), spoke at the break­fast in 2009 and 2014.

Franklin Gra­ham, who spoke in 2014, joked he was “help­ing to spon­sor the break­fast because of all the ACOGs and oth­er sights I have bought from Tri­ji­con.” Gra­ham deliv­ered an evan­ge­lis­tic address about “the wages of sin” and how “Jesus is com­ing back,” but appar­ent­ly saw no dis­con­nect between the NRA and real­iz­ing the peace­able king­dom. Instead of see­ing guns as the prob­lem, Gra­ham had pre­vi­ous­ly blamed the Sandy Hook shoot­ing on vio­lent video games and for the nation hav­ing “tak­en God out of our school” (by which he means no longer coerc­ing kids to recite gov­ern­ment prayers). He again blamed the “enter­tain­ment indus­try” and defend­ed guns after the Uvalde shoot­ing.

Oth­er min­is­ters at the events have includ­ed South­ern Bap­tist pas­tor Ike Reighard in 2011 and Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy head Bob Rec­cord in 2013.
...

And then there’s all the polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary fig­ures with CNP ties who have also spo­ken at the NRA prayer break­fast in recent years. CNP mem­ber Ken Black­well spoke in 2019. Oliv­er North spoke in 2011 and 2018. And Gen­er­al Jer­ry Boykin spoke in 2012. All CNP mem­bers. Again, it’s like there’s been a CNP fig­ure speak­ing at the prayer break­fast basi­cal­ly every year over the last decade at least. Because this isn’t just an NRA prayer break­fast. It’s an NRA/CNP joint prayer break­fast:

...
For­mer Ohio Sec­re­tary of State Ken Black­well (and Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil senior fel­low) insist­ed in 2019 that Sec­ond Amend­ment rights didn’t come from gov­ern­ment but God. Urg­ing NRA mem­bers to “be engaged both offen­sive­ly and defen­sive­ly” in fight­ing for lib­er­ties, he invoked Eph­esians 6: “My clar­i­on call is to put on the armor [of God] and pre­pare to do bat­tle.” Black­well also ref­er­enced Jesus’s words in John 3 about “those who would do us evil, love the dark­ness.”

“Broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ,” he added, “now is the time to engage and punch holes in the dark­ness.”

This effort to take spir­i­tu­al metaphors lit­er­al­ly occurs through­out the events. Such as from Iran-con­tra fig­ure Oliv­er North in 2018 as he talked about “four Chris­t­ian virtues impor­tant to NRA and to all of us.” After allud­ing to Paul about need­ing to “fight the good fight,” North added, “You see, that’s the most impor­tant les­son of all: We’re in a fight. We’re in a bru­tal bat­tle to pre­serve the lib­er­ties that the good Lord presents us.” North also spoke at the 2011 break­fast along with U.S. Rep. Adri­an Smith of Nebras­ka. Jer­ry Boykin, a for­mer mil­i­tary offi­cial who is now exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, spoke in 2012.
...

Final­ly, note how the rad­i­cal­iza­tion of the NRA is real­ly a phe­nom­e­na of the last four decades. It’s worth keep­ing in mind that the CNP itself is a phe­nom­e­na of the last four decades too, as the man­i­fes­ta­tion of the merg­er of cor­po­rate, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic right-wing move­ments. In oth­er words, fas­cism. The mod­ern rad­i­cal­ized NRA is just anoth­er man­i­fes­ta­tion of that larg­er fas­cist trend:

...
The NRA wasn’t always this way. Orig­i­nal­ly formed after the Civ­il War to improve marks­man­ship among north­ern­ers (who, appar­ent­ly, had worse aim than their south­ern coun­ter­parts — but still won) and pro­mote firearms safe­ty, the orga­ni­za­tion spent much of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry lob­by­ing for gun con­trol. Tes­ti­fy­ing before Con­gress in 1939, the organization’s pres­i­dent told law­mak­ers, “I have nev­er believed in the gen­er­al prac­tice of car­ry­ing weapons. I do not believe in the gen­er­al promis­cu­ous tot­ing of guns. I think it should be sharply restrict­ed and only under licens­es.”

Even as recent­ly as the late 1980s, the NRA accept­ed a ban on ful­ly-auto­mat­ic weapons as a com­pro­mise in advanc­ing its oth­er pri­or­i­ties through Con­gress. That moment hints at two forces today pres­sur­ing the NRA towards a less con­cil­ia­to­ry approach. The first is pres­sure from the NRA’s most extreme mem­bers. Indeed, more extreme gun rights groups use any per­ceived dis­play of weak­ness by the NRA in response to mass shoot­ings to steal mem­bers. This threat cre­ates an incen­tive for the NRA to oppose any restric­tion on gun own­er­ship.
...

But there’s one more major CNP tie that we have to men­tion: Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO since 1991. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, LaPierre has anoth­er role as a lead­ing mem­ber of the CNP:

Sojurn­ers

Who Poi­soned Talk Radio?
Behind the secre­tive net­work that con­vinced Amer­i­cans they can­not trust East Coast “elites.” An inter­view with inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Anne Nel­son.

By Jonathan Wil­son-Hart­grove
May 2020

ANNE NELSON IS a child of Still­wa­ter, Okla. Though she left home to attend Yale Uni­ver­si­ty, trav­eled as a reporter to Cen­tral Amer­i­ca in the 1980s, and has lived in New York City for four decades, Nel­son stays con­nect­ed to her home­town.

In 2004, while vis­it­ing fam­i­ly back in Okla­homa, she noticed some­thing about the con­ver­sa­tions on talk radio as she drove across town. Peo­ple in Okla­homa were not sim­ply pro­cess­ing the news through dif­fer­ent fil­ters than her neigh­bors in New York City. They were get­ting dif­fer­ent news—a whole dif­fer­ent sto­ry about what was sup­pos­ed­ly real­ly hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca. A good reporter, Nel­son want­ed to know why.

Her research led her to a group called the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. Found­ed in 1981 by extreme con­ser­v­a­tives who cut their teeth in right-wing pol­i­tics and the strug­gle for pow­er with­in the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion in the 1970s, this lit­tle-known net­work brought togeth­er Repub­li­can polit­i­cal oper­a­tives and preach­ers of the new Reli­gious Right with inde­pen­dent radio and media com­pa­nies. In the words of Richard DeVos, a long­time mem­ber, the CNP became a coor­di­nat­ing com­mit­tee for the “donors and the doers” of reac­tionary right-wing pol­i­tics. A strange con­ver­sa­tion on talk radio led Nel­son into the inner work­ings of an elite net­work that has labored for four decades to con­vince every­day Amer­i­cans in the heart­land that they can­not trust East Coast “elites.”
This appears in the May 2020 issue of Sojourn­ers

In Nelson’s recent book Shad­ow Net­work: Media, Mon­ey, and the Secret Hub of the Rad­i­cal Right, the long­time pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia University’s School of Jour­nal­ism and School of Inter­na­tion­al and Pub­lic Affairs invites read­ers to see what’s hap­pen­ing in the Unit­ed States today as a prod­uct of the pro­pa­gan­da that CNP pro­duces. Any­one who has been con­found­ed by the will­ing­ness of some Chris­tians to march in lock­step with Don­ald Trump and the Repub­li­can Par­ty through the per­son­al scan­dals and polit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies of the past four years would ben­e­fit from plac­ing a list of the char­ac­ters from Nelson’s new book beside their dai­ly news source. Peo­ple who have defend­ed Trump from the White House—Steve Ban­non, Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway—have in fact been con­nect­ed through the CNP for decades to the white evangelicals—James Dob­son, Tony Perkins, and Ralph Reed among them—who have been most eager to praise Trump as a cham­pi­on of “reli­gious val­ues.” On the same list, less rec­og­niz­able names point to radio and tele­vi­sion net­works that offer an alter­na­tive sto­ry to the fact-based jour­nal­ism Trump and his enablers attack as “fake news,” to the data com­pa­nies that empow­er tar­get­ed polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, and to the mon­ey that makes all of this pos­si­ble.

Crit­i­cal books in recent years, such as Jane Mayer’s Dark Mon­ey and Nan­cy MacLean’s Democ­ra­cy in Chains, have uncov­ered the influ­ence of big mon­ey in efforts to under­mine Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. But in an era of the most extreme inequal­i­ty since the Gild­ed Age, how do oil-rich plu­to­crats per­suade every­day Amer­i­cans that some­one like Don­ald Trump rep­re­sents a pop­ulist agen­da? The answer to that ques­tion has every­thing to do with the way Chris­t­ian val­ues have been reframed in Amer­i­can pub­lic life by mem­bers of the CNP over the past 40 years.

As a grow­ing move­ment of Chris­tians orga­nizes to chal­lenge the Reli­gious Right, Shad­ow Net­work is an impor­tant resource. Nel­son, who is her­self a mem­ber of the Epis­co­pal Church, sat down with me to talk about how her research can inform faith-root­ed orga­niz­ing to reclaim democ­ra­cy for the com­mon good.

Jonathan Wil­son-Hart­grove: As an inves­tiga­tive reporter, you’ve writ­ten a book that takes read­ers into the heart of the insti­tu­tion­al net­work that con­nects the Reli­gious Right to the NRA, the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, right-wing media, and the Repub­li­can Par­ty. It’s a wild ride. What got you start­ed on the path that made it pos­si­ble for you to write this book?

Anne Nel­son: I wrote Shad­ow Net­work out of a sense of civic duty. I observed some trends in our nation­al life that were anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic and detri­men­tal to our pub­lic wel­fare. I’m deeply con­cerned by the epi­dem­ic of gun vio­lence in our schools, the grow­ing dis­dain for sci­ence and fact-based report­ing, and, gravest of all, the cam­paigns against cli­mate sci­ence and envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions. My research gave me some insight into the under­ly­ing mechan­ics that achieved these mea­sures, and I dropped my oth­er projects in 2016 to doc­u­ment them in this book.

As some­one raised in the South­ern Bap­tist church, I was struck by the way you see so much of the extrem­ism in Amer­i­can life today root­ed in the con­ser­v­a­tive takeover of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion in the 1970s. Why was that strug­gle with­in America’s largest Protes­tant denom­i­na­tion so impor­tant to what would fol­low in pub­lic life?

It is indeed extra­or­di­nary that indi­vid­u­als con­nect­ed to the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion should play such an out­sized role in our nation­al life. I see three major fac­tors. The first is that, over a peri­od when main­line Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions were shrink­ing in mem­ber­ship and influ­ence, the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion was grow­ing and exert­ing increas­ing influ­ence over oth­er evan­gel­i­cal sects.

The sec­ond is that the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion is extreme­ly well rep­re­sent­ed in Texas, Okla­homa, and Louisiana, which, com­bined, amount to a vir­tu­al petro-state in terms of the oil industry’s sway over eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal life, and there’s been a sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship between the Bap­tists and the oil inter­ests of the region.

Third, the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion was found­ed to defend slave­own­ers before the Civ­il War. I don’t see the issue of race play­ing out in the same way, but I do per­ceive many echoes of Civ­il War-era resent­ment of fed­er­al author­i­ty in its cul­ture.

Same here. Not least in the ways this move­ment has focused on “state’s rights.” Paul Weyrich, the key orga­niz­er of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) in its begin­nings, saw the impor­tance of state gov­ern­ments to his goal of sub­vert­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al democ­ra­cy. What has this move­ment done in state­hous­es to ensure its agen­da can move for­ward with­out pop­u­lar sup­port?

The move­ment I describe in Shad­ow Net­work has devot­ed major resources and ener­gy to win­ning state-lev­el elec­tions, includ­ing state leg­is­la­tures. It is com­mon for them to pilot bills in cer­tain states, to lever­age them to oth­ers through orga­ni­za­tions such as the State Pol­i­cy Net­work and the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil. That’s one rea­son we’re see­ing so many “copy­cat” bills in areas such as lim­it­ing women’s repro­duc­tive rights and gun con­trol.

I noticed when Russ­ian agent Maria Buti­na was arrest­ed, peo­ple were ask­ing why she had so many con­nec­tions with both the NRA and the Reli­gious Right. Short answer: The CNP. Can you talk about the NRA and the role it plays in the CNP?

Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, is a lead­ing mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. The NRA claims some 5 mil­lion mem­bers and mobi­lizes them in the inter­ests of the CNP’s agen­da. The NRA’s Insti­tute for Leg­isla­tive Action is the organization’s lob­by­ing arm. Its cell­phone app uses the Koch broth­ers’ data plat­form i360 to mobi­lize and equip mem­bers to con­duct Get Out the Vote cam­paigns for gun rights sup­port­ers, to lob­by local and nation­al gov­ern­ment offi­cials, and con­duct door-to-door can­vass­ing in elec­toral cam­paigns. The app’s geofenc­ing capa­bil­i­ty con­venes NRA sup­port­ers for social inter­ac­tions in gun shops and oth­er locales.

I learned a great deal from your book about the dig­i­tal tools that polit­i­cal cam­paigns are using to con­nect with vot­ers. Why are the data wars so impor­tant to the strug­gle for democ­ra­cy in this moment?

The exten­sive use of Big Data in polit­i­cal cam­paigns is bare­ly a decade old, yet it has trans­formed our nation­al land­scape. It allows cam­paigns to tar­get and try to acti­vate vot­ers who are like­ly to sup­port their can­di­dates. All sides are using it. The seri­ous prob­lems arise when the cam­paigns use their tar­get­ed mes­sag­ing and plat­forms to cir­cu­late falsehoods—such as the idea that Democ­rats endorse “exe­cut­ing new­borns.” They don’t. But Big Data tar­get­ing, com­bined with wall­pa­per media, can con­vince peo­ple to neglect impor­tant issues such as health care and the nation­al debt while they’re bom­bard­ed with mes­sag­ing on nonex­is­tent phe­nom­e­na.

You write about this “wall­pa­per effect” of mul­ti­ple media sources that con­stant­ly rein­force a dis­tort­ed nar­ra­tive, and even out­right lies. What made this pro­pa­gan­da machine pos­si­ble? Do you see any effec­tive ways to counter its influ­ence in 2020?

When I trav­el to the Mid­west and the South­west to see fam­i­ly and friends, I’ve found that the region is blan­ket­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive fun­da­men­tal­ist and right-wing talk radio, which presents a dis­tort­ed, one-sided, and often fal­la­cious ver­sion of cur­rent events. These out­lets often use reli­gious pro­gram­ming to make polit­i­cal points, with­out even pre­tend­ing to offer fact-based report­ing. Their influ­ence is rein­forced by fun­da­men­tal­ist tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ers such as the Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Net­work and the Trin­i­ty Broad­cast­ing Net­work, as well as Fox News and local Sin­clair sta­tions.

Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy affil­i­ates such as the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil influ­ence pas­tors through groups such as Watch­men on the Wall, which claims a mem­ber­ship of more than 70,000 pas­tors nation­wide. These pas­tors are equipped with vot­er guides to insert in the church bul­letins, videos to project in their sanc­tu­ar­ies, and even down­load­able ser­mons to deliv­er. In some com­mu­ni­ties, cit­i­zens are sur­round­ed by con­tent from these sources—at a time when local news­pa­pers and oth­er sources of pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ism are strug­gling to sur­vive.

For a long time, the con­sen­sus in pro­gres­sive faith com­mu­ni­ties was that the Reli­gious Right was like the KKK in the South—a lam­en­ta­ble ves­tige of the past that was best ignored. Young peo­ple could see through the lies, so we thought it best to ignore the liars until those young peo­ple became a major­i­ty. But youth out­reach has become a huge focus of CNP orga­niz­ing. Are they recruit­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of fol­low­ers?

After sev­er­al years of intense research, I believe the Reli­gious Right is dri­ven by eco­nom­ic inter­ests. The polit­i­cal oper­a­tives have con­duct­ed focus groups and polling to iden­ti­fy hot but­ton issues and fram­ing lan­guage (such as “par­tial birth abor­tion,” which doesn’t exist as a med­ical term). Then they manip­u­late peo­ple to sup­port can­di­dates who work against their inter­ests once they take office—cutting cor­po­rate tax­es, then slash­ing bud­gets for pub­lic edu­ca­tion, pub­lic health, envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions, and pub­lic infra­struc­ture. I see it as an inge­nious shell game.

That said, the affil­i­ates of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy are aware that trends in nation­al demo­graph­ics are not in their favor—the U.S. is becom­ing more racial­ly diverse; younger gen­er­a­tions are more social­ly lib­er­al than their elders. That’s why they’re try­ing to move quick­ly in appoint­ing judges to the fed­er­al courts and spend­ing big mon­ey on recruit­ing stu­dents and young pro­fes­sion­als.

...

———-

“Who Poi­soned Talk Radio?” by Jonathan Wil­son-Hart­grove; Sojurn­ers; 05/2020

“Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, is a lead­ing mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. The NRA claims some 5 mil­lion mem­bers and mobi­lizes them in the inter­ests of the CNP’s agen­da. The NRA’s Insti­tute for Leg­isla­tive Action is the organization’s lob­by­ing arm. Its cell­phone app uses the Koch broth­ers’ data plat­form i360 to mobi­lize and equip mem­bers to con­duct Get Out the Vote cam­paigns for gun rights sup­port­ers, to lob­by local and nation­al gov­ern­ment offi­cials, and con­duct door-to-door can­vass­ing in elec­toral cam­paigns. The app’s geofenc­ing capa­bil­i­ty con­venes NRA sup­port­ers for social inter­ac­tions in gun shops and oth­er locales.”

The more we look, the more CNP ties we find. At what point can we con­sid­er the NRA to be an arm of the CNP? But, of course, the CNP is just the umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion for the oli­garchs and fel­low trav­el­ers whose agen­da it serves. An agen­da that includ­ed foment­ing an insur­rec­tion fol­low­ing the 2020 elec­tion. And that’s why we should­n’t at all be sur­prised to find that this same CNP net­work that has been pulling the strings of the NRA for years has also been direct­ing the mass media right-wing dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns that have come to define polit­i­cal talk radio in Amer­i­ca. It’s all dri­ven by the same shad­ow net­work:

...
You write about this “wall­pa­per effect” of mul­ti­ple media sources that con­stant­ly rein­force a dis­tort­ed nar­ra­tive, and even out­right lies. What made this pro­pa­gan­da machine pos­si­ble? Do you see any effec­tive ways to counter its influ­ence in 2020?

When I trav­el to the Mid­west and the South­west to see fam­i­ly and friends, I’ve found that the region is blan­ket­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive fun­da­men­tal­ist and right-wing talk radio, which presents a dis­tort­ed, one-sided, and often fal­la­cious ver­sion of cur­rent events. These out­lets often use reli­gious pro­gram­ming to make polit­i­cal points, with­out even pre­tend­ing to offer fact-based report­ing. Their influ­ence is rein­forced by fun­da­men­tal­ist tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ers such as the Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Net­work and the Trin­i­ty Broad­cast­ing Net­work, as well as Fox News and local Sin­clair sta­tions.

Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy affil­i­ates such as the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil influ­ence pas­tors through groups such as Watch­men on the Wall, which claims a mem­ber­ship of more than 70,000 pas­tors nation­wide. These pas­tors are equipped with vot­er guides to insert in the church bul­letins, videos to project in their sanc­tu­ar­ies, and even down­load­able ser­mons to deliv­er. In some com­mu­ni­ties, cit­i­zens are sur­round­ed by con­tent from these sources—at a time when local news­pa­pers and oth­er sources of pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ism are strug­gling to sur­vive.

...

After sev­er­al years of intense research, I believe the Reli­gious Right is dri­ven by eco­nom­ic inter­ests. The polit­i­cal oper­a­tives have con­duct­ed focus groups and polling to iden­ti­fy hot but­ton issues and fram­ing lan­guage (such as “par­tial birth abor­tion,” which doesn’t exist as a med­ical term). Then they manip­u­late peo­ple to sup­port can­di­dates who work against their inter­ests once they take office—cutting cor­po­rate tax­es, then slash­ing bud­gets for pub­lic edu­ca­tion, pub­lic health, envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions, and pub­lic infra­struc­ture. I see it as an inge­nious shell game.

That said, the affil­i­ates of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy are aware that trends in nation­al demo­graph­ics are not in their favor—the U.S. is becom­ing more racial­ly diverse; younger gen­er­a­tions are more social­ly lib­er­al than their elders. That’s why they’re try­ing to move quick­ly in appoint­ing judges to the fed­er­al courts and spend­ing big mon­ey on recruit­ing stu­dents and young pro­fes­sion­als.
...

And this shad­ow net­work clear­ly knows demo­graph­ics and social changes aren’t on its side. In oth­er words, democ­ra­cy isn’t on its side. That’s all part of the grim con­text of the CNP’s cap­ture of the NRA: the shad­ow umbrel­la group that’s turned the NRA into a rad­i­cal­ized extrem­ist group that threat­ens the foun­da­tion of US soci­ety is the same shad­ow umbrel­la group behind the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. It’s a ‘pow­er at any cost’ agen­da, includ­ing tak­ing pow­er by vio­lent force. The NRA is just one of the pub­lic faces of that ‘pow­er through any means nec­es­sary’ agen­da.

We got anoth­er update on the CNP’s ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ plans for the 2022 and 2024 elec­tions. It’s most­ly an update on Cle­ta Mitchel­l’s efforts. But, of course, Mitchell is just a lead­ing fig­ure in a much larg­er effort involv­ing the CNP, groups like the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee (RNC), estab­lish­ment con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tions like Her­itage Foun­da­tion, and the broad­er Koch net­work of mega-donors. ‘Elec­tion integri­ty’ and cry­ing foul is a group effort across the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment these days. But as we’ve seen, in that broad­er group effort, few stand out in their impor­tance more than Cle­ta Mitchell. Don’t for­get that Mitchell’s involve­ment in over­turn­ing the 2020 elec­tion arguably goes back to August of 2019 , when she co-chaired a high-lev­el work­ing group that end­ed up advo­cat­ing for a rad­i­cal read­ing of the con­sti­tu­tion that would enable state leg­is­la­tures to over­ride the pop­u­lar vote She’s not only been con­ceiv­ing the legal the­o­ries behind the GOP’s efforts to cry foul on any lost close elec­tion but also played a lead role in the broad­er orga­ni­za­tion­al efforts to train con­ser­v­a­tives in how to all read from the same page in this nation­wide strat­e­gy of cry­ing foul at lost elec­tions. So when we get an update on Cle­ta Mitchel­l’s plans for ‘elec­tion integri­ty’, we’re real­ly hear­ing about the broad­er orga­nized con­ser­v­a­tive move­men­t’s plans for con­test­ing elec­tions.

Plans that are as awful as we should expect at this point. The appar­ent goal of Mitchel­l’s effort, dubbed the Elec­tion Integri­ty Net­work, is to build a nation­al vol­un­teer army of thou­sands of poll watch­ers and elec­tion work­ers who will be close­ly observ­ing all elec­tions for any signs of Demo­c­ra­t­ic cheat­ing. The gen­er­al posi­tion of the group is that elec­tion work­ers have a Demo­c­ra­t­ic bias and Democ­rats only win by cheat­ing.

Here’s where it gets extra sleazy: the assump­tions about cor­rupt Demo­c­ra­t­ic bias of elec­tion offi­cials go deep enough that this net­work is plan­ning on run­ning oppo­si­tion research on basi­cal­ly every elec­tion offi­cial. That’s part of the train­ing that this army of elec­tion vol­un­teers now gets: train­ing in how to con­duct oppo­si­tion research on ran­dom local elec­tion offi­cials, along with ‘edu­ca­tion’ telling them that these offi­cials should be assumed to be cor­rupt Democ­rats. It’s basi­cal­ly a recipe to unleash a right-wing troll army upon ran­dom elec­tions offi­cials. Mem­bers of this net­work will be the only peo­ple who even want to take those posi­tions if this this kind of cam­paign works.

And it sounds like it did work some­what in the tri­al run of this strat­e­gy in Vir­ginia last fall. As we’ll see, the reg­is­trar of Fair­fax Coun­ty described abuse and harass­ment like he’s nev­er expe­ri­enced in decades of work as an elec­tion offi­cial. He just retired. Mis­sion accom­plished.

Mitchell is appar­ent­ly chan­nel­ing her ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ efforts through the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI). As we’ve seen, the CPI is not just the employ­er of Cle­ta Mitchell — the CNP mem­ber who has long played a key role in for­mu­lat­ing the GOP’s anti-vot­ing rights legal the­o­ries and was instru­men­tal in Trump’s efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion — but it’s also now the employ­er of Trump’s final Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows and con­tin­ues to push anti-vot­ing ini­tia­tives along with CNP mem­bers J Chris­t­ian Adams and Ken­neth Black­well. Also recall how the CPI was act­ing as a kind of par­ent enti­ty for a new CNP-led ‘oppo­si­tion research’ project call the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion (AAF). At least a front group when it comes to the IRS. The CPI dis­avowed any knowl­edge of the AFF when con­front­ed by reporters. Which isn’t sur­pris­ing. It sound­ed the AFF was engaged is extreme­ly bad-faithed smear­ing of vir­tu­al­ly ALL of the Biden admin­is­tra­tion’s nom­i­nees to any posi­tions. And now an army of thou­sands of vol­un­teers in every state are being trained in how to apply those bad faith tech­niques and unleash them on ran­dom elec­tion offi­cials.

So as we can see, Cle­ta Mitchell has been busy. Busy build­ing an army trained in her dark arts and ready to use them at every avail­able oppor­tu­ni­ty:

The New York Times

Lawyer Who Plot­ted to Over­turn Trump Loss Recruits Elec­tion Deniers to Watch Over the Vote

A cen­tral fig­ure in the scheme to reverse the 2020 elec­tion is mobi­liz­ing grass-roots activists into an “army of cit­i­zens” trained to aggres­sive­ly mon­i­tor elec­tions.

By Alexan­dra Berzon
May 30, 2022

In a hotel con­fer­ence cen­ter out­side Har­ris­burg, Pa., Cle­ta Mitchell, one of the key fig­ures in a failed scheme to over­turn Don­ald J. Trump’s defeat, was lead­ing a sem­i­nar on “elec­tion integri­ty.”

“We are tak­ing the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going for­ward to make sure they nev­er hap­pen again,” Ms. Mitchell told the crowd of about 150 activists-in-train­ing.

She would be “putting you to work,” she told them.

In the days after the 2020 elec­tion, Ms. Mitchell was among a cadre of Repub­li­can lawyers who fran­ti­cal­ly com­piled unsub­stan­ti­at­ed accu­sa­tions, debunked claims and an array of con­fus­ing and incon­clu­sive eye­wit­ness reports to build the case that the elec­tion was marred by fraud. Courts reject­ed the cas­es and elec­tion offi­cials were uncon­vinced, thwart­ing a stun­ning assault on the trans­fer of pow­er.

Now Ms. Mitchell is prep­ping for the next elec­tion. Work­ing with a well-fund­ed net­work of orga­ni­za­tions on the right, includ­ing the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, she is recruit­ing elec­tion con­spir­acists into an orga­nized cav­al­ry of activists mon­i­tor­ing elec­tions.

In sem­i­nars around the coun­try, Ms. Mitchell is mar­shal­ing vol­un­teers to stake out elec­tion offices, file infor­ma­tion requests, mon­i­tor vot­ing, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work. She has tapped into a net­work of grass-root groups that pro­mote mis­in­for­ma­tion and espouse wild the­o­ries about the 2020 elec­tion, includ­ing the fic­tion that Pres­i­dent Biden’s vic­to­ry could still be decer­ti­fied and Mr. Trump rein­stat­ed.

One con­cern is the group’s intent to research the back­grounds of local and state offi­cials to deter­mine whether each is a “friend or foe” of the move­ment. Many offi­cials already feel under attack by those who false­ly con­tend that the 2020 elec­tion was stolen.

An exten­sive review of Ms. Mitchell’s effort, includ­ing doc­u­ments and social media posts, inter­views and atten­dance at the Har­ris­burg sem­i­nar, reveals a loose net­work of influ­en­tial groups and fringe fig­ures. They include elec­tion deniers as well as main­stream orga­ni­za­tions such as the Her­itage Foundation’s polit­i­cal affil­i­ate, Tea Par­ty Patri­ots and the R.N.C., which has par­tic­i­pat­ed in Ms. Mitchell’s sem­i­nars. The effort, called the Elec­tion Integri­ty Net­work, is a project of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and finan­cial back­ing from Mr. Trump’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion.

Ms. Mitchell says she is cre­at­ing “a vol­un­teer army of cit­i­zens” who can counter what she describes as Demo­c­ra­t­ic bias in elec­tion offices.

“We’re going to be watch­ing. We’re going to take back our elec­tions,” she said in an April inter­view with John Fred­er­icks, a con­ser­v­a­tive radio host. “The only way they win is to cheat,” she added.

The claim that Mr. Trump lost the elec­tion because of improp­er con­duct in elec­tion offices or ram­pant vot­er fraud is false. Mr. Trump’s defeat was undis­put­ed among elec­tion offi­cials and cer­ti­fied by Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans, with many recounts and audits ver­i­fy­ing the out­come. Mr. Trump’s Jus­tice Depart­ment found no evi­dence of wide­spread fraud. Mr. Trump lost more than 50 of his post­elec­tion chal­lenges in court.

Cam­paigns, par­ties and out­side groups from both sides of the polit­i­cal spec­trum reg­u­lar­ly form poll-mon­i­tor­ing oper­a­tions and recruit poll work­ers. And Repub­li­cans have in the past boast­ed of plans to build an “army” of observers, rais­ing fears about wide­spread vot­er intim­i­da­tion and con­flict at the polls that large­ly have not mate­ri­al­ized.

Some for­mer elec­tion offi­cials say they are hope­ful that when elec­tion skep­tics observe the process they may final­ly be con­vinced that the sys­tem is sound. But sev­er­al who exam­ined Ms. Mitchell’s train­ing mate­ri­als and state­ments at the request of The New York Times sound­ed alarms about her tac­tics.

Ms. Mitchell’s train­ings pro­mote par­tic­u­lar­ly aggres­sive meth­ods — with a focus on sur­veil­lance — that appear intend­ed to feed on activists’ dis­trust and cre­ate pres­sure on local offi­cials, rather than ensure vot­ers’ access to the bal­lot, they say. A test dri­ve of the strat­e­gy in the Vir­ginia governor’s race last year high­light­ed how quick­ly the work — when con­duct­ed by peo­ple con­vinced of false­hoods about fraud — can dis­rupt the process and spi­ral into bogus claims, even in a race Repub­li­cans won.

“I think it’s going to come down to whether they are tru­ly inter­est­ed in know­ing the truth about elec­tions or they’re inter­est­ed in prop­a­gat­ing pro­pa­gan­da,” said Al Schmidt, a Repub­li­can and for­mer city com­mis­sion­er of Philadel­phia who served on the elec­tions board.

...

Ms. Mitchell’s oper­a­tion sits at a ten­sion point for her par­ty. While the estab­lish­ment is eager to take advan­tage of the base’s ener­gy and out­rage over 2020, some are wary of being asso­ci­at­ed with — or held account­able for — some of the more extreme peo­ple in the move­ment. The feel­ing is mutu­al among activists, many of whom believe the R.N.C. did not do enough to back Mr. Trump’s chal­lenge.

The Repub­li­can Nation­al Committee’s involve­ment is part of a return to wide­spread elec­tion-work orga­niz­ing. For near­ly 30 years, the com­mit­tee was lim­it­ed in some oper­a­tions by a con­sent decree after Democ­rats accused par­ty offi­cials in New Jer­sey of hir­ing off-duty police offi­cers and post­ing signs intend­ed to scare Black and Lati­no peo­ple away from vot­ing. The com­mit­tee was freed of restric­tions in 2018.

This year, its mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar invest­ment includes hir­ing 18 state “elec­tion integri­ty” direc­tors and 19 state “elec­tion integri­ty” lawyers. The par­ty has so far recruit­ed more than 5,000 poll watch­ers and near­ly 12,000 poll work­ers, accord­ing to the com­mit­tee. These efforts are sep­a­rate from the Elec­tion Integri­ty Net­work, said Emma Vaughn, an R.N.C. spokes­woman.

But in mul­ti­ple states, the R.N.C. elec­tion integri­ty direc­tors have been involved in Ms. Mitchell’s events. Ms. Vaughn acknowl­edged that par­ty offi­cials par­tic­i­pate in events host­ed by oth­er groups to recruit poll work­ers and poll watch­ers. She not­ed that in many states poll mon­i­tors must be autho­rized by the par­ty. The R.N.C. is train­ing its mon­i­tors to com­ply with laws pro­tect­ing vot­ing rights, she said.

“The R.N.C. works with oth­er groups who have an inter­est in pro­mot­ing elec­tion integri­ty, but the party’s efforts are inde­pen­dent from any out­side orga­ni­za­tion,” Ms. Vaughn said.

Har­ness­ing the Ener­gy

Since 2020, scores of local groups have popped up around the coun­try to pro­mote claims about the elec­tion. Many are run by activists with lit­tle expe­ri­ence in pol­i­tics or elec­tions but who have amassed siz­able mem­ber­ship lists and social media fol­low­ers. They are spurred on by nation­al fig­ures tour­ing the cir­cuit and spread­ing false claims.

Ms. Mitchell stepped in to har­ness that ener­gy.

The 71-year-old lawyer has been a steady and influ­en­tial force in the vot­ing bat­tles. Once a lib­er­al Demo­c­rat in Okla­homa, Ms. Mitchell has been a fix­ture in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. She has rep­re­sent­ed the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion and was on the board of the Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive Union. She has worked close­ly with Vir­ginia Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court jus­tice Clarence Thomas, on orga­niz­ing through the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, a nation­al coor­di­nat­ing group for con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers.

In August 2020, Mr. Trump tapped her to pre­pare for post­elec­tion lit­i­ga­tion. She enlist­ed John East­man, the lawyer who craft­ed spe­cious legal the­o­ries claim­ing Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence could keep Mr. Trump in pow­er. “A move­ment is stir­ring,” Ms. Mitchell wrote to Mr. East­man just two days after Elec­tion Day. “But needs con­sti­tu­tion­al sup­port.”

Ms. Mitchell helped the pres­i­dent argue his case to state offi­cials. She was on the phone with Mr. Trump when he asked Brad Raf­fensperg­er, Georgia’s sec­re­tary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” that could reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat there.

Her lat­est effort is orga­nized through the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion where she serves as a senior legal fel­low and where Mark Mead­ows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, is a senior part­ner. Mr. Trump’s polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee, Save Amer­i­ca PAC, donat­ed $1 mil­lion to the group last year.

Ms. Mitchell has described her­self as a key con­duit between activists and Repub­li­can Par­ty lead­er­ship.

“We are try­ing to bridge the gap between the grass-roots and some of the issues we’ve had with the par­ty,” she told trainees at the event out­side Har­ris­burg.

Ms. Mitchell is no doubt con­nect­ing with some of the fringe groups and ideas some in the par­ty once avoid­ed.

In Vir­ginia, for exam­ple, Ms. Mitchell helped a non­prof­it orga­nize a coali­tion that includes Vir­gini­ans for Amer­i­ca First, a group advo­cat­ing for hand-count­ing bal­lots. It’s a posi­tion pop­u­lar among some of those who believe con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about for­eign hack­ing in the 2020 elec­tion. The group was fund­ed by Patrick Byrne, the for­mer Overstock.com exec­u­tive who is now a major bene­fac­tor of the elec­tion denial move­ment.

In Michi­gan, Ms. Mitchell’s group held a train­ing ses­sion in May that was spon­sored in part by a coali­tion of grass-roots groups called the Michi­gan Elec­tion Pro­tec­tion Team. The R.N.C.’s state elec­tion integri­ty direc­tor brought togeth­er the coali­tion to recruit poll work­ers. Accord­ing to its web­site, the coali­tion includes LaRoucheP­AC, a com­mit­tee ded­i­cat­ed to Lyn­don LaRouche, the deceased con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist, and Let’s Fix Stuff, an out­fit run by a for­mer Repub­li­can state sen­a­tor who has pro­mot­ed a the­o­ry about the 2020 elec­tion that Repub­li­can Michi­gan Sen­ate lead­ers denounced as “inde­fen­si­ble.”

The R.N.C. sent both its nation­al and state elec­tion integri­ty direc­tors to Ms. Mitchell’s train­ing near Har­ris­burg. The state direc­tor, Andrea Raf­fle, had worked along­side Ms. Mitchell for months on the event, one of the speak­ers told the atten­dees. Ms. Raf­fle, as well as an orga­niz­er from Her­itage Action, would be join­ing a new coali­tion of elec­tion activists led by Toni Shuppe, a fast-ris­ing state activist, orga­niz­ers announced.

Ms. Shuppe’s group, Audit the Vote PA, has become a lead­ing ped­dler of mis­lead­ing data about the elec­tion in Penn­syl­va­nia. Last year, the group set out to find evi­dence of fraud by can­vass­ing neigh­bor­hoods in search of dis­crep­an­cies between elec­tion results and infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed from res­i­dents, a method that elec­tion experts dis­miss as invalid.

Ms. Shuppe has admit­ted to flaws in her data but stands by the con­clu­sions of her analy­sis. Ear­li­er this year, she cir­cu­lat­ed a peti­tion that declared cit­i­zens’ right “to throw off such gov­ern­ment that intends to keep the truth behind the 2020 elec­tion hid­den.”

Now, Ms. Shuppe is recruit­ing elec­tion activists, using what she learned at Ms. Mitchell’s and oth­er train­ing ses­sions, she said in an inter­view. So far, around 200 peo­ple have signed up, she said.

“Just know that we have a plan,” she wrote the day after the Har­ris­burg sem­i­nar to her 15,000 Telegram sub­scribers. “We’ll nev­er quit. This must be fixed. There is no going back to sleep. And 2020 still needs decer­ti­fied.”

‘Is That a Friend or Foe?’

Much of Ms. Shuppe’s plan is laid out in “The Cit­i­zens Guide to Build­ing an Elec­tion Integri­ty Infra­struc­ture,” a 19-page man­u­al Ms. Mitchell has dis­trib­uted at train­ings and online.

The doc­u­ment includes some typ­i­cal guide­lines for poll mon­i­tors, but elec­tions experts also not­ed tac­tics that aren’t rou­tine. The man­u­al advis­es activists to “be ever-present” inside elec­tions offices, and to meet with post office offi­cials to observe “every step” of the vote-by-mail process allowed by law. They’re advised to keep care­ful records, includ­ing details on any “encounter that is intend­ed to make you uncom­fort­able being at the elec­tion offices.”

They rec­om­mend aggres­sive­ly crowd­sourc­ing the accu­ra­cy of the vot­er rolls by col­lect­ing affi­davits from res­i­dents and mail­ing let­ters to try to iden­ti­fy poten­tial “bad address­es.” They advise each group to enlist tech-savvy vol­un­teers who, they sug­gest, can become expert on the spe­cif­ic soft­ware and equip­ment in each coun­ty and “what the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties are.”

Activists also were advised to research the back­grounds of elec­tion offi­cials, key staff mem­bers, and even peo­ple inside attor­ney gen­er­al offices who work on elec­tion issues. The ques­tion they should pose about the attor­ney gen­er­al offi­cials is, “Is that a friend or foe?” it says.

Coach­ing poll mon­i­tors to con­sid­er elec­tion offi­cials as ene­mies is a for­mu­la for con­flict, said Tam­my Patrick, a for­mer fed­er­al com­pli­ance offi­cer for the Mari­co­pa Coun­ty elec­tions depart­ment in Ari­zona, who reviewed the man­u­al.

“Six­ty to 70 per­cent of the con­tent is edu­ca­tion­al, it is obser­va­tion, it’s trans­paren­cy,” said Ms. Patrick, who now is a senior advis­er to the elec­tions pro­gram at Democ­ra­cy Fund. “But through­out the doc­u­ment, there’s this pit­ting of peo­ple against the elec­tion offi­cial or the peo­ple they’re there to learn from.”

“If they’re being obstruc­tionary and slow­ing down the process, that’s going to be incred­i­bly chal­leng­ing,” she said.

Ms. Mitchell said elec­tion offi­cials “should have no prob­lem with cit­i­zens ask­ing ques­tions and help­ing them do their jobs bet­ter.” She not­ed the activists are instruct­ed to be cour­te­ous and respect­ful.

Indeed, at the Har­ris­burg train­ing, Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin, the leader of Tea Par­ty Patri­ots, a con­ser­v­a­tive advo­ca­cy group, sug­gest­ed activists use a three-word response when­ev­er they become frus­trat­ed with offi­cials: “Bless your heart,” she said.

A Test Run in Vir­ginia

Ms. Mitchell has repeat­ed­ly held up Vir­ginia, and par­tic­u­lar­ly Fair­fax Coun­ty, as the nation­al mod­el. Ahead of last year’s governor’s race between Glenn Youngkin, a Repub­li­can busi­ness­man, and Ter­ry McAu­li­ffe, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic for­mer gov­er­nor, she helped a Vir­ginia non­prof­it orga­nize dozens of groups into a coali­tion. The net­work ulti­mate­ly trained 4,500 poll watch­ers and elec­tion work­ers and orga­nized 18 local task forces, a num­ber that has since dou­bled, orga­niz­ers say.

In Fair­fax, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic bas­tion out­side Wash­ing­ton, about three dozen activists asso­ci­at­ed with the coali­tion and the local Repub­li­can Par­ty rotat­ed through elec­tion offices, comb­ing through vot­er reg­is­tra­tion appli­ca­tions, unde­liv­er­able mail and oth­er mate­ri­als. Chris­tine Brim, the task force’s leader, appeared in per­son or emailed staff near­ly every day, accord­ing to Scott Konopasek, the reg­is­trar at the time. The oper­a­tion ate up coun­ty work­ers’ time with dozens of infor­ma­tion requests, as well as infor­mal inter­ro­ga­tions, Mr. Konopasek said.

“Every­thing they saw that they didn’t under­stand was fraud in their minds and that’s how they would frame the ques­tions,” he said. “It was always accusato­ry.”

Steve Knotts, the Fair­fax Coun­ty G.O.P. chair­man, said the activists were mere­ly try­ing to get answers, par­tic­u­lar­ly because the state had ini­ti­at­ed new vot­ing pro­ce­dures. But elec­tion offi­cials would often dodge their ques­tions or brush them off, he said.

“Maybe it offend­ed a few peo­ple. It wasn’t intend­ed to be that way,” he said.

Two weeks before the elec­tion, the non­prof­it behind the Vir­ginia coali­tion filed a law­suit, accus­ing the coun­ty of vio­lat­ing state vot­ing law by accept­ing at least 339 bal­lot appli­ca­tions that were miss­ing Social Secu­ri­ty num­bers. A judge ruled that the group did not have stand­ing, which did not set­tle the legal ques­tion — or the dis­pute.

The G.O.P. activists con­tin­ued to press Mr. Konopasek and oth­er elec­tion work­ers about it, he and oth­ers said. The Gate­way Pun­dit, a right-wing web­site, report­ed on the com­plaint say­ing “the state of Vir­ginia is being stolen again. We saw it in the 2020 elec­tion and we are see­ing it again.”

Vir­gini­ans for Amer­i­ca First, the coali­tion mem­ber that pro­motes hand-count­ing bal­lots, began post­ing reports online pur­port­ing to show poten­tial prob­lems with absen­tee bal­lots and oth­er issues. “It is also clear that the lev­el of poten­tial fraud is sig­nif­i­cant enough to affect the out­come of these elec­tions,” said one memo, dat­ed five days before the elec­tion.

On Elec­tion Day, Repub­li­can poll watch­ers in 13 polling places were observed being dis­rup­tive, hov­er­ing too close­ly or tak­ing pho­tographs, accord­ing to reports that elec­tions work­ers filed to the coun­ty. (Elec­tion work­ers at three sites had sim­i­lar com­plaints about Demo­c­ra­t­ic poll mon­i­tors. Com­plaints from 10 sites did not spec­i­fy the poll watch­ers’ par­ties.)

In at least one case, accord­ing to the reports, a vot­er who spoke Span­ish left with­out vot­ing after what two poll work­ers believed was intim­i­da­tion from a Repub­li­can poll watch­er.

Poll work­ers in oth­er loca­tions not­ed Repub­li­can poll watch­ers act­ing like, as one put it, “sleuths.” “They should not be able to act like Detec­tive Chief Inspec­tor Barn­a­by fer­ret­ing out clues,” that poll work­er wrote.

Andri­anne Kon­stas, a poll work­er and vol­un­teer with the League of Women Vot­ers, said, “It almost felt like if Youngkin hadn’t won, it would be like we’re gath­er­ing evi­dence so we can take it to dis­miss precincts or to dis­miss a process of vot­ing.”

‘We Need­ed a Fight­er’

After the elec­tion, the par­ty activists con­tin­ued to press for change. They put a new Repub­li­can on the elec­tion board, some­one Ms. Brim, the group’s leader, describes as “a real activist.”

“We need­ed a fight­er,” she said, as she recount­ed her work for the activists at the Har­ris­burg train­ing.

The new board mem­ber, Christo­pher Hen­zel, told The Times he would pro­mote trans­paren­cy to ensure “that elec­tions are both fair and per­ceived as fair.”

Despite some con­cerns about these groups’ involve­ment, the 2021 elec­tion over­all ran smooth­ly. It might have helped to have the most skep­ti­cal peo­ple close­ly engaged, said Christo­pher Piper, who until recent­ly ran the Vir­ginia Depart­ment of Elec­tions.

“Yes, it was a lit­tle bit more annoy­ing, but I think at the end of the day it’s worth it so these peo­ple can see the process and feel com­fort­able and know that it’s a safe, secure process,” Mr. Piper said.

But Mr. Konopasek, the for­mer reg­is­trar in Fair­fax Coun­ty, resigned in March in large part because of how dif­fi­cult Ms. Brim and oth­ers were mak­ing his job, he said. In his 30-year career, he said, he had nev­er seen any­thing like it.

“If there’s an absence of good will there’s noth­ing you can say that’s going to reas­sure some­one or win them over or change their mind,” he said.

————–

“Lawyer Who Plot­ted to Over­turn Trump Loss Recruits Elec­tion Deniers to Watch Over the Vote” by Alexan­dra Berzon; The New York Times; 05/30/2022

“Now Ms. Mitchell is prep­ping for the next elec­tion. Work­ing with a well-fund­ed net­work of orga­ni­za­tions on the right, includ­ing the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, she is recruit­ing elec­tion con­spir­acists into an orga­nized cav­al­ry of activists mon­i­tor­ing elec­tions.”

As we can see, CNP mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell has big plans for chal­leng­ing the results of upcom­ing elec­tions. Nation­wide plans. And as we also saw, these are far from just Cle­ta Mitchel­l’s plans. She’s act­ing as key cog in a larg­er orga­ni­za­tion­al net­work that includes the RNC and estab­lish­ment mega-donor groups like Her­itage Action. It’s this broad­er net­work of lead­ing con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions that’s real­ly build­ing this army of ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ activists.

Mitchell is appar­ent­ly chan­nel­ing her ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ efforts through the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI). As we’ve seen, the CPI is not just the employ­er of Cle­ta Mitchell — the CNP mem­ber who has long played a key role in for­mu­lat­ing the GOP’s anti-vot­ing rights legal the­o­ries and was instru­men­tal in Trump’s efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion — but it’s also now the employ­er of Trump’s final Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows and con­tin­ues to push anti-vot­ing ini­tia­tives along with CNP mem­bers J Chris­t­ian Adams and Ken­neth Black­well. Also recall how the CPI was act­ing as a kind of par­ent enti­ty for a new CNP-led ‘oppo­si­tion research’ project call the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion (AAF). At least a front group when it comes to the IRS. The CPI dis­avowed any knowl­edge of the AFF when con­front­ed by reporters. Which isn’t sur­pris­ing. It sound­ed the AFF was engaged is extreme­ly bad-faithed smear­ing of vir­tu­al­ly ALL of the Biden admin­is­tra­tion’s nom­i­nees to any posi­tions.

And that’s part of what makes Cle­ta Mitchel­l’s efforts at build­ing an army of ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ vol­un­teers so dis­turb­ing. They aren’t just going to be watch­ing polling sta­tions on Elec­tion Day or observ­ing the count­ing of the vote. They’re engag­ing in oppo­si­tion research on basi­cal­ly every ran­dom local elec­tion offi­cial. In oth­er words, that giant smear machine is going to be tar­get­ing all sorts of ran­dom peo­ple in an effort to intim­i­date or dri­ve them out of their posi­tions. Cle­ta Mitchell is build­ing and army of hos­tile stalk­ers who are going to be tasked with mak­ing the lives of elec­tion work­ers who aren’t die hard Repub­li­cans unliv­able:

...
In sem­i­nars around the coun­try, Ms. Mitchell is mar­shal­ing vol­un­teers to stake out elec­tion offices, file infor­ma­tion requests, mon­i­tor vot­ing, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work. She has tapped into a net­work of grass-root groups that pro­mote mis­in­for­ma­tion and espouse wild the­o­ries about the 2020 elec­tion, includ­ing the fic­tion that Pres­i­dent Biden’s vic­to­ry could still be decer­ti­fied and Mr. Trump rein­stat­ed.

One con­cern is the group’s intent to research the back­grounds of local and state offi­cials to deter­mine whether each is a “friend or foe” of the move­ment. Many offi­cials already feel under attack by those who false­ly con­tend that the 2020 elec­tion was stolen.

An exten­sive review of Ms. Mitchell’s effort, includ­ing doc­u­ments and social media posts, inter­views and atten­dance at the Har­ris­burg sem­i­nar, reveals a loose net­work of influ­en­tial groups and fringe fig­ures. They include elec­tion deniers as well as main­stream orga­ni­za­tions such as the Her­itage Foundation’s polit­i­cal affil­i­ate, Tea Par­ty Patri­ots and the R.N.C., which has par­tic­i­pat­ed in Ms. Mitchell’s sem­i­nars. The effort, called the Elec­tion Integri­ty Net­work, is a project of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and finan­cial back­ing from Mr. Trump’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion.

Ms. Mitchell says she is cre­at­ing “a vol­un­teer army of cit­i­zens” who can counter what she describes as Demo­c­ra­t­ic bias in elec­tion offices.

“We’re going to be watch­ing. We’re going to take back our elec­tions,” she said in an April inter­view with John Fred­er­icks, a con­ser­v­a­tive radio host. “The only way they win is to cheat,” she added.

...

Ms. Mitchell’s train­ings pro­mote par­tic­u­lar­ly aggres­sive meth­ods — with a focus on sur­veil­lance — that appear intend­ed to feed on activists’ dis­trust and cre­ate pres­sure on local offi­cials, rather than ensure vot­ers’ access to the bal­lot, they say. A test dri­ve of the strat­e­gy in the Vir­ginia governor’s race last year high­light­ed how quick­ly the work — when con­duct­ed by peo­ple con­vinced of false­hoods about fraud — can dis­rupt the process and spi­ral into bogus claims, even in a race Repub­li­cans won.

“I think it’s going to come down to whether they are tru­ly inter­est­ed in know­ing the truth about elec­tions or they’re inter­est­ed in prop­a­gat­ing pro­pa­gan­da,” said Al Schmidt, a Repub­li­can and for­mer city com­mis­sion­er of Philadel­phia who served on the elec­tions board.

...

Her lat­est effort is orga­nized through the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion where she serves as a senior legal fel­low and where Mark Mead­ows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, is a senior part­ner. Mr. Trump’s polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee, Save Amer­i­ca PAC, donat­ed $1 mil­lion to the group last year.

...

Ms. Shuppe’s group, Audit the Vote PA, has become a lead­ing ped­dler of mis­lead­ing data about the elec­tion in Penn­syl­va­nia. Last year, the group set out to find evi­dence of fraud by can­vass­ing neigh­bor­hoods in search of dis­crep­an­cies between elec­tion results and infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed from res­i­dents, a method that elec­tion experts dis­miss as invalid.

...

Much of Ms. Shuppe’s plan is laid out in “The Cit­i­zens Guide to Build­ing an Elec­tion Integri­ty Infra­struc­ture,” a 19-page man­u­al Ms. Mitchell has dis­trib­uted at train­ings and online.

The doc­u­ment includes some typ­i­cal guide­lines for poll mon­i­tors, but elec­tions experts also not­ed tac­tics that aren’t rou­tine. The man­u­al advis­es activists to “be ever-present” inside elec­tions offices, and to meet with post office offi­cials to observe “every step” of the vote-by-mail process allowed by law. They’re advised to keep care­ful records, includ­ing details on any “encounter that is intend­ed to make you uncom­fort­able being at the elec­tion offices.”

They rec­om­mend aggres­sive­ly crowd­sourc­ing the accu­ra­cy of the vot­er rolls by col­lect­ing affi­davits from res­i­dents and mail­ing let­ters to try to iden­ti­fy poten­tial “bad address­es.” They advise each group to enlist tech-savvy vol­un­teers who, they sug­gest, can become expert on the spe­cif­ic soft­ware and equip­ment in each coun­ty and “what the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties are.”

Activists also were advised to research the back­grounds of elec­tion offi­cials, key staff mem­bers, and even peo­ple inside attor­ney gen­er­al offices who work on elec­tion issues. The ques­tion they should pose about the attor­ney gen­er­al offi­cials is, “Is that a friend or foe?” it says.

Coach­ing poll mon­i­tors to con­sid­er elec­tion offi­cials as ene­mies is a for­mu­la for con­flict, said Tam­my Patrick, a for­mer fed­er­al com­pli­ance offi­cer for the Mari­co­pa Coun­ty elec­tions depart­ment in Ari­zona, who reviewed the man­u­al.

“Six­ty to 70 per­cent of the con­tent is edu­ca­tion­al, it is obser­va­tion, it’s trans­paren­cy,” said Ms. Patrick, who now is a senior advis­er to the elec­tions pro­gram at Democ­ra­cy Fund. “But through­out the doc­u­ment, there’s this pit­ting of peo­ple against the elec­tion offi­cial or the peo­ple they’re there to learn from.”

“If they’re being obstruc­tionary and slow­ing down the process, that’s going to be incred­i­bly chal­leng­ing,” she said.

Ms. Mitchell said elec­tion offi­cials “should have no prob­lem with cit­i­zens ask­ing ques­tions and help­ing them do their jobs bet­ter.” She not­ed the activists are instruct­ed to be cour­te­ous and respect­ful.

Indeed, at the Har­ris­burg train­ing, Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin, the leader of Tea Par­ty Patri­ots, a con­ser­v­a­tive advo­ca­cy group, sug­gest­ed activists use a three-word response when­ev­er they become frus­trat­ed with offi­cials: “Bless your heart,” she said.
...

Don’t for­get that Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin is also a CNP mem­ber. Her pres­ence at the Har­ris­burg ‘train­ing event’ is a reminder that we should expect a large num­ber of CNP mem­bers to be involved with kind of ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ scheme. The CNP’s pur­pose is orga­niz­ing con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers, after all. Cry­ing elec­tion fraud is clear­ly pri­or­i­ty num­ber one for the GOP at this point. The CNP is prob­a­bly demand­ing all their mem­bers be as involved as pos­si­ble in this.

Anoth­er hint at how dirty this is going to get comes from the fact that the RNC clear­ly does­n’t want to acknowl­edge its clear involve­ment. The fact that groups like LaRoucheP­AC are par­tic­i­pat­ing in this ‘elec­tion integri­ty army’ is anoth­er rea­son the RNC prob­a­bly does­n’t want to talk about this:

...
Ms. Mitchell’s oper­a­tion sits at a ten­sion point for her par­ty. While the estab­lish­ment is eager to take advan­tage of the base’s ener­gy and out­rage over 2020, some are wary of being asso­ci­at­ed with — or held account­able for — some of the more extreme peo­ple in the move­ment. The feel­ing is mutu­al among activists, many of whom believe the R.N.C. did not do enough to back Mr. Trump’s chal­lenge.

The Repub­li­can Nation­al Committee’s involve­ment is part of a return to wide­spread elec­tion-work orga­niz­ing. For near­ly 30 years, the com­mit­tee was lim­it­ed in some oper­a­tions by a con­sent decree after Democ­rats accused par­ty offi­cials in New Jer­sey of hir­ing off-duty police offi­cers and post­ing signs intend­ed to scare Black and Lati­no peo­ple away from vot­ing. The com­mit­tee was freed of restric­tions in 2018.

This year, its mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar invest­ment includes hir­ing 18 state “elec­tion integri­ty” direc­tors and 19 state “elec­tion integri­ty” lawyers. The par­ty has so far recruit­ed more than 5,000 poll watch­ers and near­ly 12,000 poll work­ers, accord­ing to the com­mit­tee. These efforts are sep­a­rate from the Elec­tion Integri­ty Net­work, said Emma Vaughn, an R.N.C. spokes­woman.

But in mul­ti­ple states, the R.N.C. elec­tion integri­ty direc­tors have been involved in Ms. Mitchell’s events. Ms. Vaughn acknowl­edged that par­ty offi­cials par­tic­i­pate in events host­ed by oth­er groups to recruit poll work­ers and poll watch­ers. She not­ed that in many states poll mon­i­tors must be autho­rized by the par­ty. The R.N.C. is train­ing its mon­i­tors to com­ply with laws pro­tect­ing vot­ing rights, she said.

“The R.N.C. works with oth­er groups who have an inter­est in pro­mot­ing elec­tion integri­ty, but the party’s efforts are inde­pen­dent from any out­side orga­ni­za­tion,” Ms. Vaughn said.

...

In Michi­gan, Ms. Mitchell’s group held a train­ing ses­sion in May that was spon­sored in part by a coali­tion of grass-roots groups called the Michi­gan Elec­tion Pro­tec­tion Team. The R.N.C.’s state elec­tion integri­ty direc­tor brought togeth­er the coali­tion to recruit poll work­ers. Accord­ing to its web­site, the coali­tion includes LaRoucheP­AC, a com­mit­tee ded­i­cat­ed to Lyn­don LaRouche, the deceased con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist, and Let’s Fix Stuff, an out­fit run by a for­mer Repub­li­can state sen­a­tor who has pro­mot­ed a the­o­ry about the 2020 elec­tion that Repub­li­can Michi­gan Sen­ate lead­ers denounced as “inde­fen­si­ble.”

The R.N.C. sent both its nation­al and state elec­tion integri­ty direc­tors to Ms. Mitchell’s train­ing near Har­ris­burg. The state direc­tor, Andrea Raf­fle, had worked along­side Ms. Mitchell for months on the event, one of the speak­ers told the atten­dees. Ms. Raf­fle, as well as an orga­niz­er from Her­itage Action, would be join­ing a new coali­tion of elec­tion activists led by Toni Shuppe, a fast-ris­ing state activist, orga­niz­ers announced.

...

Ms. Mitchell has described her­self as a key con­duit between activists and Repub­li­can Par­ty lead­er­ship.
...

Final­ly, note how the ‘nation­al mod­el’ of how this scheme is sup­posed to work real­ly was suc­cess­ful­ly test in last year’s Vir­ginia elec­tions. 4,500 poll watch­ers and elec­tion work­ers were trained. But per­haps more impor­tant­ly, Scott Konopasek, the Fair­fax Coun­ty reg­is­trar, end­ed up resign­ing large­ly because of how dif­fi­cult that army made his job. The strat­e­gy of intim­i­da­tion worked. That’s part of this Vir­ginia ‘nation­al mod­el’ for ‘elec­tion integri­ty’:

...
Ms. Mitchell has repeat­ed­ly held up Vir­ginia, and par­tic­u­lar­ly Fair­fax Coun­ty, as the nation­al mod­el. Ahead of last year’s governor’s race between Glenn Youngkin, a Repub­li­can busi­ness­man, and Ter­ry McAu­li­ffe, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic for­mer gov­er­nor, she helped a Vir­ginia non­prof­it orga­nize dozens of groups into a coali­tion. The net­work ulti­mate­ly trained 4,500 poll watch­ers and elec­tion work­ers and orga­nized 18 local task forces, a num­ber that has since dou­bled, orga­niz­ers say.

In Fair­fax, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic bas­tion out­side Wash­ing­ton, about three dozen activists asso­ci­at­ed with the coali­tion and the local Repub­li­can Par­ty rotat­ed through elec­tion offices, comb­ing through vot­er reg­is­tra­tion appli­ca­tions, unde­liv­er­able mail and oth­er mate­ri­als. Chris­tine Brim, the task force’s leader, appeared in per­son or emailed staff near­ly every day, accord­ing to Scott Konopasek, the reg­is­trar at the time. The oper­a­tion ate up coun­ty work­ers’ time with dozens of infor­ma­tion requests, as well as infor­mal inter­ro­ga­tions, Mr. Konopasek said.

“Every­thing they saw that they didn’t under­stand was fraud in their minds and that’s how they would frame the ques­tions,” he said. “It was always accusato­ry.”

...

Poll work­ers in oth­er loca­tions not­ed Repub­li­can poll watch­ers act­ing like, as one put it, “sleuths.” “They should not be able to act like Detec­tive Chief Inspec­tor Barn­a­by fer­ret­ing out clues,” that poll work­er wrote.

Andri­anne Kon­stas, a poll work­er and vol­un­teer with the League of Women Vot­ers, said, “It almost felt like if Youngkin hadn’t won, it would be like we’re gath­er­ing evi­dence so we can take it to dis­miss precincts or to dis­miss a process of vot­ing.”

...

Despite some con­cerns about these groups’ involve­ment, the 2021 elec­tion over­all ran smooth­ly. It might have helped to have the most skep­ti­cal peo­ple close­ly engaged, said Christo­pher Piper, who until recent­ly ran the Vir­ginia Depart­ment of Elec­tions.

“Yes, it was a lit­tle bit more annoy­ing, but I think at the end of the day it’s worth it so these peo­ple can see the process and feel com­fort­able and know that it’s a safe, secure process,” Mr. Piper said.

But Mr. Konopasek, the for­mer reg­is­trar in Fair­fax Coun­ty, resigned in March in large part because of how dif­fi­cult Ms. Brim and oth­ers were mak­ing his job, he said. In his 30-year career, he said, he had nev­er seen any­thing like it.

“If there’s an absence of good will there’s noth­ing you can say that’s going to reas­sure some­one or win them over or change their mind,” he said.
...

Of course, fall all the suc­cess­es of that Vir­gin­ian tri­al run for this CNP-led ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ army last year, there was one obvi­ous part of the strat­e­gy that could­n’t real­ly be test­ed last year: con­test­ing the results. Glenn Youngkin won. So that whole ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ smear machine extrav­a­gan­za did­n’t real­ly get its tri­al run. We’ll just have to wait for the nation­al tri­al run this fall. We kind of already had that nation­al tri­al run in 2020. It’s just going to be much big­ger and more orga­nized this time. In antic­i­pa­tion of what Cle­ta has in mind for 2024.

Things obvi­ous­ly did­n’t go as planned for Don­ald Trump on Jan­u­ary 6. But what was the actu­al plan on that day? How was foment­ing an insur­rec­tion going to result in Trump retain­ing the White House?

We’re get­ting greater clar­i­ty on that ques­tion with some new report­ing this week. For starters, we’ve now learned that Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, had a rather remark­able con­ver­sa­tion with Tim Giebels, the head of Pence’s Secret Ser­vice detail, on Jan 5. Dur­ing this con­ver­sa­tion, Short expressed his con­cerns that Pence faced a very real secu­ri­ty risk dur­ing the upcom­ing elec­toral vote count the fol­low­ing day.

It’s not known what exact­ly the Secret Ser­vice did in response to Short­’s warn­ings, but as we’re going to see, it appears that cre­at­ing a threat to Mike Pence’s secu­ri­ty was­n’t just an inevitable side effect of all of the var­i­ous pub­lic pro­nounce­ments Trump had been mak­ing about Pence’s pow­ers to over­turn the elec­tion results. Instead, it appears that cre­at­ing a secu­ri­ty threat that forced Pence out the Capi­tol on Jan 6 was the plan. At least Plan B, fol­low­ing Pence’s refusals to go along with the pre­ferred plan of hav­ing Pence him­self declare the results needs to be sent back to the states for ‘review’. Accord­ing to this appar­ent back up plan, once Pence is forced to flee the Capi­tol some­one else will have to take his place in cer­ti­fy­ing the elec­toral count. In par­tic­u­lar, Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Chuck Grass­ley, who was the next in line to take Pence’s spot as the longest serv­ing sen­a­tor. Grass­ley, in turn, would do what Pence could­n’t or would­n’t do.

Now, as we learned last July, Pence was asked by his Secret Ser­vice detail to indeed flee the Capi­tol dur­ing the insur­rec­tion, but Pence refused, telling Giebels “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not dri­ving the car. If I get in that vehi­cle, you guys are tak­ing off. I’m not get­ting in the car.” In oth­er words, Pence seemed to know replac­ing him by forc­ing him to flee was the plan. And to his cred­it, Pence refused to go along with it. And based on the avail­able evi­dence, it looks like that deci­sion to refuse to leave the Capi­tol real­ly was the piv­otal moment that thwart­ed Trump’s scheme. Had Pence left in the face of the insur­rec­tion, all of the oth­er pieces in this scheme could have fall­en into place.

And as we’re also going to see from addi­tion­al new report­ing this week, we can be con­fi­dent that this was the plan because a Dec 13, 2020, memo writ­ten by one of the attor­ney’s work­ing for Trump basi­cal­ly described this kind of sce­nario. Except under the plan in the memo, Pence him­self would declare on Jan 6 that he had the pow­er to count the elec­toral votes and decide how to deal with issues, but he also has a “con­flict of inter­est” and there­fore the Pres­i­dent pro tem­pore, Chuck Grass­ley, would take his place.

We learned about the memo lay­ing out this plan only because a U.S. Dis­trict Court Judge described the memo as hav­ing “like­ly fur­thered the crimes of obstruc­tion of an offi­cial pro­ceed­ing and con­spir­a­cy to defraud the Unit­ed States,” and ordered it released to the select com­mit­tee under the “crime-fraud” excep­tion to attor­ney client priv­i­lege. Yep, the memo is so incrim­i­nat­ing it could no longer be pro­tect­ed by attor­ney client priv­i­lege.

So it appears that the ini­tial plan was to have Pence vol­un­tar­i­ly hand his con­sti­tu­tion­al pow­ers over to Grass­ley, but that plan had to get mod­i­fied after Pence refused to go along with it. Plan B was to just force Pence to flee. And it almost worked.

And what about Sen­a­tor Grass­ley. Was he will­ing to go along with this? Yep. That’s more or less what Grass­ley him­self told reports on Jan 5. “Well, first of all, I will be — if the Vice Pres­i­dent isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be pre­sid­ing over the Sen­ate,” accord­ing to a tran­script of his remarks. It was only after he made those remarks that Grass­ley’s staff told reporters that they mis­in­ter­pret­ed his com­ments and Pence was actu­al­ly expect­ed the next day.

Keep in mind that Grass­ley made those com­ments on Jan 5, when Trump was report­ed­ly still try­ing to con­vince Pence to go along with the scheme. And it cer­tain­ly looked like Grass­ley knew about plans to have Pence’s pow­er hand­ed to him. So you have to won­der if Grass­ley ini­tial­ly made those com­ments under the assump­tion that Pence was going to vol­un­tar­i­ly go along with the plan. Either way, it’s pret­ty clear Grass­ley was ful­ly on board with the scheme.

That’s all part of the con­text of the seem­ing­ly spon­ta­neous, yet planned, vio­lence on Jan 6. The vio­lence real­ly was a nec­es­sary com­po­nent of the plan. But that was Plan B. The vio­lence would­n’t have been nec­es­sary had Pence been will­ing to go with Plan A. So when we’re try­ing to under­stand the forces behind that insur­rec­tion, it’s cru­cial to keep in mind that the plan the Trump team had going into that day real­ly did require a threat large enough to force Mike Pence to flee the Capi­tol:

The New York Times

Before Jan. 6, Aide Warned Secret Ser­vice of Secu­ri­ty Risk to Pence

New details flesh out how the pres­sure cam­paign by Don­ald J. Trump and his allies to block cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the 2020 elec­tion left the vice president’s staff fear­ing for his safe­ty.

By Mag­gie Haber­man
June 3, 2022

The day before a mob of Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump’s sup­port­ers stormed the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence’s chief of staff called Mr. Pence’s lead Secret Ser­vice agent to his West Wing office.

The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a mes­sage for the agent, Tim Giebels: The pres­i­dent was going to turn pub­licly against the vice pres­i­dent, and there could be a secu­ri­ty risk to Mr. Pence because of it.

The stark warn­ing — the only time Mr. Short flagged a secu­ri­ty con­cern dur­ing his tenure as Mr. Pence’s top aide — was uncov­ered recent­ly dur­ing research by this reporter for an upcom­ing book, “Con­fi­dence Man: The Mak­ing of Don­ald Trump and the Break­ing of Amer­i­ca,” to be pub­lished in Octo­ber.

Mr. Short did not know what form such a secu­ri­ty risk might take, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the events. But after days of inten­si­fy­ing pres­sure from Mr. Trump on Mr. Pence to take the extra­or­di­nary step of inter­ven­ing in the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege count to fore­stall Mr. Trump’s defeat, Mr. Short seemed to have good rea­son for con­cern. The vice president’s refusal to go along was explod­ing into an open and bit­ter breach between the two men at a time when the pres­i­dent was stok­ing the fury of his sup­port­ers who were stream­ing into Wash­ing­ton.

Mr. Short’s pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed warn­ing reflect­ed the remark­able ten­sion in the West Wing as Mr. Trump and a band of allies, with the clock run­ning out, searched des­per­ate­ly for a means of over­turn­ing the elec­tion. Mr. Trump grew agi­tat­ed as his options closed, and it became clear that he was fail­ing in his last-ditch effort to mus­cle his pre­vi­ous­ly com­pli­ant vice pres­i­dent into uni­lat­er­al­ly reject­ing the vot­ing out­comes in key states.

...

It is unclear what, if any­thing, Mr. Giebels did with the mes­sage. But as Mr. Trump attacked his sec­ond in com­mand — and demo­c­ra­t­ic norms — in an effort to cling to pow­er, it would prove prophet­ic.

A day after Mr. Short’s warn­ing, more than 2,000 peo­ple — some chant­i­ng “Hang Mike Pence” — stormed the Capi­tol as the vice pres­i­dent was over­see­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s vic­to­ry. Out­side, angry Trump sup­port­ers had erect­ed a mock gal­lows. After Mr. Pence was hus­tled to safe­ty, Mark Mead­ows, the White House chief of staff, is report­ed to have told col­leagues that Mr. Trump said that per­haps Mr. Pence should have been hanged.

Mr. Short was asked about the con­ver­sa­tion with Mr. Giebels dur­ing an inter­view with the House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Capi­tol riot, a per­son famil­iar with his appear­ance said.

New details from the weeks lead­ing up to Jan. 6 help to flesh out how Mr. Trump and his allies sought to intim­i­date Mr. Pence into accept­ing their base­less the­o­ry that the vice pres­i­dent had the author­i­ty to block con­gres­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege results — and how Mr. Pence’s refusal to do so would lead him to per­il.

...

A few weeks after Elec­tion Day on Nov. 3, 2020, aides to Mr. Pence learned that some in Mr. Trump’s loose net­work of advis­ers were dis­cussing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of Jan. 6, 2021 — set under statute as the day of the Elec­toral Col­lege cer­ti­fi­ca­tion — as a poten­tial­ly crit­i­cal date in Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in pow­er. Soon, Mr. Pence asked his gen­er­al coun­sel, Greg Jacob, to write a memo explain­ing what his pow­ers were dur­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

The memo did not take a clear posi­tion, but Mr. Pence’s advis­ers con­tin­ued to research the issue, ulti­mate­ly con­clud­ing that the vice pres­i­dent had no author­i­ty to dic­tate the out­come.

But Mr. Pence and his team were faced with reg­u­lar pres­sure from a cast of Trump sup­port­ers argu­ing that he did have such pow­er.

At the end of Decem­ber, Mr. Pence trav­eled to Vail, Colo., for a fam­i­ly vaca­tion. While he was there, his aides received a request for him to meet with Sid­ney Pow­ell, a lawyer who pro­mot­ed some of the more far-fetched con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about flaws in vot­ing machines, and whom Mr. Trump want­ed to bring into the White House, osten­si­bly to inves­ti­gate his false claims of wide­spread vot­er fraud.

The request to meet with Ms. Pow­ell was relayed through Kel­li Ward, the chair of the Ari­zona Repub­li­can Par­ty, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the exchange. Ms. Ward had joined a suit filed by Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Louie Gohmert, Repub­li­can of Texas, that asked a court to say that Mr. Pence could decide whether to accept or reject slates of elec­tors from states dur­ing the Elec­toral Col­lege cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

The suit was assert­ing pre­cise­ly what Mr. Pence’s aides argued he did not have the pow­er to do. Some Pence advis­ers were sus­pi­cious that Ms. Pow­ell want­ed to serve the vice pres­i­dent with legal papers relat­ed to the case.

Mr. Short object­ed to Ms. Ward’s sup­port of the suit. She relayed to him that they would not pur­sue it if Mr. Trump was uneasy with it. (The pro­posed meet­ing with Ms. Pow­ell nev­er hap­pened.) Ms. Pow­ell and a spokesman for Ms. Ward did not respond to emails seek­ing com­ment.

There were oth­er points of fric­tion that left the Pence team on high alert about the pres­sure cam­paign. Mr. Mead­ows told Mr. Short that the pres­i­dent was with­hold­ing approval of a pot of tran­si­tion fund­ing for Mr. Pence to estab­lish a post-White House office.

Amid the ris­ing ten­sion, Mr. Short reached out between Christ­mas and New Year’s Day to Jared Kush­n­er, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior advis­er, ask­ing how he could defuse what was becom­ing an unten­able clash between the Pence and Trump camps. Mr. Kush­n­er deflect­ed the out­reach, say­ing he was wrapped up in nego­ti­a­tions in the Mid­dle East.

At one point, John McEn­tee, the head of pres­i­den­tial per­son­nel, wrote a hand­writ­ten note that cir­cu­lat­ed in the West Wing that seemed to acknowl­edge that Mr. Pence did not think he could influ­ence the out­come of the elec­tion.

Yet with Mr. Trump fail­ing in his oth­er efforts to reverse the results, Mr. Pence con­tin­ued to receive unso­licit­ed mem­os argu­ing that he had the pow­er to block cer­ti­fi­ca­tion — includ­ing one from Mr. McEn­tee that looked far back into Amer­i­can his­to­ry to find prece­dent: “JEFFERSON USED HIS POSITION AS VP TO WIN.”

Mr. Trump also per­sist­ed, soon try­ing more direct means of pres­sur­ing Mr. Pence. On Jan. 4, 2021, he sum­moned the vice pres­i­dent to meet with John East­man, the lawyer who had been espe­cial­ly influ­en­tial in press­ing the case that the vice pres­i­dent could inter­vene. Dur­ing the meet­ing, Mr. East­man appeared to acknowl­edge that Mr. Pence did not have the pow­er to arbi­trar­i­ly set­tle the elec­tion. Still, he main­tained that the vice pres­i­dent could send the results back to states to re-eval­u­ate the results over a 10-day recess.

By ear­ly Jan­u­ary, Mr. Pence made clear to Mr. Trump that he did not believe he had the pow­er to do what the pres­i­dent want­ed, but he also indi­cat­ed that he would keep study­ing the issue.

Mr. Trump tweet­ed on the morn­ing of Jan. 5 that Mr. Pence could reject elec­tors. He had tried to per­suade some of his infor­mal advis­ers out­side the White House to go to the Naval Obser­va­to­ry, the vice president’s offi­cial res­i­dence, to seek an audi­ence to pres­sure Mr. Pence. That day, Mr. Trump spoke with Mr. Pence again, press­ing him to do what the vice pres­i­dent said he could not.

It was that day that Mr. Short called Mr. Giebels to his office.

The next day, Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and Mr. East­man addressed a crowd of thou­sands of Trump sup­port­ers at a ral­ly at the Ellipse near the White House, before the start of the Elec­toral Col­lege cer­ti­fi­ca­tion at 1 p.m. Mr. Trump and Mr. East­man both applied pub­lic pres­sure on Mr. Pence to do what they want­ed.

“You’ll nev­er take back our coun­try with weak­ness,” Mr. Trump told his sup­port­ers. At anoth­er point, he said: “Mike Pence, I hope you’re going to stand up for the good of our Con­sti­tu­tion and for the good of our coun­try. And if you’re not, I’m going to be very dis­ap­point­ed in you. I will tell you right now. I’m not hear­ing good sto­ries.”

Mr. Trump, who repeat­ed­ly told aides he want­ed to march to the Capi­tol as the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion was begin­ning, told the crowd that he would do so. But the Secret Ser­vice told him they could not pro­tect him, and he returned to the White House.

At about 1 p.m., Mr. Pence released a memo mak­ing clear that he dis­agreed with the pres­i­dent about his pow­er to inter­vene in the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. The memo was not shared with the White House coun­sel in advance; the trust between the offices was shat­tered by then.

Soon, Mr. Trump’s sup­port­ers swarmed the Capi­tol, break­ing in through doors and win­dows and dis­rupt­ing the count.

Mr. Giebels rushed Mr. Pence from the Sen­ate cham­ber and took him to an under­ground load­ing dock. The vice pres­i­dent refused to get in a wait­ing car, despite Mr. Giebels’s repeat­ed urg­ing, believ­ing it would let the riot­ers and oth­ers score a vic­to­ry against a core demo­c­ra­t­ic process, his aides have said.

Mr. Pence stayed there for hours, until it was safe to return to the Sen­ate cham­ber, where he insist­ed on fin­ish­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process.

His post-White House tran­si­tion fund­ing was approved soon after Jan. 6.

———–

“Before Jan. 6, Aide Warned Secret Ser­vice of Secu­ri­ty Risk to Pence” by Mag­gie Haber­man; The New York Times; 06/03/2022

“The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a mes­sage for the agent, Tim Giebels: The pres­i­dent was going to turn pub­licly against the vice pres­i­dent, and there could be a secu­ri­ty risk to Mr. Pence because of it.”

Marc Short could read the writ­ing on the wall. His boss was in trou­ble. Very real phys­i­cal trou­ble that Don­ald Trump was going to trig­ger when Trump decides to pub­licly turn against Pence for not going along with the plan. This was­n’t para­noia. Short­’s pre­dic­tion proved to be absolute­ly cor­rect. As we’ve now learned, Trump was lit­er­al­ly sup­port­ive of the “Hang Mike Pence” chants errupt­ing from the vio­lent mob that day. Because as we’ll see, vio­lent threats to Mike Pence’s phys­i­cal safe­ty was cru­cial to the suc­cess of the plan on that day. At last Plan B, in case Pence did­n’t go along with Plan A vol­un­tar­i­ly:

...
Mr. Short did not know what form such a secu­ri­ty risk might take, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the events. But after days of inten­si­fy­ing pres­sure from Mr. Trump on Mr. Pence to take the extra­or­di­nary step of inter­ven­ing in the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege count to fore­stall Mr. Trump’s defeat, Mr. Short seemed to have good rea­son for con­cern. The vice president’s refusal to go along was explod­ing into an open and bit­ter breach between the two men at a time when the pres­i­dent was stok­ing the fury of his sup­port­ers who were stream­ing into Wash­ing­ton.

...

It is unclear what, if any­thing, Mr. Giebels did with the mes­sage. But as Mr. Trump attacked his sec­ond in com­mand — and demo­c­ra­t­ic norms — in an effort to cling to pow­er, it would prove prophet­ic.

A day after Mr. Short’s warn­ing, more than 2,000 peo­ple — some chant­i­ng “Hang Mike Pence” — stormed the Capi­tol as the vice pres­i­dent was over­see­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s vic­to­ry. Out­side, angry Trump sup­port­ers had erect­ed a mock gal­lows. After Mr. Pence was hus­tled to safe­ty, Mark Mead­ows, the White House chief of staff, is report­ed to have told col­leagues that Mr. Trump said that per­haps Mr. Pence should have been hanged.
...

Also note part of the con­text of the pres­sure cam­paign Trump was putting on Pence in the final days lead­ing upt to Jan­u­ar­ry: dur­ing a Jan 4 meet­ing with John East­man — the fig­ure spear­head­ing Trump’s legal efforts and tak­ing the lead in devis­ing legal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for over­turn­ing the elec­tion results — acknowl­edged that Pence did­n’t have the pow­er to arbi­trar­i­ly set­tle the elec­tion, but he still insist­ed Pence has the pow­er to send the results back to the states for a 10-day review. Recall how, by eary Decem­ber 2020, East­man and Rudy Giu­liani were report­ed­ly argu­ing to law­mak­ers in key swing states won by Biden that they had the author­i­ty and even the oblig­a­tion to desis­re­gard the vote and select their own slates of elec­tors. Gin­ni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, was also involved in this lob­by­ing cam­paign. So when we learn that East­man was sell­ing Pence on a plan to send the results back to the states for a 10-day ‘review’, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that they had already been work­ing on rig­ging the ‘review’ process for over a month. And it was the day after that meet­ing, in Jan 5, when Marc Short informed the head of Pence’s Secret Ser­vice detail about his secu­ri­ty con­cerns:

...
Mr. Trump also per­sist­ed, soon try­ing more direct means of pres­sur­ing Mr. Pence. On Jan. 4, 2021, he sum­moned the vice pres­i­dent to meet with John East­man, the lawyer who had been espe­cial­ly influ­en­tial in press­ing the case that the vice pres­i­dent could inter­vene. Dur­ing the meet­ing, Mr. East­man appeared to acknowl­edge that Mr. Pence did not have the pow­er to arbi­trar­i­ly set­tle the elec­tion. Still, he main­tained that the vice pres­i­dent could send the results back to states to re-eval­u­ate the results over a 10-day recess.

By ear­ly Jan­u­ary, Mr. Pence made clear to Mr. Trump that he did not believe he had the pow­er to do what the pres­i­dent want­ed, but he also indi­cat­ed that he would keep study­ing the issue.

Mr. Trump tweet­ed on the morn­ing of Jan. 5 that Mr. Pence could reject elec­tors. He had tried to per­suade some of his infor­mal advis­ers out­side the White House to go to the Naval Obser­va­to­ry, the vice president’s offi­cial res­i­dence, to seek an audi­ence to pres­sure Mr. Pence. That day, Mr. Trump spoke with Mr. Pence again, press­ing him to do what the vice pres­i­dent said he could not.

It was that day that Mr. Short called Mr. Giebels to his office.

The next day, Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and Mr. East­man addressed a crowd of thou­sands of Trump sup­port­ers at a ral­ly at the Ellipse near the White House, before the start of the Elec­toral Col­lege cer­ti­fi­ca­tion at 1 p.m. Mr. Trump and Mr. East­man both applied pub­lic pres­sure on Mr. Pence to do what they want­ed.
...

And then we get to what could ulti­mate­ly be the decid­ing fac­tor in whether or not this scheme was going to work: Pence’s refusal to flee with his Secret Ser­vice detail out of Capi­tol on Jan 6 after the mob already start­ed storm­ing the Capi­tol, chant­i­ng about hang­ing Pence:

...
Mr. Trump, who repeat­ed­ly told aides he want­ed to march to the Capi­tol as the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion was begin­ning, told the crowd that he would do so. But the Secret Ser­vice told him they could not pro­tect him, and he returned to the White House.

At about 1 p.m., Mr. Pence released a memo mak­ing clear that he dis­agreed with the pres­i­dent about his pow­er to inter­vene in the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. The memo was not shared with the White House coun­sel in advance; the trust between the offices was shat­tered by then.

Soon, Mr. Trump’s sup­port­ers swarmed the Capi­tol, break­ing in through doors and win­dows and dis­rupt­ing the count.

Mr. Giebels rushed Mr. Pence from the Sen­ate cham­ber and took him to an under­ground load­ing dock. The vice pres­i­dent refused to get in a wait­ing car, despite Mr. Giebels’s repeat­ed urg­ing, believ­ing it would let the riot­ers and oth­ers score a vic­to­ry against a core demo­c­ra­t­ic process, his aides have said.

Mr. Pence stayed there for hours, until it was safe to return to the Sen­ate cham­ber, where he insist­ed on fin­ish­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process.
...

So giv­en the secu­ri­ty con­cerns Marc Short expressed to the head of Pence’s Secret Ser­vice detail the day before, why was Pence so adamant about not tak­ing the Secret Ser­vice’s advice on get­ting out of the Capi­tol when a crowd was threat­en­ing to hang him? Well, that brings us back to fol­low­ing details about Pence’s inter­ac­tions with the Secret Ser­vice that were first report­ed back in July: Pence appeared to refused to leave the Capi­tol because he was con­vinced he would be tak­en so far away that some­one else would have to take his place when the elec­toral vote is even­tu­al­ly count­ed and cer­ti­fied. In oth­er words, Pence knew that get­ting him out of the Capi­tol under the threat of vio­lence was Plan B after Pence refused to go along with Plan A:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Mike Pence’s team could see the storm com­ing

Analy­sis by Philip Bump
Nation­al cor­re­spon­dent
June 3, 2022 at 4:42 p.m. EDT

Mike Pence had been work­ing for Don­ald Trump long enough by Jan­u­ary 2021 to know how the pat­tern worked. Trump was up in arms about his pres­i­den­tial elec­tion loss, and those around him were busy either try­ing to con­tain the dam­age or lever­age his fury, depend­ing on their own per­son­al pri­or­i­ties. Pence was part of the first group, once again find­ing itself hop­ing that Trump would fiz­zle out before he blew up.

As Jan. 6 approached, Pence and his team sure­ly under­stood his per­ilous posi­tion. He and Trump had been argu­ing for weeks over his abil­i­ty to obstruct Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry, accord­ing to Michael Bender’s book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Elec­tion.” From mid-Novem­ber to the day before the Capi­tol riot, they’d had the same dis­cus­sion about the vice president’s pow­er “at least a dozen times.” And as oth­er options for derail­ing a Biden pres­i­den­cy col­lapsed — votes were cer­ti­fied, elec­tors for­mal­ized — the Pence-Jan. 6 plan became the only one left on the table.

We talk a lot about this in the abstract, but, again, con­sid­er Pence in that moment. He knows how mad and frus­trat­ed Trump is. He hears Trump obsess­ing over the vice president’s pur­port­ed abil­i­ties. He endures Trump push­ing on it over and over again. And as Jan. 6 nears, that cajol­ing becomes pub­lic.

At a ral­ly in Geor­gia on Jan. 4, Trump insist­ed that Pence was the last back­stop against the elec­tion being “stolen” by the left.

“I hope Mike Pence comes through for us, I have to tell you,” Trump said. “I hope that our great vice pres­i­dent comes through for us. He’s a great guy.”

“Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him quite as much,” he warned to laugh­ter. But Trump was not kid­ding.

We now know Trump and Pence had spo­ken before the pres­i­dent flew to Geor­gia. Trump had demand­ed Pence lis­ten to his attor­ney, John East­man, one of the archi­tects of the plan to have the vice pres­i­dent sim­ply reject sub­mit­ted elec­toral votes. (In an ini­tial draft of a memo detail­ing that plan, East­man glibly pre­dict­ed that Democ­rats would “howl” at hav­ing been out­played.)

...

Pence had sought his own coun­sel on the ques­tion. An ally had that same day con­tact­ed the not­ed con­ser­v­a­tive Judge J. Michael Lut­tig, who pub­licly reject­ed the idea that Pence had uni­lat­er­al author­i­ty to deny sub­mit­ted elec­toral votes. Luttig’s thoughts even­tu­al­ly made it into the let­ter Pence pre­pared in which he for­mal­ly dis­tanced him­self from Trump’s strat­e­gy.

But that let­ter didn’t come out until the morn­ing of Jan. 6. On Jan. 5, Pence endured anoth­er berat­ing by Trump. Cos­ta and Wood­ward describe the scene: Pence telling Trump that experts flat­ly reject­ed the president’s plan, Trump shout­ing, “No, no, no!” in response. Trump telling Pence that if he failed to go ahead with the plan, Trump would no longer be his friend. Trump, furi­ous, say­ing: “You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were noth­ing. Your career is over if you do this.”

It was on this day — though it’s not clear when — that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, alert­ed the Secret Ser­vice that he was wor­ried about what would hap­pen when Pence’s rejec­tion of Trump’s demands became pub­lic. On Fri­day, the New York Times report­ed the con­ver­sa­tion.

“Mr. Short did not know what form such a secu­ri­ty risk might take, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the events. But after days of inten­si­fy­ing pres­sure from Mr. Trump on Mr. Pence to take the extra­or­di­nary step of inter­ven­ing in the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege count to fore­stall Mr. Trump’s defeat, Mr. Short seemed to have good rea­son for con­cern,” Mag­gie Haber­man report­ed. “The vice president’s refusal to go along was explod­ing into an open and bit­ter breach between the two men at a time when the pres­i­dent was stok­ing the fury of his sup­port­ers who were stream­ing into Wash­ing­ton.”

This may have occurred before the Trump cam­paign released a state­ment claim­ing that the pres­i­dent and Pence were in “total agree­ment that the Vice Pres­i­dent has the pow­er to act.” Short, frus­trat­ed, called Trump aide Jason Miller to com­plain, accord­ing to Cos­ta and Wood­ward. Trump was unchas­tened, tweet­ing late that night that “[i]f Vice Pres­i­dent [Pence] comes through for us, we will win the Pres­i­den­cy.”

Short­ly before Trump began his speech out­side the White House on Jan. 6, he called Pence one more time. Dur­ing that call, he infa­mous­ly told Pence that he could be remem­bered either as a patri­ot or a wimp (though Trump used a crass syn­onym that allit­er­ates with patri­ot). More alarm­ing was what Trump said pub­licly dur­ing his speech.

“All Vice Pres­i­dent Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recer­ti­fy and we become pres­i­dent and you are the hap­pi­est peo­ple,” Trump told the crowd to cheers. All of the rage that he had been stok­ing for weeks was direct­ed at what Pence chose to do.

With­in an hour, Pence released his let­ter pub­licly reject­ing Trump’s plan. Trump tweet­ed angri­ly: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to pro­tect our Coun­try and our Con­sti­tu­tion.” Riot­ers were already in the Capi­tol. Those out­side read Trump’s tweet over bull­horns. Chants of “hang Mike Pence” erupt­ed — the sort of threat Short had clear­ly feared.

...

Pence, mean­while, was inside the Capi­tol, being urged by the Secret Ser­vice to be moved to a safer loca­tion. As The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Philip Ruck­er and Car­ol Leon­nig first report­ed, Pence refused to go.

“I’m not get­ting in the car, Tim,” Pence told the agent Tim Giebels — the same agent who had received Short’s warn­ing the day before. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not dri­ving the car. If I get in that vehi­cle, you guys are tak­ing off. I’m not get­ting in the car.”

That “I trust you” — empha­sis on “you” — has sparked ques­tions about what Pence might have thought would hap­pen if he left the Capi­tol. We know some of those in Trump’s orbit were pre­pared for a con­tin­gency in which Pence was not over­see­ing the open­ing of elec­toral votes; details for one such plan were revealed in a a new­ly released email this week. Was the back­up plan to get Pence off-site?

The Post’s Aaron Blake not­ed that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D‑Md.) had hint­ed at this in a tele­vi­sion appear­ance in April. Raskin is a mem­ber of the House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the riot and was point­ed in sug­gest­ing that Pence’s “not get­ting in the car” state­ment was “chill­ing.”

Pence’s refusal to leave the Capi­tol can be attrib­uted to not want­i­ng to acqui­esce to the whims of the mob. But, as Blake point­ed out, the vice president’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er under­stood why remov­ing Pence put his abil­i­ty to defend the elec­toral vote count­ing at risk.

“Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do,” Kei­th Kel­logg told a Secret Ser­vice agent, accord­ing to Ruck­er and Leon­nig. “I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alas­ka if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”

It is not a stretch to think Pence and his team, includ­ing Short and Kel­logg, had dis­cussed what they might expect in the after­math of the vice pres­i­dent for­mal­ly and pub­licly reject­ing Trump’s ploy. That, as they were draft­ing that let­ter in the days before Jan. 6, they were mak­ing oth­er plans, as well, dis­cussing oth­er bul­warks that need­ed to be built. Inform­ing the Secret Ser­vice. Agree­ing to stick with the process no mat­ter what.

If any­one in Amer­i­ca under­stood the rhythms and furies of Don­ald Trump by Jan. 6, 2021, sure­ly Mike Pence did.

———-

“Mike Pence’s team could see the storm com­ing” by Philip Bump; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 06/03/2022

“We talk a lot about this in the abstract, but, again, con­sid­er Pence in that moment. He knows how mad and frus­trat­ed Trump is. He hears Trump obsess­ing over the vice president’s pur­port­ed abil­i­ties. He endures Trump push­ing on it over and over again. And as Jan. 6 nears, that cajol­ing becomes pub­lic.”

The behind-the-scenes cajol­ing had turned into pub­lic threats in the days lead­ing up to Jan­u­ary 6. Pub­lic threats issued by Trump direct­ly at Pence with an unmis­tak­able mes­sage: if Pence go along with the plan he’s a trai­tor. There were pub­lic threats on the day Marc Short warned the Secret Ser­vice about his con­cerns and more pub­lic threats to fol­low, cul­mi­nat­ing in Trump’s bit­ter denounce­ment of Pence on Jan 6 and the cries of “hang Mike Pence” that fol­lowed as the insur­rec­tion­ists ram­paged through the capi­tol:

...
Pence had sought his own coun­sel on the ques­tion. An ally had that same day con­tact­ed the not­ed con­ser­v­a­tive Judge J. Michael Lut­tig, who pub­licly reject­ed the idea that Pence had uni­lat­er­al author­i­ty to deny sub­mit­ted elec­toral votes. Luttig’s thoughts even­tu­al­ly made it into the let­ter Pence pre­pared in which he for­mal­ly dis­tanced him­self from Trump’s strat­e­gy.

But that let­ter didn’t come out until the morn­ing of Jan. 6. On Jan. 5, Pence endured anoth­er berat­ing by Trump. Cos­ta and Wood­ward describe the scene: Pence telling Trump that experts flat­ly reject­ed the president’s plan, Trump shout­ing, “No, no, no!” in response. Trump telling Pence that if he failed to go ahead with the plan, Trump would no longer be his friend. Trump, furi­ous, say­ing: “You’ve betrayed us. I made you. You were noth­ing. Your career is over if you do this.”

It was on this day — though it’s not clear when — that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, alert­ed the Secret Ser­vice that he was wor­ried about what would hap­pen when Pence’s rejec­tion of Trump’s demands became pub­lic. On Fri­day, the New York Times report­ed the con­ver­sa­tion.

...

Short­ly before Trump began his speech out­side the White House on Jan. 6, he called Pence one more time. Dur­ing that call, he infa­mous­ly told Pence that he could be remem­bered either as a patri­ot or a wimp (though Trump used a crass syn­onym that allit­er­ates with patri­ot). More alarm­ing was what Trump said pub­licly dur­ing his speech.

“All Vice Pres­i­dent Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recer­ti­fy and we become pres­i­dent and you are the hap­pi­est peo­ple,” Trump told the crowd to cheers. All of the rage that he had been stok­ing for weeks was direct­ed at what Pence chose to do.

With­in an hour, Pence released his let­ter pub­licly reject­ing Trump’s plan. Trump tweet­ed angri­ly: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to pro­tect our Coun­try and our Con­sti­tu­tion.” Riot­ers were already in the Capi­tol. Those out­side read Trump’s tweet over bull­horns. Chants of “hang Mike Pence” erupt­ed — the sort of threat Short had clear­ly feared.
...

And then we get to that fas­ci­nat­ing detail that was first report last July: Pence refused to go with the Secret Ser­vice over appar­ent fears that he was going to be whisked away far from the Capi­tol. And Pence and Short clear­ly knew what the impli­ca­tions of that move would be: once Pence refused to go along with Plan A, Plan B was to get him out of the Capi­tol and install some­one else in his place will­ing to do it. A plan that was first report­ed on this week:

...
Pence, mean­while, was inside the Capi­tol, being urged by the Secret Ser­vice to be moved to a safer loca­tion. As The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Philip Ruck­er and Car­ol Leon­nig first report­ed, Pence refused to go.

“I’m not get­ting in the car, Tim,” Pence told the agent Tim Giebels — the same agent who had received Short’s warn­ing the day before. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not dri­ving the car. If I get in that vehi­cle, you guys are tak­ing off. I’m not get­ting in the car.”

That “I trust you” — empha­sis on “you” — has sparked ques­tions about what Pence might have thought would hap­pen if he left the Capi­tol. We know some of those in Trump’s orbit were pre­pared for a con­tin­gency in which Pence was not over­see­ing the open­ing of elec­toral votes; details for one such plan were revealed in a a new­ly released email this week. Was the back­up plan to get Pence off-site?

...

“Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do,” Kei­th Kel­logg told a Secret Ser­vice agent, accord­ing to Ruck­er and Leon­nig. “I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alas­ka if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”
...

So what exact­ly what the rest of ‘Plan B’ after Pence was forced to flee? Well, as the Politi­co report this week revealed, the plan was quick sim­ple: replace Pence with a Repub­li­can who would be will­ing to go along with the plan. Specif­i­cal­ly, Chuck Grass­ley, the longest-serv­ing Sen­a­tor and there­fore the next in line should Mike Pence become indis­posed for some rea­son. Plan B was real­ly Plan C(huck):

Politi­co

Read the Trump-world legal memo that a judge ruled was like­ly part of a crim­i­nal effort to over­turn the elec­tion.

An attor­ney sketched out a plan for then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to halt the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry.

By Kyle Cheney
6/1/2022, 8:50 AM CDT

If you blinked, you missed it.

The Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee last week pub­licly released a long-hid­den memo that a fed­er­al judge pre­vi­ous­ly deter­mined was evi­dence of “like­ly” felonies by Don­ald Trump and attor­ney John East­man.

The doc­u­ment: It’s a Dec. 13, 2020, email from a lit­tle-known attor­ney who had been advis­ing Don­ald Trump’s legal team, Ken­neth Chese­bro. He sent it to Rudy Giu­liani, sketch­ing out a plan for then-Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to halt the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry on Jan. 6, 2021. He dubbed it the “‘Pres­i­dent of the Sen­ate’ strat­e­gy.”

Chese­bro’s memo became pub­lic last week as a a lit­tle-noticed exhib­it in a legal bat­tle between the Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee and John East­man, who con­ferred with Chese­bro about that last-ditch strat­e­gy to delay or pre­vent the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden’s elec­tion. U.S. Dis­trict Court Judge David Carter described the memo in his March rul­ing as per­haps “the first time mem­bers of Pres­i­dent Trump’s team trans­formed a legal inter­pre­ta­tion of the Elec­toral Count Act” — the law that gov­erns the tran­si­tion of pow­er — into a day-by-day plan of action.” Carter wrote in his opin­ion that this memo “like­ly fur­thered the crimes of obstruc­tion of an offi­cial pro­ceed­ing and con­spir­a­cy to defraud the Unit­ed States.” He ordered it released to the select com­mit­tee under the “crime-fraud” excep­tion to attor­ney client priv­i­lege.

The strat­e­gy: The plan offered by Chese­bro depend­ed on the exis­tence of com­pet­ing slates of pres­i­den­tial elec­tors in a hand­ful of states where Biden won the pop­u­lar vote. In fact, just a day after Chese­bro sent his memo to Giu­liani, pro-Trump activists gath­ered in sev­er­al state cap­i­tals and signed doc­u­ments false­ly claim­ing to be the true pres­i­den­tial elec­tors from their states.

Then, Chesebro’s strat­e­gy required Pence to “firm­ly take the posi­tion that “he, and he alone, is charged with the con­sti­tu­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ty not just to open the votes, but to count them—including mak­ing judg­ments about what to do if there are con­flict­ing votes.”

Oth­er ele­ments:

- Jan 3–5: Chese­bro sug­gest­ed that mem­bers of the Sen­ate hold hear­ings in the days before the Jan. 6 ses­sion. In par­tic­u­lar, he want­ed Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham (R‑S.C.), then chair of the Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, to focus on Pence’s pow­er to count elec­toral votes. A Gra­ham spokesman empha­sized that he held no hear­ings on this sub­ject at the time. His office has declined to say whether any of Trump’s lawyers approached him about the plan.

- Jan. 6: Chese­bro sug­gest­ed that Pence should imme­di­ate­ly recuse from run­ning the elec­toral vote count, cit­ing a “con­flict of inter­est” and hand the gav­el to Sen. Chuck Grass­ley or anoth­er senior Repub­li­can sen­a­tor. Then, that sen­a­tor would lead the count but refuse to accept any elec­tors in the states Trump was con­test­ing. Instead, the sen­a­tor would con­tend that if those states want­ed to be count­ed, they had to rerun their elec­tions, engage in more lit­i­ga­tion or have their leg­is­la­tures appoint new elec­tors.

- Post-Jan. 6: Here Chese­bro essen­tial­ly sug­gests to let the chips fall. The Supreme Court might step in and over­rule the Trump gam­bit or side­step it by declar­ing it “non­jus­ti­cia­ble.” But he said even try­ing and fail­ing would be a wor­thy attempt and could resolve in unpre­dictable ways, such as the selec­tion of Pence as pres­i­dent.

The select committee’s view: The traf­fick­ing by Trump allies in these the­o­ries prove they planned to repeat­ed­ly vio­late the Elec­toral Count Act to impose their fringe inter­pre­ta­tion of the law and keep Trump in pow­er, House coun­sel Doug Let­ter wrote in last week’s fil­ing. Chese­bro was also behind argu­ments for Trump allies to send “com­pet­ing” slates of elec­tors to Con­gress, cre­at­ing the very con­tro­ver­sy those allies said was nec­es­sary for Pence to assert con­trol.

...

———-

“Read the Trump-world legal memo that a judge ruled was like­ly part of a crim­i­nal effort to over­turn the elec­tion.” by Kyle Cheney; Politi­co; 06/01/2022

“Jan. 6: Chese­bro sug­gest­ed that Pence should imme­di­ate­ly recuse from run­ning the elec­toral vote count, cit­ing a “con­flict of inter­est” and hand the gav­el to Sen. Chuck Grass­ley or anoth­er senior Repub­li­can sen­a­tor. Then, that sen­a­tor would lead the count but refuse to accept any elec­tors in the states Trump was con­test­ing. Instead, the sen­a­tor would con­tend that if those states want­ed to be count­ed, they had to rerun their elec­tions, engage in more lit­i­ga­tion or have their leg­is­la­tures appoint new elec­tors.”

Hand the gav­el to Chuck Grass­ley, cit­ing an appar­ent “con­flict of inter­est” of Pence. That was the plan. A plan that was described in a memo. A memo so crim­i­nal in nature that U.S. Dis­trict Court Judge David Carter described it as hav­ing “like­ly fur­thered the crimes of obstruc­tion of an offi­cial pro­ceed­ing and con­spir­a­cy to defraud the Unit­ed States” and ordered it released to the select com­mit­tee under the “crime-fraud” excep­tion to attor­ney client priv­i­lege. It was that incrim­i­nat­ing, accord­ing to this judge. And this incrim­i­nat­ing memo basi­cal­ly describes the plan Mike Pence and Marc Short bare­ly thwart­ed:

...
Chese­bro’s memo became pub­lic last week as a a lit­tle-noticed exhib­it in a legal bat­tle between the Jan. 6 select com­mit­tee and John East­man, who con­ferred with Chese­bro about that last-ditch strat­e­gy to delay or pre­vent the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden’s elec­tion. U.S. Dis­trict Court Judge David Carter described the memo in his March rul­ing as per­haps “the first time mem­bers of Pres­i­dent Trump’s team trans­formed a legal inter­pre­ta­tion of the Elec­toral Count Act” — the law that gov­erns the tran­si­tion of pow­er — into a day-by-day plan of action.” Carter wrote in his opin­ion that this memo “like­ly fur­thered the crimes of obstruc­tion of an offi­cial pro­ceed­ing and con­spir­a­cy to defraud the Unit­ed States.” He ordered it released to the select com­mit­tee under the “crime-fraud” excep­tion to attor­ney client priv­i­lege.
...

You know your plan was ille­gal when a memo describ­ing the plan is so incrim­i­nat­ing that it trig­gers a “crime-fraud” excep­tion to the attor­ney client priv­i­lege. And this high­ly incrim­i­nat­ing memo rais­es an obvi­ous ques­tion: So was Chuck Grass­ley ready to go along with this plan?

Yes, accord­ing to Chuck Grass­ley. At least that’s the obvi­ous con­clu­sion we can arrive at thanks to a high­ly incrim­i­nat­ing pub­lic state­ment made by Grass­ley a day before the insur­rec­tion. Yes, dur­ing a Jan 5 exchange with reports, Grass­ley explic­it­ly said he did not expect Mike Pence to be per­form­ing his duties the next day and that Grass­ley would instead stand in his place.

Yep, he actu­al­ly just came out and admit­ted this a day before the insur­rec­tion. And then his staff lat­er told reporters that they had “mis­in­tepret­ed” Grass­ley and Pence was expect­ed to be there. So it sure looks like Grass­ley knew what the plan was, and only lat­er real­ized it was the kind of plan that looks extreme­ly incrim­i­nat­ing if pub­licly you share it:

Iowa Capi­tol Dis­patch

Grass­ley sug­gests he may pre­side over Sen­ate debate on Elec­toral Col­lege votes

By: Linh Ta
Jan­u­ary 5, 2021 12:46 pm

Sen. Chuck Grass­ley, R‑Iowa, said he would pre­side over the U.S. Sen­ate debate sur­round­ing dis­putes of the 2020 elec­tion results if Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence does not show up.

He sug­gest­ed Pence was not expect­ed to attend but Grassley’s staff lat­er said that was a “mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion” and that Pence was expect­ed to be there.

On Wednes­day, Con­gress will meet to for­mal­ly count the Elec­toral Col­lege votes after they were cer­ti­fied by states last month. At least 12 GOP sen­a­tors and dozens of House Repub­li­cans say they intend to object to the Elec­toral Col­lege results as those votes are read, state by state, in a joint ses­sion that begins at noon CT Wednes­day.

Dur­ing an exchange with reporters on Tues­day, Grass­ley was asked how he plans to vote.

“Well, first of all, I will be — if the Vice Pres­i­dent isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be pre­sid­ing over the Sen­ate,” accord­ing to a tran­script of his remarks sent by a spokesper­son.

Grass­ley serves as the pres­i­dent pro tem­pore of the Sen­ate and will pre­side over any por­tion of the debate that Pence does not attend. But Grass­ley expects Pence to be present on Wednes­day, accord­ing to his spokesper­son.

...

Both Grass­ley and Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst have acknowl­edged Biden as the win­ner of the elec­tion, based on “the Con­sti­tu­tion,” accord­ing to the Des Moines Reg­is­ter, but haven’t ruled out rais­ing objec­tions. Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell said he acknowl­edges Biden as the win­ner of the elec­tion.

Grass­ley told reporters on Tues­day that any chal­lenges to the elec­tion results are a “legit­i­mate” move that Repub­li­cans are allowed to con­duct, accord­ing to Radio Iowa.

“First of all, it’s a legal process under the law and under the Con­sti­tu­tion, for these folks to do what they’re doing,” Grass­ley says. “It was done by the Democ­rats in 2004 and I think one oth­er time. Peo­ple that are find­ing fault with Repub­li­cans doing it shouldn’t do it when it’s done by Democ­rats.”

———-

“Grass­ley sug­gests he may pre­side over Sen­ate debate on Elec­toral Col­lege votes” By Linh Ta; Iowa Capi­tol Dis­patch; 01/05/2021

“He sug­gest­ed Pence was not expect­ed to attend but Grassley’s staff lat­er said that was a “mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion” and that Pence was expect­ed to be there.”

As we can see, Plan B was­n’t just Trump’s back up plan. Chuck Grass­ley was clear­ly in on it too. Well, at least least it sure sound­ed like Grass­ley was in on the plan when he told reports on Jan 5 that Pence was­n’t expect­ed to be at the Elec­toral Count cer­e­mo­ny and that Grass­ley would instead be pre­sid­ing over the Sen­ate. Yes, Grass­ley’s staff lat­er back­tracked on that pre­dic­tion. But he was very explic­it at the time:

...
Dur­ing an exchange with reporters on Tues­day, Grass­ley was asked how he plans to vote.

“Well, first of all, I will be — if the Vice Pres­i­dent isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be pre­sid­ing over the Sen­ate,” accord­ing to a tran­script of his remarks sent by a spokesper­son.

Grass­ley serves as the pres­i­dent pro tem­pore of the Sen­ate and will pre­side over any por­tion of the debate that Pence does not attend. But Grass­ley expects Pence to be present on Wednes­day, accord­ing to his spokesper­son.

...

Grass­ley told reporters on Tues­day that any chal­lenges to the elec­tion results are a “legit­i­mate” move that Repub­li­cans are allowed to con­duct, accord­ing to Radio Iowa.

“First of all, it’s a legal process under the law and under the Con­sti­tu­tion, for these folks to do what they’re doing,” Grass­ley says. “It was done by the Democ­rats in 2004 and I think one oth­er time. Peo­ple that are find­ing fault with Repub­li­cans doing it shouldn’t do it when it’s done by Democ­rats.”
...

Isn’t that a remark­able coin­ci­dence: at the same press con­fer­ence where all these reporters appar­ent­ly “mis­in­ter­pret­ed” Grass­ley’s remarks about Pence, Grass­ley also goes on to make the point that any moves to chal­lenge the elec­tion results the next day would be “legit­i­mate”. It’s obvi­ous what he had in mind. Even if he won’t now admit it.

And that’s also part of the con­text of this entire inves­ti­ga­tion: the more we learn about what was planned, the more appar­ent it’s becom­ing as to what an out­lier Mike Pence real­ly was. It was­n’t just a Trump team scheme. This was a GOP-wide scheme that includ­ed the par­ty’s most senior sen­a­tor and like­ly would have worked if Pence had been will­ing to play ball. It’s a reminder that one of the major chal­lenges fac­ing this inves­ti­ga­tion is the fact that it’s not just an inves­ti­ga­tion into the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. This was a GOP-wide plot, with a hand­ful of excep­tions. Includ­ing one very impor­tant excep­tion who need­ed to be scared out of the Capi­tol with a vio­lent mob for the plan to work.

It begins. The much antic­i­pat­ed prime time Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion con­gres­sion­al hear­ings just had their first night. And by all accounts it was a pret­ty mov­ing open­ing night fea­tur­ing a num­ber of mem­bers of the Capi­tol police who were direct­ly involved in the open com­bat that took place that day.

We also got hints about where the hear­ings would even­tu­al­ly lead as the case is made to the pub­lic in com­ing weeks, includ­ing the ‘sev­en-part plan’ ref­er­enced by Liz Cheney. Specif­i­cal­ly, Don­ald Trump’s sev­en-part plan. As we should expect, the focus of the hear­ings is indeed on Trump and estab­lish­ing his direct cul­pa­bil­i­ty in the events that played out.

But as we’re going to see when we look at that sev­en-part plan, the focus on Trump also pos­es a rather sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge in tru­ly get­ting to the bot­tom of what hap­pened. Because this was­n’t just a Trump White House oper­a­tion. The bulk of the Repub­li­can Par­ty estab­lish­ment was ful­ly on board, along with the pow­er­ful con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor insti­tu­tions like the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. And as we’ve seen, much of the ground­work that went into the efforts the cul­mi­nat­ed in the insur­rec­tion was done by these out­side groups. Most notably, key con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­er Gin­ni Thomas — wife of Supreme Court jus­tice Clarence Thomas — turned out to be a cen­tral play­er in these orga­niz­ing efforts. And in that orga­niz­ing, Thomas was focused on lob­by­ing swing state law­mak­ers in states lost by Trump with the idea that they should go ahead and elect their own pro-Trump slates of elec­tors.

Beyond that, there’s the pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence that the insur­rec­tion was ulti­mate­ly need­ed as the trig­ger­ing event that would get the votes sent back to the states for a ‘review’, with the idea that these pro-Trump elec­tors would be sent back fol­low­ing the review as Gin­ni Thomas lob­bied state law­mak­ers to do. So why was the insur­rec­tion need­ed? Because Mike Pence was­n’t going along with the plan. That result­ed in Plan B: foment an insur­rec­tion that pos­es a direct threat to Mike Pence, forc­ing Pence to flee the Capi­tol. At that point, the pro tem­pore of the Sen­ate, Chuck Grass­ley, would step in take take Pence’s place. Grass­ley would then send the votes back to the states for ‘review’. Grass­ley even pub­licly hint­ed at this kind of sce­nario of Jan 5!

And that all points towards what could be the great­est chal­lenge fac­ing law­mak­ers try­ing to con­vince a skep­ti­cal pub­lic that the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion was major his­toric crime: you can’t real­ly tell the sto­ry of what hap­pened by focus­ing on Trump alone. This real­ly was a mas­sive right-wing con­spir­a­cy to destroy democ­ra­cy:

CNN

Jan­u­ary 6 Vice Chair Cheney said Trump had a ‘sev­en-part plan’ to over­turn the elec­tion. Here’s what she meant

By Dana Bash, Jake Tap­per and Jere­my Herb,
Updat­ed 12:37 AM ET, Fri June 10, 2022

(CNN)For­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump had a “sophis­ti­cat­ed sev­en-point plan” to over­turn the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion over the course of sev­er­al months, Jan­u­ary 6 com­mit­tee Vice Chair Liz Cheney said, detail­ing how the pan­el plans to use its future hear­ings to tack­le each part of the scheme.

“On the morn­ing of Jan­u­ary 6, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s inten­tion was to remain pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, despite the law­ful out­come of the 2020 elec­tion and in vio­la­tion of his Con­sti­tu­tion­al oblig­a­tion to relin­quish pow­er,” Cheney, a Wyoming Repub­li­can, said in her open­ing state­ment at Thurs­day’s prime-time hear­ing.

...

A com­mit­tee source lat­er pro­vid­ed CNN the fol­low­ing descrip­tion of the “sophis­ti­cat­ed sev­en-part plan”:

“Pres­i­dent Trump over­saw a sophis­ti­cat­ed sev­en-part plan to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion and pre­vent the tran­si­tion of pres­i­den­tial pow­er.

1. Pres­i­dent Trump engaged in a mas­sive effort to spread false and fraud­u­lent infor­ma­tion to the Amer­i­can pub­lic claim­ing the 2020 elec­tion was stolen from him.
2. Pres­i­dent Trump cor­rupt­ly planned to replace the Act­ing Attor­ney Gen­er­al, so that the Depart­ment of Jus­tice would sup­port his fake elec­tion claims.
3. Pres­i­dent Trump cor­rupt­ly pres­sured Vice Pres­i­dent Pence to refuse to count cer­ti­fied elec­toral votes in vio­la­tion of the US Con­sti­tu­tion and the law.
4. Pres­i­dent Trump cor­rupt­ly pres­sured state elec­tion offi­cials, and state leg­is­la­tors, to change elec­tion results.
5. Pres­i­dent Trump’s legal team and oth­er Trump asso­ciates instruct­ed Repub­li­cans in mul­ti­ple states to cre­ate false elec­toral slates and trans­mit those slates to Con­gress and the Nation­al Archives.
6. Pres­i­dent Trump sum­moned and assem­bled a vio­lent mob in Wash­ing­ton and direct­ed them to march on the US Capi­tol.
7. As the vio­lence was under­way, Pres­i­dent Trump ignored mul­ti­ple pleas for assis­tance and failed to take imme­di­ate action to stop the vio­lence and instruct his sup­port­ers to leave the Capi­tol.

These are ini­tial find­ings and the Select Com­mit­tee’s inves­ti­ga­tion is still ongo­ing. In addi­tion, the Depart­ment of Jus­tice is cur­rent­ly work­ing with coop­er­at­ing wit­ness­es, and has dis­closed to date only cer­tain of the infor­ma­tion it has iden­ti­fied from encrypt­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tions and oth­er sources.”

———-

“Jan­u­ary 6 Vice Chair Cheney said Trump had a ‘sev­en-part plan’ to over­turn the elec­tion. Here’s what she meant” by Dana Bash, Jake Tap­per and Jere­my Herb; CNN; 06/10/2022

“Pres­i­dent Trump over­saw a sophis­ti­cat­ed sev­en-part plan to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion and pre­vent the tran­si­tion of pres­i­den­tial pow­er.”

It was indeed a sophis­ti­cat­ed plan. And Don­ald Trump was undoubt­ed­ly deeply involved with devis­ing and orches­trat­ing this plan. But he also obvi­ous­ly was­n’t alone in these efforts. The same trail of evi­dence that points towards Trump’s direct cul­pa­bil­i­ty in the plot is point­ing in a lot of oth­er direc­tions too. This was a joint project foment­ed by the Repub­li­can Par­ty as a whole. But not just the par­ty. The actu­al plan was exe­cut­ed by the broad­er net­work of con­ser­v­a­tive pow­er bro­kers and orga­niz­ers oper­at­ing through groups like the CNP. Fig­ures like Gin­ni Thomas.

As we’ve seen, Thomas was already caught send­ing form let­ters encour­ag­ing state law­mak­ers to choose their own slates of elec­tors. The let­ters were sent to two key Ari­zona law mak­ers: Rus­sell “Rusty” Bow­ers, the speak­er of the Ari­zona House, and Shawn­na Bol­ick, who served on the Ari­zona House Elec­tions Com­mit­tee dur­ing the 2020 ses­sion. Thomas sent the let­ters using the freeroots.com web­site. And while it might seem like Thomas just used gener­ic inter­net form when con­tact­ing these law­mak­ers, Thomas was no ordi­nary user of the freeroots.com sys­tem. For starters, the group behind freeroot.com appears to be anoth­er CNP front group. But beyond that, Shawn­na Bol­ick was­n’t just serv­ing on the Ari­zona House Elec­tions Com­mit­tee. She’s also the wife of Ari­zona Supreme Court jus­tice Clint Bol­ick, who pre­vi­ous­ly worked for Clarence Thomas and has stat­ed he con­sid­ers Thomas a men­tor. Addi­tion­al­ly, we learned that Shawn­na Bol­ick actu­al­ly per­son­al­ly replied to one of Gin­ni’s form emails, writ­ing “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” So the assump­tion that Thomas’s name was just one on a long list of peo­ple sign­ing these forms and would­n’t ever be noticed was demon­stra­bly not true. These law­mak­ers knew who Gin­ni was and what she was ask­ing them to do.

So the more we learned about these form emails Gin­ni sent to these Ari­zona leg­is­la­tors, the more it appeared to be just an exten­sion of the CNP’s broad­er efforts to over­turn the elec­tion results.

But we’re now learn­ing that Gin­ni did­n’t just send these form emails to those two Ari­zona law­mak­ers. At least 27 oth­er Repub­li­can Ari­zona leg­is­la­tors also received these freeroots.com let­ters, which was more than half of the Repub­li­can mem­bers of the state leg­is­la­ture at the time.

And, again, keep in mind how this aspect fits into the broad­er scheme that actu­al­ly played out on Jan 6: the plan to cre­ate such a large secu­ri­ty dis­tur­bance at the Capi­tol direct­ed at Mike Pence that he would be forced to flee the area, allow­ing for the then-pro tem­pore of the Sen­ate, Repub­li­can Chuck Grass­ley, to step in and take Pence’s place. At that point, Grass­ley would send the vote back to the states for ‘review’. As we saw, Grass­ley was open­ly pre­dict­ing on Jan 5 that Pence was not going to be attend­ing the Capi­tol the next day. He was in on it.

So when we’re learn­ing that Gin­ni Thomas’s lob­by­ing cam­paign of state leg­is­la­tors in swing states was far more exten­sive than we pre­vi­ous­ly under­stood, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that this lob­by­ing cam­paign was just part of a much broad­er plan to force the vote back to the states for a cor­rupt ‘review’. A plan that required the per­son play­ing Pence’s role to go along with the plan. And when Pence refused, the next option was to get rid of him and replace him with Grass­ley. That’s why they need­ed insur­rec­tion: to put Grass­ley in Pence’s place so the vote could get sent back to the states. At which point Gin­ni’s lob­by­ing cam­paign would hope­ful­ly yield results:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Gin­ni Thomas pressed 29 Ariz. law­mak­ers to help over­turn Trump’s defeat, emails show

By Emma Brown
June 10, 2022 at 11:50 a.m. EDT

Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, pressed 29 Repub­li­can state law­mak­ers in Ari­zona — 27 more than pre­vi­ous­ly known — to set aside Joe Biden’s pop­u­lar vote vic­to­ry and “choose” pres­i­den­tial elec­tors, accord­ing to emails obtained by The Wash­ing­ton Post.

The Post report­ed last month that Thomas sent emails to two Ari­zona House mem­bers, in Novem­ber and Decem­ber 2020, urg­ing them to help over­turn Biden’s win by select­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tors — a respon­si­bil­i­ty that belongs to Ari­zona vot­ers under state law. Thomas sent the mes­sages using Free­Roots, an online plat­form intend­ed to make it easy to send pre-writ­ten emails to mul­ti­ple elect­ed offi­cials.

New doc­u­ments show that Thomas indeed used the plat­form to reach many law­mak­ers simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. On Nov. 9, she sent iden­ti­cal emails to 20 mem­bers of the Ari­zona House and sev­en Ari­zona state sen­a­tors. That rep­re­sents more than half of the Repub­li­can mem­bers of the state leg­is­la­ture at the time.

The mes­sage, just days after media orga­ni­za­tions called the race for Biden in Ari­zona and nation­wide, urged law­mak­ers to “stand strong in the face of polit­i­cal and media pres­sure” and claimed that the respon­si­bil­i­ty to choose elec­tors was “yours and yours alone.” They had “pow­er to fight back against fraud” and “ensure that a clean slate of Elec­tors is cho­sen,” the email said.

Among the law­mak­ers who received the email was then-Rep. Antho­ny Kern, a Stop the Steal sup­port­er who lost his reelec­tion bid in Novem­ber 2020 and then joined U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R‑Tex.) and oth­ers as a plain­tiff in a law­suit against Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, a last-ditch effort to over­turn Biden’s vic­to­ry. Kern was pho­tographed out­side the Capi­tol dur­ing the riot on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the build­ing, accord­ing to local media reports.

Kern did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment Fri­day. He is seek­ing his party’s nom­i­na­tion for a seat in the Ari­zona state Sen­ate and has been endorsed by for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.

On Dec. 13, the day before mem­bers of the elec­toral col­lege were slat­ed to cast their votes and seal Biden’s vic­to­ry, Thomas emailed 22 House mem­bers and one sen­a­tor. “Before you choose your state’s Elec­tors … con­sid­er what will hap­pen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urg­ing swing-state law­mak­ers to “put things right” and “not give in to cow­ardice.”

Speak­er of the House Rus­sell “Rusty” Bow­ers and Rep. Shawn­na Bol­ick, the two recip­i­ents pre­vi­ous­ly iden­ti­fied, told The Post in May that the out­reach from Thomas had no bear­ing on their deci­sions about how to han­dle claims of elec­tion fraud.

But the rev­e­la­tion that Gin­ni Thomas was direct­ly involved in press­ing them to over­ride the pop­u­lar vote — an act that would have been with­out prece­dent in the mod­ern era — inten­si­fied ques­tions about whether her hus­band should recuse him­self from cas­es relat­ed to the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and attempts to sub­vert it. Gin­ni Thomas’s sta­tus as a lead­ing con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal activist has set her apart from oth­er spous­es of Supreme Court jus­tices.

Gin­ni Thomas did not respond to requests seek­ing com­ment for this report. She has long insist­ed that she and her hus­band oper­ate in sep­a­rate pro­fes­sion­al lanes.

...

The Post obtained the emails under Arizona’s pub­lic records law, which — unlike the laws in some oth­er key 2020 swing states — allows the pub­lic to access emails, text mes­sages and oth­er writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions to and from state law­mak­ers.

In March, The Post and CBS News obtained text mes­sages that Gin­ni Thomas sent in the weeks after the 2020 elec­tion to Mark Mead­ows, then Trump’s chief of staff. The mes­sages showed Thomas spread­ing false claims and urg­ing Mead­ows to keep fight­ing for Trump to remain in the White House.

“That con­flict of inter­est just screams at you,” said Adam B. Schiff (D‑Calif.), who serves on the House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capi­tol, on MSNBC in response to The Post’s May report reveal­ing the emails to Bol­ick and Bow­ers.

Schiff point­ed to Clarence Thomas’s deci­sion not to recuse when Trump went to the Supreme Court to try to block the House com­mit­tee from get­ting access to his White House records. The high court declined to block the release of those doc­u­ments. Thomas, sid­ing with Trump, was the only jus­tice to dis­sent.

“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court jus­tice,” Schiff said, try­ing to “get Ari­zona to improp­er­ly cast aside the votes of mil­lions. And also, to add to it, her hus­band on the Supreme Court, writ­ing a dis­sent in a case argu­ing against pro­vid­ing records to Con­gress that might have revealed some of these same e‑mails.”

After the May arti­cle, Mark Pao­let­ta — a long­time ally of the Thomases who, as a mem­ber of the George H.W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion, played a role in the con­fir­ma­tion of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — con­firmed that Gin­ni Thomas signed the emails, but he sought to min­i­mize her role.

“Gin­ni signed her name to a pre-writ­ten form let­ter that was signed by thou­sands of cit­i­zens and sent to state leg­is­la­tors across the coun­try,” Pao­let­ta wrote on Twit­ter on May 20. He described Thomas’s activ­i­ties as “a pri­vate cit­i­zen join­ing a let­ter writ­ing cam­paign” and added, sar­cas­ti­cal­ly, “How dis­turb­ing, what a threat!”

The let­ter-writ­ing cam­paigns were orga­nized on FreeRoots.com, which adver­tised itself as a plat­form to ampli­fy grass-roots advo­ca­cy across the polit­i­cal spec­trum. A Post review of its archived web­pages shows that it was heav­i­ly used in late 2020 by groups seek­ing to over­turn the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results.

One of those groups was Every Legal Vote, which orga­nized the cam­paign to send the mes­sage that Gin­ni Thomas sent on Nov. 9. In those first days after the Nov. 3 elec­tion, Every Legal Vote described itself online as a “labor of love by Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, in part­ner­ship” with the non­prof­it Unit­ed in Pur­pose, accord­ing to web­pages pre­served by the Inter­net Archive’s Way­back Machine. Unit­ed in Pur­pose, which har­ness­es data to gal­va­nize con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian vot­ers, in recent years host­ed lun­cheons where Thomas pre­sent­ed her Impact Awards to right-wing lead­ers.

On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden elec­tors in Ari­zona cast their votes, after the elec­tion results were cer­ti­fied by Sec­re­tary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and Gov. Doug Ducey ®.

Trump elec­tors met in Ari­zona that day and signed a doc­u­ment declar­ing them­selves the state’s “duly elect­ed and qual­i­fied Elec­tors.” One of them was Kern, the out­go­ing state rep­re­sen­ta­tive.

Kern was among more than a dozen law­mak­ers who signed on to a let­ter to Con­gress that same day call­ing for the state’s elec­toral votes to go to Trump or “be nul­li­fied com­plete­ly until a full foren­sic audit can be con­duct­ed.”

The law­mak­ers’ let­ter was an exhib­it in Kern and Gohmert’s law­suit ask­ing a fed­er­al court to rule that Pence had the “exclu­sive author­i­ty and sole dis­cre­tion” in decid­ing which elec­toral votes to count for a giv­en state. The plain­tiffs asked the Supreme Court to inter­vene after the case was dis­missed in low­er courts. The day after the Jan. 6 insur­rec­tion, the court declined in an unsigned order.

———-

“Gin­ni Thomas pressed 29 Ariz. law­mak­ers to help over­turn Trump’s defeat, emails show” by Emma Brown; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 06/10/2022

“New doc­u­ments show that Thomas indeed used the plat­form to reach many law­mak­ers simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. On Nov. 9, she sent iden­ti­cal emails to 20 mem­bers of the Ari­zona House and sev­en Ari­zona state sen­a­tors. That rep­re­sents more than half of the Repub­li­can mem­bers of the state leg­is­la­ture at the time.”

Giv­en that we’ve already learned that Shawn­na Bol­ick per­son­al­ly replied to Gin­ni’s email, you have to won­der how many of the 27 Ari­zona law­mak­ers did the same.

And, again, don’t for­get that while freeroots.com appears to be a gener­ic polit­i­cal form let­ter site, cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence strong­ly sug­gests it’s a CNP front group. So when Gin­ni, a major fig­ure her­self in the CNP, was using the freeroots.com forms, it was like the CNP was per­son­al­ly reach­ing out to these leg­is­la­tors:

...
The Post report­ed last month that Thomas sent emails to two Ari­zona House mem­bers, in Novem­ber and Decem­ber 2020, urg­ing them to help over­turn Biden’s win by select­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tors — a respon­si­bil­i­ty that belongs to Ari­zona vot­ers under state law. Thomas sent the mes­sages using Free­Roots, an online plat­form intend­ed to make it easy to send pre-writ­ten emails to mul­ti­ple elect­ed offi­cials.

...

After the May arti­cle, Mark Pao­let­ta — a long­time ally of the Thomases who, as a mem­ber of the George H.W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion, played a role in the con­fir­ma­tion of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — con­firmed that Gin­ni Thomas signed the emails, but he sought to min­i­mize her role.

“Gin­ni signed her name to a pre-writ­ten form let­ter that was signed by thou­sands of cit­i­zens and sent to state leg­is­la­tors across the coun­try,” Pao­let­ta wrote on Twit­ter on May 20. He described Thomas’s activ­i­ties as “a pri­vate cit­i­zen join­ing a let­ter writ­ing cam­paign” and added, sar­cas­ti­cal­ly, “How dis­turb­ing, what a threat!”

The let­ter-writ­ing cam­paigns were orga­nized on FreeRoots.com, which adver­tised itself as a plat­form to ampli­fy grass-roots advo­ca­cy across the polit­i­cal spec­trum. A Post review of its archived web­pages shows that it was heav­i­ly used in late 2020 by groups seek­ing to over­turn the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results.

One of those groups was Every Legal Vote, which orga­nized the cam­paign to send the mes­sage that Gin­ni Thomas sent on Nov. 9. In those first days after the Nov. 3 elec­tion, Every Legal Vote described itself online as a “labor of love by Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, in part­ner­ship” with the non­prof­it Unit­ed in Pur­pose, accord­ing to web­pages pre­served by the Inter­net Archive’s Way­back Machine. Unit­ed in Pur­pose, which har­ness­es data to gal­va­nize con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian vot­ers, in recent years host­ed lun­cheons where Thomas pre­sent­ed her Impact Awards to right-wing lead­ers.
...

Final­ly, note that we only learned about Gin­ni’s let­ter writ­ing cam­paign because Ari­zona has a law allow­ing the pub­lic to access these kinds of com­mu­ni­ca­tions. In oth­er words, we’re like­ly nev­er going to learn about how exten­sive Thomas’s lob­by­ing efforts were in the oth­er states:

.
...
The Post obtained the emails under Arizona’s pub­lic records law, which — unlike the laws in some oth­er key 2020 swing states — allows the pub­lic to access emails, text mes­sages and oth­er writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions to and from state law­mak­ers.
...

But whether or not we’re ever allowed to learn how many oth­er state leg­is­la­tors received these kinds of emails from Thomas, the evi­dence already abun­dant­ly clear. Gin­ni Thomas was deeply involved in this. As deeply involved as Trump him­self. She was all in. But also just one of a myr­i­ad of key fig­ures inside the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment who was all in on this effort. Again, it points towards one of the biggest chal­lenges fac­ing the inves­ti­ga­tors try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate the scope of this plot. Because the grand temp­ta­tion is to place Don­ald Trump at the cen­ter of these orga­niz­ing efforts. And he sure­ly was a cen­tral fig­ure. But it’s also clear he was­n’t the only cen­tral fig­ure. Don­ald Trump was­n’t the only per­son will­ing to burn down what it left of the US’s democ­ra­cy in order to keep Don­ald Trump in office. So if the pub­lic is hav­ing a hard time grasp­ing the idea that Trump con­scious­ly foment­ed Jan 6 insur­rec­tion, what are the odds of the pub­lic ever com­ing to grips with the far larg­er plot that was actu­al­ly play­ing out?

How do you edu­cate the pub­lic about some­thing that isn’t just com­plex but wild­ly out­side the realm of what most peo­ple think is even fea­si­ble. It’s a major chal­lenge. And a recur­rent theme.

With the prime time con­gres­sion­al hear­ings for the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion sched­ules to con­tin­ue next week, one of the big ques­tions we’re going to get answered soon is the scope of the that inves­ti­ga­tion. Is it focused almost entire­ly on Don­ald Trump’s involve­ment in this vast scheme or will it be includ­ing the much larg­er net­work of right-wing forces that ulti­mate­ly orga­nized and exe­cut­ed the attack on the Capi­tol. Most notably, the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy’s role, which appears to have been absolute­ly cen­tral to the scheme based on avail­able evi­dence.

As we’ve seen, part of the rea­son Pence appears to have refuse to go along with the plan is due to the advice he was get­ting from fig­ures like John Yoo who told him that, no, he did­n’t actu­al­ly have the con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty to just refuse to cer­ti­fy the votes. But still, it’s not like Pence is the kind of polit­i­cal fig­ure we would nor­mal­ly asso­ciate with a close adher­ence to the law. He was Trump’s VP, after all. Break­ing legal norms was one of the con­sis­tent themes of his admin­is­tra­tion. So why did­n’t Pence just go along with the plan? There’s a good chance we’ll nev­er tru­ly know.

So it’s worth under­scor­ing one of the aspects of this sit­u­a­tion that makes Pence’s deci­sion all the more remark­able giv­en the real­i­ty that the insur­rec­tion was large­ly as CNP-run oper­a­tion: Pence him­self is a mem­ber of the CNP. Beyond that, he even spoke at a CNP meet­ing on Novem­ber 13, 2020, a week and a half after the elec­tion, where he was met with chants “Four More Years!” by the crowd. Pence is almost an arche­typ­al CNP politi­cian. And as we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing arti­cle, the CNP was hold­ing week­ly meet­ings in the Trump White House through­out his term. There’s no way Pence could have avoid­ed reg­u­lar con­tact with the group.

And yet, in the end, Pence refused to go along with the CNP’s plan, which appears to have been the deci­sion that trig­gered the insur­rec­tion as a kind of Plan B to force Pence out of the Capi­tol before he could cer­ti­fy the vote. But regard­less of how the prime time hear­ings play out, that key ques­tion is high­ly unlike­ly to be answered by the end of it: why did Mike Pence decide not to go along with the plan? Did he feel it had no shot at work­ing? Or did he actu­al­ly fear it might work, hav­ing the con­se­quence of destroy­ing what’s left of the US’s demo­c­ra­t­ic norms? We have no idea which of those two dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed sce­nar­ios Pence was fear­ing when he made the fate­ful choice to refuse to play along. But it sure would be nice to know. After all, the for­mer sce­nario would sug­gest we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to fear the GOP try­ing a replay of this scheme in the future. But the lat­ter sce­nario makes it a near cer­tain­ty they’re going to try this again. Because whether or not Don­ald Trump runs for office and wins again, the CNP isn’t going any­where. Which, again, is part of what made Pence’s deci­sion so remark­able. By refus­ing to go along with the plan to refuse to cer­ti­fy the vote, Pence put him­self in direct oppo­si­tion to the pow­er net­work that large­ly runs the GOP:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

God, Trump and the Closed-Door World of a Major Con­ser­v­a­tive Group
What inter­nal record­ings and doc­u­ments reveal about the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy — and the future of the Repub­li­can Par­ty

By Robert O’Har­row Jr.
Octo­ber 25, 2021

In Octo­ber 2015, Don­ald Trump was still a laugh line for right-wing Chris­t­ian activists. By their lights he was a failed casi­no own­er and thrice-mar­ried play­boy. He had no appar­ent prin­ci­ples, no pol­i­cy blue­print and no grasp of the Bible. He didn’t even under­stand free-mar­ket the­o­ry, some­thing they con­sid­er to be a foun­tain­head of Amer­i­can lib­er­ty. Yet here he was in a con­fer­ence room at the Ritz-Carl­ton in McLean, Va., solic­it­ing sup­port from a closed-door group of con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers called the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy.

Trump looked the part. He wore a blue suit, white shirt and shiny blue tie. But he seemed to lose his way dur­ing the pitch and began riff­ing about his hair. He turned his head to var­i­ous angles for the crowd. “It looks pret­ty good back here,” Trump said, as CNP’s pres­i­dent, Bill Wal­ton, would lat­er recall dur­ing a con­fi­den­tial talk cap­tured on video.

It was too much for Mar­jorie Dan­nen­felser, an antiabor­tion activist also in the crowd. “This is insult­ing,” Dan­nen­felser said, accord­ing to her record­ed rec­ol­lec­tion. She pulled on Walton’s sleeve. “Can you believe what is hap­pen­ing here?” she asked.

For months after the event, Dan­nen­felser and some oth­er CNP mem­bers were deter­mined to stop Trump. While he solid­i­fied his lead as GOP front-run­ner, they denounced him as a “char­la­tan” in the con­ser­v­a­tive mag­a­zine Nation­al Review, blast­ed his pri­or sup­port of abor­tion rights and implored Repub­li­can vot­ers to choose anoth­er can­di­date.

“Amer­i­ca will only be a great nation when we have lead­ers of strong char­ac­ter who will defend both unborn chil­dren and the dig­ni­ty of women,” Dan­nen­felser and oth­er women wrote in an open let­ter to Iowa vot­ers in Jan­u­ary 2016. “We can­not trust Don­ald Trump to do either.”

Then came a great swerve that would upend pol­i­tics in Amer­i­ca: Mil­lions of con­ser­v­a­tives — Dan­nen­felser and oth­er CNP mem­bers among them — got firm­ly behind Trump. Today, the Repub­li­can Par­ty has been trans­formed, and Trump or one of his ide­o­log­i­cal heirs is like­ly to be the GOP nom­i­nee in 2024.

Much has been writ­ten about this turn of con­ser­v­a­tives toward Trump. But I want­ed to learn more about the polit­i­cal and com­mu­ni­ca­tions infra­struc­ture that con­vert­ed this sup­port into votes and influ­ence. How did these lead­ers and activists — once so crit­i­cal of Trump — end up help­ing shape and advo­cate for his agen­da? And now that he is almost a year removed from the White House, how are they con­tin­u­ing to serve him and his cause?

Work­ing with fel­low Wash­ing­ton Post reporter Shawn Boburg, I start­ed gath­er­ing doc­u­ments and cul­ti­vat­ing sources. We zeroed in on key fig­ures and groups, mak­ing charts of their ties and time­lines of their actions. We iden­ti­fied net­works of groups that served as a kind of nerve sys­tem for con­ser­v­a­tive influ­ence cam­paigns.

Enmeshed in these efforts was the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. CNP may be the most unusu­al, least under­stood con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion in the nation’s cap­i­tal. A reg­is­tered char­i­ty, it has served for 40 years as a social, plan­ning and com­mu­ni­ca­tions hub for con­ser­v­a­tive activists in Wash­ing­ton and nation­wide. One of its defin­ing fea­tures is its con­fi­den­tial­i­ty. In a town where peo­ple and groups con­stant­ly angle for pub­lic­i­ty, CNP bars the press and unin­vit­ed out­siders from its events. All mem­bers — even such lumi­nar­ies as for­mer vice pres­i­dent Mike Pence, Ralph Reed and Gin­ni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas — agree to remain silent about its activ­i­ties.

Oth­er bas­tions of con­ser­v­a­tive influ­ence — from pol­i­cy groups like the Her­itage Foun­da­tion to media out­lets like Bre­it­bart News — gen­er­al­ly have clear mis­sions. By con­trast, CNP’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, Bob McEwen, told me that the orga­ni­za­tion itself does not “do any­thing.” He and oth­er CNP lead­ers will tell you it is mere­ly an edu­ca­tion­al venue aimed at unit­ing its con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers.

Yet as I began to learn more, I came to see that it would be a mis­take to under­es­ti­mate the group’s sig­nif­i­cance. I also real­ized that research­ing CNP rep­re­sent­ed a rare oppor­tu­ni­ty: to get a behind-the-scenes look at the out­look, goals and meth­ods of activists who have so suc­cess­ful­ly pro­mot­ed Trump­ism. “I just want­ed to thank you and the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy for your sup­port and for con­sis­tent­ly ampli­fy­ing the agen­da of Pres­i­dent Trump and our Admin­is­tra­tion,” Pence wrote to CNP last year. “I know our col­lab­o­ra­tion with CNP will only strength­en and deep­en this year and beyond.”

The Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy began tak­ing root on Jan. 22, 1981, when six reli­gious and social con­ser­v­a­tives gath­ered for din­ner at a home in Dal­las. Most Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives were still jubi­lant about the inau­gu­ra­tion of Ronald Rea­gan two days ear­li­er. They rejoiced at the prospect that Rea­gan might make good on one of his cam­paign slo­gans: “Let’s Make Amer­i­ca Great Again.” Over din­ner, they resolved to bring togeth­er Chris­t­ian activists, busi­ness inter­ests and wealthy donors under one umbrel­la to cajole and pres­sure the new admin­is­tra­tion.

Details about CNP’s his­to­ry have emerged peri­od­i­cal­ly over the decades, as jour­nal­ists, authors and left-lean­ing activists pieced togeth­er leaked inter­nal doc­u­ments and oth­er mate­r­i­al. In ear­ly June this year, Nick Surgey, exec­u­tive direc­tor of a pro­gres­sive watch­dog group called Doc­u­ment­ed, reached out to say he had obtained a speech from a CNP meet­ing in May that cel­e­brat­ed the group’s 40th anniver­sary. Did I want it?

The speech offered a wealth of new infor­ma­tion and con­text. And it sup­ple­ment­ed dozens of hours of con­fi­den­tial con­fer­ence record­ings and doc­u­ments that I obtained from Surgey and oth­er sources. “I’m not going to crys­tal-ball-gaze about the way ahead,” speak­er Ed Feul­ner told the crowd gath­ered behind closed doors in Naples, Fla., on May 21. “Rather, I’m focus­ing on the ear­ly days of CNP. How we start­ed, who did what and how the foun­da­tions were laid for us now, four decades lat­er.”

One of the orga­niz­ers of the ini­tial din­ner was Tim LaHaye, an evan­gel­i­cal min­is­ter, writer and polit­i­cal activist. LaHaye lat­er wrote the pop­u­lar Left Behind series, books about the end of times and the Antichrist, using themes derived from the Bible. He thought the Chris­t­ian right would have greater force if its com­po­nents band­ed more tight­ly togeth­er. “This new orga­ni­za­tion could help bring Amer­i­ca back to moral san­i­ty,” he told Feul­ner, accord­ing to the speech.

LaHaye knew the endeav­or would need fund­ing, so he reached out to Cullen Davis, a wealthy Texas oil scion. Davis — who told me recent­ly that the orig­i­nal orga­niz­ers thought that com­mu­nists were going to take over the U.S. gov­ern­ment and that Chris­tian­i­ty in Amer­i­ca need­ed staunch defend­ers — agreed to host the din­ner. He called his pal Nel­son Bunker Hunt, anoth­er wealthy oil fig­ure known for try­ing to cor­ner the glob­al mar­ket in sil­ver. They also tapped Richard Viguerie, a fundrais­ing pio­neer and mas­ter of far-right per­sua­sion cam­paigns who once said he mailed out 1.5 bil­lion let­ters for more than 100 pub­lic pol­i­cy groups.

Dur­ing the din­ner they agreed to reach out to a long list of oth­er influ­en­tial evan­gel­i­cals and social con­ser­v­a­tives. Sev­er­al weeks lat­er, more than two dozen activists gath­ered around a con­fer­ence table at a hotel near Dallas/Fort Worth Inter­na­tion­al Air­port to sketch out CNP’s ambi­tions. Togeth­er, they made up a for­mi­da­ble force: Paul Weyrich spoke about a group he was build­ing to help elect con­ser­v­a­tives to Con­gress. Phyl­lis Schlafly described her cam­paign to thwart the Equal Rights Amend­ment. For his part, Feul­ner, a co-founder of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, spoke about how reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives need­ed an alter­na­tive to the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions.

...

Feul­ner told me recent­ly that CNP has always aimed at pro­vid­ing a forum where cer­tain con­ser­v­a­tive elites could social­ize and strate­gize — and raise mon­ey from wealthy donors. “You could let your hair down and just talk can­did­ly about shared visions,” he said. “You also have a lot of peo­ple who can write sig­nif­i­cant checks.”

From the start, CNP mem­bers cul­ti­vat­ed polit­i­cal pow­er at the high­est lev­els in Wash­ing­ton. In an ear­ly let­ter to the Rea­gan White House, a CNP leader wrote that the group includ­ed “some of the most influ­en­tial busi­ness, polit­i­cal and reli­gious lead­ers in Amer­i­ca” who want­ed to “plan togeth­er the future of our coun­try.” Their goal was a “moral rebirth” for our soci­ety.

CNP’s lead­ers had much expe­ri­ence in polit­i­cal fundrais­ing, orga­niz­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Among them was a polit­i­cal oper­a­tive named Tom Ellis, who had played on White racial fears as he helped build the career of the late for­mer sen­a­tor Jesse Helms of North Car­oli­na. (Helms, who became a revered mem­ber of CNP, was once described by The Post’s David Broder as “the last promi­nent unabashed white racist politi­cian in this coun­try.”) Oth­ers includ­ed tel­e­van­ge­list Pat Robert­son; Ed Meese, the attor­ney gen­er­al under Rea­gan; Sam Moore, the nation’s largest Bible pub­lish­er; and Rich DeVos, bil­lion­aire co-founder of Amway and fun­der of con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es.

CNP mem­bers showed they were will­ing to par­tic­i­pate in behind-the-scenes activ­i­ty in sup­port of their val­ues. Con­sid­er the covert cam­paign run by Oliv­er North, a mem­ber of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil staff from 1981 to 1986. In 1984 — appar­ent­ly before he became a mem­ber — North spoke at a CNP meet­ing about the impor­tance of sup­port­ing the con­tra rebels oppos­ing a left­ist regime in Nicaragua. At the time, Con­gress had imposed a pro­hi­bi­tion on gov­ern­ment finan­cial sup­port for the con­tras.

Accord­ing to an audio record­ing of the ses­sion, North told CNP mem­bers that Nicaragua’s lead­ers and their Sovi­et sup­port­ers had more than Cen­tral Amer­i­ca in their crosshairs. “The real tar­get is the Unit­ed States,” he said. “This coun­try is in great, great jeop­ardy from these peo­ple, who are tru­ly god­less com­mu­nists.”

North sought finan­cial sup­port from CNP mem­bers, includ­ing a wealthy elder­ly woman named Ellen Clay­ton Gar­wood, whom he met at a CNP meet­ing. “With tears in his eyes,” a Sen­ate report lat­er recount­ed, “North explained to her that the Con­tras were hun­gry, poor­ly clothed, and in need of lethal sup­plies.” Gar­wood even­tu­al­ly gave about $2.5 mil­lion to sup­port North’s off-books effort, accord­ing to the Sen­ate report. Using old CNP direc­to­ries and oth­er doc­u­ments, I deter­mined that four CNP founders, mem­bers or fun­ders were cit­ed in the Sen­ate report as con­trib­u­tors to North’s mis­sion. (I reached out to North, but a spokesman declined my requests for an inter­view.)

In inter­nal videos, audio and doc­u­ments, the con­ser­vatism of CNP mem­bers often seemed linked to fear — not just of the god­less for­eign com­mu­nists that North invoked but of lib­er­al Amer­i­cans as well. In Sep­tem­ber 2017, a guest of CNP was invit­ed to dis­cuss his efforts to map left­ist orga­ni­za­tions. “I almost think we might want to call it track­ing and defeat­ing evil,” an uniden­ti­fied CNP leader said dur­ing the speaker’s intro­duc­tion, accord­ing to an inter­nal CNP audio record­ing. “The activists on the left and the peo­ple who fund them are out to destroy every­thing you hold dear,” the leader explained. “Your fam­i­lies. Mar­riage. Your busi­ness­es. Your free­dom of speech. Your free­dom of reli­gion. Every­thing.”

When can­di­date Trump arrived at the CNP meet­ing in the fall of 2015, many White con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cals were still aggriev­ed about Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­cy and his pro­mo­tion of pro­gres­sive poli­cies, such as near-uni­ver­sal health care. The pres­ence of a Black man in the White House served as a reminder of new demo­graph­ic real­i­ty: They con­sti­tut­ed a dimin­ish­ing pro­por­tion of the elec­torate and were los­ing their pow­er to shape America’s cul­ture and pol­i­tics.

Trump’s appear­ance was part of a week­end-long meet­ing in sub­ur­ban Wash­ing­ton; CNP usu­al­ly holds these meet­ings three times a year in posh hotel con­fer­ence rooms around the coun­try. All the can­di­dates had been invit­ed to speak, but only Repub­li­cans respond­ed, a CNP offi­cial told me.

I obtained an inter­nal CNP direc­to­ry for 2015 and exam­ined it for insights about the kinds of peo­ple Trump would be court­ing. There were about 400 mem­bers from across the coun­try, many of them lead­ers of rel­a­tive­ly small non­prof­its focused on social and reli­gious con­ser­vatism. But I also saw some now-famil­iar names: Leonard Leo, then of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety; Steve Ban­non, then leader of Bre­it­bart News and lat­er chief exec­u­tive of Trump’s cam­paign; David Bossie, the head of the group Cit­i­zens Unit­ed and lat­er Trump’s deputy cam­paign man­ag­er; and Kellyanne Con­way, who would become a White House coun­selor.

On hand for Trump’s pre­sen­ta­tion was Ralph Reed, an evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal leader and CNP mem­ber. By his own account, he had come to know and admire Trump. But Reed sensed intense skep­ti­cism from oth­er CNP mem­bers, as he writes in his book “For God and Coun­try: The Chris­t­ian Case for Trump.” Then, at the meet­ing, some­thing unex­pect­ed hap­pened. After his pre­sen­ta­tion, Trump, like the oth­er Repub­li­can can­di­dates, answered ques­tions and offered to stand with any CNP mem­ber for a pho­to. The line went clear out of the ball­room.

Still, in ear­ly 2016, just months before the elec­tion, Hillary Clin­ton appeared to be ahead in the esteem of most Amer­i­cans. It was increas­ing­ly clear Trump need­ed the con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal vote to win. “The Trump train kept rolling, and Evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers were either going to have to get on board or get out of the way,” Reed writes. That March, Trump and Don­ald McGahn, who would become a White House lawyer, host­ed a meet­ing with Leo, who was involved with a non­prof­it net­work that was rais­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions to fund media cam­paigns and oth­er ini­tia­tives in sup­port of con­ser­v­a­tive judges and caus­es. The three men focused on the Supreme Court seat left open after the recent death of Jus­tice Antonin Scalia. McGahn thought Trump could ben­e­fit by releas­ing a list of nom­i­nees to replace Scalia, an unusu­al move that would reas­sure reli­gious and social con­ser­v­a­tives who want­ed an antiabor­tion jurist. Trump expressed sup­port for one of Leo’s long-cher­ished goals: a fed­er­al court sys­tem dom­i­nat­ed by judges who would inter­pret the Con­sti­tu­tion in ways that favored busi­ness and con­ser­v­a­tive views.

As Leo lat­er told mem­bers of CNP — where he served on the board of gov­er­nors — that was only going to hap­pen through a cam­paign by the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. “We’re going to have to under­stand that judi­cial con­fir­ma­tions these days are more like polit­i­cal cam­paigns,” Leo said, accord­ing to one of the videos I reviewed. “We’re going to have to be smart as a move­ment.”

On May 18, 2016, Trump great­ly boost­ed his prospects when he released the list of judges. The next month, he con­vened a faith advi­so­ry board of con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cals at Trump Tow­er. Reed and James Dob­son, a Chris­t­ian activist who had been with CNP from the ear­ly days, were on the board, accord­ing to Reed’s book. The meet­ing was fol­lowed by an extra­or­di­nary closed-door con­clave at a Times Square hotel for near­ly a thou­sand con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians.

The Reli­gion News Ser­vice account asked in a head­line: “Could con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian lead­ers res­cue a Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date whose per­son­al lifestyle and reli­gious bona fides have been punch­lines more than a tes­ti­mo­ni­al?” But some­thing else in that sto­ry popped out at me: It said a chief orga­niz­er of the Times Square con­clave was CNP mem­ber Bill Dal­las.

Dal­las was an unusu­al fig­ure. He had been con­vict­ed two decades ear­li­er on felony embez­zle­ment charges. He was sent to San Quentin State Prison, where a new­found com­mit­ment to Chris­tian­i­ty deep­ened, accord­ing to his book, “Lessons From San Quentin.” Now he was a data entre­pre­neur who head­ed a non­prof­it called Unit­ed in Pur­pose, which gath­ered and parsed infor­ma­tion about Chris­t­ian vot­ers. Among the board mem­bers was CNP exec­u­tive direc­tor Bob McEwen, who is also a for­mer House mem­ber from Ohio.

Unit­ed in Purpose’s net­work of allies and clients includ­ed oth­er CNP mem­bers from groups such as the Amer­i­can Fam­i­ly Asso­ci­a­tion, the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil and Reed’s Faith & Free­dom Coali­tion, accord­ing to Anne Nel­son, a research schol­ar at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and author of “Shad­ow Net­work: Media, Mon­ey, and the Secret Hub of the Rad­i­cal Right,” a book that exam­ines CNP. Dallas’s oper­a­tion seemed a per­fect com­ple­ment to oth­er ini­tia­tives by groups affil­i­at­ed with CNP mem­bers. “What the CNP has done is con­vene these forces in a high­ly strate­gic way and cre­ate an envi­ron­ment in which they can col­lab­o­rate and lever­age each other’s work off the radar,” Nel­son told me. “It’s a well-oiled machine.”

In a chat with me, Dal­las said he is no longer a mem­ber of CNP and is step­ping back from polit­i­cal activism. He expressed pride about the 2016 Times Square event and recalled one remark there that he believes won over the Chris­t­ian activists. It was when Trump told them not to be ashamed of their own reli­gious cul­ture and beliefs. “He said, ‘Chris­tians should not be afraid to say Mer­ry Christ­mas at Christ­mas­time,’ ” Dal­las told me. “I think that was a turn­ing point.”

In the sum­mer of 2016, Trump made anoth­er strate­gic move that would seal the deal with Dan­nen­felser, the antiabor­tion activist, and oth­er CNP mem­bers. He pledged to oppose abor­tion and put the promis­es onto paper in Sep­tem­ber. “Dear Pro-Life Leader,” Trump’s let­ter began. “I am writ­ing to invite you to join my campaign’s Pro-Life Coali­tion, which is being spear­head­ed by long­time leader Mar­jorie Dan­nen­felser.” Trump said he would nom­i­nate “pro-life jus­tices to the U.S. Supreme Court,” defund Planned Par­ent­hood and take oth­er mea­sures that the antiabor­tion activists had demand­ed.

Dan­nen­felser was thrilled. “Before that we were still stomp­ing our feet,” she said last year at a CNP meet­ing, accord­ing to one of the inter­nal videos. “Lit­tle did we know that this man, who was a per­former and can incite audi­ences in ways we nev­er even thought could be, would gal­va­nize audi­ences in bat­tle­ground states all over the coun­try and put life at the cen­ter of the project.” The CNP crowd whooped and hollered at her remarks. In Reed’s book, he writes that Dan­nen­felser told him: “Trump was my last choice until he was my first.” (A spokes­woman for Dan­nen­felser declined my request for an inter­view.)

Pence acknowl­edged CNP’s sup­port in his let­ter last year: “We are grate­ful for CNP’s time­ly coun­sel and unique capac­i­ty to rapid­ly gar­ner sup­port for the dif­fi­cult deci­sions the Pres­i­dent and I are mak­ing each day.” And CNP meet­ings reflect­ed the group’s stand­ing with the admin­is­tra­tion. In May 2017, for instance, Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency Admin­is­tra­tor Scott Pruitt appeared at a CNP meet­ing and crowed about the roll­back of reg­u­la­tions, with an empha­sis on Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion mea­sures aimed at cli­mate change. “With respect to the EPA, the future ain’t what it used to be,” he said, draw­ing cheers.

Surgey, the direc­tor of Doc­u­ment­ed, who first obtained the inter­nal CNP videos I reviewed for this sto­ry, said he “start­ed study­ing CNP because it seemed like its mem­bers were becom­ing a pow­er base, in terms of their pub­lic sup­port of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.” He added, “I was sur­prised by just how many lead­ing Trump advo­cates appear on the videos.”

Activist David Horowitz spoke at a CNP meet­ing lat­er in 2017. Horowitz, leader of a non­prof­it group called the David Horowitz Free­dom Cen­ter, cap­tured the sense of des­per­a­tion expressed by many on the right — a feel­ing that had drawn them to Trump. “For all of Donald’s faults, and every­body knows them, he stood on the right side. We are in a civ­il war,” he said. “This is the stan­dard-bear­er for us in this war.”

I met Bob McEwen at the small suite of offices CNP main­tains in the Hall of the States build­ing, just down the hill from the U.S. Capi­tol, a remark­ably tiny space for a group with such a large reach. Join­ing us was lawyer Alan Dye, a CNP mem­ber and non­prof­it spe­cial­ist.

Meet­ing with some­one like me was a depar­ture for a group that has spent decades try­ing to avoid atten­tion from the main­stream media. McEwen empha­sized that CNP was not involved in polit­i­cal cam­paigns and exists only to edu­cate its mem­bers, lead­ers of allied non­prof­it groups across the coun­try who are invit­ed to join. Like all tax-exempt char­i­ties, CNP may not under Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice rules engage in polit­i­cal activ­i­ty or sup­port par­tic­u­lar can­di­dates for office. An affil­i­at­ed group called CNP Action — anoth­er type of non­prof­it — is per­mit­ted by the IRS to focus more on polit­i­cal activ­i­ty.

McEwen, also pres­i­dent of CNP Action, told me he would not dis­cuss the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment in gen­er­al or the activ­i­ty or advo­ca­cy of CNP mem­bers. When I asked about his group’s efforts to oper­ate in secret, he reject­ed the premise of the ques­tion. “It’s not secret,” McEwen said. “It’s just pri­vate. And any­thing that we want to ele­vate is going to be ele­vat­ed by the mem­bers.”

He said CNP and its mem­bers have pri­va­cy rights, and con­fi­den­tial­i­ty helps cre­ate an atmos­phere where par­tic­i­pants can freely exchange ideas with­out unwant­ed judg­ment. “Quite frankly, in a non­po­lit­i­cal sense, this is like a Rotary Club,” McEwen said. “CNP is a con­ven­ing orga­ni­za­tion of patri­ot­ic Amer­i­cans that love their coun­try and have increas­ing­ly been of the opin­ion that the infor­ma­tion they receive is unre­li­able. And there’s not very many places they could get the truth. And CNP seeks to deliv­er the truth.”

I asked about the influ­ence cam­paigns — the adver­tise­ments, social media and such — run by var­i­ous net­works of peo­ple and groups linked through CNP. As an exam­ple, I men­tioned the con­cert­ed efforts of inter­lock­ing non­prof­it groups allied with Leonard Leo.

“What you’re real­ly talk­ing about is a whole bunch of dif­fer­ent net­works. You could do a Venn dia­gram, I sup­pose,” Dye said. “So there’d be pro-life. There’d be this and that. All the var­i­ous issues, and in every place they over­lap would be a net­work. And clear­ly there’s a net­work of peo­ple sup­port­ing con­ser­v­a­tive judi­cial nom­i­nees. And Leonard, of course, would be in that net­work. It might not encom­pass the entire CNP mem­ber­ship, but it might encom­pass a fair num­ber of them.”

Both men assert­ed the net­works on the left are far larg­er and bet­ter fund­ed than those on the right, and that some are financed by bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist George Soros. “They’re much big­ger,” Dye told me. McEwen said, chuck­ling, “We’re a gnat.”

I learned about anoth­er dimen­sion of CNP through a video fea­tur­ing Jim DeMint, a for­mer sen­a­tor and tea par­ty favorite. It was 2018, and he was telling CNP mem­bers about an ini­tia­tive called the Con­ser­v­a­tive Action Project, which had been launched years ear­li­er by CNP lead­ers.

CAP claims to include more than 100 groups “rep­re­sent­ing all major ele­ments of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment — eco­nom­ic, social, and nation­al secu­ri­ty.” Its web­site pub­lish­es pol­i­cy mem­os signed by the lead­ers of its mem­ber groups. It turns out that, accord­ing to doc­u­ments, CAP shares an address with CNP, and many CAP activists are mem­bers of both groups. CAP also works hand-in-hand with yet anoth­er group that DeMint had start­ed not long before called the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute...0 (“The Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute arms, trains, and unites con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers in Wash­ing­ton ready to fight,” its web­site until recent­ly stat­ed.)

“The whole point was to sup­port peo­ple on the inside,” explained DeMint, list­ed on the 2018 video as a CNP exec­u­tive com­mit­tee mem­ber. “But that doesn’t work unless we’ve got peo­ple like the folks here tonight with the Coun­cil of Nation­al Pol­i­cy on the out­side build­ing pub­lic sup­port for the right ideas to get things done. We’ve got an out­side game. We’ve got an inside game. And it’s the only way to win.”

DeMint said CAP’s efforts were com­ing to fruition under the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. “Folks, there are more of us than there are of them. There is no rea­son for con­ser­v­a­tives to be los­ing,” he said. “We got the pow­er in our hands.”

At one point in the video, DeMint praised Trump. “We’ve got an amaz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty here,” DeMint told them. “And it’s incred­i­ble with this pres­i­dent, who is the last per­son I ever thought would pro­mote reli­gious free­dom, pro-life. I mean, the Lord con­fus­es things!” He grinned and paused while the CNP crowd broke into laugh­ter and applause. “But this guy’s more gen­uine than any­body I’ve ever known,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know, I’m just real­ly con­fused. But then, he seems will­ing to work for us because he’s con­fused, too.”

I recalled anoth­er inter­nal CNP video where oth­ers described how a del­e­ga­tion of CNP and CAP offi­cials met most every week with Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials, often at the White House. “It’s kind of this lit­tle secre­tive hud­dle that meets every Wednes­day morn­ing,” Paul Teller, direc­tor of strate­gic ini­tia­tives for Pence when he was vice pres­i­dent, said on the video.

Yet anoth­er video includ­ed Rachel Bovard, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist who works close­ly with DeMint at CPI. She said CAP peo­ple worked behind the scenes with the White House and allies in Con­gress to main­tain pub­lic sup­port for Trump dur­ing impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings. “We worked a lot to coor­di­nate mes­sag­ing,” Bovard said. Through­out the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, she explained, CAP lead­ers also col­lab­o­rat­ed with White House offi­cials to select polit­i­cal appointees. “We work very close­ly — CAP does and then we at CPI also — with the Office of Pres­i­den­tial Per­son­nel at the White House to try and get good con­ser­v­a­tives in the posi­tions, because we see what hap­pens when we don’t vet these peo­ple,” she said, adding: “All these peo­ple that led the impeach­ment against Pres­i­dent Trump shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Last year, in the months before the elec­tion, there was a new air of des­per­a­tion in some of the rhetoric of CNP mem­bers. L. Brent Bozell III, a CNP exec­u­tive com­mit­tee mem­ber, claimed in a closed-door meet­ing that “evi­dence is pour­ing out of an attempt by the far left to steal the elec­tion,” an inter­nal video shows.

“Today we’re as close to los­ing this nation as we ever have been,” Kay Coles James, then pres­i­dent of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, said at anoth­er CNP ses­sion, accord­ing to an inter­nal video. “And make no mis­take about it: This Novem­ber is not about win­ning or los­ing an elec­tion. It’s about win­ning or los­ing our coun­try.”

The integri­ty of elec­tions has been a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion on the right for years. In 2017, Trump announced a Pres­i­den­tial Advi­so­ry Com­mis­sion on Elec­tion Integri­ty, which includ­ed two CNP mem­bers: Ken­neth Black­well, the for­mer sec­re­tary of state in Ohio, and J. Chris­t­ian Adams of the Pub­lic Inter­est Legal Foun­da­tion. In August 2019, Lisa Nel­son, a CNP mem­ber and chief exec­u­tive of the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil, launched an ini­tia­tive called “ALEC Polit­i­cal Process Work­ing Group,” accord­ing to an inter­nal email. Among oth­er things, the group was going to focus on “elec­tion law and bal­lot integri­ty.” (In a let­ter to fun­ders defend­ing that effort this year, Nel­son said the group “con­nect­ed leg­is­la­tors with each oth­er as well as fed­er­al offi­cials to dis­cuss process and gov­er­nance issues includ­ing the cen­sus, redis­trict­ing and oth­er issues relat­ed to how state gov­ern­ments work.”)

Among those work­ing with her was a CNP board of gov­er­nors mem­ber named Cle­ta Mitchell, a lawyer who often speaks in the closed-door meet­ings about issues around elec­tion integri­ty. Mitchell has described her­self jok­ing­ly as “con­sigliere to the vast right-wing con­spir­a­cy.” She was a dri­ving force behind the alle­ga­tions a decade ago that the IRS and Oba­ma White House engaged in a polit­i­cal witch hunt against tea par­ty groups — and lat­er worked close­ly with Trump as he dis­put­ed the 2020 elec­tion results.

In Feb­ru­ary 2020, Nel­son told a CNP Action ses­sion that ALEC, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Mitchell and oth­er CNP mem­bers, had begun prep­ping state law­mak­ers on rules they could invoke dur­ing an elec­tion dis­pute. “And I think we’ve iden­ti­fied a few,” she said in the meet­ing. “They can write a let­ter to the sec­re­tary of state ques­tion­ing the valid­i­ty of an elec­tion and say­ing, ‘What did hap­pen that night?’ So we are draft­ing a lot of those things. If you have ideas in that area, let us know and we’ll get those to the state leg­is­la­tors, and they can start to kind of exer­cise their polit­i­cal mus­cle in that area.”

That spring, the elec­tion prepa­ra­tions coin­cid­ed with efforts by CNP mem­bers to push back against pan­dem­ic restric­tions. Work­ing through new­ly formed coali­tions, the mem­bers pumped out mes­sages aimed at oppos­ing face masks, busi­ness clo­sures and oth­er mea­sures to con­tain the coro­n­avirus.

The cam­paigns received atten­tion in main­stream media. But the fact that CNP mem­bers played lead­ing roles was not gen­er­al­ly under­stood. One new push was called the Save Our Coun­try Coali­tion. It was announced by Free­dom­Works, whose leader is a CNP mem­ber. Oth­er par­tic­i­pants includ­ed Nel­son from ALEC and Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin, a CNP mem­ber and leader of Tea Par­ty Patri­ots. Near­ly two dozen par­tic­i­pants in all were CNP mem­bers. The group called for a resump­tion of nor­mal eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty, an end to fed­er­al con­trol of the nation’s pan­dem­ic response and pro­tec­tion of “indi­vid­ual lib­er­ties of our cit­i­zens from uncon­sti­tu­tion­al pow­er grabs by the fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ments.”

Weeks lat­er, McEwen and oth­er mem­bers host­ed a con­fi­den­tial con­fer­ence call for activists that includ­ed Trump cam­paign offi­cials. Their goal was to make rec­om­men­da­tions to the cam­paign and coor­di­nate efforts to pres­sure state and fed­er­al offi­cials to reopen the coun­try. Accord­ing to a record­ing of the call obtained by the Cen­ter for Media and Democ­ra­cy, a left-lean­ing group, McEwen opened with a prayer: “We would give you the praise in Christ’s name.” He described gov­ern­ment efforts to con­tain the pan­dem­ic as “tyran­ny.”

...

Dur­ing anoth­er CNP ses­sion that August, var­i­ous mem­bers also dis­cussed the upcom­ing elec­tion in breath­less terms. Some zeroed in on the pro­lif­er­a­tion of mail-in bal­lot­ing as an omi­nous trend, claim­ing it made the sys­tem ripe for fraud. “We need to stop those bal­lots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” said Tom Fit­ton, CNP’s new pres­i­dent and the leader of Judi­cial Watch, a con­ser­v­a­tive watch­dog group.

J. Chris­t­ian Adams, the for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial who served on Trump’s elec­tion integri­ty com­mis­sion, described mail-in vot­ing in the video as “the num­ber one left-wing agen­da.” He urged CNP mem­bers not to be cowed by crit­i­cism about efforts to stop such vot­ing. “Be not afraid of the accu­sa­tions that you’re a vot­er sup­pres­sor, you’re a racist and so forth,” Adams said. (Fit­ton and Adams did not respond to requests for com­ment for this arti­cle. In a pre­vi­ous email, Adams stood by his remarks. In an inter­view last fall, Fit­ton told me: “The left has war-gamed this out. … And it could cause civ­il war.”)

As I watched the video of these men and oth­er CNP mem­bers describ­ing the elec­tion with such pas­sion, I won­dered: Were they try­ing to out­do one anoth­er in the zeal depart­ment in a play to wealthy donors? I knew from tax fil­ings that dona­tions to some groups led by CNP mem­bers had soared dur­ing the Trump years. Dona­tions to Judi­cial Watch, for exam­ple, rose to $104 mil­lion last year from $44 mil­lion four years ear­li­er, tax fil­ings show.

In Octo­ber 2020, I wrote a Post sto­ry about those and oth­er elec­tion-relat­ed dis­cus­sions at the group’s meet­ings. But of course, I learned lat­er that much more was in play. Mul­ti­ple peo­ple from far-right groups were pro­mot­ing a move­ment to “Stop the Steal” that includ­ed spe­cious claims that Trump won. One of the most promi­nent lead­ers was a for­mer CNP fel­low named Ali Alexan­der, for­mer­ly Ali Akbar. “We will not go qui­et­ly. We’ll shut down this coun­try if we have to,” Alexan­der said at a Phoenix ral­ly in Decem­ber, lat­er lead­ing the crowd in a chant of “1776.”

At least five oth­er CNP mem­bers and their groups worked with oth­er Trump sup­port­ers to ampli­fy the Stop the Steal claims. On Dec. 30, Cle­ta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of doc­u­ments pur­port­ing to sup­port claims of elec­tion fraud, accord­ing to an email includ­ed in a report this month by Demo­c­ra­t­ic staff of the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee. Three days lat­er, Mitchell joined Trump on a call aimed at pres­sur­ing Georgia’s sec­re­tary of state “to find 11,780 votes,” the report said.

Sev­er­al CNP mem­bers were involved in the orga­ni­za­tion or pro­mo­tion of the ral­lies pre­ced­ing the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion on Jan. 6. Jen­ny Beth Mar­tin was list­ed as a speak­er in pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als (though she did not speak, in the end) and Tea Par­ty Patri­ots was list­ed as a “coali­tion part­ner.” CNP mem­ber Char­lie Kirk — the leader of Turn­ing Point USA, a group ori­ent­ed to con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dents, and Turn­ing Point Action, its polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy arm — offered to trans­port and house stu­dent pro­test­ers. Months ear­li­er, Turn­ing Point Action was behind a secre­tive cam­paign that relied on teenagers to pump out social media post­ings in favor of Trump.

Mean­while, Gin­ni Thomas, then a CNP Action board mem­ber, praised ral­ly­go­ers in tweets: “LOVE MAGA peo­ple!!!!” Ulti­mate­ly, Stop the Steal orga­niz­ers urged pro­test­ers to “take to” the Capi­tol steps “to make sure that Con­gress does not cer­ti­fy the botched Elec­toral Col­lege” on Jan. 6, accord­ing to web­pages that have since been removed.

Thomas did not respond to a request for com­ment. She wrote a note on social media stress­ing that her encour­age­ment came before the vio­lence. Kirk, Mar­tin and oth­er CNP mem­bers who helped the ral­lies con­demned the sub­se­quent events at the Capi­tol. “We are shocked, out­raged, and sad­dened,” Mar­tin told me in an e‑mail in Jan­u­ary.

McEwen also con­demned the insur­rec­tion, say­ing CNP had no role in the events or its mem­bers’ activ­i­ty. “What they do on their own time — I won’t say I don’t care — we have no inter­est or capac­i­ty to mon­i­tor,” McEwen told me ear­li­er this year.

That remind­ed me of some­thing he told me last year: CNP itself “doesn’t do ad cam­paigns. It doesn’t do brochures. It is a meet­ing of lead­ers,” he said. “Any­thing that’s done is done by the mem­ber­ship, not by the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy.”

———-

“God, Trump and the Closed-Door World of a Major Con­ser­v­a­tive Group” by Robert O’Har­row Jr.; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 10/25/2021

“Enmeshed in these efforts was the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. CNP may be the most unusu­al, least under­stood con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion in the nation’s cap­i­tal. A reg­is­tered char­i­ty, it has served for 40 years as a social, plan­ning and com­mu­ni­ca­tions hub for con­ser­v­a­tive activists in Wash­ing­ton and nation­wide. One of its defin­ing fea­tures is its con­fi­den­tial­i­ty. In a town where peo­ple and groups con­stant­ly angle for pub­lic­i­ty, CNP bars the press and unin­vit­ed out­siders from its events. All mem­bers — even such lumi­nar­ies as for­mer vice pres­i­dent Mike Pence, Ralph Reed and Gin­ni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas — agree to remain silent about its activ­i­ties.”

It’s not real­ly a sur­prise to learn that Mike Pence is a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. If any­thing it would be sur­pris­ing to learn he’s not a mem­ber. So giv­en that Pence is a mem­ber of the orga­ni­za­tion that appeared to play­ing a key orga­niz­ing role in the efforts that led up to the insur­rec­tion, we have to ask: just what kind of pres­sure was Pence expe­ri­ence from the broad­er CNP net­work to go along with the plan? As the arti­cle points out, the CNP was basi­cal­ly hold­ing week­ly secret meet­ings in the Trump White House, a like­ly a ref­er­ence to the Groundswell group formed in 2013 by CNP mem­bers Gin­ni Thomas and Steve Ban­non. It’s not like Pence could some­how avoid the pres­sure of his fel­low CNP mem­bers. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion was oper­at­ing as an exten­sion of the CNP:

...
Oth­er bas­tions of con­ser­v­a­tive influ­ence — from pol­i­cy groups like the Her­itage Foun­da­tion to media out­lets like Bre­it­bart News — gen­er­al­ly have clear mis­sions. By con­trast, CNP’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, Bob McEwen, told me that the orga­ni­za­tion itself does not “do any­thing.” He and oth­er CNP lead­ers will tell you it is mere­ly an edu­ca­tion­al venue aimed at unit­ing its con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers.

Yet as I began to learn more, I came to see that it would be a mis­take to under­es­ti­mate the group’s sig­nif­i­cance. I also real­ized that research­ing CNP rep­re­sent­ed a rare oppor­tu­ni­ty: to get a behind-the-scenes look at the out­look, goals and meth­ods of activists who have so suc­cess­ful­ly pro­mot­ed Trump­ism. “I just want­ed to thank you and the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy for your sup­port and for con­sis­tent­ly ampli­fy­ing the agen­da of Pres­i­dent Trump and our Admin­is­tra­tion,” Pence wrote to CNP last year. “I know our col­lab­o­ra­tion with CNP will only strength­en and deep­en this year and beyond.”

...

Pence acknowl­edged CNP’s sup­port in his let­ter last year: “We are grate­ful for CNP’s time­ly coun­sel and unique capac­i­ty to rapid­ly gar­ner sup­port for the dif­fi­cult deci­sions the Pres­i­dent and I are mak­ing each day.” And CNP meet­ings reflect­ed the group’s stand­ing with the admin­is­tra­tion. In May 2017, for instance, Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency Admin­is­tra­tor Scott Pruitt appeared at a CNP meet­ing and crowed about the roll­back of reg­u­la­tions, with an empha­sis on Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion mea­sures aimed at cli­mate change. “With respect to the EPA, the future ain’t what it used to be,” he said, draw­ing cheers.

Surgey, the direc­tor of Doc­u­ment­ed, who first obtained the inter­nal CNP videos I reviewed for this sto­ry, said he “start­ed study­ing CNP because it seemed like its mem­bers were becom­ing a pow­er base, in terms of their pub­lic sup­port of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion.” He added, “I was sur­prised by just how many lead­ing Trump advo­cates appear on the videos.”

...

I recalled anoth­er inter­nal CNP video where oth­ers described how a del­e­ga­tion of CNP and CAP offi­cials met most every week with Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials, often at the White House. “It’s kind of this lit­tle secre­tive hud­dle that meets every Wednes­day morn­ing,” Paul Teller, direc­tor of strate­gic ini­tia­tives for Pence when he was vice pres­i­dent, said on the video.

Yet anoth­er video includ­ed Rachel Bovard, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist who works close­ly with DeMint at CPI. She said CAP peo­ple worked behind the scenes with the White House and allies in Con­gress to main­tain pub­lic sup­port for Trump dur­ing impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings. “We worked a lot to coor­di­nate mes­sag­ing,” Bovard said. Through­out the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, she explained, CAP lead­ers also col­lab­o­rat­ed with White House offi­cials to select polit­i­cal appointees. “We work very close­ly — CAP does and then we at CPI also — with the Office of Pres­i­den­tial Per­son­nel at the White House to try and get good con­ser­v­a­tives in the posi­tions, because we see what hap­pens when we don’t vet these peo­ple,” she said, adding: “All these peo­ple that led the impeach­ment against Pres­i­dent Trump shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
...

And note the kind of rhetoric that was get­ting spewed out at the CNP’s closed-door meet­ings through­out the Trump admin­is­tra­tion: as David Horowitz but it in 2018, “For all of Donald’s faults, and every­body knows them, he stood on the right side. We are in a civ­il war.” It’s part of what makes Pence’s ulti­mate deci­sion to go against the CNP’s plans so sig­nif­i­cant. The CNP views the US as being in a state of civ­il war. Of course it’s more than hap­py to break democ­ra­cy. And that’s the group that was undoubt­ed­ly intense­ly lob­by­ing Pence through­out the entire post-elec­tion peri­od lead­ing up to the insur­rec­tion:

...
Activist David Horowitz spoke at a CNP meet­ing lat­er in 2017. Horowitz, leader of a non­prof­it group called the David Horowitz Free­dom Cen­ter, cap­tured the sense of des­per­a­tion expressed by many on the right — a feel­ing that had drawn them to Trump. “For all of Donald’s faults, and every­body knows them, he stood on the right side. We are in a civ­il war,” he said. “This is the stan­dard-bear­er for us in this war.”
...

We don’t have to spec­u­late as to whether or not Pence was active­ly coor­di­nat­ed with the CNP dur­ing this peri­od. As the fol­low­ing Novem­ber 14, 2020, Forbes report notes, Pence actu­al­ly spoke at a CNP meet­ing the pre­vi­ous day. And accord­ing to reports on the speech, Pence was met with chants of “Four More Year!” dur­ing his speech. Pence respond­ed, “that’s the plan”. Yes, a week and a half after the elec­tion, when it was already clear to every­one that Trump lost, Pence had his speech before CNP mem­bers inter­rupt­ed with cries to over­turn the elec­tion results. It’s part of what makes Pence’s ulti­mate­ly refused to go along with the scheme to over­turn the elec­tion so remark­able: He was­n’t just betray­ing Trump. He was betray­ing the CNP:

Forbes

Pence, Met With Chants Of ‘Four More Years,’ Replies: ‘That’s The Plan’

Andrew Solen­der
Forbes Staff
Nov 14, 2020,10:23am EST
Updat­ed Nov 14, 2020, 10:23am EST

Topline

Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence on Fri­day offered yet anoth­er sig­nal that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has no plans to con­cede any ground to Joe Biden’s claims to the pres­i­den­cy amid Pres­i­dent Trump’s con­tin­ued refusal to acknowl­edge his clear loss in his reelec­tion bid.

Key Facts

Dur­ing a speech to the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank, Pence was met with chants of “Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!” accord­ing to a tran­script of the speech put out by the White House.

“That’s the plan,” Pence respond­ed, lat­er stat­ing in his remarks, “I promise you: We will keep fight­ing until every legal vote is count­ed, until every ille­gal vote is thrown out, and we will nev­er stop fight­ing to make Amer­i­ca great again.”

Pence assert­ed “we await the results of our elec­tion,” despite all major news out­lets call­ing it for Biden a week ago after a win in Penn­syl­va­nia – which will not have a recount – put him over 270 elec­toral votes.

Pence’s com­ments echo Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo, who said dur­ing a brief­ing Tues­day, “There will be a smooth tran­si­tion to a sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion.”

White House trade advis­er Peter Navar­ro told Fox Busi­ness Fri­day that “we are mov­ing for­ward here at the White House under the assump­tion there will be a sec­ond Trump term.”

...

Big Num­ber

79%. That’s the share of Amer­i­cans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tues­day who said Biden won the elec­tion, com­pared to just 3% who said Trump won and 13% who said the elec­tion has not been decid­ed.

What To Watch For

So far just five Repub­li­can sen­a­tors and ten GOP House mem­bers have acknowl­edged Biden’s win, along with promi­nent for­mer Repub­li­cans offi­cials like for­mer Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Dan Quayle. Rep. Den­ver Rig­gle­man (R‑Va.) and Sen. Chris Coons (D‑Del.) have both said their Repub­li­can col­leagues pri­vate­ly acknowl­edge Biden’s vic­to­ry, with Coons pre­dict­ing more will come for­ward pub­licly as Trump’s hopes of reelec­tion con­tin­ue to slip away.

———-

“Pence, Met With Chants Of ‘Four More Years,’ Replies: ‘That’s The Plan’” by Andrew Solen­der; Forbes; 11/14/2020

“Dur­ing a speech to the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank, Pence was met with chants of “Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!” accord­ing to a tran­script of the speech put out by the White House.”

This was a week and a half fol­low­ing the elec­tion when Pence gave this defi­ant speech to the CNP. It was already quite clear Trump lost at that point. But Pence sure sound­ed like he was on board with the gen­er­al plan to some­how ensure Trump stays in office. Of course, it may not have been clear at that point that Pence him­self was going to the lead­ing fig­ure in this plan. Still, we see signs of Pence endors­ing the idea that the elec­tion was stolen from Trump. In a speech giv­en at the CNP. Why did Pence resist what the CNP’s demands? Did he fear the plan would­n’t pos­si­bly work? Or it just might work, with all of the expect­ed his­toric con­se­quences?

It start­ed with ques­tions of whether or not Gin­ni Thomas was involved with the efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results. But we’re well past that by now. At this point the ques­tions swirling around Gin­ni Thomas are focused on just how cen­tral she was to the broad­er con­ser­v­a­tive effort to help the Trump White House­’s win through any means nec­es­sary. A lead­er­ship role that involved both her sta­tus as a key con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­er but also the wife of a Supreme Court jus­tice. And a lead­ing fig­ure in the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy who co-found­ed with Steve Ban­non in 2013 the now influ­en­tial Groundswell week­ly meet­ings that played a pow­er­ful role in shap­ing the Trump White House­’s staffing and poli­cies.

As we’ve seen, there also all the ques­tions around her out­reach to state leg­is­la­tors lob­by­ing them to over­turn the elec­tion results using a CNP-affil­i­at­ed ‘grass roots’ email tool.

The ques­tions around Gin­ni Thomas’s role in the lead up to the insur­rec­tion have also increas­ing­ly involved her coor­di­na­tion with John East­man, who was lead­ing the Trump White House­’s legal strat­e­gy. Ques­tions that include just what their plan was since even East­man only thought 2 out of the 9 Supreme Court jus­tices (one of which was Clarence Thomas) would sup­port them if their case went to the Supreme Court. And that brings us to the lat­est remark­able about about Gin­ni Thomas and John East­man’s pre-insur­rec­tion coor­di­na­tion.

First, recall how a fed­er­al judge recent­ly ordered the release of those doc­u­ments to the House inves­ti­ga­tors under the “crime-fraud” excep­tion to attor­ney client priv­i­lege. As we’re going to see, it sounds judge Carter specif­i­cal­ly ref­er­ences emails between East­man and Gin­ni Thomas when he made that rul­ing. On Decem­ber 4, Ginn Thomas emailed East­man, invit­ing him to speak to one of the groups she leads, Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty, at a Decem­ber 8 meet­ing to give them an update on the Trump White House­’s strat­e­gy. Front­lin­ers was formed in August 2020 and appears to be part­nered with the Koch net­work’s Free­dom­Works.

Accord­ing to agen­da notes from the Decem­ber 8 meet­ing turned over to the com­mit­tee, East­man dis­cussed state-lev­el strate­gies for over­turn­ing the elec­tion results. Recall that Gin­ni Thomas’s lob­by­ing efforts of state leg­is­la­tors had two rounds of emails. The first was on Novem­ber 9 and the sec­ond on Decem­ber 13. Was that lob­by­ing dis­cussed with East­man dur­ing this Decem­ber 8 meet­ing? That’s unclear. What we can say with cer­tain­ty is that both East­man did­n’t want to talk about it. But thanks to that judge he had to share that info with the inves­ti­ga­tors and now we’re get­ting reports they want to talk to Gin­ni Thomas direct­ly. It’s all in keep­ing with one of the endur­ing trends of the Jan­u­ary 6 inves­ti­ga­tion: the more we learn, the worse it looks for Gin­ni Thomas. And Clarence Thomas, of course:

The Wash­ing­ton Post

Gin­ni Thomas cor­re­spond­ed with John East­man, sources in Jan. 6 House inves­ti­ga­tion say

By Jacque­line Ale­many, Josh Dawsey and Emma Brown
June 15, 2022 at 7:19 p.m. EDT

The House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capi­tol has obtained email cor­re­spon­dence between Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, and lawyer John East­man, who played a key role in efforts to pres­sure Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to block the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Joe Biden’s vic­to­ry, accord­ing to three peo­ple involved in the committee’s inves­ti­ga­tion.

The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to over­turn the elec­tion were more exten­sive than pre­vi­ous­ly known, two of the peo­ple said. The three declined to pro­vide details and spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive mat­ters.

The committee’s mem­bers and staffers are now dis­cussing whether to spend time dur­ing their pub­lic hear­ings explor­ing Gin­ni Thomas’s role in the attempt to over­turn the out­come of the 2020 elec­tion, the three peo­ple said. The Wash­ing­ton Post pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed that the com­mit­tee had not sought an inter­view with Thomas and was lean­ing against pur­su­ing her coop­er­a­tion with its inves­ti­ga­tion.

The two peo­ple said the emails were among doc­u­ments obtained by the com­mit­tee and reviewed recent­ly. Last week, a fed­er­al judge ordered East­man to turn more than 100 doc­u­ments over to the com­mit­tee. East­man had tried to block the release of those and oth­er doc­u­ments by argu­ing that they were priv­i­leged com­mu­ni­ca­tions and there­fore should be pro­tect­ed.

Thomas also sent mes­sages to Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Mead­ows, and to Ari­zona law­mak­ers, press­ing them to help over­turn the elec­tion, The Post has pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed.

While Thomas has main­tained that she and her hus­band oper­ate in sep­a­rate pro­fes­sion­al lanes, her activ­i­ties as a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal activist have long dis­tin­guished her from oth­er spous­es of Supreme Court jus­tices. Any new rev­e­la­tions about Thomas’s actions after the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion are like­ly to fur­ther inten­si­fy ques­tions about whether Clarence Thomas should recuse him­self from cas­es relat­ed to the elec­tion and attempts to sub­vert it.

In Jan­u­ary, the Supreme Court reject­ed a request by Trump to block the release of his White House records to the House com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing Jan. 6. Clarence Thomas was the only jus­tice to dis­sent, sid­ing with Trump.

...

East­man, who once served as clerk for Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court, out­lined sce­nar­ios for deny­ing Biden the pres­i­den­cy in legal mem­os and in an Oval Office meet­ing on Jan. 4 with Trump and Pence, The Post and oth­er out­lets have pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed. East­man has said that Trump was his client at the time.

Ear­li­er this year, U.S. Dis­trict Judge David O. Carter ordered East­man to release numer­ous doc­u­ments to the com­mit­tee, reject­ing priv­i­lege claims East­man had assert­ed. In April and May, East­man turned over more than 1,000 doc­u­ments to the com­mit­tee.

In a 26-page rul­ing last week, Carter addressed anoth­er 599 doc­u­ments that East­man sought to shield. Carter ruled that more than 400 of those doc­u­ments were pro­tect­ed by attor­ney-client or oth­er priv­i­lege and should not be released.

But he ordered the remain­der, includ­ing cor­re­spon­dence with state leg­is­la­tors and doc­u­ments relat­ed to alleged elec­tion fraud and the plan to dis­rupt the joint ses­sion of Con­gress on Jan. 6, be turned over to the com­mit­tee last week and ear­ly this week.

Carter described some of the doc­u­ments in more detail than oth­ers.

He ordered East­man to turn over doc­u­ments regard­ing three Decem­ber 2020 meet­ings of a group that East­man described as “civic mind­ed cit­i­zens of a con­ser­v­a­tive view­point,” includ­ing mes­sages from a per­son Carter described as the group’s “high-pro­file leader” invit­ing East­man to speak at a meet­ing on Dec. 8, 2020. The meet­ing agen­da indi­cates that East­man dis­cussed “State leg­isla­tive actions that can reverse the media-called elec­tion for Joe Biden.”

“The Select Com­mit­tee has a sub­stan­tial inter­est in these three meet­ings because the pre­sen­ta­tions fur­thered a crit­i­cal objec­tive of the Jan­u­ary 6 plan: to have con­test­ed states cer­ti­fy alter­nate slates of elec­tors for Pres­i­dent Trump,” Carter wrote.

It is not clear what the group is or who its high-pro­file leader is.

Carter also ordered the release of part of a Dec. 22 email writ­ten by an attor­ney he did not iden­ti­fy. The attor­ney encour­aged Trump’s legal team not to pur­sue lit­i­ga­tion that might “tank the Jan­u­ary 6 strat­e­gy” by mak­ing clear that Pence did not have the abil­i­ty to inter­vene in the count­ing of elec­toral votes. “Lawyers are free not to bring cas­es; they are not free to evade judi­cial review to over­turn a demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tion,” Carter wrote.

And the judge ordered the release of sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions that shared news sto­ries or tweets.

In the weeks after the 2020 elec­tion, Gin­ni Thomas repeat­ed­ly pressed Mead­ows to over­turn the out­come, accord­ing to text mes­sages obtained by The Post and CBS News. After Jan. 6, she told Mead­ows in a text that she was “dis­gust­ed” with Pence, who had refused to help block the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden’s elec­toral col­lege vic­to­ry. She wrote, “We are liv­ing through what feels like the end of Amer­i­ca.”

...

————-

“Gin­ni Thomas cor­re­spond­ed with John East­man, sources in Jan. 6 House inves­ti­ga­tion say” by Jacque­line Ale­many, Josh Dawsey and Emma Brown; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 06/15/2022

“The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to over­turn the elec­tion were more exten­sive than pre­vi­ous­ly known, two of the peo­ple said. The three declined to pro­vide details and spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss sen­si­tive mat­ters.”

It’s worse than it ini­tial­ly looked. It’s one of the endur­ing themes of this entire sto­ry, which is kind of amaz­ing giv­en how bad every­thing looked on Jan 6th. But the more evi­dence we see, the worse it gets. Worse for both John East­man and Gin­ni Thomas in this case with the court order for East­man to turn over to inves­ti­ga­tors hun­dreds of doc­u­ments and emails East­man sought to shield under attor­ney-client priv­i­lege. Pre­sum­ably crim­i­nal­ly worse. Recall how Judge Carter ordered the release of those doc­u­ments under the “crime-fraud” excep­tion to attor­ney client priv­i­lege. There’s crim­i­nal activity/intent described in those emails:

...
The two peo­ple said the emails were among doc­u­ments obtained by the com­mit­tee and reviewed recent­ly. Last week, a fed­er­al judge ordered East­man to turn more than 100 doc­u­ments over to the com­mit­tee. East­man had tried to block the release of those and oth­er doc­u­ments by argu­ing that they were priv­i­leged com­mu­ni­ca­tions and there­fore should be pro­tect­ed.

...

Ear­li­er this year, U.S. Dis­trict Judge David O. Carter ordered East­man to release numer­ous doc­u­ments to the com­mit­tee, reject­ing priv­i­lege claims East­man had assert­ed. In April and May, East­man turned over more than 1,000 doc­u­ments to the com­mit­tee.

In a 26-page rul­ing last week, Carter addressed anoth­er 599 doc­u­ments that East­man sought to shield. Carter ruled that more than 400 of those doc­u­ments were pro­tect­ed by attor­ney-client or oth­er priv­i­lege and should not be released.

But he ordered the remain­der, includ­ing cor­re­spon­dence with state leg­is­la­tors and doc­u­ments relat­ed to alleged elec­tion fraud and the plan to dis­rupt the joint ses­sion of Con­gress on Jan. 6, be turned over to the com­mit­tee last week and ear­ly this week.
...

And things are look­ing worse the uniden­ti­fied group of “civic mind­ed cit­i­zens of a con­ser­v­a­tive view­point,” who invit­ed East­man to speak to on Decem­ber 8, 2020:

...
Carter described some of the doc­u­ments in more detail than oth­ers.

He ordered East­man to turn over doc­u­ments regard­ing three Decem­ber 2020 meet­ings of a group that East­man described as “civic mind­ed cit­i­zens of a con­ser­v­a­tive view­point,” includ­ing mes­sages from a per­son Carter described as the group’s “high-pro­file leader” invit­ing East­man to speak at a meet­ing on Dec. 8, 2020. The meet­ing agen­da indi­cates that East­man dis­cussed “State leg­isla­tive actions that can reverse the media-called elec­tion for Joe Biden.”

“The Select Com­mit­tee has a sub­stan­tial inter­est in these three meet­ings because the pre­sen­ta­tions fur­thered a crit­i­cal objec­tive of the Jan­u­ary 6 plan: to have con­test­ed states cer­ti­fy alter­nate slates of elec­tors for Pres­i­dent Trump,” Carter wrote.

It is not clear what the group is or who its high-pro­file leader is.
...

Who was the “high-pro­file leader” of this group? We weren’t told, but we did­n’t have to spec­u­late very long. John East­man just iden­ti­fied the group and the high-pro­file leader. It’s exact­ly who we should have guessed, although not nec­es­sar­i­ly the group we should have expect­ed: Gin­ni Thomas was indeed the high-pro­file leader of this ‘civic group’. And while “civic mind­ed cit­i­zens of a con­ser­v­a­tive view­point” sure sounds like a descrip­tion of the Groundswell group, it turns out the group was a dif­fer­ent Thomas-led group: Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty, new­ly formed in August of 2020.

As we’re going to see, Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty appears to be close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the Koch net­work’s key front group Free­dom­Works. Of course, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, Free­dom­Works has placed none oth­er than key CNP mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell to lead its ‘vot­ing integri­ty’ efforts, which is just one exam­ple of the deep over­lap been the Koch net­work and the CNP. Don’t for­get that Mitchell has also been lead­ing the CNP’s ‘vot­ing integri­ty’ efforts too. And fig­ures like Free­dom­Works Pres­i­dent Adam Bran­don sit on the board of CNP Action. So when we see anoth­er key CNP mem­ber like Gin­ni Thomas work­ing close­ly with this new­ly cre­at­ed Free­dom­Works group, that’s to be expect­ed. It’s a pat­tern.

Inter­est­ing­ly, it also sounds like it’s specif­i­cal­ly these emails between Gin­ni Thomas and East­man invit­ing him to attend that Decem­ber 8 Front­lin­ers meet­ing that has been at the heart of the legal dis­putes between con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors and East­man’s legal team over whether or not he has to turn over emails. Why all the sen­si­tiv­i­ty over this spe­cif­ic meet­ing? That’s unclear, but there’s anoth­er aspect to Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty that would make Gin­ni Thomas’s invi­ta­tion wild­ly scan­dalous: the group has a weird fix­a­tion with Clarence Thomas. Not only is Gin­ni Thomas its high-pro­file leader, but its admin­is­tra­tor is Stephanie Cole­man, the wife of the late Gre­go­ry Cole­man who was Texas’ solic­i­tor gen­er­al. Greg Cole­man was once a clerk for Jus­tice Thomas and Cole­man and Jus­tice Thomas are repeat­ed pic­tured togeth­er on Cole­man’s per­son­al Face­book page. So a group that was formed in August of 2020 had Gin­ni Thomas as its leader and a Thomas fam­i­ly friend as the admin­is­tra­tor. It sure feels like a group this was a joint Koch/CNP group ded­i­cat­ed to doing what­ev­er it takes to ensur­ing Trump won reelec­tion, includ­ing over­turn­ing the elec­tion when it came to that. And Gin­ni Thomas was its leader. Which is pret­ty damn scan­dalous if you think about it:

CNBC

Gin­ni Thomas-tied Face­book group ‘Front­Lin­ers for Lib­er­ty’ could be a new focus in Jan. 6 inves­ti­ga­tion

Bri­an Schwartz
Pub­lished Fri, Jun 17 2022 5:31 PM EDT

* Trump attor­ney John East­man on Thurs­day pub­licly post­ed a Dec. 4, 2020 email from Thomas ask­ing him to speak to a gath­er­ing she called “Front­lin­ers,” which she described as fea­tur­ing “grass­roots state lead­ers.”
* Gin­ni Thomas is list­ed as an admin­is­tra­tor of a Face­book group that goes by a sim­i­lar name and descrip­tion: “Front­Lin­ers for Lib­er­ty.”
* The group’s pages were removed from pub­lic view after CNBC reached out to Thomas about the orga­ni­za­tion.

A Face­book group that appears to be run by Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, could become a new point of inter­est in the U.S. House Select Committee’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capi­tol.

Con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors said they planned to ask Gin­ni Thomas to tes­ti­fy before the com­mit­tee hours after Trump attor­ney John East­man on Thurs­day pub­licly post­ed a Dec. 4, 2020 email from Thomas ask­ing him to speak to a gath­er­ing she called “Front­lin­ers,” which she described as fea­tur­ing “grass­roots state lead­ers.” Gin­ni Thomas is list­ed as an admin­is­tra­tor of a Face­book group that goes by a sim­i­lar name and descrip­tion: “Front­Lin­ers for Lib­er­ty.”

The pri­vate group, which list­ed more than 50 mem­bers, was cre­at­ed in August 2020, just two months before the Novem­ber elec­tions, accord­ing to the page’s descrip­tion.

The group, which CNBC reviewed before it was removed from pub­lic view, described itself as “a new col­lab­o­ra­tive, lib­er­ty-focused, action-ori­ent­ed group of state lead­ers rep­re­sent­ing grass­roots armies to CONNECT, INFORM and ACTIVATE each oth­er week­ly to pre­serve con­sti­tu­tion­al gov­er­nance.” Although Thomas’ per­son­al Face­book page isn’t ver­i­fied, it con­tained numer­ous pho­tos of Jus­tice Thomas.

The group’s pages were removed from pub­lic view after CNBC reached out to Thomas about the orga­ni­za­tion. It now shows a notice from Face­book say­ing that it’s either been delet­ed or the pri­va­cy set­tings have been changed.

CNBC also tried to get answers through Face­book mes­sen­ger to Stephanie Cole­man, who is also list­ed admin­is­tra­tor of the group and the wife of the late Gre­go­ry Cole­man who was Texas’ solic­i­tor gen­er­al. Greg Cole­man was once a clerk for Jus­tice Thomas.

Cole­man and Thomas are repeat­ed­ly pic­tured togeth­er on Coleman’s per­son­al Face­book page, includ­ing a pho­to of the two togeth­er in Decem­ber 2016 with for­mer White House chief strate­gist Steve Ban­non.

Thomas asked East­man to speak to her Front­lin­ers group on Dec. 8, accord­ing to her email to him. East­man said Thomas “invit­ed me to give an update about elec­tion lit­i­ga­tion to a group she met with peri­od­i­cal­ly,” accord­ing to his post on Sub­stack, an email newslet­ter sub­scrip­tion ser­vice. Thomas told East­man she was “on sab­bat­i­cal until this elec­tion stuff is resolved.”

...

Thomas’ email to East­man appears to be at issue in his legal dis­pute with con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors look­ing into the Jan. 6 attack. A fed­er­al judge recent­ly ruled against East­man, who was try­ing to assert attor­ney-client priv­i­lege to with­hold emails about the 2020 elec­tion. The judge ordered East­man to turn over ten doc­u­ments, includ­ing four that per­tained to a meet­ing on Dec. 8, 2020, which was the same date Gin­ni Thomas asked him to speak to Front­lin­ers. “Two emails are the group’s high-pro­file leader invit­ing Dr. East­man to speak at the meet­ing, and two con­tain the meeting’s agen­da,” U.S. Dis­trict Judge David Carter wrote in his June. 7 order.

Based on the event’s agen­da, East­man dis­cussed ”‘State leg­isla­tive actions that can reverse the media-called elec­tion for Joe Biden.’ Anoth­er speak­er gave an ‘update on [state] leg­is­la­ture actions regard­ing elec­toral votes,’” Carter wrote.

East­man, accord­ing to the Jan. 6 House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the riot that took place about 17 months ago, tried to con­vince for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence that he held vir­tu­al­ly uni­lat­er­al pow­er to over­turn the elec­tion. Yet, accord­ing to Pence’s for­mer coun­sel who tes­ti­fied at a Thurs­day Jan. 6 com­mit­tee hear­ing, East­man once told him that the Trump advisor’s own legal the­o­ry would be reject­ed 9–0 if it went before the Supreme Court.

The select com­mit­tee said it plans to invite Gin­ni Thomas to tes­ti­fy about her cor­re­spon­dence with East­man. Thomas told The Dai­ly Caller that she was will­ing to tes­ti­fy. “I can’t wait to clear up mis­con­cep­tions. I look for­ward to talk­ing to them,” Thomas said. She report­ed­ly sup­port­ed efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion, send­ing text mes­sages to Trump’s for­mer chief of staff Mark Mead­ows that encour­aged him to stand behind the then president’s false elec­tion claims.

...

The Front­lin­ers group also worked with a con­ser­v­a­tive advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion known as Free­dom­Works, accord­ing to the nonprofit’s spokesman Peter Vicen­zi. He also said that Thomas and Free­dom­Works activists have been allies for years. Free­dom­Works does not pub­licly dis­close their donors.

“Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty, it is yet anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion that Free­dom­Works part­ners with to advance our issue set,” Vicen­zi said in an email. “Gin­ni Thomas, for years, has been an invalu­able ally to our activist com­mu­ni­ty when it comes to engag­ing on shared issues.”

Since Trump lost the elec­tion, Free­dom­Works has pushed the idea that there needs to be elec­tion reforms. Con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer Cle­ta Mitchell, who used to work with Trump’s cam­paign, now chairs Free­dom­Works’ mul­ti­mil­lion dol­lar Nation­al Elec­tion Pro­tec­tion Ini­tia­tive, accord­ing to News­max.

Meris­sa Hamil­ton, who says on her LinkedIn page that she’s a grass­roots direc­tor at Free­dom­Works, tweet­ed out in Octo­ber a pic­ture at what she described as an event at “Free­dom­Works Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty.” The pic­ture showed Reps. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, R‑Ga., Louie Gohmert, R‑Texas and Lau­ren Boe­bert, R‑Colo. attend­ing the event.

...

———-

“Gin­ni Thomas-tied Face­book group ‘Front­Lin­ers for Lib­er­ty’ could be a new focus in Jan. 6 inves­ti­ga­tion” by Bri­an Schwartz; CNBC; 06/17/2022

“Thomas’ email to East­man appears to be at issue in his legal dis­pute with con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors look­ing into the Jan. 6 attack. A fed­er­al judge recent­ly ruled against East­man, who was try­ing to assert attor­ney-client priv­i­lege to with­hold emails about the 2020 elec­tion. The judge ordered East­man to turn over ten doc­u­ments, includ­ing four that per­tained to a meet­ing on Dec. 8, 2020, which was the same date Gin­ni Thomas asked him to speak to Front­lin­ers. “Two emails are the group’s high-pro­file leader invit­ing Dr. East­man to speak at the meet­ing, and two con­tain the meeting’s agen­da,” U.S. Dis­trict Judge David Carter wrote in his June. 7 order.”

John East­man sure did­n’t want to turn over the House inves­ti­ga­tors that invi­ta­tion from Gin­ni Thomas. Why is that if it was just an innocu­ous meet­ing like East­man sug­gest? Might it have some­thing to do with the fact that this group was formed in August of 2020 and led by Thomas and fam­i­ly friend? That would be an under­stand­able source of East­man’s sen­si­tiv­i­ty on the mat­ter. Because it sure looks bad for the Thomases:

...
The pri­vate group, which list­ed more than 50 mem­bers, was cre­at­ed in August 2020, just two months before the Novem­ber elec­tions, accord­ing to the page’s descrip­tion.

The group, which CNBC reviewed before it was removed from pub­lic view, described itself as “a new col­lab­o­ra­tive, lib­er­ty-focused, action-ori­ent­ed group of state lead­ers rep­re­sent­ing grass­roots armies to CONNECT, INFORM and ACTIVATE each oth­er week­ly to pre­serve con­sti­tu­tion­al gov­er­nance.” Although Thomas’ per­son­al Face­book page isn’t ver­i­fied, it con­tained numer­ous pho­tos of Jus­tice Thomas.

The group’s pages were removed from pub­lic view after CNBC reached out to Thomas about the orga­ni­za­tion. It now shows a notice from Face­book say­ing that it’s either been delet­ed or the pri­va­cy set­tings have been changed.

CNBC also tried to get answers through Face­book mes­sen­ger to Stephanie Cole­man, who is also list­ed admin­is­tra­tor of the group and the wife of the late Gre­go­ry Cole­man who was Texas’ solic­i­tor gen­er­al. Greg Cole­man was once a clerk for Jus­tice Thomas.

Cole­man and Thomas are repeat­ed­ly pic­tured togeth­er on Coleman’s per­son­al Face­book page, includ­ing a pho­to of the two togeth­er in Decem­ber 2016 with for­mer White House chief strate­gist Steve Ban­non.
...

But it does­n’t just look bad for the Thomases. Gin­ni Thomas is a key con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­er and this group did­n’t just rep­re­sent her per­son­al whims. It was a part­ner­ship with Free­dom­Works, which has long been appoint­ing CNP mem­bers like Cle­ta Mitchell to lead their ‘vot­ing integri­ty’ efforts. So when we learn that Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty invit­ed East­man to talk about the efforts at the state-lev­el to reverse elec­tion results, that was effec­tive­ly a meet­ing for the broad­er the CNP/FreedomWorks audi­ence which was look­ing to find any rea­son to over­turn the elec­tion:

...
The Front­lin­ers group also worked with a con­ser­v­a­tive advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion known as Free­dom­Works, accord­ing to the nonprofit’s spokesman Peter Vicen­zi. He also said that Thomas and Free­dom­Works activists have been allies for years. Free­dom­Works does not pub­licly dis­close their donors.

“Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty, it is yet anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive grass­roots orga­ni­za­tion that Free­dom­Works part­ners with to advance our issue set,” Vicen­zi said in an email. “Gin­ni Thomas, for years, has been an invalu­able ally to our activist com­mu­ni­ty when it comes to engag­ing on shared issues.”

Since Trump lost the elec­tion, Free­dom­Works has pushed the idea that there needs to be elec­tion reforms. Con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer Cle­ta Mitchell, who used to work with Trump’s cam­paign, now chairs Free­dom­Works’ mul­ti­mil­lion dol­lar Nation­al Elec­tion Pro­tec­tion Ini­tia­tive, accord­ing to News­max.

Meris­sa Hamil­ton, who says on her LinkedIn page that she’s a grass­roots direc­tor at Free­dom­Works, tweet­ed out in Octo­ber a pic­ture at what she described as an event at “Free­dom­Works Front­lin­ers for Lib­er­ty.” The pic­ture showed Reps. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, R‑Ga., Louie Gohmert, R‑Texas and Lau­ren Boe­bert, R‑Colo. attend­ing the event.
...

And note how the turned over records for that Dec 8 Front­lin­ers event agen­da state that East­man dis­cussed “State leg­isla­tive actions that can reverse the media-called elec­tion for Joe Biden.” So we don’t real­ly have to won­der what was being dis­cussed. They were talk­ing about over­turn­ing the elec­tion results. It’s in the agen­da notes:

...
Based on the event’s agen­da, East­man dis­cussed ”‘State leg­isla­tive actions that can reverse the media-called elec­tion for Joe Biden.’ Anoth­er speak­er gave an ‘update on [state] leg­is­la­ture actions regard­ing elec­toral votes,’” Carter wrote.
...

Keep in mind that the ques­tions swirling around John East­man now include the rev­e­la­tion that he asked to be put on the par­don list fol­low­ing the insur­rec­tion, pos­si­bly due to his advo­cat­ing legal strate­gies he knew to be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. So we have to ask: did Gin­ni Thomas feel the need for a par­don too? Because based on the avail­able evi­dence we have every rea­son to believe she was very on board with the same uncon­sti­tu­tion­al efforts East­man was legal­ly wor­ried about. And per­haps a few extra efforts of her own.

Welp, it hap­pened. Roe v Wade is over­turned. And as we’ve seen, the CNP itself was not only pre­emp­tive­ly cel­e­brat­ing this rul­ing months ago but the group expects it to be just one in a string of his­toric rul­ings by the cur­rent Supreme Court that rat­tles the foun­da­tions of what were assumed by many US cit­i­zens to be secured rights.

So with ques­tion of “What’s next?” loom­ing large, here’s a pair of arti­cles that serve as a grim reminder that ban­ning abor­tion isn’t actu­al­ly very high on the list of pri­or­i­ties for groups like the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy and the oth­er right-wing polit­i­cal enti­ties that spent decades build­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal machine and stack­ing the courts with far right jus­tices. Pow­er is the top pri­or­i­ty. Abor­tion pol­i­tics is just a means to that end. And an impor­tant point to keep in mind as the right-wing lock on polit­i­cal and judi­cial pow­er in the US plays out in com­ing decades: the forces that brought about the over­turn­ing of Roe don’t actu­al­ly care if their agen­da has broad pop­u­lar sup­port because the over­turn­ing of Roe is hap­pen­ing in the larg­er con­text of a decades-long sub­ver­sion of democ­ra­cy and slide into author­i­tar­i­an­ism. The pop­u­lar­i­ty of this agen­da is beside the point. Or rather, mak­ing the pop­u­lar­i­ty of poli­cies beside the point is the point of this broad­er agen­da.

And that brings us to the fol­low­ing pair of sto­ries about duti­ful CNP mem­ber Mike Pence. You almost could­n’t find a politi­cian who bet­ter embod­ied the fusion of the inter­ests of theoc­ra­cy and oli­garchs than Mike Pence. Until he refused to ‘cross the Rubi­con’ for Don­ald Trump. Of course, the plot to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion was­n’t just Trump’s plan. That was a CNP-direct­ed effort through and through. When Mike Pence refused to go along with the scheme, he was effec­tive­ly betray­ing the net­work of pow­er­ful con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers who long con­sti­tut­ed his core base of sup­port. Flash for­ward to today with the GOP’s full embrace of the insur­rec­tion and we find that Mike Pence’s polit­i­cal appeal has evap­o­rat­ed.

So with the over­turn­ing of Roe rep­re­sent­ing the cul­mi­na­tion of the decades of orga­niz­ing by the con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious polit­i­cal forces that had long been Mike Pence’s base at the same time Pence is increas­ing­ly per­sona non gra­ta in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, it’s worth look­ing back on one of the more remark­able chap­ters in Pence’s polit­i­cal career. It’s the kind of sto­ry that should be a clue in terms of how far the Right is will to go with abor­tion restric­tions: In March of 2016, then-Indi­ana Gov­er­nor Mike Pence signed an abor­tion restric­tion bill that was so strict it required women to hand the remains of mis­car­riages over to the state for funer­al ser­vices. And then four months lat­er Don­ald Trump tapped Pence to be his run­ning mate:

Vox

Indi­ana Gov. Mike Pence signed a law this year that man­dat­ed funer­als for fetus­es

By Emi­ly Crock­ett
July 14, 2016
Updat­ed Oct 3, 2016, 4:59pm EDT

It’s no secret that Indi­ana Gov. Mike Pence, Don­ald Trump’s run­ning mate, oppos­es abor­tion rights. Pence basi­cal­ly invent­ed the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s war on Planned Par­ent­hood while he was in Con­gress. He wants Roe v. Wade to be over­turned. He signed every anti-abor­tion bill that crossed his desk as gov­er­nor of Indi­ana.

But Pence signed one anti-abor­tion bill in March of this year that was so extreme, even some pro-life Repub­li­cans opposed it. And it was even­tu­al­ly blocked from going into effect by a fed­er­al judge for vio­lat­ing women’s right to choose.

The law did some­thing tru­ly bizarre. It would have basi­cal­ly forced women to seek funer­ary ser­vices for a fetus — whether she’d had an abor­tion or a mis­car­riage, and no mat­ter how far along the preg­nan­cy was.

The law Pence backed would have required all fetal tis­sue to be cre­mat­ed or buried, an unprece­dent­ed mea­sure in state law. The law also banned abor­tion if the fetus had a “dis­abil­i­ty” — which would have denied women the right to end a preg­nan­cy even in case of seri­ous fetal anom­alies.

The word­ing of the bur­ial pro­vi­sion meant that tech­ni­cal­ly, even if a woman had a mis­car­riage at eight weeks of preg­nan­cy at home, she would have to keep the blood and tis­sue, take it to a hos­pi­tal or clin­ic, and have it buried or cre­mat­ed by a funer­al home. The law would have also dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased the cost of an abor­tion, since providers would have had to spend time and mon­ey on arrang­ing the funer­ary ser­vices.

And since about half of mis­car­riages hap­pen short­ly after a fer­til­ized egg is implant­ed, and occur at rough­ly the same time a woman would expect her peri­od, many women could be hav­ing a mis­car­riage and not even know it — and thus, tech­ni­cal­ly be vio­lat­ing the law if they didn’t cre­mate or bury the result­ing tis­sue.

As a protest against the new law’s extreme require­ments, women who opposed the law start­ed a Face­book group called “Peri­ods for Pence.” Mem­bers of the group start­ed call­ing Pence’s office in droves to tell him about their peri­ods in graph­ic detail.

...

The idea of women report­ing their peri­ods as a legal pre­cau­tion sounds absurd and Orwellian. But it’s also what hap­pens when you take a law as bizarre and med­ical­ly inco­her­ent as Indi­ana’s to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion.

Anti-abor­tion laws like the one Pence signed are often crit­i­cized for being med­ical­ly inco­her­ent — for requir­ing doc­tors to do things that make no sense from a med­ical per­spec­tive, or restrict­ing abor­tion in ways that fail to account for the med­ical real­i­ties of preg­nan­cy.

Pence also fell afoul of med­ical real­i­ty in 2015, when Indi­ana faced a dev­as­tat­ing HIV out­break. Pence arguably helped pro­long the out­break by wait­ing two months to autho­rize a clean nee­dle dis­tri­b­u­tion plan. And Pence’s bud­get cuts that shut­tered a rur­al Planned Par­ent­hood arguably helped cause the out­break in the first place.

Trump often comes across as inco­her­ent and incon­sis­tent on the issue of abor­tion. But Trump’s choice of Pence as run­ning mate helps indi­cate that Trump is will­ing to go all in on ban­ning abor­tion in Amer­i­ca.

————

“Indi­ana Gov. Mike Pence signed a law this year that man­dat­ed funer­als for fetus­es” by Emi­ly Crock­ett; Vox; 07/14/2016

“The idea of women report­ing their peri­ods as a legal pre­cau­tion sounds absurd and Orwellian. But it’s also what hap­pens when you take a law as bizarre and med­ical­ly inco­her­ent as Indi­ana’s to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion.”

That’s right, in March of 2016, Mike Pence signed into law a bill that forced the women of Indi­an to pro­vide buri­als for mis­car­ried fetus­es. As a result, any wom­an’s peri­od was a poten­tial crime scene. This actu­al­ly hap­pened. And then four months lat­er Don­ald Trump select­ed Pence to be his VP, and the rest of his­to­ry. It’s a major clue as to how far the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment is will­ing to take these laws. Don’t for­get that the selec­tion of Pence by Trump was seen as Trump’s way of reach­ing out to this cru­cial base of evan­gel­i­cal sup­port. Pence was the move­men­t’s stan­dard bear­er in 2016:

The law did some­thing tru­ly bizarre. It would have basi­cal­ly forced women to seek funer­ary ser­vices for a fetus — whether she’d had an abor­tion or a mis­car­riage, and no mat­ter how far along the preg­nan­cy was.

The law Pence backed would have required all fetal tis­sue to be cre­mat­ed or buried, an unprece­dent­ed mea­sure in state law. The law also banned abor­tion if the fetus had a “dis­abil­i­ty” — which would have denied women the right to end a preg­nan­cy even in case of seri­ous fetal anom­alies.

The word­ing of the bur­ial pro­vi­sion meant that tech­ni­cal­ly, even if a woman had a mis­car­riage at eight weeks of preg­nan­cy at home, she would have to keep the blood and tis­sue, take it to a hos­pi­tal or clin­ic, and have it buried or cre­mat­ed by a funer­al home. The law would have also dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased the cost of an abor­tion, since providers would have had to spend time and mon­ey on arrang­ing the funer­ary ser­vices.

And since about half of mis­car­riages hap­pen short­ly after a fer­til­ized egg is implant­ed, and occur at rough­ly the same time a woman would expect her peri­od, many women could be hav­ing a mis­car­riage and not even know it — and thus, tech­ni­cal­ly be vio­lat­ing the law if they didn’t cre­mate or bury the result­ing tis­sue.
...

So now that the US is slat­ed to see a wave of state-lev­el laws like the one Mike Pence signed into law in 2016, it seems like now would be a time for some like Pence to shine with­in the GOP cau­cus. Instead, we find that not only is Mike Pence no longer in the good grace of Don­ald Trump, but he’s been unper­son-ed by the Evan­gel­i­cal right-wing. That was the sad state of Pence’s polit­i­cal sta­tus on dis­play at last week’s Faith & Free­dom Con­fer­ence of evan­gel­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers (found­ed by CNP mem­ber Ralph Reed). Or, rather, not on dis­play: Nor­mal­ly a reg­u­lar attendee, Pence was a no show. Which is prob­a­bly for the best because Don­ald Trump did attend and had some rather nasty things to say about Pence:

Politi­co

Pence skips Faith & Free­dom con­fer­ence. Is attacked by Trump any­ways.

The ex veep finds him­self at a cross­roads, unable to lean on his once bedrock con­stituen­cy.
‘Mike was afraid’: Trump attacks Pence for actions on Jan. 6

By Meridith McGraw and Adam Wren
06/17/2022 07:06 PM EDT

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Faith & Free­dom Coalition’s annu­al gath­er­ing of social con­ser­v­a­tives was once Mike Pence’s home turf.

The for­mer vice pres­i­dent would attend the con­fer­ence each year to address an audi­ence of like-mind­ed evan­gel­i­cals who were eager to hear him speak and ele­vate him polit­i­cal­ly.

That was then.

This year, Pence has tak­en on a new per­sona among the crowd — a Trump era castoff who is prob­a­bly bet­ter off not show­ing his face. And he seems to know it. The for­mer veep was invit­ed to the con­fer­ence but decid­ed not to attend. It was the first time Pence had missed the con­fer­ence in five years.

“I was such a big fan of his but that part of the Repub­li­can Par­ty is the edu­ca­tion­al elites – the old hors­es are on their way out,” said Mary Ober­steadt, the imme­di­ate past pres­i­dent of Nashville Repub­li­can Women. She wore rhine­stone Trump and DeSan­tis pins on her con­fer­ence lan­yard. “I respect him for what he did and how he served this nation but he’s so dis­ap­point­ing when he — he should have com­mu­ni­cat­ed and stayed with Trump with Jan. 6, they should have been on the same lev­el.”

Pence’s absence from this year’s con­fer­ence was due to a sched­ul­ing con­flict, accord­ing to the con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers and Pence’s team. On Thurs­day, he attend­ed a round­table with Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.

But while he still is root­ed in the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive com­mu­ni­ty, hav­ing attend­ed an event with the Coali­tion in North Car­oli­na to engage Chrisi­tan vot­ers in the Char­lotte area, his deci­sion to skip the Faith & Free­dom gath­er­ing under­scores the cross­roads he cur­rent­ly finds him­self in polit­i­cal­ly.

“I think he’s seek­ing God’s direc­tion for his deci­sion on what to do next,” said Dr. Robert Jef­fress, pas­tor at First Bap­tist Dal­las, who is close to both Pence and Trump, and sits on the advi­so­ry board for Pence’s polit­i­cal group, Advanc­ing Amer­i­can Free­dom.

At a time when Pence’s main ide­o­log­i­cal caus­es are on the cusp of his­toric suc­cess — with the Supreme Court set to over­turn the land­mark abor­tion rights case, Roe v. Wade — he finds him­self in the thick of intra-par­ty dra­ma. This week, the House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the riots on Capi­tol Hill zeroed in on Pence’s deci­sion to resist Don­ald Trump’s pres­sure for him to block cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege vote count.

While Pence has, so far, dodged dis­cussing the committee’s pro­ceed­ings, Trump used his own appear­ance at the Faith & Free­dom con­fer­ence to attack his veep.

“Mike Pence had a chance to be great, he had a chance to be frankly his­toric,” Trump said. “But Mike did not have the courage to act.”

It was a remark­able moment for a con­fer­ence that in past years served as a cel­e­bra­tion for the for­mer vice pres­i­dent as a top con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian leader. But things have changed since Trump left office. Last year, in the shad­ow of Jan. 6, Pence was jeered by the crowd and called a “trai­tor” while on stage. Now, when asked about what they think of Pence or how they view his polit­i­cal future, atten­dees sighed or vis­i­bly shrugged.

“That’s a good ques­tion,” said San­di McGuire, a Chris­t­ian min­is­ter from Raleigh, North Car­oli­na. “I haven’t seen him much. I don’t like speak­ing adverse toward any­one, he did great work. He came here last year and a per­cent­age booed him. I’m not sure in fair­ness where he is. I wish him the best but he hasn’t been any­where to be found.”

“It’s kind of hard, it’s a hard one,” said Emi­ly Hino­jos from Ruther­ford, N.C. when asked about Pence’s polit­i­cal future. “I don’t know where he’s at since Jan 6. It’s hard to tell you’re not in their shoes but we would have liked him to sup­port Trump bet­ter.”

The mood of the crowd at Faith & Free­dom reflect­ed the degree to which Repub­li­can politi­cians are judged not so much by their ide­olo­gies but by their rela­tion­ship to Trump. Ralph Reed, a Repub­li­can strate­gist and founder of the Faith & Free­dom Coali­tion, is close with both Trump and Pence. But when asked if he was sur­prised by Trump’s attacks, he would only say he con­sult­ed with Trump’s speech­writ­ers yes­ter­day.

“If Mike Pence want­ed to come and want­ed to offer a rejoin­der to these folks, he could have done it. I’m not say­ing he should have done it. I told him when I saw him a cou­ple weeks ago, no harm no foul, but I said I want you here next year and he’ll be there,’” Reed said to a small group of reporters after Trump’s speech.

Pence’s own rela­tion­ship with Trump is deeply com­pli­cat­ed. For a few months after leav­ing the White House, the two would occa­sion­al­ly speak. But they haven’t talked for a year now even though their paths have occa­sion­al­ly crossed, includ­ing when both men addressed top Repub­li­can donors at a retreat in New Orleans in March. Trump con­tin­ues to admon­ish his for­mer vice pres­i­dent in pub­lic, while Pence has remained firm in his deci­sion to cer­ti­fy the elec­tion.

In recent months, Pence has turned his focus to the midterms. He’s offered endorse­ments in key midterm races like Geor­gia Gov. Bri­an Kemp and held a fundrais­er for incum­bent Rep. Steve Chabot on Thurs­day. On Mon­day, he is set to deliv­er a speech on the econ­o­my at the Uni­ver­si­ty Club of Chica­go.

...

But it’s unclear how Pence can build up a nation­al pro­file if he were to lose the full sup­port of his bedrock con­stituen­cy: Evan­gel­i­cals. Not every­one in his camp is wor­ried. Aides to Pence say he holds appeal across the Repub­li­can par­ty.

“Vice Pres­i­dent Pence checks the hawk lane. He checks the tra­di­tion­al GOP lane. And obvi­ous­ly prob­a­bly the biggest one is the Evan­gel­i­cal lane,” said the Pence ally.

And Bob Van­der Plaats, pres­i­dent and CEO of The Fam­i­ly Leader, a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian par­ent orga­ni­za­tion for the Iowa Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Cen­ter, said Pence’s sup­port remains strong among social con­ser­v­a­tives and Evan­gel­i­cals in Iowa, espe­cial­ly as sup­port of Trump wanes.

“Not to play Bob Seger on you, but I think they’re look­ing to turn the page,” Van­der Plaats said of Iowa vot­ers he talks to. “Take the best of Trump, and let’s see if Ron DeSan­tis can car­ry on that fight — or Mike Pence or Mike Pom­peo or Ted Cruz or who­ev­er you throw into that match.”

But among those in Nashville this week­end, Pence seemed more a rel­ic of the past than an ele­ment of the future. None of the mer­chan­dise stalls that lined the entrance to the con­fer­ence ball­room fea­tured Pence’s name, while there were piles of red, white, and blue “Trump” and “Trump 2024” t‑shirts and hats for sale.

“I feel like he was mis­treat­ed so long he want­ed to give his soul a break and his fam­i­ly. I don’t think it’s polit­i­cal, it’s per­son­al – he doesn’t want to get attacked right now,” said Krista Kiep­ke from Clarksville, Tenn. “Jesus him­self removed from the dis­ci­ples to refresh so he could do his job so I look at it as that.”

———-

“Pence skips Faith & Free­dom con­fer­ence. Is attacked by Trump any­ways.” by Meridith McGraw and Adam Wren; Politi­co; 06/17/2022

“At a time when Pence’s main ide­o­log­i­cal caus­es are on the cusp of his­toric suc­cess — with the Supreme Court set to over­turn the land­mark abor­tion rights case, Roe v. Wade — he finds him­self in the thick of intra-par­ty dra­ma. This week, the House select com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the riots on Capi­tol Hill zeroed in on Pence’s deci­sion to resist Don­ald Trump’s pres­sure for him to block cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Elec­toral Col­lege vote count.”

This should be a polit­i­cal high point for Mike Pence. And yet, as his absence from the Faith & Free­dom con­fer­ence makes clear, Pence is lit­er­al­ly per­sona non gra­ta in the con­ser­v­a­tive Evan­gel­i­cal world. For the sole sin of not sup­port­ing the plot to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. So when we’re won­der­ing just how far the far right is plan­ning on going now that it has a lock of the Supreme Court, the unper­son-ing of Mike Pence by the con­ser­v­a­tive Evan­gel­i­cal move­ment is a big hint. Hold­ing onto pow­er at all cost is the top pri­or­i­ty. Pence’s refusal to go along with the plot was a major betray­al of the move­ment:

...
This year, Pence has tak­en on a new per­sona among the crowd — a Trump era castoff who is prob­a­bly bet­ter off not show­ing his face. And he seems to know it. The for­mer veep was invit­ed to the con­fer­ence but decid­ed not to attend. It was the first time Pence had missed the con­fer­ence in five years.

“I was such a big fan of his but that part of the Repub­li­can Par­ty is the edu­ca­tion­al elites – the old hors­es are on their way out,” said Mary Ober­steadt, the imme­di­ate past pres­i­dent of Nashville Repub­li­can Women. She wore rhine­stone Trump and DeSan­tis pins on her con­fer­ence lan­yard. “I respect him for what he did and how he served this nation but he’s so dis­ap­point­ing when he — he should have com­mu­ni­cat­ed and stayed with Trump with Jan. 6, they should have been on the same lev­el.”

...

“Mike Pence had a chance to be great, he had a chance to be frankly his­toric,” Trump said. “But Mike did not have the courage to act.”

It was a remark­able moment for a con­fer­ence that in past years served as a cel­e­bra­tion for the for­mer vice pres­i­dent as a top con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian leader. But things have changed since Trump left office. Last year, in the shad­ow of Jan. 6, Pence was jeered by the crowd and called a “trai­tor” while on stage. Now, when asked about what they think of Pence or how they view his polit­i­cal future, atten­dees sighed or vis­i­bly shrugged.

...

The mood of the crowd at Faith & Free­dom reflect­ed the degree to which Repub­li­can politi­cians are judged not so much by their ide­olo­gies but by their rela­tion­ship to Trump. Ralph Reed, a Repub­li­can strate­gist and founder of the Faith & Free­dom Coali­tion, is close with both Trump and Pence. But when asked if he was sur­prised by Trump’s attacks, he would only say he con­sult­ed with Trump’s speech­writ­ers yes­ter­day.
...

That’s all part of the dis­turb­ing con­text of this dis­turb­ing Supreme Court rul­ing. The polit­i­cal fig­ure who act­ed as the Evan­gel­i­cal Right’s stan­dard- bear­er in 2016 is no longer even wel­come at Evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal events because he was­n’t will­ing to what­ev­er it took to secure the move­men­t’s grip on pow­er. It’s why ques­tions about “What’s next?” fol­low­ing the over­turn­ing of Roe should con­tin­ue to include ques­tions about when the move­ment behind this rul­ing is plan­ning its next attempt to break what’s left of the US’s democ­ra­cy.

With the sun slat­ed to set on the rights of hun­dreds of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans as the far right Supreme Court major­i­ty ‘drops the mask’ with the over­turn­ing of Roe v Wade as a pre­lude to grow­ing wave of lost rights, here’s a set of arti­cles that should serve as a reminder that you can’t sep­a­rate the decades-long suc­cess­ful dri­ve to take con­trol of the Supreme Court and impose a theo­crat­ic agen­da from the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy. The Supreme Court con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty’s agen­da is the CNP’s agen­da, after all. Don’t for­get that the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety — which basi­cal­ly picked all of the cur­rent Repub­li­can-appoint­ed Supreme Court jus­tices — is deeply over­lapped with the CNP. In addi­tion to Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety pres­i­dent Eugene May­er being a CNP mem­ber, Leonard Leo — the fig­ure who has long led that judi­cial nom­i­nee selec­tion process — is also a mem­ber. The CNP and Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety serve the same mas­ters. Who also hap­pen to be mas­ters of the GOP.

It’s one of the fea­tures of the US’s polit­i­cal pow­er struc­ture that’s under­scored in the fol­low­ing arti­cles from back in 2004, 2007, and 2008 about the CNP’s influ­ence in Repub­li­can pres­i­dent pol­i­tics. The kind of influ­ence that requires even rel­a­tive­ly ‘mod­er­ate’ pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates like John McCain in 2008 to com­plete­ly bend the knee to the CNP. As we’re going to see, when John McCain select­ed Sarah Palin as his run­ning mate in the fall of 2008, the McCain cam­paign was­n’t just attempt­ed to pla­cate the CNP. The cam­paign was also respond­ing to an overt threat made by the CNP itself to the Repub­li­can Par­ty and all poten­tial GOP nom­i­nees back in 2007. That would be the threat to lead the GOP’s evan­gel­i­cal core into a third par­ty if the GOP did­n’t nom­i­nate some­one who was staunch­ly anti-abor­tion and who pledged to nom­i­nate strict­ly con­ser­v­a­tive judges to the Supreme Court. The Court was clear­ly the group’s top pri­or­i­ty. That was the threat that qui­et­ly, but sig­nif­i­cant­ly, issued from a spe­cial meet­ing of CNP lead­ers held dur­ing the group’s Sep­tem­ber 2007 gath­er­ing. The kind of threat John McCain could­n’t ignore. And while McCain ulti­mate­ly lost, it’s clear the CNP did­n’t lose any of its influ­ence with­in the par­ty, as all three of Don­ald Trump’s arch-right selec­tions for the court made abun­dant­ly clear last week.

It’s all part of con­text of the over­turn­ing of Roe: the rul­ing sig­ni­fied the ulti­mate vic­to­ry of the CNP’s decades of orga­niz­ing going back to its for­ma­tion in 1981. But it also sig­ni­fied just the begin­ning of the imple­men­ta­tion of the CNP’s agen­da. An agen­da that goes far beyond just whims of theocrats and includes all of the eco­nom­ic and oth­er ‘reforms’ the oli­garchic side of the CNP has long want­ed to see put in place. To put it anoth­er way, the kind of lib­er­tar­i­an-ori­ent­ed oli­garchs who care lit­tle about reli­gios­i­ty but deeply about dereg­u­la­tions and tax cuts are going to be feel very at home in the upcom­ing Amer­i­can Hand­maid­’s Tale. It’s going to be the oli­garchs’ tale too. A tale of how they teamed up with the theocrats to win it all togeth­er after decades of work­ing togeth­er under the umbrel­la of the CNP:

Salon

Reli­gious right may black­ball Giu­liani
Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers pri­vate­ly con­sid­er sup­port­ing a third-par­ty, antiabor­tion can­di­date should Rudy Giu­liani win the GOP nom­i­na­tion.

By Michael Scher­er
Pub­lished Sep­tem­ber 30, 2007 2:32PM (EDT)

A pow­er­ful group of con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian lead­ers decid­ed Sat­ur­day at a pri­vate meet­ing in Salt Lake City to con­sid­er sup­port­ing a third-par­ty can­di­date for pres­i­dent if a pro-choice nom­i­nee like Rudy Giu­liani wins the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion.

The meet­ing of about 50 lead­ers, includ­ing Focus on the Fam­i­ly’s James Dob­son, the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil’s Tony Perkins and for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Gary Bauer, who called in by phone, took place at the Grand Amer­i­ca Hotel dur­ing a gath­er­ing of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, a pow­er­ful shad­ow group of most­ly reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives. James Cly­mer, the chair­man of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion Par­ty, was also present at the meet­ing, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the pro­ceed­ings.

“The con­clu­sion was that if there is a pro-abor­tion nom­i­nee they will con­sid­er work­ing with a third par­ty,” said the per­son, who spoke to Salon on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty. The pri­vate meet­ing was not a part of the offi­cial CNP sched­ule, which is itself a close­ly held secret. “Dob­son came in just for this meet­ing,” the per­son said.

The deci­sion con­firms the fears of many Repub­li­can Par­ty offi­cials, who have wor­ried that a Giu­liani nom­i­na­tion would irrev­o­ca­bly split the GOP in advance of the 2008 gen­er­al elec­tion, giv­en Giu­lian­i’s rel­a­tive­ly lib­er­al stands on gay unions and abor­tion, as well as his rocky mar­i­tal his­to­ry. The pri­vate meet­ing was held Sat­ur­day after­noon, dur­ing a lull in the offi­cial CNP sched­ule. Ear­li­er in the day, Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney had trav­eled to Utah to deliv­er a brief address to the larg­er CNP gath­er­ing. Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney also addressed the larg­er group.

The deci­sion has also been report­ed in an unsigned arti­cle by World­Net­Dai­ly, a con­ser­v­a­tive online news ser­vice. “Not only was there a con­sen­sus among activists to with­hold sup­port for the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee, there was even dis­cus­sion about sup­port­ing the entry of a new can­di­date to chal­lenge the fron­trun­ners,” the arti­cle said. Accord­ing to the Salt Lake Tri­bune, World­Net­Dai­ly’s edi­tor, Joseph Farah, attend­ed the larg­er CNP gath­er­ing.

...

Dob­son, who is one of the nation’s most out­spo­ken Chris­t­ian lead­ers, has pre­vi­ous­ly announced that he does not sup­port Giu­liani, Ari­zona Sen. John McCain or for­mer Ten­nessee Sen. Fred Thomp­son as nom­i­nees for the Repub­li­can Par­ty.

...

————

“Reli­gious right may black­ball Giu­liani” by Michael Scher­er; Salon; 09/30/2007

“The meet­ing of about 50 lead­ers, includ­ing Focus on the Fam­i­ly’s James Dob­son, the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil’s Tony Perkins and for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Gary Bauer, who called in by phone, took place at the Grand Amer­i­ca Hotel dur­ing a gath­er­ing of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, a pow­er­ful shad­ow group of most­ly reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives. James Cly­mer, the chair­man of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion Par­ty, was also present at the meet­ing, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the pro­ceed­ings.”

The threats were clear to the Repub­li­can Par­ty lead­er­ship: nom­i­nate a staunch­ly anti-abor­tion can­di­date for the 2008 elec­tion or else. That was the mes­sage deliv­ered at a pri­vate meet­ing held at one of the CNP’s secre­tive annu­al gath­er­ings. So a secret meet­ing inside a secret meet­ing. That was where the GOP was deliv­ered the CNP’s ulti­ma­tum: nom­i­nate some­one who will appoint ‘pro-life’ jus­tices to the Supreme Court or face a third par­ty revolt from the par­ty’s evan­gel­i­cal base. It’s the kind of ulti­ma­tum that par­ty lead­ers could­n’t casu­al­ly ignore. Espe­cial­ly since those threats did­n’t just include Rudy Giu­liani but also John McCain, the guy who ulti­mate­ly got the nom­i­na­tion:

...
“The con­clu­sion was that if there is a pro-abor­tion nom­i­nee they will con­sid­er work­ing with a third par­ty,” said the per­son, who spoke to Salon on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty. The pri­vate meet­ing was not a part of the offi­cial CNP sched­ule, which is itself a close­ly held secret. “Dob­son came in just for this meet­ing,” the per­son said.

The deci­sion con­firms the fears of many Repub­li­can Par­ty offi­cials, who have wor­ried that a Giu­liani nom­i­na­tion would irrev­o­ca­bly split the GOP in advance of the 2008 gen­er­al elec­tion, giv­en Giu­lian­i’s rel­a­tive­ly lib­er­al stands on gay unions and abor­tion, as well as his rocky mar­i­tal his­to­ry. The pri­vate meet­ing was held Sat­ur­day after­noon, dur­ing a lull in the offi­cial CNP sched­ule. Ear­li­er in the day, Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney had trav­eled to Utah to deliv­er a brief address to the larg­er CNP gath­er­ing. Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney also addressed the larg­er group.

...

Dob­son, who is one of the nation’s most out­spo­ken Chris­t­ian lead­ers, has pre­vi­ous­ly announced that he does not sup­port Giu­liani, Ari­zona Sen. John McCain or for­mer Ten­nessee Sen. Fred Thomp­son as nom­i­nees for the Repub­li­can Par­ty.
...

Also note how the first report­ing on this meet­ing showed up in World Net Dai­ly of all places. Keep in mind that World Net Dai­ly’s edi­tor, Joseph Farah, is him­self on the CNP mem­ber­ship. So when this meet­ing was leaked to the world, it was effec­tive­ly being leaked by the CNP itself:

...
The deci­sion has also been report­ed in an unsigned arti­cle by World­Net­Dai­ly, a con­ser­v­a­tive online news ser­vice. “Not only was there a con­sen­sus among activists to with­hold sup­port for the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee, there was even dis­cus­sion about sup­port­ing the entry of a new can­di­date to chal­lenge the fron­trun­ners,” the arti­cle said. Accord­ing to the Salt Lake Tri­bune, World­Net­Dai­ly’s edi­tor, Joseph Farah, attend­ed the larg­er CNP gath­er­ing.
...

So giv­en that John McCain was ulti­mate­ly nom­i­nat­ed, what does that say about the CNP’s grip on the GOP? Well, here’s an arti­cle from Sep­tem­ber of 2008, short­ly after McCain select­ed far right evan­gel­i­cal Sarah Palin as his VP can­di­date. As the arti­cle makes clear, when McCain’s cam­paign made the deci­sion to select Sarah Palin, The CNP was the main part of the elec­torate McCain was try­ing to please with that deci­sion. But the McCain cam­paign’s feal­ty to the CNP was­n’t just estab­lished with the selec­tion of a staunch­ly anti-abor­tion evan­gel­i­cal like Sarah Palin. As the arti­cle describes, the cam­paign endorsed the CNP’s push to force the GOP to adopt the most anti-choice plat­form in the par­ty’s his­to­ry up to that point. Despite John McCain win­ning the nom­i­na­tion, the CNP ulti­mate­ly won the par­ty’s plat­form:

The New York Times

McCain’s Effort to Woo Con­ser­v­a­tives Is Pay­ing Off

By David D. Kirk­patrick
Sept. 2, 2008

ST. PAUL — Moments after Sen­a­tor John McCain announced his run­ning mate Gov. Sarah Palin of Alas­ka, an out­spo­ken abor­tion oppo­nent his cam­paign sprang into action to fan flames of enthu­si­asm among his party’s demor­al­ized con­ser­v­a­tive sup­port­ers.

At a lunch Fri­day in Min­neapo­lis, two of his top advis­ers Char­lie Black, a vet­er­an polit­i­cal oper­a­tive, and Dan Coats, a for­mer sen­a­tor from Indi­ana were extolling Ms. Palin’s virtues to about 150 influ­en­tial evan­gel­i­cals as evi­dence of Mr. McCain’s ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments.

That night, at a larg­er gath­er­ing of Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives, the cam­paign sent Frank Donatel­li, vice chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, to rein­force the mes­sage: Mr. McCain would be a “pro-life” pres­i­dent, which could make a cru­cial dif­fer­ence with two Supreme Court jus­tices close to retire­ment. (Mr. McCain has said that he would appoint con­ser­v­a­tive jurists and run a “pro-life” admin­is­tra­tion but that abor­tion would not be a “lit­mus test” for judi­cial nom­i­nees.)

The crowd erupt­ed into a stand­ing ova­tion before Mr. Donatel­li start­ed talk­ing and anoth­er when he fin­ished. Sev­er­al par­tic­i­pants described the meet­ings, both of which were asso­ci­at­ed with the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because the group bars its mem­bers from pub­lic dis­cus­sion of its activ­i­ties.

The McCain cam­paign has spent months try­ing to shore up sup­port among reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives, who have long viewed him as a neme­sis.

Mr. McCain has met with small groups of Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives in piv­otal states like Michi­gan and Ohio even per­suad­ing one Ohio advo­cate to send a mass e‑mail mes­sage announc­ing his switch from “no way” to “I can’t wait” to sup­port Mr. McCain.

He used a recent appear­ance with the Rev. Rick War­ren at Sad­dle­back Church in Cal­i­for­nia to embrace oppo­si­tion to abor­tion more explic­it­ly than Pres­i­dent Bush ever did. Asked when a fetus gains human rights, Mr. McCain respond­ed, “At the moment of con­cep­tion.”

And he has aban­doned pre­vi­ous calls to mod­er­ate the Repub­li­can platform’s sup­port for a ban on abor­tion with­out excep­tion. Instead, he allowed con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­ers like Phyl­lis Schlafly to shape what many advo­cates say is the most con­ser­v­a­tive plat­form in the party’s his­to­ry. At Ms. Schlafly’s behest, for exam­ple, the par­ty approved an immi­gra­tion plank call­ing for new laws to speed wide­spread depor­ta­tions and oth­er puni­tive mea­sures at odds with Mr. McCain’s stance on one of his sig­na­ture issues.

To make up for a his­to­ry of con­flict with the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive wing of his par­ty, Mr. McCain has in some ways gone fur­ther than Mr. Bush to reas­sure the right of his inten­tions, even at the risk of spook­ing more mod­er­ate vot­ers.

“I am now more con­fi­dent about a John McCain pres­i­den­cy than I am about a George Bush pres­i­den­cy,” said Tony Perkins, pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil. “The cam­paign has court­ed con­ser­v­a­tives aggres­sive­ly, and it has turned around remark­ably in just the last few weeks.”

For skep­ti­cal Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives, Mr. Perkins said, the selec­tion of Ms. Palin was evi­dence that when it came to the Supreme Court, Mr. McCain would deliv­er on the prin­ci­ples he laid out at Sad­dle­back Church.

...

Mr. McCain has been spar­ring with lead­ers of the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment since some attacked the 1989 nom­i­na­tion of his friend John G. Tow­er as defense sec­re­tary. Many object­ed that his cam­paign finance reforms would hurt their groups. And their oppo­si­tion hard­ened when he cam­paigned in 2000 as the mod­er­ate alter­na­tive to Mr. Bush includ­ing urg­ing the par­ty to soft­en its platform’s total oppo­si­tion to abor­tion.

His ear­ly efforts to woo Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives this year stum­bled as well. When he addressed a gath­er­ing of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy in New Orleans this year, he made lit­tle impres­sion, sev­er­al par­tic­i­pants said. Asked about his own faith, he appeared awk­ward, repeat­ing sto­ries he often tells about dis­plays of faith he saw as a pris­on­er in Viet­nam sto­ries, one per­son present not­ed, that involved only the beliefs of oth­ers.

Then, on June 2, the McCain cam­paign sent a pair of orga­niz­ers to Ohio to meet with about 40 state-lev­el Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers, hop­ing to enlist them in the kind of vot­er turnout efforts they had engaged in for Mr. Bush four years before. But the response was notably cool, sev­er­al par­tic­i­pants said.

Phil Bur­ress, head of the Ohio group Cit­i­zens for Com­mu­ni­ty Val­ues and a dri­ving force in church-based get-out-the-vote efforts four years ago, had already said pub­licly that he would do noth­ing to help the McCain cam­paign, and he made clear that he left the meet­ing uncon­vinced, peo­ple present said.

McCain aides took notice. Two weeks lat­er, Mr. McCain sat down for an hour with six Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­ers in Ohio, includ­ing Mr. Bur­ress, who grilled him on his views.

“For me this elec­tion is pri­mar­i­ly about the next Supreme Court appoint­ments,” Mr. Bur­ress lat­er wrote in an e‑mail mes­sage explain­ing that Mr. McCain had won him over. “John McCain, unlike most politi­cians, will not be bul­lied, threat­ened, paid off or pres­sured into chang­ing his posi­tion.”

Col­in Han­na, a promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­er in Penn­syl­va­nia and Ohio said, “The can­di­date and his brain trust have evi­dent­ly con­clud­ed what we have always held as a giv­en: that he can­not suc­ceed with­out the enthu­si­as­tic sup­port of the con­ser­v­a­tive base.”

In July, when James C. Dob­son, the influ­en­tial founder of Focus on the Fam­i­ly, said on his radio broad­cast that he, too, might drop his staunch oppo­si­tion to a McCain pres­i­den­cy, cam­paign oper­a­tives quick­ly called to express their thanks and ask Dr. Dob­son to meet alone with the can­di­date, a spokesman for Dr. Dob­son said.

That con­ver­sa­tion has not yet tak­en place, but on Fri­day, Dr. Dob­son said the Palin selec­tion had per­suad­ed him to endorse Mr. McCain. Dr. Dob­son said in a state­ment that the nom­i­na­tion “gives us con­fi­dence he will keep his pledges to vot­ers regard­ing the kinds of jus­tices he would nom­i­nate to the Supreme Court.”

In Min­neapo­lis, “it was as if the whole Repub­li­can con­ven­tion had start­ed drink­ing Red Bull,” said Richard Land of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, who added that when the McCain cam­paign had sought his input weeks before he had sug­gest­ed pick­ing Ms. Palin.

———

“McCain’s Effort to Woo Con­ser­v­a­tives Is Pay­ing Off” by David D. Kirk­patrick; The New York Times; 09/02/2008

“To make up for a his­to­ry of con­flict with the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive wing of his par­ty, Mr. McCain has in some ways gone fur­ther than Mr. Bush to reas­sure the right of his inten­tions, even at the risk of spook­ing more mod­er­ate vot­ers.”

It’s pret­ty clear who held the real pow­er. John McCain was basi­cal­ly forced to jet­ti­son the ‘mod­er­ate mav­er­ick’ brand that got in the nom­i­na­tion in the first place and turn him­self into a CNP stooge. So it’s not sur­prise to read that his cam­paign was con­tin­u­ing to make feal­ty pledges to the CNP imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the selec­tion of Sarah Palin as his VP. The selec­tion of Palin was done for the CNP:

...
At a lunch Fri­day in Min­neapo­lis, two of his top advis­ers Char­lie Black, a vet­er­an polit­i­cal oper­a­tive, and Dan Coats, a for­mer sen­a­tor from Indi­ana were extolling Ms. Palin’s virtues to about 150 influ­en­tial evan­gel­i­cals as evi­dence of Mr. McCain’s ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments.

That night, at a larg­er gath­er­ing of Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives, the cam­paign sent Frank Donatel­li, vice chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, to rein­force the mes­sage: Mr. McCain would be a “pro-life” pres­i­dent, which could make a cru­cial dif­fer­ence with two Supreme Court jus­tices close to retire­ment. (Mr. McCain has said that he would appoint con­ser­v­a­tive jurists and run a “pro-life” admin­is­tra­tion but that abor­tion would not be a “lit­mus test” for judi­cial nom­i­nees.)

The crowd erupt­ed into a stand­ing ova­tion before Mr. Donatel­li start­ed talk­ing and anoth­er when he fin­ished. Sev­er­al par­tic­i­pants described the meet­ings, both of which were asso­ci­at­ed with the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because the group bars its mem­bers from pub­lic dis­cus­sion of its activ­i­ties.

...

He used a recent appear­ance with the Rev. Rick War­ren at Sad­dle­back Church in Cal­i­for­nia to embrace oppo­si­tion to abor­tion more explic­it­ly than Pres­i­dent Bush ever did. Asked when a fetus gains human rights, Mr. McCain respond­ed, “At the moment of con­cep­tion.”

And he has aban­doned pre­vi­ous calls to mod­er­ate the Repub­li­can platform’s sup­port for a ban on abor­tion with­out excep­tion. Instead, he allowed con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­ers like Phyl­lis Schlafly to shape what many advo­cates say is the most con­ser­v­a­tive plat­form in the party’s his­to­ry. At Ms. Schlafly’s behest, for exam­ple, the par­ty approved an immi­gra­tion plank call­ing for new laws to speed wide­spread depor­ta­tions and oth­er puni­tive mea­sures at odds with Mr. McCain’s stance on one of his sig­na­ture issues.

...

In July, when James C. Dob­son, the influ­en­tial founder of Focus on the Fam­i­ly, said on his radio broad­cast that he, too, might drop his staunch oppo­si­tion to a McCain pres­i­den­cy, cam­paign oper­a­tives quick­ly called to express their thanks and ask Dr. Dob­son to meet alone with the can­di­date, a spokesman for Dr. Dob­son said.

That con­ver­sa­tion has not yet tak­en place, but on Fri­day, Dr. Dob­son said the Palin selec­tion had per­suad­ed him to endorse Mr. McCain. Dr. Dob­son said in a state­ment that the nom­i­na­tion “gives us con­fi­dence he will keep his pledges to vot­ers regard­ing the kinds of jus­tices he would nom­i­nate to the Supreme Court.”
...

And because this is a sto­ry about the CNP’s secre­tive influ­ence, we should­n’t be sur­prised to learn that a num­ber of the peo­ple quot­ed in this arti­cle show up on the leaked CNP mem­ber­ship lists, includ­ing Richard Land, who was one of the fig­ures push­ing McCain to ulti­mate­ly pick Palin:

...
In Min­neapo­lis, “it was as if the whole Repub­li­can con­ven­tion had start­ed drink­ing Red Bull,” said Richard Land of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, who added that when the McCain cam­paign had sought his input weeks before he had sug­gest­ed pick­ing Ms. Palin.
...

Also note how this pres­sure cam­paign from the CNP was going on through­out the 2008 nom­i­na­tion process and McCain appar­ent­ly did­n’t make a great ear­li­er impres­sion on the group. And in the end, we see who won: McCain ulti­mate­ly had to bend the knee:

...
His ear­ly efforts to woo Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives this year stum­bled as well. When he addressed a gath­er­ing of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy in New Orleans this year, he made lit­tle impres­sion, sev­er­al par­tic­i­pants said. Asked about his own faith, he appeared awk­ward, repeat­ing sto­ries he often tells about dis­plays of faith he saw as a pris­on­er in Viet­nam sto­ries, one per­son present not­ed, that involved only the beliefs of oth­ers.

Then, on June 2, the McCain cam­paign sent a pair of orga­niz­ers to Ohio to meet with about 40 state-lev­el Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers, hop­ing to enlist them in the kind of vot­er turnout efforts they had engaged in for Mr. Bush four years before. But the response was notably cool, sev­er­al par­tic­i­pants said.

Phil Bur­ress, head of the Ohio group Cit­i­zens for Com­mu­ni­ty Val­ues and a dri­ving force in church-based get-out-the-vote efforts four years ago, had already said pub­licly that he would do noth­ing to help the McCain cam­paign, and he made clear that he left the meet­ing uncon­vinced, peo­ple present said.

McCain aides took notice. Two weeks lat­er, Mr. McCain sat down for an hour with six Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive orga­niz­ers in Ohio, includ­ing Mr. Bur­ress, who grilled him on his views.

“For me this elec­tion is pri­mar­i­ly about the next Supreme Court appoint­ments,” Mr. Bur­ress lat­er wrote in an e‑mail mes­sage explain­ing that Mr. McCain had won him over. “John McCain, unlike most politi­cians, will not be bul­lied, threat­ened, paid off or pres­sured into chang­ing his posi­tion.”
...

And then there’s the fact that one of the CNP’s ear­ly objec­tions to McCain includ­ed is long-stand­ing oppo­si­tion to the influ­ence of Dark Mon­ey on the US polit­i­cal sys­tem. It’s a reflec­tion of the CNP’s func­tion as a joint ven­ture between the theo­crat­ic and oli­garchic and busi­ness forces on the Right and a reminder that you can’t sep­a­rate the CNP from the net­work of con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donors:

...
Mr. McCain has been spar­ring with lead­ers of the Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment since some attacked the 1989 nom­i­na­tion of his friend John G. Tow­er as defense sec­re­tary. Many object­ed that his cam­paign finance reforms would hurt their groups. And their oppo­si­tion hard­ened when he cam­paigned in 2000 as the mod­er­ate alter­na­tive to Mr. Bush includ­ing urg­ing the par­ty to soft­en its platform’s total oppo­si­tion to abor­tion.
...

And just as you can’t sep­a­rate the CNP from the con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor class, you also can’t real­ly sep­a­rate their agen­da. That’s part of the con­text of the his­toric over­turn­ing of Roe: it’s not just a har­bin­ger of more theo­crat­ic rul­ings to come. The entire GOP mega-donor agen­da is slat­ed to ‘judi­cial review’, not just the theo­crat­ic parts. And that brings us to the fol­low­ing August 2004 NY Times pieces about the CNP’s influ­ence over the Repub­li­can Par­ty. As we’ll see, Phil Bur­ress is ref­er­enced in the arti­cle as a CNP mem­ber, along with fig­ures like Wayne LaPierre and Grover Norquist. On one lev­el, it almost seems odd find­ing some­one like Norquist — who does­n’t gen­er­al­ly seem to be very focused on reli­gious issues — as a mem­ber of this group­No mat­ter how many high pro­file news arti­cles are writ­ten about this group. But that just under­scores the CNP’s role as the group where theo­cat­ic and busi­ness inter­ests inter­sect. Don’t for­get how the CNP mem­ber­ship includes oth­er fig­ures who, like Norquist, are tasked with pri­mar­i­ly eco­nom­ic agen­das, like ALEC CEO Lisa B. Nel­son. The CNP’s agen­da isn’t just a prod­uct of Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing theocrats. It’s a joint pro­duc­tion of the most pow­er­ful forces in the US. Forces that obvi­ous­ly run the GOP too:

The New York Times

THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE CONSERVATIVES; Club of the Most Pow­er­ful Gath­ers in Strictest Pri­va­cy

By David D. Kirk­patrick
Aug. 28, 2004

Three times a year for 23 years, a lit­tle-known club of a few hun­dred of the most pow­er­ful con­ser­v­a­tives in the coun­try have met behind closed doors at undis­closed loca­tions for a con­fi­den­tial con­fer­ence, the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, to strate­gize about how to turn the coun­try to the right.

Details are close­ly guard­ed.

”The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our pro­grams, before of after a meet­ing,” a list of rules obtained by The New York Times advis­es the atten­dees.

The mem­ber­ship list is ”strict­ly con­fi­den­tial.” Guests may attend ”only with the unan­i­mous approval of the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee.” In e‑mail mes­sages to one anoth­er, mem­bers are instruct­ed not to refer to the orga­ni­za­tion by name, to pro­tect against leaks.

This week, before the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion, the mem­bers qui­et­ly con­vened in New York, hold­ing their lat­est meet­ing almost in plain sight, at the Plaza Hotel, for what a par­tic­i­pant called ”a pep ral­ly” to re-elect Pres­i­dent Bush.

Mr. Bush addressed the group in fall 1999 to solic­it sup­port for his cam­paign, stir­ring a dis­pute when news of his speech leaked and Democ­rats demand­ed he release a tape record­ing. He did not.

Not long after the Iraq inva­sion, Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney and Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald H. Rums­feld attend­ed a coun­cil meet­ing.

This week, as the Bush cam­paign seeks to ral­ly Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers to send Repub­li­can vot­ers to the polls, sev­er­al Bush admin­is­tra­tion and cam­paign offi­cials were on hand, accord­ing to an agen­da obtained by The New York Times.

”The des­tiny of our nation is on the shoul­ders of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment,” the Sen­ate major­i­ty leader, Bill Frist, Repub­li­can of Ten­nessee, told the gath­er­ing as he accept­ed its Thomas Jef­fer­son award on Thurs­day, accord­ing to an atten­dee’s notes.

The secre­cy that sur­rounds the meet­ing and atten­dees like the Rev. Jer­ry Fal­well, Phyl­lis Schlafly and the head of the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, among oth­ers, makes it a sub­ject of sus­pi­cion, at least in the minds of the few lib­er­als aware of it.

”The real crux of this is that these are the gen­uine lead­ers of the Repub­li­can Par­ty, but they cer­tain­ly aren’t going to be vis­i­ble on tele­vi­sion next week,” Bar­ry W. Lynn, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Amer­i­cans Unit­ed for Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State, said.

Mr. Lynn was refer­ring to the list of mod­er­ate speak­ers like Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger of Cal­i­for­nia and for­mer May­or Rudolph W. Giu­liani of New York who are sched­uled to speak at the con­ven­tion.

”The C.N.P. mem­bers are not going to be vis­i­ble next week,” he said. ”But they are very much on the minds of George W. Bush and Karl Rove every week of the year, because these are the real pow­ers in the par­ty.”

A spokesman for the White House, Trent Duffy, said: ”The Amer­i­can peo­ple are quite clear and know what the pres­i­den­t’s agen­da is. He talks about it every day in pub­lic forums, not to any secret group of con­ser­v­a­tives or lib­er­als. And he will be talk­ing about his agen­da on nation­al tele­vi­sion in less than a week.”

The admin­is­tra­tion and re-elec­tion effort were major focus­es of the group’s meet­ing on Thurs­day and yes­ter­day. Under Sec­re­tary of State John Bolton spoke about plans for Iran, a spokesman for the State Depart­ment said.

Like­wise, a spokesman for Assis­tant Attor­ney Gen­er­al R. Alexan­der Acos­ta con­firmed that Mr. Acos­ta had addressed efforts to stop ”human traf­fick­ing,” a major issue among Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives.

Dr. Frist spoke about sup­port­ing Mr. Bush and lim­it­ing embry­on­ic stem cell research, two atten­dees said. Dan Senor, who recent­ly returned from Iraq after work­ing as a spokesman for L. Paul Bre­mer III, the top Amer­i­can civil­ian admin­is­tra­tor, was sched­uled to pro­vide an update on the sit­u­a­tion there.

Among pre­sen­ta­tions on the elec­tions, an advis­er to Mr. Bush’s cam­paign, Ralph Reed, spoke on ”The 2004 Elec­tions: Who Will Win in Novem­ber?,” atten­dees said.

...

Mem­ber­ship costs sev­er­al thou­sand dol­lars a year, a par­tic­i­pant said. Its exec­u­tive direc­tor, Steve Bald­win, did not return a phone call.

Over the years, the coun­cil has become a stag­ing ground for con­ser­v­a­tive efforts to make the Repub­li­can Par­ty more social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. Ms. Schlafly, who helped build a grass-roots net­work to fight for social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive posi­tions in the par­ty, is a long­stand­ing mem­ber.

At times, the coun­cil has also seen the par­ty as part of the prob­lem. In 1998, Dr. James Dob­son of Focus on the Fam­i­ly spoke at the coun­cil to argue that Repub­li­cans were tak­ing con­ser­v­a­tives for grant­ed. He said he vot­ed for a third-par­ty can­di­date in 1996.

Oppo­si­tion to same-sex mar­riage was a major con­fer­ence theme. Although con­ser­v­a­tives and Bush cam­paign offi­cials have denied seek­ing to use state bal­lot ini­tia­tives that oppose same-sex mar­riage as a tool to bring out con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers, the agen­da includes a speech on ”Using Con­ser­v­a­tive Issues in Swing States,” said Phil Bur­ress, leader of an ini­tia­tive dri­ve in Ohio, a bat­tle­ground state.

The mem­ber­ship list this year was a who’s who of evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant con­ser­v­a­tives and their allies, includ­ing Dr. Dob­son, Mr. Weyrich, Hol­land H. Coors of the beer dynasty; Wayne LaPierre of the Nation­al Rif­fle Asso­ci­a­tion, Richard A. Viguerie of Amer­i­can Tar­get Adver­tis­ing, Mark Mix of the Nation­al Right to Work Com­mit­tee and Grover Norquist of Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform.

Not every­one present was a Bush sup­port­er, how­ev­er. This year, the coun­cil includ­ed speech­es by Michael Bad­narik of the Lib­er­tar­i­an Par­ty and Michael A. Per­out­ka of the ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive Con­sti­tu­tion Par­ty. About a quar­ter of the mem­bers attend­ed their speech­es, an attendee said.

Nor was the gath­er­ing all busi­ness. On Wednes­day, mem­bers had a din­ner in the Rain­bow Room, where William F. Buck­ley Jr. of the Nation­al Review was a spe­cial guest. At 10 p.m. on Thurs­day and Fri­day, mem­bers had ”prayer ses­sions” in the Rose Room at the hotel.

———–

“THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE CONSERVATIVES; Club of the Most Pow­er­ful Gath­ers in Strictest Pri­va­cy” by David D. Kirk­patrick; The New York Times; 08/28/2004

“The secre­cy that sur­rounds the meet­ing and atten­dees like the Rev. Jer­ry Fal­well, Phyl­lis Schlafly and the head of the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, among oth­ers, makes it a sub­ject of sus­pi­cion, at least in the minds of the few lib­er­als aware of it.”

It’s one of the grand ironies of the CNP: those who know about it real­ize it’s basi­cal­ly the pow­er behind the throne. And yet bare­ly any­one actu­al­ly knows about it. Secre­cy works. But if you know, you know. Like Bar­ry Lynn of Amer­i­cans Unit­ed for Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State, who iden­ti­fied the CNP as hid­den lead­ers of the GOP back in 2004.

And yet the group clear­ly remained large­ly hid­den despite this expo­sure in the NY Times. It’s anoth­er one of the CNP’s grand ironies: no mat­ter how much cov­er­age its giv­en, some­how the pub­lic nev­er actu­al­ly learns about the exis­tence of this group. Even after it foments an insur­rec­tion. It’s like the CNP has an invis­i­bil­i­ty cloak:

...
‘The real crux of this is that these are the gen­uine lead­ers of the Repub­li­can Par­ty, but they cer­tain­ly aren’t going to be vis­i­ble on tele­vi­sion next week,” Bar­ry W. Lynn, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Amer­i­cans Unit­ed for Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State, said.

Mr. Lynn was refer­ring to the list of mod­er­ate speak­ers like Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger of Cal­i­for­nia and for­mer May­or Rudolph W. Giu­liani of New York who are sched­uled to speak at the con­ven­tion.

‘The C.N.P. mem­bers are not going to be vis­i­ble next week,” he said. ”But they are very much on the minds of George W. Bush and Karl Rove every week of the year, because these are the real pow­ers in the par­ty.”
...

Also note how James Dob­son’s 2007 third par­ty threat was­n’t the first time he made those kinds of third-par­ty threats. When Dob­son told CNP mem­bers that he vot­ed for a third par­ty in 1996, a year the GOP lost, that was a seri­ous threat. The kind of seri­ous threat that the McCain cam­paign clear­ly knew to take seri­ous­ly 10 years lat­er:

...
At times, the coun­cil has also seen the par­ty as part of the prob­lem. In 1998, Dr. James Dob­son of Focus on the Fam­i­ly spoke at the coun­cil to argue that Repub­li­cans were tak­ing con­ser­v­a­tives for grant­ed. He said he vot­ed for a third-par­ty can­di­date in 1996.
...

Final­ly, regard­ing the CNP’s role as a kind of merg­er between right-wing theocrats and right-wing busi­ness inter­ests, note we don’t just find noto­ri­ous fig­ures like NRA pres­i­dent Wayne LaPierre, but also fig­ures like Grover Norquist. When Bar­ry Lynn described the CNP as the secret lead­ers of the GOP he was­n’t exag­ger­at­ing:

...
Oppo­si­tion to same-sex mar­riage was a major con­fer­ence theme. Although con­ser­v­a­tives and Bush cam­paign offi­cials have denied seek­ing to use state bal­lot ini­tia­tives that oppose same-sex mar­riage as a tool to bring out con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers, the agen­da includes a speech on ”Using Con­ser­v­a­tive Issues in Swing States,” said Phil Bur­ress, leader of an ini­tia­tive dri­ve in Ohio, a bat­tle­ground state.

The mem­ber­ship list this year was a who’s who of evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant con­ser­v­a­tives and their allies, includ­ing Dr. Dob­son, Mr. Weyrich, Hol­land H. Coors of the beer dynasty; Wayne LaPierre of the Nation­al Rif­fle Asso­ci­a­tion, Richard A. Viguerie of Amer­i­can Tar­get Adver­tis­ing, Mark Mix of the Nation­al Right to Work Com­mit­tee and Grover Norquist of Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform.
...

It’s quite a club: theocrats, oli­garchs, gun man­u­fac­tur­ers, and cyn­i­cal polit­i­cal strate­gists. For Jesus, alleged­ly. And that’s the club that’s effec­tive­ly installed the Supreme Court’s far right major­i­ty. Yes, tech­ni­cal­ly the jus­tices are tech­ni­cal­ly inde­pen­dent once they’re installed on the bench. But as decades of report­ing on the CNP makes clear, the group knows how to wield its influ­ence qui­et­ly. Even when its out in the open and at the high­est ech­e­lons of pow­er.

With the Supreme Court’s far right major­i­ty poised to uphold the “Inde­pen­dent State Leg­is­la­ture” (ISL) right-wing legal the­o­ry in the upcom­ing Moore v. Harp­er case set for next year, here’s a set of arti­cles that are reminder of how cen­tral the ISL the­o­ry was to the whole scheme at the cen­ter of the Trump team’s effort’s to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion.

Efforts that includ­ed a last minute attempt­ed hand­off of an alter­na­tive slate of fake elec­tors for the states of Wis­con­sin and Michi­gan that was attempt­ed by a top aide to Wis­con­sin sen­a­tor Ron John­son min­utes before Mike Pence start­ed the elec­toral count on Jan 6. Yes, Ron John­son’s office that made the lit­er­al last minute attempt to keep Pence on board with the plan. In oth­er words, John­son was deeply in on the plot and active­ly work­ing for it on that day right up to the insur­rec­tion.

That’s all why the sen­a­tor has been down­play­ing and run­ning from ques­tions about his role in the plot for the last cou­ple of weeks fol­low­ing the Politi­co report about that last-minute memo sent by top John­son aide Sean Riley to Pence’s leg­isla­tive direc­tor Chris Hodg­son. As we’re going to see, John­son is dis­miss­ing it as both a non-sto­ry about some­thing he knew noth­ing about that was also the right thing to do.

As we’re also going to see, the rea­son Pence’s office ulti­mate­ly refused to go along with the scheme had to do with the con­clu­sion in a Jan 5 memo writ­ten by his top lawyer, Greg Jacobs, con­clud­ing the scheme was crim­i­nal in nature. Here’s the utter­ly ter­ri­fy­ing part that relates to the Supreme Court’s like­ly uphold­ing of the ISL the­o­ry: Jacobs wrote that he would have like­ly advised Pence he could have gone ahead with the scheme had any of the state leg­is­la­tures actu­al­ly vot­ed to send their own slates of alter­nate elec­tors. Yep. They almost had all the required pieces but not quite.

Don’t for­get the efforts by Gin­ni Thomas to lob­by dozens state leg­is­la­tors to do exact­ly that and nom­i­nate their own slates of elec­tors. As we’re going to see, leg­isla­tive lead­ers from the tar­get­ed states — all Repub­li­cans — describe a lob­by­ing cam­paign by the Trump White House for pre­cise­ly this too. Alter­nate slates of elec­tors cre­at­ing a cloud of con­sti­tu­tion­al con­fu­sion was intend­ed to cre­ate the open­ing for the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to secure a sec­ond term. It was­n’t intend­ed to be legal. It was intend­ed to be con­sti­tu­tion­al stress­ful in a man­ner that could be exploit­ed.

Also recall how we’ve learned how the insur­rec­tion itself appears to have been a last ditch plot to cre­ate large enough secu­ri­ty threat to Mike Pence that he was forced to flee the Capi­tol, allow­ing Sen­a­tor Chuck Grass­ley to step in for Pence and do what Pence would­n’t do and send the votes back to the states for ‘review’ by the leg­is­la­tors. Get­ting the state leg­is­la­tors to cre­ate their own alter­nate slates of elec­tors was at the core of this scheme. A scheme that will pre­sum­ably be much more viable after the Supreme Court upholds the ISL the­o­ry next year.

But there’s anoth­er inter­est facet to this sto­ry we’re going to look at: In March of this year it was report­ed that an obscure right-wing super PAC, the Nation­al Vic­to­ry Action Fund (NVAF), spent $100,000 on dig­i­tal ads for Sen­a­tor John­son’s reelec­tion cam­paign. A reelec­tion cam­paign where he faces no real oppo­si­tion in the GOP pri­ma­ry which isn’t held until August. As we’ll also see, NVAF’s biggest fun­der in this elec­tion cycle is an obscure right-wing dark mon­ey 501c4 called Stand Up To Chi­na. Guess who found­ed the the group: none oth­er than Cle­ta Mitchell, the CNP Gov­ern­ing Board mem­ber who is not just the archi­tect of the GOP’s long-stand­ing ‘elec­tion integri­ty’ cam­paign to inval­i­date elec­tion results through mass vot­er fraud claims, but also appears to be the fig­ure who ini­tial devised the Trump White House­’s whole alter­nate slate of elec­tors strat­e­gy. As we’re going to see, it was Mitchell who ini­tial­ly emailed John East­man on Novem­ber 5, 2020, on behalf of Trump ask­ing East­man to come up with the alter­nate slate of elec­tors scheme. The plot arguably start­ed with with Mitchell and end­ed with John­son’s staff’s last-minute hand­off attempt right before the insur­rec­tion. So when we see an obscure super-PAC fueled with dark mon­ey for anoth­er obscure group found­ed by Mitchell spend­ing $100k sup­port­ing John­son right when con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors are furi­ous­ly look­ing into this plot, you have to won­der to what extent NVAF’s $100k ad cam­paign rep­re­sent­ed a kind of ongo­ing pay­off from the same dark mon­ey forces who helped finance and sup­port the entire plot.

It’s also worth not­ing anoth­er inter­est­ing CNP-relat­ed tie between Cle­ta Mitchell and Ron John­son: Recall the sto­ry about the Amer­i­can Account­abil­i­ty Foun­da­tion (AAF), the CNP-fueled ‘non-par­ti­san non-prof­it char­i­ty’ slime machine that was pump­ing out dan­ger­ous dis­in­for­ma­tion about vir­tu­al­ly every Biden admin­is­tra­tion nom­i­nee. As we saw, the AAF was co-found­ed by Tom Jones, a well-known fig­ured in the con­ser­v­a­tive oppo­si­tion research com­mu­ni­ty whose past work includes serv­ing on the staff of CNP mem­ber Jim DeMint. Jones worked on oppo­si­tion research for Ted Cruz’s 2016 cam­paign and also worked as a senior staffer for Ron John­son.