Insurrection Investigation, Con't

A lot of stuff to cover today on the January 6th investigation front. First up:

 

Will Bunch discusses how close we came to a Trump autocracy, and why the Trump coup failed. In addition to Mike Pence's cowardice as I have pointed out several times, Bunch cites the January 3rd letter from (then) all 10 living former Secretaries of Defense, and the warning from DC Mayor Muriel Bowser for people to stay away from the Trump rally on January 6th so as not to become the justification for military action against the people by the DC National Guard.

Three days ahead of the pro-Trump rally, all 10 then-living ex-secretaries of defense — including Donald Rumsfeld, who died in 2021, and Dick Cheney — published an extraordinary letter in the Washington Post, warning the White House not to engage the military in its election challenge. They wrote: “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”

Americans might well wonder what prompted such a stern warning. One of the signers, in fact, was Mark Esper, whom Trump had shockingly fired as Pentagon chief just days after the Nov. 3 election. The supposed lame duck president had not only replaced Esper but — with just nine or so weeks before leaving office — had installed an entire slate of new loyalists at the Pentagon as well as intelligence agencies. Asked the New York Times in a headline: “To what end?”

To what end, indeed?

Although there was understandable speculation about what the moves meant for U.S. troops then in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the then-president had been increasingly focused since the spring of 2020 — and the at-times destructive protests over the police murder of George Floyd — on what he claimed was a domestic threat posed by “antifa.” In June, Trump promised in a tweet that “the United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization” — even though experts agree such extreme leftist elements are small and lack any umbrella organization.

Although it didn’t receive a ton of attention at the time, violence between pro-Trump groups like the Proud Boys and leftist counterprotesters may have peaked on December 12, 2020, at rallies which in hindsight look like trial runs for January 6. A man was shot in Olympia, Washington, while several dozen people on both sides were arrested or hurt in the D.C. fighting that lasted well into the night. In another bit of foreshadowing, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio posted mysterious pictures from the White House portico. Trump previewed the “wild” January 6 rally one week later.

But then something happened that arguably altered the course of history. People on the left who’d spent four years actively resisting Trump in the streets shared a surprising new message in those two weeks ahead of the insurrection: Stay home on January 6. This was reinforced by a number of Democratic officials who pushed out the same message to both traditional leftists and Black Lives Matter activists.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was typical: “I am asking Washingtonians and those who live in the region to stay out of the downtown area on Tuesday and Wednesday and not to engage with demonstrators who come to our city seeking confrontation.” But more important, arguably, were rank-and-file anti-Trump liberals sharing that message on social media sites. There was even a hashtag making the rounds, #DontTakeTheBait.

The anti-Trumpers didn’t take the bait. We’ll never know what would have happened if there had been street battles between the two factions on January 6, but there’s a chilling hint in the coup-planning PowerPoint presentation from Trump ally and former Army psy-ops specialist Phil Waldron that circulated both among Meadows and others in the White House as well as their allies in Congress. It called for Trump to declare a “National Security Emergency” — a move that might have aligned with his “antifa” memo of the day before.

Meanwhile, if National Guard troops were — as Meadows stated in his email — indeed on standby to support pro-Trump protesters, military leaders seemed to freeze that Wednesday afternoon when they were asked to do the exact opposite and confront the insurrectionists. D.C. officials who dispatched metro police officers to quell the insurrection pleaded with the Pentagon — which had operational control over the D.C. National Guard — to send in added forces, only to face three long hours of stunning inaction.

More recently, a former high-ranking official in the D.C. National Guard has called two top Army generals “absolute and unmitigated liars” in their efforts to explain the delay in deploying Guard troops positioned at a nearby armory until nearly 5:30 p.m., or when the worst fighting that injured scores of police officers was already over. This discrepancy needs to be answered — but so does the question of whether Guard troops would have been more hastily deployed in the event of leftist protesters, and whether that action would have impeded Biden’s certification. (Also, the question of why one of those two generals in that line of command was Gen. Charles Flynn, brother of Trump ally Michael Flynn who was leading efforts to overturn the election.)

While an alarming timeline about the possible role of troops and a national security emergency on January 6 is taking shape, there are, of course, many holes that still need to be filled in by an aggressive House investigation. First and foremost is learning what communications took place between Meadows and other White House staffers with the Pentagon to believe that soldiers were “on standby” to support their cause. Investigators should also ask about Trump’s focus on “antifa,” right up to the middle of the afternoon on January 6. Increasingly, the question is less whether there were plans for a coup on January 6 — clearly, there were — but who needs to be held accountable for the greatest assault on U.S. democracy since 1861.

Keep in mind something else rather shocking that we learned this week — that even knowing that the violent Capitol Hill insurrection was the work of Trump supporters, and horribly wrong, key Fox News hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity went on national TV that night continuing to suggest antifa might somehow be to blame. Because once the script for a coup has been written, apparently it’s hard to break character.

 

Again, we know what the plan was: The Justice Department would put the election "under investigation" for fraud in the five battleground states Biden won, Mike Pence would send the electoral votes for those five states back to the legislatures (all controlled by the GOP), declare that there were not enough electoral votes to elect either Biden or Trump, and send the matter to the House where Trump would win based on House state delegations.

In addition, the plan was to justify Pence's actions and declare a national state of emergency precipitated by the destructive Trump rally, with the DC National Guard to be called in to deal with the "Antifa caused chaos" while electoral votes were being counted. If Pence balked, he would be "taken to a secure location" where in the ensuing emergency, House Republicans would declare Trump to be President.

We know that Trump's team was also considering sending US Marshals to all 50 states to secure electoral vote boxes from all 50 state legislatures. The final result would have been a Trump second term, and enough House and Senate races flipped due to "election fraud" in favor of the GOP that the Republicans would keep Congress.

It would have been the end of American democracy, with martial law declared to maintain Trump's hold on power.

It was absolutely a coup.

The question now is whether or not we send the people who engineered the attempt to prison, and whether or not we stop the inevitable next attempt when it happens in 2022 and 2024, as three retired US Army generals warn us.

With the country still as divided as ever, we must take steps to prepare for the worst.

First, everything must be done to prevent another insurrection. Not a single leader who inspired it has been held to account. Our elected officials and those who enforce the law — including the Justice Department, the House select committee and the whole of Congress — must show more urgency.

But the military cannot wait for elected officials to act. The Pentagon should immediately order a civics review for all members — uniformed and civilian — on the Constitution and electoral integrity. There must also be a review of the laws of war and how to identify and deal with illegal orders. And it must reinforce “unity of command” to make perfectly clear to every member of the Defense Department whom they answer to. No service member should say they didn’t understand whom to take orders from during a worst-case scenario.

In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.

Finally, the Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.

The military and lawmakers have been gifted hindsight to prevent another insurrection from happening in 2024 — but they will succeed only if they take decisive action now.

These are bold actions that need to be taken. If Trump gets into power again, if the GOP is allowed to steal the election in 2024, the US military will absolutely be used. We have to find the weaknesses and shore them up.

 

Meanwhile, back on the January 6th Committee, it seems that Stop The Steal founder Ali Alexander is turning states' evidence on Trump and his GOP co-conspirators.

Ali Alexander, who founded the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement and attended the rally that preceded the Capitol attack, told congressional investigators that he recalls “a few phone conversations” with Rep. Paul Gosar and a text exchange with Rep. Mo Brooks about his efforts in the run-up to Jan. 6, his lawyers confirmed in a late Friday court filing.

Alexander also told the Jan. 6 House select committee that he spoke to Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) in person “and never by phone, to the best of his recollection,” his lawyers say.

The description of the testimony comes in a lawsuit Alexander filed to block the committee from obtaining his phone records from Verizon. Alexander says in the suit that the records include contacts with people protected by privileges: religious advisers, people he counsels spiritually and his lawyers. He also indicated that he already shared more than 1,500 text messages with investigators, in addition to sitting for an eight-hour deposition. The Brooks text, he indicated, is among the texts he turned over.

Alexander’s testimony underscores the degree to which the select committee continues to probe the roles of their Republican colleagues in efforts to promote former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud — and their potential support for fringe figures who helped gather people in Washington on Jan. 6, the day Congress was required to certify the 2020 election results.

The panel hasn’t formally requested testimony from any of the GOP lawmakers yet but has continued to ask witnesses about Gosar, Biggs, Brooks and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who helped push a strategy to use the Department of Justice to promote the fraud claims.

 

The GOP lawmakers like Jim Jordan and Paul Gosar really, really, really do not want those phone records used as evidence, almost as if it would empirically prove a case of seditious conspiracy.

We'll see where all this goes.