"Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun [...] Related: The mess in Maricopa "Is the Maricopa County election audit truly an audit? Here's what professional auditors have to say" [...] "“Look, this is comical to watch,” Hobbs says of the Maricopa mess. “We’ve all laughed at it, watching it unfold,” but “it is very serious. This is precedent-setting. They are writing the playbook here.”" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164714048 [...] For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters."
by Greg Palast January 6, 2022
[Washington, January 6, 2025] Take a Red Pill and join me in the future for the reading of the electoral vote. The year is 2025. It’s 1pm on January 6 and Vice-President Kamala Harris has begun opening the envelopes with the electoral vote from each state, alphabetically.
January 6, 2021 – Capitol Riot, DC
When she reaches Georgia, new Republican Senator Herschel Walker objects to accepting Harris’ choice of the slate of Electors pledged to Joe Biden, the slate submitted by Georgia’s Governor Stacey Abrams. Instead, Sen. Walker demands Harris count the vote of the slate submitted by Georgia’s GOP-controlled legislature with Electors committed to Donald Trump.
Under this little-known Constitutional process, each state receives but a single vote. Republicans control the Congressional delegations of 27 states. Though that represents just a tiny portion of America’s voters, Donald Trump wins “re-election” with a vote of 27 to 23. Trump will be inaugurated, for a second time, on January 20, 2025.
Yes, it CAN happen here
You’re thinking, “Palast, do you really believe this could happen?”
You betcha.
Forget the whack-jobs who invaded the Capitol one year ago today. These “insurrectionists” were schmucks with no chance of overturning the election. (I don’t dismiss the gravity of their actions — they crushed the skull of a policeman and threatened other murders in the hall of the people.)
But truly, the real danger was in the Oval Office when, two days earlier, Trump peddled a memo by attorney John Eastman. Eastman’s memo laid out .. https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf , in detail, the dark scenario I described above, in which Republicans use the Twelfth Amendment to overturn the choice of the voters.
And if you think the US Supreme Court will block this coup d’état, fuhgeddaboudit.
Count on the Supreme Court to cite Article II of the Constitution .. https://www.gregpalast.com/3-constitutional-ways-trump-can-overturn-the-vote/ , the one that says the electors to the Electoral College will be chosen by state legislatures, not voters. That’s right. In fact, there’s not one damn word in the Constitution granting citizens the right to vote — and certainly not the right to vote for President.
The Supremes have already relied on Article II to bless a coup against democracy: In 2000, the Court adopted the Florida Legislature’s certification of the Electors for George W. Bush before the ballot count was completed. Sec. of State Katherine Harris stopped count when Bush was ahead by a teensy 537 votes — yet 178,000 ballots had not been tallied, ballots concentrated in Jacksonville and other African-American majority towns. The GOP-controlled legislature chose the Bush electors.
How to Stop a Coup
As a journalist, it’s not my job to tell you whether Biden or Trump should be President. How about we let the voters make that choice? But that’s not easy.
Whether we have a democracy in 2024 depends on whether we can preserve democracy in 2022.
And once again, it will come down to Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting is about to get a lot harder for people of color, as we’ve uncovered in our latest investigation .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL1IhSJqiMU . [Insert embed]
This year, vigilante “vote fraud” hunters have challenged the right of 360,000 Georgians to cast their ballots. If they succeed in this mass voter purge, combined with other vote suppression trickery in the new law SB 202, Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock’s re-election is in real danger, no matter the will of the voters.
The following scenario is then more than possible in January 2025: Warnock loses, throwing US Senate control to the GOP; the House goes Republican as well. In 2024, the Democratic presidential candidate wins Georgia, as in 2020, by just 12,000 votes.
But then, the Georgia legislature, citing alleged vote fraud by Democrats, certifies a slate of Electors committed to Trump. Gov. Stacey Abrams, who gets elected despite vote suppression headwinds, sends a competing slate of Electors to Congress.
The Twelfth Amendment (and the empowerment of state legislatures in Article II) gives the new Republican Congress the power to choose the Trump slates. And this time, the GOP Senators and Reps, watching what has happened to the careers of anti-Trump Republicans, fall in line and let the Twelfth Amendment take its dark course.
Then it’s Hail to the Thief.
Can we stop this coup? Yes, but only before it happens: by protecting the vote in Georgia and other swing states. If we wait until 2024, it will be too late. The work begins this midterm year.
Right now.
And while we’re at it, repeal the Constitution
Did our Founding Fathers make an unintended error in designating state legislators, not voters, the power to choose our President?
Nope. Historians like to say the Declaration of Independence gave America its democracy, and the Constitution took it away. John Adams, our second President, was thrilled that Thomas Jefferson was excluded from writing the Constitution, and Jefferson’s furious objection to it mostly ignored. Adams warned against creating this dangerous thing democracy, which he termed the instrument of “the firewomen, badauds, the stage players, the atheists, the deists, the scribblers for any cause at three livres a day, the Jews,” and other such undesirables who would “destroy all nobles.”
So, our founding nobility chose the nobles of each state, the legislators, all then landed gentry, to choose the Electors who would in turn, choose the President.
Indeed, if you are a fan of democracy, it’s hard to find a clause in the Constitution worth defending. What kind of “democracy” gives two Senate seats to West Virginia, an equal number to California, and none to Washington DC? Let us give thanks for the Bill of Rights which put some limits on this Constitutional monstrosity.
So, should we junk the Constitution? Well, that’s a discussion for another day, probably another century.
In the meantime, let’s start, today, with protecting the fragile little shards of democracy still left to us.
A week before the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, issued an unusual message to his crew. Originally launched in 2016, the Proud Boys are a violent, far-right group whose members describe .. https://www.takimag.com/article/introducing_the_proud_boys_gavin_mcinnes/ .. themselves as “Western chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”
In a Dec. 29, 2020, post on Parler, Tarrio called on .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172392/pb-nordean_et_al_1st_superseding_indictment_0.pdf .. gang members to “turn out in record numbers” on Jan. 6, but this time “with a twist.” He continued: “We will not be wearing our traditional Black and Yellow. We will be incognito and we will be spread across downtown DC in smaller teams.”
That same day, the head of a Florida Proud Boys chapter, Joe Biggs, issued his own Parler post highlighting the importance of “blending in” on Jan. 6.
“You won’t see us,” he wrote. “We are going to smell like you, move like you, and look like you. The only thing we’ll do that’s us is think like us! Jan 6th is gonna be epic.”
- It is CRITICAL that all patriots who can be in DC get to DC to stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup, through the massive vote fraud and related attacks on our Republic. … [W]e will also have well armed and equipped QRF [quick reaction force] teams on standby, outside DC, in the event of a worst case scenario, where the President calls us up as part of the militia to assist him inside DC. -
From Jan. 5 through Jan. 7, the Oath Keepers did, in fact, stash an arsenal of firearms and ammunition at the Comfort Inn in Ballston, Va.—about a 15-minute drive from the Capitol—according to an indictment .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172347/513-sixth-superseding-indictment.pdf .. subsequently brought by federal prosecutors.
Of the more than 700 individuals who have been charged with federal crimes stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot, only about 40 have been accused of “conspiracy”—meaning that they are accused of planning and coordinating with others in advance to commit crimes on that date. Of the 40 conspiracy defendants, the vast majority are either Oath Keepers or Proud Boys.
These two groups appear to have played an outsized role in the events of that day, and their cases should hold particular interest for those trying to understand the causes of the insurrection. Some of these individuals—mainly Proud Boys—stand accused of having played crucial roles in initiating the violence that day and in “getting the normies” around them “all riled up,” as one Proud Boy later bragged .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172393/rehl-detention-memo.pdf .. of having done. Others—mainly Oath Keepers—played semi-official roles at the rallies leading up to the riot, serving either as speakers themselves or providing “security” for speakers or “VIPs.”
“I’ll keep working on overall contact between Natl/congress team and stop the steal team for scheduling etc.,” Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs wrote, for instance, in an encrypted Oath Keeper chat channel on Signal on Jan. 4.
Twenty-one Oath Keepers (either dues-paying members or informal associates) have been charged in one indictment .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172347/513-sixth-superseding-indictment.pdf .. for, among other things, conspiring to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding—namely, the Joint Session of Congress devoted to counting the state’s previously certified Electoral College votes pursuant to the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act. Four of these defendants have already pleaded guilty, pledging to cooperate. The remaining defendants, who have all pleaded not guilty, are set to go to trial on April 19.
The Proud Boys prosecutions are more numerous, splintered and harder to count definitively—perhaps reflecting Tarrio’s instructions to remain “incognito” and to act in “smaller teams.” At least 15 Proud Boys (or their close associates) have been indicted for conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, though they have been charged in four different cases .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172395/pezzola-superseding-indictment.pdf . (One of these defendants .. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/new-york-man-pleads-guilty-conspiracy-and-obstruction-charges-related-jan-6-capitol .. has pleaded guilty.) In addition, at least a dozen more Proud Boys or associates have been charged with serious felonies stemming from the attack—including assaulting police officers—although not with conspiring to commit those felonies.
The groups’ leaders—Oath Keeper founder Rhodes and Proud Boy chairman Tarrio—have not been charged, though each is alluded to in an indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator. Although Rhodes was present in D.C. on Jan. 6, he remained on the lawful side of the perimeter of the Capitol grounds’ restricted areas that day. He allegedly did communicate with his colleagues from there by phone and text, however. (Rhodes has denied that he or any Oath Keepers sought to disrupt certification of the Electoral College results, and has told the New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/politics/stewart-rhodes-oath-keepers-fbi.html .. that the Oath Keepers who entered the Capitol building did so only to render aid after hearing that someone had been shot there. But according to the government’s timeline, at least 14 Oath Keepers had penetrated the building five minutes before rioter Ashli Babbitt was shot in a hallway outside the Speaker’s Lobby.)
Although there is some evidence of coordination between at least some Oath Keepers and Proud Boys in the days leading up to Jan. 6, for the most part the groups acted in quite distinct ways that day.
The Oath Keepers, for their part, acted in an audaciously open, disciplined and military fashion as they allegedly attacked the heart and symbol of our democratic government. At about 2:39 p.m. that day, when about 14 of them allegedly helped force open the building’s Eastern doors near the Capitol Rotunda, they were decked out in full tactical gear, wearing hard-knuckled gloves, tactical vests or “plate carriers,” camo helmets, ballistic goggles, radios with earpieces, gaiters and boots. Certain individuals allegedly carried bear spray or a coil of paracord. The spectacle of at least 12 Oath Keepers maneuvering up the Capitol steps in “stack formation”—each holding the shoulder of the cadre in front of him or her—became an indelible symbol of the insurrection. It was consistent with Rhodes’ repeated, months-long predictions of an imminent “bloody, bloody civil-war.”
The Oath Keepers’ case is also of special interest in that a number of these defendants were playing semi-official roles at the rallies that weekend as well as at earlier Stop the Steal rallies. At least one Oath Keeper—Jessica Watkins—had a VIP pass to provide security at the main rally at the Ellipse, while six others were providing security for longtime dirty trickster, convicted felon and Trump pardonee Roger Stone on Jan. 5 and 6.
- I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly. He needs to say for example: . . . ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’
. . . I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their Inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it. -
Turning to the Proud Boys, their role on Jan. 6 was far more furtive than the Oath Keepers’—but also more violent and momentous. (Just one among the 21 accused Oath Keeper conspirators has been charged with assaulting a police officer, for instance, while many of the Proud Boys have been. The rest of the Oath Keepers are mainly charged with conspiracy, obstructing an official proceeding, impeding law enforcement officers during a civil disorder, damaging federal property and destroying evidence after the fact.)
By the time the Oath Keepers first helped the mob force its way into the east side of the Capitol at 2:39 p.m., the western side of the building had already been breached about a half hour earlier, at about 2:13 p.m. The Proud Boys had played a crucial role in accomplishing that feat, according to the government.
Moreover, as we’ll see, there is evidence that the Proud Boys planned to storm the Capitol from before the day ever began. They were allegedly present when rioters pushed over the very first line of bike-rack barriers on the Capitol’s northwest side and overpowered the first set of Capitol Police officers—leaving one with a concussion. Proud Boys then allegedly helped remove a second line of barriers closer to the building. They were allegedly at the forefront of those pushing up the steps beneath the Inaugural scaffolding to reach the Upper West Terrace. A Proud Boy broke out the very first window pane with a stolen riot shield at about 2:13 p.m. Over the next two minutes, at least six Proud Boys were among the first rioters to forcibly enter the Capitol building, either jumping through that broken window or walking through the door next to it, after a rioter forced it open from within.
In this article I provide an overview and timeline of what’s known so far about the extraordinary roles the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys played on that historic day. It is based largely on the allegations of indictments, charging instruments and other government filings in the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper cases, but is supplemented with other publicly available source materials and media analysis. (I have also relied in some instances on allegations contained in civil suits filed against individual Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, especially those brought against certain members of those groups by Capitol Police officer Conrad Smith .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21154303/amended-complaint-in-conrad-smith-et-al-v-trump-et-al.pdf .. and seven other injured police officers and by the District of Columbia .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21154301/jan-6-complaint-in-district-of-columbia-v-proud-boys-international-et-al.pdf .)
At this stage, although none of the cases have gone to trial and much is yet to learn, we can make some tentative conclusions:
* There is strong evidence that Proud Boy leaders planned and executed an attack on the Capitol.
* Though the Proud Boys made up a tiny percentage of the crowd, there is strong evidence that they played an extraordinarily important role in fomenting and executing the attack.
* There is strong evidence that Oath Keepers prepared in advance for violence on Jan. 6 and hoped that President Trump would “call them up” to impose something like martial law—probably by “invoking the Insurrection Act.”
* In contrast to the Proud Boys, however, it’s unclear if the Oath Keepers specifically set out to breach the Capitol that day. It’s not even clear whether they would have breached the Capitol had not the mob, spearheaded by Proud Boys, already done so first.
* Though there are individuals outside the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper organizations who obviously played crucial roles in setting the stage for the violence that these groups allegedly effectuated on Jan. 6–including Alex Jones, Roger Stone and Donald Trump—the Oath Keeper and Proud Boy prosecutions do not seem likely, in themselves, to present evidence that will criminally implicate those individuals. (I do not address here whether, by rebuffing for hours numerous entreaties to call off the rioters, Trump committed—or aided and abetted—the crime of corruptly obstructing an official proceeding under 18 U.S.C. §1512(c)(2).)
By May 2020, President Trump had begun laying the foundation for blaming his upcoming election loss on voter fraud. Apparently following Roger Stone’s template from 2016, he was alleging “widespread voting fraud” and “talking about it constantly.”
In September,Stone himself began implementing his own earlier narrative. In an interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Jones’s Infowars network, Stone said .. https://www.mediamatters.org/roger-stone/roger-stone-calls-trump-seize-total-power-if-he-loses-election .. that ballots already cast in Nevada were “completely corrupted,” that “we can prove voter fraud in the absentees right now” and that “the votes from Nevada should not be counted.” Stone added that the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory, and that Trump should consider declaring “martial law” or invoking the Insurrection Act.
In late October 2020, Oath Keepers founder Rhodes was also interviewed by Jones on Infowars, where he was a frequent guest. Whether by design or predisposition, Rhodes was fully onboard with the false election fraud narrative. He said that he would not recognize a Biden victory as “legitimate,” and that he didn’t “trust the electoral system any longer.” He spoke of a “coming civil war,” expressed concern about someone staging a “Benghazi-style attack” on the White House on election night and urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act before then.
Rhodes and his Oath Keepers have always evinced a strong paranoid streak. A former Army paratrooper and 2004 Yale Law School graduate, Rhodes founded the group in 2009 after President Obama took office. The group recruits heavily among former—and even current—military servicemen, police officers, firefighters and EMT personnel. Rhodes often wears an eye patch. That stems from a 1993 accident in which he dropped a loaded handgun, shooting himself in the face, according to the Atlantic .. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/right-wing-militias-civil-war/616473/ ’s Mike Giglio.
Rhodes built his organization on the premise that the U.S. government had been subverted by globalists and socialists. These enemies were not only going to try to seize Americans’ guns—though that was certainly the primary fear—but also to throw them into concentration camps. Oath Keepers, therefore, take oaths .. https://www.adl.org/Backgrounders/OathKeepers .. to refuse to obey a list of improbable government “orders” including, for instance, “any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps” or “any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps.”
On Nov. 7, 2020, the networks projected that then-former Vice President Joe Biden had won the election. The event had immediate implications for both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
That same day, Proud Boy chairman Tarrio posted on Parler: “Standby order has been rescinded.”
Tarrio was referring to the galvanizing, legitimizing event that Trump had conferred upon the Proud Boys in late September, during a Presidential debate. Asked by Chris Wallace if he would disavow “white supremacists and right-wing militia” like, for instance, “the Proud Boys,” Trump had responded .. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918572904/trump-appears-to-engage-far-right-group-during-debate-answer :
- The Proud Boys, stand back, and stand by. But I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what — somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem. -
Two days after Biden’s apparent victory, Rhodes held a virtual conference over the GoToMeeting app with at least six other high-ranking Oath Keepers, including Jessica Watkins of Ohio and Kelly Meggs and Kenneth Harrelson of Florida. (It appears to have been taped, and the government quotes from it verbatim in its Oath Keeper indictment .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172347/513-sixth-superseding-indictment.pdf .)
“We’re going to defend the president, the duly elected president,” Rhodes said—referring to Trump—"and we call on him to do what needs to be done to save the country. Because if you don’t, guys, you’re going to be in a bloody, bloody civil war and a bloody—you can call it an insurrection or you can call it a war or a fight.”
Rhodes then called on the Oath Keepers to show up in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14 for what became known as the Million MAGA March. He continued:
- If the fight comes, let the fight come. Let Antifa—if they go kinetic on us, then we’ll go kinetic back on them. . . . If they throw bombs at us and shoot us, great, because that brings the president his reason and rationale for dropping the Insurrection Act. . . . We hope he will give us the orders. We want him to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia. -
Afterward, Oath Keeper Watkins began recruiting people to join the tiny local militia she had founded, called the Ohio State Regular Militia, apparently in anticipation of bringing them to D.C., too. Watkins, then 38, ran a bar called The Jolly Roger in Woodstock, Ohio. She lived in an apartment above the bar with her companion, who was also a dues-paying Oath Keeper. Watkins is an Army vet who had served in Afghanistan. (According to later representations .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172397/26-watkins-m-for-bond.pdf .. by her attorney, she is a transgender female who “was forced out of the military after her sexual orientation was discovered.” After the riot, when the FBI searched Watkins’s home in January 2021, agents found .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21171998/101-5-ltr-supp-bomb-making-recipes.pdf .. two bomb-making recipes in her apartment, including one for “Making Plastic Explosives from Bleach” and another for a pyrotechnic called “thermite.”)
“Basic training is mandatory,” Watkins texted one would-be recruit in November 2020, according to a later government filing .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172398/15-usa-m-for-pretrial-detention-watkins.pdf . “I need you fighting fit by innaugeration [sic].” The training would include “2 days of wargames,” she explained, incorporated into larger “combat” training for “urban warfare, riot control, and rescue operations.”
Other Oath Keepers, the government alleges, had already begun combat training even before the election. Florida Oath Keepers (and now Jan. 6 defendants) Kelly Meggs, Connie Meggs (Kelly’s wife) and Kenneth Harrelson had taken a private combat training course .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172399/106-usa-supp-re-meggs.pdf .. in Leesburg, Fla., in September, which included training on “AR-platform firearms.”
On Nov.10, 2020, Rhodes posted a “Call to Action!” on the Oath Keeper web site .. https://archive.md/ZRvMC#selection-1213.0-1213.515 , which was further entitled: “March on DC, Stop the Steal, Defend the President, & Defeat the Deep State.” It said in part:
- This election was stolen and this is a communist/Deep State coup, every bit as corrupt and illegitimate as what is done in third world banana republics. We must refuse to EVER recognize this as a legitimate election, and refuse to recognize Biden as a legitimate winner, and refuse to ever recognize him as the President of the United States. This election was stolen by corrupt, law-breaking Democrat partisans on the ground, and by the manipulation of the CIA created HAMMR (“Hammer”) and Scorecard programs. -
Later that same day, Rhodes appeared .. https://www.mediamatters.org/infowars/militia-leader-stewart-rhodes-says-he-has-men-stationed-outside-dc-ready-engage-violence .. on Alex Jones’s show again, where he mixed apocalyptic predictions about bloodshed to come with QAnon-like tirades about the need to expose deep-state “pedophiles,” including Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr.: “It’s either President Trump is encouraged, and bolstered, [and] strengthened to do what he must do,” Rhodes said, “or we wind up in a bloody fight. We all know that. The fight’s coming.”
Several Oath Keepers attended the Million MAGA March, including Watkins and Donovan Crowl, 50, who was also a member of Watkins’s militia in Ohio. Crowl is a former Marine whose later life, according to a post-riot New Yorker .. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-former-marine-stormed-the-capitol-as-part-of-a-far-right-militia .. profile, had been marred by “drinking,” “addiction,” “domestic violence” and “extreme overt racism.” While they were in the D.C. area, Watkins and Crowl stayed at the farm of a retired Navy colonel, Tom Caldwell, of Berryville, Va., who was sympatico to the Oath Keepers’ objectives and worldview.
A few days after the Million MAGA March, Caldwell wrote .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172401/18-usa-opp-re-caldwell-release.pdf .. to Crowl musing about next steps. “I think there will be real violence for all of us next time,” Caldwell wrote. “I know its [sic] not my place but I’m sure you have seen enough to know I am already working on the next D.C. op. We either WILL have a country and we’ll be battling antifa-like bugs to keep it or we will have lost our country/freedom and we will be fighting to regain it.”
Caldwell also texted Watkins a note a few days later, according to government filings:
- I believe we will have to get violent to stop this, especially the antifa maggots who are sure to come out en masse even if we get the Prez for 4 more years. Stay sharp and we will meet again. You are my kinda person and we may have to fight next time. I have my own gear, I like to be ON TIME and go where the enemy is, especially after dark. -
Since his post-riot arrest, Caldwell’s attorney has suggested in court filings .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172406/53-caldwell-mf-recons-of-detention.pdf .. that his client has a fertile imagination and likes to bluster, having once tried his hand at writing military-themed screenplays. Caldwell is 65, his attorney has noted, and is on full disability due to spinal injuries suffered while in the service. It’s unlikely Caldwell could have ever effectuated many of the boasts found in his vivid emails and texts, his attorney has argued.
In any case, other Oath Keepers’ rhetoric was as apocalyptic as Caldwell’s—at least when it came to the prospect of a Biden Presidency. On Nov. 17, 2020 Watkins wrote to a recruit:
- I don't underestimate the result of the deep state. Biden may still yet be our President. If he is, our way of life as we know it is over. Our Republic would be over. Then it is our duty as Americans to fight, kill and die for our rights. . . . If Biden get [sic] the steal, none of us have a chance in my mind. We already have our neck in the noose. They just haven’t kicked in the chair yet. -
- [W]e tried playing nice and by the rules, now you will deal with the monster you created. The spirit of 1776 has resurfaced and has created groups like the Proudboys and we will not be extinguished. We will grow like the flame that fuels us and spread like love that guides us. We are unstoppable, unrelenting and now … unforgiving. Good luck to all you traitors of this county we so deeply love … you’re going to need it. -
Earlier that month, Nordean had solicited “militia groups” in the Pacific Northwest to contact him on an encrypted social media application, according to Washington, D.C.’s civil suit.
Proud Boy Zachary Rehl, the president of its Philadelphia chapter, was issuing similarly ominous warnings and threats, according to prosecutors .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172522/rehl-detention-memo.pdf : “Hopefully the firing squads are for the traitors that are trying to steal the election from the American people,” he wrote on Nov. 27, 2020. “[S]ome people at the highest levels need to be made an example of with an execution or two or three.”
More Stop the Steal rallies were held in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, two days before Presidential electors were to meet in state capitals to formalize the results of the 2020 election in their states. Speakers included Roger Stone, Proud Boy chairman Tarrio, Proud Boy elder Nordean, Oath Keeper founder Rhodes and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
show the world who the traitors are, and then use the Insurrection Act to drop the hammer on them. And all us veterans who swore that oath, until you’re age 65, you can be called up as the militia, to support and defend the Constitution. He needs to know from you that you are with him, that if he does not do it now, while he is commander in chief, we’re going to have to do it ourselves later, in a much more desperate, much more bloody war. Let’s get it on now while he is still the commander in chief. At the rally, Rhodes’s Oath Keepers provided security .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/us/politics/phil-waldron-jan-6.html .. for Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pardoned, former national security advisor. By then, Flynn was also calling for imposition of an at least “limited” form of martial law, with the military seizing voting devices and running a do-over election.
- You must act NOW as a wartime President, pursuant to your oath to defend the Constitution. . . . We are already in a fight. It’s better to wage it with you as Commander-in-Chief than to have you comply with a fraudulent election, leave office, and leave the White House in the hands of illegitimate usurpers and Chinese puppets. Please don’t do it. Do NOT concede, and do NOT wait until January 20, 2021. Strike now. . . . If you fail to act while you are still in office, we the people will have to fight a bloody civil war and revolution against these two illegitimate Communist Chinese puppets, and their illegitimate regime. -
On Dec. 19, Trump issued perhaps the most momentous dog whistle of his career:“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” he tweeted .. https://www.thetrumparchive.com/?searchbox=%22will+be+wild%22 . “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Within minutes, the tweet had been pinned on the home page of TheDonald.win, a site where extremist Trump supporters congregated. One user commented there, “If you’ve been waiting for a signal, THAT’S IT,” according to the civil suit .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21154303/amended-complaint-in-conrad-smith-et-al-v-trump-et-al.pdf .. later filed for Capitol Police Office Conrad Smith. “He can’t exactly openly tell you to revolt,” observed another. “This is the closest he’ll ever get.”
Later that same day, Alex Jones told his viewers .. https://www.banned.video/watch?id=5fde8270a8d3d905041c357a .. that Trump’s “will-be-wild” tweet was “one of the most historic events in American history,” likening it to Paul Revere’s ride in 1776. In language later quoted by the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol in its November 2021 cover letter to Jones subpoenaing his testimony and pertinent documents, he continued:
- He is now calling on We the People to take action and show our numbers. . . . The time for games is over. The time for action is now. … I’ve been on the air for 27 years and I’ve never reported on anything that comes as close to being this huge. This is seismic. -
Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs was among the scores of Jan. 6 rioters now facing criminal charges who appear to have taken Trump’s will-be-wild tweet as an invitation to violence. On Facebook he wrote .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172400/98-usa-resp-re-meggs-detention.pdf : “Trump said It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!! It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!! He wants us to make it WILD that’s what he’s saying. He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild !!! Sir Yes Sir!!! Gentleman we are heading to DC pack your shit !!”
For months, the Oath Keepers had been coordinating with one another by holding virtual chat sessions over the GoToMeeting app. After the election, however, many of them stopped using their real names on those channels, and started using pseudonyms. Meggs, for instance, switched .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172400/98-usa-resp-re-meggs-detention.pdf .. to “Gator1;” Ken Harrelson, to “Gator6;” Joseph Hackett, of Sarasota, Fla., became “Ahab.”
Toward the end of December, the Oath Keepers set up invitation-only chat groups on the encrypted Signal app to supplement their communications. One Signal channel, used by at least 10 leadership-level Oath Keepers—including Rhodes, Watkins and Meggs—was called “DC OP: Jan 6, 21.” A second, Florida-centric Signal chat group, consisting of at least nine Oath Keepers—including Meggs, Harrelson and Hackett—was called “OK FL DC OP Jan 6.”
Oath Keeper Hackett became particularly meticulous about secrecy during this period, according to prosecutors .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172523/344-usa-opp-to-release-of-hackett.pdf . When he used the Oath Keeper GoToMeeting channels, he’d sign in—under his Ahab pseudonym—through a virtual private network (VPN). Instead of placing calls or texts through his ordinary carrier, AT&T/TracFone, he used an app on his iPhone called TextMe. He then associated his Signal account with his TextMe phone number, rather than his AT&T number. His TextMe account was, in turn, registered to his encrypted Protonmail email address, which was listed under a false name, John Willow. Hackett also advised fellow Oath Keepers that when they sent plans on Signal, they should write them out longhand on a scrap of paper and then send a photo of the piece of paper. “Messages in cursive to eliminate digital reads,” he explained.
Eventually, it was decided that firearms would be stored with a “quick reaction force” (QRF) just outside D.C. at the Comfort Inn in Ballston. An aging Oath Keeper named Paul—referred to as “Person Three” in the indictment—was eventually chosen to watch over the arsenal there, apparently because he was “too broken down to be on the ground all day,” as Caldwell later put it .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172401/18-usa-opp-re-caldwell-release.pdf .. in a text to Watkins.
At one point, as Jan. 6 approached, Caldwell and Meggs both toyed with the idea of floating the QRF arms across the Potomac to D.C. by boat, if the need arose.
“Can’t believe I just thought of this,” Caldwell wrote to an associate affiliated with the Three Percenters on Jan. 3. (The Three Percenters .. https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/three-percenters .. are a far-right militia group premised on the false belief that only three percent of American colonists actually fought against the British during the Revolutionary War.) “If we had someone standing by at a dock ramp (one near the Pentagon for sure) we could have our Quick Response Team with the heavy weapons standing by, quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms.”
Meggs had discussed a similar notion on the Oath Keepers’ leadership Signal chat channel on Jan. 2:“1 if by land North side of Lincoln Memorial 2 if by sea Corner of west basin and Ohio [Ave.] is a water transport landing!! … QRF rally points Water of [sic] the bridges get closed.”
- Meggs: We need to make those senators very uncomfortable with all of us being a few hundred feet away. Our peaceful protests need to have a little more teeth. They aren’t listening. Now we aren’t talking about crossing the line. But we need to be standing on the line!!! It’s all bad from here guys. We need Trump because it will make our jobs easier. There is gonna be blood in the streets no matter what.
Rhodes: I think Congress will screw [Trump] over. The only change [sic] we/he has is if we scare the shit out of them and convince them it will be torches and pitchforks time is [sic] they don’t do the right thing. But I don’t think they will listen. -
As Jan. 6 approached, Alex Jones hinted that historic bombshells were afoot. On Dec. 29 he told his viewers: “Now I know some incredible information that I am not at liberty to tell you. But I am at liberty to give you a hint, which I don't think is too hard. You notice Trump said, ‘January 6th will be wild in D.C.?’ Well, it will be wild.”
Wild rumors were circulating in right-wing circles. Many Oath Keepers were anticipating Trump’s imminent invocation of the Insurrection Act:
“It begins for real Jan 5 and 6,” wrote .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172401/18-usa-opp-re-caldwell-release.pdf .. Caldwellon Facebook on Dec. 31, “on [sic] Washington D.C. when we mobilize in thestreets [sic]. Let them try to certify some crud on capitol hill with a million or more patriots in the streets. This kettle is set to boil.”In late December 2020, Kelly Meggs made several references .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172400/98-usa-resp-re-meggs-detention.pdf .. to having struck some sort of alliance with the Proud Boys. “Well, we are ready for the rioters,” Meggs wrote on Facebook on Dec. 19. “[T]his week I organized an alliance between Oath Keepers, Florida 3%ers, and Proud Boys. We have decided to work together to shut this shit down.” He later described the Proud Boys as a “force multiplier,” because “they always have a big group.”
Still, it’s very unclear exactly what sort of alliance—if any—was truly struck. Meggs’s references were vague, and seemed more targeted toward beating up Antifa in West Side Story-style rumbles than toward coordinating an attack on the Capitol. On Christmas Day, for instance, Meggs wrote on Facebook (according to a later government filing .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172218/98-usa-resp-re-meggs-detention.pdf ):
- At night we have orchestrated a plan with the proud boys. I’ve been communicating with [redacted] the leader. We are gonna March with them for a while then fall back to the back of the crowd and turn off. Then we will have the proud boys get in front of them the cops will get between Antifa and proud boys. We will come in behind antifa and beat the hell out of them. -
On Dec. 29, Proud Boy chairman Tarrio issued the previously referenced order for his colleagues to remain atypically “incognito” on Jan. 6. That same day, the Proud Boys initiated a new leadership structure called the Ministry of Self Defense, prosecutors allege, consisting of Tarrio, Nordean, Biggs, Rehl and at least one other. To communicate, they set up an encrypted messaging channel on Telegram, called “MOSD”.
Chairman Tarrio’s Jan. 4 arrest appears to have momentarily thrown the Proud Boys’ plans into disarray. Apparently fearful that Tarrio’s phone would be searched, Proud Boy Nordean, of the Seattle chapter, took steps to “nuke” the “MOSD” communications channel and replace it with a “New MOSD,” according to the government .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172392/pb-nordean_et_al_1st_superseding_indictment_0.pdf . The “New MOSD” participants included Nordean, Biggs, Rehl and Charles Donohoe, the head of a Proud Boys chapter in North Carolina.
By that evening, however, the Proud Boys were regaining their footing. An unindicted Proud Boy co-conspirator wrote .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172392/pb-nordean_et_al_1st_superseding_indictment_0.pdf .. on the New MOSD channel: “We had originally planned on breaking the guys into teams. Let’s start divvying them up and getting baofeng channels picked out.” (Baofeng is a brand of walkie-talkie type radios.)
The next day, Jan. 5, the Proud Boys created another encrypted messaging channel on Telegram—with over 60 users—called “Boots on the Ground,” according to the government. In the early afternoon, Biggs used it .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172392/pb-nordean_et_al_1st_superseding_indictment_0.pdf .. to urge Proud Boys to stay out of trouble that day. “We are trying to avoid getting into any shit tonight,” he posted. “Tomorrow’s the day. . . Just trying to get our numbers. So we can plan accordingly for tonight and tomorrow’s plan.” Later, he reiterated, “We have a plan.”
Stone was, in fact, scheduled .. https://web.archive.org/web/20210105002231/https:/wildprotest.com/ .. to be a lead speaker the next day, on Jan. 6, at a rally just northeast of the Capitol. That rally was scheduled to start immediately after the Save America rally at the Ellipse, where Trump would speak. The Capitol rally seems to have been envisioned with the notion of luring Trump supporters to march the 1.7 miles from the Ellipse to the Capitol.
As it happened, Stone did not attend any rallies on Jan. 6. Last month he told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson in an interview, “I had a feeling, an intuition. I just did not want to go. I think that God was giving me a signal.”
On the morning of Jan. 6, the Proud Boys did not attend Trump’s speech near the Ellipse. Instead, they gathered initially at a spot near the Washington Monument, at about 10 a.m., according to the indictment .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172392/pb-nordean_et_al_1st_superseding_indictment_0.pdf .. of Nordean, Biggs, Rehl and Donohoe. They then walked to a lawn in an unrestricted area east of the Capitol.
Standing among the Proud Boys were also some individuals whom the government has not alleged to be members of the group, but who would also later be charged with serious felonies stemming from the insurrection. Robert Gieswein can be seen there, for instance. A 24-year-old Colorado man affiliated with the Three Percenters, Gieswein .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172342/robert-gieswein-affidavit-in-support-of-criminal-complaint-and-arrest-warrant.pdf .. would later be charged with assaulting police officers with a baseball bat, a chemical irritant aerosol and a bike-rack barrier.
By 12:45 p.m., before Trump had finished his address, the Proud Boys reached a spot northwest of the Capitol known as the Peace Monument, where Pennsylvania Ave. dead-ends into the Capitol grounds. A large crowd was forming there near a thinly guarded barricade that blocked entry to a pedestrian walkway. The walkway led diagonally, in a southeast direction, straight to the west steps of the Capitol Building.
The crowd that gathered at the Peace Monument allegedly included Proud Boys Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, Donohoe, Dan “Milkshake” Scott, Dominic Pezzola, William Pepe, Matthew Greene, William Chrestman, Christopher Kuehne, Ryan Ashlock, Louis Colon and others, according to multiple government indictments and complaints.
Later in January, after Samsel’s arrest on felony charges, Samsel told FBI agents that Proud Boy Biggs had incited his actions, as the New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/us/politics/proud-boys-capitol-riot.html ’s Alan Feuer first reported. Biggs’s attorney told the Times that Samsel’s account was a “desperate, if wildly entertaining, false history.”
With the first barrier now toppled, the crowd—including more than a dozen Proud Boys—streamed across it and past the officers down the walkway toward the west Capitol steps. An individual described in the Nordean indictment .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172392/pb-nordean_et_al_1st_superseding_indictment_0.pdf .. as “UCC-1”—meaning an unindicted co-conspirator—wrote on the Proud Boys’ Telegram channel, “Storming the capital [sic] building right now!” and “Get There,” according to prosecutors.
Closer to the Capitol, the mob encountered a second barrier. Proud Boys Nordean, Biggs, Pepe and Ashlock played direct, physical roles in tearing it down, according to their respective indictments or criminal complaints.
Then, for maybe a half hour, a police line held the rioters at an impasse at the base of the Capitol.
At 1 p.m.,Vice President Pence officially gave notice, in a tweet .. .. https://twitter.com/Mike_Pence/status/1346879811151605762/photo/2 , that he viewed his role that day as largely “ceremonial,” and that he would not unilaterally reject the results of the swing states’ popular elections.
At this time, Oath Keepers began to depart the Ellipse area in tactical gear, news media analyses have shown. (Most of the Oath Keepers appear to have attended the Ellipse rally, where some of them, like Watkins, have said they were providing security for VIPs. Several other Oath Keepers appear to have initially gone to the Willard Hotel, where Roger Stone was staying, but to have later returned to their hotels.)
At 1:25 p.m., Oath Keeper founder Rhodes wrote in the leadership’s Signal chat channel, “Pence is doing nothing. As I predicted.”
About 10 minutes later, Rhodes added, “All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They’ve had enough.” And 10 minutes after that, Rhodes wrote that he was on his way to the Capitol.
At about 1:37 p.m., there was a breakthrough in the impasse at the western base of the Capitol. Proud Boy Dan “Milkshake” Scott was “one of the first, or perhaps the first,” rioter to “initiate contact with law enforcement at this location,” according to the criminal complaint .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172485/scott_charging_docs.pdf .. against him. He allegedly pushed two officers backwards, up the steps, and then pulled one of them into the crowd. Soon thereafter, rioters began pushing their way up a staircase under the inaugural scaffolding.
“We have a good group,” she said. “We have 30-40 of us. We are sticking to plan.” Someone responded, “We’ll see you soon, Jess. Airborne.”
(Watkins’s attorney has maintained that the government’s timeline is wrong, and that this Zello conversation occurred much earlier in the morning. The “plan” referred to was simply to provide security at the Ellipse rally, her attorney has maintained.)
At 2 p.m., Watkins reported that she was “one block away from the Capitol,” adding: “I’m probably gonna go silent when we get there, because I’m gonna be a little busy.”
Three minutes later, according to prosecutors, the “administrator” of the Zello channel Watkins was using—the person is not further identified—announced: “You are executing citizen’s arrest. Arrest this assembly, we have probable cause for acts of treason, election fraud.”
By about 2:00 p.m., according to both news media analyses and criminal complaints, the mob had reached the Capitol’s upper west terrace. Proud Boys Donohoe and Pezzola were allegedly among these rioters, as was Gieswein, the Three Percenter with the baseball bat.
Once inside, some of the Proud Boys allegedly made incriminating videos. One made by Gilbert Garcia .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21173761/garcia-complaint-sof.pdf .. allegedly shows an “aggressive confrontation” with police officers, and features Garcia boasting, “We went ahead and stormed the Capitol. It’s about to get ugly.” He can later be heard berating police officers as “fucking traitors” while instructing other rioters to pull a person who had been grabbed by officers out of their clutches. Garcia is so close to the officers that “their names are clearly visible in the video” from their badges. He turns the camera to the crowd and yells, “Keep ‘em coming. Keem ‘em coming. Storm this shit.” Later still, one of Garcia’s recordings allegedly catches his own voice calling through the halls, “Nancy come out to play,” “Nancy,” “Whose house?,” and “Free Enrique.”
Proud Boys allegedly did additional damage once inside the building. William Chrestman, Christopher Kuehne, Louis Colon and Cory and Felicia Konold are charged .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172396/kuehne-indictment.pdf .. with having helped disable crash barriers that were designed to descend from the ceiling, and which police were trying to deploy to halt rioters’ progress. Two other Proud Boys or associates—the brothers Jonathanpeter Klein and Matthew Klein—exited the building and then allegedly forced .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172598/klein-ss-indictment.pdf .. open another door, on the north side, in an effort to allow still more rioters to enter.
High-ranking Oath Keeper Michael Simmons learned about the breach of the Capitol’s western face, spearheaded by Proud Boys, about one minute after it happened. At 2:14 p.m., he posted .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172347/513-sixth-superseding-indictment.pdf .. to the Oath Keepers’ leadership Signal chat channel: “The[y] have taken ground at the capital [sic] We need to regroup any members who are not on the mission.”
Simmons has not been charged with any offense, but is alluded to in the main Oath Keeper indictment as Person Ten. Like Rhodes, he is believed to have always stayed on the lawful side of the fencing marking the Capitol’s restricted perimeter that day.
But like Rhodes, Simmons allegedly had access to the leadership’s Signal channel, and was in telephone contact with certain Oath Keepers while these events were playing out. Between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., for instance, he had 10 telephone calls with Oath Keeper Joshua James (who appears to have been one of those assigned to guard Stone) and two with Rhodes. Rhodes, in turn, allegedly had two calls with Oath Keeper Meggs, one of which became a conference call with Simmons. (Interviewed .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172344/534-michael-simmons-interview.pdf .. by the FBI this past May, Simmons denied that he or, to his knowledge, any Oath Keeper ever planned or contemplated violence or wrongdoing on Jan. 6.)
After receiving Simmons’s Signal post about the Capitol breach, Rhodes immediately reposted it and added the note: “Come to the South Side of the Capitol on steps.” He appended a photo showing the southeast side of the Capitol.
By that time, only two Oath Keepers were trespassing on restricted grounds, according to the government, and none had yet breached the building. The two in a restricted area, Jason Dolan and Ken Harrelson, had made their way to the top of the Capitol steps on the eastern side—which had not yet been breached.
Five Oath Keepers who had been on the Roger Stone detail—now back at their own hotels—learned of the breach at 2:16 p.m., according to prosecutors. One of them, Roberto Minuta, 36, of Prosper, Tex., was overheard saying, “Now we’re talking. That’s what I came up here for.” These five suited up in tactical gear and began heading for the Capitol. They were joined en route by a sixth Oath Keeper, Jonathan Walden, 46, of Birmingham, Ala., who had with him his 82-pound German Shepherd, Warrior.
Another 13 Oath Keepers, including Watkins and Meggs, entered restricted Capitol grounds at about 2:22 p.m., according to prosecutors, though their precise whereabouts have not been alleged.
Two minutes after that, Rhodes texted Meggs, instructing him to go to the “SOUTH side of US Capitol,” adding, “That’s where I am going. To link up with [Simmons].” A minute later, Rhodes reforwarded Simmons’s Signal message about the breach—“the[y] have taken ground at the capital [sic]”—together with the photo showing where to head on the southeastern side.
At 2:26 p.m., the group of 13 Oath Keepers—including Meggs and Watkins—were walking around the north exterior of the Capitol toward the eastern side, according to the indictment.
Minuta’s group of Oath Keepers was evidently still trying to catch up. They were driving through traffic in two golf carts—presumably the ones they’d used to chauffeur Stone around the day before—“at times swerving around law enforcement vehicles,” according to the government. Minuta allegedly made statements then that are quoted in the indictment, although it’s unclear whether they were written or oral, or how they were recorded:
- Patriots are storming the Capitol building; there’s violence against patriots by the D.C. Police; so we’re in route in a grand theft auto golf cart to the Capitol building right now. … it’s going down guys; it’s literally going down right now Patriots storming the Capitol building … fucking war in the streets right now. … word is they got in the building. … let’s go. -
At about 2:35 p.m., at least 12 Oath Keepers—including Watkins, Meggs, Crowl and Hackett—scaled the eastern steps of the Capitol in stack formation. Video footage shows that the two other Oath Keepers already at the top—Harrelson and Dolan—are motioning their colleagues to join them.
There, according to the government, the 14 Oath Keepers joined the mob as it “assaulted the officers guarding the doors, threw objects and sprayed chemicals toward the officers . . . and pulled violently on the doors.” They allegedly joined in the pushing and shoving and, at 2:39 p.m., the east side Rotunda door was breached. Watkins would later brag in a Parler post that their entry had been “Forced. Like rugby.” (Portions of the breach—amid blaring alarm bells and chants of “treason, treason”—were captured on YouTube video .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b76KfHB0QO8 , surveillance video and, allegedly, by a three-minute-plus video taken by Oath Keeper Harrelson himself.)
[embed video here]
At 2:44 p.m., Watkins reported triumphantly on her Zello channel: “We are in the main dome now. We are rocking it. They are throwing grenades, they are fricking shooting people with paint balls. But we are in here.”
Someone who, according to the government, had “participated in at least one prior Oath Keeper operation with Watkins” responded: “Get it, Jess. Do your fucking thing. This is what we fucking [unintelligible] up for. Everything we fucking trained for.” Minuta’s contingent finally breached the Capitol at about 3:15 p.m., and the last of them—Walden and his dog, Warrior—were not flushed from the building by police officers until about 3:35 p.m.
A little after 4 p.m., at least 16 Oath Keepers huddled together with Rhodes and Simmons at the northeast corner of the Capitol, on the lawful side of the fencing about 100 feet from the building, according to both the indictment and to video analyses by news media.
Later that evening, Simmons, Rhodes and several other Oath Keepers had dinner together at an Olive Garden restaurant near their hotel in Virginia, according to two interviews Simmons gave to the FBI this past May. During that FBI interview .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21172344/534-michael-simmons-interview.pdf ., Simmons maintained, however, that he had never realized that any Oath Keeper had entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 until he was either driving home to Indiana later that night or the next day.
This account is necessarily biased, in that it relies overwhelmingly on prosecutors’ accusations against nearly 40 individuals who have denied any wrongdoing and not yet had a chance to provide their own accounts. As these cases come to trial in the months ahead, it will become possible to flesh out the outline of events offered here. Doubtless, there will be surprises, and some people may have been maligned in this very rough draft of history.
Still, not all of the surprises to come will necessarily be exculpatory. Four originally charged Oath Keeper co-conspirators are already cooperating, as is one Proud Boy co-conspirator, and perhaps others will be persuaded to join them. Their accounts, too—also not yet heard—will make valuable contributions to future narratives.
In addition, the many civil suits that have already been filed concerning these same events—by injured police officers, by members of Congress and by the District of Columbia—will unearth still more valuable information through the civil discovery process, as will the ongoing work of the House Select Committee.
In due time, we will know much more about the roles of those who have been criminally charged and—far more importantly—those who have not been.
"Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun [...] For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie.They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters. [...] Whether the shooting was warranted is debatable. Federal prosecutors cleared Lieutenant Michael Byrd of wrongdoing .. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/us/capitol-police-ashli-babbitt-riot.html , and the Capitol Police exonerated him .. https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/press-releases/uscp-completes-internal-investigation-january-6-officer-involved , saying, “The actions of the officer in this case potentially saved Members and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large crowd of rioters who … were steps away.” The crowd was plainly eager to follow Babbitt through the breach, but a legal analysis .. https://www.lawfareblog.com/evaluating-police-shooting-ashli-babbitt .. in Lawfare argued that the unarmed Babbitt personally would have had to pose a serious threat to justify the shooting."
By Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Jed Handelsman Shugerman Friday, July 1, 2022, 9:40 AM
But Tuesday’s explosive testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, changed our minds. In particular, Hutchinson testified to hearing Trump order that the magnetometers (metal detectors) used to keep armed people away from the president be removed: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags [magnetometers] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here; let the people in and take the mags away.”
Admittedly, Hutchinson is only one witness, and it is true that some of her testimony would, in the context of a criminal trial, constitute hearsay. But Hutchinson—unlike many of her detractors who have contested certain details of her testimony—testified under oath and, contrary to the sneering commentary .. https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1541833774966636544 .. of the House Judiciary Committee GOP Twitter account, not all of Hutchinson’s second-hand remarks were introduced to establish the truth of the matter asserted. Even much of that portion of her testimony that did constitute hearsay might still be admissible under the relevant evidentiary rules .. https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_804 .
These utterances by Trump (as alleged by Hutchinson) were not political speech. They serve as additional proof of intent and context, and—crucially—a material act to increase the likelihood of violence. This easily distinguishes Trump’s speech at the rally from other kinds of core political speech that should never be criminalized.
Insufficient Evidence Before Tuesday’s Testimony
Let’s start with what was publicly known of Trump’s speech at the “Stop the Steal” rally at the White House Ellipse. Trump told the crowd .. https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial , “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Then he added:
-- Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down… Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong … And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore … So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue ... And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give … give our Republicans … the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. --
Hindsight is 20/20, and before Tuesday, we both believed that hindsight bias was causing too many commentators to leap from Trump’s remarks to the violence that followed, and that a criminal prosecution of the speech itself would run afoul of foundational principles of First Amendment law. In particular, we were skeptical that Trump’s speech would satisfy the stringent requirement of Brandenburg v. Ohio .. https://casetext.com/case/brandenburg-v-ohio , the landmark case in which the Supreme Court held that the government could only criminalize speech advocating unlawful action if “such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Although Trump’s speech was undoubtedly a but-for cause of the violence, the content of the speech itself is hard to distinguish from other politicians or activists who may call on supporters to “fight like hell” or “march to the Capitol” or any other government building for a political purpose.
Indeed, this is why we disagreed with D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta’s February ruling .. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21266365/mehta-2-18-22-thompson-v-trump-opinion.pdf , in a civil case brought against Trump, that held that the content of Trump’s speech was not protected by the First Amendment. Our concern was that if prosecutors could indict Trump for the content of his speech alone they could also indict lower-profile politicians and even community activists and organizers for such common rhetoric—especially if a crowd independently got out of control, and especially in parts of the country wanting to suppress certain kinds of political speech. Indicting just on the content of the speech would have set a bad precedent. If only for this reason alone, we both agreed with Jack Goldsmith’s analysis in the New York Times explaining why indictments were problematic.
Incitement to Riot
18 U.S.C. § 2101 .. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2101 .. applies to anyone who, with intent to “incite a riot” or “organize, promote, [or] encourage ... a riot ... performs or attempts to perform any other overt act” to incite, organize, etc., a riot.
Let’s start with the intent requirement. We believe that, if presented in a criminal trial, Hutchinson’s testimony would establish that Trump was at the very least willfully blind .. https://www.lawfareblog.com/actual-knowledge-willful-blindness-and-jan-6-hearings .. to the possibility of, and—as seems increasingly plausible—actively in favor of, the crowd causing violence at the Capitol. According to Hutchinson, Trump was told by numerous White House officials, including his deputy chief of staff (and former lead Secret Service agent), about the danger that the crowd posed. Trump refused to defuse the situation despite multiple desperate entreaties from his staff. Hutchinson even added a new dimension to Trump’s already notorious endangerment of Vice President Mike Pence—previously expressed via tweet—stating that she heard Trump say Pence deserved the mob’s calls to hang him. This testimony, in combination with Trump’s assertion that “Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” which he tweeted while the rioters roamed the Capitol chanting, “Hang Mike Pence,” makes it difficult to maintain that Trump’s speech and surrounding conduct was intended merely to express his political views.
But intent by itself is not enough; as both a legal and a prudential matter, the case for prosecuting political speech is much stronger when that speech is accompanied by additional actions that facilitate lawlessness and violence, just as the crime of conspiracy requires an overt act .. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R41223.pdf .. to avoid the overcriminalization of loose talk.
And it is here that Hutchinson’s testimony about Trump’s angry demand to remove the magnetometers is critical, because that order, were it to have been followed, would have brought the most dangerous members of that crowd closer to him and arguably would have made them more likely to be moved by his inflammatory rhetoric. Even if those armed supporters could hear him from a distance when they were staying back from the “mags,” Trump clearly wanted a larger and a more fired-up rally. A larger, more packed crowd that could hear at higher volume, that could see Trump better, and that was part of a denser mob, with more of his most hard-core followers with weapons and body armor, would be more likely to march and fight physically, not just metaphorically. Trump would have been aware of this likelihood, and he tried materially to increase this likelihood.
In other words, Trump’s order to “take the fucking mags away,” whether or not the Secret Service obeyed it, was not constitutionally protected political speech but, rather, an overt act, sandwiched between sentences reflecting awareness and intent, that would have made the threat of lawflessness far more “imminent” (in the language of Brandenburg). Trump’s actions transformed his words “Fight like hell” from a political metaphor to a consciously literal and imminent danger.
Using Trump’s order as a key element in his criminal prosecution thus offers a safeguard to prevent the case against Trump from being used as a precedent to criminalize loose political talk. A leader or an activist who simply called on a crowd to “fight like hell” and “march to the Capitol” would not be liable to prosecution for incitement under the above logic. By contrast, a leader or an activist who distributed weapons, knives, spears, bear spray, and body armor to a mob of activists, and then immediately fired them up about an imminent government conspiracy, and called on them to “fight like hell” and “march to the Capitol” would—and we think should—be subject to prosecution for incitement. By ordering the removal of the magnetometers, Trump acted in a way that would have increased the dangerousness of the crowd, and so he too should be held accountable for incitement.
Section 1512(c)(2) requires “corrupt” intent. Before Tuesday, Trump’s defense was that he was simply telling his supporters to go to the Capitol to protest peacefully. But after Hutchinson’s testimony, it is clear that he knew (or believed) that he was sending a heavily armed and potentially violent crowd to the Capitol that was almost inevitably going to disrupt and impede Congress’s proceedings. One reference to “peaceful” protest does not negate the increasing mountain of evidence demonstrating that Trump, at the very least, knew about and was deliberately indifferent to the danger that the mob posed and quite possibly wanted them to violently storm the Capitol.
Trump’s speech, his attempt to remove the magnetometers, his refusal to intervene when the rioters entered the Capitol, and the inflammatory tweet he sent about Pence despite being told of what was going on all show that Trump intended and acted so as to “endeavor to influence, obstruct, or impede” Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote, all to corruptly cling to power.
Insurrection and Seditious Conspiracy
The federal insurrection statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2383, applies to “[w]hoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto.”
Before Tuesday, it seemed like hyperbole to suggest charging Trump with insurrection. But once a prima facie case has been made to charge Trump with inciting a riot and with obstructing Congress, the case for an insurrection charge follows logically. After all, what is an insurrection against Congress but a violent riot with the intent to obstruct Congress’s most solemn duty: facilitating the peaceful transition of power?
Indeed, not only is insurrection on the table after Tuesday, but so is the related crime of seditious conspiracy .. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384 , which occurs when “two or more persons ... conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” In this context, to commit insurrection is also to commit sedition. Prosecutors already have charged .. https://www.lawfareblog.com/seditious-conspiracy-what-make-latest-oath-keepers-indictment .. leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys with seditious conspiracy. Although seditious conspiracy requires an independent finding of conspiracy, which Tuesday’s testimony did not establish, the Jan. 6 committee has promised to offer evidence of contacts between the rioters and the White House. If those contacts reach Trump, a charge of seditious conspiracy becomes substantially more likely.
DOJ’s Changed Calculus
So far, we have addressed the legal case for holding Trump criminally accountable for the violence of Jan. 6. But for a prosecution to be legitimate, it is not enough that the prosecutor believes that the law and the facts are on their side. The prosecutor must also conclude .. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/standards/ProsecutionFunctionFourthEdition/#:~:text=(a)%20A%20prosecutor%20should%20seek,in%20the%20interests%20of%20justice. .. that “the decision to charge is in the interests of justice.” At the federal level, this means that a prosecutor should bring charges unless .. https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-27000-principles-federal-prosecution#9-27.220 .. “(1) the prosecution would serve no substantial federal interest; (2) the person is subject to effective prosecution in another jurisdiction; or (3) there exists an adequate non-criminal alternative to prosecution.” The second requirement does not apply in this case because the actions at issue took place in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital and a federal enclave. So the question is whether a prosecution of Trump would serve a substantial federal interest and whether there exist adequate alternatives to prosecution.
Second, a prosecution would deter future presidents, and their enablers, from engaging in the sort of extreme, anti-democratic conduct that Trump embraced. Of course, deterrence can go too far, and it is a legitimate concern to worry about creating an overly cautious and risk-averse executive. But just because a prosecution would have chilling effects doesn’t mean that all chilling effects are bad. We want future presidents to err well on the side of respecting the democratic process: extra caution is no bad thing.
Finally, and perhaps most controversially, a prosecution could serve criminal law’s goal of incapacitating criminals. We do not take a position on whether prosecution would necessarily mean incarceration, and one of us has previously argued against putting Trump in prison .. https://shugerblogcom.wordpress.com/2018/02/08/justice-without-jail/ . A criminal penalty could be limited to a large fine. It could be used by Congress as the basis for impeachment and Senate disqualification or disqualification by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. However, we also think it is important to recognize some of the benefits of equality before the law. Our legal system should treat ex-presidents who have committed violent felonies the same way it treats other citizens who commit violent felonies. In our society, violent felons tend to serve time in jail, and incitement and insurrection are crimes of violence, in which people were killed and badly injured. After Tuesday, the case for Trump to face equal justice is increasingly strong on a moral and retributive basis as well as on a deterrence basis. Given Trump’s repeated invocations of the “big lie .. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2022/06/09/why-many-republicans-believe-the-big-lie-00036384 ,” there is no reason to think that he has learned any sort of lesson, and he remains popular among his base and continues to be enabled by Republican politicians across the country and in Washington. The ordinary political process seems unable to deal with Trump, so there is no “adequate non-criminal alternative to prosecution.”
We recognize the radical implications of this last point. It’s essentially a call to allow political considerations to enter into what should ordinarily be completely removed from politics: the weighty responsibilities of the federal prosecutor. But when we’re talking about the president of the United States committing not just crimes but attacking the very foundation of democratic government, there’s no way to cleanly separate law from politics. And while indicting a former president who remains the frontrunner for his party’s presidential nomination will no doubt do immense short-term damage to American political stability and raise some potential separation-of-powers issues .. https://www.lawfareblog.com/mueller-reports-weak-statutory-interpretation-analysis , the alternative—to allow American democracy to be attacked literally from within and from the very top—is even worse.
Trump, as he so often does, has left the country facing a painful dilemma. Attorney General Merrick Garland has no good options, only bad ones. But the bad options are not all equally bad. While we certainly don’t envy Garland and the difficult decision he has to make, we think that, after Tuesday’s testimony, letting Trump off the hook poses a greater threat to American democracy than does prosecuting him.
Trump’s attempted coup continues – even after January 6 hearings are over for now
"Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun [...] For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
The committee has produced history’s most detailed account of an American president’s cruel and seditious pursuit of power. Even now, Trump continues to push states to alter the outcomes of the 2020 election
‘Trump is encouraging Republican lawmakers in several states to pass legislation allowing them to take over election machinery and ignore the popular vote.’ Photograph: Rebecca Noble/Reuters
Sun 24 Jul 2022 20.17 AEST Last modified on Mon 25 Jul 2022 04.51 AEST
The House of Representatives’ select committee investigating the January 6 attack has finished its hearings, at least for now.
But Trump’s attempted coup continues.
He has not stopped giving speeches to stir up angry mobs with his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen. He gave another fiery address Friday evening in Arizona.
He is actively backing congressional candidates who propound his big lie.
Trump continues to push states to alter the outcomes of the 2020 election. Just last week he urged Wisconsin assembly speaker Robin Vos to support a resolution to retract Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes cast for Biden. Advertisement
He is encouraging Republican lawmakers in several states to pass legislation allowing them to take over election machinery and ignore the popular vote.
The committee’s message to all of America, including Republicans: Stop supporting this treachery.
The committee has made that treachery crystal clear.
It has shown the deception behind Trump’s big lie, including Trump’s attorney general William Barr, saying “I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations” and that promoting it was “a grave disservice to the country”.
It has demonstrated non-partisan repulsion toward Trump’s attempted coup, even in Trump’s White House. As former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson said, “I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”
It has made open appeals to Republican lawmakers to stop supporting the attempt. The Republican vice-chair of the committee, Liz Cheney, warned her Republican colleagues “who are defending the indefensible” that “there will come a day when Donald Trump .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump .. is gone, but your dishonor will remain”.
It has revealed how average Americans fell for Trump’s treachery, with disastrous results. Witness Stephen Ayres, who described himself as “nothing but a family man and a working man”, participated in the January 6 attack because Trump “basically put out, you know, come to the Stop the Steal rally, you know, and I felt like I needed to be down here”.
And it has reminded Americans of their duties to democracy. As committee chair Bennie Thompson put it: “When you’re on the losing side, that doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it … but you can’t turn violent.”
Committee member Jamie Raskin recalled Lincoln’s warning that politicians who encourage mobs to rampage and terrorize will destroy the bonds of social trust necessary for democracy to work.
It is impossible to know whether the hearings will lead to criminal indictments and convictions of Trump and his enablers.
But the hearings already appear to have convinced some Trump supporters that he is a dangerous charlatan.
History teaches that it is possible to bring down an American demagogue by putting his wickedness on display for all to see.
In 1954, I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings. The Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy – whose communist witch hunt was ending careers and debasing much of the US government – had charged the US army with lax security at a top-secret army facility. The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case.
At a session on 9 June 1954, after McCarthy accused one of Welch’s young staff attorneys of being a communist, Welch responded in words that led to McCarthy’s undoing: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”
When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
Almost overnight, McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.
Now, the January 6 committee has produced history’s most detailed account of an American president’s cruel and seditious pursuit of power.
Will it be enough to stop Trump’s ongoing attempted coup? That depends on whether Americans heed the committee’s implicit plea to ensure that American democracy endures.
This article was amended on 24 July 2022. McCarthy was a senator for Wisconsin, not Minnesota.
The non-inflated truth about inflation And the best way to fight it without hurting workers or slowing the economy. - Robert Reich [...] What to do? Don’t slow the economy. Instead, reduce corporate concentration. P - As I mentioned at the outset, the Fed meets today. It’s poised to try to control inflation by raising borrowing costs. This means the Fed will battle inflation the old way — drafting millions of workers into the inflation fight by slowing the economy and causing them to lose their jobs or wages, or both. P - This is the wrong medicine for the wrong disease. It will hurt millions of people who are among the most vulnerable in the economy. The correct medicine is to reduce corporate market power. P - Biden has started to try. He has prodded the Agriculture Department to investigate large meatpackers that are raising prices and underpaying farmers — while tripling their profit margins during the pandemic. He has encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate accusations that large oil companies are artificially inflating prices, even after global oil prices began to fall in recent weeks. P - In late October, the FTC ordered nine large retailers, including Walmart, Amazon and Kroger, to turn over detailed information to help root out the sources of supply chain disruptions that were “harming competition in the U.S. economy.” P - Biden has urged the Federal Maritime Commission to root out price gouging by large shipping companies at the heart of supply chains. The Commission has investigated the handful of corporate shipping alliances that effectively control the flow of goods across the world’s oceans and which have raised prices as much as ninefold during the pandemic, according to data from the freight-tracking firm Freightos. P - In addition, Biden has tapped antitrust crusaders for key roles, including Lina Khan to be chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter (a long-time adversary of Facebook and Google) to lead the antitrust division of the Justice Department. And he has brought Tim Wu (a proponent of breaking up Facebook and other large companies) into the White House as a special adviser on competition issues. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167665622
Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote
--- "Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun [...] “The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.” P - For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters. P - By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response. " ---
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.
This article is part of our Midterms 2022 Daily Briefing
Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer and architect of Donald J. Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in April. Matt Rourke/Associated Press
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.
[...]
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.
Repeat excerpts: Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun
"Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun "Creeping Fascism SUXX, and Other Hot Takes" Related: The mess in Maricopa "Is the Maricopa County election audit truly an audit? Here's what professional auditors have to say" [...] "“Look, this is comical to watch,” Hobbs says of the Maricopa mess. “We’ve all laughed at it, watching it unfold,” but “it is very serious. This is precedent-setting. They are writing the playbook here.”" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164714048"
Feels even more pertinent today, so repeat some. With others added.
January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
By Barton Gellman December 6, 2021
Listen to this article 1:36:45 Updated at 3:21 p.m. ET on December 9, 2021.
Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.
The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.
Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.
“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time.
[Insert:Cleta the cheata, N Carolina - As 2024 Voting Battles Heat Up, North Carolina G.O.P. Presses Forward "Yep. Trump does still have much control within the GOP. See YouTube of the NBC News video in yours [...]Lawyer [insert Mar. 25, Cleta Mitchell] Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote Mar. 2, 2023 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171344479 " When losing on all policy fronts what do you do? Lie. Cheat. Try to steal. The Trump GOP way. Republicans, whose edge in the state has narrowed in recent years, have gone on offense politically, leading to clashes over voting access and control over elections. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172259429]
Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.
Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.
[...]
Patterson is admirably eager for a civil exchange of views. He portrays himself as a man who “may be wrong, and if I am I admit it,” and he does indeed concede on small points. But a deep rage seems to fuel his convictions. I asked him the first time we met if we could talk “about what’s happening in the country, not the election itself.”
His smile faded. His voice rose.
“There ain’t no fucking way we are letting go of 3 November 2020,” he said. “That is not going to fucking happen. That’s not happening. This motherfucker was stolen. The world knows this bumbling, senile, career corrupt fuck squatting in our White House did not get 81 million votes.”
He had many proofs. All he really needed, though, was arithmetic. “The record indicates 141 [million] of us were registered to vote and cast a ballot on November 3,” he said. “Trump is credited with 74 million votes out of 141 million. That leaves 67 million for Joe; that doesn’t leave any more than that. Where do these 14 million votes come from?”
Patterson did not recall where he had heard those figures. He did not think he had read Gateway Pundit, which was the first site to advance the garbled statistics. Possibly he saw Trump amplify the claim on Twitter or television, or some other stop along the story’s cascading route across the right-wing mediaverse. Reuters did a good job debunking the phony math .. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-13-million-votes-idUSKBN2970JQ , which got the total number of voters wrong.
Steven Carrillo Sentenced to 41 Years in Prison for Murder and Attempted Murder for Role in Drive-By Shooting at Federal Courthouse in Oakland [...]... boogaloo members tend to have at least one overarching belief: They claim they are preparing for, and are even seeking to bring about, another civil war, or “boogaloo.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171844635
Cassidy Hutchinson’s Testimony Changed Our Minds About Indicting Donald Trump [...]But Tuesday’s explosive testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, changed our minds. In particular, Hutchinson testified to hearing Trump order that the magnetometers (metal detectors) used to keep armed people away from the president be removed: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags [magnetometers] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here; let the people in and take the mags away.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169322953
Hope to see that quote used in the case against Trump. ---
Richard Patterson, a retired firefighter, in the Bronx. Like tens of millions of other Trump supporters, Patterson firmly believes that the 2020 election was stolen. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
I was interested in something else: the worldview that guided Patterson through the statistics. It appeared to him (incorrectly) that not enough votes had been cast to account for the official results. Patterson assumed that only fraud could explain the discrepancy, that all of Trump’s votes were valid, and that the invalid votes must therefore belong to Biden.
“Why don’t you say Joe Biden got 81 million and there’s only 60 million left for Trump?” I asked.
Patterson was astonished.
“It’s not disputed, the 74 million vote count that was credited to President Trump’s reelection effort,” he replied, baffled at my ignorance. “It’s not in dispute … Have you heard that President Trump engaged in cheating and fraudulent practices and crooked machines?”
Biden was the one accused of rigging the vote. Everybody said so. And for reasons unspoken, Patterson wanted to be carried away by that story.
Robert A. Pape, a well-credentialed connoisseur of political violence, watched the mob attack the Capitol on a television at home on January 6. A name came unbidden to his mind: Slobodan Miloševic.
Back in June 1989, Pape had been a postdoctoral fellow in political science when the late president of Serbia delivered a notorious speech. Miloševic compared Muslims in the former Yugoslavia to Ottomans who had enslaved the Serbs six centuries before. He fomented years of genocidal war that destroyed the hope for a multiethnic democracy, casting Serbs as defenders against a Muslim onslaught on “European culture, religion, and European society in general.”
By the time Trump unleashed the angry crowd on Congress, Pape, who is 61, had become a leading scholar on the intersection of warfare and politics. He saw an essential similarity between Miloševic and Trump—one that suggested disturbing hypotheses about Trump’s most fervent supporters. Pape, who directs the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, called a staff meeting two days after the Capitol attack. “I talked to my research team and told them we were going to reorient everything we were doing,” he told me.
Miloševic, Pape said, inspired bloodshed by appealing to fears that Serbs were losing their dominant place to upstart minorities. “What he is arguing” in the 1989 speech “is that Muslims in Kosovo and generally throughout the former Yugoslavia are essentially waging genocide on the Serbs,” Pape said. “And really, he doesn’t use the word replaced. But this is what the modern term would be.”
Pape was alluding to a theory called the “Great Replacement.”
--- [[An Old Hate Cracks Open on the New Right Nov. 19, 2023 [...]“White genocide” is a term of art on the racist right and is linked to the so-called great replacement theory, the notion that leftists (including Jewish progressives) are trying to import people of color to replace America’s white majority. This is the theory that motivated the shooter in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. It is false, evil and very dangerous. [...]Buchanan is no minor figure. As Nicole Hemmer wrote in 2022, his presidential campaigns in the 1990s forecast the present moment in Republican politics. The party “traded Reaganism for Buchananism,” she contended. The evidence that she was correct grows by the day. P - Everything about the New Right mind-set told us that this devolution was inevitable. It scorns character, decency and civility in the public square, often turning cruelty into a virtue. This was a necessary precondition for the entire enterprise. Decent people can be misguided, certainly, but they are not consumed with hate. Decent people do not indulge bigots. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173269977
Stewart Rhodes wrote message to Trump after Jan. 6 calling on him to 'save the Republic' and arrest members of Congress [...]“Fight’s coming. I’m not f---ing living on my knees, no f---ing way. … We’re just the tip of the iceberg. There’s millions of others that feel the same way about this s--- that we do," Rhodes said in a recording. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171859974
The term itself has its origins in Europe. But the theory is the latest incarnation of a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants, and the rise of nonwhite citizens, to take power from white Christian people of European stock. When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”
Trump borrowed periodically from the rhetorical canon of replacement. His remarks on January 6 were more disciplined than usual for a president who typically spoke in tangents and unfinished thoughts. Pape shared with me an analysis he had made of the text .. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-second-impeachment-trial/card/fJwBp6fJTrqHGmS8Q0jk .. that Trump read from his prompter.
“Our country has been under siege for a long time, far longer than this four-year period,” Trump told the crowd. “You’re the real people. You’re the people that built this nation.” He famously added, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Just like Miloševic, Trump had skillfully deployed three classic themes of mobilization to violence, Pape wrote: “The survival of a way of life is at stake. The fate of the nation is being determined now. Only genuine brave patriots can save the country.”
Watching how the Great Replacement message was resonating with Trump supporters, Pape and his colleagues suspected that the bloodshed on January 6 might augur something more than an aberrant moment in American politics. The prevailing framework for analyzing extremist violence in the U.S., they thought, might not be adequate to explain what was happening.
When the Biden administration published a new homeland-security strategy .. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-second-impeachment-trial/card/fJwBp6fJTrqHGmS8Q0jk .. in June, it described the assault on the Capitol as a product of “domestic violent extremists,” and invoked an intelligence assessment that said attacks by such extremists come primarily from lone wolves or small cells. Pape and his colleagues doubted that this captured what had happened on January 6. They set about seeking systematic answers to two basic questions: Who were the insurgents, in demographic terms? And what political beliefs animated them and their sympathizers?
Pape’s three-bedroom house, half an hour’s drive south of Chicago, became the pandemic headquarters of a virtual group of seven research professionals, supported by two dozen University of Chicago undergraduates. The CPOST researchers gathered court documents, public records, and news reports to compile a group profile of the insurgents.
“The thing that got our attention first was the age,” Pape said. He had been studying violent political extremists in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East for decades. Consistently, around the world, they tended to be in their 20s and early 30s. Among the January 6 insurgents, the median age was 41.8. That was wildly atypical.
Then there were economic anomalies. Over the previous decade, one in four violent extremists arrested by the FBI had been unemployed. But only 7 percent of the January 6 insurgents were jobless, and more than half of the group had a white-collar job or owned their own business. There were doctors, architects, a Google field-operations specialist, the CEO of a marketing firm, a State Department official. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” Pape told me.
Yet these insurgents were not, by and large, affiliated with known extremist groups. Several dozen did have connections with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or the Three Percenters militia, but a larger number—six out of every seven who were charged with crimes—had no ties like that at all.
Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and co-editor of A Field Guide to White Supremacy .. https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780520382527 , says it is no surprise that extremist groups were in the minority. “January 6 wasn’t designed as a mass-casualty attack, but rather as a recruitment action” aimed at mobilizing the general population, she told me. “For radicalized Trump supporters … I think it was a protest event that became something bigger.”
Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.
Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline.For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.
Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.
The CPOST team decided to run a national opinion survey in March, based on themes it had gleaned from the social-media posts of insurgents and the statements they’d made to the FBI under questioning. The researchers first looked to identify people who said they “don’t trust the election results” and were prepared to join a protest “even if I thought the protest might turn violent.” The survey found that 4 percent of Americans agreed with both statements, a relatively small fraction that nonetheless corresponds to 10 million American adults.
In June, the researchers sharpened the questions. This brought another surprise. In the new poll, they looked for people who not only distrusted the election results but agreed with the stark assertion that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” And instead of asking whether survey subjects would join a protest that “might” turn violent, they looked for people who affirmed that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”
“Stop the Steal” protesters in Detroit on November 6, 2020. Republican county authorities later attempted to rescind their votes to certify Detroit’s election results. (Philip Montgomery)
Pollsters ordinarily expect survey respondents to give less support to more transgressive language. “The more you asked pointed questions about violence, the more you should be getting ‘social-desirability bias,’ where people are just more reluctant,” Pape told me.
Here, the opposite happened: the more extreme the sentiments, the greater the number of respondents who endorsed them. In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists.” (An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)
“This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” Pape told me. He drew an analogy to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, at the dawn of the Troubles.
Why such a large increase? Pape believed that Trump supporters simply preferred the harsher language, but “we cannot rule out that attitudes hardened” between the first and second surveys. Either interpretation is troubling. The latter, Pape said, “would be even more concerning since over time we would normally think passions would cool.”
In the CPOST polls, only one other statement won overwhelming support among the 21 million committed insurrectionists. Almost two-thirds of them agreed that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.” Slicing the data another way: Respondents who believed in the Great Replacement theory, regardless of their views on anything else, were nearly four times as likely as those who did not to support the violent removal of the president.
The committed insurrectionists, Pape judged, were genuinely dangerous. There were not many militia members among them, but more than one in four said the country needed groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. One-third of them owned guns, and 15 percent had served in the military. All had easy access to the organizing power of the internet.
What Pape was seeing in these results did not fit the government model of lone wolves and small groups of extremists. “This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” he told me. “This is collective political violence.”
Pape drew an analogy to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, at the dawn of the Troubles. “In 1968, 13 percent of Catholics in Northern Ireland said that the use of force for Irish nationalism was justified,” he said. “The Provisional IRA was created shortly thereafter with only a few hundred members.” Decades of bloody violence followed. And 13 percent support was more than enough, in those early years, to sustain it.
“It’s the community’s support that is creating a mantle of legitimacy—a mandate, if you would, that justifies the violence” of a smaller, more committed group, Pape said. “I’m very concerned it could happen again, because what we’re seeing in our surveys … is 21 million people in the United States who are essentially a mass of kindling or a mass of dry wood that, if married to a spark, could in fact ignite.”
The story of Richard Patterson, once you delve into it, is consonant with Pape’s research. Trump appealed to him as an “in-your-face, brash ‘America First’ guy who has the interest of ‘We the People.’?” But there was more. Decades of personal and political grudges infuse Patterson’s understanding of what counts as “America” and who counts as “we.”
Where Patterson lives, in the Bronx, there were 20,413 fewer non-Hispanic white people in the 2020 census than in 2010. The borough had reconfigured from 11 percent white to 9 percent.
Patterson came from Northern Irish stock and grew up in coastal Northern California. He was a “lifetime C student” who found ambition at age 14 when he began to hang around at a local fire station. As soon as he finished high school he took the test to join the Oakland fire department, earning, he said, outstanding scores.
“But in those days,” he recalled, “Oakland was just beginning to diversify and hire females. So no job for the big white kid.” The position went to “this little woman … who I know failed the test.”
Patterson tried again in San Francisco, but found the department operating under a consent decree. Women and people of color, long excluded, had to be accepted in the incoming cohort. “So, again, the big white kid is told, ‘Fuck you, we got a whole fire department of guys that look just like you. We want the department to look different because diversity is all about an optic.’?” The department could hire “the Black applicant instead of myself.”
Patterson bought a one-way ticket to New York, earned a bachelor’s degree in fire science, and won an offer to join New York’s Bravest. But desegregation had come to New York, too, and Patterson found himself seething.
In 1982, a plaintiff named Brenda Berkman .. https://www.atourofherown.com/toho/brendaberkman .. had won a lawsuit that opened the door to women in the FDNY. A few years later, the department scheduled training sessions “to assist male firefighters in coming to terms with the assimilation of females into their ranks.” Patterson’s session did not go well. He was suspended without pay for 10 days .. http://archive.citylaw.org/oath/02_Cases/89-217c.pdf .. after a judge found that he had called the trainer a scumbag and a Communist and chased him out of the room, yelling, “Why don’t you fuck Brenda Berkman and I hope you both die of AIDS.” The judge found that the trainer had “reasonably feared for his safety.” Patterson continues to maintain his innocence.
Later, as a lieutenant, Patterson came across a line on a routine form that asked for his gender and ethnicity. He resented that. “There was no box for ‘Fuck off,’ so I wrote in ‘Fuck off,’?” he said. “So they jammed me up for that”—this time a 30-day suspension without pay.
Even while Patterson rose through the ranks, he kept on finding examples of how the world was stacked against people like him. “I look at the 2020 election as sort of an example on steroids of affirmative action. The straight white guy won, but it was stolen from him and given to somebody else.”
Wait. Wasn’t this a contest between two straight white guys?
Not really, Patterson said, pointing to Vice President Kamala Harris: “Everybody touts the gal behind the president, who is currently, I think, illegitimately in our White House. It is, quote, a woman of color, like this is some—like this is supposed to mean something.” And do not forget, he added, that Biden said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”
What to do about all this injustice? Patterson did not want to say, but he alluded to an answer: “Constitutionally, the head of the executive branch can’t tell an American citizen what the fuck to do. Constitutionally, all the power rests with the people. That’s you and me, bro. And Mao is right that all the power emanates from the barrel of a gun.”
Did he own a gun himself? “My Second Amendment rights, like my medical history, are my own business,” he replied.
Many of Patterson’s fellow travelers at the “Justice for January 6” protest were more direct about their intentions. One of them was a middle-aged man who gave his name as Phil. The former Coast Guard rescue diver from Kentucky had joined the crowd at the Capitol on January 6 but said he has not heard from law enforcement. Civil war is coming, he told me, and “I would fight for my country.”
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