Without Arizona, Trump would have to win three of the five undecided swing states (Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) to stay in power. The Blue Wall states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) had supported Democratic candidates in every presidential election but one since 1992. Nevada had gone Democratic for the last three presidential cycles.
Sensing that they might have been dealt a death blow, the Trump campaign had conniption fits when Arizona was called by their network of choice. A call was put in to Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch later “testified that he could hear Trump shouting in the background as the then-president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told him the situation was ‘terrible.’”
Murdoch reportedly said, “‘Well, the numbers are the numbers.’”
Two-and-a-half hours later, Biden won Nebraska’s 2nd District, a right-leaning swing district that had gone Democratic just one other time.
Arizona and the 2nd District gave Biden 238 electoral college votes. To get to the magic number of 270, he just needed to win Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Michigan (16), and Nevada (6), Georgia (16), or Pennsylvania (20).
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With so many routes to 270, Biden’s likelihood of winning shot up to 80% at electionbettingodds.com by the morning of November 4.
That afternoon-into-evening, pre-2016 patterns reappeared when Wisconsin and Michigan were called for Biden, the latter by over 150,000 votes.
Trump’s campaign team made noise about challenging Biden’s 20,000-ballot Wisconsin victory, but as former Wisconsin governor and Trump ally Scott Walker pointed out at the time, a recount was highly unlikely to change the result.
With Wisconsin and Michigan in Biden’s column, Democrats needed just six more electoral college votes to retake the White House, exactly the number in Nevada. Biden’s chances of losing Nevada were low, and Pennsylvania appeared to be a really good bet, based on Trump’s narrowing margin and the proportion of votes which remained to be counted in heavily-Democratic precincts.
Joe Biden was officially declared the winner of Pennsylvania and president-elect of the United States at 11:26 a.m. EST on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020.
Biden went on to win Nevada and Georgia, giving him 306 electoral college votes — well above the necessary threshold of 270 — to go with a commanding seven million-ballot popular vote win.
If anything, it was surprising that the race was close, given that Biden came into election day with an 8.4% national lead, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Among the possible causes for the polling errors were aggressive GOP voter suppression in some swing states, the reluctance of some Trump supporters to talk to pollsters, and Trump’s momentum at the end of the race, which was helped along by an endless tour of crowded, virus-spreading rallies at the height of Covid-19 (something the Biden campaign didn’t risk).
Sifting through the election results, it was apparent that record levels of culture war polarization enflamed by Donald Trump turned right-leaning, non-degreed whites out in droves. Iowa and Ohio (which were forecast to be close) were Republican blowouts, and Biden’s Wisconsin win was narrower than pollsters thought it would be.
At the same time, racial divisiveness backfired among many young voters, suburbanites, and most people of color, driving Georgia and Arizona to Joe Biden.
Given voter turnout demographics, the results of the 2020 presidential election were relatively orderly and predictable. Biden’s victory was more conclusive than Trump’s 2016 victory and either of George W. Bush’s two wins, and his popular-vote margin exceeded that of Obama’s 2012 re-election.
In a functional democracy, the Pennsylvania call would have triggered a graceful concession and set the presidential transition in motion.
But America had the distinction of being governed by Donald J. Trump, a deeply-wounded narcissist with no regard for the rule of law.
***
Trump’s disinformation campaign began long before the election with constant repetition of the false claim that mail balloting was inherently corrupt and that the 2020 election would be “rigged” against him.
Mail balloting was targeted because Trump knew Democrats would use it in higher proportions than Republicans, since they were more concerned about getting Covid-19 at crowded polling stations.
This false narrative was also a way to pre-emptively delegitimize a potential loss at the polls. Trump repeated this lie so often that many Republican voters took it at face value, prepping his followers to believe the blizzard of lies to come.
There were hints that Trump might refuse to concede before November 2020.
In July, well behind Joe Biden in the polls, Trump was rebuffed by his own party when he used false pretenses to propose that the presidential election be delayed (which hadn’t even happened during the Civil War).
In August, it was reported that Facebook executives were gaming out post-election scenarios in which Trump refused to admit defeat.
In September, Trump publicly suggested that the election could be decided by unelected judges on the federal Supreme Court — rather than the voters — and ordered the extreme right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in the first presidential debate.
As the election drew near, Trump failed to close the polling gap with Biden due to mass job losses and his poor handling of the worsening Covid-19 pandemic.
Outside of the right-wing echo chamber, it was common knowledge that Republican-leaning, in-person votes would be counted first in a lot of competitive states, creating a “red mirage” (the false impression that Trump was going to win), after which there would be a “blue shift” as more Democratic votes — mail votes in particular — were counted.
Three days before the 2020 election, Tom Fitton of the right-wing group Judicial Watch emailed Trump an election night speech to exploit his base’s programmed ignorance of the red mirage/blue shift:
“The voters have spoken. The ballots counted by the Election Day deadline show the American people have bestowed on me the great honor of reelection to President of the United States. Federal law establishes November 3 as Election Day — the deadline by which voters in states across the country must choose a president. Some partisans will try to overturn today’s lawful election results by shamelessly counting ballots that arrive after Election Day for days and weeks. This is lawless, invites massive voter fraud, undermines our democracy, and could dishonestly cancel the votes of tens of millions of Americans who ensured their votes would arrive to be counted on Election Day. I am prepared to go to court to make sure this election is not stolen and am directing the Justice Department to defend federal election law accordingly. We had an election today — and I won. Some believe Election Day deadlines don’t matter and would attack democracy through fraud and judicial activism. Counting ballots that arrive after Election Day is unfair and shows contempt for the will of the people. I will defend, to the full extent of the law, free and fair elections and our constitutional republic from any electoral coup. Thank you and God bless America.”
That same day, Trump strategist Steve Bannon told “a group of associates” about this plan to stage a big announcement not long after polls closed, while the red mirage was at its peak:
“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner ... He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Jonathan Swan of Axios broke a story about this strategy on November 1, two days before the election. According to Swan, “President Trump has told confidants he'll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he's ‘ahead,’ according to three sources familiar with his private comments. That's even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.”
Swan would later report that this plan had been in the works since “the second week of October.”
Trump ally Roger Stone was filmed saying much the same in conversation with other Trump supporters:
“I really do suspect it’ll still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine tenths of the law. ‘No, we won. F--- you, Sorry. Over. We won. You’re wrong. F--- you.’”
Right on script, Trump held a press conference at 2:20 a.m. EST on the morning after Election Day. He read off his election day numbers in swing states and claimed that his shrinking leads resulted from duplicity:
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
After the applause died down, he added, “So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation.”
***
The unveiling of the Big Lie was a trumpet call to right-wing extremists.
The theory was tailor-made for the big portion of Trump’s base motivated by white grievance narratives. Only too happy to exploit this sense of victimhood in the name of raw power were Trump’s allies in state legislatures, Congress, the Republican Attorneys General Association, right-wing television media and social media.
While gullible and crestfallen Republican voters were being conned with a bogus cover story in public, Trump allies worked behind the scenes to keep Biden out of the White House.
The day after the election, Nov. 4, 2020, the Trump campaign contracted with Simpatico Software Systems in hopes of finding evidence of voter fraud which could be used in courtrooms and in the court of public opinion.
The GOP also sent “protesters” to a vote-counting center in Detroit — which is 78% Black — to whip up Republican indignation and stir public doubt.
While America’s eyes were distracted by shiny objects, the shadow campaign to steal the White House kicked into high gear.
Central to this effort was Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, who would be “directing traffic” among conspirators (including 34 members of Congress.) That day, Meadows received a text from Energy Secretary Rick Perry suggesting an “aggressive strategy” to keep Trump in office.
The plan was to convince at least three Republican-controlled legislatures (in swing states Trump had lost) to shatter long-standing legal precedent by overriding the will of their voters and declaring electors for Trump.
Shorting Biden of three of these six swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona — would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans had a majority of delegations in more states than Democrats, thanks to gerrymandering.
As reported at CNN.com, Mark Meadows on November 5 received a text from Donald Trump Jr., which discussed “filing lawsuits and advocating recounts to prevent certain swing states from certifying their results, as well as having a handful of Republican state houses put forward slates of fake ‘Trump electors’.
Donald Trump Jr. (Photo by Chandan Khanna for AFP)
“If all that failed, according to the Trump, Jr. text, GOP lawmakers in Congress could simply vote to reinstall Trump as President on January 6.”
The will of the American people was irrelevant, according to Trump Jr.:
“It’s very simple ... We have multiple paths. We control them all.”
Trump ally Stone was in sync with Trump Jr.
Dictating to an aide on camera, Stone said, “Although state officials in all 50 states must ultimately certify the results of the voting in their state…the final decision as to who the state legislatures authorize be sent to the Electoral College is a decision made solely by the legislature….Any legislative body may decide on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud, to send electors to the Electoral College who accurately reflect the president’s legitimate victory in their state, which was illegally denied him through fraud.”
Meanwhile, Trump sent a series of tweets encouraging supporters to disrupt vote counts in the minority-majority swing state cities of Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.
Meadows received another fake electors proposal on November 6 from Andy Biggs, a House representative from Arizona, to which he texted back, “I love it!”
Also on the 6th, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona (who would later be tied to the January 6 “Save America” rally in Washington, D.C.) sent out widely-shared tweets implying that his states’ tally was fraudulent because of vote-flipping on Dominion voting machines.
Rep. Paul Gosar. Photo: Gage Skidmore.
This would be Trump supporters’ main voting fraud talking point up through January 6.
While Republicans publicly implied that fraud had taken place in America’s black and brown Democratic cities, Trump spokesman Jason Miller texted Mark Meadows and a host of other top officials that the narrative was demonstrably false in Pennsylvania, which was about to be declared for Biden:
“One other key data point: In 2016, POTUS received 15.5% of the vote in Philadelphia County. Today he is currently at 18.3%. So he increased from his performance in 2016. In 2016, Philadelphia County made up 11.3% of the total vote in the state. As it currently stands, Philadelphia County only makes up 10.2% of the statewide vote tally. So POTUS performed better in a smaller share. Sen. (Rick) Santorum was just making this point on CNN - cuts hard against the urban vote stealing narrative.” (Philadelphia’s Republican city commissioner Al Schmidt would say much the same thing to CNN a few days later.)
On the day Biden was declared president-elect, November 7, Trump met with conservative activist David Bossie and top campaign staffers Bill Stepien, Jason Miller and Justin Clark in the White House.
Deputy campaign manager Clark said Trump’s only hope of reversing his loss lay in squeaking out victories in Georgia and Arizona, which were still counting votes, and getting thousands of Wisconsin votes disqualified over technicalities. Clark said this had a “5 to 10 percent chance” of succeeding.
With the chances of legal victory so slim, Trump started looking for outside-the-box thinking.
That day, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) hinted at what was to come when he texted Mark Meadows with a suggestion that Trump meet with Republican lawyer Sidney Powell, who “[had] a strategy to keep things alive and put several states back in play.”
Key to Powell’s strategy would be a sustained PR attack on Dominion Voting Systems, which were used in multiple swing states. By claiming that Dominion had rigged those states for Biden, Trump’s people would imply that state legislatures should be allowed to override “fraudulent” official vote counts.
Fox executives considered the theories so outlandish that they cancelled that night’s Jeanine Pirro show on Fox News (in which she planned to target Dominion).
But the caution would be short-lived.
The following day, November 8, Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch texted Fox CEO Suzanne Scott that his network was “Getting creamed by CNN!” Apparently, many of his partisan viewers didn’t have the heart to watch infotainment about a one-term president who had lost his re-election battle.
That day, Fox attempted to juice their ratings by having Sidney Powell on the Maria Bartiromo show, the first of several appearances Powell, Giuliani and other conspiracy-peddling Trump allies would make on the network.
On November 9, Trump’s exceptionally loyal (up to then) attorney general, William Barr, sent a directive to federal prosecutors to ramp up voter fraud charges before state elections were certified, a change in Justice Department policy which prompted the resignation of Richard Pilger, who headed the department’s election crimes division.
In addition, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper for not being “sufficiently loyal.” Esper had fallen out of favor for refusing to deploy troops to American cities during the summer protests, supporting diversity, barring Confederate flags on military bases and keeping an eye on Russia. He was replaced with the underqualified Christopher Miller, who brought three Trump loyalists with him, including Kash Patel, a lawyer with no military experience.
Kash Patel
Kash Patel. (Shutterstock.com)
This was an oddly consequential move for an outgoing administration to make. Suspicions were further aroused when two administration officials told reporters from the New York Timesthat Trump was considering firing FBI chief Christopher Wray and CIA head Gina Haspel. Haspel reportedly told General Mark Milley (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.”
Haspel was on to something. On November 10, two Texas businessmen linked to Energy Secretary Rick Perry met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, where they discussed the plan to have Republican-controlled swing state legislatures ignore the will of their voters and unilaterally pick the electors for their states.
According to I Alone Can Fix It by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, when hearing of the fake elector plans circulating, Mark Milley responded that, “They may try, but they’re not going to f------ succeed” because “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”
Speaking at a military installation in Virginia on November 11 (Veteran’s Day), Milley told the assembled crowd, “We do not take an oath to a king or queen, or tyrant or dictator, we do not take an oath to an individual … We take an oath to the Constitution, and every soldier that is represented in this museum — every sailor, airman, marine, coastguard — each of us protects and defends that document, regardless of personal price.”
Over at Fox, panic continued about ratings. Senior VP Raj Shah, who on other occasions had referred to Sidney Powell’s election claims as “MIND NUMBINGLY NUTS” and “totally insane,” said the network was “under heavy fire from our customer base.” Shah suggested they get feedback from viewers to see “if they have been somehow betrayed by the network” and concluded that “bold, clear and decisive action is needed for us to begin to regain the trust that we’re losing with our core audience.”
Attempts to regain the core audience’s trust were undermined by Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich, who fact-checked a Trump tweet referencing Dominion lies told on Lou Dobbs’ and Sean Hannity’s shows.
A November 12 group text among Fox stars Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson revealed that Hannity had complained about Heinrich’s fact-check to CEO Suzanne Scott, who had kicked the complaint up to Jay Wallace and Irena Briganti, Fox’s head of PR.
Tucker Carlson. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In the text, Carlson wrote, “Please get her fired. Seriously … what the f---? I'm actually shocked ... It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
In a separate text that day, Hannity told Fox producers “we need to own the dominion story.”
While anchors worried about ratings, Tommy Firth — one of the producers of Laura Ingraham’s show — bemoaned the network’s embrace of the Dominion narrative.
In a text to Ron Mitchell (a Fox executive involved in the show), Firth said, “This dominion s--- is going to give me a f------ aneurysm — as many times as I’ve told Laura it’s bs, she sees s--- posters and Trump tweeting about it …”
Mitchell replied that “This is the Bill Gates/microchip angle to voter fraud.”
Experts agreed.
A statement from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (an arm of the Department of Homeland Security created under Trump which closely monitors elections) said that “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” The statement went on to say that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) actively sought to delete votes on November 13.
While Georgia was engaged in a recount that Donald Trump was almost certain to lose, Graham called Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. According to Raffensperger, Graham asked pointed questions about signature matching for votes cast.
Raffensberger told CNN “Well, it’s just an implication that look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.”
Later, when appearing before the bipartisan House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (hereafter referred to as the "January 6 House Select Committee"), Raffensperger said, “My concern was, would you be disenfranchising voters when the ballots have already been accepted by the county process.”
Georgia cancels 101,000 people in voter registration removal
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger makes remarks during a news conference at the Georgia State Capitol building in Atlanta on Dec. 2, 2020. Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS
The ballots had been accepted because they were valid.
As Fox Information Specialist Leonard Balducci emailed producers that day, “There’s no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, or of major problems with Dominion’s systems. Election officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.”
Nonetheless, eager to appease the outgoing president, White House deputy director of communications Zach Parkinson asked Trump staff to look into conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines.
Staff gave Parkinson a memo on November 14 which showed that many of the claims were false, including the claim — made that night by Sidney Powell on Jeannine Pirro’s Fox show — that “It is one huge, huge criminal conspiracy that should be investigated by military intelligence.”
Fox maintained a focus on ratings. On November 16, Rupert Murdoch told CEO Suzanne Scott via email that they needed to keep an eye on Newsmax, who was getting a surge of far-right viewers due to its willingness to hype phantasmal voter fraud. (Fox president Jay Fox had called Newsmax’ coverage “an alternative universe”).
Murdoch’s email said, “These people should be watched, if skeptically … We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake here.”
A November 17 text (which Fox would later try to have redacted from a defamation trial) revealed Tucker Carlson’s true feelings about the Dominion story.
Of Sidney Powell, he said, “She’s a psychopath. She’s getting Trump all spun up and has zero evidence.” He added, “Same with Rudy [Giuliani]. [National Security Council] Cyber did a through [sic] analysis. There’s nothing to see.”
Though Carlson considered Powell a psychopath, Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward recommended her services to Clint Hickman, forwarding Powell’s number and asking that he “call her.” Hickman, a Republican who had supported Trump, was chairman of the Maricopa County Board, which was still counting votes.
Around the same time, Trump called two Republicans on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers (covering Detroit, which is 78% Black) and pressured them not to certify the results because “We've got to fight for our country … We can't let these people take our country away from us.” On the call with Trump was GOP national chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. McDaniel told the canvassers, “If you can go home tonight, do not sign [the certification] … We will get you attorneys.”
The two election officials’ efforts to placate Trump came too late to be legally binding and only delayed the obvious, given Biden’s 154,000-vote margin of victory in Michigan.
Though Joe Biden had been officially declared president-elect and was presumably going to take office, the Trump administration made another significant personnel move on November 18.
Republican Chris Krebs, the Trump-appointed head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, was fired by tweet because he had publicly fact-checked election fraud claims and gotten off-message with the statement that 2020 was “the most secure election in American history.”
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal echoed Krebs’ findings, saying there was no substance to the Dominion claims, as did Fox host Laura Ingraham — in private. In a text to Tucker Carlson, Ingraham wrote that “Sidney [Powell] is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”
But The Big Lie was all Trump had left, so the deception continued.
That day, Republicans Jim Jordan and James Comer made a Twitter announcement that they would “investigate” the 2020 election to keep the Republican base on boil while GOP lawyers got to work.
Enter Kenneth Chesebro.
Chesebro, a former Democrat and future felon, sent Jim Troupis (a Republican lawyer in Wisconsin) a memo detailing a plan to get Wisconsin’s legitimate pro-Biden electors replaced with fake (pro-Trump) electors.
This would be “among the earliest known efforts to put on paper proposals for preparing alternate electors” and one of several such memos Chesebro would send to GOP operatives in swing states Trump had lost.
According to reporters for the New York Times, “The memos show how just over two weeks after Election Day, Mr. Trump’s campaign was seeking to buy itself more time to undo the results. At the heart of the strategy was the idea that their real deadline was not Dec. 14, when official electors would be chosen to reflect the outcome in each state, but Jan. 6, when Congress would meet to certify the results.”
On November 19, Trump’s outside attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell and Jenna Ellis had a surreal hair dye-dripping press conference in which they served up several false claims to try to pressure the Justice Department to open “a full-scale criminal investigation” of the election.
These lawyers were part of “Team Kraken,” second-string attorneys who stepped up to push claims Trump’s official White House lawyers wouldn’t touch. One GOP operative told a reporter for New York magazine, “Any time Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis are leading your legal battle, you are not in a good place … I wouldn’t let those lawyers represent me for a parking ticket.”
Two members of Congress in regular text contact with Mark Meadows — Lee of Utah and representative Chip Roy of Texas — were critical of the press conference. Roy told Meadows, “Hey brother — we need substance or people are going to break.” Lee said, “The potential defamation liability for the president is significant here …Unless Powell can back up everything she said, which I kind of doubt she can.” Meadows wrote Lee back that he agreed and was “very concerned” about the press conference.
Privately, Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch referred to the press conference as "Really crazy stuff. And damaging."
But Fox CEO Suzanne Scott threw a fit when Fox News White House correspondent Kristin Fisher fact-checked claims made at the presser. In an email to Fox president Jay Wallace, Scott said that “I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories … We need to manage this […] The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us.”
On November 20, Trump continued the campaign to flip states he’d lost when he invited Republican representatives from Michigan’s state legislature to the White House.
At one point, Trump “raised his false claim, among others, of an illegitimate vote dump in Detroit. In response, the Michigan Senate Majority Leader [Mike Shirkey] told [Trump] that he had lost Michigan not because of fraud, but because the Defendant had underperformed with certain voter populations in the state.”
After the meeting, the Michigan representatives made a joint statement to the press in which they said, “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan's electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”
Trump was at it again on November 21, tweeting “Why is Joe Biden so quickly forming a Cabinet when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes, enough to ‘flip’ at least four States, which in turn is more than enough to win the Election? Hopefully the Courts and/or Legislatures will have....the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself. THE WORLD IS WATCHING!!!”
While publicly showing sympathy for Trump’s outrage, Tucker Carlson texted Trump Kraken attorney Jenna Ellis that “circumstantial [evidence] won’t work with this story. If there’s any Dominion documents or copies of the software show them to me. And as you know there isn’t.”
On November 22, Trump and Rudy Giuliani called Rusty Bowers, the conservative Republican speaker of the Arizona house who had endorsed Trump. Bowers was asked to have show trials positing that fraudulent votes among the deceased and undocumented immigrants may have been the difference in Biden’s Arizona win. He refused.
Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump. Photo via AFP.
On November 23, Trump appointee Emily Murphy of the General Services Administration finally released money for the Biden Administration’s transition. This unprecedented delay jeopardized national security (since Biden was not yet receiving intelligence briefings) and the containment of Covid-19, which was at peak numbers in part because of Trump’s failure to aggressively address the pandemic.
The president had more pressing matters than working with public health officials to counteract a virus that was killing 1,500 of his constituents per day.
On November 25, Trump conferenced in from the White House to a hearing/publicity stunt in Gettysburg, where Giuliani issued — and Trump backed — false claims about voter fraud in that state.
Trump later invited Pennsylvania legislators to the White House. Joining Trump was Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who would circulate a PowerPoint presentation chockfull of outlandish conspiracy theories to Republican members of Congress and Mark Meadows.
False claims continued on November 29, when Trump spewed election lies and whined about the FBI and the Justice Department in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, who would later be sued for promulgating disinformation about the presidential election.
On November 30, Arizona was certified for Biden. While publicly signing the paperwork, Republican governor/Trump supporter Doug Ducey silenced a phone call from the White House.
Ducey later called Trump back and was subjected to conspiracies about dead and undocumented voters. According to reporters for the Washington Post, following this call, “Trump directed Pence, a former governor who had known Ducey for years, to frequently check in with the governor for any progress on uncovering claims of voting improprieties, according to two people with knowledge of the effort.
“In each of the calls, Ducey reiterated that officials in the state had searched for alleged widespread illegal activity and followed up on every lead but had not discovered anything that would have changed the outcome of the election results, according to Ducey’s recounting to the donor.”
Lack of evidence to the contrary, Fox continued to nurse their viewership’s grievances. That day, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell, whom he had previously referred to as an “f’ing lunatic.”
Up-’til-then Trump toady William Barr felt the same way about Powell’s claims. Shockingly, he said so publicly.
On December 1, Barr told the AP, “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election.”
Bill Barr (Brendan Smialowski:AFP)
According to reporter Jonathan Karl, Barr felt that Trump’s fraud allegations were “all b-------,” but he’d agreed to the investigations to “appease his boss.”
In a fit of rage at the breaking AP story, Trump allegedly heaved a porcelain plate of food through the air, leaving servants (and Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson) to wipe up the ketchup which dripped down a wall of the White House dining room.
Another Republican who refused to parrot Trump’s Big Lie was Gabriel Sterling. Sterling, who worked for Georgia’s conservative Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, held a press conference to denounce the violent threats Georgia elections officials were receiving as a result of Trump’s endless disinformation about voting machines in the state:
“Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia … Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”
On December 2, Fox CEO Suzanne Scott emailed Meade Cooper (executive VP of primetime programming) that fact checks of Trump’s false claims “[Have] to Stop Now. The Audience is Furious.”
Trump continued to pour gasoline on the fire. In a speech that day, he said that “in one Michigan county, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
The claim was false, and even if true wouldn’t have mattered, since Trump had lost Michigan by 154,000 votes.
Trump sent Rudy Giuliani on the road December 3. In Georgia, Giuliani made “fantastical claims” for seven hours before the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Subcommittee. Giuliani also took the carnival to Michigan, where he refused to be sworn in.
That same day, Trump’s communication director Alyssa Farah Griffin went to see Mark Meadows. According to Griffin, “I'd gone into his office to say that I was going to resign. I didn't agree with what we were saying about the election result of the election being stolen. And he said, ‘Wait, what if I can tell you that we're not leaving office?’”
Key to Trump staying in office was Republican lawyer John Eastman.
John Eastman
John Eastman during Trump's "Save America" rally on January 6, 2021. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP)
Eastman, working in concert with Kenneth Chesebro, was one of the central architects of Trump’s extralegal efforts to overcome democracy.
On December 4, he emailed Russ Diamond, a far-right member of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives. Eastman proposed that Pennsylvania Republicans challenge and disqualify enough absentee ballots in the state to “provide some cover” for the GOP-controlled legislature to declare the election invalid and appoint fake electors for Trump.
Pennsylvania Republicans didn’t go this far, but they did sign a public letter asking Congress to block their state’s electoral votes on January 6 — “just hours after” PA Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff and House Speaker Bryan Cutler “had unequivocally stated — in a memo cosigned by Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) and President Pro Tempore Jake Corman (R., Centre) — that state legislators had no authority to ignore certified election results and appoint Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Electoral College themselves, despite repeated calls from the president and some within their own party to do so.”
The fake elector strategy continued on December 5, as Trump tried to muscle Republican governor Brian Kemp into throwing out Georgia’s electors. Kemp, a self-proclaimed “politically-incorrect conservative” (who had endorsed Trump) refused.
Convincing Republicans in at least three swing states to reject Biden’s legitimate electors was still Trump’s only chance at holding onto the White House, barring a Supreme Court decision to toss out Biden’s wins in several swing states.
To this end, on December 6, Kenneth Chesebro sent a memo suggesting a “bold, controversial strategy” to have fake electors vote on December 14 — the day the electoral college would meet — in the six key swing states. This move would give Mike Pence an “alternative” (fake/pro-Trump) set of electors to choose from on January 6, the day electoral college votes would officially be counted in Congress.
Jim Troupis (see November 18) explained the logistics in a December 7 communication to Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn:
“The second slate [of fake electors] just shows up at noon on Monday [December 14] and votes and then transmits the results … It is up to Pence on Jan 6 to open them. Our strategy, which we believe is replicable in all 6 contested states, is for the electors to meet and vote so that an interim decision by a Court to certify Trump the winner can be executed on by the Court ordering the Governor to issue whatever is required to name the electors. The key nationally would be for all six states to do it so the election remains in doubt until January.”
One of those six states was Pennsylvania. Trump’s maneuvering to overcome an 81,000-vote loss in that state was set back on December 8, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit claiming a measure to expand mail voting (passed by Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature) had been unconstitutional.
In an email that day, Trump adviser Jason Miller explained why they kept losing in court: “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our case. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy s--- beamed down from the mothership.”
Legal setbacks notwithstanding, the plot continued. Arizona lawyer Jack Wilenchik emailed Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn about the means by which fraudulent electors could be used on January 6: “We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to [Mike] Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted.”
Wilenchik further wrote that the plan should be “[kept] under wraps until Congress counts the vote Jan. 6th (so we can try to ‘surprise’ the Dems and media with it).” (Wilenchik, who admitted in the same email that “the votes aren’t legal under federal law,” later corrected himself, typing in the same thread that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” to which he attached a smiley face emoji.)
These efforts were coordinated through outside lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the head of “Team Kraken”; Trump’s official White House lawyers saw the moves as illegal.
By the end of December 9, the District of Columbia and all 50 states had certified their vote totals, and Joe Biden’s win.
Republican representative (and future House speaker) Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent a solicitation email to fellow Republicans asking them to join a legal brief filed by the attorney general of Texas. The aim of the lawsuit was to invalidate votes in states won by Biden.
While Republicans tried to invalidate legitimate electors, Kenneth Chesebro emailed Jim Troupis about how to “operationalize” the casting of fake electors in the six swing states, based on state-by-state election regulations.
Two days later, the outgoing Trump Administration considered another major 11th-hour personnel change.
Gina Haspel. (Screenshot)
On December 11, Trump planned to fire CIA director Gina Haspel’s deputy director and replace him with the woefully-underqualified Kash Patel (see November 9) in order to install a loyalist near the top of the CIA. As with the post-election firing of Defense Secretary Mike Esper and (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency leader) Christopher Krebs, this would be a consequential move for a lame duck administration to make.
In response, Haspel told Trump she would resign if her deputy was let go.
Afterward, Trump met with Mike Pence and other senior aides, who recommended keeping Haspel happy. Trump left Haspel’s deputy in place.
***
With the December 14 deadline approaching, fake elector and Nevada State Republican National Committee member Jim DeGraffenreid emailed Kenneth Chesebro with the subject “URGENT-Trump-Pence campaign asked me to contact you to coordinate Dec. 14 voting by Nevada electors.”
Planning to use an alternate slate of electors in Nevada had begun as early as four days before the 2020 election, when DeGraffenreid told other state party officials in a text that Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske “might do a lot of things, but sending a slate of Republican electors without them being clearly the winners of the popular vote is not one of them.”
The fake elector scheme took a hit that day when the U.S. Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit by the state of Texas challenging results in four other states, saying Texas did not have “a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
Outraged by the decision, Trump supporters held protests across the country on December 12.
The D.C. rally, which featured future January 6 paramilitary operators the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the 1st Amendment Praetorian, turned violent when counter-protesters showed up, leading to four stabbings and 33 arrests.
One protester told a reporter for the New York Times, “They don’t want to deal with this…It’s going to have to go nuclear, using the Insurrection Act and bringing out the military.” This comment referenced the possibility that Donald Trump would use the chaos of street violence (even street violence provoked by his own supporters) as a false pretext to declare a national emergency, deploy troops domestically, and extend his stay in the White House.
Concerns about the legality of the fake elector strategy lingered. Christina Bobb (an anchor for the far-right One America News) that day sent an email about Douglas Mastriano, Trump’s point person for Pennsylvania’s fake electors:
“Mastriano needs a call from [Rudy Giuliani]. This needs to be done. Talk to him about legalities of what they are doing,….Electors want to be reassured that the process is * legal * essential for greater strategy.” [emphasis mine]
On the call, Giuliani claimed that Pennsylvania Republicans, who would be meeting in two days to pledge their fraudulent electoral votes for Trump, were meeting on a contingency basis only. Their fake elector certificates included verbiage to the effect that the certificates would be valid only if lawsuits went Trump’s way; the certificates were not intended as absolute substitutes for the legitimate PA electors.
The conditional language to limit legal liability was used in only one of the six main swing states; all other fake certificates were posed as genuine. Kenneth Chesebro suggested to Trump campaign staffer Michael Roman that the conditional language be used for all of the certificates, but Roman texted back “F--- these guys.”
On December 13, Kenneth Chesebro emailed Giuliani about the campaign’s “President of the Senate” strategy.
The idea was to have Republican allies in Congress hold hearings questioning the Electoral Count Act precedent, under which the vice president’s role was purely ceremonial. The hope was that the hearings could convince Mike Pence to “firmly take the position that he, and he alone, is charged with the constitutional responsibility not just to open the votes, but to count them — including making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.”
Alternately, the hearings could jog Pence’s doubt about his involvement in counting the electoral college votes. If Pence recused himself, Trump ally Charles Grassley, the octogenarian Republican senator from Iowa, would preside over the process, giving him the option to reject legitimate electoral certificates and accept fraudulent ones.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (Photo by Andrew Harnick for AFP)
One leg of this strategy involved flipping Georgia, where Trump operative Robert Sinners instructed state Republicans to appoint alternate electors in “complete secrecy” so that the media wouldn’t know what they were doing:
“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process … Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”
Emails from Christina Bobb to Trump lawyers and swing state operatives revealed that state Republicans also had false electors ready in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
On the final day before certification, the Trump team added fake electors in New Mexico, which Biden had won by double digits. To give this tactic a patina of legitimacy, they filed a lawsuit challenging Biden’s win six minutes before the filing deadline was up.
In a group chat that day, Trump campaign officials — who wouldn’t back the plan in a signed statement — referred to it as “a crazy play” that would be “certifying illegal votes.”
On December 14, the Electoral College met and certified Joe Biden’s victory.
According to Biden, seven Republican senators called to congratulate him. Trump allies Mitch McConnell, Israeli Prime Miniter Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian Vladimir Putin publicly congratulated the president-elect, too.
In Michigan, Republican state Senate leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield announced that they would not get in the way of their voters.
Shirkey said, “[W]e have not received evidence of fraud on a scale that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan.”
Chatfield said, “We’ve diligently examined these reports of fraud to the best of our ability. I fought hard for President Trump. Nobody wanted him to win more than me. I think he’s done an incredible job … But I love our republic, too. I can’t fathom risking our norms, traditions and institutions to pass a resolution retroactively changing the electors for Trump, simply because some think there may have been enough widespread fraud to give him the win. That’s unprecedented for good reason.
“And that’s why there is not enough support in the House to cast a new slate of electors. I fear we’d lose our country forever. This truly would bring mutually assured destruction for every future election in regards to the Electoral College. And I can’t stand for that. I won’t.”
While Shirkey, Chatfield and the civilized world recognized Biden’s victory, 84 state-level Republican officials in seven states (including Michigan) signed fake elector certificates in hopes that Vice President Mike Pence would reject the legitimate electors on January 6.
With the fake electors secured, Trump’s focus returned to pursuing thus-far elusive evidence of voter fraud.
As reported by CNN, “Trump's assistant sent [deputy attorney general Jeff] Rosen and [Justice Department official] Richard Donoghue a document claiming to show voter fraud in Antrim County, Michigan. An aide to Donoghue forwarded the document to the US Attorneys for the Eastern and Western Districts in Michigan. Less than an hour later, Trump tweeted that [Attorney General William] Barr would be leaving the Justice Department just before Christmas, elevating both Rosen and Donoghue to the top spots at [the Justice Department].”***
The day after the electoral college certified Joe Biden’s win, December 15, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke publicly on the Senate floor, congratulating Biden and referring to him as the “president-elect.”
This was significant because McConnell — who had voted with Trump 91% of the time and shepherded his judges through the Senate — was publicly signaling that he thought Trump’s election challenges no longer had merit.
Rebecca Green of William and Mary Law School told USA Today, “The legal avenues for pursuing a change in the outcome of the 2020 election have closed …It's not for lack of trying. There's just a lack of evidence of irregularities in this election.”
McConnell had moved on. But Donald Trump hadn’t.
After McConnell’s speech, Trump tweeted, “This Fake Election can no longer stand” and invited Jeff Rosen to the White House. At the Oval Office, Trump pressured his next attorney general to put Justice Department backing behind election lawsuits, 61 of 62 of which would be rejected by Democratic and Republican judges—including Trump appointees — often with uncharacteristically scathing judicial rulings.
On December 16, Senator Mike Lee told Mark Meadows, via text, that weeks of failures to turn up concrete evidence of fraud was weakening party resolve. Referring to senators objecting to the electoral vote certification, Lee said, “I think we’re now passed [sic] the point where we can expect anyone will do it without some direction and a strong evidentiary argument.”
Trump’s former chief of staff Reince Priebus agreed. In a meeting with Trump at the Oval Office that day, Priebus planned to let Trump down easy, to make it clear that he’d fought the good fight but it was time to prepare to leave the White House. In attendance were Priebus, Jim Troupis, Kenneth Chesebro, Mark Meadows and lawyers who had worked on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court case Trump had recently lost.
To Priebus’ dismay, Chesebro went off script, mentioning that Trump could still win with fake electors. The key date was no longer December 14, when the electoral college had elected Joe Biden, but January 6, when Congress would certify the electoral college certificates.
Mark Meadows (Photo by Olivier Douliery for AFP)
Bulling ahead, someone in the Trump orbit drew up a draft executive order to have the military seize voting machines in Georgia. According to Betsy Woodruff Swan of Politico, “The order empowers the defense secretary to ‘seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under’ a U.S. law that relates to preservation of election records.” The order also “would have given the defense secretary 60 days to write an assessment of the 2020 election. That suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021.”
Variations on this plan included Rudy Giuliani asking the Department of Homeland Security to seize machines, Trump asking his attorney general, and Trump asking Republican legislators in Pennsylvania and Michigan to summon local law enforcement. Memos were drawn up for both the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon to seize voting machines. The requests were not acted on.
A document covering similar ground (dated December 17) was referenced in a privilege log provided to the January 6 House Select Committee by the attorney for Bernard Kerik (see January 4). The withheld document was titled, “DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS.”
On December 18, a memo emerged which advocated for the Department of Defense (DOD) to appoint a team who would review data (collected by the National Security Agency) in search of foreign interference in the 2020 election. The memo concluded that the Trump Administration could take the law into their own hands, depending on the findings:
“If evidence of foreign interference is found, the team would generate a classified DOD legal finding to support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies (which should still be pursued in parallel).”
The content of the December 16-18 documents happened to dovetail with a contentious six-hour meeting at the White House that evening.
The meeting began when Trump received “Team Kraken” (Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne), outsiders unaffiliated with Trump’s official White House legal team who were happy to entertain—and act on—the president’s conspiracy theories.
Upon finding out who was with the president, Trump’s lawyer Pat Cipollone “rushed” to the White House, purportedly out of fear that Trump might receive advice which could put him at risk of breaking the law.
According to witness testimony before the January 6 House Select Committee, a screaming match ensued between those who supported the rule of law and those who did not.
In the latter category were Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former national security adviser, convicted felon Michael Flynn, who had recently said that Trump should declare martial law, seize voting machines, and force a new election.
Donald Trump and Michael Flynn (cnn.com)
On the side of historical precedent and the rule of law were White House staff secretary Derek Lyons and White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann.
Among the ideas Cipollone and Herschmann heard were Flynn’s claim that foreign countries had rigged America’s election with Nest-brand thermostats and suggestions that Trump declare a national emergency (which could be used as a justification for martial law), sign an executive order to have the National Guard seize voting machines and/or oversee re-votes in the six states Trump was contesting, and name Sidney Powell special counsel to investigate voting machines.
When Cipollone and Herschmann asked for evidence to support the fraud claims, nothing substantial was offered. Unhappy with this line of questioning, Trump griped about the White House lawyers not offering “solutions.” Giuliani accused them of being “pussies.”
In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Politico reporter Nicholas Wu said of the overlap between the potential “smoking gun” December 17 document (referenced in a privilege log provided by Bernie Kerik’s lawyer) and the controversial topics discussed on December 18, “It’s unclear exactly if these two things are linked, but … that’s quite a coincidence.”
With lawyerly options to overthrow the election narrowing, Trump escalated his tactics.
At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, just a few hours after the White House showdown, Trump tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Trump’s announcement set far-right militants into motion.
According to New York Times reporters Alan Feuer, Michael S. Schmidt and Luke Broadwater, extremists “began to set up encrypted communications channels, acquire protective gear and, in one case, prepare heavily armed ‘quick reaction forces’ to be staged outside Washington.
“They also began to whip up their members with a drumbeat of bellicose language, with their private messaging channels increasingly characterized by what one called an ‘apocalyptic tone.’ Directly after Mr. Trump’s tweet was posted, the Capitol Police began to see a spike in right-wing threats against members of Congress.”
A Twitter employee who monitored traffic on the site told the January 6 House Select Committee:
“It felt as if a mob was being organized and they were gathering together their weaponry and their logic and their reasoning behind why they were prepared to fight prior to December 19 … Very clear that individuals were ready willing and able to take up arms. After this Tweet on December 19, again it became clear not only were these individuals ready and willing, but the leader of their cause was asking them to join him.”
CNN reported that “a Justice Department court filing revealed that the Oath Keepers had extensive plans for violence in the days surrounding January 6. Prosecutors say that at least three chapters of the gang held military training camps focusing on ‘military-style basic’ training, ‘unconventional warfare,’ and ‘hasty ambushes.’ At least one of the Oath Keepers brought explosives, including grenades, to the quick reaction force (QRF) site outside Washington, D.C.”
The forces of insurrection — the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, Bikers for Trump, Vets for Trump, members of QAnon, and others — were banding together. The head of homeland security for the District of Columbia, Donell Harvin, told the January 6 House Select Committee:
“We got derogatory information from [open-source intelligence] suggesting that some very, very violent individuals were organizing to come to D.C. But not only were they organizing to come to D.C. — these non-aligned groups were aligning ... When you have armed militia collaborating with white supremacy groups collaborating with conspiracy theory groups online all towards a common goal, you start seeing what we call in terrorism a blended ideology and that’s a very, very bad sign.”
Terrorist groups shared a might-makes-right psychology with Donald Trump. According to Trump campaign consultant Jenna Ellis, while at a White House Christmas party that day, Trump aide Dan Scavino told her “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.”
When Ellis said, “Well, it doesn’t quite work that way,” Scavino replied “We don’t care.”
On December 21, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows met with congressional allies at the White House. According to Meadows’ aide Cassidy Hutchinson — one of the central witnesses before the January 6 House Select Committee — this group included Republicans Paul Gosar, Jody Hice, Scott Perry, Andy Harris, Brian Babin, Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks and Jim Jordan. The House members had come in response to an email invite from Mo Brooks (who would speak at the January 6 rally) with a subject line of “White House meeting December 21 regarding January 6.”
The topic, once again, was how to get illegitimate electors accepted or get legitimate electors tossed, which would allow House Republicans — rather than America’s voters — to pick the president.
To sustain the cover story for these illegal actions, Trump continued to bray about fraud. That day’s PR offensive included the tweet that he’d “won in a landslide” and “[needed] backing from the Justice Department.”
Loyal Vice President Mike Pence disagreed, but only in private. As reported by ABC News, in an Oval Office meeting with just the two of them that day, Trump asked Pence what they could do now that the campaign’s lawsuits were uniformly being rejected. According to Pence, he said that if the remaining legal challenges didn’t go in their favor, Trump “should simply accept the results,’ ‘you should take a bow,’ travel the country to thank supporters, ‘and then run again if you want.’”
Trump’s most fervent supporters weren’t ready to say farewell. A Capitol police intelligence report received that day revealed a pro-Trump group’s plans for January 6, as revealed on Reddit. Among the lines cited in the report were:
- “Get into Capitol Building, stand outside congress. Be in the room next to them. They won’t have time [to] run if they play dumb.”
- “Deploy Capitol Police to restrict movement. Anyone going armed needs to be mentally prepared to draw down on LEOs. Let them shoot first, but make sure they know what happens if they do.”
- “If they don’t show up, we enter the Capitol as the Third Continental Congress and certify the Trump Electors.”
- “Surround every building with a tunnel entrance/exit. They better dig a tunnel all the way to China if they want to escape.”
- “If a million patriots who [show] up bristling with AR’s, just how brave do you think they’ll be when it comes to enforcing their unconstitutional laws? Don’t cuck out. This is do or die. Bring your guns.”
The mass brainwashing of aggrieved Republicans continued on December 22, when Trump tweeted a video with the claim that “the rigging of the 2020 election was only the final step in the Democrats’ and the media’s yearslong effort to overthrow the will of the American people.”
In hopes of overthrowing the will of the American people, House Republican Scott Perry, one of the main collaborators, “arranged for [Jeffrey] Clark to meet Trump behind the back of senior Department of Justice officials — and contrary to long-standing department regulations — in the Oval Office.”
While Jeffrey Clark was on the way to becoming one of the main players in Donald Trump’s attempted coup, Mark Meadows flew to Georgia, where he hoped to crash signature-matching done by elections officials.
Per established protocols, Meadows was not allowed to observe the process. As a consolation prize, he wangled the phone number of Frances Watson, an elections investigator at the site.
Donald Trump called Watson the following day, December 23. He flattered her, trotted out grievances about voter fraud, and said, “When the right answer comes out, you'll be praised … People will say ‘great,’ because that's what it's about, the ability to check and to make it right, because everyone knows it's wrong.”
Also that day, John Eastman emailed a strategy memo to Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, cc’ing Chesebro. He said that they should forego the congressional hearings suggested by Chesebro on December 13 because hearings might “invite counter views that we do not believe should constrain Pence (or Grassley).”
That day, a Grassley aide James Rice emailed Pence staff, “Is there any reason to believe that your boss will not preside over the electoral college vote count … leaving my boss in the spot as [president pro tem]?”
Paul Teller, an aide to Pence, replied “it’s not a zero percent chance of that happening.”
The big news that Wednesday was the resignation of Attorney General William Barr.
With Barr out of the way, Trump called new attorney general Jeffrey Rosen on December 24 to see if he could convince him to issue fake findings of vote fraud.
During the conversation, Trump asked Rosen if he knew Jeffrey Clark. Clark was a largely unknown lawyer for the Environment and Natural Resources Division (and head of the United States Department of Justice Civil Division) with no legal purview over White House affairs.
Rosen later told the January 6 House Select Committee, “When I hung up I was quizzical as to how does the president even knew Mr. Clark … I was not aware that they had ever met or that the president had been involved in any of the issues in the civil division.”
While Trump worked on Rosen, outside attorney John Eastman commented (in an email to Kenneth Chesebro and “Trump campaign officials”) that there was a “heated fight” on the Supreme Court about Trump’s lawsuit to overturn the election.
Chesebro responded that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
The email hinted that Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni — a board member of the far-right Council for National Policy —may have given insider information to Eastman about the status of Trump’s case before the Supreme Court. Ginni Thomas sent multiple texts to Eastman, who had previously clerked for her husband. Swaying Justice Thomas was seen as the linchpin to blocking electors in Georgia, as Thomas oversaw the courts in that district.
When Vice President Pence called Trump on December 25 to wish him a merry Christmas, Trump shifted the discussion to his desire to have Pence reject valid electors — and 231 years of democracy — on January 6.
Pence replied that, “You know I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome.”
Trump also spoke on the phone with William J. Olson, a Republican lawyer who would go on to represent Trump ally/vote fraud conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow.
Olson advocated declaring martial law and replacing Jeffrey Rosen with an attorney general willing to revive the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit to nullify electoral college votes in otherstates (which had been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on December 11).
To this end, Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania texted Mark Meadows to see if he had gotten in touch with Jeffrey Clark.
On December 26, Trump tweeted more lies about the election (calling it “the biggest SCAM in our nation’s history”), attacked the FBI, the Justice Department, and the courts for following the rule of law, and referenced his January 6 “Save America” rally.
The rally and its aftermath were top of mind for Trump’s militant supporters. That day, the Secret Service received intelligence that the Proud Boys “think they will have a large enough group to march into DC armed and will outnumber the police so they can’t be stopped … Their plan is to literally kill people.”
That same day, Trump ally Scott Perry texted Mark Meadows, suggesting that the administration elevate Jeffrey Clark to attorney general if they hoped to stay in power. This was one of at least 62 texts with Meadows after the election (in addition to dozens of contacts with Trump’s outside lawyers).
Clark was mentioned because Trump’s attorney general of less than a week, Jeffrey Rosen, insisted on following the rule of law. On December 27, Trump pressured Rosen to review “election fraud” in Pennsylvania and Arizona that former attorney general William Barr had found to be inconsequential.
Rosen reportedly told Trump that the Department of Justice “can’t, and won’t, just flip a switch and change the election.”
In response, Trump told Rosen to “just say that the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen.”
Trump’s allies were in on a “Strategic Communications Plan,” a document detailing an aggressive disinformation campaign filled with talking points about fraud in swing states, messaging channels, and target audiences — even though Trump was told that the fraud talking points were false by “at least 11 aides and close confidants.”
Trump also tried to get Rosen to sign on to a lawsuit (which had already been rejected by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel) asking the Supreme Court to toss out electoral college votes in six states Biden had won and order a “special election.”
Trump wasn’t the only one badgering Rosen. Jeffrey Clark made five cracks at the new attorney general, trying to get him to challenge election results in key states lost by Trump.
Rosen’s second-in-command also felt the heat.
Coaxed by Trump, Pennsylvania representative Scott Perry called Richard Donoghue, the deputy attorney general, to try to get the Justice Department to review debunked voter fraud claims in Pennsylvania. Perry also tried to convince Donoghue to grant more power to Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to scour election results for any data which could be exploited for GOP messaging.
On December 28, Clark peddled conspiracy theories around the Justice Department and sent a message to Jeff Rosen and Richard Donoghue requesting their sign-off on a letter (conveniently typed on official Department of Justice letterhead) which asked Georgia’s Republican legislature to call a special session to investigate election “irregularities” and choose a slate of illegitimate electors for Trump.
In the words of historian Heather Cox Richardson, “Clearly, there was no time to actually conduct another investigation into the election before January 6; the letter was designed simply to justify counting out Biden’s ballots or, failing that, to create popular fury that might delay the January 6 count.”
Donoghue responded via email that signing such a letter was “not even in the realm of possibility.”
Without the backing of Justice Department leadership, Clark worked with aide Ken Klukowski (who had started at the DOJ on December 15) to gather witnesses to provide “testimony” of voter fraud. The January 6 House Select Committee revealed that voter suppression expert Ken Blackwell emailed Mike Pence’s office to ask him to meet with Klukowski and John Eastman. According to Jeremy Stahl of Slate, “this email was the first piece of public evidence linking Eastman directly to the efforts to use the [Department of Justice] to change the outcome of the election.”
Another effort to change the outcome of the election came from William Olson, the lawyer Trump had spoken to on Christmas. Warning that “time is about to run out” for their plans, Olson sent a letter to Trump saying that the Office of White House Counsel and Attorney General Rosen were failing the president.
Olson suggested the White House replace Rosen within 24 hours and re-file a case along the lines of Texas v. Pennsylvania, which would nullify the electoral college votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If the Supreme Court didn’t rule in Trump’s favor, the president could act unilaterally, since “that body was never intended to be the final authority on matters of this sort.”
Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post disagreed. The day prior, the right-wing newspaper ran an editorial telling Trump “Give it up, Mr. President — for your sake and the nation’s.” The editorial opened with “Mr. President, it’s time to end this dark charade,” mentioned that the electoral college vote count on January 6 was merely pro forma, and called Trump to account for “cheering for an undemocratic coup.”
Even as Fox continued to placate viewers by feeding doubt about 2020, Post owner Murdoch congratulated the editor-in-chief (Col Allen) on a “great” editorial and added that it might convince Trump to throw in the towel: “If he doesn’t tweet it’ll mean he’s read it and stopped to think.”
If Trump did pause to collect his thoughts, it was brief. In a December 29 conversation with Mike Pence, Trump claimed the Department of Justice had found “major infractions” of election law.
This wasn’t true.
Mark Meadows did his part for the Big Lie that day when he urged Attorney General Rosen and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue to consider the right-wing myth that the number of votes cast in Pennsylvania was larger than the number of registered voters in the state and to take a look at “Italygate” (a theory that Biden supporters in Italy had used satellites to change a decisive number of votes in swing states from Trump to Biden).
Rosen also heard from Trump’s personal assistant Molly Michael. Michael emailed Rosen, Donoghue, and Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall a legal complaint claiming that the six swing states Trump had lost by the narrowest margins (Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona) had violated the Electors Clause of the Constitution, along with a request to file a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The pressure on Rosen continued on December 30. Outside attorney Kurt Olsen called Jeff Rosen and said that Trump expected him to file Michael’s Supreme Court lawsuit by noon that day.
Rosen didn’t budge.
Meanwhile, Trump strategist Steve Bannon called the president and suggested he lure Mike Pence back to Washington (from a skiing vacation) in order to pressure him into refusing to accept Biden electors during the January 6 certification. The goal was to convince Pence to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”
As Trump worked on Pence, presidential aspirant Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, became the first senator to announce his intent to object to electors for Joe Biden on January 6.
While Hawley made a savvy play for future Republican primary voters, Trump’s minions continued to pressure the Justice Department (DOJ). In two of five known emails Mark Meadows sent asking the DOJ to review tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories, Trump’s chief of staff that day sent Justice officials disinformation about alleged voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia. (Meadows also forwarded debunked conspiracy theories to “the FBI, Pentagon, National Security Council, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”)
Late that night, Republican Scott Perry of Pennsylvania texted Jeffrey Clark. Among the key lines in the exchange were:
Perry: “[Trump] seems very happy with your response. I read it just as you dictated.”
Clark: “I’m praying. This makes me quite nervous. And wonder if I’m worthy or ready.”
Perry: “You are the man. I have confirmed it. God does what he does for a reason.”
If so, God decreed that Ken Chesebro email John Eastman and other coup legal staff on December 31. Chesebro asked Eastman’s opinion about getting Clarence Thomas (who oversees the circuit courts in Georgia) to issue a stay of the Georgia results, thereby gaining legal (and PR) legitimacy for the idea that other swing state results were potentially fraudulent, and thus ripe to be overturned by state legislatures.
Among those states was Arizona. The White House left a message that day for Clint Hickman, the Republican head of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, asking for a call back. This was one of numerous Republican attempts to get Hickman to issue arbitrary rulings in Trump’s favor in order to flip a state Trump had lost by more than 10,000 votes.
Mindful of election laws and legal liability, Hickman didn’t return this call (or the one the White House placed three days later).
The main event on the final day of 2020 involved the Department of Justice. Frustrated that he couldn’t get the new attorney general to break the law, Trump invited Rosen and Donoghue to the White House.
At the meeting, Trump reportedly said that he was considering replacing Rosen with Jeffrey Clark because Rosen hadn’t been aggressive enough in investigating voter fraud. Trump wanted voting machines seized by the Justice Department, but was told by Rosen that the DOJ had “no legal authority” to do so. If any such authority existed, it was held by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
After the meeting, “Trump then called Ken Cuccinelli, the DHS acting deputy secretary, and falsely told him that the acting attorney general had just said that it was Cuccinelli’s job to seize voting machines ‘and you’re not doing your job.’”
As Trump tried to cling to power, Chip Roy, a supporter of Trump’s election challenges a few weeks earlier, texted Mark Meadows that it was time to give up:
“The president should call everyone off. It’s the only path. If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by congress every 4 years…we have destroyed the electoral college.”
Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio had no such concern about constitutional niceties.
In an end-of-year text to fellow right-wing activists, he wrote, “Let’s bring this new year in with one word in mind: revolt.”
***
On Jan. 1, 2021, Jeff Rosen received a 13-minute YouTube video about “Italygate” from Mark Meadows (which Meadows had gotten the day prior from Scott Perry). Meadows also asked Rosen to send Jeffrey Clark to Georgia, presumably so that Clark could find something, anything which could be construed as “voter fraud.”
Pressure on Pence continued. Trump loyalist and director of presidential personnel Johnny McEntee texted a memo to Greg Jacob (Pence’s chief of staff), headlined with the words “Jefferson Used His Position as VP to Win,” a fanciful interpretation of the 1800 presidential election.
McEntee’s memo took a hit when three Republican judges (including a Trump-appointed judge) in Texas rejected Rep. Louie Gohmert’s lawsuit claiming Mike Pence could unilaterally pick and choose which electors to accept on January 6.
Following the ruling, Trump called Pence. The president was upset that Pence had sided with the Department of Justice, who had opposed the lawsuit of Gohmert, a Texas Republican. Pence told Trump that he was bound by the Constitution to follow the will of the voters.
Trump reportedly told him, “You’re too honest.”
Kenneth Chesebro was more to Trump’s liking. In a message to John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn, Chesebro listed 14 talking points for congressional Republicans
to ignore the spirit of the Electoral Count Act on January 6.
Key among these ideas was the suggestion that Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, break 133 years of precedent and oppose the rule that each member of Congress who objected to certifying a state’s electoral votes had no more than five minutes to state their case.
Breaking the precedent would allow endless objections, buying Trump more time for a miracle court decision, for Pence to give in and pick the electors himself, or for Pence to step down and let Sen. Chuck Grassley take over and do Trump’s bidding.
Jan. 2, 2021, was a busy day in the annals of failed election theft.
Eleven Republican senators, including former and likely future presidential candidate Ted Cruz, made a joint statement in which they referred to ill-defined fraud and advocated “an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states.”
The senators’ public pretense was that the audit was necessary in order to assuage millions of Americans who had doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Polls cited showed that one-third of independents, two-thirds of Republicans, and 39% of all voters held the baseless belief that the election had been “rigged.”
Sen. Ted Cruz. (Right Cheer/Flickr)
In plain English, the senators were contending that since four out of every 10 Americans were gullible enough to believe ludicrous and self-serving Republican lies about an election they clearly lost, a 10-day “audit” giving Republicans more time to peddle ludicrous and self-serving lies about an election they clearly lost was necessary to “restore faith in American Democracy.”
While his congressional sycophants performed Kabuki theater, Trump made another attempt to flip Georgia. After 18 requests from Mark Meadows, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger consented to a call with Trump.
During an infamous 67-minute conference call, Raffensperger debunked Trump’s conspiracy theories and pointed out that multiple recounts hadn’t come close to reversing Trump’s Georgia loss. Unbowed by the facts, Trump tried to bully the Republican Secretary of State into “[finding] 11,780 votes” for him—just enough to give Trump Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes.
The Justice Department wouldn’t bend to Trump’s will either. Jeff Rosen wrote Jeffrey Clark back and said (as his second-in-command Richard Donoghue had already done on December 28) that he was “not prepared to sign” a letter asking Georgia’s Republican legislature to “investigate” trumped-up allegations of fraud.
Evidence or no evidence, plans continued for January 6.
Trump called 300 Republican state legislators, telling them they could overrule the will of the voters in their states and put forward fake electors.
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio took part in a conference call with Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies to discuss “strategies for delaying the January 6th joint session” and ways to coax Trump supporters to D.C. through social media.
According to Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson, “the terms ‘Proud Boys’ and ‘Oath Keepers’” came up “when [Rudy] Giuliani was around.” After a January 2 meeting between Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and other White House officials, Giuliani told Hutchinson, “We’re going to the Capitol! It’s going to be great!”
Cassidy Hutchinson (Screen cap / House Select Committee video)
Hutchinson asked Meadows for clarification.
Meadows told her “There’s a lot going on … things might get real, real bad on January 6.”
Department of Homeland Security employees felt the same way, “[noting] that people were sharing a map of the Capitol building online. Those employees messaged each other, saying they ‘feel like people are actually going to try and hurt politicians. Jan 6th is gonna be crazy.’”
One politician who may have been targeted was current senator and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who received a call that day from independent Sen. Angus King of Maine. King warned Romney about violence at the Capitol — and potentially violence directed toward him.
Romney texted Mitch McConnell: “In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator — the President — is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”
Romney said that McConnell did not reply.
On Jan. 3, 2021, Mark Meadows received a text which said, “I heard Jeff Clark is [going toreplace Jeff Rosen] on Monday [January 4]. That's amazing. It will make a lot of patriots happy, and I'm personally so proud that you are at the tip of the spear, and I could call you a friend.”
As reported at Talking Points Memo, “Clark planned to send letters to state legislatures saying that the DOJ had found evidence suggesting that the election results were in doubt, while advising state lawmakers to consider tossing out Biden’s electors and replacing them with the fake electors slates that the Trump campaign had created.”
That afternoon, deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin, who believed Trump should follow the rule of law, told Clark that the fraud allegations were baseless and that a fake elector coup would cause “riots in every major city in the United States.”
Reportedly, Clark replied, “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Call logs revealed by the January 6 House Select Committee showed that Clark called the White House four times that day. By the fourth call — at 4:19 p.m. — Clark was officially referred to in the logs as the “acting Attorney General.”
In testimony before the committee, Jeff Rosen said that Clark “told me that the timeline had moved up and that the president had offered him the job and that he was accepting it.” Rosen “wasn’t going to accept being fired by [a] subordinate,” so he arranged a meeting at the White House.
Rosen told congressional investigators that Trump began the meeting by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything to overturn the election,” and implied that he could keep his job if he agreed to send Jeffrey Clark’s letter (written by Ken Klukowski, see December 28) to Georgia legislators.
For two-and-a-half hours, Clark tried to convince Trump that he should become attorney general while Richard Donoghue, Pat Cipollone, Jeff Rosen and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steven Engel argued against the elevation of Clark.
Engel told the January 6 House Select Committee:
“I said, ‘Mr. President you’re talking about putting a man in that seat who has never tried a criminal case, who has never conducted a criminal investigation, and he’s telling you that he’s going to take charge of the department’s 115,000 employees, including the entire FBI, and turn the place on a dime and conduct nationwide criminal investigations that will produce results in a matter of days. It’s impossible, it’s absurd, it is not going to happen, and it is going to fail.’
“He has never been in front of a trial jury, a grand jury, he’s never even been to [FBI Director] Chris Wray’s office. I said at one point, ‘If you walked into Chris Wray’s office, one, would you know how to get there, and two, if you got there, would he even know who you are? And do you really think that the FBI is going to suddenly start following your orders?’ It’s not going to happen. He’s not competent.”
Trump backed off of his threat to replace Rosen after “Donoghue and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steve Engel made clear that there would be mass resignations at [the Department of Justice] if Trump moved forward with replacing Rosen with Clark.”
Though he left Rosen in place, Trump fired the U.S. attorney who covered the Atlanta area, BJay Pak. Trump said Pak hadn’t done enough to uncover fraud in his district. Pak’s replacement, Trump loyalist Bobby Christine, later concluded that “There’s just nothing to” Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Fulton County, where Biden amassed a huge share of his Georgia votes.
While manipulating the electoral college certification was Trump’s main focus, many political insiders had concerns that the president might fall back on the Insurrection Act — especially if pro-Trump protesters clashed with left-leaning forces on January 6. Earlier that day, all 10 living defense secretaries penned an op-ed in the Washington Post aimed at top decision makers on the Trump administration’s national security team.
The signatories said that acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and those working under him “are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.”
Trump and his collaborators weren’t yet accepting that there would be a “new team” on January 20.
On Jan. 4, 2021, Republican senators were given a Team Kraken pitch to seize voting machines and delay the official January 6 certification.
Kevin Cramer, a conservative Republican senator who had voted with Trump 94% of the time, said that the presenters wheeled out “some of the most fantastical claims” about interference from Venezuela or China as a justification for this extraordinary step. Attending via Zoom was Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who would try to pass off fake electors for Wisconsin and Michigan on January 6.
Another Wisconsin Republican who was in on the plot was Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state party. With the fake Wisconsin electoral certificates hung up in the mail, Trump’s lawyers were becoming desperate. In a text to a colleague, Jefferson said, “Freaking Trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate President … They’re going to call one of us to tell us just what the hell is going on.”
While Republicans played chicken with democracy, security concerns grew. As revealed duringthe January 6 House Select Committee hearings, here summarized by historian Heather Cox Richardson:
“On January 4, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien called [Mark] Meadows to warn of violence on January 6. The Secret Service and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato, who was in charge of security protocol to protect anyone covered by presidential protection, also warned of coming violence.”
Despite these warnings, Gen. Mark Milley was turned down when he suggested to Trump cabinet members that permits for a January 6 protest at the Capitol building be revoked due to the possibility of violence.
Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee / photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos M. Vazquez II.
Still hoping to avoid a messy, violent coup in favor of a bloodless, lawyerly coup, Trump’s outside attorney John Eastman presented Mike Pence with a six-step plan to toss the electoral college votes from seven states Trump lost.
If Pence carried out the plan, neither candidate would have 270 electoral college votes, which would throw the election to the House of Representatives, allowing Republicans to override the will of American voters.
Eastman’s plan was in clear violation of the Electoral Count Act passed in the late 19th century; Pence’s counsel Mark Jacob would later say that Eastman’s reading of 133 years of election precedent was “essentially entirely made up.”
A second option was to have Pence adjourn the counting, allowing time for states Trump had lost to submit fake electors. Eastman had advocated for this scheme on a Steve Bannon podcast two days earlier and sketched out its details in a two-page memo to Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee, both of whom would later conclude that Trump’s fraud claims were baseless.
Speaking to Jim Acosta on CNN, famous Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said of the Eastman memo, “I think what we are seeing in these memos particularly are blueprints for a coup …The actual blueprints in document form in which the president of the United States, through his chief of staff, is sending to Mike Pence’s, the vice president’s, staff a blueprint to overturn an election, a blueprint for a conspiracy led by a president of the United States to result in an authoritarian coup in which the election is stolen.”
The nerve center of the authoritarian coup attempt was a war room at the Willard Hotel, one block from the White House.
In the weeks before January 6, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a team of conspirators who attempted to overturn Biden’s election victory. Interlocking strategies included injecting disinformation about voter fraud into the right-wing media bloodstream, encouraging swing state Trump supporters to pressure their state legislators to block certification of Biden’s win, pushing state legislators directly to block certification of Biden’s victory, and trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the power to deny state-certified electoral college votes.
At various times Giuliani was joined by Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Bernard Kerik, Phil Waldron, and Roger Stone, who had Oath Keepers as bodyguards along with connections to both Stewart Rhodes (leader of the Oath Keepers) and Enrique Tarrio (leader of the Proud Boys).
Details of the Willard team’s agenda were revealed in a document given to the January 6 House Select Committee by Bernard Kerik’s attorney. (See December 17.)
While Trump and his war room cabal brainstormed ways to manipulate Mike Pence, other Republicans gave the vice president sound interpretations of constitutional law. Conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig told Pence’s staff that there was no legal basis for him to reject electoral college votes, advice also passed on by conservatives John Yoo and former Vice President Dan Quayle.
The day before the official counting of electoral ballots, Jan. 5, 2021, Mike Pence’s attorney, Greg Jacob, released a three-page memo which pointed out that the rejection of Joe Biden’s electors would be a flagrant violation of the 1887 Electoral College Act.
Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, called a meeting with Timothy Giebels, the head of the vice president’s security detail. Giebels was told that due to Pence’s reluctance to meddle with the electoral count, Donald Trump “was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.”
Meanwhile, even some of Trump’s most loyal staff were getting skittish about Trump’s proposed power grab. Trump aide Jason Miller, tasked with putting out an official White House statement about the fake electors, asked other communications staff via text “How best [to] proceed tomorrow so we don’t look like a donkey show, particularly on the comms/media front?”
Justin Clark, deputy campaign manager, responded that “Here’s the thing the way this has morphed it’s a crazy play so I don’t know who wants to put their name on it.”
Pennsylvania’s fake electors were having the same reluctance. As reported in the Washington Post, general counsel for the Pennsylvania GOP, Thomas W. King III, emailed a Trump campaign official “saying he understood that the Trump electors in Pennsylvania had been told they would receive ‘indemnification by the campaign if someone gets sued or worse.’
“They were also to receive ‘a legal opinion by a national firm and certified to be accurate by a Pa. lawyer,’ King wrote. Instead, he wrote, they got a memo from Kenneth Chesebro … [who] described the plan in Pennsylvania as ‘dicey’ because state law calls for the governor, who at the time was a Democrat, to approve any elector substitutions.
“King made changes to the electors’ paperwork to make clear that the Republican electoral votes were valid only with the finding of a court order that could not be appealed.” (King would later tell the Post, “No one ever offered indemnification ... Any document that any lawyer looks at needs to be accurate.”)
Oddly enough, while fake electors tried to cover their backsides, an article appeared that day about Republican senator/Trump ally Chuck Grassley overseeing the electoral college vote if Pence somehow failed to show up.
Grassley’s exact words were, “If the vice president isn’t there, and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate and obviously listening to the debate without saying anything.” (Grassley’s office later said the statement was misinterpreted by the media).
The Capitol was supposed to be closed to the public that Tuesday due to Covid-19, but Republican House member Barry Loudermilk of Georgia gave a tour. The January 6 House Select Committee would later tweet that “Individuals on the tour photographed/recorded areas not typically of interest to tourists: hallways, staircases and security checkpoints.” One of the people on the tour marched to the Capitol the following day while threatening violence against Democratic members of Congress.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) giving tours in the Capitol to MAGA fans on Jan. 5, 2021. Photos via screen capture of released video from Jan. 6 investigatory committee
Democrats weren’t the only ones under threat. Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko was caught on tape asking congressional leadership to “come up with a safety plan for members” because “I’m actually very concerned about this, because we have who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people coming here. We have Antifa. We also have, quite honestly, Trump supporters, who actually believe that we are going to overturn the election. And when that doesn’t happen — most likely will not happen — they are going to go nuts.”
Aware of the potential for violence, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser requested National Guard backup, but Donald Trump’s Defense Department handcuffed the Guard’s mission. According to Paul Sonne, Peter Hermann and Missy Ryan of the Washington Post, “the Pentagon prohibited the District’s guardsmen from receiving ammunition or riot gear, interacting with protesters unless necessary for self-defense, sharing equipment with local law enforcement, or using Guard surveillance and air assets without the defense secretary’s explicit sign-off.”
In addition, “The D.C. Guard was also told it would be allowed to deploy a quick-reaction force only as a measure of last resort,” which forced local D.C. officials to get approval from Trump’s Defense Department for rapid deployment, a bureaucratic hurdle which hadn’t existed previously.
While the Secret Service “warned the U.S. Capitol Police that their officers could face violence at the hands of supporters of former President Donald Trump,” Mark Meadows sent out an email demanding that the National Guard “protect pro-Trump people.” A statement from the White House Office of the Press Secretary hyped the threat of left-leaning protesters, saying “President Trump will not allow Antifa, or any terrorist organization, to destroy our great country.”
Trump mirrored this with a tweet threatening members of antifa who showed up in D.C. on January 6. There was speculation later on that this messaging could have been put in place to give Trump cover to declare a national emergency on January 6, if anti-Trump protesters showed up to fight pro-Trump protesters. A national emergency could have allowed Trump to seize voting machines according to Phil Waldron’s 38-page PowerPoint titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for January 6” (see November 25, January 4).
As D.C. girded for trouble, Trump riled his supporters up with a 5 p.m. tweet which read, “Washington is being inundated with people who don’t want to see an election victory stolen by emboldened Radical Left Democrats … Our Country has had enough, they won’t take it anymore!”
This call out to the troops coincided with a pro-Trump event at Freedom Plaza that night. Speaking at the rally were Trump allies who were considered too extreme to speak at the main event on January 6 — Alex Jones, Ali Alexander, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.
Infowars host Alex Jones. (Screenshot)
Stone told those in attendance they were in an “epic struggle for the future of this country between dark and light, between the godly and the godless, between good and evil. And we will win this fight or America will step off into a thousand years of darkness.”
According to deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, during an Oval Office meeting which took place while music was booming at Freedom Plaza (just half a mile from the White House), “[Trump] was in a very good mood. And I say that because he had not been in a good mood for weeks leading up to that, and then it seemed like he was in a fantastic mood that evening.”
Deputy press secretary Judd Deere concurred, saying Trump was “animated” and “excited about the next day. He was excited to do a rally with his supporters.”
At the meeting, Trump discussed the march to the Capitol which would follow his speech at the Ellipse on January 6. Though it was known to pro-Trump activists and administration figures, the march to the Capitol wasn’t public knowledge. As January 6 committee member Stephanie Murphy would later say, “the evidence confirms that this was not a spontaneous call to action, but rather was a deliberate strategy decided upon in advance by the president.”
Late that evening, Trump called his allies at the Willard Hotel and strategized about how they could delay the vote count long enough to get three swing states to reject Biden’s electoral votes and send false electoral votes to the Capitol.
One of the key strategists at the Willard was Steve Bannon. Rep. Liz Cheney, future vice chair of the January 6 House Select Committee, would later say, “Based on the committee’s investigation, it appears that Mr. Bannon had substantial advance knowledge of the plans for January 6th and likely had an important role in formulating those plans.”
On his podcast the night of January 5, Steve Bannon concluded ominously:
“It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say is, strap in … You made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready.”
***
Prior to Jan. 6, 2021, the electoral college vote count and certification had been purely ceremonial.
But since none of Trump’s tactics to overthrow the election had worked, the president’s fundraiser Caroline Wren, campaign operative Katrina Pierson, chief of staff Mark Meadows, Republican members of Congress, and right-wing activists planned one final, grand charade: a “Save America” rally followed by a stealth march to the Capitol.
Activists involved in the planning bought burner phones with cash to secretly communicate with members of the White House, including chief of staff Mark Meadows. It would later come out that “Trump’s political operation reported paying more than $4.3 million to people and firms that organized the Jan. 6 rally since the start of the 2020 election.”
According to Hunter Walker of Rolling Stone, event planners also collaborated with fringe-right members of Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar (later to become one of the biggest defenders of the insurrectionists), Madison Cawthorn (who spoke at the January 6 rally), Andy Biggs and Lauren Boebert.
Two of Walker’s sources (both event planners) said that Gosar — who allegedly made phone calls to the sources on January 6 — promised that Trump would grant them pardons if they incurred any legal trouble as a result of the rally. Right-wing activist Ali Alexander, one of the organizers of the “Wild Protest,” had also mentioned collaborating with Gosar and Biggs in a video which was later deleted.
The rally and the march were a prelude to the formal challenge by 13 Republican senators and 140 House members to Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. The challenge would consist of regurgitated fraud claims which had been rejected for lack of merit in more than 60 judicial cases, by judges of all ideological stripes.
Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro would later brag about his role in recruiting members of Congress. He and Steve Bannon came up with a plan called “the Green Bay sweep.” The aim was to get challengers to delay the electoral vote certification as long as possible in hopes that several hours of televised hearings (full of Republican claims about a “rigged election”) would pressure Mike Pence to reject electors from Biden states and end 231 years of American democracy.
While the suits conspired, Trump’s ground troops stood by. Alongside the Oath Keepers, who “were expecting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act” so that he would have a false pretense to call up the U.S. military and maintain control of the government by force, 250-300 Proud Boys had plans to pre-empt the certification by seizing government offices and making demands on behalf of the losing presidential candidate. The leaders of the two groups had met in a D.C. underground parking lot the day prior.
According to Mark Meadows’ aide Cassidy Hutchinson, as of 8:00 a.m., “intelligence reports were already coming in that some of the people near the Ellipse, where Trump was to speak, were dressed in body armor and armed with Glock-style pistols, shotguns, and AR-15s, along with other weapons.”
When deputy chief of staff Anthony Ornato told Meadows about weapons confiscated by law enforcement, “Meadows appeared uninterested and didn't look up from his phone … saying: ‘All right, anything else?’”
At 8:24 a.m., Eric Waldow, a deputy chief in the Capitol Police force who was “responsible for directing officers’ movements,” sent a message over Capitol Police radio for his fellow officers to “watch out for anti-Trump protesters in the massive pro-Trump crowd.”
There was concern of violence between Trump’s white supremacist followers and left-wing activists, but this would turn out to be an empty threat. Prodded to stay home with hashtags #Jan6TrumpTrap and #DontTakeTheBait, the left’s presence at the rally was minimal to nonexistent.
With just over four hours to go before the certification was to start, Trump allies continued their attempts to overturn the will of the American people.
The speaker of the Arizona House, Rusty Bowers, received a call from House of Representatives member Andy Biggs asking him to reject Biden’s legitimate electors for the state of Arizona. This was one of many requests from conspirators to Bowers (including a call from Rudy Giuliani, who had earlier admitted to Bowers that “we have lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence”).
Bowers refused to buckle, even as his family had been doxxed, with Trump supporters shouting epithets outside of his home while his daughter was inside dying of cancer.
One of the main conspirators was Rep. Jim Jordan. Jordan and Trump spoke for 10 minutes that morning. Jordan would later gum up the works during the certification, after the Capitol was cleared.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). Photo: lev radin/Shutterstock
Trump also received a call around 11:04 a.m. from Republican senator David Perdue.
It was the last call recorded in the official White House logs until 6:54 p.m. that evening.
The most consequential conversation Trump had was with Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump had already pressured twice that day, with tweets at 1:00 a.m. and 8:17 a.m.
Around 11:20 a.m., Trump called Pence from the Oval Office. Several witnesses were present. Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, estimated that the call lasted 15-to-20 minutes.
According to reporters Kyle Cheney and Betsy Woodruff Swan, “Multiple people familiar with the testimony given to the [January 6] committee about the call offered a consistent account. One of those people — granted anonymity to speak candidly — said witnesses described the conversation as beginning relatively pleasantly, with Trump embracing the legal advice he was given about Pence’s ability to send the election back to the states.
“Although people in the Oval Office couldn’t hear him, Pence had clearly rejected Trump’s entreaties, the person indicated. Witnesses have said listeners in the room were surprised because it was the first time they recalled Pence saying no to Trump. The call deteriorated and Trump grew frustrated.”
Trump told Pence, “You can either go down in history as a patriot … or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
Pence chose to go down in history as a patriot.
Just before the count began, he released a public letter confirming that he lacked the constitutional authority to unilaterally decide which electoral college votes to accept.
Trump responded to this pushback from his previously subservient #2 by “reinserting language [into his rally speech] that he had personally drafted earlier that morning — falsely claiming that the Vice President had authority to send electoral votes to the states — but that advisors had previously successfully advocated be removed.”
This change in emphasis increased the threat risk for Vice President Pence. As reported by historian Heather Cox Richardson, the “Save America” rally that day was simmering with latent violence:
“Text messages between [Cassidy] Hutchinson and [Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony] Ornato show that Trump was ‘furious’ before the Ellipse rally because he wanted photos to show the space full of people and it was not full because law enforcement was screening people for weapons before they could go in. Trump wanted the screening machines, called magnetometers, to be taken down.”
According to Hutchinson’s testimony before the January 6 House Select Committee, “I overheard the president say something to the effect of, you know, ‘I don’t even care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the f-ing mags away.’”
The speeches included several incitements to violence.
Lead-off speaker Mo Brooks, clad in body armor, said, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!”
Addressing congressional Republicans who intended to honor the will of American voters, Donald Trump, Jr. said, “We’re coming for you, and we’re going to have a good time doing it.” If they didn’t change their minds and oppose Biden’s certification, “I’m gonna be in your backyard in a couple of months.”
Rudy Giuliani said, “Let’s have trial by combat,” which was “an eerie reference to battles to the death in the series ‘Game of Thrones.’”
Donald Trump headlined at noon. Talking tough from behind bulletproof glass, he unleashed a torrent of self-serving lies about the election, “used the words ‘fight’ or ‘fighting’ at least 20 times,” and said, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength. You have to be strong.”
Over at the Capitol, with the clock running down, Republicans were still scheming to get illegitimate electors to Mike Pence. At 12:37 p.m., an aide to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson texted a Pence aide about “alternate” electors for Wisconsin and Michigan that Johnson wanted to pass off. In response, the Pence aide said, “Do not give that to [Pence].”
By 12:54 p.m. — six minutes before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was scheduled to bring Congress to order — Trump supporters had busted through barrier fences around the U.S. Capitol.
Less than 10 minutes after the formal count had begun, Trump finished his speech with a call to action:
“We will never give up; we will never concede … We will stop the steal. We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol … We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones … the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
The march had been hidden — by design — from the general public. In a January 4 communication, conservative organizer Kylie Jane Kramer had texted MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that “It can also not get out about the march because I will be in trouble with the national park service and all the agencies but POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’”
Trump’s advisors had composed a tweet which mentioned the march. Trump read the tweet, but didn’t send it, leaving Capitol security in the dark about what they were about to face.
In the presidential limousine, the Secret Service refused to take Trump to the Capitol. Cassidy Hutchinson told the January 6 House Select Committee that the outgoing president threw a fit as he “attempted to grab the steering wheel and then lunged at the agent driving” the vehicle. Trump’s demand (“I am the f---ing president, take me up to the Capitol now”) went unheeded.
At 1:14 p.m., Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was evacuated from Democratic National Committee headquarters, where a pipe bomb was found. Another pipe bomb, placed by the same suspect the night prior, would be found at the Republican National Committee headquarters. The motive remains unknown, but it could have been to draw law enforcement attention away from the Capitol.
Donald Trump was in the White House dining room by 1:25 p.m., where he was soon notified about the “violence at the Capitol.”
Doing nothing to stop the insurrection, President Trump got cozy in front of Fox News. He “asked aides for a list of senators to call as he continued to pursue paths to overturn his defeat,” according to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Around the same time, Trump’s ally, Paul Gosar (who had collaborated with the “Save America” organizers), began the GOP stalling tactics, objecting to electors from Arizona. The two houses of Congress separated to “debate” Gosar’s objection.
At 1:30 p.m., insurrectionists overtook police at the back of the Capitol, forcing them inside the building.
Unaware of the threat, Congress continued the proceedings. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell said, “Voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken — they've all spoken … If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever.”
As McConnell spoke, a crowd of 8,000 equipped with “riot helmets, gas masks, shields, pepper spray, fireworks, climbing gear ... explosives, metal pipes, [and] baseball bats” surrounded the front of the Capitol.
At 1:39 p.m., Trump had a four-minute call with Rudy Giuliani, who would call several senators that day to try to derail the certification. They spoke again a half hour later.
Because local officials’ authority to order backup had been taken away by the Trump administration one day before the certification, Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund had to beg Trump allies in the Department of Defense for National Guard reinforcements.
Trump’s military officials stonewalled Sund, who first called for help at 1:49 p.m.
According to testimony before the January 6 House Select Committee, here referenced by Professor Heather Cox Richardson, “[Cassidy] Hutchinson went into [Mark] Meadows’s [White House] office between 2:00 and 2:05 to ask if he was watching the scene unfold on his television. Scrolling through his phone, he answered that he was. She asked if he had talked to Trump. He said, ‘Yeah. He wants to be alone right now.’ [White House Counsel Pat] Cipollone burst into the office and said to go get the president. Meadows repeated that Trump didn't want to do anything. Cipollone very clearly said this to Mark — something to the effect of, ‘Mark, something needs to be done or people are going to die and the blood’s going to be on your f-ing hands. This is getting out of control.”’
Back at the Capitol, as officer Caroline Edwards later described it to the January 6 committee, “What I saw was just a war scene … There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”
At 2:11 p.m., Trump supporters — heavily represented by right-wing hate groups, including many former members of law enforcement and the military — burst through a police line to storm the Capitol, the first hostile takeover of America’s seat of government since 1814.
By 2:13 p.m., they were inside the building.
Once inside, insurrectionists assaulted Capitol police officers, attacked journalists, and traumatized members of Congress and congressional aides.
Under the surface appearance of random chaos were a number of determined seditionists with concrete goals. Some targeted the offices of specific members of Congress in hopes of kidnapping them, or worse. Others ransacked the Senate parliamentarian’s office in an apparent attempt to intercept electoral college ballots. There were allegations that plotters may have had help from members of the Capitol police force and/or Republican representatives (including Barry Loudermilk, who had conducted a tour of the Capitol on January 5, and Ronny Jackson).
At 2:15 p.m., Pat Cipollone texted Mark Meadows that “we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be f’ing hung.”
Meadows responded that “You heard [President Trump], Pat. He thinks Mike deserves that. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
Four minutes later, Hogan Gidley (the national press secretary for Trump’s 2020 campaign) texted Hope Hicks (counselor to the president) with a suggestion that Trump put out a request to his followers to be non-violent.
Hicks replied that she had suggested as much “several times” on Monday and Tuesday — this was Wednesday — but “I’m not there.”
The Senate was called into recess at 2:20 p.m.
The House soon followed.
At 2:24 p.m., while “America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and reveling in their own astounding impunity,” Trump sent out what would become a notorious tweet:
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify … USA demands the truth!”
As Trump’s deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews would tell the January 6 House Select Committee, this was exactly what wasn’t needed in that moment, as Trump was “giving the green light to [the insurrectionists]” who “truly latch on to every word and every tweet.”
While lawmakers hid from rioters, Trump called Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to ask him to stall the electoral college vote certification whenever (or if) it could safely resume. Trump reached Tuberville around 2:26 p.m. and was notified that Mike Pence, his wife, his brother and his daughter had just been whisked away from the Senate floor. Later reports showed that seditionists missed Pence and his family by one minute (or “five to 10 feet” by another account).
An excerpt from I Alone Can Fix It by reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker described the scene:
“At that moment, Pence was still in his ceremonial office — protected by Secret Service agents, but vulnerable because the second-floor office had windows that could be breached and the intruding thugs had gained control of the building. Tim Giebels, the lead special agent in charge of the vice president’s protective detail, twice asked Pence to evacuate the Capitol, but Pence refused. ‘I’m not leaving the Capitol,’ he told Giebels. The last thing the vice president wanted was the people attacking the Capitol to see his 20-car motorcade fleeing. That would only vindicate their insurrection.
“At 2:26, after a team of agents scouted a safe path to ensure the Pences would not encounter trouble, Giebels and the rest of Pence’s detail guided them down a staircase to a secure subterranean area that rioters couldn’t reach, where the vice president’s armored limousine awaited. Giebels asked Pence to get in one of the vehicles. ‘We can hold here,’ he said.”
At 2:28 p.m., Mark Meadows received a text from Republican Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (“Please tell the president to calm people … This isn’t the way to solve anything”). Meadows would continue to field desperate pleas from Trump allies to stop the violence over the next half hour.
Around 2:30 p.m., Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund asked lieutenant generals Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn (the brother of martial law advocate Michael Flynn) for permission to deploy the National Guard.
Accompanying Sund were Maj. Gen. William Walker (the commander of the D.C. National Guard), Walker’s counsel (Col. Earl Matthews), and D.C. Chief of Police Robert Contee.
Walker had buses of troops ready to go.
According to Matthews, Piatt told Sund he didn’t like “the optics” of “having armed military personnel on the grounds of the Capitol,” though the Defense Department had had no concern for “optics” the previous June, when they had deployed armed military personnel at peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.
After police chief Contee threatened to ask D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to have a press conference exposing Piatt and Flynn’s suspicious delay, Piatt’s fallback suggestion was to have “Guardsmen take over D.C. police officers’ traffic duties so those officers could head to the Capitol.”
This, too, was baffling, as a hand-off would take more time than sending the Guard directly to the Capitol. As reported by Politico, Matthews’ 36-page memo about January 6 said that “Every D.C. Guard leader was desperate to get to the Capitol to help … then stunned by the delay in deployment. Responding to civil unrest in Washington is ‘a foundational mission, a statutory mission of the D.C. National Guard.’”
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy had been invited to the call but was “incommunicado or unreachable for most of the afternoon,” according to Matthews.
As Trump’s Defense Department officials let seditionists ravage the Capitol, Trump allies — including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Lindsey Graham, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and former advisor Kellyanne Conway — called the White House to try to get Trump to act.
But the commander-in-chief wasn’t taking calls.
He was wrapped up in the West Wing dining room watching on Fox News the attempted coup he’d fomented. As one aide told a reporter, “‘He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV … If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.’”
According to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Trump was also pressured (in person) to ask the rioters to go home by “fellow lawyers Pat Philbin and Eric Herschmann, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner … Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, [Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications] Dan Scavino, [Pence National Security Adviser] Gen. Keith Kellogg and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.”
Ivanka Trump. Photo: AFP
Fulfilling the request would have required minimal effort. Trump’s deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews told the January 6 House Select Committee, “It would take probably less than 60 seconds to get from the Oval Office dining room to the press briefing room. There’s a camera that is on in there at all times. If the president wanted to address people, he could have done so.”
But Trump was unmoved, even when his daughter, Ivanka, initially asked him to stop the violence, perhaps because he felt the rioters kept his hopes alive by obstructing the certification.
Eventually, Trump took a call from Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was inside the Capitol. Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who was with McCarthy, tweeted, “When McCarthy finally reached the president on January 6 and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially repeated the falsehood that it was anti-fascists that had breached the Capitol … McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump supporters. That's when, according to McCarthy, the president said, ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’”
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska would later that week say that Trump was “confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building.” Sasse also mentioned that Trump was talking to the other people in the room about “a path by which he was going to stay in office after January 20.”
Key to this path was a delay in the certification. As they hid in an underground Senate loading dock, Trump’s deputy chief of staff (in charge of the Secret Service) Tim Giebels asked Mike Pence to get into one of the Secret Service-protected vehicles. According to reporting in I Alone Can Fix It, Pence replied, “I’m not getting in the car, Tim ... I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”
Another excerpt from I Alone Can Fix It indicates that Pence had good reason to stay put.
In the scene described, Mike Pence’s national security adviser Keith Kellogg interacts with White House Deputy Chief of Staff/liaison to the Secret Service Anthony Ornato. The exchange takes place shortly after Pence’s refusal to get into the Secret Service car. Ornato’s loyalties — to Donald Trump or democracy — are in question, as Trump had brought Ornato to the White House from the Secret Service, a major break with the non-partisan code of the Secret Service:
“Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing. Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him that Pence’s detail was planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews. ‘You can’t do that, Tony,’ Kellogg said. ‘Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.’”
While Pence held firm, Ivanka Trump convinced her father to make a half-hearted attempt to defuse the violence with a tweet at 2:38 p.m.: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
Donald Trump Jr. texted Mark Meadows in response: “He’s got to condemn this s--- ASAP. The capitol police tweet is not enough.”
'Sociopathic': New reports suggest Trump sided with violent mob during Capitol attack
Supporters of President Donald Trump protest on the steps of the U.S. Capitol building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. - Yuri Gripas/Yuri Gripas/TNS
At 3:13 p.m., Trump sent another tweet:
“I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”
But President Trump wouldn’t ask the insurrectionists to leave the Capitol, which forced Mike Pence and Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to call the governors of Virginia and Maryland, the secretary of defense, the attorney general — anyone who could help.
By 3:45 p.m., Trump aide Jason Miller had come up with messaging which could end the insurrection and appease the president (by shifting the blame). Miller texted Mark Meadows and (Trump aide) Dan Scavino two tweet suggestions:
1) “Bad apples, likely ANTIFA or other crazed leftists, infiltrated today’s peaceful protest over the fraudulent vote count. Violence is never acceptable! MAGA supporters embrace our police and the rule of law and should leave the Capitol now!”
2) “The fake news media who encouraged this summer’s violent and radical riots are now trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions. This isn't who we are! Our people should head home and let the criminals suffer the consequences!”
At 4:06 p.m., president-elect Joe Biden tweeted a speech:
“I call on President Trump to go on national television now, to fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution and demand an end to this siege. This is not a protest. It is an insurrection.”
Since Trump’s tweets had had little discernible impact on the insurrectionists, his advisers came up with a neutral, yet unequivocal video statement:
“I urge all of my supporters to do exactly what 99% of them have already been doing — express their passions and opinions PEACEFULLY.
“My supporters have a right to make their voices heard, but make no mistake — NO ONE should be using violence or threats of violence to express themselves. Especially at the U.S. Capitol. Let’s respect our institutions. Let’s all do better.
“I am asking you to leave the Capitol Hill region NOW and go home in a peaceful way.”
Trump agreed to ask his followers to go home, but ad-libbed disinformation which fed the misplaced rage at the heart of the insurrection.
His video plea was posted at 4:17 p.m., more than two hours into the breach and more than three hours after he became aware of the violence outside the Capitol:
“It was a landslide election. And everyone knows it. Especially the other side. But you have to go home … There’s never been a time like this when such a thing happened when they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election … Go home. We love you. You're very special.”
As reported by Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix, “According to the Department of Defense’s and U.S. Army’s own timelines, it is only after President Trump publicly released [his video statement] that [Defense Secretary Christopher] Miller approved [Army Secretary Ryan] McCarthy’s plan for deploying the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol and even later when McCarthy authorized [D.C. National Guard commander William] Walker to deploy his forces to the Capitol.”
The National Guard finally arrived at 5:20 p.m.
The Capitol was cleared at 5:34 p.m.
At 6:01 p.m., Trump tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long … Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
Around 7 p.m., with an hour to go before the vote count would resume, Rudy Giuliani called what he thought was Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s cellphone and left a voicemail. But Giuliani mistakenly dialed the wrong senator, who gave the recording to The Dispatch.
In the message, Giuliani asked the senator to organize objections to 10 states won by Biden in order to drag the certification out as long as possible, preferably until the end of the following day.
Giuliani said that the delay would give Republicans more time to present “evidence” of fraud in key swing states. Another goal could have been to impede the certification in order to allow more time for the resolution of a longshot election lawsuit that was before the Supreme Court (who would refuse to expedite the claim on January 11). This was one of eight members of Congress Giuliani reached out to throughout January 6.
After Mike Pence re-started the official vote count, Trump lawyer John Eastman emailed Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, claiming that Pence was breaking the Electoral Count Act because debate was going “past the allotted time.”
Pence officially certified Joe Biden’s victory at 3:42 a.m. on January 7, 2021.
Mike Pence speaking with attendees at the 2020 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA.
Mike Pence. (Gage Skidmore)
Biden’s win was certified despite the objections of two-thirds of House Republicans and eight Republican senators who came out of hiding to spout election fraud lies which had jeopardized their safety just hours earlier.
Remarkably, dead-enders continued to push Trump’s cause after the sun came up.
According to White House counsel Eric Herschmann, he received a call from John Eastman the day after the insurrection “asking for legal work ‘preserving something potentially for appeal’ in the contested state of Georgia,” where Trump lawyer Sidney Powell flew — that same day — to gather confidential voter data.
Herschmann reportedly told Eastman, “You’re out of your effin’ mind,” and, “Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re getting in your life: Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.”
Not long after this conversation, Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani to ask if he could be added to the growing list of pardon requests.
While some administration officials resigned and others pondered using the 25th Amendment to force Donald Trump from office, Ivanka Trump patiently fought off temper tantrums as she tried to coax her father to make a statement condemning the violence he had caused.
Trump couldn’t admit he had lost.
He cut out language in a prepared speech about the importance of law and order, one of his favorite themes during the campaign, removing his advisors’ verbiage that “I am directing the Department of Justice to ensure all lawbreakers are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We must send a clear message — not with mercy but with JUSTICE. Legal consequences must be swift and firm.”
Trump removed a line that could have insulted his fanbase: “I want to be very clear you do not represent me. You do not represent our movement.”
Trump’s most feral supporters had done substantial damage. They had inflicted severe trauma on Capitol law enforcement and members of Congress. They had injured more than 150 law enforcement officers and contributed to the deaths of five (an Iraq War vet who was bashed in the head with a fire extinguisher and four who later committed suicide). Their rampage cost America’s taxpayers $480 million to secure the Capitol (with 25,000 National Guard members) before Joe Biden’s inauguration. Taxpayers spent another $1.5 million dollars to repair the citadel of American democracy. The damage done to America’s long-standing tradition of peaceful transfers of power was (and still is) incalculable.
To date, Donald Trump has expressed no contrition for inciting the January 6 insurrection.
In a TV appearance in September of 2021, ABC reporter Jonathan Karl, who interviewed Trump for his book Betrayal: the Final Act of the Trump Show, said, “I was absolutely dumbfounded at how fondly he looks back on January 6th. He thinks it was a great day. He thinks it was one of the greatest days of his time in politics.”
***
Four years after Donald Trump’s failed coup attempt, big gaps remain in the public’s understanding of January 6, 2021.
The January 6 House Select Committee was hobbled in their mission by a long list of Trump allies who refused to appear before the committee or pleaded the 5th Amendment when they did.
Encrypted communications among Republican conspirators, insurrectionist organizers, and between organizers and Republican conspirators have slipped into the ether.
Phone communications on January 6 among members of key government agencies — the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Defense Department— have disappeared.
During the January 6 House Select Committee hearings, Representative Jamie Raskin called Mike Pence’s refusal to get into the Secret Service vehicle (“I’m not getting into that car”) “the six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far” and asserted that the efforts to get Pence out of the Capitol were motivated by a desire to delay the vote certification: “[Pence] knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was to do.”
The role of Secret Service members in Trump’s plot could be a critical piece of the puzzle, but Secret Service texts from January 5 and January 6 mysteriously disappeared.
The texts vanished after multiple House committees requested all such records be preserved on January 16, 2021. The Trump-appointed Department of Homeland Security inspector general Joseph Cuffari discovered that these texts had been deleted in May of 2021 but didn’t notify Congress until July 14, 2022. Officials in the inspector general’s office wrote a memo notifying Congress of the missing texts in April of 2022, but Cuffari didn’t forward the information.
Not surprisingly, Joe Biden hired a new Secret Service team on entering office.
An investigation is ongoing.
The biggest mystery is why backup deployment to the Capitol took so long.
This delay happened despite the fact that chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was with Trump, was in “non-stop” communication all day with Kash Patel, the chief of staff for Defense Secretary Christopher Miller — whom Trump had installed after losing the 2020 election.
One line of thought is that Trump’s appointees handcuffed D.C. police and conspired to delay National Guard deployment to give the insurrectionists time to stop the vote certification. Miller was perfectly aware of how dire the situation was from early on and yet reportedly didn’t sign on to the emergency deployment until 4:32 p.m., two hours and 43 minutes after Capitol police chief Steven Sund first asked for backup.
And it’s hard to imagine Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn (whose brother Michael Flynn was in Trump’s inner circle of coup planners) being disappointed if the certification didn’t happen. This could explain his odd concern about “optics” when Capitol police chief Steven Sund asked for permission to deploy backup around 2:30 p.m. Col. Earl Matthews, a lawyer for the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, said that Flynn and his cohort Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt were “absolute and unmitigated liars” when they spoke to the January 6 House Select Committee.
A second theory, based on the testimony of General Mark Milley (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Christopher Miller before the January 6 committee, is that deployment was held off out of fear that the introduction of troops could create the chaos Trump needed to invoke the Insurrection Act, just as the Oath Keepers hoped he would. The timing of deployment — after Trump had asked his supporters to go home in the 4:17 p.m. video — may support this theory.
Or maybe Miller and/or Milley were covering their butts before the House Select Committee. Maybe the deployment happened when it did because Mike Pence and congressional leadership were pushing the Department of Defense to act and Miller/Milley felt that Trump’s 4:17 p.m. video statement indicated that he no longer expected their acquiescence.
Hopefully more will come out about key players’ actions and motivations in the Jack Smithand Fani Willis investigations of Trump’s election interference.
What we know with absolute certainty is that The Big Lie which fueled Donald Trump’s coupattempt looks even more preposterous now than it did in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
When “Kraken” attorney Sidney Powell was sued by Dominion, her lawyers defended their client by claiming that “no reasonable person” would have believed Powell’s attacks on Dominion.
Big Lie perpetrators, from Rudy Giuliani to Mike Lindell to One America News to Sidney Powell to Jenna Ellis to Kenneth Chesebro have flipped or lost/settled court cases.
Mike Lindell. Real America's Voice/screen grab
For News settled a $787 million defamation lawsuit with Dominion. The presiding judge said, “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it] is crystal clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
The conspiracy peddlers have lost court cases because the real-world data collected about the 2020 has been remarkably consistent and in line with previous studies showing voter fraud to be very rare.
In fact, two studies the Trump campaign paid for in November and December of 2020 contradicted their public messaging.
Berkeley Research Group tested “at least a dozen hypotheses that Trump’s team wanted tested,” according to Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post. Dawsey’s source said, “None of these were significant enough [to impact the election result]….Just like any election, there are always errors, omissions and irregularities. It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove, and it actually went in both directions.”
Simpatico Software Systems was hired by the Trump campaign on the day after the election. Simpatico’s founder, Ken Block, told the Post, “No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at … Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Thomas Windom, a senior assistant special counsel in Jack Smith’s insurrection investigation, told Politico “that prosecutors asked Trump’s ‘former DNI, former acting secretary of DHS, former acting deputy secretary of DHS, former CISA director, former acting CISA director, former CISA senior cyber counsel, former national security adviser, former deputy NSA, former chief of staff to the National Security Council, former chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, presidential intelligence briefer, former secretary of Defense and former DOJ leadership’ for any evidence of that foreign or domestic actors flipped a single vote from a voting machine in 2020.
“They offered none,” he says.
Recounts from the six states at the heart of the 2020 presidential election further disproved Trump’s fraud claims. And the consistency of swing state results from 2020 to 2022 suggest that the former was no fluke.
Georgia did three recounts, one by hand. All three verified a Biden margin of over 11,000 ballots. Biden’s win was within 0.6% of the pre-election projections at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. In 2022, Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock beat Republican Herschel Walker by almost 100,000 votes in the Peach State, despite aggressive voter suppression legislation passed by Republicans in 2021.
The final 2020 tally in Arizona was within .6% of the RealClearPolitics polling projection. A thorough study conducted by Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich (which involved 60 staff and 10,000 person hours) found “no evidence of election fraud, manipulation of the election process, or any instances of organized/coordinated fraud was provided by any of the complaining parties.”
An independent audit of Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, found no change in Biden’s margin of victory. Arizona’s Republican legislature didn’t like this finding, so they hired Cyber Ninjas, a Trump-supporting (and Trump-supported) security company, on the taxpayer dime. The Cyber Ninjas’ audit increased Biden’s Maricopa margin by 360 votes.
In 2022, Democrats won the two most hotly-contested races in Arizona — for governor and U.S. Senate — despite party-line Republican voter suppression legislation passed after the 2020 election. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won by almost six points.
A recount of Wisconsin’s two biggest Democratic counties requested by Republicans padded Biden’s 20,000-plus-vote margin by another 87 ballots. A 2021 nonpartisan audit showed that 2020 was “largely safe and secure” in the words of the Republican co-chair of the committee that commissioned the report. A 14-month partisan audit done by Republicans to placate Donald Trump found “absolutely no evidence” of fraud before it was disbanded.
In 2022, African American Democrat Mandela Barnes narrowly lost to incumbent U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (after being swamped by outside money and racist appeals), but Democrats won four out of the other five statewide offices. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, the bulwark against a complete Republican takeover of the state’s election system, won by a comfortable 90,000 votes despite race-based GOP voter suppression measures on the books.
One month ago, as part of a settlement, Wisconsin’s fake electors put out the following statement:
“We hereby reaffirm that Joseph R. Biden, Jr. won the 2020 presidential election and that we were not the duly elected presidential electors for the State of Wisconsin for the 2020 presidential election … We oppose any attempt to undermine the public’s faith in the ultimate results of the 2020 presidential election.”
Michigan’s recount validated Biden’s 154,000-vote margin. An audit conducted by a bipartisan panel of Michigan state senators in 2021 found “no widespread or systemic fraud.” A report released in lieu of the investigation said, “The committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”
Biden’s win was small next to Democrats’ Michigan victories in 2022, in which Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won by 11 points and Democrats regained control of the state legislature.
Like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Biden won Nevada by a big enough margin — 2.4 points in Biden’s case — to negate the need for a recount. This margin was within 0.3% of the RealClearPolitics’ pre-election projection. Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State put out a point-by-point refutation of right-wing conspiracies.
A sample audit of 63 counties in Pennsylvania after the 2020 election found results which were within “a fraction of a percentage point” of the official tabulation. Biden’s margin of victory — 1.2% — was the exact same margin predicted by RealClearPolitics.com. Democrats easily won the two big races in 2022: John Fetterman clinched the U.S. Senate seat by five points; Josh Shapiro won the governor’s mansion by almost 15 points. Democrats also won control of the state House of Representatives for the first time in 12 years.
A thorough AP study of the six closest swing states in 2020 found a total of less than 475 potentially fraudulent votes. Not all of the ballots were necessarily fraudulent (thus the word “potentially”), not all of the ballots were necessarily counted, and the ballots came from Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Joe Biden won each of these states by more than 10,000 votes.
A peer-reviewed study published by the National Academy of Sciences concluded the following:
“After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous.”
“Lost, Not Stolen,” a paper published by “a group of prominent conservative legal and political figures,” concluded that “there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct.”
The most important takeaway from all of the evidence to emerge over the past three years is that Donald Trump did nothing to clear the Capitol for over three hours.
In the words of the January 6 House Select Committee co-chair Bennie Thompson, “For 187 minutes on January 6th, this man of unbridled destructive energy could not be moved — not by his aides, not by his allies.…or the desperate pleas of those facing down the rioters … He ignored and disregarded the desperate pleas of his own family, including Ivanka and Don Jr., even though he was the only person in the world who could call off the mob. He could not be moved to rise from the dining room table … and carry his message to the violent mob.”
Thompson’s counterpart on the committee, Liz Cheney, was a conservative Republican who endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020, donated to and raised money for his 2020 campaign as a co-captain of the Trump Victory Finance Committee, and voted with Trump 93% of the time during his single term in office. In closing remarks made in a January 6 committee hearing in July of 2022, she said, “In our hearing tonight, you saw an American president faced with a stark and unmistakable choice between right and wrong. There was no ambiguity, no nuance. Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office.”
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY). MSNBC
Looking to this year’s presidential race, Cheney posed the question every American with a conscience should ask themselves:
“Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”
***
Despite overwhelming evidence that Joe Biden won fairly and that Donald Trump incited an insurrection and refused to stop it, Trump’s support around the country has remained relatively steady.
In large part, this is because tens of millions of Americans are gullible enough to still buy the Big Lie and the concomitant belief that the Capitol protest was justifiable.
Credulousness is particularly pronounced among the GOP base, whose authoritarian leanings and sense of victimhood have been expertly manipulated by a steady diet of hate radio, far-right social media, Fox, and three years of well-funded disinformation about The Big Lie.
A recent Washington Post poll showed that only 31% of Republicans grasp/accept that Biden’s 2020 win was legitimate. By a 72-24% margin Republicans believe “too much is being made of the storming of the United States Capitol” as opposed to “January 6, 2021 was an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten.” Only 14% of Republicans believe Trump bears “a great deal” or “a good amount” of responsibility for the siege of the Capitol.
Capitalizing on this vast gulf between perception and reality, Trump is currently ahead in general election polls and betting markets. The leads are narrow, and Trump faces numerous legal problems, but there is no guarantee that any of the cases will be resolved before the election. And even if they were, to date Trump hasn’t gotten a scratch (polling-wise) from the indictments; how much would a conviction change this?
The upshot is that mass, programmed ignorance threatens 235 years of American democracy.
Donald Trump’s America is a cauldron of fear beset with bomb threats at state capitols, election workers in exodus, and rampant gun violence rubber-stamped by a political party whose members play along for personal safety and personal gain.
If Trump isn’t held accountable for January 6, it will only get worse.
Trump’s lawyers recently argued that he had not taken an oath to support the Constitution prior to January 6, and the former president has made no secret of his plans should he re-take the White House.
A cabinet of loyal — if not necessarily qualified — extremists.
Mass roundups, detentions, deportations and an end to automatic citizenship for people born in the U.S.A.
An expansion of Muslim bans.
An end to the longstanding prohibition on using the military domestically (in order to harass Democratic-majority cities).
Weaponization of the historically non-partisan Department of Justice and unilateral executive branch control over government agencies.
A phalanx of far-right lawyers in the White House and government agencies bound to Trump’s whims, rather than the rule of law.
Replacement of 50,000 non-partisan civil service employees with partisan Republican stooges.
An end to the Affordable Care Act (and with it, coverage for tens of millions and protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions).
An assault on LGBTQ rights.
Empowerment of extreme-right white nationalist groups and pardons for the January 6 seditionists.
If this seems like cartoonishly dystopian doom-mongering, consider how much more destructive George W. Bush was than the mild-mannered “compassionate conservative” who ran in 2000.
Or that hundreds of thousands of Americans died needlessly because of Trump’s mishandling of Covid-19.
Or how close America came to becoming a banana republic on Jan. 6, 2021.
If the recent past is prologue, a second Trump term would probably be much grimmer for our future than we can now imagine.
On Tuesday, November 5, America faces a stark choice: We can continue to grow into a dynamic, multicultural democracy or we can devolve into a stunted Handmaid’s Tale plutocracy, forever playing catch up with the 21st century.
Dan Benbow has been an online political features writer since 2003. His work has appeared at Raw Story, the Miami Herald, the New York Daily News, Salon, Truthout and the Progressive. He is currently seeking representation for his first novel and can be reached at benbowauthor@gmail.com or followed @danbenbow on X.
