BREAKING NEWS: A January Lawsuit in Texas Appears to Be the Focus of a Seditious Conspiracy Involving Trump, His Lawyers and Political Aides, Texas Politicians, Stop the Steal, and the Capitol Attack

The January 6 Capitol attack appears to have been a planned stalling tactic aimed at clearing a path for Trump to retake the White House via a Supreme Court ruling—just as George W. Bush did in 2000.

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⏰ Reading Time: 12 minutes
📕 Proof Section: January 6

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Introduction

Yesterday we learned that in late December of 2020, Donald Trump attorney Sidney Powell worked with top Trump Congressional ally Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) to file a petition for emergency injunction intended to reach the Supreme Court—a petition whose purpose was to block certification of Joe Biden’s election victory in Congress.

Gohmert—alongside members of the Arizona Republican Party who had long been in close contact with domestic terrorist Ali Alexander (of Trump adviser Roger Stone’s Stop the Steal “movement”)—filed his lawsuit on January 1, 2021. While Dallas-based attorney Sidney Powell’s name didn’t appear on the filing, a firm located just over ten miles from Powell’s Dallas office did. The head of the tiny Dallas law firm is William Lewis Sessions, brother of top Trump Congressional ally Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), a co-conspirator with Trump in the Trump-Ukraine and Trump-Venezuela scandals (discussed in exhaustive, fully sourced detail in the USA Today-bestselling 2020 book Proof of Corruption, published by Macmillan). Sessions, a vocal insurrectionist, was also, before January 6, an adjunct member of Powell’s Team Kraken, making regular contact with a small ring of dubious “intelligence experts” attached to her operation.

In an interview Powell recently did with far-right activist/propagandist Stew Peters, Powell refers to the Gohmert-Sessions team using the first-person plural—“we”—confirming that, as Trump’s attorney in December 2020, she also considered herself a part of the legal team that filed Gohmert’s lawsuit, if not one named in the filing itself.

This is only the beginning of the connections between Trump’s legal team and a now historically controversial lawsuit—and only the beginning of what makes Gohmert’s lawsuit the new epicenter of criminal and Congressional investigations of January 6. Present indications are that Gohmert’s lawsuit, and its intersections with the attack on the U.S. Capitol, bear all the signs of a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the federal government.

A December 2020 Meeting in the Oval Office

According to Reuters, on Monday, December 21, then-President Donald Trump had at least two big meetings in the Oval Office: one with his foremost Congressional allies, including Congressional representatives from both Texas and Arizona, and one with one of his lawyers, Sidney Powell; Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was also in the White House that day and met with Trump, though it remains unclear whether this meeting involved Powell or was a separate (third) major meeting held by the president that day.

While the White House would refuse to answer any media queries about any of these two (or three) meetings, Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows put out a statement indicating that the purpose of Trump’s meeting with his top Congressional advocates was to generate a plan to “fight back against mounting evidence of voter fraud”—apparently via upcoming legal maneuvers—with Meadows indicating that more news on this front would shortly be forthcoming (“stay tuned”, advised a cagey Meadows).

Reuters offers even more details than this, noting that (a) Trump’s purpose in meeting with his Congressional allies was to figure out “how to fight the election results” (again, apparently both in court and in Congress); (b) Trump asked his Congressional allies for legal advice; (c) Trump specifically discussed planned legal actions by Powell with his allies; and (d) those allies seem to have aided Trump in crafting a legal strategy while emphasizing they did not believe Powell should lead the legal team executing it. At the time, as Proof has reported, Trump was considering giving Powell new powers and a new title (one whose parameters were murky): Special Counsel to the President.

Was Louie Gohmert with Trump in the Oval Office on December 21 discussing legal schemes and Sidney Powell? Yes. Was Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), one of Ali Alexander’s co-conspirators, per Alexander? Yes. Was Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), yet another co-conspirator identified by Alexander? Yes. Was Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), the third and final Trump Congressional ally who Alexander says he conspired with pre-January 6? Yes. And did Gohmert, Biggs, and Gosar also meet in the White House on December 21 with Trump’s lead attorney, Rudy Giuliani? Yes. Did they acknowledge seeing Powell in the White House (though they deny meeting with her, consistent with them wanting someone else to take the lead in filing new lawsuits on Trump’s behalf)? Yes.

Did they also—critically—meet with Vice President Mike Pence, who Gohmert was about to sue? Yes. And indeed this last meeting strongly suggests that Gohmert did not, in fact, keep from the Vice President that he was planning to file a suit against him (nor would there have been any reason for Pence to oppose such a lawsuit, as if Gohmert won it would relieve Pence from having to “betray” his longtime political patron, Donald Trump, on January 6).

{Note: While it’s unclear if Pete Sessions was present, it would be unsurprising if he were not, as he wasn’t a Congressman at the time. Sessions was re-elected to Congress in November of 2020, and he wasn’t officially seated in Congress until 72 hours before January 6.}

Following Trump’s Congressional allies (including Louie Gohmert) discussing legal strategies with Trump and advising him not to put Sidney Powell out in front of any of these strategies, Gohmert retained his incoming Texas Congressional peer Pete Sessions’ brother as the face of Team Trump’s newest post-election lawsuit. With him as litigants he brought top Republican Party leaders from Arizona—including Arizona state rep Anthony Kern, who would end up at the Capitol riot—all of whom were closely aligned with Reps. Gosar and Biggs, who had both (again) met with Trump in the Oval Office on December 21. One benefit of using Kern as a litigant rather than Gosar and Biggs, presumably, was that the latter two men, according to Ali Alexander, had been directly and very publicly working with one of the groups (i.e., Stop the Steal) plotting a major protest on Capitol Hill for January 6; this was the first of what looks to have been many efforts to create an appearance of separation between Gohmert’s lawsuit and the violence in D.C. that would be required to give him the time to win it, albeit this cover was blown once Kern couldn’t keep himself away from the Capitol on January 6.

{Note: Because we don’t yet know exactly what Kern did at the Capitol—though we do know he later ended up participating in Arizona’s fraudulent, Trump-ally-generated post-election “audit”—we can’t yet determine if he was simultaneously a litigant with Gohmert and also directly involved in coordinating the assault-enabled delay that Gohmert (and he himself) needed for their lawsuit to succeed. Federal investigators will have to question him about this.}

According to a Boston Globe paraphrase of Brooks’ media debrief of the December 21 meeting, the “White House meeting was originally scheduled for about an hour, but lasted for three hours, with Trump participating for much of it. Other attendees included Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.”

So there can be little doubt that Trump was involved in the legal machinations that thereafter issued from Gohmert—and Powell’s Dallas peer William Lewis Sessions—on January 1, 2021. These schemes would have been worked on between December 21, 2020 and December 31, 2020 (given that this was an emergency petition, it would have to have been produced in the days immediately preceding its filing in federal court).

The Gohmert Lawsuit

When Gohmert, represented by Pete Sessions’ brother, sued Pence—with whom he’d just met—on January 1, doing so on behalf of a man (Donald Trump) he’d also just met with, the suit was a Texas operation from the start. It was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, a federal district court just 90 minutes’ drive from Sidney Powell’s law office.

By the next day, the petition had been denied by Trump appointee Jeremy Kernodle.

On the day Gohmert lost his suit, January 2, Trump held a highly unusual conference call with fifty of his foremost Congressional allies to discuss the way forward for his failed presidential campaign. While we don’t know everything discussed during the conference call, we do know it involved Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress, including members of the Texas Congressional delegation; we know that, according to the then-president’s then-lawyer Sidney Powell, Gohmert spent the 72 hours after the call working with Representative Sessions’ brother to appeal his federal district court defeat directly to the Supreme Court (specifically, in the first instance, to far-right Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who is assigned, as Gohmert and his legal team surely knew in advance, to review emergency petitions from this part of the country); and we know that Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had a phone call with Amy Kremer at some point during this highly consequential stretch of 120 hours.

Kremer, who Proof reported on in great detail here, is the head of Women for America First, and her call with Meadows was in “early January”, according to media reports. While we don’t know if Meadows discussed with Kremer—who was the lead organizer of Trump’s January 6 White House Ellipse speech—the importance to Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election of delaying the January 6 certification, we know that the two Trumpists discussed the planned January 6 march on the Capitol, and we know, moreover, that Kremer advised Meadows that the march Ali Alexander, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and Stop the Steal had planned was likely to get out of control. We know, again from major media reporting on the call, that, despite Kremer’s fears about the Stop the Steal organizers and their march (which they were in direct contact with Trump himself about on multiple occasions), after her conversation with Meadows Kremer did not thereafter cease cooperation with Stop the Steal—and the Trump campaign began using Kimberly Guilfoyle, a top Trump adviser and Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, to speak directly with Alexander rather than going through Kremer.

At a minimum, this suggests that Trump’s political operation knew that Alexander’s march was likely to cause a significant delay in the January 6 certification, at that following this realization it not only did not disassociate from Alexander but indeed drew him even further into Trump’s orbit.

All this is mere backdrop, however, to the primary question raised by the bombshell news that Sidney Powell was working with Louie Gohmert to delay the joint session of Congress on January 6 even as Trump’s presidential campaign was in contact with Stop the Steal militants at the Capitol and Trump’s legal team was in contact with 1st Amendment Praetorian militants at the Capitol. And that question is this one: did the chief litigant in the Texas case, Gohmert, who’d been working not just with Sidney Powell but Trump himself, realize that (as implied by Powell in her interview with Stew Peters) violence at the Capitol on January 6 was key to delaying the joint session of Congress long enough for Justice Alito to review Gohmert’s emergency petition?

The answer is yes. And we know this because Gohmert said as much on camera.

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Louie Gohmert’s Public Encouragement of Violence

After he lost his lawsuit at the federal district court level, Gohmert made a statement on Newsmax, the far-right propaganda vehicle owned by Trump friend Chris Ruddy—who, as Proof recently reported, met with Donald Trump and Stop the Steal’s Roger Stone at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach just 72 hours before Gohmert filed his petition. Here are some of the headlines Gohmert’s statement led to:

Dallas Morning News

Rolling Stone

Forbes

The Daily Beast

The Hill

While Gohmert subsequently attempted to modify his advocacy for violence, even his modification (posted on Twitter) called for a “protest” of the 2020 election results and repeated his prior insistence that “what lies ahead…[is] violence”—a deliberate moving of the Overton Window that thousands of Trumpists then preparing to descend upon Washington wouldn’t have missed.

Gohmert’s follow-up statement also accused federal judges of “hid[ing]” from “their responsibility”—a direct challenge issued to reliable far-right justice Samuel Alito at the very moment Gohmert was preparing to send him a petition for emergency relief.

Gohmert had now made clear what was in store for America on January 6 (a “protest” with inevitable “violence”) if Alito did not act as Trump and his top allies in Congress demanded.

The Gohmert Newsmax Interview

Newsmax @newsmax

BREAKING 🚨: Representative Louie Gohmert reacts to his lawsuit being dismissed. nws.mx/tv

What is striking about this video, besides all the obvious things, is Gohmert’s false claim that it was the de facto “ruling” of the Trump-appointed Kernodle that “riots and violence in the street” were the only recourse for Trumpists, as “if I [Gohmert] don’t have standing” to challenge Biden’s electors, “nobody does”; “basically, in effect”, Gohmert added, “the ruling [from the federal district court in Texas] would be that you’ve got to go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM.” Gohmert thus positioned his suit as the last stop for Trumpists before violent rebellion, and noted that the “standing” issue—which would have to be addressed by Alito in reviewing Gohmert’s emergency petition—would be dispositive of whether the message from the courts was that a revolution was indeed warranted and necessary.

As Proof has reported, the Proud Boys, who led the assault on the Capitol on January 6—and were coordinating with Roger Stone, Ali Alexander, and Stop the Steal—would ultimately confess that they dressed up as antifa when they attacked the U.S. Capitol. It would subsequently become clear, moreover, that the Trump campaign and legal team had developed a prior plan to blame any violence at the Capitol on antifa and BLM—a stratagem consistent with the blueprint laid out by Trump’s ally Gohmert on Trump’s oft-recommended far-right television network just 96 hours before January 6.

{Note: If you can believe it, Gohmert is a former trial-court and appellate judge. The Texas county he presided in, Smith County, is in the Eastern District of Texas, where he filed suit.}

Enter Texas Senator Ted Cruz

One of the less-noticed components of Gohmert’s incendiary Newsmax interview was his assertion that what Donald Trump’s allies were seeking from Justice Alito was an “evidentiary hearing…[to] allow the evidence of fraud to come in and be introduced.”

It was precisely such “evidence” that Giuliani said Team Trump needed somewhere between “two” and “ten” days to gather when he urged the January 6 mob to pursue “trial by combat” and thereafter called Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) as the attack at the Capitol was ongoing; in his call with Tuberville, Giuliani urged the new senator to produce the longest delay in Congress’s certification process that he possibly could. In other words, the Gohmert lawsuit was indeed, as Powell would later indicate to Stew Peters, working hand in glove with Giuliani’s search for new evidence of supposed “election fraud”—and both of these gambits required a delay, by any means necessary, in the joint session of Congress.

But the myriad connections between the Trump 2020 campaign, Trump’s legal team, and the Gohmert lawsuit don’t end there.

As Proof has reported, Team Trump’s Senate liaison in the lead-up to January 6 was Ted Cruz (R-TX), who is believed to have attended Trump “war room” meetings on January 5 and may well have been one of the senators Ali Alexander bragged about speaking to on Insurrection Eve. It was Cruz who coordinated Senate objections to Biden’s electors; Cruz who spoke to Trump about their joint plan on January 5, per Peril by Robert Costa and Bob Woodward; and Cruz who, two weeks prior to the fateful Oval Office meeting Trump held on December 21, offered to argue Trump’s cause before the Supreme Court.

Given the involvement of members of the Texas Congressional delegation in the Gohmert plot, investigators will surely now seek to determine whether Cruz, a member of that delegation, had spoken to then-president Trump (and/or members of the House from Texas, including Gohmert and two other avowed insurrectionists known to have had meetings with Trump, Brian Babin and Lance Gooden) about arguing the Gohmert case before the Supreme Court on January 6 or shortly thereafter if it made it past Justice Alito’s initial review and was referred to the full Court.

Cruz, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has long been an avid Court-watcher, even commenting on the timing and likelihood of Justice Alito retiring from the Court and its political implications. It is, candidly, almost inconceivable that his close contact with the House Freedom Caucus, the White House, and Trump’s legal team (quartered at the Willard Hotel during Insurrection Week) did not involve any discussion of Gohmert’s lawsuit and how it could be aided by any delays caused by Cruz’s objections in the Senate. Indeed, we already know, as noted above, that in the midst of the Capitol attack Rudy Giuliani called Tommy Tuberville—the co-organizer of the Senate objection to Biden’s electors alongside Cruz—to ensure the two senators would elongate their objections as much as possible.

And how worried is Tuberville about being asked about the conversations he had with Team Trump on January 5? Worried enough that, as Proof exclusively reported, he lied about about being at a Trump International Hotel meeting on Insurrection Eve with other unnamed U.S. senators—one of whom was almost certainly Ted Cruz of Texas—and members of Team Trump.

Conclusion

In view of all the foregoing, the Gohmert lawsuit increasingly looks like the epicenter of what can only be called a seditious conspiracy: a secret and illegal coordination between members of Congress (some previously identified as co-conspirators by Ali Alexander); the Stop the Steal team (involving Alexander, Stone, and the man Trump asked to lead the march on the Capitol, Alex Jones); members of Trump’s legal team; officials from the Trump 2020 campaign; and Trump himself. The only “theory of the case” supported by the evidence is that Trump hoped a combination of Congressional objections and chaos outside the Capitol would cause a sufficient delay in certifying Joe Biden’s win that (a) the Gohmert lawsuit, possibly argued by Ted Cruz, would be able to reach the newly far-right Supreme Court (which Trump had previously noted was primed to hear critical post-election lawsuits), and (b) his legal team would be able to coordinate GOP-led state legislatures decertifying Joe Biden’s victory in enough battleground states to put Biden below 270 electoral votes. At that point, per the just-released Eastman Memo (link)—written by Trump lawyer John Eastman—VP Pence would throw the 2020 election to the House, where eldritch procedures would ensure Trump emerged victorious, as the GOP controls more delegations than the Democrats.

Kelli Ward, head of the Arizona GOP and one of Louie Gohmert’s co-litigants, has made explicit everything described above, publicly connecting the Gohmert lawsuit aimed at Samuel Alito and the march on the Capitol scheduled for January 6. This is what she posted on Twitter on January 4:

Republican Party of Arizona @AZGOP

In today's update, Chairwoman @kelliwardaz announces our motion for emergency injunctive relief that has been sent to Justice Alito & also encourages all patriotic Arizonans who can't travel to D.C. on January 6, 2021, to attend the event at the Arizona State Capitol at 9:00 AM.

Because no good faith argument can be made that VP Pence had the powers Trump’s legal team claimed; because state and federal courts had already found Team Trump’s “evidence” of election fraud to be preposterous and no justification for Congressional objections; because Trump’s plan required an assault on the Capitol to elongate the joint session of Congress beyond January 6; because this scheme also required GOP-led state legislatures to overturn the will of U.S. voters under both secret and public pressure from the White House; because all of the foregoing was coordinated by the leadership of the Republican Party, including then-President Trump; it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the theory of the case the House January 6 Committee and the Federal Bureau of Investigation must now pursue is that January 6 was the result of a seditious conspiracy that went up to the man then behind the Resolute Desk.

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