BREAKING NEWS: Three Obscure Pre-Insurrection Meetings Require Immediate Congressional Investigation

Beyond the key meetings already outlined by Proof, these virtually unreported ones—involving, variously, Trump, members of Congress, and domestic terrorists—require media and Congressional attention.

Introduction

Proof has now written at great length about several pre-insurrection meetings only lightly reported elsewhere. This article adds three even more obscure—but possibly even more important—meetings to that roster. The roster presently includes the following events (see prior Proof reporting for articles on all 15 of these meetings and confirmation from various eyewitnesses to the meetings that all of them occurred):

1. A December 18, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office at the White House;

2. a December 21, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office at the White House;

3. a December 28, 2020 meeting in Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago;

4. a January 3, 2021 meeting in the Oval Office at the White House;

5. a January 4, 2021 meeting in Ivanka Trump’s office at the White House;

6. a January 5, 2021 afternoon meeting in Trump International Hotel;

7. a January 5, 2021 meeting at the Vice Presidential Residence in Washington;

8. a January 5, 2021 meeting in the InfoWars suite at the Willard Hotel;

9. a January 5, 2021 Stop the Steal meeting in the Downtown Marriott Hotel DC;

10. a January 5, 2021 White House-Pentagon conference call;

11. a January 5, 2021 meeting of social media influencers in the White House;

12. a January 5, 2021 VIP area meeting at Stop the Steal’s Freedom Plaza event;

13. a January 6, 2021 VIP area meeting at the White House Ellipse event;

14. January 5 and January 6, 2021 meetings in Roger Stone’s Willard Hotel suite;

15. January 5, January 6, and January 8, 2021 meetings in Rudy Giuliani’s suite (the Team Trump “war room”) at the Willard Hotel in Washington.

It may seem impossible that there could be more meetings than these 15 that Congress must investigate—doing so before any (additional) evidence is destroyed or now-seven-month-old memories (more) plausibly erode—but there are. The meetings discussed below appear to remain almost entirely unknown in the United States beyond a small cadre of January 6 researchers. Now Proof readers will be aware of them as well.

#1: Proud Boy Leadership and Oath Keeper Leadership

Date

Insurrection Eve.

Location

An unidentified parking garage in Washington, DC.

Participants

Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys
Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers
+ five others (unidentified)

Description

A federal judge ordered Enrique Tarrio to leave Washington on January 5. Incredibly, before his banishment from the city Tarrio decided that it was vital that he meet with Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes in a parking garage (both men arrived with other parties who remain unidentified and whose significance, if any, remains unknown).

Lest one presume this was a casual meeting, Channel 4 (UK) not only has video of it but also of Tarrio’s explanation for why it had to happen the day before Insurrection Day and indeed why it had to happen at all: “I guess, for situations like this, where there’s a need to unite, regardless of our differences [Rhodes and I can get along]. We’re fighting the same fight, and I think that’s what’s important.”

We shouldn’t assume that the presence of Channel 4 at the beginning of the meeting means that the well-respected British media outlet was present for the entirety of the encounter—and indeed, it’s not clear that Channel 4 was provided (or even wanted) such a level of access to the private conversations of a man just charged with multiple federal crimes and now consorting with other individuals suspected of federal crimes.

Per the outlet, it merely had “access to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio in the days around the Capitol attack” and was “following his movements” on January 5. It does not say that that access was persistent and total on January 5, or that it was a party to Tarrio’s private conversations. In fact, the Channel 4 video makes clear that at some point the camera crew stepped back for an unspecified period of time and was unable to hear what was said between Tarrio, Rhodes, and the other persons at the meeting:

Moreover, there’s no indication from Channel 4 that its video depicts the full duration of this meeting, or even its multiple locations (if indeedthere was more than one). All the outlet has done is provided brief video of the very beginning of the meeting—when Tarrio and Rhodes shake hands—and an un-timestamped subsequent portion of it, in which the two men are in a group speaking at a distance from the Channel 4 crew. We don’t know the length of the meeting or whether its entirety took place in the parking garage shown above; just so, we don’t know if the man who does most of the talking with Tarrio in the brief clip available on Channel 4 holds a high position in the Oath Keepers. Certainly, it would have been possible for Tarrio and Rhodes to exchange information—orally, via documents, or by a sharing of contact data for future text or cell communications—without directly engaging one another in a way Channel 4 or any other shadowing video unit could capture.

At one point, Channel 4 catches Rhodes sending or receiving a message on his phone during the meeting:

The key here is Tarrio’s statement to Channel 4: that his purpose in meeting Rhodes, a man with whom he says he hasn’t always had a good relationship, was to “unite” for the “fight” that was upcoming on January 6. What did the uniting look like and entail?

Certainly, we know from major-media reporting—and over twenty articles on the topic at Proof—that longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone arrived in Washington without a contingent of bodyguards beyond his NYPD friend Sal Greco; that Tarrio is a longtime Stone aide; that Rhodes’ Oath Keepers ended up serving as bodyguards for Stone during his time in D.C.; and that Stone still won’t say—even in an interview with his InfoWars pal and fellow insurrectionist Alex Jones—how he ended up surrounded by Oath Keepers on both January 5 and January 6.

Just so, as was recently reported by Proof, we now know that Stone was attended, at the Willard, by both Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two groups without a robust history of coordination. How did rank-and-file members of these organizations know that they were expected to cooperate—if indeed they were—on both Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day, such that members of both groups ended up partying together at the Willard with Stone (per his PR flack Kristin M. Davis) following events at the Capitol?

Both the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys are paramilitary extremist organizations, meaning that orders are given and received in the context of a hierarchy. A meeting between Tarrio and Rhodes is therefore much more than a casual encounter between potential rivals: it’s an implicit, even explicit statement that two paramilitary extremist hierarchies are going to be working in concert (or at a minimum not in opposition) in an upcoming encounter. We already know that Tarrio was in contact with his soldiers from a distance during the attack on the Capitol, as Eddie Block confirmed on video, and that Rhodes was coordinating the movements of his forces in the Capitol area from outside the building. Even if the Tarrio-Rhodes meeting captured by Channel 4 had involved nothing more than a sharing of cell phone numbers, it could profoundly alter America’s understanding of which Trumpist forces were in contact with one another on January 6. Congress must quickly find out what was said during this odd subterranean meeting of influential domestic terrorists, and immediately. Identities for all its participants should be established soon as well.

#2: Donald Trump and Nearly 300 State GOP Officials

Donald Trump (l), VP Mike Pence (c), and presidential adviser Peter Navarro (r).

Date

Less than 96 hours before the January 6 insurrection.

Location

National conference call via Zoom.

Participants

Donald Trump, President of the United States
Rudy Giuliani, attorney to President of the United States Donald Trump
John Eastman, attorney to President of the United States Donald Trump
Peter Navarro, top adviser to President of the United States Donald Trump
Phill Kline, the Thomas More Foundation
John Lott, Senior Adviser for Research and Statistics to the Department of Justice
+ “two [additional] briefers” (unidentified)
+ “nearly 300 [Republican state] legislators” (unidentified)*

*Navarro has explicitly confirmed that Republican legislators from battleground states Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were on the call.

Description

Normally, this publication would never cite a far-right website like the Epoch Times. In certain instances, however—and this is particularly true with the Epoch Times and the Daily Caller, a blog founded by Tucker Carlson—far-right websites that aim to be news outlets rather than something less do report on obscure Trumpist events that the more credible outlets (wrongly) ignore. Frequently, they do so to flatter or please Trump and his sycophants, never realizing that the evidence they’re passing on to (they presume) largely Trump supporters is in fact incriminating. Such is the case with this January 3 report by the Epoch Times, whose credibility is bolstered not only by the fact that it was issued contemporaneously with the event it describes but that it precedes Insurrection Day—meaning its authors couldn’t have realized how damning it would become in hindsight. Moreover, and more importantly, one of the two meeting organizers and leaders later acknowledged the meeting had occurred in an interview on Fox News.

What the website details is a January 2 national conference call run by two of the most influential insurrectionists within the inner circle of then-president Donald Trump: Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, and Peter Navarro, perhaps the most trusted Trump adviser outside Trump’s immediate family. The then-president himself was a featured speaker during the conference call, and just as astoundingly, a senior adviser to the Department of Justice was an active participant.

What’s so shocking about this conference call is how few people know about it. Even excellent attorney Daniel Goldman, a follower of the Proof Twitter feed and a longtime counsel to the Adam Schiff-run House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, tweeted as recently as yesterday (August 2, 2021),

Don’t forget the reporting from the Washington Post that Trump was calling over to DOJ almost daily in the lead-up to January 6. Would you bet against him also calling officials in every other state he targeted to overturn the will of the people? I wouldn’t.

While it certainly would be particularly sensational—if unsurprising—if we learned that in addition to hosting GOP officials from Michigan at the White House, calling (as Proof exclusively reported) officials in Arizona, harassing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger by phone, and tweeting obsessively about events in Nevada in a way GOP officials there couldn’t possibly have missed, Trump had made private phone calls to even more Republican legislators from all the states Giuliani was orchestrating a public contestation of, the fact that this large-scale conference call occurred and that even a well-placed Democrat like Goldman doesn’t know about it underscores that the event remains essentially unreported within mainstream major media.

Trump’s presence and participation in the briefing aside, it must also be remembered that Giuliani was at all times on January 2 an “agent” of Donald Trump in legal terms, and Navarro a representative of the Trump administration. So both were in a position to speak on Trump’s behalf on January 2. A conference call convened by these two men would have been received by those asked to join it as a call authorized, encouraged, and indeed absolutely essential to then-President Trump and his interests, and would have been seen that way even if Trump hadn’t contributed to it.

According to the Epoch Times article, Trump authorized a “team” to “brief” literally “hundreds” of state GOP legislators (the publication suggests the number was around 290) less than 96 hours prior to the January 6 insurrection. While nominally the call was “hosted” by the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Foundation, this appears to have been pretextual—as it allowed Trump and his agents to say that they had been invited to address a group, when of course a call of this sort would never be convened by an obscure private entity without the initiation of top officials at the White House.

So what was discussed during this unprecedented conference call? We actually have some idea of the précis of the address:

1. From Navarro (indicating that the purpose of the call was to both induce future action and underline current plans, as well as to spread conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party’s alleged collusion with hostile foreign powers, including Venezuela and China): “These legislators, they’re hot, they’re angry, they want action. We gave them the receipts. We explained exactly how the Democrat Party [sic], as a matter of strategy, stole this election from Donald J. Trump.”

2. From the Epoch Times (suggesting that information from an adviser to the DOJ was disseminated): “Lott, a senior adviser for research and statistics for the Department of Justice, authored a recently released report on election theft.”

3. From the Epoch Times (underlining that legislators were directed to a repository of fake “evidence” of election fraud, and that the purpose of the repository was to empower the legislators to “de-certify” Joe Biden’s election win): “Legislators were briefed on evidence of alleged voter, ballot, and election fraud, which can be viewed on a webpage hosted by ‘Got Freedom?’ ‘This information should serve as an important resource for state legislators as they make calls for state legislatures to meet to investigate the election and consider decertifying their state election results,’ [said] Phill Kline, who heads the Thomas More Foundation’s Amistad Project and who hosted the call on behalf of the group.”

4. From the Epoch Times (implying that Navarro spent some of his portion of the briefing both summarizing a pre-insurrection report he had published less than two weeks earlier and previewing a pre-insurrection report he was less than 48 hours from publishing): “Navarro released a report on December 21, 2020 that summarized and categorized evidence of election theft. In the January 2, 2021 interview [with FNC], he said the report ‘shows beyond a shadow of a doubt this election was stolen’ and…planned to release another report on January 4.”

5. From Navarro (as recounted by the Epoch Times, in an account that suggests that Navarro raised the subject of the appointment of an extraordinary “White House Special Counsel”—which per Sidney Powell would have been her—either in his FNC interview, in speaking to GOP legislators on January 2, or both): “Navarro also suggested that a special counsel may be appointed to investigate if fraud had occurred. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to see a special counsel on this,’ he said.”

6. From the Epoch Times (implying that the Republican legislators knew and were told that they had a role to play in Trump’s plan for January 6, inasmuch as the purpose of the delay of the joint session of Congress Trump was seeking was intended to provoke GOP-led state legislatures to de-certify their Biden electors and award their electors to him instead): “Some of the [United States] senators who committed to objecting to the Electoral College votes [on January 6] said they will do so unless Congress appoints a special commission to conduct a 10-day emergency audit of the election. Individual state legislatures would then vet the findings and have the opportunity to convene and vote on a new set of electors.”

In Navarro’s interview with Fox News—specifically, an interview the top presidential domestic policy adviser conducted on-air with top presidential domestic policy adviser Jeanine Pirro—Pirro speaks of how “we [she and Navarro] talked about [previously and off-air] the fact that now there’s a commission, there’s an effort by ten [to] twelve [United States] senators to start a commission to count, and to review and audit, what happened in this last election”, to which Navarro responds that he will “break a little news for” his fellow Trump adviser and her FNC audience by revealing that “today I was part of a six-person team, we did a Zoom meeting with hundreds and hundreds of state legislators.”

While it’s no surprise that “breaking news” on an opinion program run by a far-right Trump adviser wouldn’t make it into mainstream media, it’s deeply surprising that what Navarro says next hasn’t gotten more attention, especially as he underscores that the event he describes wasn’t a random gathering involving Republicans from across the nation but focused specifically on legislators from “across the [2020 presidential election] battlegrounds”—meaning that it was an action-step-oriented meeting rather than a rallying-the-troops-with-rhetoric meeting. Indeed, after describing the purpose of the meeting to Pirro, Navarro adds, in the same sentence, “…and on Monday I’m coming out with a report, ‘The Art of the Steal’—it’ll be on my Twitter feed—that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt this election was stolen.” Given that Navarro created the report as a member of the Trump administration, it must be seen as a taxpayer-funded document that was explicitly or implicitly encouraged by Trump.

Even though Navarro intended the document to be used to “de-certify” the Biden electors from battleground states, he conceded to Pirro that he felt the Democratic Party had used “a lot of legal means” (emphasis supplied) “to get to an illegal end.” Navarro’s confession that the only illegality he could identify was Trump not being re-elected, rather than anything done by Democrats at the state or federal level, may well end up being seen as relevant to the FBI in a future investigation of Navarro or the man who was his boss when “The Art of the Steal” was written using taxpayer funds.

One reason this interview may not have gotten the attention it deserves is that (a) it was not immediately clear that Trump had participated in this January 2 meeting, though we now know that he did, and (b) Navarro ended the interview by saying that Trump had the authority to vacate Inauguration Day via executive order, a statement so specious that it easily obscured the actually factual submissions that had preceded it.

“They stole it [the White House] and we need to take it back for the People”, Navarro closed his FNC interview by saying, just days before an armed attack on the Capitol.

{Note: Readers of Proof will know that Peter Navarro attended a number of the meetings that are discussed in the Introduction to this article, including, at a minimum—#6, #12, and #13. Certain of his statements about Trump’s supposed powers and the evidence of election fraud also underline his contacts with both Jones’s InfoWars and Team Kraken. See below for more.}

#3: Team Kraken and Many GOP Members of Congress

Above: conspiracy theorist Peter Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.

Date

The morning of Insurrection Eve.

Location

Washington, DC.

Participants

Patrick Byrne, former Overstock CEO
+ “scientists and [cyber-experts]” (names/number undisclosed)
+ “a variety of [U.S.] senators and [agents] of senators” (names/number undisclosed)
+ “an [agent] of Vice President Mike Pence”
+ “delegates of other interested parties” (names/number undisclosed)

Description

It has long been understood, due to exclusive reporting at Proof, that in the afternoon of Insurrection Eve a massive gathering was held at the Trump Townhouse at Trump International Hotel to discuss strategy for Insurrection Day. Proof has catalogued the attendees of that meeting across almost too many articles to count (see the archive).

New evidence suggests that the same space, or one nearby, may have played host to a meeting on the morning of Insurrection Eve—marking it as a different gathering than the afternoon one that Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and others have now admitted occurred (and that some, such as Navarro, still falsely deny attending for reasons that remain unclear). As both events involved pro-Trump GOP senators, the likelihood for overlap in the two meetings’ attendance is high, and therefore there is reason to think that the first meetup would have occurred in the general vicinity of the subsequent one at Trump International.

Another individual who, like Peter Navarro, was at a number of the pre-insurrection meetings referenced in the Introduction to this article is Patrick Byrne. Byrne seemed to be everywhere in the days leading up to the November election, and then in the days immediately prior to the January 6 insurrection; in addition to contacting this author pre-election through an intermediary (his entreaty was ignored), Byrne ended up inside the Oval Office in mid-December, in the Willard Hotel and at Freedom Plaza on Insurrection Eve, and at the White House Ellipse and (again) the Willard Hotel on Insurrection Day. In the interim, he corresponded with everyone from Navarro to Trump to Powell to Giuliani to Alex Jones to Michael Flynn, Michael Lindell, and Robert Patrick Lewis, the unsettling insurrectionist who runs the extremist militia group 1st Amendment Praetorians. Indeed, Byrne even engaged in the now-classic maneuver of all Trump co-conspirators—one that appears in every book of the Proof trilogy, and multiple times—by making Sidney Powell his attorney at a time she was also the president’s attorney, the better to ensure it would be difficult for investigators to find out any information Byrne and Trump had shared with Powell as a conduit.

Byrne ended up at the center of what has come to be known as Team Kraken, a group of radicals who claim to understand complex elections processes sufficiently to know that Trump’s 2020 landslide defeat was the result of a multinational conspiracy which did everything possible to hurt Trump but left no credible evidence of its existence.

In this March 2021 interview, Byrne tells insurrectionist Ann Vandersteel—who, as Proof earlier reported, was inside Donald Trump’s “war room” at the Willard Hotel on January 8—a good deal of nonsense about the sprawling conspiracy he falsely says stole the 2020 election. But what’s more significant is the book Byrne was pushing during his interview, which was published in February 2021 and is called The Deep Rig.

While it’s difficult to properly cite The Deep Rig, as it has no page numbers, Proof can report that in his apparently self-published print-on-demand tome Byrne, who swore repeatedly he’d offer readers the unvarnished truth, submits everything you see below.

Chapter 5-6 (in November, Team Kraken proposes martial law and the seizure of election equipment by federal troops; in December, the plan is presented to Trump):

Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, I, and others developed a Solution-in-a-Can [to the alleged theft of the 2020 election]. It was really the solution we had started with in mid-November, redone by a top-notch lawyer [Powell] and a three-star general [Flynn]. Under various orders signed previously by both [President Barack] Obama and by Trump, if an election had a foreign entanglement, the President had a broad spectrum of powers. The President on his own judgment could sign a “finding” saying that there was adequate evidence…of foreign involvement on numerous fronts….[that] the President [could] use his powers under the requisite Executive Orders to send U.S. Marshals and the National Guard into the six problematic [states], open up the paper ballot backups, and recount them on live-streamed TV.

Ideally, they [the federal troops] would also image the hard drives of (but leave in place) the election equipment in those [six] counties [in six states], for forensic examination. If there were no big discrepancies, Trump would concede. If there were big discrepancies…then more aggressive courses of action could be countenanced, such as re-running the election in those…states….General Flynn drafted a beautiful operational plan for such a mission. One signature from the President and the whole thing would roll.

At one point I learned how the President was staying involved [in November 2020 and early December 2020]. It turned out the answer was: periodically. Mayor Giuliani and [another lawyer Byrne will not name, though one of Jenna Ellis, Joe diGenova, or his wife Victoria Toensing are a possibility, judging from the context] were going over to the White House [periodically] to brief him.

[In the Oval Office on December 18], Sidney and Mike began walking the President through things from our perspective. In brief: there was a quick way to resolve this national crisis because he had power to act in ways he was not using. Under an Executive Order that he had signed in 2018, and another Executive Order that President Obama had signed in 2015, he could “find” that there was evidence of foreign interference with the election. Doing so would give him authority to do big things, but we were going to ask him to do one small thing: direct a federal force (we suggested the United States Marshal Service and the National Guard) to go to the six problematic [states] in question and, on live-streamed TV, recount the paper ballots that were held as [a] fail-safe back-up. It would only take a few days….We pointed out that, it being December 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting…problematic…counties) finished before Christmas [2020].

Byrne then told the president to name Powell his “Special Counsel” and Flynn his “Field Marshall”—the German term being Feldmarschall, appropriate to note here as Byrne was proposing the end of American democracy and the launch of an autocratic American government—and added that “You should see how well Mike has this planned, it would run like clockwork.” Per Byrne, Trump eventually told him, Flynn, Powell, and White House counsel Pat Cipolline, “I have decided, [and] now I’m saying it: ‘Sidney Powell is hereby appointed as White House Special Counsel.’ There, that’s it….[And] I grant Sidney Powell a Top Secret security clearance.” According to Byrne, the meeting ultimately lasted for hours, extended past midnight, and was conducted in more than one location in the White House.

{Note: Remember that Powell later conceded to a federal court that everything she said to the president and the nation about the 2020 election was a lie designed to overturn the election.}

Chapter 7 (Patrick Byrne is told by a Trump agent in late December of 2020 that the president wants to see him at Mar-a-Lago to follow up on their prior conversation, this occurring during the same time-period that Roger Stone met Trump at Mar-a-Lago):

[On December 24] I got a call from someone in Trump-orbit. The caller told me that I should get down to Florida, to somewhere near Mar-a-Lago, and it was being arranged that I could have another short meeting with Trump, maybe as little as ten minutes.

…

Soon I received a call from a well-known person who is publicly associated with Trump….[w]ith him [this “well-known person”] on the call was a colleague of his [the Trump associate], and they told me to get over to Mar-a-Lago and ask for [a person Byrne won’t name].

Byrne indicates that the United States Secret Service thereafter blocked him from seeing Trump—not because they had orders to do so, but apparently because Byrne didn’t have an appointment that had previously formalized in their paperwork.

This next section describes the third meeting discussed in the Introduction to this article—and it’s the one that Congress needs to focus on urgently, even if there’s reason to doubt whether every component of Byrne’s narrative is accurate. Indeed, if even the broadest strokes of Byrne’s account below are true, it is vital that our elected representatives get to the bottom of it.

Chapter 7 (Byrne describes a two-hour meeting at an undisclosed D.C. location on the morning of Insurrection Eve; note that all the parentheticals below are Mr. Byrne’s):

On the morning of January 5, a meeting was had by myself and a few of our [Team Kraken] scientists and [cyber experts], and a variety of senators and delegates [designated agents] of senators, a delegate of Vice President Mike Pence, and delegates of other interested parties.

The scientists laid out the case simply and clearly. They answered questions for a couple hours, and after those couple hours, it was clear no one doubted what we were telling them: that a sophisticated operation had rigged the presidential election. The delegate from Vice President Pence went directly back from our meeting to brief the Vice President, I was told.

I am told that Pence heard the [content of the January 5 morning] briefing, agreed with its implications, and decided on a course of action: when he stood before the Senate the next day, January 6, he was going to call for a 7-day suspension [of the joint session of Congress], so that individual state legislatures could look into whatever they wanted to look into, even perform quick investigations, then re-vote their electoral votes. Both on the day in question [January 5] and days later, this fact was confirmed to me: at 3:30PM [ET] on January 5, Pence was solidly there [on board with helping Trump overturn the 2020 election results].

….

I later learned from proverbial “White House insiders” that on Tuesday afternoon, January 5, at 3:30PM [ET], Pence had indeed “been there.” He had been ready to stand up in from of the Senate on January 6 and call for a 7-day recess, to let the states consider all the information that had come in (and could be generated) about election irregularities, then re-commit their electoral votes. And he stayed that way all the way until [January 5] at 6:30PM [ET]. At that point, a gentleman named Marc Short—Chief of Staff of Vice President Pence—had talked Pence out of it.

Byrne then says that both he and Flynn were invited, on January 5, to speak alongside Trump on January 6 at the White House Ellipse—an invitation which would imply that Trump was all right with them making their ideas public—but that the invitation was rescinded, for unknown reasons, at the last moment, in fact, it appears, under an hour before the two men and their designees were slated to speak for (Byrne says) about “30 minutes.”

Given the plan we already know Byrne’s team had devised for the nation—martial law, though not couched that way—it’s impossible to believe that Byrne outlined for GOP members of Congress, agents of other members of Congress, and an agent of the Vice President of the United States all the supposed “evidence” of fraud in the 2020 election without also noting that a so-called “Solution-in-a-Can” existed to quickly fix all of it. It’s therefore impossible to believe GOP members of Congress and the Vice President were not aware, as of midday on Insurrection Eve, that Trump was under the influence of a group of persons advocating for him to seize control of the United States by force.

This may explain why the only known attendee at Mike Pence’s January 5 war room, Bubba Saulsbury, fled the city immediately after his meeting with the Vice President, as was exclusively reported by Proof.

There are other revelations in the book, such as the part in Chapter 5 in which Byrne reveals that the Trump campaign and Trump’s legal team shared an office—which further underscores how Team Trump might have thought about the “war room” that Giuliani was running from the Willard Hotel during the week of the insurrection—and that convicted felon Bernie Kerik played a bigger role in Trump’s efforts to spread the “Big Lie” than anyone realizes. Byrne’s claims that Giuliani was an incompetent lush during the transition are almost as easy to credit. The entirety of Byrne’s presentation bespeaks a joint Team Trump operation that had no lines it wouldn’t cross—and no conspiracy theory it wouldn’t credit—if the end result was Trump’s re-installation as President of the United States on January 20, 2021. All three of these under-reported meetings underline both this fact and the broader threat America faced on January 6.

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