NEW: Trump Addressed Extremists Via Zoom 96 Hours Before the Capitol Attack—Some of Whom Thereafter Trespassed on Capitol Grounds
NEW: Trump Addressed Extremists Via Zoom 96 Hours Before the Capitol Attack—Some of Whom Thereafter Trespassed on Capitol Grounds
Trump made two historically important phone calls on January 2, 2021. One is now the focus of a criminal investigation in Georgia. The other is almost never spoken of— but may be just as significant.
Introduction
On Saturday, January 2, 2021, from 2PM ET until after 4PM ET, Donald Trump, his legal team, and several others spoke by Zoom to a much larger contingent of far-right insurrectionists than was previously understood. While it has long been known (and was reported on by Proof here) that Trump addressed nearly 300 GOP state legislators on the call—a call in which the then-president outlined the coup plot now known as “The Green Bay Sweep”—new audio evidence indicates that the composition of Trump’s January 2 audience was significantly broader than originally thought. And further evidence developed by Proof and its readership establishes the profoundly troubling reasons why this was so. This new picture of Trump’s activities on January 2—the same day he sought to coerce Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into “finding” new votes for him through threats of prosecution and the end of Raffensperger’s political career, an event that is now the subject of a grand jury inquiry in Fulton County—underscores how close Trump’s January 2021 coup plot came to achieving its objective: the end of American democracy as we know it.
The entry-point for this new Proof report—though not its ultimate focus—was this January 4, 2021 podcast episode at BKP Politics, a far-right broadcast recorded in Ellijay, Georgia. Ellijay is in Georgia’s 9th congressional district, the fourth-most pro-Trump district in the United States; it is represented in the House of Representatives by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), the man who famously compared the January 6 rioters to “tourists” despite photographs showing him barricading a door on the day itself.
Two days before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the host of BKP Politics, a far-right extremist who hides his name but not his face, interviewed Northampton County (PA) Republican Party chairwoman Gloria Lee Snover, an insurrectionist.
Despite not being a state legislator, Snover—who trespassed on Capitol grounds on January 6—participated in the January 2 Trump conference call allegedly intended for state legislators only. In her interview with the north Georgia man known as “BKP,” Snover discussed how then-president Trump outlined a “game plan for Wednesday [January 6]” during his January 2, 2021 Zoom call.
While there are components of Snover’s account of the call that remain newsworthy—for instance, we learn from it that Donald Trump addressed the January 2 Zoom call immediately after getting off the phone with Raffensperger, prompting him to begin the former call by insisting that if Raffensperger were a loyal political supporter of his he’d change Georgia from the Joe Biden column to the Trump column (another sign Trump had no interest in the effective administration of elections in Georgia)—this article focuses on a component of the January 2 call Snover describes that has never previously been considered: how it incited, and was intended to incite, illegal activity on January 6 itself. That Snover should never have been on the call only underscores that its audience was not what (or who) we had been led to believe it was.
Snover’s involvement in the January 2 Zoom call as an unelected insurrectionist who intended to illegally enter the Capitol building on January 6 opens a Pandora’s Box of new revelations about one of the most infamous days in American history—notably, that it was intended to seal into law (and nearly did) a jurisprudential con-job known as Independent State Legislature doctrine (ISL).
The former Solicitor General for Ronald Reagan, staunch conservative constitutional law professor Charles Fried, told MSNBC 72 hours ago that ISL is a “slow-moving coup d’état”, citing the current far-right Supreme Court’s apparent intention to make this repeatedly SCOTUS-rejected right-wing fever dream the law of the land starting in Summer 2023 (through a case called Moore v. Harper). The Washington Post calls Moore v. Harper “the new Supreme Court case that imperils American democracy.”
What Professor Fried, the Post, and others appear not to realize is that not one or two but six distinct insurrectionist groups tied to Trump aimed to use January 6 as a pretext to install ISL into law in January 2021 rather than mid-2023—and came within a hair’s breadth of doing so. Had Trump’s January 2 call reached as many unelected Gloria Lee Snovers as it intended to, American democracy would already be a thing of the past.
What Is Independent State Legislature Doctrine (ISL)?
You can find an excellent primer on Independent State Legislature doctrine here, but a fair summary of it would be this: under ISL, state legislatures have absolute authority over how their state’s various elections (local, state, and federal) are run, with the only check on these legislatures being the United States Constitution.
According to the dictates of ISL, neither a state constitution nor a state supreme court nor a state executive has any final power over how elections are run. This includes the determination of how presidential electors—state delegates to the Electoral College—are chosen for the national presidential election held every four years.
The upshot is that, under ISL, state politicians can pick which presidential candidate has won their state every four years, taking this authority away from the voters of their state. ISL holds that state legislators can declare as the victor of any statewide vote whosoever they wish—even a candidate who has lost the popular vote in the state—and that no one anywhere in the state can stop them from doing so.
But wait a minute, you might say: wouldn’t the voters of a state just vote out of office any state legislator who picked a presidential candidate different from the one who’d won the popular vote in that state?
And the sad answer to that observation is this one: they would if they could, but by and large they no longer can.
Gerrymandering Meets the ISL
The fig leaf of respectability ISL clings to, after decades and decades of being rejected by the Supreme Court as a far-right fantasy, is the notion that the Founding Fathers would have wanted the governmental bodies “closest to the people”—state legislative branches—to have plenary power (i.e., absolute authority) over elections rather than either (a) an unelected state supreme court, or (b) a presumably easily corruptible sole state executive official like a Governor or Secretary of State. But Supreme Court after Supreme Court has made clear that ISL is a misreading of two clauses in the United States Constitution, the Elections Clause (“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations”) and the Presidential Electors Clause (“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors”).
More specifically, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that these clauses actually refer to the system of checks and balances the Constitution repeatedly underlines: the power of legislatures to make laws, as then executed by state executive-branch officials and as then interpreted by state courts. The thrust of every word of the Constitution is that no one branch should have absolute authority over any sphere of civic life, an idea Republicans (who have made a show of being anti-government for decades now) have always clung to fervently.
Until now, that is. Until Donald Trump, Trumpism, and the current far-right Supreme Court—which sees an opening for a return to Big Government now that the levers of long-term power appear to be held, at the state level, by a Republican Party of which six of them are members.
It all comes down to, as Proof has often said, the historically ruthless gerrymandering the Republican Party has authored ever since Chief Justice John Roberts—who’s been on an anti-voting rights crusade his entire judicial career—wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, the case that gutted the Voting Rights Act and declared it open season for the sort of racist congressional redistricting that Act had forbidden.
After the fall of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans across the country launched a redistricting campaign so obviously intended to thwart the will of voters—to make state legislatures in no way reflect the will of their states’ voters—that the notion of a state legislature being “closest to the people” became farcical. In fact, most state legislatures are now little more than the codification of a deeply amoral realpolitik: politicians grabbing for whatever power they can however they can, democracy be damned. And the overwhelming majority of the politicians who’ve unscrupulously grabbed power in this fashion are Republicans.
It was, of course, at this very moment that Trumpist Republicans decided that making state legislatures the final, inalterable authority on choosing presidential electors was a good idea.
And it’s at this very moment that the far-right majority on the Supreme Court appears to now—suddenly, conveniently, with transparent partisan intent—agree with them.
If, as expected, ISL becomes the law of the land in Summer 2023 (Moore v. Harper will be argued this December, but the ruling in the case won’t come out until the middle of next year) it will make the Dobbs decision—which overruled Roe v. Wade—look like a mere skirmishing volley. Why? Because after ISL, there may never be another free and fair election in the United States. The GOP can install Donald Trump as president in 2024 whether he wins or loses the popular vote nationally or in a sufficient number of states to win the Electoral College; in short, he can be made POTUS again by a party he rules with an iron fist, and there’ll be nothing anyone in America can do about it.
What most Americans don’t realize is that Trumpist insurrectionists intended to have the United States reach this dire moment in its history prior to January 6, 2021. Every Trump agent, aide, associate, ally, attorney, and adviser was working toward this end in December 2020 and early January 2021. It was an effort that culminated in a single conference call on January 2, 2021.
The Call
The Basics
Top Trump presidential adviser Peter Navarro—self-admitted co-author of Trump’s Green Bay Sweep coup plot—was the first to discuss the call in public, admitting on Fox News on January 2, 2021 that earlier that day he had been on a conference call with “hundreds and hundreds” of state legislators “across the battleground[ ] [states]—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.” Navarro was clear on the notion that only elected “state legislators” had been involved in the call, as was every other leading Trumpist who summarized—in oddly elusive terms—the two-hour private event Trump himself had “attended” virtually.
This claim—that only “state legislators” were involved—would turn out to be untrue.
Navarro said that the people on the call were “hot”, “angry”, and “wanted action”, descriptors that become even more striking when the actual composition of the call’s audience is understood. Navarro refers to the several men who led the call (besides Trump himself) as a “team” that included top Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman as well as a man named John Lott (about whom readers will learn much more below). According to Navarro, this small team sought to convince GOP-led state legislatures that “the Democrat [sic] Party, as a matter of strategy, stole this election [the 2020 presidential election] from Donald J. Trump.”
In his January 2, 2021 Fox News interview (which he conducted with fellow Trump presidential adviser Jeanine Pirro), Navarro linked the presentation he had given to state legislators earlier in the day to a single document and link that he said would be going out to the general public on Monday, January 4, 2021: a wholly unofficial report entitled “The Art of the Steal.” This is significant because an earwitness to the call—the aforementioned Gloria Lee Snover—would later say that its focus was a document and link that was now being made public, a seeming reference to Navarro’s “report.”
What is astonishing about Navarro’s implication that the focus of the January 2 call was his report is that he conceded on Fox News that evening that, in his “report,” the most he could find was that the Democratic Party had used “legal means” to win the 2020 election.
In other words, even if Navarro believed the final result of the 2020 election had been somehow “illegal”—as he insisted—he could not identify or articulate any misconduct by the Democratic Party. Indeed, what he said it was “illegal” for the Democrats to do was “strategically game” a national election, which of course is not only what political parties do in every election but what the 2016 Trump presidential campaign (which Navarro supported) did to a degree never before seen in U.S. politics via Cambridge Analytica microtargeting, blackmail held over the head of the FBI, the dissemination of misinformation authored by a Kremlin front operation (WikiLeaks), public and private requests for illegal foreign election interference, and much, much more.
But Navarro was also—though Americans couldn’t have known it at the time—tying the January 2 Zoom call to another recent event: a 3-hour December 18, 2020 meeting at the White House (spanning the Oval Office and Trump’s personal living quarters in the building, the Presidential Residence) involving Trump, Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne, and Sidney Powell. Flynn, Byrne, and Powell had been transported to the White House by 1st Amendment Praetorian leader Robert Patrick Lewis, had been admitted to the White House by an aide to Navarro (Garrett Ziegler), and had made their way to the Oval Office and Trump in an unauthorized way described by Byrne as a covert operation—as they didn’t have an appointment, and it had been made clear to them by Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows that they weren’t to see the president.
Following this meeting—during which Flynn and Byrne urged Trump to name Powell his “special counsel”, and further urged the president to declare martial law, seize all voting machines in six battleground states, and demand a national re-vote be held under the armed supervision of the United States Armed Forces and National Guard—Trump put out a tweet, right after his unauthorized guests had left his company in the wee hours of December 19, calling for a “wild” protest in Washington on January 6 and advertising that Navarro had come out with a new report on the 2020 election.
When Navarro, whose top aide Ziegler made possible (but didn’t attend) the December 18 coup-plotting meeting, revealed on Fox News on January 2, 2021 that he was about to issue a second report of the sort Trump had referenced in his December 19 tweet (which second report he had already summarized that afternoon over Zoom) he added, “I would not be surprised to see a special counsel on this.” His apparent knowledge of the December 18 meeting at the White House—the only time and place in which discussion of the appointment of a special counsel is known to have occurred—as well as his apparent feeling (bolstered by Trump’s tweet mentioning his work as soon as the December 18 meeting had concluded) that the events of that night were tied to his research, could not have been clearer. So if in fact it was the second of Navarro’s post-election reports that was the focus of Trump and his team’s presentation to an “angry” audience that “wanted action” on January 2, it gives us a strong sense of the tenor of the conversation and perhaps even the sort of militant action some of those on the call wanted and expected. (Navarro and Bannon have since been indicted by DOJ, while Flynn and Lewis have pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid any federal questioning. Powell is now in the process of being disbarred by the State Bar Association of Texas.)
{Note: Until now, the January 2, 2021 Navarro-Pirro Fox News interview had been best known among American media for featuring Navarro’s jaw-dropping claim that the constitutionally mandated January 20 inauguration date “can be changed, actually. We can go past that date. We can go past that date if we need to. We got to get this right, as Lara Trump said. Get it right—they stole it, we need to take it back for ‘the People’ [Trump voters].” At the time Navarro’s words were seen as potentially traitorous, as they implied Trump’s presidency could be extended beyond its constitutionally mandated limit by extra-judicial fiat. One wonders if this view, expressed by Peter Navarro on national TV on the evening of January 2, was also expressed by him during the Zoom call that day involving Trump, Giuliani, and Eastman. Certainly, it’s unclear why he would say something on cable that he wouldn’t say on Zoom.}
Lest one wonder what justification Trump and his legal team used to convene a call with hundreds of GOP politicians just 96 hours before the federal certification of an election Trump lost in a popular-vote and electoral-college landslide, it turns out that the call was actually “hosted” by Phill Kline, an indefinitely suspended attorney then directing the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, the former of which was running a 501(c)4 nonprofit “election integrity watchdog group” called Got Freedom?
Like the headed-toward-disbarment Trump lawyer Eastman and the headed-toward-disbarment Trump lawyer Powell and the headed-toward-disbarment Trump lawyer Giuliani, the indefinitely suspended lawyer Kline has a view of American democracy—as yet adopted by no court anywhere in America—known as the Independent State Legislature doctrine (see above).
By January 2, 2021, Kline’s Got Freedom? had published a website intended to serve as a compendium of supposed 2020 election-fraud evidence, which website included and incorporated Navarro’s two unofficial “reports” (the first, published on December 17, 2020, called “The Immaculate Deception”, and the second, first presented on January 2, 2021 but published for the public on January 4, called “The Art of the Steal”). It may be, then, that when earwitness Snover refers to a single website that the audience of Trump’s January 2 Zoom call was directed to she’s at once referring to Got Freedom’s now-defunct website and the key documents housed thereby, including Navarro’s two enthusiastically presidentially endorsed reports. In his book In Trump Time, Navarro claims that upon completing his first post-election report on December 17—perhaps not coincidentally, 24 hours before his aide let Team Kraken into the White House to discuss a plan of action with Trump that Navarro’s report had implicitly endorsed—Trump immediately thereafter told his assistant Molly Michael to get a copy of the report to every GOP member of both the House and U.S. Senate by the next morning.
The Participants: Got Freedom?
Proof readers should understand that, as of January 2, 2021, Got Freedom? was not a venerable institution. In fact, it had been formed less than 60 days earlier. In its less-than-a-blink-of-an-eye existence as a voracious lawsuit-filing far-right entity, it had inexplicably made the aforementioned indefinitely suspended lawyer (Kline) its leader, “led [the] effort to promote fake Trump electors [in December 2020]” per a news report in its leader’s home state, and become a “partner” of the 2020 Trump presidential campaign—whatever that means—per Trump personal lawyer Giuliani.
Yet within weeks of creating a litigation arm, amidst its participation in an illegal plot to overturn the 2020 election via fake electors, the (itself only 18 months old) Amistad Project declared itself “the nation’s leading election integrity watchdog.” It certainly seemed as though Amistad’s new litigation project felt it needed to accrue a great deal of legitimacy fast—though for what purpose remained unclear until it scored what from the outside looking in seemed an unlikely role: bringing together the President of the United States, his legal team, members of his presidential administration like Navarro, more than 300 Republican state legislators, and leading far-right activists for a two-hour conference call just 96 hours before an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol that stood to politically benefit all of the aforementioned.
The existence of Got Freedom? as a going concern—however flimsy and fly-by-night—enabled it to issue a press release after the conference call whose title (for starters) did all it could to simultaneously acknowledge the event and downplay the now-obvious fact that it had been coordinated by the White House as part of an illegal conspiracy.
“Election Integrity Group Meets with Legislators From Contested States”, the press release was rather innocuously titled, somehow leaving out of its headline the highly engaged involvement of the sitting President of the United States. Even the release’s subtitle was misleading, asserting that “National leaders discussed overwhelming evidence of voter, ballot, and election irregularities, and lawlessness in the presidential election of November 3, 2020” when in fact all of the discussion of this topic came from two sources—President Donald Trump and his lawyers—the former of whom was indeed a “national leader” but wasn’t mentioned in the press release’s title, and the latter of whom couldn’t be described as “national leaders” at all. It might have seemed, then, to an outside observer, that Got Freedom? was unusually invested in minimizing the role of the White House in setting up and conducting the Zoom call to the extent practicable.
Its press release went on to insist that the January 2 call occurred “at the request of state legislators”; hide the identity of the true leaders of the call through the use of the passive voice (“The documentation discussed during the briefing is being made available for public consumption”); and save the revelation that the President of the United States was heavily involved in the event until the third paragraph. The release was cagey about the call’s participants (“Nearly 300 state lawmakers and others”, it said, sans italics); twice claimed that men clearly using their authority as federal employees were in fact “appearing [on the call] in [their] personal capacity”; tried to move the Zoom call as far away from the Thomas More Society as possible (by solely connecting it to Got Freedom?, an obscure outgrowth of the Amistad Project, itself an outgrowth of The Thomas More Society); failed to identify either Giuliani or Eastman as Trump lawyers, possibly to further distance the event from Trump and his legal maneuvers, with which the Amistad Project was in fact semi-officially partnered; echoed long-simmering anti-Semitic Trumpist conspiracy theories about Jewish billionaire George Soros by accusing Jewish billionaire Mark Zuckerberg of spending “$400 million….[to] depress[ ] turnout in conservative areas” during the 2020 election; and closed with a sentence that’s in hindsight ominous because it can be read to imply that, by making its fraudulent data and accusations public, Got Freedom? intended to also influence individuals besides elected officials (perhaps even those euphemistic “others” mentioned early on in its January 2 press release): “We’re pleased to provide this information so that those who develop policy and make decisions will have all the relevant information available to them” (emphasis supplied).
{Note: That the Zuckerberg attack was merely another Soros-based anti-Semitic conspiracy theory was confirmed in a January 5, 2021 Steve Bannon-Peter Navarro interview, in which Navarro clarified that while the Amistad Project may have only mentioned Zuckerberg in its press release, in fact the “grand strategy” Navarro had outlined for GOP state legislators on January 2 posited that both the Jewish Mark Zuckerberg and the Jewish George Soros jointly acted as “Democratic operatives” in helping the Democratic Party steal the 2020 election. Per Navarro, what these two Jews did in secret coordination with one another was “strategically game the whole [election] process—they went in, across six states, [and] they changed laws, they changed rules, they changed guidance, and sometimes they did it legally but sometimes they bent or broke the law.” See 33:25 in this video to hear Navarro link these two supposed Jewish criminals—men whose only actual connection seems to be their religion. It remains unclear why the Amistad Project whitewashed Navarro’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to suggest it targeted only one Jew rather than two. Certainly, readers of its brief press release would have no idea that Navarro in his written presentation was accusing two Jewish men of leading the effort to land a “brass-knuckle punch in the face to the American people and a kick in the groin to American democracy.” While Navarro has since insisted that he had no idea his top aide Garrett Ziegler let Team Kraken into the White House just 24 hours after Navarro himself had published a report he desperately wanted Trump to act upon, it’s worth noting that in this July 2021 interview with insurrectionist David K. Clements—set up by insurrectionist Lin Wood—Ziegler cites German-American economist Friedrich List, whose writings inspired the economic policies of Nazi Germany, as one of his chief influences. His other major influence, Ziegler avers, is Peter Navarro. In the interview, Ziegler calls the 2020 election a “coup”, the COVID-19 pandemic “not real”, and President Joe Biden a mere “administrator”; just as tellingly, he says he “loathes” former Jewish Trump adviser Gary Cohn “because he [Cohn] truly doesn’t care about the United States.” Ziegler adds that Navarro felt he was competing with the Jewish Cohn as to “everything having to do with human life.” Ziegler also says that one of the gravest errors of U.S. economic policy is that it funds academics who say “all white people are racist.” He says his biggest fear is “a world run by [Muslim-cum-Buddhist] Pierre Omidyar and [Jewish Holocaust survivor George] Soros.” Ziegler even goes out of his way to call Jewish columnist Bill Kristol “very evil”, adding that Kristol is a “very portly man” and “an eternal enemy of mine, literally [an] eternal enemy.”
Ziegler also reveals that he, Navarro, and several other Navarro aides—with whom he says he co-wrote (alongside Navarro) Navarro’s two post-election “reports”—are now the subject of a federal Hatch Act investigation, which he calls “a great honor” because he says the Hatch Act, which prevents the use of taxpayer funds for partisan political activities, is “is one of the stupidest statutes in the history of the country.” This underscores how cavalierly Navarro’s office took the idea of “acting in a personal capacity,” for all its lip-service to the concept. Ziegler, who admits that his friends believed the two Navarro reports were intended to get the Supreme Court to take up an ISL case, boasts that “I’ve seen more than any twenty-five year-old in the country”—even as it’s not clear that Congress has yet subpoenaed him. The New York Times reports that his visitor-access “credentials” were revoked after the December 18, 2020 “Team Kraken” incident, which Ziegler says he aided because of his “Christian faith.” He also implies—which certainly should get Congress’ attention—that he was present at the coup meeting, though this has not yet been confirmed. At one point he tells Clements that the Republican Party needs to “stop electing nice guys. We need to elect Christian zealots.”}
As for the last sentence of the Got Freedom? press release—“We’re pleased to provide this information so that those who develop policy and make decisions will have all the relevant information available to them”—if we didn’t know what we do now about who was on the January 2 call with President Trump other than elected officials, we would not be in a position to consider that Kline and his nascent “election integrity group” may have been referencing decision-makers other than elected officials.
Not to be coy, we are speaking here of unelected insurrectionists willing to engage in real-time acts of lawlessness.
Lest you doubt whether Donald Trump would openly associate himself with a group seeking to appeal to such persons just four days before the biggest day of his political life, consider that the Amistad Project was itself such a group.
As reported by KCUR in Kansas City,
On Friday [January 21, 2022] the New York Times reported that as members of the Electoral College were set to meet on December 14, 2020, and certify electors in all 50 states, a lawyer for The Amistad Project tried to deliver a fake slate of pro-Trump electors to the Michigan Legislature but was turned away by state troopers. The Times reported that ]Phil] Kline on the same day fanned across right-wing media outlets promoting the fake elector plan.
It’s a rare association of lawyers that has hostile police contact within its first months of existence, but again the leader of the group in question—charged with overseeing an operation that primarily files lawsuits—had by then been indefinitely suspended from the practice of law. This perhaps explains why Kline was not involved in the actual “Amistad-Trump” post-election lawsuits themselves, but was instead spending his time peddling a conspiracy to seat fake electors and thereby end American democracy.
{Note: The Attorneys General of at least two states, Michigan and New Mexico, have now asked the Department of Justice to investigate the Amistad Project-Trump campaign plot.}
Approximately a week after the Amistad Project began pushing its fake elector plot nationwide, it filed an ISL-inspired lawsuit in D.C. demanding that state legislatures be given the power—for the first time in American history—to exclusively issue state certifications of presidential electors. As KCUR reports, the federal suit was quickly dismissed, with the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, holding that the Amistad Project’s position lay “somewhere between a willful misreading of the Constitution and fantasy.” In fact, Judge Boasberg was so angry at the Amistad Project for bringing such an irresponsible lawsuit into his court that he “referred The Amistad Project’s lawyer in the case, Erick Kaardal, for possible disciplinary action.”
At the time he was mysteriously tapped to start up an “election integrity watchdog group” following the 2020 election, Kline was a professor at Liberty University—the same institution at which Ken Klukowski had taught before beginning his work with Trump lawyer John Eastman and then being mysteriously tapped to work at DOJ as senior counsel to the environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, Trump briefly made acting Attorney General of the United States on January 3, 2021—the day after Klukowski’s fellow Liberty University faculty member Kline hosted a national Zoom call for Trump.
The Participants: John Eastman
As we learn from this episode of Steve Bannon’s “War Room”, John Eastman gave his pro-ISL lecture on Phill Kline’s January 2 Zoom call less than 24 hours after giving a similar address on a conference call whose participants remain unknown to this day except for one man: Bannon himself.
During his interview with Mr. Eastman—conducted shortly after the aforementioned Zoom call—Bannon asked Eastman to repeat his lecture from the night before, which presumably was also the lecture Eastman had just given to the 300 or more people on Zoom (with Trump himself, Eastman’s client, in attendance).
So what claims did this oft-repeated, pre-insurrection, pro-ISL John Eastman lecture contain?
On the evidence of the summary Eastman gave the same day as the Amistad Project call, the tone of the lecture was intemperate. Eastman repeated multiple times, in speaking with Bannon that day, that the 2020 presidential election had been “illegally conducted”, which would of course make Joe Biden an illegitimate president-elect. Eastman was particularly incensed about the 2020 vote in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin, the first two of these three being states his fellow Ginni Thomas friend (and fellow Trump lawyer) Cleta Mitchell had told Ginni Thomas’ CNP Action group to focus on during a November 2020 “workshop”.
{Note: Later in the conversation, Eastman says the states he is most intensely interested in are Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—the three states Cleta Mitchell had spoken of to CNP Action 45 days earlier but with the addition of Wisconsin. This addition, as we’ll see below, was no accident. In fact, it was key to everything Eastman was doing at the time.}
Echoing his co-Zoom-call-leader Navarro, Eastman’s specific objection to the conduct of the 2020 election amounts not to a claim that the Democratic Party committed any crimes, but that state elections officials and state judges in several states issued pre-election opinions pursuant to their respective constitutional authorities that Eastman happens to dislike and which arguably disadvantaged Trump—and which, by January 2, Eastman was demanding state legislators overrule using ISL as their sole justification.
Eastman follows this fringe argument by reasoning that, unless the state legislatures aggregate unto themselves (under ISL) powers never before sought let alone wielded by state legislatures, the 2020 election must be described as “illegal” and “failed.”
The third and final step in Eastman’s reasoning is the most insidious. In a complex bit of tautological rhetoric, Eastman submits that if state legislatures do not move ex post to overrule the legal actions taken by judges and elected executive-branch officials pre-election, it means the whole election in which these actions occurred is ex ante illegal.
This is a sure way to confuse lay Trumpists who deem the 2020 presidential election ex ante illegal for other, even more attenuated reasons—like the supposed plot involving “Italian satellites” (called Italygate by insurrectionists) pushed by Ziegler in his July 2021 interview with David Clements, or Team Kraken’s chronologically paradoxical claim that long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) stole the 2020 election through vote-switching software implanted into Dominion Voting machines, or the litany of made-up nonsense about dead voters and underage voters and “mules” that Trump and his agents and allies have been spreading for 18 months despite all of it having been thoroughly debunked by experienced professionals over and over again.
Fortunately for John Eastman, he doesn’t have to stand alongside far-right grifters like Dinesh D’Souza (author of a debunked propaganda-and-disinformation reel known as “2,000 Mules”) to indulge and deepen the other existing “ex ante illegal” beliefs about the election held by Trump supporters, as other members of Trump’s legal team (like Powell) were doing that work throughout December 2020. Indeed, in a stunning May 2022 federal court filing from the House January 6 Committee, the bipartisan select committee reveals that even as John Eastman was claiming to have evidence of fraud in multiple states—as many as ten, according to his co-counsel Rudy Giuliani—in fact he was privately telling fellow Ginni Thomas friend and Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell that he had “no idea” about any supposed election misconduct anywhere but Georgia.
Below is the relevant portion of the House committee’s May 26, 2022 federal filing:
But for all that Eastman avoids repeating the claims of Team Kraken, his words are nevertheless those of a radical. He tells Steve Bannon on January 2, 2021 that unless President-elect Biden’s electors are decertified, America will have as President of the United States “some guy that didn’t get elected.”
Were the only audience members for Eastman’s radical January 2 presentation state GOP lawmakers, one might think Eastman’s hyperbolic rhetoric would fall on deaf ears. In fact, as we’ll see later in this article, others were listening as Trump’s lawyer—with Trump present—issued an unambiguous legal opinion that it would actually be illegal for Democrat Joe Biden to take possession of the Oval Office on January 20.
There was a far more unsettling component to the January 2, 2021 Bannon-Eastman interview, however. In rehashing for Bannon’s viewership and listenership a chat the two men had apparently had the night before, Bannon submitted for Eastman’s eager agreement that the issue of the 2020 presidential election would eventually, and on an “expedited” basis, end up before Eastman’s friend Ginni’s husband Clarence Thomas and his eight peers on the Supreme Court. Bannon averred that Eastman’s previously expressed view was that when (not if) his claims made it to Thomas and his peers, the decision of the Court would be “flip this whole thing back to the state legislatures.”
This victory for ISL was, Bannon made clear, what he anticipated was about to happen as well.
So why did Eastman and Bannon, having discussed the matter privately just the night before—on New Year’s Day—have such a high degree of confidence that the Supreme Court would solidify in American jurisprudence, for the first time ever, the very same Independent State Legislature doctrine that nearly the entirety of the American legal establishment had rejected, and that only far-right fringe radicals were still pushing?
This article in The Carolina Journal may provide the answer to that question.
The article details the history of the case that may permanently end our democracy: Moore v. Harper, which if it goes the way Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly want it to, will overturn a North Carolina Supreme Court ruling on how elections are to be held in North Carolina. The Court would invest sole authority on the matter of elections in North Carolina in the General Assembly, without any state judicial oversight focusing on the North Carolina (as opposed to federal) constitution permitted. In this way, ISL would become the law of the land in the United States.
Now look at what comes next in The Carolina Journal:
In summary, John Eastman may well have believed in early 2021—rightly—that there were already four votes to uphold Independent State Legislature doctrine as to the 2020 presidential election, and that the newest Justice on the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, had 75 days earlier become the tie-breaking vote in his (and Trump’s) favor.
Just as importantly, Eastman—who, remember, had intermittently replaced Arizona with Wisconsin in his roster of states that Trump’s legal team was most focused on—knew that “Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 concurring opinion in a case concerning the deadline for casting mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, ‘the Constitution provides that state legislatures—not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials—bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.’” So Eastman had reason to believe that what had been a concurring opinion in 2020 would now, in 2021, be the majority opinion of the Court, due to Justice Barrett.
Remember that when Trump’s son Don Jr. texted Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows on November 5, 2020 to boast that the Trump family had “operational control” of every path to Trump being re-elected—despite all indications at the time the text was sent being that Trump had in fact lost the 2020 election badly—Jr. may well have been referring to the fact that the Senate had confirmed Amy Coney Barrett ten days earlier.
{Note: Proof is about to publish, in the next few days, a breaking news report dealing with this Trump Jr. text and the Supreme Court. Note also that, per the Eastman-Bannon interview on January 2, as of that date Eastman had petitions before the Court relating to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia—once again explaining his focus on those three states in particular.}
Lest you feel a November 2020 text by Don Jr. couldn’t possibly reflect a legal opinion held by a Trump lawyer in January 2021, remember that that Trump lawyer—Eastman—had joined Trump’s legal team in August, and that besides confirming Barrett in late October Team Trump had also somehow installed a man at DOJ (see below) who had the necessary statistical chops and limitless unscrupulousness to use dodgy data to claim that state-level judicial and executive actions had given Joe Biden the White House in contravention of state legislatures’ supposed plenary authority on elections.
In short, John Eastman arrived at the January 2 Zoom call believing that if he could find a way to postpone the January 6 joint session—in any way whatsoever—he could get new Trump electors seated in six major battleground states, and that this historic switcheroo would be upheld by the current 5-4 fringe-right majority in the SCOTUS.
It’s in this troubling context that Proof reminds its readers that when Eric Hershmann of the White House Counsel’s Office accused Eastman of fomenting election-related violence in the United States just days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Eastman casually replied, “There’s been violence in the history of our country to protect the democracy.” Even after the January 6 attack, Hershmann testified under oath before Congress, Eastman was exclusively interested in how the violence might be used to buy Trump more time to seat new electors. It is therefore no stretch to say that, on January 2, Eastman’s chief concern was not that Independent State Legislature doctrine would fail before the Supreme Court—he knew he had the votes, just as the Moore v. Harper litigants know the North Carolina General Assembly will have the votes it needs when it argues that case at the end of 2022—but rather that he would never make it to the Supreme Court unless he found a way to avoid having the joint session of Congress on January 6 lock in President-elect Biden’s landslide electoral and popular-vote victory.
So imagine how clearly Trump, Giuliani, Eastman, and Navarro understood the task before them when they spoke not just to state legislators but unnamed “others” on a mysteriously arranged (and subsequently lied about) Zoom call on January 2, 2021.
Indeed, during that call Trump’s lawyers and advisers would have been as or even more concerned with the “others” on the call—the non-lawmaker insurrectionists—as with the legislators to whom the spoke that day. The same would have been true of Trump himself, who demonstrated his understanding of ISL (and its importance to his coup plot) by making it one of the major topics he addressed during his twenty-minute speech to a group largely (but not entirely) comprising Republican state legislators:
The most important people [to deciding the 2020 presidential election] are you. You’re more important than the courts. You’re more important than anything, because the courts keep referring to you, and you’re the ones that are going to make the decision [about who won the election].”
While Trump and his lawyers and advisers knew there was a chance that new electors couldn’t be certified by January 6—after all, as of January 2 no legislature had entered a special session, and the first business day on which they could do so was January 4—they also knew that if events went the way they hoped and had been told in advance by the U.S. Secret Service they would go on January 6, with absolute chaos breaking out at the Capitol, it would only require a postponement of the January 6 joint session to give the state legislators Trump and his team were addressing on January 2 the time they needed to do as the leader of their political party was then commanding them.
So how much more useful would it have been for Trump and his team to have had not just state legislators on the line on January 2 but also grassroots radicals with a plan to postpone Congress’ January 6 joint session by flooding the Capitol with protestors?
As you ponder that question, consider the fact that if John Eastman’s summary of his January 2 Zoom call presentation for Bannon was accurate, it means that during the Zoom call—with Trump present and with “others” listening on the line—he likened a member of Congress putting forward (or accepting) a Biden slate of electors in a 2020 battleground state to a mortgage-seeker committing a federal crime by purposefully putting a substantive misrepresentation in a mortgage application. Eastman drew this analogy for Bannon so calmly and fluidly on the evening of January 2 that it certainly seemed like one he’d used before, specifically earlier that day on the Amistad Project Zoom call. The idea of a Republican presidential lawyer directly accusing Republican members of Congress—not to mention the sitting Vice President of the United States—of federal crimes just days before the same people were attacked by an armed mob who believed the same thing as the aforementioned lawyer beggars the imagination.
But what if the mob believed as it believed because the lawyer told them to believe it?
We will return to this shortly.
The Participants: Rudy Giuliani
Like Eastman, on January 2, 2021, Rudy Giuliani gave an interview to Steve Bannon.
While Proof will not dwell overmuch on this interview, it did produce two noteworthy comments by Giuliani: (1) a claim that the team that had briefed GOP state legislators earlier in the day was only “three or four votes” away from getting the Georgia state legislature to decertify Joe Biden’s electors and certify Trump electors under the ISL doctrine, underscoring the urgent nature of the January 2 call, and (2) the following statement, in which he mimics the reaction of a state legislator to being told by John Eastman that ISL means state legislators, not voters, pick presidents: “‘I’m just a state representative. You mean I get to choose the president?’ Yes sir, yes ma’am—you do. Our Founding Fathers put the finger of responsibility on you. Because it’s your job.”
This was a rather jaunty way to dramatize the fall of American democracy through the demolition of the popular vote—indeed, the sudden purposelessness of ever voting at all, when under ISL doctrine it’s legislatures not American voters that pick presidents.
The Participants: Peter Navarro
If the Amistad Project’s December 2020 fake elector scheme—which put it in hostile contact with Michigan State Police at a time it was “partner[ed]” with the 2020 Trump presidential campaign—sounds identical to (i) the “Green Bay Sweep” plot Peter Navarro claims was devised by himself, Bannon, and Trump; (ii) the CNP Action post-election coup plot advanced by Ginni Thomas with the aid of Ken Klukowski co-author and fellow CNP Action board member Kenneth Blackwell; (iii) the strategy devised by Trump lawyers Giuliani, Eastman, and Mitchell (the latter two good friends of Ginni Thomas), it certainly should—as all four plans were exactly the same ISL plan.
Perhaps you better understand, now, why Ginni Thomas was so willing to be heavily involved in the plan. She well knew both that her husband Clarence was essential to it and that he would go along with it—bringing four other ultra-right Justices with him.
It is also no great surprise, then, that the repository of information Phill Kline pointed unnamed “decision-makers” to in his January 2, 2021 Got Freedom? press release featured among its documents the two “reports” by Navarro—which by substance and design were justifications for a coup. Nor is it a surprise that Trump tapped Navarro to co-lead the January 2 conference call Kline hosted and Trump headlined. Nor is it any surprise that Bannon, who Navarro has claimed co-authored the Green Bay Sweep with him, spent a portion of his Insurrection Eve podcast plugging Navarro’s Amistad Project-housed reports:
{Note: The tweet above is offered merely to embed a video clip that cannot easily be found elsewhere. You can find all of Episode 634 of Bannon’s “War Room” here. See 31:00 in the episode video to find the clip above.}
The specific report Navarro’s fellow Trump presidential adviser Steve Bannon is referring to above is Navarro’s second post-election Navarro report, the one published on January 4 but clearly—see below—the same report Navarro had been asked to talk about during the January 2 conference call with lawmakers “and others.” This second report focused on the “grand strategy” Democrats had allegedly used to “steal” the 2020 election, whereas Navarro’s first report (issued on December 17, just before his aide Ziegler admitted Team Kraken to the White House) focused on election “math.”
{Note: Bannon’s comment in the video about Navarro’s second report being intended for “state legislators” is of course anachronistic, as it was delivered on January 5, 2021 but referred to the usage to which Navarro’s “Art of the Steal” had already been put beginning on January 2.}
Navarro’s involvement in the January 2 call, and his connection of his reports to the clandestine push by Team Kraken for (a) martial law, and (b) Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell to be appointed White House “Special Counsel”, is significant given that on the same day Bannon enthusiastically endorsed Navarro’s second report on his “War Room” podcast—Insurrection Eve—Navarro also appeared at a Stop the Steal event at Freedom Plaza in D.C. alongside Team Kraken members Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne, and Robert Patrick Lewis (the latter, again, the man who had driven Team Kraken to the White House on December 18, and who’s since bragged about pre- and post-insurrection contact with John Eastman and Oath Keeper head Stewart Rhodes).
During his partisan political appearance at Freedom Plaza on January 5—an apparent violation of the Hatch Act—Navarro, wearing Trump-branded outerwear and taking the stage only after an introduction by domestic terrorist Ali Alexander (who had co-organized Stop the Steal with Trump friend Roger Stone and the man Trump tapped to lead the march on the Capitol on January 6, Alex Jones) said the following:
{Note: The tweet above is offered merely to embed a video clip that cannot easily be found elsewhere. You can find the full livestream of the January 5, 2021 Freedom Plaza event here.}
Just 72 hours removed from speaking to a large Zoom audience he falsely claimed was solely composed of “state legislators,” Navarro was making clear that he expected pro-Trump protesters to enter the Capitol building itself on January 6—as there’d otherwise be no way for them to do as he’d commanded them and “when…you get up to Capitol Hill, let your senators know that ‘you need to hold the line [and] Stop the Steal.’”
Had Navarro urged any less in the Zoom call he’d participated in just 72 hours earlier?
It’s worth noting, here, that just as Navarro described the audience on the January 2 call as “angry”, he urged those he spoke to on January 5 to “stay angry”—thus linking (at least in his own mind) the two audiences, one (on January 2) falsely said by Navarro to be composed exclusively of state legislators, and the other (on January 5) composed of grassroots radicals.
By wearing his 2016 Trump campaign jacket on January 5, Navarro ensured that his audience would get the message that—whatever disclosures he might be forced to make for the cameras—he was, in fact, sending the mob a message from the president.
That Navarro knew his message was going to lead to bedlam at the Capitol was clear. Just moments after he spoke at Freedom Plaza, he went on the podcast of another long-time Trump presidential advisor, Sebastian Gorka, to admit that there was going to be “a little [conflict]” up at Capitol Hill on January 6.
This, of course, echoes Trump presidential adviser Steve Bannon’s now-infamous claim, that same day, that “all hell is going to break loose" [on January 6].” (This was consistent with what we now know, from both recent congressional hearings and Proof, Trump and his team had been told by the USSS several days before January 6.)
In view of the foregoing, it’s little surprise that one of Bannon’s featured guests on Insurrection Eve was Peter Navarro, the co-author of Trump’s coup plot. And it is no surprise that during his interview with Navarro just hours before the attack on the Capitol, Bannon urged his listeners—whom he had called the most rabid right-wing activists in America during his January 2 interview with John Eastman—to read the very same material that Navarro had briefed “state legislators” on two days earlier.
This latter point is worth underscoring.
The material Navarro used for the Amistad Project call on January 2 was also intended to be read by the grassroots radicals who were on January 5 descending on Washington.
So perhaps there’s a reason that Navarro titled his report to appeal to Trump fanatics (“The Art of the Steal”) and ended it with words that would have had no real impact on Republican politicians but possibly an enormous one on potentially violent Trump supporters: the Democratic Party’s alleged theft of the 2020 presidential election—or as Navarro would put it, the Democrat Party’s theft of the 2020 presidential election— was a “brass-knuckle punch in the face to the American people and a kick in the groin to American democracy.”
That’s right: Navarro ended a presidentially endorsed report on a national election by implying that Democrats had committed an act of violence against Trump supporters, with the implied second shoe being that that violence might justify Trump supporters responding in kind on January 6.
And yet, it’s important to understand that, while these may have been the words Peter Navarro ended “The Art of the Steal” with, they’re not how he ended his Insurrection Eve interview with Steve Bannon. Navarro, now under federal criminal indictment, saved far viler language for his pre-insurrection discussion with another ex-Trump adviser who’s now under federal indictment. At 36:10 in this video, Navarro begins a rant made all the more chilling by the fact it came just hours before a violent attack on the Capitol and was preceded by the words, “this is what we need heading into tomorrow [January 6]”:
Up on Capitol Hill, they breathe a different kind of air. And none of that air has the grassroots smell in it. And once they [those who will be inside the Capitol building on January 6] begin realizing that there’s anger—and knowledge at the state-legislature level—at this steal [of the 2020 election], that will give them [members of Congress] more of a backbone to do what needs to be done.
{He laughs.}
We’re gonna see some backbone tomorrow, or this Republic’s gonna perish.
Navarro is saying that members of Congress need to be close enough to “smell” not just one but two things on January 6: (i) “grassroots anger”, and (ii) “state legislators’ knowledge [of their power under the Independent State Legislature doctrine].”
Journalists previously assumed that Navarro had either only developed this bifurcated view of congressional persuasion on Insurrection Eve or was somehow able to separate—despite being a man known for his impulsiveness and loquaciousness—two lines of persuasion depending on which audience he was speaking to, with a clear distinction between a legislators-only audience (January 2) and a grassroots-only one (January 5).
But this understanding of events is now proven false. It is unsupported by evidence.
Just as Peter Navarro had infused the report he presented on January 2 with violent language intended to appeal to grassroots anger, he well knew that his audience on January 2 included “others”—namely, as we will see below, “Stop the Steal leaders” and radical party activists like Gloria Lee Snover—who needed to be incited not by dry discussions of plenary power but the same sort of rhetoric used to whip up mobs by Stop the Steal leaders Alexander, Stone, and Jones. Recall that Peter Navarro had described both his January 2 audience and his January 5 audience with exactly the same term—“angry”—and that on Insurrection Eve he’d tell Bannon that he deemed the entirety of Trump’s view of the 2020 election as geared toward the “grassroots.”
So it cannot be said that when Navarro spoke on the Amistad call January 2, 2021 he wasn’t aware that there were active, on-the-ground insurrectionists in his audience, and the same can be said of Trump so vocally expressing “disgust” and “frustration” with those who, like the Georgia Secretary of State, would not do as he had urged them to do. While such messages may well have resonated with state legislators like Oath Keeper Mark Finchem (R-AZ) and Oath Keeper ally Amanda Chase (R-VA)—themselves only a cut above armed paramilitary radicals—they would have resonated also with the Stop the Steal leaders (or, since Mark Finchem was himself the founder of Stop the Steal in Arizona, it might be best to say the other Stop the Steal leaders) who were on the January 2 call with Trump and several of his legal and political advisers.
So what happens when a President of the United States speaks to an “angry” group of people who “want action” but have no actual evidence of malfeasance by their political enemies? How does a president incite such people to engage in extraordinary and in fact utterly unprecedented conduct to try to keep himself in office contrary to the law?
More on this in a moment.
The Audience, Part I: Mike Pence (Indirectly)
Following the January 2 call, far-right websites were immediately alerted to the event that had just taken place—with the apparently critical talking-point that the call had only included state legislators firmly in place. The Bannon-affiliated Breitbart wrote:
President Trump spoke to 300 state legislators from the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia on Saturday in a Zoom conference call hosted by Got Freedom? in which the 501 (c) (4) non-profit election integrity watchdog group urged those lawmakers to review evidence that the election process in their states was unlawful and consider decertifying the results of the November 3 presidential election.
The anxiety provoked by the January 2 call was evident in all those who reported on it.
Breitbart rushed to underscore that presidential adviser Navarro was “appearing in his personal capacity” by participating in the call, as was DOJ senior advisor John Lott (more on him below; recall that Trump had launched a coup inside DOJ by this point, and was less than 24 hours from firing the acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, and replacing him with a stooge, Jeffrey Clark, bolstered by a man connected to Ginni Thomas, Ken Klukowski). Breitbart—never known for journalistic integrity—was unnerved enough about the call that it carefully distinguished the “501(c)4” Got Freedom? from the “501(c)(3)” Amistad Project, further disclosing that while the latter had seemingly invited Trump and his lawyers to address state legislators as a matter of “public interest” it was also, in fact, “engaged in [pro-Trump] litigation regarding the 2020 election”—in other words, working hand in glove with the very same Trump lawyers who it had “invited” to lecture to state legislators from battleground states.
Perhaps aware of the instant implausibility of two supposedly discrete sets of pro-Trump lawyers willy-nilly setting up a massive national event days before January 6, Breitbart added an equally improbable modifier—following the lead of Got Freedom?—by noting that the “exclusive national briefing….[had come] at the request of state legislators from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to review the extensive evidence of irregularities and lawlessness in the 2020 presidential election.” While it seems unlikely that state legislators rather than the White House would have initiated this briefing by the White House—the false implication that the Trump White House was indifferent to whether the January 2 call took place is both impossible to miss and impossible to credit—the Got Freedom? press release, dutifully quoted by Breitbart, does not explain how or why legislators from states other than those that supposedly asked for the briefing ended up on the call, let alone anyone who was not a legislator.
Of course, the truth is as you have already heard in this report: as Trump’s legal team was in fact filing lawsuits in conjunction with the Amistad Project, the two legal teams were in fact effectively indistinguishable. Giuliani told media at the time that the Amistad Project would in fact, in the post-election period, be a “partner” of the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.
For a team alleging that they had only appeared on a call because of a sudden invite from state legislators, Giuliani and Eastman and Kline were remarkably prepared to offer an extensive package of information (all of it fraudulent) to the legislators both on and after the call. As Breitbart reports (emphasis supplied),
A communication sent to participating state legislators after the call summarized Professor Eastman’s argument during the call about the specific “Constitutional imperatives” of state legislators. State legislators, Eastman stated, have both the right and duty to:
Assert your plenary power
Demand that your laws be followed as written
Decertify tainted results unless and until your laws are followed
Insist on enough time to properly meet, investigate, and properly certify results to ensure that all lawful votes (but only lawful votes) are counted.
In that subsequent communication, Kline encouraged the state legislators to agree to sign on to a joint letter from state legislators to Vice President Mike Pence to demand that he call for a 12-day delay on ratifying the election, allowing the states the necessary time to further investigate the lawlessness with which the presidential election was conducted. We also request that you send this message out to fellow legislators to ask them to sign on to the letter as well.
He added that “Representative Daryl Metcalfe (R-Pennsylvania), Senator Brandon Beach (R-Georgia), and Representative Mark Finchem (R-Arizona) already wrote a letter to Vice President Mike Pence for this narrow purpose. Coming together to sign a joint letter is a vital step—one you should take confidently and in solidarity. We will send the joint letter to all legislators who contact us in reply to this message.”
Putting aside Eastman turning ISL into an obligation rather than merely an opportunity—perhaps the only way to make a radical idea still more radical—and the fact that he was asking for a twelve-day delay rather than the ten days Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had just called for that same day or the three days Giuliani and Eastman themselves would be saying they were willing to accept when they spoke to an armed mob on January 6, the last piece of the excerpt above is uniquely telling. It underscores that a letter of the sort Trump was then seeking had already been sent to Pence by three influential GOP legislators from the states Trump was then most focused on, meaning that the purpose of the January 2 call was clearly not just to get more signatures on an identical missive. Keep in mind, too, that those who organized the call already knew Pence was going to ignore any such letter—Pence himself had already made this clear to Trump and his legal team—further confirming that they were focused, in the call, on what legislators and non-legislators would or could do rather than what Pence had already said he could not and would not do.
In fact, Pence publicly announced on the same day as the Amistad Project conference call that while he “welcomed” lawmakers submitting “evidence” of election fraud, he also wanted to be crystal clear on when and why and from whom such evidence should emanate (emphasis supplied):
The Vice President welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on January 6th.
In other words, Mike Pence had made clear that did not want evidence sent to him (a) privately, (b) by state legislators, or (c) prior to the January 6 joint session of Congress.
The Participants: John Lott
According to this Washington Examiner article, one of the men Trump spoke alongside on January 2, John Lott, was an economist whose research has focused on gun issues—not elections—who had “recently [been] named a senior adviser for research and statistics at the [DOJ] Office of Justice Programs.” If this news is raising the hair on the back of your neck a bit, it’s because it likely sounds familiar. It appears that Lott was hired at DOJ during the late election season in the same mysterious way that Ken Klukowski was suddenly hired there and Jeffrey Clark was suddenly promoted from a mid-to-high-tier environmental-law litigator at DOJ to (on January 3, 2021, the day after the Amistad Zoom call) Attorney General of the United States. And just as Ken Klukowski appears to have been hired into DOJ at an office outside his field of expertise exclusively to help Mr. Clark issue as an official DOJ directive a letter Klukowski had prepared with John Eastman—which letter was intended to be sent to and used by state legislators—Lott, at most a gun-issues expert, appears to have been been hired at DOJ outside his field of expertise exclusively to issue data reports to be sent to and used by state legislators and be seen as having the imprimatur of the Department of Justice. Perhaps it is for this reason that Lott was introduced to the legislators as being from DOJ, but when right-wing media was given the story of the Amistad Zoom call after the fact it was instructed to report that Lott was “appearing in a personal capacity” rather than as a representative of the Department.
Lott was unusually coy about his hire just days before the November 2020 election, at a time Trump knew—as he had been told so repeatedly by his advisers—that he was about the lose his office. When Politico contacted Lott asking why an economist who works on gun issues had been hired by “a DOJ division that doles out $5 billion in grants a year”, Lott replied cagily, “I took a job at the Department of Justice. I’m really not supposed to say more than that.” Nor was DOJ itself more forthcoming, “declin[ing] to answer further questions about [John Lott’s] hiring” and, incredibly, refusing to even “say whether Lott is serving as a political appointee.” Was Lott’s hire proof that Trump knew in advance he was going to lose and would need a data-oriented agent at DOJ ready to put the Department’s imprimatur on dodgy analyses of voting data? If not, precisely what sort of need-to-know-only work was an academic hired by Team Trump to do just days before an election Trump knew he would lose?
It certainly seems this question was answered on January 2, though Lott had begun to show his value to Trump (and perhaps the purpose of his hire) much earlier, making news just days after his start at DOJ and the 2020 election by posting on multiple social media platforms an “endorse[ment] [of] the White House’s wildly exaggerated claim that 1 million Trump supporters showed up in Washington earlier this month [November 2020] for the so-called Million MAGA March.” Tellingly, Lott’s lie—an apparently deliberate failure in his chosen field, statistics—focused on an event that is now considered the unofficial launch of the insurrectionist Stop the Steal “movement.”
Politico helpfully offers additional clues as to how early on Team Trump realized it would need a plant inside DOJ to spread false data about election fraud. As the media outlet reports, “While gun violence has been the primary focus of Lott’s work, he has also dabbled in research related to election fraud. In September 2017, he delivered a presentation to Trump’s short-lived election-integrity commission, urging use of the national gun background check database to verify voter rolls. In recent days, Lott has insisted that the presidential election results were tainted by a huge wave of illegal ballots. ‘Massive vote fraud in Pennsylvania,’ he declared on Facebook on November 4.” That Lott was declaring he had statistical proof of systemic voter fraud just hours after polls closed in Pennsylvania on the evening of November 3 certainly suggests he’d been preparing to make such a declaration from the time of his hire a few days earlier.
Lott’s 2017 election work to aid Trump may be even more telling, however. Consider that Trump’s thirteen-person 2017 election integrity commission, which Lott advised and which quickly disbanded due to its inability to find any evidence of rampant voter fraud in the United States, had just seven Republicans on it (not counting its honorary chair, Mike Pence). One of those seven Republicans? Kenneth Blackwell, friend and co-worker of Ginni Thomas and co-author, of two books no less, with Ken Klukowski—who showed up at DOJ under circumstances as mysterious and secretive as Lott’s.
By December 22020, Trump was meeting secretly with Klukowski’s boss and tweeting out preposterous statistical reports written by Lott. Blackwell does not appear to have been questioned by Congress yet.
The Audience, Part II: Stop the Steal
On January 3, 2021, the Washington Examiner published an “exclusive” report entitled, “Trump Urges State Legislators to Reject Electoral Votes, ‘You Are the Real Power.’”
One sentence in the report couldn’t possibly be missed by anyone researching January 6, especially as it contradicted everything the White House, the Amistad Project, Got Freedom?, Trump’s legal team, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Breitbart, and GOP state legislators had said about who was on the January 2 Zoom call with President Trump.
“Several leaders of the Stop the Steal movement were on the call,” the Examiner said.
This means that when Trump said during the call, per the Examiner, “You know that we won the election”, he was speaking not only to the state legislators his camp was willing to admit to Breitbart he had been speaking to, but also to domestic terrorists.
And when Peter Navarro said, “Your job, I believe, is to take action, action, action—the situation is dire”, he was speaking to domestic terrorists.
And when Giuliani said, “We need you to put excessive pressure on your leadership, where the real weakness and cowardice is mostly located”, he was also speaking to domestic terrorists, and might well have understood that his words applied with equal force to the hundreds of men and women who’d be in the U.S. Capitol on January 6 as to Republican state legislators listening to a Zoom call with the president on January 2.
And lest the domestic terrorists from Stop the Steal weren’t listening closely to what these men had to say, Trump repeated their key term—“steal”—over and over again: “It’s a scam, it’s rigged. It was a rigged election. They stole the election. We can’t let them steal it. I went from leading by a lot to losing by a little. It is a disgrace that it can happen. Everyone knows it was a scam, it was a rigged election.”
Did Trump, speaking to an audience comprising not just legislators but terrorists on January 2, raise the subject of an event on January 6 that he’d already been told would potentially be dangerous? Yes, he did.
As the Examiner reports, “Trump also referenced the planned protests in Washington on Wednesday as Congress and Vice President Mike Pence join to certify the election. ‘I don’t think the country is going to take it,’ said Trump. “And I think it would be a horrible thing for this country if this happens [Biden becomes President of the United States] with somebody that was in a basement, because his brainpower is shot, and it wasn’t great before, but he’s in a basement, and he ends up winning an election that everybody knows he lost.” What could the then-president possibly have been referring to with respect to January 6, when he said “I don’t think the country is going to take it”? And why would he have directed these comments to state legislators who (supposedly) had only asked him for statistical evidence of voter fraud?
Trump certainly had Stop the Steal on his mind on January 2, 2021. Less than 24 hours after the call, he quote-tweeted Women for America First leader and self-described Stop the Steal co-organizer Kylie Jane Kremer, writing “I will be there. Historic day!” atop a Kremer tweet that included the hash-tags #StopTheSteal and #MarchforTrump and a link to “TrumpMarch[.]com.” Was Kremer one of the “several leaders of the Stop the Steal movement” who was on the January 2 Zoom call? We don’t know. And yet, if multiple Stop the Steal leaders had indeed been permitted on the call, why in the world would one of Trump’s favorite such leaders have been kept from joining them?
The Timing
As you can tell from the Examiner reporting above, of the few far-right media outlets that even knew of the January 2 Zoom call—let alone major media, which seemed to have no useful information about it at all—some weren’t as cautious as Bannon’s Breitbart had been in how they framed the January 2 call. Indeed, the Examiner report itself not only included the astonishing, above-referenced statement on the scope of the Zoom call’s audience (“Several leaders of the Stop the Steal movement were on the call”) but direct quotes from Trump taken from the private Republican event.
Per the Examiner, Trump told the more than 300 people on the call that “You are the real power. The most important people are you. You’re more important than the courts. You’re more important than anything because the courts keep referring to you, and you’re the ones that are going to make the decision [about who won the 2020 presidential election.”
Trump also revealed to the hundreds of insurrectionists that he had just gotten off a call with Brad Raffensperger—a call now the subject of a massive and “escalating” criminal investigation in Georgia—meaning that at all points during his January 2 address Trump was aware (because he had just been told so, in no uncertain terms, by its top elections official) that there was no credible evidence of voter fraud in Georgia, the state whose vote he claimed had been the most fraudulent of any state’s in 2020.
In addition to all those named above, the large January 2 group of legislators and non-legislators was apparently addressed by “some other people who had been involved in this discovery [of] and [the] exposing of voter fraud irregularities.” According to the earwitness Gloria Lee Snover, these men presented “evidence”—presumably, the same evidence that had been thrown out of courts all across the country, meaning that these individuals, like Trump, were aware that they were now making an extra-judicial appeal to pro-Trump legislators (to overturn the votes of their constituents) and to pro-Trump grassroots radicals (to orchestrate a massive protest in Washington on January 6) that had nothing whatsoever to do with the law, rule of law, admissible evidence, or American democracy as enshrined in documents and institutions. Rather, their aims appear to have been two-fold: (1) to justify the production of a mob on January 6, and (2) to stage a state-level legislative coup that would operate separate from the federal executive-branch coup at DOJ or the judicial coup (Charles Fried’s “slow-moving coup d’état”) that Eastman was hoping for and even expecting at SCOTUS (at a time he was in regular secret contact with Clarence Thomas’ wife).
The Law
But Team Trump did not merely provide fraudulent and misleading data to legislators and activists on January 2. In addition to, as Gloria Lee Snover would put it on January 4, presenting “irregularities” and “anomalies” and “statistical math that doesn’t add up”—none of which, Proof notes, even if true, is evidence of a stolen election, as every presidential election (cf. 2004) has odd statistical quirks in its data that are ultimately explained by innocuous phenomena—Team Trump took advantage of the fact that it had so flooded the state and federal courts with frivolous lawsuits (even though, at the time, it was 1-61 in such lawsuits) that certain suits were still pending as of January 2.
These suits—all of which should have been filed earlier, none of which had any merit, some of which were duplicative, and the entire body of which were doomed to failure—were an insurrectionist fait accompli: an attempt to artificially create the need for more time. As long as Team Trump could say that certain lawsuits had not yet been resolved, Trumpist partisans could claim that those suits deserved to be heard before Biden’s landslide election victory was certified, even if the lawsuits lacked merit and had not been filed in a timely fashion. In short, Giuliani, Eastman, and their several Team Trump compatriots had, at their client Trump’s direction, constructed a Build-a-Bear Workshop of sedition: disparate pieces haphazardly patched into something for which an emotionally immature audience could be manipulated into feeling affection.
Snover told BKP Politics on January 4, 2021 that during the January 2 Zoom call Team Trump “kept saying” that “everything still lies in the state legislatures”—a bit of wish-casting that couldn’t possibly have been believed by any of the men presenting for Trump on January 2, as of course by that date the federal “safe-harbor deadline” for state-level objections to electors (including lawsuits) had passed 19 days earlier.
Per Snover, the presenters insisted that, “according to the Constitution, these state legislatures do not have to follow their state rules.” As already noted, this is the ISL doctrine the Supreme Court will take up in Moore v. Harper in late 2022, which holds that state legislatures can ignore state-court rulings and executive orders relating to elections.
What John Eastman was apparently particularly focused on during the January 2 call was that state legislatures do not need the agreement of their governors to call a special session (in fact, most state constitutions say otherwise). In this way, Eastman was betraying his real motive: not to outline the evidence he and others (including allies inside the domestic-terrorist Stop the Steal movement) were then submitting to GOP members of Congress, but to convince state legislators to illegally decertify the 2020 election after the federal safe-harbor date, doing so with the aid of a large band of grassroots activists who would swarm the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and thereby give these special sessions of GOP-led state legislatures the time they needed to do their work. In short, merely by virtue of acknowledging—and focusing on—the fact that none of the six battleground states being discussed on the January 2 Zoom call had yet entered into a special session at all, let alone conducted a thorough probe of their state voting data as requested by Team Trump, Eastman and Trump and their compatriots were acknowledging that there wasn’t enough time left for their plan to work.
Nor did Eastman even seem to think that, if these six states went into special session, there would necessarily be majorities in favor of decertifying Biden’s electors outright.
Recognizing that it might not be possible to get such majorities, Eastman (per Snover) told the state legislators that his backup plan was to have them “pen a letter to Pence asking him to not count the electors in their state.” This is perhaps as extraordinary as anything John Eastman has said post-election, as it means that on January 2 he was asking any state that could not establish a majority for an illegal ISL action to act as a minority in instructing Pence, via letter, to ignore the 2020 votes of all their voters.
In this way—and under Trump’s in-person supervision—Eastman, Giuliani, Navarro, and other Trump agents were going beyond the already repeatedly-SCOTUS-rejected Independent State Legislature doctrine to a nakedly partisan “election nullification” plan to be executed by a single man at the time being coerced by Trump: Mike Pence.
But Eastman and his co-conspirators were so desperate on January 2 that they didn’t even stop there.
They asked any state-legislative minorities not willing to ask Pence to throw out all votes from their state to at least ask Pence to “provide them with more time” to get “evidence” from Trump’s lawyers. On the surface this makes no sense, as we now know that Eastman was unaware of any such evidence from outside Georgia and Giuliani had stonewalled supplying any such evidence to Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers for months. So what were Eastman and Giuliani planning to do if the state legislators they were speaking to opted for this course of action? Simple: the two men had already put together fraudulent slates of Trump electors that had no legislative imprimatur whatsoever, and if push came to shove it would be these electors that they would put before Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court via an expedited lawsuit. In short, ISL was only a pretext; if Team Trump had to abandon it altogether and simply beg the five ultra-right Justices on the Supreme Court to hand Trump the White House under no jurisprudential justification but blind partisanship, it would.
Either that, or Trump could opt for “the Kraken” and declare martial law.
The Element of Fear
Some of the pitch made by Giuliani and Eastman on January 2 was predicated on a false sentence of empathy—per Snover, they kept saying words to the effect of, “We don’t want Mike Pence to be standing there naked with no information and not knowing where these state legislators are going with this”—but it appears that much more of it was founded in the darkest and most dangerous sort of fear-mongering.
As noted above, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories involving Mark Zuckerberg (whose Facebook had, with its lack of moderation, possibly made Trump president in 2016) abounded, with the presenters telling Republican legislators that Mr. Zuckerberg (as Snover summarized their argument) “was like a third party controlling this election.” In Pennsylvania, Snover falsely claimed on January 4—aping her January 2 briefers—Zuckerberg had used his money to “control Pennsylvania’s ‘statewide data system.’”
But some of the prophesizing offered by Trump and his agents was even more Biblical.
At one point Snover is asked by “BKP,” “Was there a dire warning to everyone on the call [from President Trump] that this is what America looks like...if you don’t wake up now—this is what you’re going to wake up to in America?” She answers as follows:
Absolutely. And I actually had like chills during this call. After I got off the call, I couldn’t stop thinking about it all weekend because America hangs in the balance. I’m telling you, folks, the stuff that was on the call, the evidence we have, they [the Democrats] have been working [for] years to undermine these swing states, since 2016, and they put this “Ultimate Plan” in place. And they [on the call] were talking about it being a constitutional crisis, because people are afraid—the legislators, a lot of them, they don’t have the ability to stand up and put the Constitution [first] and stand behind it and say what it means and see this thing through [to a second Trump administration]. A lot of them just can’t do it. They’re going to have to be patriots. They’re going to have to be warriors. This is a dire time in America—there’s a lot going on here....we’re losing our country. They [the Democratic Party] can control the votes from here on out. It’s systematic now. We have to stand up to it now. This is the time. We have to do it.
For those wondering what the “Ultimate Plan” refers to here, I’m afraid that it’s even darker than you might fear: the reason QAnon conspiracy theorists use the term “plandemic” and consistently insist that the “Biden crime family” is in league with “Chinese communists” is that they believe the COVID-19 pandemic was a plot by the Democratic Party and the Chinese Communist Party to create a plausible excuse for emergency election procedures in America. Indeed, when Giuliani and Eastman and others opine of election-year procedural changes resulting from a once-in-a-century pandemic that has now (undercount included) killed almost 1.5 million Americans, they are aware their rhetoric resonates with QAnonist claims that the theft of the 2020 election was planned years in advance by a transnational cabal. Indeed, the most extreme version of Trump’s coup plot, “the Kraken,” was devised using a misreading of a federal regulation that says that the Department of Homeland Security can seize voting machines if there is sufficient evidence of foreign election interference. What is now known as “Team Kraken” used amateur “intelligence” from various sources, including its paramilitary bodyguard the 1st Amendment Praetorians, to claim that the 2020 election had been the product of fraud by an unholy alliance of the Democratic Party and up to nine countries. As 1st Amendment Praetorian leader Robert Patrick Lewis, who has now asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to avoid answering inquiries from Congress and honoring a federal subpoena issued to him in November 2021, told two insurrectionist interviewers from the Patriot Voice Podcast on January 7, 2021 (at a time Lewis implied he was regularly meeting in the Willard Hotel with Eastman and others post-insurrection),
We know China has their fingerprints all over it [Trump’s election loss]. Pakistan has their fingerprints all over it....So we know Pakistan was actually involved. We know China was actually involved. China was involved, looking like Pakistan. Venezuela was involved. Russia was involved. Iran was involved....There are a lot of stories going around about Leonardo, that company in Italy—having the United Kingdom and I think Spanish data people in there helping it.
If the idea of a U.S.-China-Pakistan-Venezuela-Russia-Iran-Italy-United Kingdom-Spain conspiracy to make Trump lose the U.S. popular vote for the second time sounds far-fetched to you, you probably weren’t on Trump’s January 2, 2021 Zoom call.
But in the shadow of these unambiguously preposterous conspiracy theories, Trump’s personal lawyers Giuliani and Eastman fraudulently put themselves forward as lawyers for the Republican Party writ large. As Snover details, “They were answering questions for these state lawmakers so they could be secure in the decisions they were making.”
In fact, the men were preaching seditious conspiracy—under Trump’s watchful eye.
The “Game Plan”
BKP to Snover on January 4, 2021: “After being on the phone with the President of the United States for two hours, do [you believe that] they have a ‘game plan’ for Wednesday [January 6]?” Snover’s response:
The people on this call...really believe that we had an election that was stolen that needs to be dealt with. And I think that’s why they keep referring to your state legislators, because your state legislators need to be the strong patriots that send a message to Mike Pence that Mike Pence believes strong[ly] enough to not seat these [Biden] electors or count these [Biden] electors [from the battleground states]. So what the plan is—here is the plan—it’s very simple: the states that are in question (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin), if the Republicans’ state representatives and state senators in those states send a strong message in a letter, and evidence, to Mike Pence, asking him on January 6 [to] not count these electors because we don’t feel the election is settled in our state, we feel there may be irregularities and we may be decertifying the [Biden] electors [in those states], that’s what they’re asking Mike Pence to do. And if they send a strong enough message to Mike Pence that Mike Pence gets to their state [on January 6]....and says, ‘I’m not going to be counting their electoral votes today,’ then he goes on another state, that’s the plan.
Of course, by January 2 Pence had made clear to Trump that he would not do any of this.
And by January 2 Pence had already received—and ignored—a letter from three GOP state legislators asking him not to count their state’s electoral votes. So why hold a two-hour conference call just to ask state legislators to continue doing what some of them had already done, in service of an escapade Trump already knew would fail?
As we’ll see in a moment, the plan outlined by Snover was not the only plan available, and she well knew it. Indeed, having been on the call but not being a state legislator herself, she somehow had come to understand—as had others on the call—that what they were being asked to do was something rather different. Proof submits that, on the evidence, the theory that the January 2, 2021 Zoom call was focused on the creation of a letter to send to Mike Pence is faulty. Not only had that already been done, but it would not have required two hours and an address by the President of the United States to orchestrate it. Instead, what the evidence now indicates Trump wanted out of his January 2 national conference call with hundreds of GOP insurrectionists was two things:
(1) Illegally held special sessions in six battleground states.
(2) Some collective action beyond a letter that would either persuade or coerce Pence to (a) not count some states’ electors, or more likely (b) postpone the joint session.
We know why state GOP legislators were on the call; they would be needed for the first item above. But why were party activists—who wouldn’t have been signatories to any legislative letter imagined by Team Trump, however preordained to be ineffective—on the call? Could party activists have helped to accomplish the second item above?
This latter question is especially pertinent given that Snover admits that there was no indication given during the January 2 call that Pence was “on board” with Trump’s plan. In other words, the audience on the call was being told that something needed to happen in the next 96 hours that would somehow compel Pence to be on board, but was given no real hope that yet another letter from GOP legislators would actually do that.
Grassroots Activists Weren’t the Only Insurrectionists Supposed to Get to Vice President Pence on January 6
While DOJ has thus far arrested 825+ people who either entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6 or committed violent crimes outside of it, it has yet to offer any meaningful accounting of the thousands and thousands of Trump supporters who trespassed on Capitol grounds on January 6—a federal crime—but will not be charged with doing so simply because other, more serious crimes were being committed by fellow rioters just a few yards away. These individuals stepped over barricades to trespass at the Capitol; saw that law enforcement officers were being attacked by insurrectionists; and strongly desired to enter the U.S. Capitol in a way that would help ensure the overturning of the 2020 presidential election (via illegal interference in the January 6 joint session of Congress), but they simply waited and bided their time during the riot to see if federal law enforcement officials would be so conclusively defeated outside the building that the entire, massing crowd outside the Capitol building could go inside it.
Many Americans still do not understand that the sole reason “only” 2,000+ Trumpist irregulars entered the Capitol on January 6—rather than 100,000 or more—is because of some combination of the following: (a) several entrances to the building remained blocked by law enforcement officers throughout the attack; (b) the insurrectionists didn’t realize when and where certain building entrances had already been forced open, leading them to congregate at bottlenecks where progress entering the building was slow or non-existent; (c) some insurrectionists became scared to enter the Capitol after hearing that seditionist Ashli Babbitt had been shot; (d) a few Trumpist leaders were urging rioters to stay outside the building because they wrongly believed (or made as if to believe) that Trump would soon be appearing outside the building for a large Stop the Steal rally; (e) reinforcements arrived to relieve the Capitol defenders at a certain point in the riot, shoring up defenses in endangered areas and ejecting many Capitol attackers from several points of entrance and egress; and (f) some rioters were overcome by tear gas, medical issues, fear of police riot-control tactics, the possibility of being crushed or trampled, or some or all of these, and thus discarded their initial plans and expectations of entering the Capitol building itself.
While DOJ may be insufficiently resourced to pursue insurrectionists who either planned to eventually enter the Capitol but never did so or would have done so had the right set of conditions manifested but never did because conditions remained unripe, Congress is in a position to look at the class of Capitol trespassers who never entered the building out of sheer luck rather than lawfulness. In doing so, it can determine what if anything we can learn about Trump’s coup plot from analyzing the identities and intentions of such Capitol-grounds trespassers. In short, Congress is not limited to investigating criminality, and there are moments in which a federal criminal investigator—as I know from formerly being one—can learn as much from parties who will not be charged with any criminal offense as from those who will be.
For instance, Proof has already written about two classes of January 6 insurrectionists that Congress, the DOJ, and the FBI seem to have taken no notice of whatsoever:
(1) Insurrectionists who fled D.C. before January 6 due to information they had received upon their arrival in Washington. In this category we might put Texas GOP mega-donor Bubba Saulsbury, who repeatedly wrote on social media about how very excited he was to attend all the events on January 6—then fled the city immediately after having dinner with Mike Pence at the Vice President’s Residence (the Naval Observatory) on Insurrection Eve. Needless to say, Congress should have subpoenaed Saulsbury to find out what Pence told him hours before the attack on the Capitol that made him reverse his well-laid plans to protest on January 6 and instead take flight from the nation’s capital.
(2) Insurrectionists who attended Trump’s Ellipse speech—to which no possibility of criminal liability accrued for mere attendees—but who immediately thereafter fled to their hotels or even fled the city. Almost every high-level coup plotter and Trump ally with insurrectionist inclinations is in this category. Almost universally, Trump’s inner circle knew to stay away from the Capitol, underlining that Trump himself had been told there would be violence there—and likely spread this intelligence to those he wanted or needed to keep from the clutches of federal law enforcement. Every Trump agent, ally, associate, aide, or adviser who avoided the Capitol on January had an excuse for doing so: Ginni Thomas got cold; Charles Herbster had to catch a plane to Florida with the Trump family (though he lied about even this to Nebraska media); Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne were allegedly disgusted by the failure of Trump’s Ellipse rally to carefully outline the case for a stolen election; Roger Stone decided that the streets of D.C. were too dangerous for him to walk (even to the Ellipse rally); Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer went back to their hotel to drink wine; Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman and Joe Oltmann and Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and others from the Willard Hotel “war room” suddenly had work they needed to do at their hotel; Ali Alexander and Alex Jones—who at least made a brief appearance on the Capitol grounds—had to do a television show from the roof of the Newsmax building (within view of the Capitol); Robert Patrick Lewis had a security detail he needed to run from a great distance from the Capitol, though he had at least one member of his team with eyes on the building; since-arrested Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes apparently needed to direct his many troops from outside the building; Trump himself was kept from the U.S. Capitol by his Secret Service detail, allegedly against his wishes. No one from Trump’s family went to the Capitol, nor did anyone from Trump’s legal team, nor did anyone from Team Kraken, nor did anyone in any position of authority within the Trump administration. Every one of these people had urged others to go to a place they somehow knew not to go to themselves. None of this has ever been explained.
Can anyone doubt that, in some instances, failure to commit the most obvious crime in a given situation is not conclusive evidence of innocence but possible evidence of foreknowledge a crime is going to be committed and (perhaps) participation in other, equally serious crimes that are less easily detected?
With this in mind, Proof puts forward a third category of insurrectionist who never entered the Capitol but has gotten less attention than even the two groups above:
(3) Insurrectionists who trespassed on Capitol grounds but bided their time waiting to see if they could enter the Capitol without getting arrested—and having at some point determined that they could not do so, never did. This group, it turns out, does include a large number of people of interest to federal investigators. But the subpart of this group that Proof wants to focus on here includes state Republican politicians.
As you can see, for instance, in this video taken by insurrectionists who posed with Michael Flynn in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel on Insurrection Eve (a building he claims he was never in that day), many of the reserved seats in the “VIP” area of Trump’s “incitement-to-insurrection” event at the White House Ellipse on January 6 were intended for state GOP politicians of precisely the sort Trump had addressed on January 2. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the class of politician who asked for a VIP seat at Trump’s January 6 event but declined to attend his January 2 Zoom call.
In the video linked to above, we see seats reserved for Category 2 insurrectionists like Kylie Jane Kremer (Women for America First and Stop the Steal) and Dustin Stockton (a Steve Bannon associate, January 6 leader, and March for Trump organizer), as well as several unknown or lesser-known persons (e.g., William Renson, Greg Vizier of the NRA-affiliated Carry America, and Steve Bannon associate Jeff Rainforth). But we also see reserved seats for state politicians like Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-PA)—now the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania—and Rep. Vernon Jones (R-GA).
At a bare minimum, the New York Times reports, 21 state GOP legislators were present in D.C. on January 6:
Rep. David Eastman, Alaska
Rep. Mark Finchem, Arizona
Rep. Anthony Kern, Arizona
Rep. Richard Champion, Colorado
Rep. Ron Hanks, Colorado
Rep. Vernon Jones, Georgia
Rep. Chris Miller, Illinois
Del. Dan Cox, Maryland
Rep. Matt Maddock, Michigan
Rep. Justin Hill, Missouri
Assemb. Annie Black, Nevada
Sen. Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania
Rep. Justin Price, Rhode Island
Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver, Tennessee
Rep. Kyle Biedermann, Texas
Sen. Angela Paxton, Texas
Sen. Amanda Chase, Virginia
Del. Dave LaRock, Virginia
Del. John McGuire, Virginia
Sen. Mike Azinger, West Virginia
Del. Derrick Evans, West Virginia
{Note: More info on insurrectionist Republicans can be found via the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, here. No Democratic politicians were among the January 6 rioters.}
These 21 Republican state legislators (some no longer in office) participated in a wide range of January 6 activities: from actually storming the Capitol (Evans) to “merely” trespassing on Capitol grounds (Kern), from speaking at Stop the Steal events in Washington during Insurrection Week (Jones) to actively coordinating Oath Keeper movements (Finchem), from meeting with far-right paramilitaries prior to the attack (Chase) to orchestrating busloads of insurrectionists to come to D.C. (Maddock). We don’t know how many of these individuals were on the January 2 Zoom call, though at least five would likely have been given the battleground states they represent and the constitution of the call’s audience according to all the parties concerned.
Still other state GOP legislators believed to have been on the January 2 call helped to organize Stop the Steal events in their home states—consistent with Trump’s widely acknowledged expectation (indeed one oft-mentioned by Trump himself) that the chaos he incited on January 6 would be national in scope rather than restricted to D.C. One example of such an individual is Oath Keeper and Arizona state representative Wendy Rogers, a close ally of the above-listed Mark Finchem.
{Note: Others who were at the Capitol now seek to be GOP state legislators or executives, or have successfully gained that status or one adjacent to it—whether it’s Ryan Kelley, who is now running for Governor of Michigan; or Lynwood Nestor, who is now on the Monaghan Township County Republican Committee in Pennsylvania; or Jody Lynn Echevarria-Tagaris, who has served as an official in the Florida Republican Assembly; or Philip Grillo, who is a Republican state committeeman for the 24th Assembly District in Queens, New York. And of course many of the January 6 insurrectionists have since unsuccessfully run for office as Republicans, or else had already done so prior to their actions on January 6.}
What is less well known is how many others who are not state GOP legislators but were on the January 2 Zoom call ended up in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.
For instance, Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, accompanied her husband—who appears on the list above—to Washington on January 6, but she returned to rhe couple’s hotel after Trump’s speech.
Given that, just this February, the Republican National Committee issued a statement declaring the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol “legitimate political discourse”, we might well wonder how many other unelected Republican Party officials like Meshawn Maddock were on or aware of the January 2 call and thereafter headed to Washington.
Gloria Lee Snover offers us a particularly compelling exemplar of this phenomenon.
Gloria Lee Snover
Chairwoman Snover is no garden-variety insurrectionist, as local reporting confirms.
Not only was she at the White House Ellipse rally on January 6; not only did she march on the Capitol; not only did she trespass on Capitol grounds; not only did she get close enough to police lines to get tear-gassed; not only did she subsequently lie to the country thereafter, claiming that the only violence she saw on January 6 was violence committed by federal officials upon Trump voters; even after the bloody attack on the Capitol she maintained that the Capitol building was eligible to be stormed by insurrectionists because the insurrectionists own the building.
Some of Snover’s post-insurrection lies were truly spectacular. She told National Public Radio that despite getting “up pretty close to the Capitol”—up to “the Capitol steps”—and despite engaging in conduct that involved her getting tear-gassed by law enforcement, she could say from her own eyewitness experience that “there was not any violence all day” (a false claim she repeated to NPR more than once) and that only “two people” went inside the Capitol. She added, again falsely, that a “billion people” were present in downtown Washington at Trump’s invitation on January 6.
But her most chilling comment was this one: “[We’re] allowed to be in the Capitol building. Okay? We own the building. That’s our building. We’re allowed to be in that building….we’re allowed to be in the building.” Given all the evidence that Team Trump wanted to see their extremist allies occupy the Capitol on January 6 in order to delay the joint session of Congress scheduled for that day, the fact that a participant in Trump’s January 2 Zoom call believed that this is exactly what she was being called upon to do is profoundly troubling. Just 96 hours earlier, she had been involved in a call that lasted two hours but which we only have approximately one minute’s worth of direct quotes from. What was said in the other 119 minutes about Trump’s “game plan for [January 6]” that permitted Snover to believe she should personally try to assist those looking to illegally enter the Capitol and stay there on January 6? Clearly, Snover expected the Capitol to either be (a) open to all Trump protesters, or (b) if not open per se, then at least eligible to be made open by a sufficiently rowdy protest. Navarro’s reference to members of Congress needing to “smell” the “grassroots” on January 6 may be relevant here—and to whatever Navarro said during the January 2 Zoom call attended by “Stop the Steal leaders” and “others.”
According to County Chairwoman Snover, she was personally invited to join the January 2 call by the Chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, meaning that not only did Trump and Giuliani allow their invite to be extended to unelected political operatives, but implicitly or explicitly gave those operatives further license to extend their own invitations to county-level operatives—precisely the sort of party operatives who organize buses to large-scale political events. Indeed, this is exactly what Michigan Republican Party chairwoman Meshawn Maddock, very likely on the January 2 call (given that her equally politically active husband was), ultimately did.
In other words, Trump didn’t just want to talk to legislators on January 2, 2021—he wanted to talk to organizers.
What’s more, clearly Trump and his team didn’t expect their January 2 call with an almost impossibly expansive national audience of insurrectionists to be the terminus of their effort to incite partisan action nationwide over inadmissible and fraudulent evidence of election fraud. As Snover explained to her interviewer, “They [Giuliani, Eastman, and their associates] have put all of this evidence into one site—one link—where anyone can find it and go through it themselves.” Before long, we now know, Navarro would be on Bannon’s podcast hawking his own contributions to that site.
Mark Finchem
Or maybe we should consider Arizona Republican state representative Mark Finchem, the cofounder of the Stop the Steal movement in Arizona and a sworn Oath Keeper.
As part of Donald Trump’s audience on January 2, Finchem had spent the prior ten days texting with his Stop the Steal compatriot Ali Alexander, who first announced that he would be holding an event in D.C. on January 6 on or before December 17, 2020. Yet as his texts with Alexander over the last two weeks of December confirm, Finchem was not planning to come to D.C. when he spoke to Alexander on December 23, nor when he spoke to him again on December 26. It appears that it was not until early January that Finchem made the decision to go to Washington. Did the January 2 Zoom call play a part in this? We don’t know, though certainly Finchem’s contacts with Alexander the month prior, which were extensive, were not enough to build up his interest in taking a flight to the nation’s capital.
Once in Washington, Finchem became a key part of Stop the Steal’s integration with, communication with, and even coordination of the Oath Keepers on-scene, a dozen of whom have now been charged with Seditious Conspiracy—including some of those, like Joshua James and Roberto Minuta, who Rep. Finchem directly worked with.
And of course we know from Snover that an unknown number of individuals were surely directed to the coup-inciting Got Freedom? archive at the implicit urging of Team Trump. Snover herself—though a Pennsylvanian—admits to having sent the link to her pseudonymous Georgia interviewer “BKP”, pointing out to him that “They [Team Trump] don't mind” if the link is shared. The link was likely shared in this way over and over despite the fact that Snover admits that the information at the link was more in the nature of claimed “irregularities” than clear evidence of any wrongdoing.
{Note: As odd as it may sound, this was consistent with the Team Trump plea to simply “look into” the supposed irregularities—all of which were actually meaningless or fraudulent—that it had compiled. It appears that Team Trump never explained, however, why data from an election held on November 3, 2020 still needed to receive new assessments over two months later, especially given that most of the men who spoke alongside Trump on January 2 were lawyers who knew that no evidence of election fraud could be investigated past the federally mandated December 14, 2020 certification of the presidential election by the fifty states and D.C. If in fact a majority of Congress were to reject a given state’s slate of electors on January 6, it would invalidate only those electors—and would not result in a new federal investigation. So Team Trump seemed to be pulling a bait-and-switch on state legislators, telling them that if they de-certified Biden’s electors it would lead to further post-election investigations when in fact one of two things—and only one of two things—would result from such a scenario: either (a) one candidate would still have enough electoral votes to be named president, or (b) no candidate would have the requisite 270 electoral votes to be named president, throwing the election into a by-delegation vote in the House that Team Trump knew it could win.}
As the above parenthetical underscores, the reason Team Trump sought a delay of the January 6 joint session of Congress was not to hold an unprecedented and logistically impossible (not to mention legally invalid) “investigation,” but to give state legislators more time to install fraudulent Trump electors and/or to give the Supreme Court time to institute ISL nationwide. This suggests that the primary reason Team Trump would have needed to speak to “Stop the Steal leaders” and party activists like Snover on January 2 was not to recruit them to a letter-writing campaign—as non-legislators, they could not possibly hope to influence Mike Pence—but rather to ensure that they understood that the Capitol needed to be physically overrun on January 6 in order for the joint session to be delayed.
Conclusion
When I studied with former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried at Harvard Law at the close of the last century, we didn’t often see eye to eye—as was reflected in my semester grade (a “B-”, the worst grade I ever received in law school, and desperately far from the “A+” I now find myself embarrassed to say I got from Alan Dershowitz).
Now, almost a quarter of a century later, both the arch-conservative professor and his progressive former pupil see eye-to-eye on at least one thing: ISL spells the end of our democracy.
For every one time Critical Race Theory (CRT) is mentioned in public discourse in America, ISL should be referenced—and debated—10,000 times or more. It is that much more involved in, and engaged by, the question of whether our great country can survive past 2024 as a democracy rather than an autocracy.
I’m put in mind, here, of how Gloria Lee Snover closed her interview with “BKP”—as it sealed in my mind that one of two things must collapse over the next decade: the United States of America or the Republican Party. The two cannot both survive into the 2030s.
Indeed, Snover concluded her January 4, 2021 interview by issuing a public warning to the very D.C. Republicans she would be trying to physically gain access to on January 6: she said that if they continued to “turn” on Donald Trump, there would be another party born from the Republican Party. In her January 7 NPR interview three days later, she made clear that this party would be called the Patriot Party—the very same name Michael Flynn, now being backed for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination by Roger Stone if Trump is unable to run, endorsed on Insurrection Eve from the same stage that played host to Stone, Navarro, Byrne, Lewis, Jones, Alexander and countless other extremists that night. The odds that Snover would have serendipitously landed upon the same name for a new political party that Flynn had been pushing for weeks or months prior to January 6 is slim, and likely marks her, instead, as hailing from the same “Team Kraken” camp that had a voice in both the Oval Office on December 18, 2020 (Flynn, Powell, Byrne) and on the January 2, 2021 Zoom conference call (Navarro).
It’s a sorry state of affairs when a small-d “democrat” must root for Team Kraken to destroy its host (the GOP) rather than ISL destroying America—as we really do need a strong two-party political system in the United States. But if the alternative is a neo-fascist Trump regime that’s impossible to unseat because free and fair elections are no longer possible, a circumstance it’s hard to imagine wouldn’t be accompanied by civil unrest and harrowing systematic oppression of leftists, the choice is no choice at all.
Thirty-six hours after this report is published, the House January 6 Committee will hold its first hearing of July 2021. The subject of the hearing? The extremist groups involved (in whatever various ways) in the many far-flung events of January 6, 2021, from the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters to Stop the Steal, the 1st Amendment Praetorians to Women for America First. Of particular interest to the bipartisan congressional committee is how and when the White House and its many attendant legal and political arms interacted with any or all of these extremist groups.
Congress would be wise to turn its gaze on Trump’s January 2 national conference call.
What I found so striking was the hitleresque appeal to Jewish hatred. Targeting soros and Zuckerberg like they’re leaders of American liberalism. What a laugh. Not 1 in 10,0000 americans, much less any idiots on the right have ever read ONE word of anything soros ever wrote (they should) or have given any thought to how much Zuckerberg helped trump in 2016 with Facebook’s ability to micro-target voters.
History will show how trump didn’t so much as steal the election as target millions of voters who could be propagandized into believing that democrats were evil. Not just political rivals, but EVIL. And once the ENEMY had been identified, you must DESTROY him. Erego, all the capitalized exhortations to destroy the evil libs. As long as trump was in power, the rage was contained. But once the overlords’ power was taken away, the gloves came off and the main right wing villain was suddenly catapaulted into the spotlight. Just like in Charlottesville when the puppet master said there were good people on both sides or when he told the proud boys to stand back and stand by, we knew what he meant.
We’ve seen this play. Shakespeare wrote about it. And it’s happening here. In the fucking United States of America. But we shouldn’t be surprised. The goal was to rip us in two. And in that regard, they’ve already succeeded.
Even if we thwart the seditious takeover of American democracy, we face half a country that doesn’t believe in the promise of American democracy. And that’s not something that will be cured by the J6 committee or any prosecutions of these treasonous bastards
ISL should be a headline everywhere, it does need to be shouted from every roof top over and over. Those that don't believe it will happen must wake up to the reality that it can easily happen. I was living in an authoritarian 3rd world country where the leader took full control of all levels of government.
"Ortega took "full control of all four branches of government, state institutions, the military, and police", and in the process dismantled "Nicaragua’s institutional democracy"."
Previously he had banned all abortions. He also has imprisoned or killed any opposition. He has dismantled any "free press" that existed. In November 2021 my husband and I flew to Miami to get vaccinated. Our trip was for 3 days. What ensued after was a dystopian nightmare. Long story short, we had left with just a carry on each, when we attempted to return we got refused over and over to board the plane. At first we thought it was due to covid procedures. The end result was they refused us entry because four years earlier I had posted a story about how Ortega had acquired all his properties. I also wrote a Nicaraguan newsletter for expats for about a year and that was 99.9% positive at all times. I was deemed a journalist and thus refused entry.
In Nicaragua it's against the law to fly the National Flag without his FSLN party flag. It reminds me very much of how MAGA's have taken over the USA National Flag.