Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection
Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection
This fourth book in the NYT-bestselling Proof series is a 250-page exposé on the January 6 coup plot at the Pentagon, with hundreds of citations, photos and videos.
Author’s Note: This full-length book is provided to the public for free. If you’d like to tip the Proof Project, you can do so in seconds at this link or at Venmo via @SethAbramsonTwitter.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Flynns
Piatt
O’Donnell
The Pentagon Report
Matthews
O’Donnell
Miller
Patel
Cohen-Watnick
McCarthy
Team Kraken
Waldron
Bobb
Jones
Cuffari
The Coup Plot at the Pentagon
Meadows
Ginni Thomas
Trump
January 6: Part I
Funes
Document Flow
January 6: Part II
Conclusion
{Note: This 250-page, Fall 2022 report on the coup plot at the Pentagon is the fourth book in the Proof series. Other books in the series include the national bestsellers Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019); and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020). The Proof project also includes an international top-ten podcast that ran just before the 2020 election, Proof: A Pre-Election Special (Cineflix/Connect3 Media, 2020).}
1. Introduction
In early 2018, as part of his unsuccessful efforts to goose congressional Republicans’ chances in the upcoming midterm elections, then-president Donald Trump signed into law an act designed to bring Hillary Clinton and her name out of retirement and back into mainstream political discussion. As Politico summarizes it, the law Trump signed “stiffened the penalty for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents from one year to five years, turning it into a felony offense.”
That Trump intended the law as a political stunt—one that gave him an excuse to now and again invoke Clinton’s 2015 “email” case three years later—would subsequently be confirmed by facts no American who didn’t work in the White House could’ve known at the time: behind the walls of the People’s House, Trump was himself (though in his case unambiguously) mishandling government records, including classified documents, to a degree that had been unthinkable in the nearly quarter-millennium of American history that preceded Trump taking office. Not only would Trump sometimes literally consume government records, he would routinely flush documents legally required to be preserved down his private toilet. At other times he simply ripped up government records and threw them in the trash, while on still other occasions he had his aides take a large number of such records, put them in “burn bags”, and incinerate them.
One of the many reasons that legal experts—including the DOJ prosecutor who led the investigation into Clinton’s email practices—say that Trump’s conduct exceeded in audacity his 2016 Democratic opponent’s by orders of magnitude is that Trump curated which records he wanted destroyed, suggesting a degree of premeditation and nefarious intent found to be wholly absent in the Clinton case.
But perhaps the best evidence of Trump’s years-long plot to hide his conduct in office from U.S. voters by selectively removing key documents from the taxpayer-owned public record was a means of handling classified documents less spectacular than those listed above but no less troubling: in his final months in office—which included his months of pre-election preparations to steal the upcoming election through false claims of election fraud, and extended to the ten days after his failed January 6, 2021 coup attempt—Trump was followed around the White House by a troupe of aides with oversized cardboard boxes of government records he’d commanded be stored in this bizarre fashion.
On a regular basis, the then-president would order that these boxes be deposited in his private residence in the White House. Throughout the waning months of the Trump presidency—amidst his clandestine effort to hold onto power via stratagems America had never seen before—the president would routinely select certain documents to be secreted in these boxes, with the said material evidence never to be seen again, he seemed to hope, by either the taxpayers who were paying his salary or the federal investigators who had in the past and would soon be again investigating his conduct in office.
By the end of his term, Donald Trump had no fewer than twenty-five such boxes of taxpayer property, many of them containing classified documents that significantly implicated U.S. national security. All of them were whisked off to his Florida home.
When that home was searched, earlier this week, (a) under a federal court order, (b) by federal agents commanded by Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray, the agents weren’t just idly searching for any potential remnants of Trump’s secret stash. While they knew some of what Trump had taken from the White House had been returned to the National Archives after months of tortured negotiations, by this time, CNN now reports, the FBI had also demonstrated probable cause to a federal judge that Trump had not only not turned over all the documents he had said he had, but in fact may have instructed some of his agents to lie to federal investigators about the national security-implicating materials he had absconded from the White House with.
Given that lying to federal investigators is a federal felony—something Trump would well know because of how many of his former advisers were indicted for it, including Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopolous, among others—a federal agent could be forgiven for thinking that the documents Trump was still withholding from the government and the American people were important ones indeed.
One might even suspect some concerned preparations for the January 6 insurrection.
Why? Well, apart from the fact that so many of those who assisted Trump in this illicit course of action have since pleaded the Fifth Amendment under federal subpoena (from Flynn to Alex Jones, Charlie Kirk to John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark to Stone), and apart from the fact that the members of the GOP House Freedom Caucus who met with Trump on December 21, 2020 to plan for January 6 all directly or indirectly (in the latter case through one of their number, Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama) thereafter sought a presidential pardon, there’s the far more esoteric fact that almost all of the seven men Trump designated as his representatives to the National Archives—the very men who would know which documents Trump had or had not turned over, and all the things he’d done to avoid relinquishing certain records—are now cooperating with the House January 6 Committee.
Among these seven men are the former White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone; former deputy White House Counsel Patrick Philbin; and Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel chief Steven Engel.
Even former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, one of the seven, partially complied with his House January 6 Committee subpoenas before cutting off his cooperation.
We recently learned that Trump’s lawyers have ordered him to have no further contact with Meadows—a directive, like most directives from his lawyers, that Trump ignored—which has led some to speculate that Trump’s legal team now believes Meadows is a DOJ cooperating witness.
{Note: Breaking news from CNBC on August 10, 2022 indicates that while Trump and his team told federal investigators that they’d turned over everything to the federal government that they were required to turn over, the recent FBI search of Trump’s Florida home turned up “about a dozen boxes” of documents, apparently some classified, still in Trump’s possession. We do not know how many additional boxes, if any, were hidden, given away, destroyed, sold, altered, or otherwise defaced or evaporated by Trump from January 2021 to August 2022.}
In short, the push inside DOJ to find out which sensitive records Trump is still hiding from federal investigators has coincided with growing cooperation between the men tasked with supervising Trump’s document-retention ploys and federal investigators from both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. What we don’t yet know is what information the documents Donald Trump is hiding contain.
We do know that both Trump and his lawyers are now baselessly accusing the FBI of planting evidence at Mar-a-Lago. We know that Trump’s son Eric Trump is now trying to draw attention away from the documents seized by baselessly accusing Joe Biden—in the strangest possible way, namely by confirming that it’s something his father did while in office—of green-lighting a federal search of a former political rival. We know that Trump and his team are inexplicably hiding the Mar-a-Lago “warrant return”—that is the record of documents sought and seized that Trump and his lawyers were given by the FBI on-site at Mar-a-Lago, and are doing this even as they falsely claim to have no idea why Trump’s home was searched. And we know that there’s at least probable cause to believe Trump’s agents committed federal felonies to try to keep the seized materials out of the hands of the FBI. So in short, we have very good reason to suspect the documents Trump is hiding would in some fashion incriminate him.
And because it has been confirmed through numerous major-media reports that the documents in question implicate national security, it seems evident that any potential crimes revealed by these documents relate to actions taken by, or communications with, those Trump advisers and Trump-era executive-branch entities that deal with national security: for instance, the White House’s National Security Council, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, or even DOJ.
That this FBI search of Mar-a-Lago comes at a time when America has just learned that several of these entities deleted key evidence related to January 6 under highly suspicious circumstances casts a particularly strong light on three of these federal subunits in particular: the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and the Pentagon. And of course the fact that Trump escaped indictment over two of the three biggest scandals of his administration—the Trump-Russia and Trump-Ukraine scandals—puts significant additional focus on these sequences of events in particular along with the January 6 insurrection and coup plot.
So it’s with great interest that Proof learned that two men have just been added to Trump’s team of document-retention representatives: John Solomon and Kash Patel.
As was exhaustively detailed in the only bestselling treatise on the Trump-Ukraine scandal thus far, Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020), John Solomon and Kash Patel were both members of the “BLT Prime Team”—a group of Trump sycophants in and out of government service who aided and abetted Trump’s clandestine effort to steal the 2020 presidential election by contracting with Kremlin agents in Ukraine for manufactured “dirt” on Joe Biden. The information this small team sought was false information whose would-be purveyors and would-be receivers both knew it was false; indeed, some of the former of whom, notably ex-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, have now confessed to such misconduct.
John Solomon was, at the time of his 2019 and 2020 participation on the BLT Prime Team—so named because its meetings were held inside the BLT Prime Restaurant in Trump International Hotel in D.C., later the site of Trump’s primary January 6 “war room”—pretending to be a journalist at The Hill. In fact, he was a clandestine Trump political agent (and has long since been fired from employment in institutional media).
Kash Patel’s story is even more interesting, however. Far from being pushed to the perimeter of Trump’s inner circle or stripped of his employment, Patel’s career as a leading Trump co-conspirator skyrocketed following the Trump-Ukraine scandal.
Indeed, by the time Donald Trump urgently transferred Patel to be chief of staff to his newly installed Secretary of Defense Chris Miller in the immediate aftermath of his 2020 election loss, the former White House aide had become central to Trump’s second major scheme to steal the 2020 election: a post-election coup plot.
Until now, Patel’s role has only lightly been detailed in major media, as little attention has been placed on how the civilian leadership at the Pentagon—not negligently but willfully—participated in the January 6 coup plot and in the illicit scheming that both preceded and followed it.
This massive Proof book on the coup plot at the Pentagon aims to remedy this lacuna.
{Note: Per an exclusive Newsweek investigation released just as this Proof book was in its final editing, the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home “was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek. The officials, who have direct knowledge of FBI deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Trump’s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur when the former president was away….Both officials say the raid was scheduled with no political motive, [with] the FBI solely intent on recovering highly classified documents that were illegally removed from the White House.”
Additional information on the Mar-a-Lago search, including up-to-the-minute reporting on the most recent, mid-2022 developments in this breaking news story, is found in Chapter 23.}
Some Critical Background
On May 29, 2021, the Twitter feed linked to Proof issued the following public call:
I am begging all U.S. investigative journalists to dedicate themselves to this only (don’t wait for the FBI): you must report on what the Pentagon did on December 17, 2020; the December 18, 2020 Oval Office meeting that almost came to blows; and the December 21, 2020 insurrection planning meeting [involving Donald Trump and members of Congress].
On the evening of December 17, Trump’s handpicked acting Secretary of Defense [Miller] suddenly cut off [president-elect] Joe Biden’s team from national security briefings. Less than twelve hours later, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Patrick Byrne were in the Oval Office for ten minutes {NB: since revealed to be closer to a half-hour} alone with Trump as part of an unauthorized and unscheduled meeting [regarding using the Pentagon to seize voting machines]. On the very next work day—Monday, December 21—Trump convened with him only those members of Congress who would be willing to commit acts of Sedition.
The reason for this public call was that Proof is a curatorial-journalism media outlet; it offers curated major-media and OSINT reportage rather than developing first-hand sources. It required conventional reportage to gain insight from inside Trump’s civilian military leadership, and that meant major-media journalists with a significant history of covering the Pentagon reaching out to the sources they’d developed across years and years to find out who at the Pentagon orchestrated cutting off Biden’s transition team from any access to the Department of Defense at a time when Trump lawyer Powell was (with Trump lawyer Giuliani present) floating using the Pentagon to seize voting machines—an act that would not only have been illegal but would’ve required Trump declaring martial law and effectively launching America’s first military coup.
Unfortunately, despite its abundant investigative resources major media did virtually nothing to pursue this story in 2021.
So in early February of this year, Proof put out a second and more specific call not just to the hundreds of major-media journalists who follow the Proof project but also to members of the recently constituted House January 6 Committee—several of whom also follow Proof both on social media and here on Substack.
Congress needs Pentagon visitor logs for December 1, 2020 to January 20, 2021—as well as a tick-tock of the movements of Kash Patel, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Michael Lindell, Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn during this span. Much more was happening at the Pentagon [pre-January 6] than we realized. There’s a reason Powell was ensconced at a hotel near the Pentagon writing a coup plot that required aid from Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon. And there’s a reason Lindell met with [son of Brazilian neo-fascist dictator Jair Bolsonaro] Eduardo Bolsonaro in Pentagon City on Insurrection Eve. {NB: The Proof report on this meeting reveals that by January 5, 2021, Lindell and the rest of Team Kraken had prepared a 15-page document calling for martial law and a Second U.S. Civil War.}
There’s a reason the Army lied about the role of [Flynn’s brother] Charles Flynn on January 6. There’s a reason a whistleblower now calls Charles Flynn an “absolute liar.” Pentagon operations on January 6 seem to have been coordinated by Patel and Cohen-Watnick, not Secretary Miller.
The pre-election “purge” of the Trump administration that put radical Trump loyalists in positions of authority at DOJ, DHS, the Pentagon, and the State Department was orchestrated by three people: Ginni Thomas, Barbara Ledeen, and John McEntee. Their “purge” made a coup attempt possible.
….
It increasingly appears that, while January 6 wasn’t a military {NB: as in uniformed-personnel} coup attempt, there were co-conspirators in civilian leadership at the Pentagon.
Since Proof wrote about the January 6 and pre-January 6 actions of “DOJ, DHS, the Pentagon, and the State Department” in early February, we’ve learned the following:
Trump loyalists inside the Department of Justice, including Jeffrey Clark and Ken Klukowski, were plotting an internal coup to force the Department to falsely declare the 2020 election results fraudulent. Clark has now pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times to avoid answering questions from Congress; Klukowski is now cooperating with federal investigators.
The Department of Homeland Security deleted January 2021 text messages from Trump appointees Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli—messages sent and received during the same period of time former DHS employee and Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, then posing as a “reporter” for far-right propaganda outlet OANN, was lobbying DHS to seize ballots and voting machines from her perch inside the Trump “war room”/“command center” at D.C.’s Willard Hotel. Meanwhile, the U.S. Secret Service, a subsidiary of DHS, deleted all texts from January 5 and January 6 for at least 24 of its agents, including several who were in close contact with Trump as he planned his insurrection: Trump detail chief Bobby Engel; Trump detail chief-cum-Trump political adviser Tony Ornato, and the unnamed driver of the presidential SUV on January 6, 2021—the day that Trump, per sworn testimony from former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson, tried to commandeer the said SUV to ensure he could personally lead what he knew at the time, per Hutchinson, was an armed march on the U.S. Capitol. (Trump had hand-picked Alex Jones to lead this armed march prior to its arrival at the Capitol, as confirmed via the video here and other video, audio, and text—including a video confession by Roger Stone and an audio confession by Ali Alexander—documented by Proof throughout 2021.)
The State Department was on January 6 being lobbied by members of Trump’s Willard Hotel war room, with Colorado paramilitary extremist Joe Oltmann—an adjunct to Trump’s legal team both before, on, and after January 6—spending much of Insurrection Day in a Faraday cage at the State Department trying to convince top lieutenants of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to assist in the then-president’s ongoing coup attempt.
The Pentagon deleted January 2021 texts and secure messages from nearly all of Trump’s top political appointees in the Department of Defense, including Patel and Miller. According to a report by the Washington Post, others at the Pentagon whose electronic communications were destroyed include then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy; then-general counsel for the Department of Defense, Paul Ney; Gen. James McConville, the Army chief of staff; and Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, director of the Army staff. American Oversight—the nonpartisan and nonprofit watchdog that filed a FOIA request for the messages in question before they were deleted—now says that the deletion of the requested material not only violates the Army’s and Department of Defense’s FOIA obligations but also the Federal Records Act, which “require[s] that the government preserve records that have ‘informational value of the data in them.’” According to a follow-up report by CNN, “a former Defense Department official from a previous administration” said that the deletions also violated the Presidential Records Act. Per a CNN summary of the official’s comments, “[I]t is ingrained into new [Defense Department] hires during their onboarding that their work devices were subject to the Presidential Records Act, and [it is] indicated [to them then that] their communications would be archived….[and that] when they turn in their devices at the end of their employment [at the Pentagon], any communication records [will] be archived.”
You might think, from all the above, that Congress has now launched an investigation into the involvement of the Pentagon in the events of January 6. It has not—at least not publicly. While it has queried certain former Pentagon officials about why it took so long for the Pentagon to respond to the attack on the Capitol that day (and has also asked whether Trump was telling the truth—spoiler alert, he was not—when he said, first in 2021 and since then over and over again, that he commanded that “10,000” National Guard troops be deployed to the Capitol on January 6) it does not seem to have launched an investigation into whether elements inside the Pentagon’s civilian leadership were working to advance Trump’s coup plot both on January 6 and before.
One also might think, from all the above, that major media has now widely reported on the involvement of the Pentagon in the events of January 6. It has not. Indeed, it has more or less done the opposite. Most recently, for instance, lawyer and MSNBC journalist Ari Melber aired a one-hour special about January 6 in which he opined—incorrectly—that Trump dropped his plan to use the Pentagon to further his coup plot on December 18, 2020, deciding on that day to focus his attention on the January 6 joint session of Congress, instead. Viewers of this particular MSNBC special were left with the impression that (a) the notion of using the Pentagon to advance a coup plot had originated from outside the White House, and (b) it had died on the very same day it was first presented to the White House because it was immediately clear to the White House that no such plot could succeed. That nothing in the January 6 record supports either of these conclusions appeared to be no block upon them being reported as fact.
In view of the foregoing, it is clear in retrospect that Proof made a mistake in never publishing a comprehensive overview of the role of the Pentagon in January 6 until now. Such a major exposé was long planned for Proof, but other events intervened—and as Proof is the work of one journalist rather than hundreds of them (such as we find at the New York Times or the Washington Post), when the publication’s attention moves on to other matters, it can be hard to wrench it back.
So Proof is now—with this book—remedying its mistake, in so doing exposing the error of media in exculpating the Pentagon and the error of Congress in not yet holding hearings to focus on deliberate Pentagon misconduct relating to January 6.
Proof can assure its readers that there is news in this exposé you’ve never before seen.
2. The Flynns
It was widely known, weeks before January 6, that Michael Flynn had not only been publicly agitating for the overthrow of American democracy but planned to attend the events of January 6—which Cassidy Hutchinson reports Trump’s Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe believed would lead to terroristic violence—as part of the Jericho March, which (a) planned to march around the Capitol building throughout the day on January 6 (risking regular trespasses on the closed-to-the-public federal property), and (b) had called itself a “Jericho march” in honor of a section of the Old Testament in which the Israelites march around the walls of the City of Jericho a preordained number of times because their deity assured them that if they did so the walls of the city would crumble prior to the Israelites’ planned military invasion. In short, Flynn was known to be participating in a sequence of events that the Trump administration believed would lead to violence—and Flynn’s own anticipated role in that sequence of events had been forecast through a Biblical metaphor predicated upon violence and invasion. Yet instead of exiling Flynn from Trump’s sphere, Team Trump put him on the speaking schedule alongside Trump for the January 6 rally at the White House Ellipse. (At the last moment, Flynn and others deemed “crazies” were removed from the speaking schedule by Trump aide Katrina Pierson, possibly without Trump’s knowledge or input.)
Notably, one of the last orders Donald Trump gave anyone on Insurrection Eve was to command his chief of staff Mark Meadows to call two men to get more intelligence on what would unfold on January 6: Stop the Steal capo Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.
When Insurrection Week arrived, Flynn attended Trump war rooms, spoke at a Stop the Steal rally on Insurrection Eve in which he counseled the assembled mob to think of “blood” and “war”, did a lengthy Insurrection Eve interview with the man Trump had tapped to lead the march on the Capitol (Alex Jones) in which he sounded all of the same themes, had a front-row “VIP” seat to Trump’s now-infamous “incitement to insurrection” speech on January 6 (and, as noted above, was originally scheduled to speak from the White House Ellipse stage alongside fellow insurrectionist Patrick Byrne), and did all these things in early January 2021 just two weeks removed from having advised Trump—in a wild and nearly violent Oval Office meeting—to declare martial law, seize voting machines across the country with the aid of the United States Armed Forces, and conduct a new federal election at the barrel of a gun.
The gun(s) in question would be wielded by contingents of U.S. soldiers at least in part—directly or indirectly—under the authority of Flynn’s brother, General Charles Flynn.
{Note: Michael Flynn has now pleaded the Fifth Amendment to avoid all questions related to his political activities on and immediately prior to January 6, 2021.}
While there is no evidence as yet that General Charles Flynn knew of the Pentagon-dependent plot hatched weeks before January 6 by his brother, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, it certainly was universally known by New Year’s Day of 2021 that the latter was advocating for chaos alongside the domestic terrorists of the Stop the Steal operation, promoting a plan that would end American democracy, and aiming to help orchestrate a flatly fraudulent “election” that would not only be illegal but held while the nation was effectively under martial law. (After Biden’s Inauguration, Flynn called for a violent military coup—one that would necessarily involve his brother Charles as a seditious rebel—during a QAnon rally in Dallas.)
For all these reasons, it’s a good thing General Charles Flynn was not part of the chain of command on January 6, 2021 with respect to the question of whether National Guard troops would be deployed to the U.S. Capitol—especially as the failure of the Pentagon to send the said troops to relieve the Capitol in a timely fashion stands as one of the greatest Pentagon scandals in modern American political history, and was nearly the single deciding factor in whether Trump’s January 6 coup plot succeeded.
Yet we now know that insurrectionist Michael Flynn’s brother Charles Flynn was inexplicably inserted back into the chain of command on January 6, and that Charles Flynn was in fact an essential part of the decision to keep National Guard troops away from the Capitol for hours on January 6. This disastrous decision led to the sacking of the Capitol, the grotesque endangerment of hundreds and hundreds of elected federal officials, and the deaths of both civilians and uniformed law enforcement personnel.
All that would be bad enough. In itself, the unwarranted and candidly unconscionable insertion of a Flynn brother into the sensitive national security operations of January 6 would be a scandal well worth Congressional oversight and major-media reporting.
But then the Pentagon lied about Flynn’s involvement in the events of January 6.
And then a whistleblower revealed that the Pentagon had even lied about its lies, and that Charles Flynn himself had allegedly lied to Congress about his role on January 6.
And then former Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, a civilian counterpart of Flynn in Pentagon leadership on January 6, lied to Congress under oath about January 6. And then he went on Fox News and, in an interview with longtime Trump domestic policy adviser Sean Hannity, lied about that testimony. (The setting for Miller’s compounded deceit was appropriate, as Hannity would himself engage in a months-long seminar in post-January 6 revisionist history as to his own views and statements about January 6.)
Did a major congressional inquiry into Michael Flynn, Charles Flynn and Chris Miller follow? No. Did a flurry of major-media reporting on the lies told by the latter Flynn and Secretary Miller follow? It did not. It was simply assumed that the Pentagon on January 6 had been unencumbered by political considerations, and had indeed done its utmost to avoid any bloodshed on January 6.
One imagines that, somewhere inside the Pentagon, there’s some witness who could testify about (a) how Charles Flynn entered a chain of command he had no business being in on January 6; (b) why and/or how both the Pentagon and Flynn came to lie about his involvement in decision-making on January 6; and (c) how, why, and by whom the initial decision was made not to relieve the Capitol in a timely manner on January 6, which decision—thereafter lied about by Trump appointee Miller and others, including Charles Flynn—could have led to the delay of the January 6 joint session of Congress that Charles Flynn’s brother Michael had been demanding in public. Presumably, such a witness could also explain (d) when and by whom the judgment of Chris Miller and Charles Flynn was countermanded, and (e) what role Trump political appointees Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick played in either the initial decision not to relieve the Capitol or any discussions that subsequently played out about countermanding that order.
Fortunately, there is such a witness: Lieutenant General Walter E. Piatt, Director of the Army Staff. LTG Piatt was present for many of the key events at the Pentagon on January 6.
3. Piatt
This week, we learned that the Pentagon erased all Piatt’s electronic communications from early January 2021.
But that’s not all we learned. We also learned that the Pentagon lied about deleting those critical communications between Piatt and unknown others at the Pentagon.
According to a report in the Washington Post, when the Pentagon was caught having deleted reams of federal evidence, a “defense official” was willing to “speak on the condition of anonymity” to say that “the deletions were just standard process.” But it now appears that this official chose anonymity not “because of the sensitivity of the issue”, as the Post first reported, but because he or she was lying. How do we know? Because a Post review of Pentagon protocols founds that key federal witness Piatt’s electronic communications “should not have been deleted” because he “still work[s] at the Pentagon.”
So the Pentagon told America that it had to delete certain “texts and secure messages” because the owners of the accounts that sent those texts and secure messages were no longer working at the Pentagon—except that some were, requiring a serious violation of Pentagon protocols to execute mass deletions that were clearly deemed desirable and necessary for other reasons despite being categorically illegal and maybe criminal.
And yet—one might say—isn’t Piatt still available to testify before the House January 6 Committee about what Charles Flynn (as well as Chris Miller, Kash Patel, Ezra Cohen-Watnick and other Trump political appointees) did on and before January 6? Wouldn’t the destruction of his texts and secure messages only be of grave concern if we had reason to believe Piatt lied—and would continue to lie—about what happened on and before January 6 (suggesting that his texts and secure messages were deleted in part to ensure that he could lie going forward without contradiction)? And that’s a fair point.
Or it would be.
But on December 6, 2021, Colonel Earl Matthews, a veteran who held “high-level National Security Council and Pentagon roles during the Trump administration”—and who was senior legal counsel to Major General William Walker, commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, on January 6—sent a letter to Congress in which he called both Charles Flynn and Walter Piatt “absolute and unmitigated liars” over what he said were their false accounts of January 6, 2021.
Colonel Matthews was, to be clear, not casually accusing Flynn and Piatt of stretching the truth—he was, rather, accusing them both, in writing, of committing felony Perjury.
How certain would a military whistleblower have to be that what he was outlining for Congress was the truth to accuse, in writing, two current generals of federal felonies?
Pretty sure, one would think.
In undertaking his presumably daunting task, Col. Matthews was likely emboldened not only by the fact that he was telling the truth but the fact that his superior officer could corroborate his version of events. As NBC News reported in March 2021, long before Flynn or Piatt testified before Congress (emphasis supplied),
The commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard told members of Congress Wednesday that he had troops ready to deploy immediately to the Capitol on January 6, but it took more than three hours for the Defense Department to give the green light. The commander, Major General William J. Walker, added that military leaders—including the brother of ex-Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn— advised at one point during the afternoon that deploying troops would not be “good optics.”
Matthews’ 36-page letter to Congress makes the awesome breadth and depth of its exhaustively documented corroboration even more conspicuous (emphasis supplied):
Although [this letter is] written in the third person, the recollections expressed are those of Major General (Retired) William J. Walker, U.S. Army, who served as Commanding General of the District of Columbia National Guard on the date in question, and Colonel Earl G. Matthews, U.S. Army, who then served as his Staff Judge Advocate.
This memorandum was drafted primarily by Colonel Matthews with the assistance of current and former D.C. National Guard officers who were continuously with Major General Walker during the afternoon and evening of 6 January 2021, or who otherwise supported our response to the attack on the Capitol. This memorandum is drawn from the contemporaneous notes and emails of these soldiers and airmen and from their individual and collective memories.
Per Matthews, Walker, and the many others in federal service who apparently saw and heard the same things Matthews and Walker did, “The DoD-IG report [the report by Pentagon Inspector General Sean O’Donnell about the Pentagon’s alleged actions on January 6] relied heavily on close associates of LTG Walter Piatt and other Army Staff principals….[and] eventually adopted a narrative formed and developed by LTG Piatt, and his close associates, and is fundamentally flawed as a result. The DoD-IG report is replete with factual inaccuracies, discrepancies and faulty analysis. It relies on demonstrably false testimony or statements.”
All of which indicates that—when it illegally and counter to longstanding DoD policy destroyed critical electronic evidence produced by Piatt—the Pentagon was aiding and abetting the precarious legal standing of a federal witness who stands accused of Perjury.
Perhaps—putting aside the obvious fact that everyone at the Pentagon knew as the attack on the Capitol was unfolding that it would be federally investigated for years—the Pentagon destroyed the evidence at issue because it simply didn’t know for certain that anyone would want it at the time it destroyed it?
Unfortunately, even this weak attempt at exculpating the Pentagon fails. According to the Post (emphasis supplied), “The [Pentagon’s text and secure-message] deletions appear to have been conducted after the FOIA requests [from American Oversight] were filed.” The FOIA requests were filed in the week after the January 6 attack, and not only did they fail to cause the preservation of records they (by law) had triggered, the Pentagon went well beyond even its own protocols, not to mention ignoring the national-security and criminal-justice implications of all evidence associated with January 6, to destroy records it was illegal and against protocol to destroy. And what it destroyed was evidence generated by men who are now said to have used the lack of any independent digital record to feloniously lie to the U.S. Congress and to America.
In view of the above, it is remarkable that among the people who agree that Piatt may have gotten many of his facts wrong about January 6 is Piatt himself.
As the Washington Post reports,
In an interview with the Post, [former U.S. Capitol Police chief Steven] Sund recalled the Army staff director, Lieutenant General Walter Piatt, saying, “I don’t like the visual of the National Guard standing a police line with the Capitol in the background.” Piatt, in a statement, initially said he didn’t make those remarks or any comments similar to them. Later, he backtracked, saying he didn’t recall citing such concerns but note-takers in the room told him he may have said that.
Piatt, who wasn’t in the chain of command, was leading the [open conference] call [with the Capitol’s law-enforcement defenders, including the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C.] while waiting for the Army secretary [Trump appointee Ryan McCarthy] to receive approval for the full activation of the D.C. Guard from [Secretary of Defense and Trump appointee Chris] Miller.
The above account tells us several things about Piatt: (i) that despite not being in the chain of command on January 6, he—and reportedly Michael Flynn’s brother as well—strenuously presented his own personal objections to relieving the Capitol though he was only on the Pentagon’s open line to the U.S. Capitol as a mere placeholder for the suddenly absent Trump-appointed Ryan McCarthy; (ii) that after January 6 he was, as Colonel Matthews has since unambiguously accused him of being, willing to lie or casually distort his conduct on January 6; and (iii) the locus of his deceit appears to be the particular question of whether he acted without due authority to push back against the desperate request for aid he was then hearing from the men and women charged with defending the Capitol. We of course know now, too, that the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, all of it appointed by Donald Trump, was so worried about both Piatt’s and Flynn’s actions, and perhaps about McCarthy’s stunning absence from the Pentagon’s open line to the Capitol, that for days after January 6 it lied about whether Piatt’s on-site phone-call co-participant Charles Flynn was even on the line on January 6 at all.
And of course General Charles Flynn wasn’t simply “on the line”—he is now said to have worked in tandem with Piatt to try to convince the Capitol’s defenders that they should not expect to be relieved by the D.C. National Guard and should consider their request for relief conditionally denied.
{Note: The Post observes that “in the days before the [January 6] protest” there were “reports that former national security adviser Michael Flynn had raised the possibility with Trump of declaring martial law to ‘rerun’ the election”, a fact that makes an out-of-the-chain-of-command Charles Flynn—Michael Flynn’s brother—pushing back on the Pentagon relieving the U.S. Congress as it tried to certify Trump’s loss an historic breach of military protocol.}
4. O’Donnell
When a federal agency destroys historically important evidence in its possession both illegally and counter to protocols—and in defiance of an open FOIA request—it will surprise no one to hear that a federal inspector general must eventually get involved.
It should also surprise no one that when the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas; the wife of Michael Flynn friend and co-author Michael Ledeen (and also a top staffer for two top Trump congressional allies, Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina), Barbara Ledeen; and fired Trump body man-turned-Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office John McEntee assisted Trump in executing his 2020 purge of all non-radicals in the Inspector General offices of his largest executive-branch departments, they started with the Pentagon and the intelligence units associated with the Pentagon’s activities.
{Note: Proof has published a series of viral reports on Ginni Thomas that expose her role in the events leading up to January 6, 2021. You can read those reports here, here, here, and here.}
As CBS News reported in May 2020, when the Ginni Thomas-led purge of supposed “Deep State” career civil servants in the Trump administration began, among the first people to go were Glenn Fine, the Pentagon’s Principal Deputy Inspector General, and Michael Atkinson, the Intelligence Community Inspector General. (And before anyone says, of Fine, that he was just a deputy, not so fast—as CBS News also reports, emphasis supplied, “Fine was tapped for the role of the Defense Department’s acting inspector general in January 2016 and remained in that post until his ouster April 6.”).
But do we have reason to think that the loyalist Trump replaced Fine with was willing to help Piatt, Charles Flynn, and others at the Pentagon like Patel and Cohen-Watnick cover up their actions on and before January 6? Yes, unfortunately, we do.
According to the Politico report on Col. Matthews’ whistleblower letter to Congress, the formal missive “slams the Pentagon’s inspector general for what [Col. Matthews] calls an error-riddled report that protects a top Army official who argued against sending the National Guard to the Capitol on January 6, delaying the insurrection response for hours.”
It’s important to focus here not just on the first part of the sentence above but the second part as well. The actions of Flynn, Piatt, and others at the Pentagon on January 6 made it not just possible but likely that the joint session of Congress scheduled for that day would be delayed not just for a few hours but for days—which we now know was precisely the plan endorsed by Trump and several members of his inner circle.
A delay of the joint session that lasted several days would have given Trump and his allies on GOP-led state legislatures the time they needed to certify new (fake) Trump “electors” and to take a case on the power of state legislatures to do something so unprecedented to the Supreme Court, where Trump’s legal team believed it would find a sympathetic ear in Ginni Thomas’ husband Clarence Thomas and the four other far-right judges on the Court (three of them recent Trump SCOTUS appointees, and the fourth, Justice Samuel Alito, known for a jurisprudence as far to the right as Thomas’).
{Note: As a central part of his and Ginni Thomas’ purge, Donald Trump also axed the State Department Inspector General, Steve Linick. At the time Linick was investigating the basis and justification for a 2017 arms deal Trump had signed with the murderous Saudi autocrat Mohammed bin Salman. Note also that while Glenn Fine had the right to stay on as a deputy inspector general at the Pentagon after his firing as acting IG, Trump had, by Spring 2020, made so clear he wanted Fine gone that on June 1, 2020, Fine resigned his Pentagon position.}
Trump first nominated Jason Abend to replace Fine. Abend had been a “senior policy adviser” under Trump at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and if that sounds like a position perfect for a highly partisan Trump loyalist, indeed it is; in fact, Abend was widely deemed so unqualified for the position of Pentagon Inspector General that one of the inspectors general who immediately preceded Fine at the Pentagon, 2008-2012 Pentagon Inspector General Gordon Heddell, wrote an article for Defense News in which he called Abend “unqualified”, “inexperienced”, “untested”, and—certainly most troublingly—a man whose “ability to remain independent under pressure is in question.” (In short, former Inspector General Heddell was worried that Abend would be Trump’s creature, which may explain why Abend was ultimately never confirmed.)
All that the failure of Trump’s Abend nomination meant, however, was that his Spring 2020 interim Pentagon Inspector General (DoD-IG) appointee, Sean O’Donnell, got to stay in his role. Indeed, it remains possible that then-president Trump nominated the unqualified Abend for the role of Pentagon Inspector General in part because he knew Abend couldn’t be confirmed—which result would give Trump the unconfirmed (and perhaps even unconfirmable) Pentagon Inspector General he really wanted: O’Donnell.
So who is Sean O’Donnell, and why would Donald Trump have liked him so much?
It’s a good question, especially as Trump—who has frequently been accused of bank fraud and involvement with international money launderers—was selecting as acting Pentagon Inspector General a man who’d spent 15 years working at DOJ in the Bank Integrity Unit of the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering/Asset Recovery Section.
Had Trump ever crossed paths with Mr. O’Donnell before? We don’t know. But we do know that O’Donnell, who remains the Pentagon Inspector General in August 2022, is currently illegally in his job according to the Government Accountability Office, and has been for eight months. He was also illegally in his job, per the GAO, for nine and a half months at the end of the Trump administration, meaning that in total O’Donnell has been illegally in the role Trump mysteriously wanted him in for about a year and a half. O’Donnell could have resigned at any time—ending his violation of the law—but he declined. Instead, he oversaw the writing of the Pentagon’s report about January 6.
We’ll return to O’Donnell’s Pentagon role after we take a look at his January 6 report.
{Note: The GAO also found that Donald Trump’s initial nomination of O’Donnell was illegal. Note also that, per the Federal News Network, “Something similar happened when the GAO ruled in 2020 that Chad Wolf was never properly appointed [by Trump] as acting secretary of [the Department of] Homeland Security. The Trump administration openly defied the ruling and left Wolf in place.” It seems Trump felt it was as important to leave O’Donnell in his job at the Pentagon as it was to leave Wolf in his job at DHS. Wolf is one of the Trump-appointed administration officials whose January 6 communications have now disappeared.}
5. The Pentagon Report
If you doubt that the Pentagon report on January 6 took the general form of a cover-up from the start, consider its title: “Review of the DoD’s Role, Responsibilities, and Actions to Prepare For the Protest and Its Aftermath at the U.S. Capitol Campus on January 6, 2021.”
By November 2021, the month the report was released, it was widely understood that the event that had taken place at the Capitol on January 6 had not been a “protest” at all but at best a riot and at worst an armed insurrection. Yet even before the first word of its text proper, the January 6 Pentagon Report had concluded that the event it detailed was a legitimate political protest.
Yet the Report got even more strikingly (and strangely) biased—almost immediately.
This is the beginning of the January 6 timeline, according to DoD-IG Sean O’Donnell:
That’s correct—half a year after former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering an unarmed American civilian, George Floyd, the Pentagon described the event as Floyd having simply “die[d] while in police custody.” O’Donnell exhibited no such excess of caution, however, in describing the response to Floyd’s murder, which he termed “violent protests” (unlike the armed January 6 attack on the Capitol, which was deemed an un-adjectivized “protest”). The IG also, for a second time, in the latter entry above, declined to call Mr. Floyd’s death a “murder” despite this having been the final judgment of a duly constituted state court. O’Donnell also elides the fact that the “federal response” to the overwhelmingly peaceful Floyd protests was, at least in D.C.—the only site of protest relevant to O’Donnell’s focus, the D.C. National Guard, and, problematically for O’Donnell, one where it was federal officials who initiated violence—was in fact made up of an impromptu interagency army of dubious legality raised by Trump’s then-Attorney General, William Barr.
What any of this has to do with January 6 is unclear, though it has long been a talking point of the January 6 insurrectionists that the Floyd protests in some way justified or opened the door to the far-right domestic terrorism we saw in Washington that day.
Other components of the Pentagon Report timeline are equally shocking, like this one:
We now know that DHS—the Department of Homeland Security—has destroyed all the electronic communications of some of its top Trump-appointed officials, so it may be impossible to recreate how in the world DHS estimated, a week before over 120,000 Americans descended on the nation’s capital, that only “2,000 protestors” would be in D.C. on January 6. Nevertheless, the Pentagon Report reveals that, between January 2 and January 4, 2021, Trump-appointed Acting Secretary of Defense Miller repeatedly corresponded with Trump appointees at DHS about January 6, perhaps even using the latter entity’s truly preposterous crowd estimates—approximately 93% smaller than the estimates that were being made by the Metropolitan Police Department at the time—to justify being so slow to respond to an RFA (“Request for Assistance”) made by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on December 31, 2020. (Inexplicably, Trump appointee Ryan McCarthy decided that Bowser’s request would not be acted upon until late in the day on January 4, 2021, despite the fact that the start-time of the request was the morning of the following day.)
{Note: It cannot be sufficiently underscored how derelict the Pentagon’s intelligence-gathering apparatus would have to have been to be repeating, on the second-to-last day of December in 2020, the “2,000” figure cited above. As Newsweek reports, by December 23 one of the January 6 organizers, Cindy Chafian, had already sent out a mass email predicting at least “15,000” protesters, an email immediately followed, the same day, by both a U.S. Park Police directive reporting that “A higher number [of people] tha[n] expected…have already made concerted plans to travel to the District of Columbia for the event” and a U.S. Capitol Police Special Assessment reporting that “The [January 5-6] protests/rallies [are] expected to be similar to the previous Million MAGA March rallies in November and December 2020”—events that, per Reuters and CBS News, drew “tens of thousands” and “17,000” protestors, respectively.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Secret Service, which the Pentagon also spoke to in December, estimated that the crowd on January 6 would be at least “20,000” before New Year’s Eve, but adjusted its estimate upward shortly thereafter, as did all the entities the Pentagon had been in contact with—in each case well before McCarthy finally authorized a limited D.C. RFA on January 4, 2021, hours before Insurrection Eve. See below for much more detail on the RFA’s limitations.}
So how did Miller and McCarthy spend the critical five days between Bowser’s urgent late December 2020 request and its ultimate (limited) granting on the very doorstep of Insurrection Eve? Apparently, looking for excuses to give the least support possible to the Democratic mayor of D.C., Bowser, particularly by—as first indicated above—talking to Trump political appointees elsewhere inside the Trump administration:
“Miller’s staff”—headed up by Trump political operative Kash Patel—falsely reported to O’Donnell that “the FBI had no specific concerns” about January 6, that DHS “was not tracking any threats to Federal facilities [including the U.S. Capitol]”, and that the U.S. Marshals Service had no plan to be involved in responding to January 6 at all.
As D.C. Metropolitan Police and the D.C. National Guard waited for Miller, Patel, or McCarthy to take any meaningful action on Bowser’s request from the previous year, Patel—for some reason—continued reaching out to other agencies to compare notes about whether they perceived a threat approaching on January 6, despite the fact that the Pentagon had an in-house intelligence apparatus and superstructure run by Patel’s fellow Trump political appointee, well-known Trump loyalist Ezra Cohen-Watnick.
Keep in mind that, given Patel’s own intelligence background (see much more on this below), and his friend Cohen-Watnick’s role atop the intelligence apparatus at the Pentagon—and, as much as any of this, given their status as leading Trump acolytes who had long had their ears to the ground with respect to Trump’s fanatical “MAGA” base—the two men would have been aware, the weekend before January 6, that many more than “2,000 people” were expected in D.C. in the coming week, and that violence was likewise anticipated. Even so, “Miller’s staff,” headed by Patel, reported to Miller that neither the U.S. Capitol Police nor the U.S. Park Police were requesting “DoD support” (whether this equates to the D.C. National Guard and/or other Department of Defense resources is unclear) for either January 5 or January 6.
Apparently convinced by the “research” conducted by Patel’s agents—which, despite Patel’s many years of intelligence expertise, somehow underestimated the size of the January 6 crowd by approximately 118,000 people, reported no evidence whatsoever of any threats connected to the events of January 5 or January 6, and used Patel’s check-ins with fellow Trump appointees to issue the veiled implication that the Democratic Bowser was being hysterical and could be ignored—Trump appointee McCarthy told Bowser and the Metropolitan Police Department that he would not act on their RFA until the night of January 4, 2021, and then urged them to seek resources elsewhere.
It is now clear that, as of the night before Insurrection Eve, not only had the Trump appointees Miller, Patel, and McCarthy—and presumably Pentagon intel chief Cohen-Watnick—gotten every fact about the coming disaster wrong, but in each instance had gotten their intelligence wrong in precisely a way that advanced the political ambitions (a delayed joint session of Congress) of the man who had appointed all of them to their jobs: Donald Trump.
On Sunday, January 3—during a period of time when, known only to Donald Trump and a few others in the White House, Jeffrey Clark was the Acting Attorney General of the United States (see more below)—Trump appointee Miller went to the White House to meet with his political patron, the very man who had stoked the January 6 threat to the U.S. Capitol that Mayor Bowser had correctly foreseen and that Miller, Patel, and McCarthy had by January 3 spent four days attempting to downplay. While O’Donnell implies in his report that it was after his meeting with Trump that Miller decided to “approve” Bowser’s RFA, this isn’t correct. Rather, it was after his meeting with Trump that Miller decided not to grant Bower’s unambiguously warranted RFA without a raft of conditions that made his superficial approval of the RFA meaningless.
The two Trump appointees’ (Miller and McCarthy’s) onerous conditions on the D.C. RFA are discussed in detail in a section of their own below, but suffice to say that they made it impossible for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and the civilian government in D.C.—run by Democrats—to properly defend the Capitol on January 6.
Among much else, what is particularly odd about the timeline the Pentagon Report seeks to establish is that Trump appointee Miller claims to have spent the weekend before January 6 checking in with DOJ about whether he should accept the D.C. RFA, but Miller then apparently approved the RFA before he’d spoken to acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen about it. Putting aside the strangeness of Patel’s team speaking to the FBI but apparently not the DOJ on January 2, 2021—why was it such a fraught endeavor for the Pentagon’s Trump appointees to check in with the DOJ’s leadership the weekend before the attack on the Capitol?—note the first two and last two entries in the Pentagon timeline below:
January 4 is the Pentagon Report’s first reference to contact between the Pentagon and Attorney General Rosen about the Pentagon’s preparation (or lack of preparation) for January 6. This is especially odd given that, the weekend before January 6, per the Report, “[Secretary] Miller sought to ensure that civilian agencies had no additional support requirements for the Department of Defense, and that the Department of Justice would be designated as the lead Federal agency if circumstances developed to necessitate a Federal response to potential civil disturbances” (emphasis supplied).
Why would a Trump appointee at the Pentagon spent January 2 and January 3 trying to ensure that DOJ—not the Pentagon—would take the lead on any federal response to January 6, especially when the authority to deploy federal troops laid with only two men in Washington: Trump and Miller himself? Why was Miller so set on ensuring the Pentagon couldn’t respond on January 6, and that only Trump political appointees at DOJ could—or, alternately, choose not to?
It’s enough to make a longtime January 6 researcher wonder if there’s a reason for this.
And indeed there appears to be.
Though acting Attorney General Rosen didn’t know it at the time, he wasn’t the acting Attorney General of the United States on January 2, January 3, or even the morning of January 4 in 2021, the period of time Secretary of Defense Miller spent delegating his own authority to whoever was in charge at DOJ. According to internal White House documents, during this period then-President Trump had informed sycophant Jeffrey Clark (advised by Ken Klukowski, a legal adjunct to Trump lawyer John Eastman and a close associate of Ginni Thomas’ circle at the far-right Council for National Policy) that he was the acting Attorney General of the United States. Could this explain why, in the fifth-to-last entry above, Trump appointee McCarthy approves the D.C. RFA, and then, after this has already happened, Miller apparently discusses the D.C. RFA with Rosen for the first time? Per the Pentagon Report, the latter meeting occurred in the evening of January 4, which would be just after Rosen had (again, somewhat strangely, unbeknownst to him) just gotten his job back after a meeting with President Trump.
Equally odd is Miller’s late-on-January-4 decision to “ask Rosen by letter to confirm the plan….to fulfill the D.C. RFA.” If Miller thought AG Rosen’s sign-off was needed, why didn’t he get it before his fellow Trump appointee Ryan McCarthy told the D.C. National Guard’s commanding officer, William Walker, that the D.C. RFA was a go (but only a slew of debilitating and unprecedented limiting conditions)?
The most obvious explanations here would be that either (a) O’Donnell elided from his report details of the contacts between the Pentagon and DOJ on the weekend before January 6 because those contacts would reveal that the Pentagon’s Trump appointees knew of the—at the time successful—coup plot inside DOJ to replace Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, or (b) Miller, Patel, McCarthy, and other Pentagon witnesses hid from the Pentagon Inspector General the fact that they did not consider Rosen the final word at DOJ the weekend before January 6 (as revealing this to O’Donnell would also have revealed to him that they knew about Trump’s DOJ plot, and were making national security decisions in part on the strength of this illicit partisan knowledge).
{Note: O’Donnell attempts to explain his timeline’s reference to the Trump administration’s disastrous response to the peaceful George Floyd protests in Washington on June 1, 2020 by indicating that these left-wing protests made Trump appointees reticent to authorize the D.C. National Guard in response to domestic political protests. But instead of noting that a series of reckless actions by then-Attorney General Barr shouldn’t be used as an excuse for reckless inaction in the face of a known domestic terror threat six months later, O’Donnell goes in the other direction and quotes Barr—not by name—for the proposition that the alleged violence of left-wing protesters outside D.C. in mid-2020 justified excessive caution by the Trump administration in the face of armed right-wing protestors inside D.C. half a year later. Barr, apparently referencing his own forces’ televised use of violence in Lafayette Square by way of projecting it onto left-wing protestors, is quoted by O’Donnell as saying that May 31, 2020 was “the most violent day of civil unrest in the District in thirty years.” It is unclear why O’Donnell elides Barr’s name, though it gives some indication of the lengths he was willing to go to in order to avoid referencing Trump appointees—perhaps including Kash Patel—unless it was absolutely necessary.
It should be noted, too, that by January of 2021 it had been established that the violence and property damage that did take place following George Floyd’s murder in mid-2020 was largely the work of organized gangs of professional criminals, not political protesters. It is therefore impossible to understand—other than by considering that the decision-makers involved were partisan Trump appointees—why anyone at the Pentagon, DHS, DOJ, the FBI, or anywhere else would have seen a crime spree by gangs of career criminals in mid-2020 as instructive of how to respond to a dangerously charged political event in D.C. in January 2021. Incredibly, the role of organized crime was known to elected officials as soon as the Floyd protests began. In their very first days, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had said that “We’re now confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out-of-state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.” Notably, Trump’s response to the supposed left-wing violence was to publicly endorse the use of the National Guard in such situations—not the opposite response, which his political appointees at the Pentagon would take on January 6—tweeting in mid-2020, “I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City [Minneapolis]. A total lack of leadership. Either [Frey]….get[s] his act together and bring[s] the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.” By January 6, Trump’s appointees had somehow decided that, at least when the protesters were Trump supporters, the opposite was true and use of the Guard was suspect.}
6. Matthews
In view of the foregoing, it’s useful to compare the Pentagon Report and the Matthews Letter—particularly with respect to how January 6 ultimately played out after Miller and McCarthy had tied the hands of Mayor Bowser, Metropolitan Police Department Chief Robert Contee, and D.C. National Guard Major General William Walker (all of whom happen to be Black, a politically notable fact this report will return to later on).
According to Colonel Matthews, the Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy—whose January 6 texts were illegally destroyed by the Pentagon in contravention of FOIA regulations—failed to show up at the first emergency interagency conference call on January 6, an absolutely essentially moment that arose at 2:30 PM ET on January 6, 41 minutes after a riot had been declared at the U.S. Capitol. Instead of gathering any intelligence about events at the Capitol from those who were there, Trump’s political appointee inexplicably excused himself from his office to go speak to another civilian Trump political appointee: acting Secretary of Defense Miller, whose January 6 texts and secure messages the Pentagon has now also illegally destroyed.
{Note: While a uniformed Trump appointee, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, did also report to Miller’s office—like McCarthy did—for a 2:30 PM meeting there, meaning that it wasn’t only civilian political appointees in Miller’s office at the time, Milley’s account of the meeting contains a startling revelation: that he understood Secretary Miller to have “issued an order at 3:04 PM to send in the D.C. [National] Guard.” But in fact, as the readers of this Proof report will learn more about below, no such order was given at 3:04 PM. In fact, no order to deploy the Guard was given until more than two hours later, raising the question of what Trump’s political appointees were doing—and discussing—in Miller’s office.
General Milley would later tell the New Yorker that on January 6 he believed the Trumpist attackers had been given enough time at the Capitol unimpeded by the D.C. National Guard to give Trump a “Reichstag moment” that would “allow [him] to invoke martial law and maintain his grip on power.” Had Trump’s political appointees actually effectuated the order at 3:04 PM that they led Milley to believe had not just been issued but was being pursued with all possible haste, the Capitol would have been relieved more than two hours earlier than it actually was, and events at the Capitol would not have escalated out of control as they did.}
The result of McCarthy abandoning his office in the midst of an armed attack on the federal government by domestic terrorists was that two men now called “absolute and unmitigated liars” by Colonel Matthews, Major General Walker, and a massive cadre of commissioned personnel in the D.C. National Guard who were either on or aware of the content of the critical interagency (Pentagon-Capitol) call as it was happening—Piatt and Flynn, the latter of whom had no business being in the chain of command on that day either as a matter of protocol or ethics, nor the former as a matter of long-standing hierarchy—were left in charge of the conference call on the Pentagon’s end.
McCarthy’s inexplicably permanent absence from the call had two chief effects: (1) it meant that no decision on whether to allow the D.C. National Guard to relieve the Capitol could be made during the conference call, as under the standing letter that McCarthy had issued to Major General Walker on January 4 only McCarthy had (a strictly limited) authority to make such a decision, and (2) it gave Generals Piatt and Flynn an opportunity to, as Matthews summarized in his letter to Congress, tell the federal law enforcement officials assembled at the Capitol that “it would not be his [Piatt’s] best military advice to recommend to the Secretary of the Army [McCarthy] that the D.C. National Guard be allowed to deploy to the Capitol at that time. LTG Piatt stated that the presence of uniformed military personnel could inflame the situation and that the [D.C.] police were best suited to handle the situation. Both LTGs Piatt and Flynn stated that the optics of having uniformed military personnel deployed to the U.S. Capitol would not be good.” Of course, Piatt and Flynn had just been told that the situation was out of control and could not be contained by the police, and indeed had been told this by the leaders of the very entities that they (both Piatt and Flynn) were summarily declaring could handle events at the Capitol just fine. But just as importantly, these statements by Piatt and Flynn gave the D.C. National Guard the understanding that the two men had some authority over federal troop deployments on January 6, when in fact they had none whatsoever. Neither man was even in the chain of command that day; they were on the line speaking out of turn only because McCarthy’s absence had enabled them, and perhaps even encouraged them, to do so.
The stunning announcement by Piatt and Michael Flynn’s brother Charles that they were unwilling to see guardsmen at the Capitol on January 6 led to absolute chaos on the interagency conference call, as Colonel Matthews details:
[D.C. Metropolitan Police Department] Chief Contee then stated that he would inform the Mayor (D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser) that the Army was refusing to send the National Guard to the Capitol and that he would ask her to convene a press conference to make this refusal known. LTG Piatt then asked Chief Contee to please not do this.
So Piatt and Flynn (a) appear to have refused to immediately take the Metropolitan Police Department’s request to McCarthy, (b) functionally denied that request in situ, then (c) asked the police department to hide from the public that the Pentagon had—in McCarthy’s then-still-unexplained absence—refused to relieve the U.S. Capitol on the authority of Piatt and Michael Flynn’s brother. Most extraordinarily, (d) Piatt then tried to evade responsibility for his inaction by saying “he had no power to deny or approve the [MPD] request, only that he would not recommend [its] approval to his civilian leadership” (emphasis supplied).
This last statement was extraordinary because it referred to a “civilian leadership”—McCarthy (a veteran who was now a senior civilian official) and Chris Miller, the latter closely advised by Trump acolytes Patel and Cohen-Watnick—that should have been on the January 6 interagency call but was not. Indeed, McCarthy and Miller’s evasion of the call not only partly put a matter into Charles Flynn’s conflicted, out-of-chain-of-command military hands that should have been entirely in civilian hands, it added a needless layer of bureaucracy that Trump’s civilian leadership had deliberately created by huddling in a cloister as it was supposed to be speaking to MPD and USCP officials.
Incredibly, after this 25-minute interagency call ended at 2:55 PM ET—more than an hour after a riot had been declared at the Capitol, and well over a half-hour since the Capitol had been breached—Michael Flynn’s brother became more involved in the chain of command at the Pentagon, not less. As Matthews reports, “LTG Flynn then [at 2:55 PM] directed that a secure video conference bridge be established between the Army Staff and the D.C. National Guard Leadership. At approximately 3:05 PM, MG Walker joined from his office the secure video conference hosted by LTG Flynn. Present with MG Walker were BG Dean, [myself], 1LT Nick, and CSM Brooks.”
On this new call, Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon—Miller and McCarthy, whose communications on the day in question were, again, illegally destroyed—were still absent. Their absence came despite Flynn’s comms “bridge” launching a full 35 minutes after a channel of communication between the Capitol and the Pentagon had first been opened up. While we don’t know all the people Miller and McCarthy were speaking to during this period (though we do know some, as will be discussed further below), we know that the two men Miller and McCarthy left in charge of the bridge, Flynn and Piatt, had (a) either chosen not to, or been unsuccessful in trying to, bring the Pentagon’s civilian leadership into the conversation, (b) were non-responsive to law enforcement’s unambiguous statement that it needed the D.C. National Guard immediately because it could not handle the armed attack on the Capitol on its own.
The conference call Flynn convened at 3:05 PM ET stayed open until 5:15 PM ET—a total of 130 minutes—but it was only in the final seven minutes of this 130 minutes that word came down from Trump’s civilian leadership at the Pentagon (specifically Miller) that he “had authorized the D.C. National Guard to deploy to the Capitol in support of the USCP.” Neither Miller nor McCarthy appears to have ever joined the call during its 130-minute runtime, meaning that the two Trump appointees (a) were conferring with others during that time who were not in any of the relevant law enforcement agencies, (b) were conferring with persons—presumably largely civilians, as all of the relevant military and law enforcement leaders showed up on the 130-minute call at some point—whose identities can’t be definitively ascertained now because DoD destroyed the records that would reveal the identities of these persons, and (c) only released the D.C. National Guard to the Capitol after it was clear that Trump’s insurrection would fail.
So who were Miller and McCarthy seeking advice from, if not D.C. law enforcement or the U.S. military officials who were on the 130-minute open call to the Capitol?
At the risk of being too obvious by half, we might start with Secretary Miller’s advisers.
Miller’s top advisers on January 6 were Trump political agents Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, neither of whom are even mentioned in the 152-page Pentagon Report.
Indeed, there’s no public evidence that either of these two men were even spoken to by Pentagon Inspector General O’Donnell, unless he has slyly slotted them into his catch-all category of “DoD personnel involved in planning and executing the D.C. National Guard’s response to requests for assistance at the U.S. Capitol Building”—though to be clear, both men are far too senior in the civilian leadership at the Pentagon to be so blithely and ignominiously anonymized.
Further evidence that O’Donnell was specifically interested in exculpating Trump’s political appointees—or hiding their role in the Pentagon’s January 6 response altogether—comes in the most startling fashion possible: Matthews’ revelation, to Congress, that “The DoD-IG report incorrectly indicates that McCarthy was an active participant on the [130-minute] call.” Why would O’Donnell falsely place a Trump political appointee on a call he’d deliberately avoided? And why would the Pentagon destroy all electronic evidence relating to a Trump political appointee it falsely placed on a call he was never on?
Indeed, not only does O’Donnell falsely put Ryan McCarthy on a call he never joined, he elides the fact that the only words spoken by a soldier at the Pentagon besides Piatt and Flynn during that 130-minute “bridge” were spoken by Colonel John Lubas, who curtly informed the call that McCarthy “could not participate” in it for reasons that were not explained. But O’Donnell goes even farther than this, citing an inexplicably anonymous “witness” to the call for the false claim that Piatt told the call participants “McCarthy was [absent because he was] getting the approval from Mr. Miller [for the deployment of the D.C. National Guard.” In fact, Secretary McCarthy’s absence was not explained in this or any other, nor would this explanation have made sense unless it took McCarthy 122 minutes of desperate pleading to get his boss Chris Miller to act.
But it gets worse.
O’Donnell’s report falsely makes McCarthy—who, again, wasn’t on the 130-minute call at all—a key player in the call, citing another inexplicably anonymous witness for the false claim that during the call “McCarthy asked Walker how quickly the Quick Reaction Force [of the D.C. National Guard] could respond [to the Capitol]”, then adding insult to injury by quoting Piatt for the false claim that “Secretary McCarthy directed Walker to move the Quick Reaction Force to the Armory.” So even as Trump political appointee McCarthy was inexplicably huddling with other Trump appointees rather than doing his duty, Trump appointee O’Donnell not only places him atop an urgent call he never joined but accuses Major General Walker of failing to position his forces as McCarthy had allegedly instructed him to do.
If Trump appointee O’Donnell appears to have had an unexplained interest in making Trump’s political appointees look engaged on January 6 rather than absent, he seems to have possessed the opposite inclination as to Michael Flynn’s brother Charles—who the Pentagon Report does all it can to eliminate entirely from the events of January 6. O’Donnell’s efforts dovetail perfectly with those of the Pentagon writ large, which has eliminated the electronic communications of all the aforementioned men so that their actions can only be determined on the basis of (a) their (now alleged false) statements and (b) claims made by persons at the Pentagon whose identities DoD-IG O’Donnell mysteriously refuses to reveal. Meanwhile, one of the only things we know about the Pentagon response to January 6 is that it definitely lied to America about it for days, with the lies only conclusively ending after Biden took office—and Trump’s political appointees were gone from the building.
Here’s Matthews on how Michael Flynn’s brother has been written out of the story of January 6 by the Pentagon and its Inspector General:
Lieutenant General [Charles] Flynn is portrayed by the report as having listened to the 2:30 PM conference call for “a couple of minutes”, not saying anything and then leaving to establish a video conference. The report states that “Army witnesses” confirmed that Flynn’s participation was minimal. These may have been some of the same “Army witnesses” who, according to open press reporting, repeatedly and strenuously denied to the press for days that Flynn was even a participant on the 2:30 PM conference call which occurred on January 6. [D.C. National Guard commanding officer Major General] Walker conversely recalls that Flynn was an active participant on the call who stayed to the end of the call and that Flynn commented on the negative optics that would ensue from the presence of uniformed military personnel at the Capitol.
Sean O’Donnell’s false narrative neatly replaces Michael Flynn’s brother (Charles Flynn) with Trump political appointee (Ryan McCarthy), thereby at once sidestepping the question of why Flynn was in the room at all, as well as the related question of where McCarthy actually was on January 6 and who he was speaking to (and who the men he was speaking to were speaking to) while he was absent from his office during a historic national emergency.
O’Donnell goes on to exculpate the entirety of the Pentagon by again using inexplicably anonymous witnesses for a key proposition: that “[LTG] Piatt asked questions during the 2:30 [PM] phone conference, such as ‘what was happening at the Capitol, what tasks DCNG personnel would perform, whether they should be armed, who the QRF would align with, and where the QRF would assemble once they arrived at the Capitol’….[and] no one on the conference call could answer Piatt’s questions.” In fact, reports Matthews, these questions were not asked because the answers were provided up front, without prompting. There was no basis for Piatt to later claim any confusion or concern about the unarmed mission the D.C. National Guard would be serving on January 6; instead, it was simply the case that he and Michael Flynn’s brother knew—from the very beginning of their contact with the Capitol’s defenders—that they did not want the Pentagon to aid the Capitol, and/or that there was no point in contemplating relieving the Capitol because Trump’s political appointees were already against it and had absented themselves from the chain of command so they wouldn’t have to be on a memorialized conference call admitting as much. And to yet again add insult to injury, O’Donnell’s account blames Black Americans in the Black Lives Matter movement and the Black officials leading the Capitol’s defense on January 6 for all of it, not the white men (with one exception) in Trump’s political-appointee cadre at the Pentagon.
It’s an account that squares perfectly with the racially tinged Republican Party line since January 6, one that federal judges nominated by presidents of both parties have angrily rejected time and time again when put forward by January 6 insurrectionists.
Yet here we have the same argument being made by the U.S. Department of Defense.
The deceptions of the Pentagon Report go well beyond any of this, however—as of course they must explain, too, the uncommon length of the McCarthy-Miller meeting.
Here’s Colonel Matthews again, on that very subject:
According to the Report, during their 2:30 PM meeting [in Miller’s office] “McCarthy told Miller that the D.C. National Guard needed to mobilize everything and move to the Capitol as quickly as possible, and Mr. Miller immediately agreed.” The report goes on to state that “Miller ordered McCarthy to mobilize all of the D.C. National Guard’s 1,100 personnel at approximately 3:04 PM.” Miller told [O’Donnell] that his 3:04 PM order “gave McCarthy the approval and guidance he needed to mobilize the D.C. National Guard to help the U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department, and that Walker would immediately employ the [D.C. National Guard] Quick Reaction Force.” When asked by [O’Donnell] whether Miller’s order to mobilize the entire D.C. National Guard included approval to deploy Guard personnel immediately to the Capitol to support the Metropolitan Police Department and the Capitol Police, McCarthy replied, “It did.”
Needless to say, none of this happened—nor could it have, unless “immediately” means “34 minutes,” the time from the meeting’s start to Miller’s alleged order.
Had it happened, McCarthy would in fact have appeared on the 130-minute comms bridge that opened at 2:55 PM ET. He would have (as in actuality he did not) at some point around 3:10 PM ET, just 15 minutes into the open line, announced that Miller had green-lit participation of the D.C. National Guard in the defense of the Capitol.
But not only did McCarthy never appear on the call; not only did Miller’s green light not arrive until two hours (5:08 PM ET) after Miller claims it was given; but Charles Flynn spent these hours giving the opposite information to the Capitol’s defenders—telling them that no direct relief from the D.C. National Guard would be forthcoming, and that at best (if Miller willed it) the D.C. Guard could be sent to other locations in Washington to free up more Metropolitan Police Department officers for the Capitol.
Even Secretary McCarthy and Secretary Miller can’t seem to get their stories straight.
Whereas Miller told Congress that he was done with McCarthy—having given him full authority to assist the Capitol using the D.C. National Guard—by 3:04 PM ET on January 6, for his part McCarthy claims that (as Colonel Matthews summarizes), “he [McCarthy] briefed his ‘plan’ to deploy the Guard to Miller at 4:30 PM, nearly 90 minutes after Miller, according to Miller’s statement to [O’Donnell] and his sworn testimony to a congressional committee, gave McCarthy full authorization to deploy the Guard to support the Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police at the Capitol.”
Any effort to figure out which of McCarthy or Miller lied to Congress or the Pentagon—or if both did—is now made impossible by the destruction of their communications.
How bad are things at the Pentagon now? The Pentagon Report details a supposed call between Secretary McCarthy and D.C. National Guard commander Walker at 3:05 PM ET—according to Miller’s story, right after McCarthy had been given authority to act by Miller—that Walker says never took place. Per Colonel Matthews, “Walker categorically denies that Secretary McCarthy called him at 3:05 PM on January 6.”
7. O’Donnell
Neither Proof nor any media outlet could or would submit that Donald Trump had foreknowledge in the spring of 2020 that he would need a pliant Inspector General at the Pentagon in late 2021. But this hardly means that the context of Sean O’Donnell’s appointment as acting Inspector General of the Department of Defense (DoD-IG) is inconsequential. In fact, it’s a critical backdrop to the Pentagon report detailed above.
Recall that O’Donnell received his “acting” position because his predecessor was fired from his role; that this firing was part of a partisan purge of inspectors general in the Trump administration, one guided by far-right presidential-adviser ideologues like Ginni Thomas (see prior Proof reporting on Thomas for more); and that prior to the beginning of the purge, Trump stated the following publicly: “I think we’ve been treated very unfairly by inspector generals [sic]. I can go into instances, but I’m not going to do it now. We’ve had a lot of cases where we thought that [sic] was unfair.”
Donald Sherman, deputy director of CREW, gave a response to this statement and Trump’s purge that was mirrored by many other political observers: “The president has been pretty explicit in his desire to undermine the [federal] Inspector General community.”
In sum, it was clear in the spring of 2020, shortly after Trump had been acquitted in an impeachment trial spurred in part by the actions of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson—who Trump fired during his purge—that what the president wanted was less oversight of his actions by federal inspectors general.
It was in this context that Trump appointed O’Donnell an acting IG at the Pentagon without removing him from his identical role at the Environmental Protection Agency.
And to compound matters, the latter was a role O’Donnell had only had for 60 days.
That’s right: then-president Trump’s apparent scheme concerning O’Donnell, from the moment of his hiring at the Pentagon—and at a time when Trump had no idea if he’d be able to get a full-time replacement for O’Donnell confirmed by the Senate in the final months of his term—was to ensure his ineffectiveness by (a) tapping him for a major expansion of his inspector general role when he had only 60 days of experience as an inspector general, and (b) making him oversee two massive federal agencies at once.
{Note: Former Pentagon Inspector General Gordon Heddell has written, “Arriving at the Pentagon [as an Inspector General] with no experience is an invitation for disaster. At the Defense Department, the Inspector General is [supposed to be] well beyond his or her days of ‘on the job training.’ The odds are stacked against any individual going from a[n] [Inspector General’s office] non-supervisory investigator role [the experience Jason Abend had when Trump nominated him for Pentagon Inspector General, which was far more experience in an Inspector General’s office than O’Donnell had at the time of his elevation] to a four-star position at the Pentagon.”}
In essence, by firing Pentagon Inspector General Glenn Fine—who thereafter left the Pentagon altogether—from his role, Trump was creating the very problem he’d wanted: an extended tenure of coerced, foreseeable incompetence.
That nobody else wanted this problem—or had anticipated it—has since become clear because of backchannel emails that have now been made public. A sizable tranche of Environmental Protection Agency emails have revealed that Trump’s decision to simultaneously make O’Donnell an inspector general at two federal agencies caught everyone everywhere off guard. E&E News/Greenwire reports that O’Donnell’s staff at the EPA were “shock[ed]” and almost immediately found themselves “struggling to answer questions from reporters as well as assuage concerns from colleagues….[as they] worried over how [O’Donnell] simultaneously serving as internal watchdog for two sprawling federal agencies would affect their work.” When one of O’Donnell’s employees sent an email to another asking, “What exactly will this mean for us?”, the response that came back was, “We don’t know yet, and neither does Sean. He says he’s hoping this will be a short-lived responsibility.” During one early 2020 phone call, reports another EPA employee, O’Donnell—who’s now been the acting Pentagon Inspector General for over two years—“emphasized his DoD-IG role is temporary.” This underscores just how little even O’Donnell understood about what was going on and what was likely to be his short-, medium- or even long-term future in government.
But what about O’Donnell’s past? Above, Proof submitted, half-tongue-in-cheek, that it’s interesting that O’Donnell worked in a subunit of the Department of Justice for fifteen years that Trump would have been particularly interested in based upon his own well-documented international business dealings and associations: the division that focuses on banks and money laundering. But Proof left out another component of the work that Sean O’Donnell did at DOJ: vetting Trump’s Supreme Court nominees.
If you find this a bit confusing, you should. How does a DOJ prosecutor working on international money laundering cases end up vetting far-right Supreme Court nominees, and shortly thereafter get a shockingly generous elevation to a position (EPA Inspector General) for which he doesn’t appear to be particularly qualified?
According to reporting from O’Donnell’s home state of Maryland, he was specially “detailed” to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy. So why did Trump’s often melodramatically loyal Attorney General, William Barr, detail O’Donnell to work on shepherding far-right Supreme Court nominees onto the federal bench? Candidly we don’t know, though presumably Barr knew enough about O’Donnell’s political bent to see a temperamental and partisan fit there. Per Maryland Matters, O’Donnell was instrumental in “vett[ing] and prepar[ing] [Trump’s Supreme Court] candidates—including now-Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch—for federal judicial nominations.”
But Trump and Barr would have had other reasons to see Sean O’Donnell as a partisan they could trust. Prior to coming to DOJ, writes Maryland Matters, O’Donnell had “clerked for U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Gruender on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, who was on Trump’s short list of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees. Politico reported that Gruender ‘has been a solidly conservative vote’ on the bench.”
And indeed Trump and Barr knew even more than this. In fact, everyone did. At the time Trump installed O’Donnell at the Pentagon, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) said of his fellow Marylander, “He is conservative.” Senator Cardin also expressed concerns about whether O’Donnell would be able to remain independent of the Trump White House. “I just hope he will step up and recognize that the responsibilities [at the Pentagon] are really awesome and carry out the title [of Inspector General], which is [an] independent [role]” (emphasis supplied). Meanwhile, former Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney would say of O’Donnell that his installation at the Pentagon was “an attempt to put somebody in there that they [the White House] know[s].”
Clearly Barr had seen and heard enough from O’Donnell during his role shepherding now-Justice Neil Gorsuch to be confident in his conservative bona fides; but so too, one imagines, had Ginni Thomas, the leader of Trump’s ongoing effort to staff his administration with far-right loyalists, and moreover a long-time far-right activist whose particular bailiwick was and remains (a) grooming conservative lawyers, and (b) all matters touching on the United States Supreme Court and matters that might go before the Court. Indeed, based upon his pre-EPA and pre-Pentagon credentials, O’Donnell would’ve looked to all three of Trump, Barr, and Thomas like just the sort of reliable conservative who should withstand Trump’s purge of alleged Deep Staters.
Whether this background contributed to members of Congress and their staffs being alarmed when Trump installed O’Donnell in an environmental-law position in the Trump administration—despite his background in banking-related prosecutions at DOJ—in the same way his allies would later install an election-law specialist, Ken Klukowski, in an environmental-law position at DOJ, we don’t know. But we do know that members of Congress and their staffs were in fact concerned about O’Donnell.
Brian Eiler, the oversight counsel for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Democratic staff, wrote an EPA official saying, of O’Donnell’s new role at the Pentagon, that he and his office were “surprised” and “had questions” about O’Donnell’s appointment, particularly as to what Trump had been expecting when he made it: “How did [O’Donnell] get the position? Was it something that [he] asked to do? Who approached him? When?” Eiler asked an EPA official in another email.
Indeed, when just two months after installing him at the EPA Trump sought to add the Pentagon to O’Donnell’s profile, the president moved so precipitously that, per E&E/Greenwire, “O’Donnell’s security clearance hadn’t been transferred over to the Pentagon the day his appointment was announced to staff.” Eiler’s questions about the suddenness and the propriety of Sean O’Donnell being added to Pentagon staff match almost precisely the sort of concerns that we hear now—retrospectively—about conservative lawyer Klukowski getting very oddly and very suddenly installed at DOJ.
While there has been speculation that Trump fired O’Donnell’s predecessor, Glenn Fine, solely because his role as Pentagon Inspector General also put him in charge of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee—which was then overseeing the Trump administration’s handling of $2 trillion in COVID-19-related relief funds—this is a separate matter from why the president chose a man already employed by him to simultaneously oversee two massive federal agencies (by any accounting an impossible task to complete to perfection), let alone why O’Donnell in particular was chosen to be that uniquely burdened man. While a possible explanation is that Trump was actually most concerned with O’Donnell having less time to devote to oversight of the then-president’s historically scandal-ridden EPA, there certainly may be others that instead have to do with even more sensitive matters at the Pentagon.
Most important to this aspect of the current January 6 scandal at the Pentagon is the following: as of the time of this Proof report, O’Donnell is still an inspector general for two federal agencies. What this means is that when O’Donnell was tasked with issuing perhaps the most important DoD-IG report in the history of the Pentagon, he did so while (a) not confirmed by the U.S. Senate, (b) illegally in his job, (c) stretched thin by his dual responsibilities at the Pentagon and the EPA, (d) without—apparently—the willingness to resign one of his positions that we might have expected from any other federal employee illegally occupying two jobs that can’t in good conscience be well-executed simultaneously. While one might be tempted to give O’Donnell the benefit of the doubt, indeed to even surmise that he remains at the Pentagon because Biden for some reason wants him there, reading the Pentagon’s January 6 report, and then comparing it to the Matthews Letter, all but extinguishes such a desire for leniency.
Whether the Report was incompetent and riddled with errors because Trump had carefully orchestrated the obsolescence of effective executive-branch oversight before he left office; or whether it was because Trump had carefully selected O’Donnell for a role at the Pentagon in which he believed O’Donnell would be susceptible to influence from outside forces; or whether it was because O’Donnell chose to write his report in a careful way that at all turns advantaged Trump’s political appointees and family members of insurrectionists because this is the role O’Donnell occupied as a shepherd of Ginni Thomas’s husband’s co-workers at the Supreme Court hardly matters, now.
What matters is the simple fact there’s no longer a basis to trust the Pentagon Report.
Arguably, there’s only a limited basis left to trust Sean O’Donnell. Why? Because one of the first rules of oversight—of any investigation, as I know from my formal training in federal investigation at Georgetown University—is that if two witnesses contradict one another, you give each an opportunity to respond to the other’s account. This can only further illuminate either the truth of the matter or (at worst) the credibility of one or both of the witness accounts at hand.
But as the Washington Post has reported, in finding that “[the Pentagon’s January 6 response was] reasonable in light of the circumstances”, O’Donnell inexplicably deviated from basic investigative ethics by allowing Trump appointee McCarthy and even anonymous witnesses to give accounts that conflicted with those of a Major General (Walker) without giving Walker forewarning of the conflicts or any opportunity to respond to them. What sort of investigator treats anonymous witnesses and a political appointee with more deference than a uniformed Major General, a uniformed Colonel and a host of Guardsmen with memorialized accounts? It’s no wonder that the Post wrote, of O’Donnell’s strange behavior, “It’s unclear why Walker was never asked for a response to the claims he was told twice to dispatch his [Guard] forces [on January 6]. A spokeswoman for the Inspector General’s office, Megan Reed, said that as a matter of practice, she could not comment on the [IG] office’s oversight processes.”
Nor was the dispute between McCarthy and Walker just a minor one. In fact, it went straight to the heart of O’Donnell’s investigation and therefore to his eventual report.
Nor was the dispute one in which Walker lacked documentary evidence to support his own claims and to contest McCarthy’s. As the Post reports, Walker was able to show O’Donnell that “memorandums issued by [Ryan] McCarthy and Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, restricted his ability to quickly dispatch the National Guard”—an unprecedented intervention in Major General Walker’s authority by both McCarthy and Miller, which makes their subsequent claims that Walker’s authority was not in any way impeded on January 6 so contrary to their own signed documents (and so self-aggrandizing, as it appears to be an attempted self-exculpation for signing such unprecedented documents) that it’s almost impossible to understand why O’Donnell wouldn’t have given Walker, Matthews, and all of their corroborating witnesses an extended opportunity to reply to McCarthy and Miller.
Instead O’Donnell hid from Walker—altogether—what McCarthy and Miller had said.
Nor was the dispute between Walker and McCarthy one in which Walker lacked testimonial evidence to support his claims and contest McCarthy’s. As the Matthews Letter makes clear, not only could Colonel Matthews corroborate everything Walker had told Congress under oath in early 2021, but so would “current and former D.C. National Guard officers who were continuously with Major General Walker during the afternoon and evening of January 6, 2021, or who otherwise supported our response to the attack on the Capitol.” Matthews even writes that “these soldiers and airmen” stood ready to offer Congress or O’Donnell “contemporaneous notes and emails” as well as their “individual and collective [testimonial] memories.” But Mr. O’Donnell appears never to have spoken to any of these soldiers—even as he was not just speaking to but unreservedly crediting the words of unsworn and anonymous people at the Pentagon, many if not all of whom may have been Trump political appointees.
Equally surprising is that O’Donnell took at face value the words of people he knew had already lied about January 6. As the Post reports, “[Charles] Flynn’s involvement [in the response on January 6 by the Pentagon] became controversial because his brother is retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, a former Trump adviser who called for the military to participate in re-running the 2020 election. Army officials falsely asserted for days that Charles Flynn was not at the [January 6 afternoon video conference] meeting [between the Pentagon, USCP, DCNG, MPD, and others].” Gen. Flynn allowed those lies to go unchecked—yet O’Donnell credited Flynn’s statements about January 6. Just so, according to the Post one of O’Donnell’s sources said that Mayor Bowser spoke critical words during a call she didn’t actively participate in at all. Why did O’Donnell credit witnesses who’d so clearly hidden or misconstrued key facts, while expending no effort to follow up with witnesses outside the Pentagon?
In the same vein, one wonders why O’Donnell granted anonymity to some figures at the Pentagon but not to others—especially when some of the individuals who were granted anonymity appear to have been in privileged positions of power, perception, and/or influence on January 6. Consider the “unidentified Army witness” who was so familiar with the movements of Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy in the midst of a domestic terror attack on the federal government—a significant piece of national-security-related intelligence, to be sure—that he or she was able to recite exactly the moment that McCarthy went to Metropolitan Police Department headquarters and why he did so (allegedly, because an apparently suddenly inarticulate Major General, Walker, “could not clearly articulate to [McCarthy’s staff]” the resources the DCMP needed at the Capitol). Why would anyone with this sort of national-security-related intelligence be granted anonymity in a report that repeatedly name-checks not just the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army but a number of top generals?
8. Miller
Questions were first raised about the independence of Trump’s Secretary of Defense appointee Chris Miller when he suddenly, on December 17, 2020—the day before former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn pitched Trump on a coup plot that required the cooperation of the Pentagon, where his brother worked—the Pentagon suddenly announced that it would cease to acknowledge president-elect Biden’s presidential transition team as being entitled to further DoD access. As Axios reported at the time, “Acting Defense Secretary Miller ordered a Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation with the transition of President-elect Joe Biden, shocking officials across the Defense Department, senior administration officials tell Axios.”
Worse still, Secretary Miller apparently lied to the public about the reason for his decision—suggesting that the real reason couldn’t be revealed. Though Miller said that cutting off Team Biden from access to national-security-related information was a “mutually agreed-upon holiday”, Biden transition director Yohannes Abraham immediately declared this to be untrue: “Let me be clear”, Abraham told reporters, “there was no mutually agreed upon ‘holiday break.’ In fact, we think it’s important that briefings and other engagements continue during this period as there’s no time to spare, and that’s particularly true in the aftermath of [an] ascertainment delay.”
Per Axios, it wasn’t just that everyone at the Pentagon outside of Miller’s office—an office headed by Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick—was stunned by the December 17 announcement. “Trump administration officials…were unsure what prompted Miller’s action, or whether President Trump approved [it]” (emphasis supplied). A “senior Defense Department official” who refused to allow their name to be used by reporters—but under the circumstances (inasmuch as the unnamed person had some knowledge of Miller’s thinking) may well have hailed from Miller’s office—“sought to downplay the move, calling it ‘a simple delay of the last few scheduled meetings until after the new year.’” This casual confession that Miller’s edict ended Pentagon cooperation with the incoming Biden administration for an unprecedented sixteen days (at least) would be startling under any circumstances, but the fact that, per Axios, it caused nearly “two dozen” Team Biden meetings at the Pentagon to be cancelled underscores the scope of Miller’s unexplained and never justified announcement.
{Note: On the same day the Department of Defense broke off all contact with Team Biden, former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn announced publicly for the first time that he believed Trump “could use the armed forces to conduct a do-over election in several swing states he lost. Trump, he said, ‘could take military capabilities [of the Department of Defense] and place them in those states and basically re-run an election in those states.’” Flynn’s statement was widely covered by major media at the time, again raising the question of whether the news-obsessed Trump had seen Flynn’s comment when or if he involved himself directly in Miller’s sudden and otherwise inexplicable reversal of a standing Pentagon policy.}
Secretary Miller’s unusual conduct in late 2020 was followed by even more troubling behavior in 2021. Indeed, that Miller lied under oath to Congress about January 6 was so obvious early on in the January 6 investigation that Proof wrote a lengthy report on his misleading of the U.S. House of Representatives in May of 2021.
Certainly, Miller had much to be cagey about with Congress and the American people, given that his actions in the immediate aftermath of a January 3, 2021 meeting with then-president Trump made a coherent, timely, effective response to an armed attack on the Capitol on January 6 all but impossible. Specifically, following his (and Kash Patel’s) meeting with Trump the weekend before the insurrection, Miller levied three crippling conditions on the use of the D.C. National Guard to assist the U.S. Capitol on January 6:
For the first time ever, the commanding officer of the D.C. National Guard, a Major General, would not be allowed deploy the Guard during an emergency without a prior authorization from a political appointee (Ryan McCarthy);
for the first time ever, McCarthy was forbidden by Trump appointee Miller to authorize the use of “riot control equipment or tactics” by the Guard (though Miller knew this is exactly what the Guard would need, and be needed for, on January 6) or to “use military Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance assets” (though presumably the Guard would need “ISR” to track any dynamic kinetic threats on January 6), or to “share equipment with law enforcement agencies” (though it was clear that the Guard would be serving alongside law enforcement agencies under circumstances so fluid and unpredictable that equipment would undoubtedly have to be shared), or to “seek support from non-Guard units” (which would, in effect, make it impossible for the Guard to serve alongside law enforcement, as in such situations both entities routinely seek aid from one another); and
despite representing that he was “approving” the D.C. RFA, Trump’s appointee Miller was in fact rejecting it, as he told Trump appointee McCarthy that any “standby Quick Reaction Force” capable of doing anything more than traffic control—keeping in mind that Miller knew, by January 4, that the Guard would be needed for much more than traffic control—could not be deployed unless it was (a) a demonstrable “last resort”, and (b) in “response to a request from an appropriate civil authority” (meaning that Miller had determined that Bowser’s late December 2020 RFA did not qualify as a request sufficient to deploy a “QRF.”
Arguably there was even a fourth condition: that if McCarthy authorized a QRF—the use of which Miller had already done much to discourage and render difficult—he had to inform Miller of this immediately, meaning Miller would instantly have the ability to cancel the deployment. In short, Miller had created such a byzantine deployment framework, immediately after meeting in private with Trump and Patel, that it made it a fait accompli that the Capitol would not be relieved by the D.C. National Guard for hours and hours on January 6 even if it quickly became apparent (as was ultimately the case within minutes of the Capitol attack’s beginning) that the Guard was necessary.
Put even more starkly, Chris Miller, during a period of time in which he was speaking regularly with Donald Trump and advised by a man (Kash Patel) who’d already spent a year and half aiding efforts to illegally steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump, had ensured that Trump’s January 6 irregulars would have all the time they needed to storm and occupy the Capitol. If their efforts failed, Miller would be in a position—as Trump was—to announce, after-the-fact, that he was willing to relieve the Capitol, or even (as both Miller and Trump subsequently did) invent new facts aimed at changing the timeline of his January 6 response to make it seem more earnest than it ever was.
And Chris Miller’s earnestness is unquestionably in doubt. After telling Congress under oath that President Trump never ordered him, pre-January 6, to ready “10,000” members of the D.C. National Guard (or any at all) for the defense of the Capitol—a false claim Trump has made repeatedly—Miller went on Fox News to falsely tell Trump adviser Sean Hannity and an audience of millions of Trump supporters that the opposite was true (in fact, he even said he’d testified under oath that the number of troops Trump authorized for January 6 was “20,000” National Guard members):
{Note: An odd bit of trivia is that one of Miller’s top lieutenants, Patel, who appeared with Miller in the clip above to corroborate his ex-boss’s lie, only got his job at the White House after Trump domestic policy adviser Hannity took him to the Oval Office to meet Trump.}
It would be one thing if Miller had merely lied to Fox News and its viewers. But in fact he’s been lying to the media about the insurrection since Insurrection Day. The thing we don’t yet know for sure is, why?
Fortunately, we do at least have some relatively consistent indications of the reason.
According to a report by Vanity Fair, for instance, Miller has now chosen to “dispute reports [largely from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley] that the vice president [Mike Pence] was calling the shots [on January 6], or was the one who sent in the Guard [to the Capitol].” Miller’s account, as noted, is directly contradicted by the sworn testimony of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which not only contends that then vice-president Mike Pence was the one “calling the shots” on January 6 and was the one who demanded that the Guard be sent to the Capitol, but reports that there was one person on January 6 whose only worry was that everyone at the Pentagon tell media that Pence didn’t call any shots on January 6: Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff.
This would be the same Mark Meadows who Kash Patel says he was in contact with “nonstop” on January 6, during a period of time that he—Patel—was also with Miller.
It now appears that while Chairman Mark Milley rebuffed Meadows’ recitation of the Republican Party line on January 6 and thereafter, Miller and Patel have since adopted it wholesale—and begun spreading it to media and voters without any thought for the fact that it’s manifestly false. This alone calls into question what Miller and Patel have said about January 6, and ascribes an obvious partisan motive to their accounts of that day.
Given his apparent penchant for deceit, it seems odd to say that Miller is considered to have been more forthright than either of his two top lieutenants, Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, on (and in the two months before) January 6. Yet according to Vanity Fair, the dilemma posed to the Miller-Patel-Cohen-Watnick triumvirate on January 6 was this one:
With the president missing in action [on January 6], who was protecting the republic? Was Miller—with his command of America’s troops and nukes—still receiving orders from the vestigial president? And what to make of Cohen-Watnick and Patel, who in some corners of the Pentagon were referred to as zampolit, a term the Soviets used to describe political enforcers who were deployed to strategic locations to ensure loyalty to the Kremlin?
….
One highly placed source worried less about Miller himself and more about his having “to navigate around” Cohen-Watnick and Patel—“these Svengalis chained to him by the White House to make sure that he doesn’t do too much completely honest, forthright stuff.”
….
Cohen-Watnick was promoted to a more senior role and Patel brought into the Pentagon in the wake of Miller’s appointment, adding to the view that they were Trump watchmen implanted to keep a keen eye on things. Both had drawn scads of media attention—Patel, in particular, for trying to help discredit Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and for his appearance in the Ukraine controversy that led to Trump’s first impeachment. People across the national security spectrum said: “You don’t have to like, respect, or agree with Cohen-Watnick and Patel, but you underestimate their drive and Machiavellian prowess at your own peril.”
As for Miller, Vanity Fair called him a “little-known careerist” when he was selected as acting Secretary of Defense, who entered the Pentagon under a cloud of doubt: “the perception that he must be a loyalist or a yes-man.” The magazine adds that the view of well-placed observers of the Pentagon was that, as a trio, the three men had been brought together—Cohen-Watnick got a promotion when Miller was appointed, and Patel was sent to the Pentagon concurrent with Miller’s start—to “allow the president to deploy [federal] forces when and where he damn well pleased.”
This certainly doesn’t sound like a group of men who accepted the fact that, prior to January 6, it was actually they—and not the president—who’d determine whether to deploy federal forces to relieve the U.S. Capitol. (While nominally the President of the United States has chief authority in this realm, historically the authority over the D.C. National Guard has always devolved to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army). Indeed, it rather suggests that, again in the view of well-placed observers of the Pentagon in November and December of 2020, these three men may have been brought together precisely because they would always defer to Trump about troop deployments—or any refusal to deploy troops—no matter which “where” was involved.
9. Patel
“For the past year [2020] Kash [Patel] has swung the biggest dick in D.C., because he could just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go to the president.’ And we were on emails with him where he’s telling four-star generals, ‘Hey, this is a White House priority. Don’t make me go talk to the president, because I will.’ And the generals always rolled over.”
—a “senior [Trump] administration official” to Adam Ciralsky of Vanity Fair
Given that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in an electoral-college and popular-vote landslide, it was initially almost inconceivable that he would start making new political appointments during the 2020 presidential transition period.
Indeed, even if Trump held out hope that he would somehow find himself in a second presidential term, which we know he did, it’s not clear why he would have made new political appointments in November or December of 2020 unless there were things he needed these new political appointees to do in November and December of 2020 to ensure that he got a second term. As defeated presidential incumbents cannot advance their agendas in any meaningful way during a “lame-duck” period, there is generally no reason for a defeated POTUS to make new hires or—candidly—for a POTUS hoping for a miracle leading to a second term not to wait until his imagined second inauguration to stock his presidential administration with fresh blood. So short of a need to replace certain departing employees with short-term hires, there’s no clear reason for Trump to have made major 2020 personnel moves post-election.
Yet as we’ve already seen in prior Proof reports, at least one of Trump’s inexplicable mid-transition hires—Ken Klukowski, who was slotted into a role at the Department of Justice for which he lacked any of the proper qualifications (he was an election-law lawyer aligned with Trump’s legal team before he was ensconced in an environmental-law DOJ subunit)—was given his position explicitly to help ensure Trump would be in a position to use a key federal executive-branch agency to advance his coup plot.
So is there any reason to think Trump wouldn’t have sought to do the very same thing—nestle a radical political appointee into a major unit of the federal executive branch with the aim of advancing a coup plot—at the Pentagon, just as he’d done at DOJ? Of course not. Indeed, it would be more surprising if Trump executed such a scheme only once rather than several times across several units of the federal executive branch.
And so it was that immediately after the November 3, 2020 election he lost that then-president Trump sent perhaps his most sycophantic and unscrupulous operative—Kash Patel—to be a top official within the civilian leadership of the United States Armed Forces (at the same time promoting another, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, to an even more powerful position at the Pentagon than he already had). Arguably, neither man was yet sufficiently qualified to serve in the position he was given—but these were political appointments, for which the recipient’s loyalty rather than competence or experience is generally what seems to matter most. And in a certain sense, both Patel and Cohen-Watnick did have experience of a sort that Trump might have felt qualified them for their new postings: as previously noted, during the early months of the 2020 election cycle Patel had worked diligently with his then-boss (Rep. Devin Nunes of California, then head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) to acquire for Trump manufactured “dirt” on his political rival Joe Biden, while Cohen-Watnick had been at the center of a pro-Trump leak scandal that would’ve endeared him all the more to Trump even as its basics (as recounted by The Atlantic) mirror a bad spy novel:
The story was first reported by The New York Times, and then expanded by other outlets.
On the night of March 21, House Intelligence chairman [Devin] Nunes got a call from a source, jumped into another car, and didn’t tell his staff where he was going. He was going, it turned out, to the White House. The next day, Nunes gave a now-infamous press conference at the Capitol in which he described how “the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”
Though the phrase “incidental collection” by definition refers to the communications of individuals who are not targets of surveillance, Nunes’s statement was taken by Trump supporters as vindication of the president’s tweet accusing [former president Barack] Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, an incident intelligence chiefs have told Congress never happened.
Nunes claimed at one point that his source had been an intelligence official, not the White House. Citing four U.S. officials, the Times later reported that his sources on the intelligence reports were Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office focused on national security. But the question of who cleared Nunes onto White House grounds, and why Cohen-Watnick was looking into the material, have never been fully answered. The strong implication of the stories about the incident has been that either Cohen-Watnick, Ellis, or both cleared Nunes onto the campus.
On Insurrection Day, Slate reports, Patel, now at the Pentagon, “talked throughout the day” with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who after January 6 would refuse to release many of his December 2020 and January 2021 communications to Congress despite a federal subpoena requiring it—even risking federal imprisonment to do so (perhaps suggesting that he believes some component of his work for Trump, which included an enormous amount of contact with Patel for some reason, may soon lead to him being indicted; certainly, per Rolling Stone this is what Trump’s legal team expects will happen).
One reason we know a surprising amount about what was happening at the Pentagon on January 6—more, apparently, than either the Pentagon or the White House want us to know—is that, perhaps by coincidence, the Pentagon unwisely gave permission to a Vanity Fair reporter to shadow Secretary Miller during the latter days of the 2020 post-election presidential transition. The reporter, Adam Ciralsky, was able to give a long and compelling (if still incomplete) account of what happened at the Pentagon during the pendency of Trump’s coup plot.
According to Ciralsky, Patel and his boss Chris Miller spent Insurrection Eve in the Oval Office with President Trump. Miller, at least, appears to have lied to Ciralsky about the discussion—suggesting that something about it was untoward—given that he told Congress in no uncertain terms (contary to what he told Ciralsky, as you can see in the Vanity Fair excerpt below) that Trump never did or said anything to suggest he wanted D.C. National Guard troops on the U.S. Capitol grounds on January 6:
[On January 5, 2021, Patel and Miller] were meeting with President Trump on “an Iran issue”, Miller told me. But then the conversation switched gears. The president, Miller recalled, asked how many troops the Pentagon planned to turn out the following day. “We’re like, ‘We’re going to provide any National Guard support that the District requests’”, Miller responded. “And [Trump] goes, ‘You’re going to need 10,000 people.’ No, I’m not talking bullshit. He said that. And we’re like, ‘Maybe. But you know, someone’s going to have to ask for it.’” At that point Miller remembered the president telling him, “‘You do what you need to do. You do what you need to do.’ He said, ‘You’re going to need 10,000.’ That’s what he said. Swear to God.”
If Trump said anything like the above, it does indicate that—as Proof has repeatedly reported—Trump indeed knew well prior to January 6 that the planned “wild protest” at the Capitol was going to get dangerous, indeed so dangerous that it might require “10,000” federal troops to stop it (quite apart from the hundreds of Capitol and D.C. law enforcement officers Trump was aware would already be defending the building).
But to the extent Miller’s statement to Vanity Fair might been seen to echo what he recently, and falsely, told Sean Hannity live on-air at Fox News (see section above), it underscores that Patel and Miller did not go to the White House on the eve of an armed domestic insurrection that White House knew was coming just to talk about Iran, as Miller claimed. And Trump did not just casually bring up the events planned for the following day, as Miller strongly implied he did.
Also significant is that Miller told Ciralsky that on January 5 his understanding was that “anywhere from 5,000 to 40,000” people were going to be at the Capitol, though he also knew the President of the United States (based on the information Trump then had, perhaps colored by his own enthusiasm) said the numbers would be closer to “a million.” This underscores how circumspect Miller should have been about his aide Patel’s “intelligence” from DHS suggesting that only “2,000” people were coming to D.C. on January 6—one of the false assessments that had informed Miller’s letter to Major General Walker just the previous day severely curtailing his longstanding powers.
Patel confessed to Ciralsky that in addition to meeting with Trump on January 5, he had also met with him on January 3—the day Jeffrey Clark was in fact acting Attorney General of the United States, which may explain why the Pentagon didn’t seek the approval of the next day’s acting Attorney General of the United States (Jeffrey Rosen) for the D.C. RFA until January 4. Patel goes much farther than the reporting we have currently on his contacts with Meadows on Insurrection Day, telling Ciralsky that he was in “nonstop” communication with the White House Chief of Staff on January 6.
Patel and Miller separately told Ciralsky apparently pre-synchronized stories about January 6—stories we now know to be false. As Ciralsky writes (emphasis supplied),
Miller and Patel both insisted, in separate conversations, that they neither tried nor needed to contact the president on January 6; they had already gotten approval to deploy forces.
However, another senior defense official remembered things quite differently. “They couldn’t get through. They tried to call him”—meaning the president.
As we just saw in the section above, in fact Chris Miller had never received any prior authorization—on January 5 or any other day—to “deploy [federal] forces” to the Capitol. The authority to do so was his and his alone on January 6, and there should have been no reason for him to need a prior (or real-time) presidential authorization.
Yet Miller and Patel, despite not needing any authorization from Trump because power over the D.C. National Guard has always been delegated by the Office of the President to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army, repeatedly sought to get an approval from Trump on January 6 that they knew they didn’t need. Why? What were Miller and Patel hoping would happen, and—for that matter—what were they worried would happen if they didn’t call Trump? The appearance left by Patel and Miller’s actions on January 6, not to mention their subsequent lies about these actions and the summary destruction of electronic evidence of their conduct, is that they were either (a) falsely using their supposed need to get Trump’s approval to send troops to the Capitol as an excuse to delay a deployment they had every authority to make themselves, (b) hoping that they would get through to the president and he would revoke their authority to deploy troops to the Capitol, or (c) not certain what the president wanted or would do on January 6 but willing to let the decision about whether to relieve the Capitol be a partisan one—meaning they fully appreciated the political ramifications of January 6 and bent the knee before them rather than doing the job that their oaths of office required of them. Certainly, nothing Trump had said to them about the D.C. National Guard prior to January 6 made them believe he wanted the Guard sent to the Capitol on January 6 post-haste.
As has been discussed above, the lacunas in the January 6 stories told by Patel and Miller are legion. Patel has been excised from Sean O’Donnell’s Pentagon Report despite being the chief of staff for the man responsible for deploying the Guard on that day and being in nonstop contact with the White House throughout the attack on the Capitol. Miller has given a timeline of events that not only contradicts the notes and testimony of every Guard officer and trooper who interacted with him directly or indirectly on January 6 but even contradicts the testimony of fellow Trump political appointee Ryan McCarthy. Both Miller and Patel have used far-right TV air-time to lie about January 6 and even to lie about the former’s testimony to the U.S. Congress.
All of which brings us to the several suspiciously anonymous witnesses used by Sean O’Donnell in the Pentagon Report. These witnesses advance significant false claims in that document without the Report explaining its precondition for these anonymous witnesses being believed or even why they’ve been granted anonymity. All we can say of these several anonymous witnesses—and it’s quite a lot, actually—is the following:
(1) They are not named on O’Donnell’s witness list. The first two pages of the 152-page Pentagon Report list—by name—14 witnesses. However, O’Donnell says that he spoke to “44” witnesses in total. It can be presumed that these additional 30 witnesses were all from O’Donnell’s “catch-all” witness category: “DoD personnel involved in planning and executing the D.C. National Guard’s [January 6] response to requests for assistance at the U.S. Capitol Building.” O’Donnell’s anonymous witnesses are clearly members of this latter class of persons, as there would be no reason to keep them anonymous if the Report had already revealed (using their names) that they had cooperated with the DoD-IG.
(2) They hold high positions at the Department of Defense. O’Donnell does not generally use anonymous witnesses for minor or inconsequential submissions of fact; rather, they are used at critical points in the Report’s narrative to establish a timeline of events now deemed the “official” one by the Pentagon. Simply put, rank-and-file Department of Defense employees would not have been in a position to observe the sorts of events attributed to the accounts of anonymous witnesses in the Pentagon Report.
(3) They are likely political appointees. While it is true that some low-level Pentagon employees might fear being named in an Inspector General report—they might worry about retribution from their superiors, or the degradation of their future professional prospects—but it is also the case that (a) compliance with an Inspector General’s questioning is a part of a federal employee’s job; (b) retaliation for any such mandatory compliance is illegal; (c) O’Donnell takes great pains to protect the reputations of Trump political appointees (and individuals, like Charles Flynn, with strong ties to political partisans inside Trumpworld), suggesting he would have sought any means available to him, including anonymizing witness accounts, to aid such individuals (including Patel and Cohen-Watnick); (d) the accounts of anonymous witnesses in the Pentagon Report almost always serve to exculpate Trump political appointees; (e) while there’s no particular reason to be sensitive about the identities of rank-and-file DoD employees—and indeed, the Pentagon Report names many of them—there is without a doubt significant sensitivity surrounding the role Trump political operatives may have played on January 6, as indeed this is currently the subject of both congressional and DOJ investigations; (f) there is already evidence of the Department of Defense using extraordinary measures to hide the potential culpability and legal liabilities of Trump political appointees, as we’ve seen with the illegal destruction of many texts and secure messages authored by such appointees; and (g) the Pentagon is more likely to try to protect the identities of private citizens—which most Trump political appointees who were at the Pentagon on January 6 now are—than it is those who are career civil servants, who’ll not only continue to work for the federal government for an indefinite period but who would have naturally expected to continue dealing with the Pentagon Inspector General after January 20, 2021 (whereas political appointees, assuming they were no longer in federal service, could have told O’Donnell that they would only speak to him without a subpoena on condition of anonymity, giving him only one shot to avoid protracted litigation if he wanted testimony from these people).
(4) They are liars. As the Matthews Letter makes abundantly clear, the claims made by O’Donnell’s several anonymous witnesses are in many instances not just categorically false but melodramatically so. These witnesses insist on calls that never happened, words that were never spoken, and movements by leading Trump appointees at the Pentagon that never occurred. While we don’t know why these anonymous witnesses lied, there’s certainly one very likely reason that federal investigators will consider: a partisan bias. By comparison, rank-and-file civil servants are far less likely to make up spectacular tales exculpating temporary political appointees for whom they would feel no particular loyalty.
(5) They believe that they may have criminal liability for their actions. Why would a federal witness insist on—and be granted—anonymity and then lie? It suggests both that the witness in question didn’t want their words linked back to them by the media (which in itself suggests both a political motive and an advanced political awareness, as expounded upon already above) and that even under the cloak of anonymity they had some significant concern that the truth would cause someone, whether themselves or someone else, significant harm. A career Pentagon employee would, in contrast, only worry about telling the Inspector General the truth, as any lie could lead to them losing their job.
Taking all five of the above points together—and adding to them the earlier-observed fact that Secretaries McCarthy and Miller, two Trump appointees, seem to have made themselves scarce and exceedingly hard to reach on January 6 (while engaged in acts of advice-seeking with anonymous individuals whose names we can’t now because the Pentagon destroyed any evidence the disclosure of which would reveal them)—we can now consider an example of O’Donnell relying on a mysteriously anonymous witness for an abject lie. As Matthews writes in his letter.
[D.C. National Guard commander] Walker categorically denies that Secretary McCarthy called him at 3:05 PM on January 6. Walker at that time was in the midst of a video teleconference with Piatt, Flynn, and senior Army leaders, and D.C. National Guard key leaders, discussing events at the Capitol and potential Guard responses thereto. Walker would have of course prioritized a call from [McCarthy], the Secretary of the Army, his direct and immediate superior, if it had come, but it did not. The above [claim that McCarthy called Walker at 3:05 PM], posited as a fact by [O’Donnell], apparently does not rely on the firsthand statements of McCarthy or Walker, but the recollection of an anonymous witness. Walker maintains that this phone call did not occur.
What sort of anonymous witness would be highly enough ranked inside the Pentagon to make knowledge of a McCarthy-Walker call believable? What sort of anonymous witness would be biased enough—or fearful enough of the truth—to lie about a phone call between the Secretary of the Army and the Commander of the D.C. National Guard (two men so highly placed within the superstructure of the Pentagon that one cannot imagine a mere Department of Defense peon lying about their actions or even being in a position to credibly do so)? What sort of anonymous witness would lie to a federal Inspector General in order to protect a Trump political appointee and secure the false narrative that the Pentagon did all it could to aid the Capitol in a timely fashion on January 6? What sort of federal witness would insist on anonymity and then lie, as if the witness worried about the media and/or political implications of being caught lying?
On January 6, 2021, there were perhaps two or three witnesses at the Pentagon who answered to these descriptions, and there’s no doubt that two of the men answering to all of them are Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick. These two Trump sycophants were just the sort of advisers and fellow Trump political appointees McCarthy and Miller would have privately consulted with as they were only dubiously exercising their sworn duties on January 6, and at least the former has not only a history of deceit but a specific history of working with Trump to steal a presidential election—indeed, the 2020 presidential election in particular.
We must also consider the role that Kash Patel had at the Pentagon—the role Donald Trump had gone to unusual lengths to get for him—in the lead-up to January 6.
According to the Pentagon, “Patel served as the former Chief of Staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and [was] responsible for leading the Secretary’s mission at the Department, including his executive staff and providing counsel to the Secretary on all matters concerning the Department’s operations.”
In what investigative universe would Department of Defense Inspector General Sean O’Donnell not have spoken to Secretary of Defense Chris Miller’s chief of staff?
Indeed, had O’Donnell never done so during the course of a nine-month investigation into the worst attack on the U.S. Capitol since the War of 1812, it would have been a firing offense. So we can assume that (a) O’Donnell spoke to Patel, (b) for inexplicable reasons Patel asked for and was granted anonymity by O’Donnell or was simply given such an extraordinary privilege gratis, and (c) Patel was one of a fairly small population of people—30, at a maximum—who could have been responsible for any given claim attributed to an anonymous source in the Pentagon Report.
And yet, to suggest that Patel was merely “one among [30] equals” would be absurd.
As his official biography reveals, Patel’s specialization while in federal service wasn’t generically being a top adviser to top federal officials—though he was that—but more specifically intelligence. Before his installation at the Pentagon, Patel was a Deputy Assistant to the President (specializing in foreign intelligence matters, particularly those relating to Russia and Ukraine); a Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council; a Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence; a National Security Advisor and Senior Counsel for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and a “terrorism prosecutor” at the Department of Justice.
So how did Patel end up at the Pentagon? Well, he was sent there in part because, at every step of his career in federal government, he had contacts with the military. He had such contact at NSC and the ODNI; his focus while working with HPSCI was Russian “active measures”, which in some cases are detected in the first instance by elements of the United States Armed Forces (for instance, the DIA); he “oversaw sensitive programs for the…U.S. Special Operations Forces”; and while at DOJ he was even Liaison Officer to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which is a subunit of—as you might expect—the Pentagon.
In other words, it’s virtually impossible that any of the other 29 anonymous federal witnesses spoken to by O’Donnell had Patel’s level of insight into the movements of Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy on January 6, or access to the uniformed personnel Walker and Matthews spoke to on January 6, or, for that matter, a vested interest in the political fortunes of the man serving as President of the United States.
10. Cohen-Watnick
“If I was writing your headline, it would be, ‘Who really is the secretary of defense? Chris Miller? Kash Patel? Ezra Cohen-Watnick? Or Mark Milley?’ I don’t know how to answer that, frankly. The scuttlebutt is that Miller is the good guy who’s the frontman and it’s Cohen and Patel who are calling all the shots.”
— a “senior national security official” to Vanity Fair reporter Adam Ciralsky as the latter prepared to embed himself at the Pentagon on January 4, 2021
Like Patel, Ezra Cohen-Watnick was a well-known Trump political agent and acolyte with a specialty in intelligence matters when Trump installed him at the Pentagon.
Per his official biography, he had been—prior to moving to his new post-election role at the Department of Defense (Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security)—Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict; Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counternarcotics and Global Threats; Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council; and Chief Executive Officer for National Security Issues at Oracle Corporation.
For a man with only a Bachelor’s degree who wasn’t even 35 years old when Donald Trump made him Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, Cohen-Watnick had an illustrious career working for the former president—indeed a career so suspiciously accelerated that it led to articles about how it possibly could have come to pass. In one such article by The Atlantic entitled “The Man McMaster Couldn’t Fire”, journalist Rosie Gray writes that “Thirty-one-year-old Ezra Cohen-Watnick holds the intelligence portfolio on the National Security Council—but almost everything about him is a mystery.” Gray went on to note the following facts about Trump’s far-right wunderkind:
He’s a protégé of Michael Flynn who worked with Flynn in the Defense Intelligence Agency and then while Flynn was (briefly) at the White House as National Security Advisor;
for reasons that were never made clear to him, Flynn’s successor as National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, found that Cohen-Watnick was the only Flynn protégé he wasn’t permitted to jettison outright after Trump fired Flynn;
Trump made Cohen-Watnick “powerful” because he was “loyal”, not because he was experienced or even necessarily qualified for the jobs he was given;
his role at the White House allowed him to regularly interact with Donald Trump directly (as did, it’s important to note here, Kash Patel’s);
he’s friends with the Ledeens (Michael Flynn’s co-author Michael Ledeen and his wife Barbara Ledeen, a friend of Ginni Thomas’);
he’s been caught politicizing intelligence in the past (as noted above, secretly leaking national security information to the then-GOP head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Devin Nunes, who now runs Trump’s disinformation platform Truth Social, where Patel is a top adviser);
people seem to be scared to talk about him, with Gray writing that if a journalist “ask[s] around about Ezra Cohen-Watnick, people get defensive…[s]ome profess not to know him, or ask why anyone would want to write about him, [and] others simply refuse to discuss him”;
“he [had] become [by mid-2017] a flashpoint in the long-running tension between Trump and the intelligence community”;
a college friend of Cohen-Watnick reports that he “talked about his goal of becoming a spy ‘all the time’”;
he interned with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in 2008 and worked there as a civilian in 2009, just before domestic extremist and disinformation merchant Jack Posobiec—who like Christina Bobb and Chanel Rion was posing as a “journalist” for OANN on January 6, but unlike these other two was apparently in the company of Ali Alexander and Alex Jones at many points during the day—began working there (Cohen-Watnick was at the DIA during precisely the time period, 2010 to 2017, Posobiec was in the Navy, including time spent by the latter working with Cohen-Watnick’s former colleagues at ONI);
he spent time working for the DIA in southern Florida, where Trump lives, eventually doing work for the Central Intelligence Agency overseas, where CIA operatives pegged him as a “spy….for [Michael Flynn and the DIA]”; and
“Michael Flynn seems to have elevated Cohen-Watnick to his high station in the Trump administration.”
What we can take from the above is that Cohen-Watnick had every reason to be aware of what was coming on January 6, not just because of his ties to the insurrectionist Flynn; not just because of his ties to the White House (which knew of the danger coming on January 6 several days before Insurrection Day, per the House January 6 Committee); not just because of his ties to Ginni Thomas friend and top Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) aide Barbara Ledeen (Proof readers may recall that Grassley falsely claimed to have intelligence suggesting Vice President Mike Pence would not be coming to the Capitol on January 6 and that he would be overseeing and possibly delaying the joint session of Congress scheduled for that day instead), but because his job at the Pentagon was to know more about intelligence—particularly relating to domestic and international terror threats—than any person in any room he walked into.
As we’ve seen, in December 2020 and January 2021, Cohen-Watnick was a top member of Secretary Miller’s staff with Kash Patel—the latter also an intelligence expert—meaning that (a) Cohen-Watnick almost certainly was interviewed by O’Donnell and is therefore one of the 30 witnesses inexplicably granted anonymity by the Pentagon Inspector General, (b) when the Pentagon Report says (as it often does) that Miller’s “staff” conducted an investigation into whether there was any threat to the Capitol on January 6 and concluded there was none, it would have been Cohen-Watnick who not only participated in but likely led that “investigation,” perhaps even authoring its fraudulent results, and (c) Cohen-Watnick, like Patel, would have been one of the few members of O’Donnell’s group of thirty anonymous federal witnesses with the capacity to know and/or observe the movements of Miller and McCarthy on January 6—precisely the topic for which O’Donnell often elected to dip into his stock of shadowy Pentagon sources. And finally, given Cohen-Watnick’s past partisan leaking of national security information to a top Trump agent—Nunes, who at the time was working with Patel on the BLT Prime Team to steal the 2020 election for Trump by allying with Kremlin agents—we can also add (d) Cohen-Watnick would, it appears, be willing to lie about intelligence or lie to a Pentagon Inspector General to advance his professional ambitions by protecting his patron Trump or Charles Flynn (the brother of his other patron, Michael Flynn).
As to Trump, what wouldn’t Cohen-Watnick do for a man who, The Atlantic reports, directly intervened to save his job when the then National Security Advisor of the United States tried to transfer him (an event that begs the question of why precisely Trump wanted to keep Cohen-Watnick close to him)?
{Note: The Atlantic even contends that the importance of Cohen-Watnick to the White House was one of the only things arch-enemies Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner ever agreed upon.}
Could the fact that the Ledeens worked with Michael Flynn and Russian nationals to try to steal the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump have anything to do with their good friend Ezra being seen as critical to Trump’s inner circle? We don’t know, but it’s certainly one theory of the case the evidence currently supports. Add this to the one thing The Atlantic could get people to say about Cohen-Watnick—“several White House staffers used the same word to describe Cohen-Watnick: loyal”—and it stands to reason that Cohen-Watnick’s opaque intelligence work at the Pentagon was every bit as important to Trump as Kash Patel’s in the run-up to January 6. Indeed, it would be inexplicable if, among the members of Defense Secretary Chris Miller’s staff, Patel and Cohen-Watnick had not taken the lead in creating a fraudulent record pre-January 6 intimating that Mayor Bowser was being hysterical and there was no basis to believe the federal government would be under threat on January 6.
Just how important to Trump was Cohen-Watnick in December 2020 and January 2021? Consider this anecdote from 2017, much earlier in Trump’s relationship with the strikingly young intelligence expert:
The Washington Post reported in April [2017] that days after McMaster’s effort to remove Cohen-Watnick, the CIA’s liaison to the White House was fired. The Guardian’s story on the firing cited sources describing it as an “act of retaliation” against the CIA for encouraging McMaster to sack Cohen-Watnick.
So not only was Cohen-Watnick the equivalent of a “made man” in the Trump White House, but even an effort to transfer him from one job in federal service to another was met with swift punishment—even to the point of a top CIA official getting fired.
Then there’s the curious association of Cohen-Watnick with Nunes aide Derek Harvey—despite the fact that, as even a Cohen-Watnick ally quoted by The Atlantic conceded, Harvey’s area of focus is the Middle East and “Cohen-Watnick, in his role as the liaison between the White House and intelligence agencies, has no purview over Iran [or other Middle East-related] policy” (as the ally put it, “It’s not in his lane and he’s not involved in those regional policy discussions.”).
Nevertheless, we find this intriguing note in The Atlantic report:
A recent story in Foreign Policy tagged [Cohen-Watnick] and Derek Harvey, the NSC’s top official on Middle East issues, as pushing for increased action against Iranian-backed forces in Syria.
So who is Derek Harvey? Beyond being a member—with Kash Patel and Devin Nunes—of the same BLT Prime Team that sought to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump through clandestine dealings with Kremlin agents (other members of the team included Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Victoria Toensing, and Joe diGenova, as well as subsequently indicted Giuliani clients and Trump ad hoc advisers Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman), Harvey was Michael Flynn’s chief executor inside the White House of a clandestine and illicit six-nation deal that Trump spent the first year of his presidency seeking to consummate—the deal known as a “grand bargain” that Jared Kushner was deeply invested in, that would have made both Flynn and Trump rich, and is the chief subject of the New York Times-bestselling book Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2020).
In view of all the foregoing, Cohen-Watnick being a carefully protected asset inside the Trump White House begins to make a lot more sense—as does the fact that after he lost the 2020 presidential election in a popular-vote and electoral-college landslide Donald Trump instantly decided that, at a time he planned to steal the election he’d just lost—perhaps with the aid of the Pentagon)—he needed two men whispering in Chris Miller’s ears: Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick.
Cohen-Watnick and QAnon
It must also be said that, as Politico reports, “many” Trumpist insurrectionists believe Cohen-Watnick is the domestic terrorist known as “Q”—the nominal (fictional, or at least fraudulent) leader of the QAnon domestic terror movement.
To be clear, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Cohen-Watnick is “Q”—and every reason imaginable to think he’s not. There are countless major-media investigations available online establishing which man (or two to four men) have pretended to be Q at various points in time, and Cohen-Watnick is not one of them.
And yet, even Trumpists’ false belief that Ezra Cohen-Watnick is Q matters.
Why? Because many of the January 6 insurrectionists were QAnon supporters, per major-media reports, and many of the domestic terrorists involved in the Capitol attack—particularly those from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, as well as certain members of the Three Percenters—believed Trump would declare martial law on January 6 (via The Insurrection Act) and use the resources of the Pentagon to stay in power. While Cohen-Watnick can’t be blamed for the false accusation that he is or was Q, this accusation was born in major part from (a) Cohen-Watnick’s objectively inexplicable and unwarrantedly accelerated career trajectory, (b) his patronage by a leading QAnon adherent, Michael Flynn, (c) the ongoing efforts of Kash Patel to promote the domestic terrorist “Q” by any means possible on Truth Social; and (d) his involvement (as described above) with a host of unsavory far-right figures in the U.S. intelligence community and his demonstrated willingness (in an incident that led to Devin Nunes having to recuse himself from a major intelligence investigation) to leak national security-related data of the sort the fictional “Q” claims to be hinting at.
In other words, the mystique surrounding Cohen-Watnick may have contributed to the fervor felt by some of the January 6 attacks, inasmuch as it caused them to believe that Trump was secretly working hand-in-glove with the Pentagon in the run-up to January 6. What is so unsettling about this belief is that it does not appear to be at all incorrect in general terms; it is simply that the Pentagon appears to have been working hand-in-glove with the White House to withhold resources from the Capitol rather than (as the QAnonists would have it) to flood the Capitol with military assets. While the two scenarios are wildly different, the fundamental reality of the Pentagon being deliberately politicized in an unprecedented way before January 6 remains accurate.
Unlike Cohen-Watnick himself, his two primary patrons—Flynn and Trump—have done much to endorse QAnonism, which itself may have contributed to Cohen-Watnick, their sole shared protégé in the intelligence community, as being “Q.” As Politico reports,
Flynn effectively hired Cohen for the Trump White House in 2017. Cohen tried to reach out to Flynn through intermediaries to urge him to stop tweeting and retweeting QAnon content, a source familiar with the situation said. It didn’t work, and Flynn returned to Trump’s orbit in recent weeks [December 2020 and early January 2021] as the president sought to overturn his election defeat.
Trump also gave QAnon oxygen—or at least did nothing to snuff it out. At a televised town hall meeting on NBC in October, host Savannah Guthrie asked Trump to denounce the conspiracy theory. His muddled response was taken by many QAnon backers as an endorsement. “I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard, but I know nothing about it”, Trump said.
Behind the scenes, Trump reportedly dismissed the notion that QAnon posed any danger and seemed willing to continue his public dalliance with the group. “You know, people say they’re into all kinds of bad things and say all kinds of terrible things about them”, Trump said at a July meeting with top aides and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to Axios. “But, you know, my understanding is they basically are just people who want good government.”
If Cohen-Watnick’s account of January 6 and the buildup to it aided Trump politically and Flynn’s brother legally and professionally, it certainly puts Cohen-Watnick in the position of having bolstered the two highest-profile enablers of QAnonism in the world at a time Cohen-Watnick was claiming to Politico—essentially unconfirmably—that he’d been fighting against QAnonism behind the scenes for many years. Indeed, if Cohen-Watnick was Trump’s top intelligence adviser in the White House as Trump came to believe, from the intelligence he was receiving, that “QAnon [didn’t] pose any danger”, who precisely in the White House would have given him that understanding? Who told him that QAnonists were “just people who want good government”? And if it wasn’t Cohen-Watnick who told Trump this, why was Cohen-Watnick, who Trump appears to have trusted implicily on intelligence matters and who now claims he was on a crusade against “Q” while in the White House, able to convince him of the truth—that QAnon is a domestic terror movement capable of fueling an armed insurrection?
But it isn’t just “Q” who Cohen-Watnick wants to disassociate from—it’s Trump himself.
While we cannot know if Cohen-Watnick’s conversion is an authentic one or if he simply has ascended so quickly in his professional career because he is a moral chameleon who knows when to change the color of his camouflage, we do know that Vanity Fair reports Cohen-Watnick having a post-January 6 epiphany in January 2021:
Ezra Cohen, another of [then-Secretary of Defense Chris] Miller’s top confidants, believes that his colleagues’ [Miller’s and Patel’s] words and deeds [about what they did on January 6] may be well and good, but are beside the point: “The president threw us under the bus. And when I say ‘us,’ I don’t mean only us political appointees or only us Republicans. He threw America under the bus. He caused a lot of damage to the fabric of this country. Did he go and storm the Capitol himself? No. But he, I believe, had an opportunity to tamp things down and he chose not to. And that’s really the fatal flaw. I mean, he’s in charge. And when you’re in charge, you’re responsible for what goes wrong.”
Is Cohen-Watnick protecting his professional reputation from being unduly entwined with Trump’s potentially seditious conduct while in office, or is he protecting himself from potential legal liability for the things he himself said and did before January 6?
We don’t know. But we do know that Cohen-Watnick’s texts and secure messages were destroyed, that he appears not to have told the whole truth about his pre-January 6 contacts with Michael Flynn, that Vanity Fair calls him a “staunch Trump loyalist” (implying that he would only break with Trump if he found himself in potential legal extremis, and not simply as a matter of professional or political convenience), and that he was—with Patel—one of Miller’s “two closest aides” on January 6, meaning that though his name (like Patel’s) never appears even once in the 150+ pages of the Pentagon Report, every time anonymous members of “Miller’s staff” are mentioned in the report it either refers to Cohen-Watnick or Patel or members of Miller’s staff who were being overseen by one or both of those two men.
{Note: It is telling that Adam Ciralsky of Vanity Fair asked to be embedded at the Pentagon starting on January 4, 2021 explicitly because he was “worried that Donald Trump, using domestic havoc or a foreign military skirmish as pretext, might move to delay Biden’s inauguration [using the Pentagon]—or actually attempt a putsch by invoking martial law.” If a reporter was this aware of possible political manipulation of the Pentagon by Trump in early January 2021, we can be certain that Miller, Patel, and Cohen-Watnick were equally aware—which makes their actions in December 2020 and early January 2021 more rather than less astonishing.}
11. McCarthy
We must begin our assessment of Ryan McCarthy’s credibility with the following CNN report:
Major General William J. Walker, the commanding general of the Washington National Guard is claiming his authority [to command the D.C. National Guard] was restricted by the Department of Defense before the Capitol riot, a move he says prevented his forces from arriving to the attack sooner than they did. Walker told the Washington Post that the authority he usually has to dispatch troops in dire situations as well as other powers were stripped from him ahead of the riot. That meant “he couldn’t immediately roll out troops when he received a panicked phone call” from the U.S. Capitol Police chief warning him that a crowd of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters were about to breach the iconic building in an attack.
….
Asked how quickly his troops could have been able to arrive to the Capitol, which sits near the D.C. National Guard’s headquarters, [had he had the authority to command them on January 6], Walker said: “With all deliberate speed—I mean, they're right down the street.”
In the days leading up to the protest, defense officials pulled Walker’s ability to deploy the 40-person quick response force (QRF) on his own, requiring instead that he seek the Army secretary’s [Ryan McCarthy’s] approval. In a letter from McCarthy to the Department of Justice written two days before the riot, he said the QRF could only be deployed as a last resort. This decision was made in the days before January 6 during the planning for what was expected to be a far less violent protest.
Keep it mind that it appears to have been Trump agents Patel and Cohen-Watnick, working in tandem or as part of a larger group, who convinced—though this may not be quite the right word, as it appears they very much wanted to be convinced—Trump appointees Miller and McCarthy that January 6 would “be a far less violent protest” than (a) it ultimately was, and (b) any competent or earnest intelligence assessment by experts like Patel and Cohen-Watnick would have alerted the agencies they were in contact with (DOJ, DHS, MPD, USCP, USPP, USMS, and the USSS) it was going to be.
Indeed, we have no record of any component of Trump’s administration working as hard to communicate with other agencies and convince them that there was no threat coming to Washington on January 6 than the civilian leadership at Trump’s Pentagon, which was composed of at least six persons fiercely loyal to his political ambitions: Miller, Patel, McCarthy, Cohen-Watnick, and two men discussed in more detail below, Anthony Tata and Douglas MacGregor.
But it’s not just that the Pentagon’s outrageously off-target intelligence assessment was used as a justification by Miller to place four crippling conditions on any January 6 deployment of the D.C. National Guard; it’s not just that Miller and McCarthy bit on this facially implausible assessment (which included a claim that only 2,000 people were coming to D.C., when the final tally was 120,000+) and attempted to retroactively blame their apparent incompetence on left-wing protestors violently attacked by a rag-tag army assembled by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr six months earlier; it’s that McCarthy thereafter appears to have lied to Congress under oath in an effort to bury the career of a distinguished Black Major General and protect himself, Michael Flynn’s brother, and fellow Trump political agents Miller, Patel, and Cohen-Watnick.
As CNN reports,
Former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told a House panel on Tuesday that the National Guard only planned to deal with traffic in Washington, D.C., the day the deadly U.S. Capitol insurrection occurred, with “no contingency” in place if things escalated in the city, according to a copy of his prepared testimony obtained by CNN. McCarthy also told Congress that alternate plans would only have happened if the U.S. Capitol Police or local authorities in Washington requested it.
“114 citizen soldiers…were spread out over 20 city blocks…with no contingency or recall plan for a change of mission in place”, his statement reads.
The evidence presently available suggests that McCarthy’s statement is not only false but part of a cover-up of the Pentagon’s role in Donald Trump’s January 6 coup plot.
As CNN observes, new U.S. Capitol Police chief Yogananda Pittman told Congress—on the same day McCarthy testified—that “the department was aware of a ‘strong potential for violence’ targeting Congress” prior to January 6, and that in view of this unambiguous pre-January 6 intelligence, USCP had to admit to Congress that it had “failed to meet its own high standards.”
Unlike the non-partisan public servant Pittmann, McCarthy—the political appointee—offered an account that exculpated himself and the other partisans with whom he’d worked on Insurrection Day.
Months before he would tell Pentagon Inspector General Sean O’Donnell that Chris Miller gave him sole authority to authorize the D.C. RFA for January 6, McCarthy told CNN—shortly after January 6—that “There’s too many people that are involved with the [RFA authorization] decision [at the Pentagon], and ultimately no one, [no] one single person responsible. It makes it very difficult and slow in the response [to emergencies like January 6].” The latter of these two statements appears to be false, unless McCarthy willfully lied to the Pentagon Inspector General.
McCarthy has since compounded his deceit by telling Congress that on January 6 the Pentagon was hampered by an “archaic system” for handling D.C. National Guard deployments—even though he told O’Donnell, as would other Trump appointees, that the system for deploying the D.C. National Guard on January 6 had been devised in the 90 days before the insurrection because of the mid-2020 George Floyd protests. So which was it: an “archaic” system or an only several-months-old system? We still don’t know the truth, or even whether the “system” at the Pentagon, rather than partisan politics, was the issue on January 6 at all.
What we know for certain is that, as the Washington Post reports, the letter McCarthy sent to Major General Walker on January 5—already an impermissibly tardy response to a December 31 request from Mayor Bowser for federal aid that was to begin on the morning on January 5—“tightly” controlled Walker’s actions on January 5 and January 6, making it impossible for the D.C. National Guard to aid local police with the Proud Boy-led Black Lives Matter Plaza riot on Insurrection Eve, or respond in a timely way to the riot at the Capitol (again led by the Proud Boys, who Trump had told to “stand by” in the fall of 2020, to the evident delight of the organization) the following day.
{Note: While we cannot know what if any role race played in the narrative of January 6, it is striking that a series of well-off white Republican men appointed to public service positions by a Republican president who’s been credibly accused of being a white supremacist now seek to blame their actions on January 6 on a Black Major General at the D.C. National Guard, a Black MPD chief, a Black mayor, and anti-police brutality protests by predominantly Black Americans that occurred half a year before January. In this view, which dovetails with Trump’s partisan narrative and the partisan line of the Republican Party establishment, well-off white Republican Ezra Cohen-Watnick wasn’t to blame for his suspiciously thorough incompetence in collecting intelligence ahead of January 6; well-off white Republican William Barr wasn’t responsible for assembling an illegal interagency army to brutalize Black Americans in central D.C. in the summer of 2020 (purely so a well-off white Republican President of the United States could stage a photo op with an upside-down Bible outside a church); and well-off white Republican Chris Miller wasn’t responsible for setting a series of unprecedented restrictions on the authority of the aforementioned Black Major General shortly after Miller met privately with the aforementioned GOP president. Given that the chief response from Trump supporters to the events of January 6 has been to say that the attack on the Capitol was a minor kerfuffle compared to the supposed widespread rioting and looting of Black Americans in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, it is difficult not to see both McCarthy and Miller’s strategy in testifying to Congress as being born of political calculations whose rhetoric is race-conscious.
Proof notes, too, that the Pentagon Report elided the January 5, 2021 white supremacist riot at Black Lives Matter Plaza, which was orchestrated by pro-Trump domestic extremists who Trump had told to “stand by”—the Proud Boys—despite the event being caught on video by numerous sources. Just so, despite online domestic-extremist activity in the lead-up to January 6 providing the Pentagon’s intelligence apparatus with ample warning that the Trumpists who came to D.C. on January 5 were not just dangerous but explicitly activated by their anger at the very George Floyd protests the Pentagon would subsequently use to justify its malfeasance on January 6, the Pentagon Inspector General wrote about Insurrection Eve that “No major incidents of rioting or other violence occurred on January 5.” This is simply flatly untrue.}
12. Team Kraken
It has become gospel in major media that the idea of seizing voting machines after the 2020 presidential election was first raised to Trump on December 18, 2020, and was immediately batted down by him. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth.
According to a report in the New York Times, “Trump was amenable to the idea of civilian authorities’ seizing voting machines; in November, he reportedly proposed the idea of the Justice Department’s doing so to his attorney general, William Barr.”
While Trump may have “draw[n] the line at using the military” to seize machines because he’d been told by his lawyer Rudy Giuliani that he’d “end up in prison” if he did so, not only was Trump’s objection to using the Pentagon inorganic—it came via legal advice, not his instincts, and Trump has a long history of ignoring lawyers and obeying his instincts—but it’s not clear that the duration or scope of that objection has been correctly reported by major media.
On December 18, 2020, some reports submit, Trump vetoed the seizure of U.S. voting machines by any entity other than DOJ (which is arguably entitled to seize machines in vanishingly rare instances Trump had already been told were not extant in 2020).
But there are at least two problems with this narrative: (1) Trump launched his plot to stage an internal coup at DOJ and install his creature Jeffrey Clark as the new acting Attorney General of the United States the very week he learned DOJ could colorably (but not in 2020) seize voting machines, suggesting that he sought to manufacture an illicit and illegal reason for doing so via new political appointees at DOJ, and (2) the Post reports that, after Trump had allegedly rejected having any entity but DOJ seize voting machines on December 18, 2020, “Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who served with [Michael] Flynn and was now working with Powell’s legal team…offered his own revised draft executive order, in which the Department of Homeland Security would be ordered [by Trump] to seize the machines.” If Trump had indeed made clear to the members of Team Kraken who came to see him in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020 that he would only sanction DOJ—where, again, he was busy orchestrating a coup—seizing voting machines, why did Waldron present a plan both on and after that date under which DHS would do so? It seems likely that Donald Trump’s December 18 edict wasn’t nearly as ironclad and his allies have claimed it was.
More evidence of this can be found in how Michael Flynn reacted after Trump had—again, allegedly—put the kibosh on using the military to seize voting machines. What did Flynn do immediately after he’d supposedly been told to nix his Pentagon plot by President Trump in the Oval Office? Why, he called up the Pentagon, of course. The New York Times reports the following:
Flynn, meanwhile, continued to agitate for military intervention [post-December 18].
Through an intermediary, he contacted Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the Defense Department acting under secretary for intelligence, who served under Flynn both at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Flynn had been director, and on the National Security Council.
Cohen-Watnick was traveling in the Middle East at the time; the intermediary told him that Flynn wanted him to return to Washington right away.
So was Michael Flynn going around the back of the President of the United States in contacting Cohen-Watnick? Was he countermanding a direct order—and Flynn very much thought of Trump as his personal commander-in-chief, by his own admission—to drop his plan to pursue a military coup? Did Flynn believe Cohen-Watnick had a special relationship with Trump no one else had, and could perhaps convince him of something not just one but two of his lawyers (Giuliani and Powell) could not? Or—as seems far more likely given the evidence, and consistent with Occam’s Razor—is it possible that those who claim Donald Trump fully shut the door on a military coup on December 18 somehow got their account wrong, either deliberately or negligently? Is it not possible that Flynn contacted Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon because he had been led to believe it would not be out of turn for him to do so?
So what would have led him to this belief, if he had it? More to the point, if Cohen-Watnick flatly refused Flynn’s first entreaty as he claims, why did Flynn contact him a second time with the same request?
Flynn called [Cohen-Watnick] a second time, shortly before Christmas, catching [him] on his cellphone as he was driving home from a Whole Foods in Maryland. [Flynn] explained that he needed Cohen-Watnick to direct the military to seize ballots and voting machines and rerun the election.
So are we to believe Flynn was now not only countermanding a direct order from his commander-in-chief, and substituting his own orders for Trump’s, but also ignoring an unambiguous “no” from the Pentagon for his military-coup plot? Something here doesn’t seem right, and the whole situation raises far more questions than answers. If, as he now claims, Cohen-Watnick flatly and forcefully refused to even hear Flynn out during the first call between the two men in December, the above account of a second call makes no sense whatsoever.
Fortunately, a prior Proof report—and televised testimony before the House January 6 Committee answers these undeniably important questions.
As discussed in detail here, and as White House Counsel Pat Cipollone grudgingly confirmed in his videotaped deposition for the House January 6 Committee (aired on July 12, 2022, a video that can be found here), Sidney Powell and her team had good reason to believe that Trump did appoint her White House Special Counsel on the evening of December 18, 2020. And under oath Cipollone adds, again grudgingly, that Powell did take actions following December 18, as did those connected with her, to suggest that she understood herself to have been appointed to this position by Trump.
So why would Powell think this? Perhaps because Trump said—directly, out loud, and unambiguously—that he was making the appointment. Specifically, the appointment was made on December 18, 2020, in the Oval Office, amidst a room full of witnesses.
While Cipollone, who disagreed vehemently with the appointment, may have chosen to ignore it, this doesn’t mean, as a matter of fact (or for that matter criminal evidence) that it didn’t happen. And indeed Donald Trump thereafter took at least two overt steps to confirm Powell’s understanding of events: (1) he ordered his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to follow up on the Christina Bobb-written DHS-related executive order that was one of the two means Powell had proposed of her doing the job he immediately thereafter appointed her to do, and (2) he ordered his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to on-board Powell because he was aware Cipollone was refusing to do so.
The evidence that Trump was by no means done with Powell or her (and Flynn’s) DHS and Pentagon plots on December 18—as many major-media outlets have erroneously averred—is actually legion.
Less than 72 hours after the six-hour December 18 meeting at the White House between Trump, Powell, Flynn, Byrne, Cipollone, and several others, Trump convened a meeting with the House Freedom Caucus to plan for January 6—a meeting that was apparently so rife with potentially criminal plotting that every attendee, per the public hearings of the House January 6 Committee, either directly or indirectly asked Trump for a presidential pardon over it after the events of Insurrection Day. But increasingly there is evidence that it wasn’t just Trump, Meadows, and members of the Freedom Caucus (including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jody Hice of Georgia, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of Arizona, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and Louie Gohmert of Texas) who were meeting in the White House on December 21. Here’s a photograph from December 21, 2020 of none other than Sidney Powell, newly made White House Special Counsel, entering the White House:
Powell’s re-appearance at the White House came less than 24 hours after her fellow Team Kraken member Michael Lindell sent a lengthy text to Mark Meadows about her and Flynn. A CNN January 6 archive includes this lengthy December 20 missive:
So on December 18 Trump met with Team Kraken about seizing voting machines; in that meeting he decided—on the strength of her plan to seize voting machines—that he would appoint Sidney Powell special counsel to the White House; on December 19, immediately after the conclusion of his meeting with Powell and members of Team Kraken, Trump announced to the world that he was supporting and even sponsoring a “wild protest” in D.C. on January 6, suggesting that Team Kraken (and Powell in particular) may have had some role in convincing Trump to target January 6 as a key date for post-election mischief; on December 20, a member of Team Kraken (Lindell) sent a lengthy message to Mark Meadows about Sidney Powell and her plot to seize voting machines; on December 21, Trump met with Meadows and the House Freedom Caucus about January 6 and Powell herself may have joined them; and immediately after this meeting—whose attendees seem to believe, to a man and woman, was in some way incriminating—Michael Flynn began calling Ezra Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon about enacting Powell’s plan to have the Pentagon seize voting machines. Then, in the days that followed, a man considered by many to be the true head of the Trump-appointed civilian leadership at the Pentagon, Kash Patel—coincidentally a key part of Team Kraken’s plan for the quick-strike takeover of the U.S. intelligence community that was essential to its plot—repeatedly met with Trump in person and spent all of January 6 in self-described “nonstop” contact with Mark Meadows. The moment the January 6 coup failed, Lindell began demanding to see Trump, finally getting his wish on January 15 at an Oval Office meeting with Trump in which he presented a plan centering on Sidney Powell, Kash Patel, and the seizure of voting machines via a Pentagon-aided declaration of martial law. The plan, which used the presumption of Kash Patel acquiring a new position atop the CIA (a plan Trump was indeed considering in late 2020, Patel would later appear to confess to Vanity Fair) to release sufficient “evidence” of foreign election interference to “justify” the seizure of voting machines by the Pentagon, had at the very latest been written by Team Kraken on January 5, before the insurrection and after Trump allegedly put a definitive stop to Pentagon-related coup plotting. (Note that Trump’s ongoing entertainment of a plan to give Patel his second post-election-loss political appointment only underscores that he did indeed have an idea of what he wanted or needed Patel to do to help him remain in power.)
But that’s not all.
As noted above, Powell’s justification for the seizure of voting machines by DHS or the Pentagon—as opposed to DOJ, which is what Trump had originally wanted—was her claim that Iran and as many as eight other nations hacked voting machines on Election Day 2020, which if true would have made the 2020 presidential election a flash-point of international terrorism. While of course no such vote-hacking ever occurred, the fact that Powell sought to focus Trump’s attention on Iran is telling.
Recall, from the section on Kash Patel above, that Patel joined former Michael Flynn aide Derek Harvey in obsessing over Iran with Trump—even though the topic of Iran was well outside Patel’s remit. Recall, too, that Patel now says that his private meeting with Trump and Chris Miller in the Oval Office on January 5 was about “Iran.” Now look below at New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s follow-up to her tweet about Michael Flynn co-conspirator and new Trump White House Special Counsel Sidney Powell entering the White House on the day of Trump’s January 6 planning meeting with the House Freedom Caucus (December 21, 2020); in the tweet Haberman refers to a document Powell is seen carrying into the White House (and possibly even the GOP House Freedom Caucus meeting) on that day:
{Note: As it turned out, the news story Powell was passing on to the White House involved two men—men the Justice Department has never conclusively linked to the Iranian government—posing as far-right Proud Boys. Their aim was to spread pro-Trump messages prior to the 2020 presidential election. There’s no evidence this pro-GOP campaign by two Iranians to spread disinformation about the Democratic Party had an effect on the presidential election.}
This calls to mind another document carried into the White House by a key member of Team Kraken during the presidential transition period: the Team Kraken document created around the time of the insurrection that finally reached Donald Trump’s desk via Michael Lindell on January 15, 2021. That document insisted it was urgent that Patel be made CIA director as part of Powell’s plot to seize voting machines using the military might of the Pentagon, and explicitly mentioned “Iran” as a key justification (see more below, including a close-up photograph of the January 15 Lindell document).
For a long time, Proof was mystified—as a source of January 6 journalism—about why Team Kraken would have wanted Patel at the CIA rather than the Pentagon. If the Pentagon was going to be overseeing the seizure of voting machines, wouldn’t Team Kraken have wanted Patel to stay in his role there? The answer would likely be “no”, however, if both of two things were true: (i) Team Kraken believed there was someone else at the Pentagon loyal enough to Trump to oversee the seizure of voting machines (and we already know that Team Kraken did believe this, as evidenced by Michael Flynn’s two calls to Patel’s Pentagon peer Ezra Cohen-Watnick), and (ii) Team Kraken needed a man inside the CIA to leak intelligence about Iran that would colorably (if still only gesturally) justify the Pentagon getting involved in seizing U.S. voting machines.
In short, Team Kraken needed Patel at the CIA and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon.
Cohen-Watnick has already admitted to Vanity Fair—in the midst of Patel’s caginess (and then soft confession) on the topic—that Trump wanted to move Patel to the CIA.
So how can anyone possibly believe that Trump was done with Sidney Powell’s coup plot as of December 18, 2020? Indeed, it seems only to have heated up after that point.
An Important Note About the Composition of “Team Kraken”
For some time now, the roster of what Proof calls Team Kraken, including primary and adjunct members, has been relatively set:
Primary Team Members
Sidney Powell (Trump attorney)
Lin Wood (attorney)
Michael Flynn (ex-military intelligence)
Phil Waldron (ex-military intelligence)
Patrick Byrne (businessman)
Michael Lindell (businessman)
Peter Navarro (Trump adviser)
Key Adjunct Members
Ginni Thomas (Trump adviser)
Boris Epshteyn (Trump adviser)
Rudy Giuliani (Trump attorney)
Jenna Ellis (Trump attorney)
Victoria Toensing (Trump attorney)
Joe diGenova (Trump attorney)
John Eastman (Trump attorney)
Kenneth Chesebro (attorney)
Matthew DePerno (attorney)
Ken Klukowski (Trump attorney)
Cleta Mitchell (Trump attorney)
Christina Bobb (Trump attorney)
Maria Ryan (Giuliani aide)
Bernie Kerik (Giuliani aide, ex-law enforcement)
Robert Patrick Lewis (ex-military)
Joshua Merritt (ex-military intelligence trainee)
Seth Keshel (ex-military intelligence)
Ivan Raiklin (ex-military intelligence, current Army reserve)*
Michael Flynn Jr. (cyber-intelligence expert)
Russell Ramsland, Jr. (cyber-intelligence expert)
Jovan H. Pulitzer (conspiracy theorist)
Joe Oltmann (conspiracy theorist)
Garrett Ziegler (conspiracy theorist)
*Per Reuters, as a current U.S. Army reservist “[Ivan] Raiklin’s conduct is now under government scrutiny. The Army Reserve’s chief spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Simon Flake, said Raiklin’s superiors are ‘aware of the situation and investigating,’ but that privacy rules restrict him from providing details. Flake added, ‘The U.S. Army Reserve follows the Department of Defense’s long standing policy in regards to forbidding service member involvement in partisan political campaigns to avoid the perception of DOD sponsorship, approval, or endorsement of any partisan political candidate, campaign, or cause.’”
Primary Patrons
Donald Trump
Mark Meadows
As readers will note, Kash Patel has never in the past been associated with Team Kraken, whose leading members sought to help Trump steal the 2020 presidential election.
But when we look at the only other discrete clandestine group known to have sought to help Trump steal the 2020 presidential election with Trump’s patronage, the BLT Prime Team discussed at length in the 2020 national bestseller Proof of Corruption, one notices something interesting:
BLT Prime Team Members Who Survived the Trump-Ukraine Scandal
Rudy Giuliani (Trump attorney)
Victoria Toensing (Trump attorney)
Joe diGenova (Trump attorney)
Kash Patel (Trump adviser)
BLT Prime Team Members Who Did Not Survive the Trump-Ukraine Scandal
Lev Parnas (indicted and convicted)
Igor Fruman (indicted and convicted)
David Correia (indicted and convicted)
Derek Harvey (lost his job in the White House and therefore his usefulness to Trump)
John Solomon (lost his job in major media and therefore his usefulness to Trump)
Devin Nunes (left politics for Truth Social, ending his political usefulness to Trump)
Perhaps you can see what’s interesting about the above. Of the four known survivors of the BLT Prime Team, three unambiguously ended up on Team Kraken. Which begs the question: why do January 6 researchers not deem the fourth known survivor, Kash Patel, to also be on Team Kraken?
One particular point of focus for this observation is the aforementioned Lindell, who immediately after the Trumpists’ failed attack on (and occupation of) the U.S. Capitol came in possession of the one-page document apparently re-outlining Powell’s coup plot that Lindell brought to the Oval Office on January 15. That prospectus mentions Powell, Patel, and the imposition martial law. If Lindell seems like a peripheral figure on Team Kraken—after all, he wasn’t present in the Oval Office during the six-hour Team Trump-Team Kraken meeting on December 18, 2020—that’s a misapprehension of the evidence. In fact, as Proof began detailing in early 2021, Lindell was present in the primary Trump “war room” at Trump International Hotel on Insurrection Eve (the very hotel Team Kraken capo Patrick Byrne had been leasing a suite of rooms in for several months, all of them intended for use by his teammates and their agents), and more importantly, Lindell spent part of Insurrection Eve dining in Pentagon City, less than a mile from Kash Patel’s office, with a man who he believed could confirm that communists and other anti-American agitators in Iran, Venezuela, and six other countries (identified by Team Kraken bodyguard Robert Patrick Lewis in a January 7, 2020 interview as China, Pakistan, Russia, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom) had hacked the 2020 presidential election.
That man was Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of neo-fascist Brazilian dictator and Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro—and perhaps the Brazilian politician (Jair’s son is also a member of the Brazilian congress) with the best handle on Brazilian intelligence in all of Brazil.
Putting aside the disturbing but at present unexplained fact that the lion’s share of Team Kraken’s potentially seditious conduct appears to have occurred in and around Pentagon City—less than a mile from the Pentagon—the fact remains that if any man in the world was in a position on January 6 to provide manufactured evidence about Venezuela-led hacks to Team Kraken, and if any man in the world (given that Brazil’s Bolsonaro government sees Venezuela as its chief geopolitical enemy) was motivated to permanently poison any potential for a reconciliation between the United States and Venezuela at a historically fraught moment in the relationship between the two countries, it was Eduardo Bolsonaro.
{Note: Proof previously issued two lengthy reports on this highly complex geopolitical issue—and its equally complex association with Donald Trump and January 6—here, here, and here.}
As had been the case with the BLT Prime Team, Team Kraken appears to have been constituted in significant part to receive manufactured dirt that would harm Joe Biden, specifically from dangerous foreign nationals.
Lindell’s outreach to the Brazilian government—which mirrors the BLT Prime Team outreach to Kremlin agents and Venezuelan dissidents detailed in Proof of Corruption, seems to be an additional explanation for why, on January 15, 2021, the longtime pillow salesman carried a document into the Oval Office insisting that BLT Prime Team member Kash Patel be made head of the CIA. In that role, Patel would not only have access to all foreign intelligence compiled by the CIA, but be in a position to frame that intelligence (or even launder, into an undeserved state of credibility, “new” intel from men like Bolsonaro) in support of a Pentagon seizure of voting machines.
So much for Patel. But what about Team Kraken’s plans for Ezra Cohen-Watnick?
Why did Michael Flynn believe that Patel’s co-shadow-DoD-secretary Cohen-Watnick was the man who would be heading up the effort at the Pentagon to execute Sidney Powell’s wishes as Trump’s new and duly appointed White House Special Counsel?
Perhaps it’s simple as the fact that he, Powell, Lindell, and the rest of Team Kraken—including Patel himself—knew that at the moment Powell’s plan for martial law and Flynn’s plan for a national “re-vote” were enacted, Patel wouldn’t be at the Pentagon anymore but, as noted, atop the CIA. Cohen-Watnick, Flynn’s former protégé, would presumably have been elevated to the role of Chris Miller’s de facto or de jure chief of staff.
{Note: Proof offers here Ezra Cohen-Watnick’s own account of what transpired during his first December 2020 phone call with Michael Flynn, which is inconsistent with everything he know about the former man: his understanding of his own authority within Trumpworld; his years of deference to his patron Flynn; his ready willingness, apparently, to assist in Trump’s January 6 plans by obscuring the intelligence suggesting there would be major violence on January 6; his virtually mythical degree of loyalty to Trump, who at the time Cohen-Watnick spoke twice to Flynn in late 2020 wanted nothing more than to find a way to reverse the 2020 election; and his years and years of willing association with precisely the sort of men and women—not just Flynn but Nunes, Harvey, Michael Ledeen, Barbara Ledeen, and others—who we know from their individual documented histories would do almost anything to overturn a U.S. election.
Nevertheless, here’s what Cohen-Watnick told the Times and got the Times to report: “Cohen said he was too stupefied to ask his former boss [Flynn] how he thought Cohen-Watnick had the authority to do such a thing [seize voting machines using his position atop the intelligence apparatus at the Pentagon]. ‘Sir, the election is over,’ he said, according to ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl’s book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. ‘It’s time to move on.’ Cohen told me that Flynn yelled so loudly that Cohen’s wife could clearly hear it from the passenger seat. ‘You’re a quitter!’ Flynn berated him, as he had berated [Trump senior adviser Eric] Herschmann. ‘This is not over! Don’t be a quitter!’” Beyond its sheer implausibility for the reasons already noted, Cohen-Watnick’s account is unlikely for another reason: on both December 18, 2020 and in every other reported-on conversation Flynn had in December 2020, he was clear that he believed the authority to seize voting machines lay in the idea that the 2020 presidential election results were the byproduct of an act of international terrorism. As the top international-terrorism expert in Trump’s inner circle, Cohen-Watnick would have known precisely why Flynn had called him, and even Flynn’s precise grounds for thinking the Pentagon could seize voting machines. Any account of the two Cohen-Watnick-Flynn calls in December 2020 in which Cohen-Watnick is flabbergasted that he has been contacted is all but impossible to credit. Flynn would have outlined his reasoning and his plot to Cohen-Watnick with exactly the detail and fervor he did in speaking to Donald Trump.}
13. Waldron
While Phil Waldron—a close associate of Michael Flynn who, like Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was formerly an employee of the Flynn at the Defense Intelligence Agency—was like Flynn a member of Team Kraken, meaning that he spent the post-election period at Trump International Hotel and a hotel in Arlington, Virginia plotting to end American democracy, the strange story of his central role in Trump’s coup plotting requires its own section in this report. There’s a reason this “former Army colonel with a background in information warfare” has become a focus of both January 6 investigators and major media.
Beginning in August 2020—months before the 2020 presidential election, and the same month one of the chief proponents of Trump’s “stolen election” conspiracy theory, Ginni Thomas friend Cleta Mitchell, recruited coup plotter John Eastman (a former Clarence Thomas clerk) to Trump’s legal team—Waldron began insisting that the 2020 election would be stolen in emails to Trump appointees at the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the 2020 Trump presidential campaign (via Trump’s director of strategic communications, per the New York Times), and the congressional office of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), this last of whom, as we will shortly see, had been open to Waldron’s conspiracy theories since at least 2018.
{Note: During the same period Waldron began spreading his conspriacy theories, considerably more respected pro-Trump figures began writing pseudo-academic articles laying out stolen-election theories distantly echoing Waldron’s. Many of these figures had ties to Ginni Thomas and her far-right social and activist circle in Washington, as Proof has reported on here.}
In a Reuters article entitled “The Military-Intelligence Veterans Who Helped Lead Trump’s Campaign of Disinformation”, we get the following additional information about Waldron (keeping in mind here that Cohen-Watnick also worked in military intelligence at the DIA, and that by November 2020 Patel was likewise working in military intelligence, though as part of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership cadre):
During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the careers of two military officers often intersected. Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in both countries, Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service.
Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs—targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field manual describes, “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
Now the two military veterans, along with at least two other retired and reserve officers, are engaged in a new mission, this time with a domestic target: They are central to the far-right effort to persuade Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.
That a coup plot involving the Pentagon saw former top soldiers and counter-intel experts targeting American civilians with military maneuvers intended for hostile foreign operations is scary enough, but perhaps more unnerving is the fact that it was Waldron, not Flynn or Powell or Lindell, who actually cowrote (apparently with Bobb) the component of Trump’s January 6 coup plot that required the complicity of Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick in their role as “shadow” secretaries of defense. And just as unnerving is how simple Waldron’s plan was. It only had three components:
Convince decision-makers that there was non-zero evidence of foreign hacking during the 2020 presidential election;
on the basis of this evidence and a deliberate misreading of federal legislation concerning international terrorism, have DHS seize voting machines or, in the face of any unwillingness by DHS to do this, have President Trump declare martial law via the Insurrection Act of 1807 (text) or other means to give the Pentagon the authority to immediately seize voting machines across the country; and
schedule a national “re-vote” of the 2020 election (thereby canceling the results of a Trump-administration-confirmed free and fair national vote) that would be conducted under guidelines to be unilaterally established by Trump and the Pentagon (including the full far-right wish-list of anti-voting rights principles, such as abandonment of mail-in balloting and the presence of armed soldiers at all polling places) and that would be “justified” by the fact that a full review of the seized voting machines would take too long to wait for without a new election being run first—ensuring that the 2020 election would be negated without evidence having been provided of doing so being legal or appropriate.
While Waldron’s old boss Flynn may have been the one who pitched this coup plot to Trump—a plot that arguably would constitute Treason (in the statutory sense) because it would amount to “levying war” against the United States using the United States Armed Forces as the instrument of same—it was Waldron who had first conceived of the plan using his experience from overseas in undermining governments (some of them, possibly, democratically elected ones). The Washington Post tells the story here:
A retired U.S. Army colonel who circulated a proposal to challenge the 2020 election, including by declaring a national security emergency and seizing paper ballots, said that he visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election, spoke with President Donald Trump’s chief of staff “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed several members of Congress on the eve of the January 6 riot.
Phil Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN”, Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.
A version of the presentation made its way to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on January 5 [of 2021]. That information surfaced publicly this past week after the congressional committee investigating the insurrection released a letter that said Meadows had turned the document over to the committee.
“The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here’s the proof”, Waldron said. “These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.”
Putting aside the lie that concludes the excerpt above—what Waldron was proposing was by no means constitutional or legal, and whether or not he subjectively deemed it feasible and suitable, it was on moral grounds not even colorably “acceptable”—what is most concerning here is the timeline and audience for Waldron’s coup plot.
Between November 4, 2020 and January 5, 2021—a period of just 63 days, or roughly two months—Waldron was physically at the White House “on multiple occasions” and spoke to Donald Trump’s chief political agent (Mark Meadows) “8 to 10 times”, meaning approximately once a week over those two months. While we don’t know the exact dates that Waldron was at the White House, we know that (a) Trump tried to block the disclosure of White House visitor logs to the House January 6 Committee, suggesting some concern about when it would show certain people being inside the building, (b) we may say that Waldron was at the White House “on multiple occasions” over 63 days but in fact we know Waldron’s effort to have voting machines seized didn’t begin in earnest until Joe Biden’s election victory was certified by the 50 states and D.C. on December 14, 2020, making it more likely his “multiple” visits occurred over a period of just 22 days, and (c) while Waldron may have briefed lawmakers on his coup plot on January 5, 2021, (i) we do not know that this was the first time any federal lawmakers were so briefed, and (ii) in the 22 days between December 14 and January 5 there were relatively few occasions for a group of GOP lawmakers of any size to be together in one place (in large part because of the Christmas holiday and New Year’s).
One of the only times (that we know of) that a group of far-right Republican members of Congress got together between December 14, 2020 and January 5, 2021 was on December 21, 2020 at the White House: the day Trump met with many members of the House Freedom Caucus and discussed with all of them something (we don’t know what) they apparently thereafter believed required the receipt of a presidential pardon.
In view of all the foregoing, we must now consider the following additional facts:
The first time the Waldron Plot was presented in full to Trump (that we know of) was in the White House on December 18, 2020;
Waldron was not present during that presentation, which was led by his Team Kraken associate Sidney Powell;
following Powell’s December 18 presentation, Trump appointed her White House Special Counsel, thereby formalizing his desire that the plan presented by Powell (i.e., the Waldron Plot) be advanced from December 19, 2020 onward;
on December 18, Trump expressed aloud his sense that the Waldron Plot could not be successfully advanced by people working inside the White House because it was opposed by the White House Counsel’s Office (e.g., Pat Cipollone);
on the very next working day after December 18, this being December 21, 2020, Trump convened in the Oval Office the members of Congress most likely (and able) to advance the Waldron Plot from outside the White House, this being the members of the very House Freedom Caucus his chief of staff Mark Meadows had formerly led;
on December 21, 2020, Sidney Powell was seen entering the White House with a document that clearly referenced the (manufactured) “foreign interference” component of the Waldron Plot (“Iranian Threat Actor Identified Obtaining Voter Registration”), specifically as to a topic, Iran, that was mysteriously focused on in 2020—and again on January 5—by apparent Team Kraken member and top Pentagon official Kash Patel in meetings at the White House; and
if indeed Donald Trump and Mark Meadows first learned of the Waldron Plot on December 18, 2020, and Waldron was not in the White House on that Friday, the “multiple occasions” he was at the White House in the post-election period almost certainly occurred between December 21, 2020 and January 5, 2021—a period of just sixteen days—and the same could be said for his “eight to 10” conversations with Meadows (a frequency of at least one contact every 48 hours from December 21 to Insurrection Day).
Was Phil Waldron present with Sidney Powell at the White House on December 21, 2020—less than 96 hours before Christmas of 2020—briefing House Freedom Caucus members on a seditious conspiracy and prompting all of them to thereafter directly or indirectly request a presidential pardon? The seven facts above certainly point to this possibility, but so too do these seven additional facts worth consideration and study:
According a Washington Post report, Waldron admits he had “a meeting…[with] others…[and] Meadows in the days around Christmas” (a meeting that almost certainly would have occurred at Meadows’ sole place of employment, the White House; Proof notes the oddity of Waldron being unwilling to name the “others” who were at the meeting);
this meeting likely held at the White House between Meadows, Waldron, and unnamed others around Christmas involved “how to determine whether the election had been hacked [by foreign actors]”, a topic consistent with the document Waldron co-conspirator Powell carried into the White House less than 96 hours before Christmas (“Iranian Threat Actor Identified Obtaining Voter Registration”);
Waldron’s “ask” at this meeting was for the Trump administration to “us[e] the powers of the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus” to work on the question of whether the 2020 election had been hacked by foreign actors, and we know that it was on December 22 or December 23—the day after the mysterious House Freedom Caucus meeting at the White House that Powell and Waldron may have attended—that Waldron co-conspirator Michael Flynn made his first post-election contact with the man at the Pentagon (Ezra Cohen-Watnick) who was one of Trump’s most trusted political agents and at that time oversaw “the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus”;
a Washington Post source “familiar with the matter” has “confirmed” to the Post that there was an in-person December 2020 meeting at the White House that involved (at a minimum) Mark Meadows and Phil Waldron;
according to a report by the New York Times, the Dallas cyber-security firm from which the Waldron Plot first originated (see much more on this below) “in July 2020…gave a two-hour briefing to seven members of the House Freedom Caucus…[that] ‘horrified’ [the HFC members]”, dramatically increasing the odds that Waldron, a close associate of the Dallas firm’s founder, would have been tapped to give a briefing to more or less the very same group in December of that year;
Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified under oath that on Insurrection Eve Mark Meadows desperately wanted to leave the White House to visit one of the two Team Kraken headquarters in Washington (a suite at the Willard Hotel) and had to be talked out of doing so by his staff, who openly worried about how such a trip would affect his legal liability down the line for upcoming events in D.C.; and
the two men in all of America who Donald Trump wanted Meadows to call for him just hours before the attack on the Capitol began on January 6 were a co-organizer for Stop the Steal (Roger Stone) and a Team Kraken co-leader (Flynn).
The above facts are doubtless sufficient to warrant a DOJ investigation into whether not just Meadows and Trump but GOP members of the U.S. House were briefed on Waldron, Powell, and Flynn’s seditious scheme on December 21 as they met to discuss Trump’s plan for January 6—and whether this explains why these same members of Congress believed thereafter that they needed a presidential pardon from Trump.
All of the above notwithstanding, we do have significant information on times and dates Waldron was in the White House, in contact with Meadows, and/or self-tasked with briefing GOP members of Congress. Per the Post, all of the following meetings prior to the insurrection involving Phil Waldron and the “Waldron Plot” occurred:
(1) A November 7, 2020 phone call with a top Trump congressional ally, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX). While Trump was not involved in this briefing, Reuters reports that during the call Waldron falsely “told Gohmert he [Waldron] had tracked internet traffic routed through a server in Frankfurt, Germany [and that 2020] votes could be rerouted, too.” Waldron subsequently learned that after he got off the phone with Gohmert, “Gohmert immediately called Trump.” When Gohmert was asked about his November 7 post-Waldron debriefing with Trump, the Texas congressman refused to respond. If Waldron’s account is accurate, Trump was first exposed to the ideas being produced inside Team Kraken—all of them intended to justify the seizing of voting machines—96 hours after Election Day in 2020, and which would be 42 days before Trump met with Team Kraken in the Oval Office. Waldron nows says that within 72 hours of his call with Gohmert he was in D.C. meeting with Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani about his theory of a massive, transnational, multinational hacking scheme—and after 45 minutes, he says, Giuliani “came aboard [accepted the theory as true].”
By the second week of November, Reuters reports, Waldron was working with Flynn to advance his theories into political and legal action. By November 25, Waldron was testifying in a televised Pennsylvania hearing on allegations of election fraud—his testimony watched by Trump himself, who after it was over called into the hearing and told Waldron and the Pennsylvania state GOP elected officials present, “I’m in the Oval Office right now, and it’s very interesting to see what’s going on [at this hearing].”
(2) A November 25, 2020 meeting involving Waldron, Giuliani, Trump, “several Pennsylvania legislators,” and unnamed others in the Oval Office. This meeting is significant because, while the legislators in question appear to have been state GOP legislators, we do not know if Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), head of the House Freedom Caucus and the man who introduced Trump to Jeffrey Clark, was also present. Recall that then-Attorney General William Barr eventually resigned in part because Trump asked him to seize voting machines and Barr refused; it was Perry who aided Trump in finding a replacement for Barr who would do Trump’s bidding. The eventual failure of the internal coup plot at DOJ on January 4—due to then-deposed acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue explaining to Trump that if Clark became Attorney General, DOJ would likely collapse nationwide (leading the then-president to retract his still-secret appointment of Clark as his new acting Attorney General)—is what strengthened Waldron’s hand for his confirmed January 5, 2021 briefing to GOP legislators on using the Pentagon instead of DOJ to seize voting machines. That is, by January 5 it was clear that DOJ couldn’t be used for this purpose.
Per Reuters, this meeting occurred on the very day that Waldron testified before a group of Pennsylvania legislators (see above). When Waldron and the state legislators arrived at the White House to celebrate the televised event’s conclusion, Trump said to them, “That was great!” Even more troublingly, Reuters reports that it was on November 25, perhaps even during this very meeting between Trump and two men on Team Kraken (Waldron and Giuliani), that “The White House focus turned to pushing Republican-led legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia to replace Biden electors with those for Trump.” Indeed, Waldron has since admitted that “that whole [fake elector] strategy started from that [November 25] Pennsylvania hearing.” There is now significant evidence to suggest that this “fake elector” scheme could soon lead to federal indictments across the United States, with federal judge David Carter even ruling that this scheme “more likely than not” constituted a criminal conspiracy participated in by (at a minimum) Donald Trump and John Eastman.
It was also on November 25, 2020 that Trump unexpectedly issued a presidential pardon to Phil Waldron’s closest Team Kraken associate, Michael Flynn.
(3) A December 15 or December 16 (2020) briefing of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and his staff. Per a summary of a statement on this briefing that Waldron made to the Post, Waldron “brief[ed] Johnson and his staff ahead of a December 16 hearing on election fraud by the Senate Homeland Security Committee.” Senator Johnson has since refused to say whether he and/or his staff ever met with Waldron—though his office’s non-denial of the allegation looks to be, in Washington terms, a sort of soft confession.
(4) A January 4, 2021 briefing to a “group of [U.S.] senators.” According to a report by the New York Times, “Waldron told the Times that on January 4, 2021, members of his team spoke to a group of senators about allegations of election fraud contained in the PowerPoint presentation that recommended declaring a national emergency.” It is not clear whether Waldron merely orchestrated this briefing by his subordinates or whether he attended it himself.
(5) A January 5, 2021 briefing held in an unidentified “congressional office.” It is important to note that while Waldron refuses to state which members of Congress were in this meeting with him and “about a half-dozen” other briefers, he does acknowledge that “other [members of Congress] may have joined [the briefing] by video.” This is key because it confirms that, in repeatedly briefing top Republicans on his coup plot between mid-December 2020 and Insurrection Day, Waldron and his co-conspirators were willing to transmit their presentations with the aid of video-conferencing software. This suggests that, whether or not Waldron was present with his co-conspirator Powell in the White House on December 21, and for that matter whether he was present during Powell’s six-hour presentation of the Waldron Plot to Trump on December 18 (and into the wee hours of December 19), Waldron could easily have participated in either or both briefings via a video-conferencing set-up.
(6) Another post-election briefing at the White House—in Mark Meadows’ office—involving Waldron, Rudy Giuliani, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). We do not know the date of this briefing, or whether others were present besides those noted above, but certainly White House visitor logs establishing the post-election date(s) on which Giuliani and Graham were in the White House at the same time could resolve this mystery.
(7) Multiple calls from Rudy Giuliani to Mak Meadows in which Phil Waldron participated. According to the Post, the “communication [between Waldron and Trump’s chief of staff] was often through Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who sometimes asked [Waldron] to ‘explain this to Mark’ over the phone.”
None of these meetings or calls came “around Christmas”, so given that Trump was in Florida during the last week of December 2020—where he met with Stop the Steal co-organizer Roger Stone, then rushed back to Washington to oversee preparations for January 6—Waldron had to have been in the White House sometime between Monday, December 21 (the first business day after Powell’s initial presentation of the Waldron Plot to Trump) and Thursday of that week (Christmas Eve). This would place Trump and Meadows’ December 21 meeting with the House GOP Freedom Caucus squarely in the window of the meeting “around Christmas” that Waldron is the most cagey about in speaking to journalists.
In fact, the question is really whether Waldron and Trump’s chief of staff met more than once in the week after Trump appointed Powell to execute the Waldron Plot—as the New York Times reports that, in a court filing by the House January 6 Committee, an email reveals Waldron admitting he was in the White House with Mark Meadows on December 21, 2020. The relevant page from the congressional filing is below.
{Note: Proof adds here one additional piece of troubling information that it hasn’t yet been able to follow up on. In 2018, Trump’s Department of Defense awarded a contract worth over $60,000 to Pointstream Inc., a cybersecurity firm whose CEO is Phil Waldron. While Kash Patel didn’t take a role at the Pentagon until 2020, and while Ezra Cohen-Watnick was at DOJ—as a national security adviser to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions—in 2018, there’s an interesting synchronicity between Cohen-Watnick’s role at the Pentagon and Waldron’s company getting a lucrative deal with the Pentagon. The deal, which certainly may have been planned and/or launched well before the 2018 paperwork on it that’s now available, was between Phil Waldron and the Pentagon’s United States Southern Command. Ezra Cohen-Watnick worked for United States Southern Command from 2010 to 2014, with a focus on “countering drug trafficking”—precisely the sort of interdiction work that would require the “highly adaptive cybersecurity services” Waldron was providing Cohen-Watnick’s employer by 2018—and also, curiously given that Cohen-Watnick was shortly to take a job at DOJ, “money laundering.” As we now know, the man in charge of money laundering prosecutions at DOJ at the time was Sean O’Donnell—the man who’d eventually become DoD-IG and grant Cohen-Watnick extraordinary anonymity in the Pentagon Report. It must also be underscored that both Waldron and Cohen-Watnick worked under Flynn at the DIA, and that when the former’s coup plot failed to secure any endorsement beyond Trump’s at the White House on December 18, one of the first phone calls Flynn made was to Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon.}
You can read the full Waldron Plot here. Proof highlights the page below from the Plot, which was presented to GOP members of Congress (though not necessarily for the first time) on January 5, 2021, the same day that Waldron’s fellow Team Kraken member Michael Lindell met in Pentagon City with a sworn Trump ally and enemy of Venezuela. This page of the Plot identifies what it calls the key issue in the 2020 U.S. presidential election:
And here is the very beginning of Waldron’s “timeline” of key events justifying the imposition of martial law by Donald Trump, which repeatedly mentions Venezuela.
Waldron’s Venezuela-obsessed conspiracy theory appears to have originated with a member of Team Kraken who was a longtime Waldron associate, Russell Ramsland—owner of Dallas-based Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG)—in “late 2019.”
The 2019 origin of Waldron’s conspiracy theory confirms that it had little to do with the hard data of the 2020 presidential election but had been concocted a year before as (it seems in retrospect) a possible basis for Trump to contest an election result he’d always planned to contest if it were unfavorable to him.
About Russell Ramsland and ASOG
ASOG was founded in Texas by Adam Kraft in 2017. Kraft was a “senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency” under Michael Flynn. The two other co-founders of ASOG were Alvan “Locke” Neely, a former U.S. Secret Service agent, and J. Keet Lewis, at the time a member of the executive committee of the Council for National Policy (CNP)—an entity on whose board Ginni Thomas serves and which Ramsland is himself a member of. A report by the Washington Post strongly implies that Ramsland’s efforts received support from Ginni Thomas’ CNP.
In 2016, Ramsland unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Texas as a Tea Party candidate (the same Tea Party Ginni Thomas was an influential figure in), and like Thomas was a donor and supporter of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) before becoming a Trump donor and supporter. One of ASOG’s first clients was Guo Wengui, the infamous now-under-FBI-investigation and formally-held-in-contempt business associate of Steve Bannon. Wengui regularly visits Trump’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, according to a report in the New York Times, and indeed he has been a member of the Trump-owned club there since 2015, the very same year that Trump announced the start of his political career.
After Wengui was indicted in China a few years ago—after which he fled the country—he launched a “vociferous campaign” against the Chinese government, per the Times. As discussed in more detail below, and as seen in the sample page from the Waldron Plot above, Wengui associate Ramsland’s two chief targets, in spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election, were the governments of Venezuela and China.
{Note: As incredible as it seems, the Waldron Plot, which came to envelop the Pentagon, may have even older origins than this. The Washington Post, writing of Sidney Powell’s “kraken” lawsuits in November and December of 2020, reports that Powell had “been briefed [by ASOG] two years earlier [on Ramsland’s Venezuela-focused conspiracy theory]”, i.e. in late 2018. This would have been the post-midterm moment when Trump and the GOP first turned their attentions squarely on the 2020 election, having just faced a shocking Democratic Party “blue wave” in the 2018 midterms. The Post now reports that during this period of time the Waldron-linked ASOG also briefed Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who would later appear in the December 21, 2020 White House meeting in which Powell may have briefed members of Congress on the Waldron Plot. Laura Pressley, a “former Ramsland ally”, now says she cut ties with him because she had “suspicions that his motives [in pushing his narratives about Venezuela] were financial or partisan.” She now notes that Ramsland “sought funding from Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas and fracking industries.”
As Proof previously reported in its 2020 bestseller Proof of Corruption, certain Americans in the oil, gas, and fracking industries have long sought regime change in Venezuela to open up for themselves and their companies new investment opportunities there. If a U.S. president—for instance, Trump—were to come to believe, or at a minimum find it politically convenient to say that he believed, that Venezuela had attacked the 2020 presidential election, it could lead to him using the U.S. military to do what he’s publicly threatened to do and “repeatedly” threatened to do privately: overthrow the Nicolás Maduro administration in Caracas. One of the earliest adopters of Ramsland’s Venezuelan hacking theory was top Trump congressional ally Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who would thereafter become one of Trump’s co-conspirators in the Trump-Venezuela scandal of 2018-19, an under-reported event detailed exhaustively in Proof of Corruption. Another early Russell Ramsland believer was Charles Richard “Dick” Saulsbury, a Texas oil-and-gas man whose son Bubba Saulsbury would come to D.C. to join in the events of January 6 and then flee the capital instead after a mysterious Insurrection Eve dinner with Vice President Mike Pence.
Pressley now says, of Ramsland’s activities from 2018 onward, “Everything he was doing…became about getting to Trump. He had this idea [that] it [his conspiracy theory about Venezuela, China, and other foreign nations hacking elections] had to get to Trump.” It should also be noted—as an odd coincidence requiring further investigation, rather than one constituting certain evidence of wrongdoing—that Ramsland is also on the board of directors of Photonx, which per the Washington Post is “a company that, according to its website, uses variable wavelengths of light ‘to treat specific pathogenic.…diseases.’” Readers will recall that, during the period of time Ramsland was working for Photonx and seeking to establish a plot under which Trump could steal the 2020 presidential election via false claims of election fraud, Trump stunned the country by declaring—on April 24, 2020—that he had received information from an undisclosed non-governmental source suggesting that a coronavirus infection could be instantly destroyed if “we hit the body with a tremendous…ultraviolet or just very powerful light….[which] brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.” To this day, no one seems to know who gave Trump this bizarre idea. Perhaps in part to end any questions about where he was getting his information from, Trump later declared that—in the midst of a killer global pandemic—he was merely joking around about using light to treat COVID-19, or, in his words, “asking sarcastically to reporters [about the very type of research Ramsland’s Photonx was then doing] just….to see what would happen.” But according to the Times, Trump was serious, saying to White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx on national television that day that he had (in the Times’ summary) “[heard of] the success of sunlight as an effective tool against viruses”, which he felt (in his own words) was “a great thing to look at.” If indeed Trump was referring to Photonx’s research, it would not have been the first time he advanced a dubious coronavirus remedy due to his clandestine contacts with far-right activists aiming to benefit him politically. As Proof of Corruption (2020) exhaustively details, Trump publicly pushed the quack COVID-19 remedy hydroxychloroquine at a time he had undisclosed connections to rich GOP donors behind the push to authorize it as a treatment for coronavirus infections.
Note: It does not appear that Ramsland’s Florida-based Photonx Therapeutx Inc. is in any way connected to Florida-based Photon-X, which three days before Trump’s April 24 presser announced a “collaboration to develop advanced [infrared] camera applications to help screen for persons who may be infected with COVID-19 as they enter buildings.” While Ramsland’s similarly named, same-state company also deals in infrared technology relating to COVID-19, no linkage between “Photonx” and “Photon-X” has yet been located by Proof. Regardless, the Times reports that “in 2019 and 2020, Ramsland was attempting to win the attention of Washington insiders, an effort [Trump congressional ally Louie] Gohmert was also engaged in. Gohmert has said that [in 2019], a year before the election, he gave Trump information from a group of ‘former intelligence people that were monitoring the election in Dallas County’—a description that closely resembles the way [Ramsland’s] ASOG portrays itself—and that Trump considered it ‘a real problem.’” Most of the co-founders of ASOG are also corporate officers at Photonx.}
The Venezuela Conspiracy Theory—Aimed at Justifying Martial Law and the Pentagon’s Seizure of Voting Machines—Spreads
According to the Washington Post, after the 2020 election “The [false] claim that all U.S. voting machines secretly harbored Venezuelan software was repeated by Giuliani and Powell in numerous media appearances.” What neither Giuliani nor Powell could do was prove their claims. It would require a member of Team Kraken like Patel having access to intelligence presumptively in the hands of the CIA, or for Powell to work directly with the intelligence guru at the Pentagon—Flynn’s protégé Cohen-Watnick—for Team Kraken writ large to gain access such critical information.
For this reason, Waldron’s implication that the January 15, 2021 Lindell Document was a product of his work—a scheme that would have further empowered Powell and moved Patel to the CIA—both explains Lindell’s Insurrection Eve dinner with Venezuelan arch-nemesis Eduardo Bolsonaro and further underscores that Waldron’s efforts to stage a coup inside the Pentagon did not end in mid-December 2020.
In any case, by the time Michael Lindell entered the Oval Office on January 15 with a plan apparently linked to the Waldron-Flynn-Powell-Ramsland axis, then-president Trump had been fixated on Russell Ramsland’s work for at least two months—and some of his allies (including one of his lawyers and an ally in Congress) for far longer.
As the Washington Post reports, “on November 15, 2020, Trump retweeted to his millions of online followers a video clip of [Russell] Ramsland [falsely] saying in a pre-election interview that votes from 29 states were routed through ‘a server in Frankfurt, Germany’ and that [Spanish electronic voting system company] Scytl ‘controls and reports your vote.’ Ramsland also contributed material to [Trump lawyer Sidney] Powell’s lawsuits….[and one] Ramsland claim [about the election] was amplified by Giuliani and Powell at a [November 19, 2020] news conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee.”
{Note: Per the Post, Mssrs. Waldron and Ramsland appeared together at post-election GOP-legislator-led hearings in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia. During these four hearings, Waldron confirmed “he was working with ASOG to examine the 2020 election.”}
14. Bobb
While Waldron is typically identified as the progenitor of the Waldron Plot because of his association with Ramsland, the man who initially pursued the false allegations of foreign election interference that ostensibly motivated the Plot years before the 2020 election, meta-data associated with the very first draft of Team Kraken’s proposed executive order—which, if signed by Trump, would have authorized the Pentagon to seize voting machines, implicitly putting the United States under conditional martial law and ending American democracy as it’d previously been understood—shows the primary author of the document to be Christina Bobb.
Bobb, a lawyer, a former employee of the Department of Homeland Security, and at least nominally a “journalist” with far-right pro-Trump propaganda organ OANN, joined Trump’s legal team as a direct report to Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani shortly after the 2020 election. When Biden’s landslide electoral and popular-vote victory was certified by 50 states and D.C. on December 14, 2020, it appears that the synchronization between Team Kraken and Trump’s legal team was already complete—as by December 17, just 72 hours after all Trump’s legal options to remain in power officially expired, Waldron was passing around via a series of urgent emails (to Flynn, Giuliani, Ramsland, and even D.C. lawyer Katherine Friess) the executive order Bobb had co-written.
What a Politico report on this email chain reveals is that the former DHS employee Bobb actually wrote two versions of the executive order that circulated amongst Team Kraken and Trump’s lawyers the day before the six-hour December 18 Team Kraken-Team Trump summit at the White House—an event spanning the Oval Office and the Presidential Residence, and that climaxed with Trump announcing to the nation his endorsement of the Stop the Steal rally planned for January 6, 2021 by Alex Jones, Ali Alexander, and the president’s longtime friend and political adviser, Roger Stone.
The second version of the ex-DHS employee Bobb’s draft order would have seen her former employer, with whom she’d still be in contact during Insurrection Week (via calls and/or texts that appear to have gone to top DHS officials and therefore were among those destroyed by DHS, with their destruction thereafter hidden by Trump supporter and DHS-IG Joseph Cuffari, who is discussed in much more detail below), seizing voting machines instead of the Pentagon. In either case—a seizure by DHS or a seizure by the Pentagon—the unprecedented action would ostensibly be justified by “evidence” Team Kraken had accumulated suggesting foreign election interference in November 2020. (As would later be revealed, and is discussed in far more detail below, most of this supposed “evidence” had been produced by a former Army mechanic and Dallas IT specialist who was himself indirectly in the employ of Trump’s presidential campaign through Russell Ramsland’s ASOG.)
Bobb’s involvement in the creation of the executive order; and Giuliani’s participation in the workshopping of the order; and even the participation of Friess—who has since acknowledged, in seeking to hide all her electronic communications from Congress, that she was an attorney working for Trump in December 2020—gives the lie to the idea, often indulged (even in this report) as a matter of narrative expediency, that there was any separation at all between “Team Kraken” and Donald Trump’s “legal team.”
{Note: See the bullet-pointed list of Team Kraken participants above to discover how many of them were attorneys for Donald Trump between Election Day and Insurrection Day.}
While a contingent from Team Kraken—including Powell, Flynn, Byrne, and a Powell aide—may have been driven to the White House on December 18 by Team Kraken bodyguard Robert Patrick Lewis and let in by a top staffer for Team Kraken principal Peter Navarro (Garrett Ziegler), almost immediately upon accessing the White House Trump brought Rudy Giuliani into the discussion (it is unclear if Giuliani was already conveniently in the White House at the time or was summoned for an in-person visit following a phone call), and indeed it was Trump lawyer Giuliani who Trump directed to call DHS regarding the proposed executive order written by Trump lawyer Bobb—a command to Giuliani that Trump issued after he had authorized Trump lawyer Powell to pursue the draft of the Bobb executive order that directed Trump appointees Miller, McCarthy, Patel, Cohen-Watnick, Tata, and MacGregor at the Pentagon to work with Powell to illegally seize voting machines around the country. (The undue number of appearances of the word “Trump” in the sentence preceding is intentional, as it aims to underscore how aligned with Trump everyone involved in the Pentagon plot was.)
In short, much of the major-media coverage of what has been called the “craziest meeting of the Trump presidency” has wrongly focused on businessman Patrick Byrne (perhaps because he’s been the most vocal about it) and Michael Flynn (at the time not a member of Trump’s inner circle, but often focused on because of his long and complicated history with Trump). White House Counsel Pat Cipollone has also been a feature of much news coverage of the event, perhaps because he was long seen as the participant most likely to testify before Congress (as he has now done). But in fact, the most important figures surrounding this meeting were Trump and his attorneys, both those present in the Oval on December 18 and those who were not:
Bobb, who had apparently co-written the documents Trump reviewed;
Powell, who Trump authorized to act on those documents via his appointment of her as White House Special Counsel (or perhaps we might say “White House special counsel,” as there’s no evidence that “White House Special Counsel” is a title one can formally receive);
Friess, who had reviewed the Bobb-written, Powell-presented documents prior to the Oval Office meeting, presumably to determine their legal sufficiency (a function that neither Phil Waldron nor Michael Flynn, let alone Patrick Byrne, could competently perform); and
Giuliani, who Trump invited into the meeting and who he then tasked with following up on Bobb’s second (DHS) executive order with officials at DHS whose electronic communications were thereafter summarily destroyed.
Giuliani and Bobb would end up being central figures in Trump’s Insurrection Week “war room”/“command center” at the Willard Hotel, confirming that nothing about their actions in mid-December 2020 led to the then-president distancing himself from them—but in fact appear to have led him to draw them still closer into his confidence.
{Note: Both Politico and ABC News note that longtime Rudy Giuliani associate and ex-con Bernie Kerik was also intimately involved in the activities of Team Kraken. Trump pardoned Kerik in February 2020 under suspicious circumstances; the pardon came toward the end of the Trump-Ukraine scandal and the subsequent Trump-Ukraine impeachment trial—a sequence of events centering on the illicit actions of Giuliani and his longtime associates.}
Trump has long been interested in aligning himself with individuals with ready access to mass media, and this was especially so during the period of time he was using his now-suspended Twitter feed to try to rally domestic extremists to D.C. to march on the U.S. Capitol. Politico reports that ostensible OANN “reporter” Bobb “was on at least one conference call about setting up alternate slates of electors for the January 6 certification vote”, and she was thereafter a key fundraiser and advocate for the partisan “audit” of the 2020 presidential election conducted in Arizona. Even today, in August 2022, Bobb is working as a Trump lawyer seeking to have battleground states around the country illegally “decertify” Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and declare Trump the rightful President of the United States.
By eliding the role of Trump lawyers from its account of the December 18, 2020 event at the White House, major media has inaccurately framed the six-hour meeting as an attempt by outside agitators to bring Trump into a clandestine effort he had had no part in staffing or encouraging. In fact, as we’ve seen (and will continue to see below), Trump and his lawyers were directly aware of and involved in the movements of Team Kraken beginning just days after the 2020 election. The recruitment, by Trump’s legal team, of a fake journalist (Bobb) even matched Trump’s equally direct recruitment of another fake journalist—Alex Jones—to lead the very march on the Capitol that, as readers will learn in the final sections of this report, Trump and his lawyers believed would provide an inalterable justification for (a) his imposition of martial law upon the United States, and quickly thereafter (b) the execution of Bobb’s executive order.
Bobb was most recently seen on far-right media baselessly accusing the FBI of “making up” evidence seized from Mar-a-Lago during a recent search of the property.
While this report on the Pentagon is not focused on the ongoing presidential records case in which Trump is embroiled—the former president illegally took 27 boxes of government records from the White House and sent them to his Florida home after January 6, with some of the documents since having been identified as classified and new evidence suggesting persons acting on Trump’s behalf lied to the FBI (a crime) about whether Trump had returned the documents in response to a federal subpoena in June—it is worth noting that Trump’s illicit asportation from the Oval Office of what could well be key federal criminal evidence in the sprawling investigation of the Trump presidency echoes the recent destruction-of-evidence scandals at DHS, DoD, and the U.S. Secret Service that this report does analyze in depth. Indeed, with the news of a massive, court-ordered search of Trump’s Florida home we must add “the Trump White House” to the list of federal entities of the Trump era that were involved in systematic mishandling of evidence (though candidly there was already significant evidence of this from pre-January 6, particularly by Trump himself).
On August 12, 2022, breaking news at the Washington Post revealed that among the documents apparently stolen by Trump from the White House were highly sensitive documents regarding U.S. nuclear programs, including “special access”-classification materials—the classification level above “top secret”—the illegal possession of which can violate the Espionage Act. If indeed the former president absconded from D.C. with data about U.S. nuclear technology and nuclear armaments, it could be an early signal that the “Red Sea Conspiracy” that is the chief subject of Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019) is finally going to break wide in major media. As that book details, Donald Trump, Michael Flynn, and several other members of Trump’s inner circle of policy advisers in 2015 and 2016 were pursuing a clandestine multinational “grand bargain” that involved transferring U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for pecuniary and political profit (with the aim of these two Middle Eastern nations being to both engage in a nuclear arms race with Iran and transition their energy markets into Russian-built nuclear power plants). Other countries involved in this conspiracy include Bahrain, Russia, Israel, and Egypt.
15. Jones
Now that we know that three of the Trump executive-branch entities closest to the events of January 6—the Pentagon, DHS, and the U.S. Secret Service—all deleted texts and secure messages in contravention of one or more of (a) protocol, (b) regulatory frameworks, and (c) federal statutes; now that we further know that the FBI has had to secure criminal warrants to seize the electronic devices of a wide range of top Trump agents, including his lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Victoria Toensing and his plant inside the DOJ, Jeffrey Clark; it’s appropriate to let the other shoe drop and ask the following question: what are the chances that a top Trump ally would lie about the content of their texts and secure messages in an effort to hide their wrongdoing?
We recently got an answer to that question, and the answer appears to be “very high.”
As Proof has previously reported, all three of Alex Jones, Ali Alexander, and Roger Stone—the leaders of the Stop the Steal domestic terror movement—claim that they were personally asked by Donald Trump to lead the January 6 march on the Capitol.
Alexander has gone still further and said that he was in constant contact with the 2020 Trump presidential campaign while he was illegally trespassing on Capitol grounds on January 6; we also know that he had spoken by phone with Trump’s daughter-in-law-to-be, Kimberly Guilfoyle, on Insurrection Eve (at the time, Guilfoyle was in the Trump International Hotel pre-insurrection war room with Donald Trump Jr. and several members of Team Kraken, as well as a bevy of top Trump presidential advisers).
All three Stop the Steal leaders indicate that the U.S. Secret Service, one of the Trump administration entities that erased all electronic communications from January 5 and January 6, was designated by Trump to assist the three of them in bringing the White House Ellipse mob to Capitol Hill—making the aforementioned now-destroyed Secret Service texts perhaps the most important lost evidence in the January 6 investigation, as they could link Trump directly to the domestic extremists who stormed the Capitol grounds on Insurrection Day.
This week, in an unrelated civil trial arising from Alex Jones’ heinous lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre, it was revealed that Mark Bankston, the plaintiffs’ attorney in the case—thus, the legal counsel for parents who lost a child in a school shooting Jones thereafter called a “false flag” operation and who therefore, with good reason, are among the fiercest critics of Jones anywhere in the world—accidentally got access to two years’ worth of Alex Jones’ text messages. This period of time would cover not just January 6, 2021, but Jones’s months of working to overthrow American democracy via his Stop the Steal organization in November and December of 2020.
{Note: For some of this period, Stop the Steal shared security with Team Kraken. Team Kraken bodyguard Robert Patrick Lewis worked security for not just Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Patrick Byrne in late 2000, but also for Ali Alexander, leading to not just Flynn and Byrne but even Lewis getting a speaking slot at the Stop the Steal rally at Freedom Plaza in D.C. on Insurrection Eve. Just as Team Kraken overlaps significantly with Trump’s legal team, so too does it overlap significantly with the post-election Stop the Steal “movement” and even the domestic extremists—the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—with whom all three leaders of Stop the Steal regularly consorted on and before January 6. Team Kraken’s Lewis has even boasted of having direct contact with Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes, now imprisoned pretrial on Seditious Conspiracy charges, both before and after Insurrection Day.}
While the biggest news to come out of Alex Jones’ lawyers’ apparently accidental provision of excess discovery to the lawyers in a civil case is that the House January 6 Committee has now subpoenaed and received from the Sandy Hook plaintiffs’ lawyers two years of information from Jones’s cell phone, a less-discussed consequence of this incident is that we learned that Jones (who did not realize his phone records were in the hands of his enemies) not only lied outside of court but also under oath about the contents of his phone records.
While no two people can be perfectly analogized—for instance, Jones is less loyal to Trump than Patel and Cohen-Watnick, but more dishonest than Piatt and McCarthy—his ongoing civil trial is nevertheless significant because it offers Americans an object lesson in why people without moral scruples (a class that includes the overwhelming majority of people in Trump’s inner circle) would lie under oath: because they believe that the electronic evidence that could prove them liars has either been destroyed or will be, for another reason, forever beyond reach of anyone who could gainsay them.
After Cassidy Hutchinson testified before Congress that former Trump Secret Service chief Tony Ornato—quite possibly the three Stop the Steal leaders’ liaison with the White House, and a man whose texts and secure messages were inexplicably destroyed—had told her, in the presence of then-Trump Secret Service detail chief Bobby Engel (who corroborated the story) that Trump had both assaulted Engel and tried to force the presidential SUV to the Capitol on January 6, anonymous sources within the USSS claimed that both Ornato and Engel would deny Hutchinson’s testimony (an account that had helped establish that on Insurrection Day Trump was looking to personally lead a rebellion that he knew was filled, in military terms, with armed irregulars; it is less of a leap than many might think to associate such actions with the “levvying war” clause in the Treason statute).
But in the days that followed—even in the midst of the House January 6 Committee publicly urging Mssrs. Ornato and Engel to return to Capitol Hill for further sworn testimony, either to explain why they had hid President Trump’s conduct in their prior testimony or else to denounce Hutchinson’s account under penalty of perjury—what happened instead was that all those who could confirm or deny Hutchinson’s account got lawyers and refused to speak to Congress. One man, the still-unnamed driver of the presidential SUV on January 6, even retained the son of Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’ lawyer. It was, all in all, a sign that Trump had indeed done what major media had long ago reported he’d done: replaced anyone in his Secret Service detail who was unwilling to be as loyal to him personally as his longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller (who lied during and after the Trump-Russia scandal at a time the RNC was paying him an exorbitant salary for a slate of curiously unclear duties) had been.
While Alex Jones does not feel the same loyalty to Trump, or perhaps to anyone, that Schiller did and does to Trump, we know that Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Kash Patel, and Tony Ornato are not just famously loyal to Donald Trump but received accelerated advancement in their respective careers precisely because of that loyalty. So it cannot be said that they are much less likely to lie for Trump than Alex Jones has been to lie on his own behalf.
When Jones falsely testified that there were no texts about Sandy Hook on his phone, it struck this author as being as similarly improbable as Cohen-Watnick’s account of his December 2020 phone calls with Michael Flynn; the now-proven lies the Pentagon told about whether Charles Flynn was involved in the Pentagon’s response on January 6; McCarthy’s claim to have been on a phone call on January 6 that he in fact never joined; Piatt’s sudden back-tracking on what he did or didn’t say while he and a Flynn brother were strongly rebuffing attempts to relieve the Capitol with federal troops; or even something as esoteric as the intelligence-gathering supposedly conducted by Cohen-Watnick and Patel pre-January 6 that now appears to have had the sole aim of understating the threat posed to the U.S. Capitol by their political patron’s fanatical followers.
This much now seems likely: the Pentagon, DHS, and the U.S. Secret Service deleted texts and secure messages that would have revealed their words, actions, and decision-making processes on January 5 and January 6 for a good reason. Given the historical enormity of January 6, and its instant place as one of the gravest national security threats ever to unfold inside the United States, there is simply no possibility that mere bureaucratic snafus led to the destruction of the most critical criminal evidence in the possession of Trump’s executive branch—simultaneously, at multiple key agencies—between January 7, 2021 and the end of that month. The odds of merely “negligent” erasures are zeroed out not just by the nature of the events on January 6 but by the fact that all three of these mass deletions (four, if you count the course of events that unfolded inside the White House itself) occurred in the context of FOIA requests and preservation letters from legislative entities as well as standing federal statutes.
The mass destruction of evidence that could directly link a President of the United States to domestic terrorists does not just happen. Just so, the mass destruction of evidence that could establish the Pentagon as having deliberately dragged its feet on January 6 for partisan political reasons—making it a knowing accomplice in Trump’s January 6 coup plot—does not just happen. Such things do not just happen any more than Alex Jones lies about the content of his cell phone in the middle of a civil trial by accident rather than to hide the fact that he chose to lie about the murder of children for profit.
As noted above, as of August 8, 2022, the House January 6 Committee is in possession of Alex Jones’ text messages from the last two years (from at least one of his phones).
In related news, CNN confirms that Jones “repeatedly asserted his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent during [his] closed-door deposition” with the House January 6 Committee despite claiming to have done nothing wrong on or before January 6.
Tellingly, before Congress acquired two years of his text messages, Jones had begged the Texas state-court judge in his civil trial to order all his texts destroyed rather than turned over to the House pursuant to a federal subpoena—despite (again) the fact that Jones was simultaneously claiming there was nothing incriminating in any of them.
The judge in Jones’s defamation case of course refused Jones’s text-deletion request, and Jones has now lost the case in question to the tune of a nearly $50-million-dollar compensatory and punitive damages award—a staggering award that acknowledges the fact that few Americans have more frequently and brazenly lied about major public events than Jones. The question, now, is just how much he lied about his role in the events of January 6—and Trump’s—as well.
16. Cuffari
As we’ve already seen, the origin of the current political super-scandal involving the destruction of critical federal criminal evidence at DHS, the USSS, and the Pentagon—not to mention the widening picture that has emerged of the systematic destruction of evidence inside the Trump White House—is a partisan purge of federal government orchestrated in part by Ginni Thomas. This historic purge (a) led to the installation of Trumpist radicals atop key executive-branch agencies, and (b) removed independent inspectors general from their posts on nakedly partisan political grounds. We might also add (c): the deliberate, chronic understaffing of the federal government under Trump, which put the competent execution of ordinarily low-intensity government functions suddenly in doubt.
While this report has been primarily focused on the Pentagon and, to a lesser extent, the White House, it would be remiss—especially given its focus on inspectors general—if it failed to mention recent shocking discoveries about Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, the man tasked with figuring out how and why the electronic devices of the Secret Service agents closest to Trump on January 5 and January 6 were wiped despite four formal (binding) demands for preservation of evidence by legislative bodies with the authority to issue such demands upon DHS.
As regular Proof readers will recall, it was the U.S. Secret Service that informed Trump days before January 6 that there would be a significant potential for danger on Capitol Hill on that day, a foreknowledge that may itself be sufficient to establish criminal intent for many of Trump’s actions on Insurrection Day (even if he hadn’t learned on January 6 itself, as we now know from the House January 6 Committee hearings he did, that the mob he sought to personally address at the White House Ellipse and lead to the Capitol thereafter was armed). It was also the Secret Service that was tasked, by Trump and his agents, to extract Alex Jones and Ali Alexander from the “VIP” section of Trump’s Ellipse speech and lead them—sans Roger Stone, who had chosen to hide at his hotel, instead—to the starting point of the January 6 march on the Capitol, thus conferring upon them the status of sanctioned marshals for the event.
In other words, not only could Secret Service texts from January 5 and January 6 establish criminal intent for a spate of crimes by Donald Trump on January 6, they could also provide the unambiguous direct link between Trump and the far-right domestic terrorists who trespassed on Capitol grounds on January 6 that Congress and federal criminal investigators have been ardently looking for since early 2022.
Recovering these apparently illegally destroyed Secret Service texts is therefore of utmost important to the United States government and its people. Unfortunately, the very “purge” that surely aided and abetted the widespread destruction of evidence across several Trump-era executive-branch agencies also prompted President Biden to issue a commitment at the dawn of his presidency to not fire Trump-era inspectors general—part of an effort to depoliticize their roles post-Trump—with the predictable result that men and women who should not have been given their jobs at all saw their job security skyrocket even after the inauguration of a new Democratic president.
This was, by default, a rewarding of Trump’s and Thomas’ unprecedented, ideologically driven attack on civil service in America.
One result of this sequence of events is that a man who almost certainly should have been fired from his job—DHS-IG Cuffari—was not only kept in his role but now has sole authority over recovering the destroyed Secret Service texts and secure messages or (if he fails to do so) both punishing those who destroyed this key evidence and compelling their cooperation with his investigation into that destruction (as well as any ongoing investigations of the same by Congress and the Department of Justice).
Can a Trump loyalist be trusted to work diligently to unearth evidence that may well incriminate the former president? It seems unlikely—which makes the scandal now unfolding in the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General (DHS OIG) seem entirely predictable.
According to a major investigative report by the Washington Post,
The Homeland Security watchdog [Cuffari] now under scrutiny for his handling of deleted Secret Service text messages from the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol previously was accused of misleading federal investigators and running “afoul” of ethics regulations while he was in charge of a Justice Department inspector general field office in Tucson, Arizona, according to a newly disclosed government report.
In the 2013 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general, which was never publicly released, investigators said they did “not believe” Joseph V. Cuffari’s explanation for why he failed to inform his supervisors—against federal rules—about his testimony in a lawsuit brought by a federal prisoner.
Separately, they found that Cuffari broke ethics rules by referring law firms to the prisoner’s family, including firms where some of his close friends worked. “We concluded Cuffari’s actions violated the [inspector general] manual’s prohibition on unethical conduct”, said the report, which also noted that he may have violated guidelines by using his government email to lobby for a position as inspector general for the Arizona National Guard, among other issues.
For a federal agent, failing to be truthful with investigators can lead to discipline, suspension, and possible termination from federal service.
An internal team recommended referring Cuffari to the Inspector General’s investigations unit for a deeper review of his actions, the report said—but [Cuffari] quickly retired and the following month joined the administration of then-Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) as a policy adviser for public safety.
When he was nominated five years later by President Donald Trump to become the Homeland Security watchdog, Cuffari told Senate lawmakers in a questionnaire that he had been fully truthful to investigators in their probe. Senators in both parties did not press him for details of the investigation before his confirmation by a voice vote in July 2019.
In the event that the upshot of all the above isn’t clear,
Cuffari committed a spate of major ethical violations while a federal inspector general in Arizona;
those violations were sufficient to bar him from any future federal employment as an inspector general (and possibly any federal employment at all);
Cuffari fled federal service for partisan political employment with one of the farthest-right Republican governors in America—and key Trump supporter in a critical battleground state—in order to avoid any consequences for his actions;
in November 2018, at the very dawn of the Trump-Ukraine scandal—when Trump and his allies were just beginning to formulate their plot to secure fake “dirt” on then-candidate Joe Biden from Kremlin agents overseas in order to steal the 2020 president election via election fraud—Trump nominated Cuffari to be the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General;
in July 2019, as Trump was extorting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for fake dirt on Biden to try to steal the 2020 election, Cuffari was confirmed as Department of Homeland Security Inspector General by Congress (following minimal investigation into his background); and
now, in mid-2022, Cuffari is the man tasked with helping Congress confirm that Trump sought to steal the 2020 presidential election through clandestine communications with various government officials—precisely the sort of allegation Trump had faced during the Trump-Ukraine scandal, and adjacent to the sort of normally-career-ending ethical violations Cuffari himself had previously been found to have committed while an inspector general at DOJ.
So how are things going in Cuffari’s investigation? Sadly, exactly how you’d expect.
As the Post now reports, “Cuffari’s three years as Homeland Security’s inspector general have been marked by numerous allegations of partisan decision-making and investigative failures—including, most recently, his decision in February to scrap efforts by his department to recover Secret Service texts sent during the January 6 insurrection.”
But the Cuffari story gets worse—and actually does, in the event, involve the Pentagon.
Cuffari is now such a problematic inspector general that he is under active investigation by another inspector general.
As the Post reveals, “The Defense Department inspector general [O’Donnell] has been investigating allegations for more than a year that Cuffari retaliated against several whistleblowers on his staff, according to individuals familiar with the case.”
Given what we know about O’Donnell’s thoroughness as an investigator, that he has been tasked with determining whether Cuffari engaged in conduct sufficient to get him fired (finally) by President Biden hardly engenders confidence that a just result will be reached in the matter. If O’Donnell already has a well-documented history of anonymizing and improperly crediting testimony from Trump appointees, refusing to interview witnesses who might offer counter-narratives, and publishing data that runs counter to the evidentiary record, what hope is there that his investigation of Cuffari will uncover more of the sort of ethical violations that should have kept Cuffari from being confirmed as DHS-IG in July 2019?
{Note: Per the Post, the “committee of federal inspectors general” who vet federal inspector general nominees “interviewed [Cuffari] for less than an hour…[before] recommend[ing] his candidacy to the Trump White House.”}
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), chair of the House January 6 Committee, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, have now asked Cuffari to step aside and let someone else seek the missing Secret Service texts that could implicate Donald Trump in the gravest crime in modern American political history. Knowing what we do now, what American could oppose such a result? As the Post reports (emphasis supplied), “From immigration policy to reports of sexual misconduct in [DHS]…[DHS-IG] Cuffari has shown an unwillingness to conduct the independent oversight of federal agencies mandated by law, critics say—instead directing his staff to tread lightly on the conduct of former political appointees in his own party to avoid embarrassing them when investigators uncovered mismanagement or misconduct.”
Yet calls for Cuffari to recuse himself from the U.S. Secret Service investigation aren’t merely based on his past conduct at DHS, let alone the fact that—on the record we have from his pre-DHS employment at DOJ—he isn’t even eligible to be in federal service at all. Instead, the concerns Thompson and Maloney are expressing center on Cuffari’s conduct in the ongoing January 6 investigation. Per the Post (emphasis supplied),
Cuffari upended the House investigation into the January 6 attack last month when he told the House and Senate Homeland Security committees that the Secret Service’s text messages had been erased as part of a program to replace the agency’s phones—after he had asked for them. But lawmakers said they have since discovered that Cuffari knew about the missing texts more than a year before he alerted Congress. The Post reported that he backed off plans to retrieve the data via forensic analysis. The scope of the missing text messages has since expanded to include those of Trump’s top Homeland Security appointees.
When one considers that Cuffari is presently tasked with two of the three destruction-of-evidence scandals facing the former Trump administration—the ones at DHS and inside the Secret Service (with the third scandal being part of O’Donnell’s remit)—it is frightening to learn that though the Secret Service destroyed evidence in contravention of Cuffari’s own preservation and production demands, the DHS-IG still protected agents in Trump’s highly politicized security detail by (a) hiding from Congress the violation of his own directives to the Secret Service, and (b) declining to aggressively investigate that violation or even deploy all available resources to locate the material the USSS destroyed in contravention of his authority as Inspector General. What could any objective observer conclude about Cuffari’s conduct other than that he is continuing the course of unethical, impermissibly partisan conduct he’s demonstrated for years?
{Note: The Post also reports that Cuffari “declined to scrutinize the [Trump administration] Secret Service’s handling of the George Floyd protests in Lafayette Square in 2020” and the “spread of the coronavirus in the [Trump administration] Secret Service.”}
But it gets worse.
It now appears that not only did Mr. Cuffari and his top lieutenants learn about the improperly destroyed Secret Service texts a year before Cuffari informed Congress they were gone, and not only did he “secretly abandon” efforts to retrieve the texts, the very Trump appointee charged with investigating a cover-up by Trump appointees may have authored a massive cover-up himself. As Politico reports, Thompson and Maloney now say that newly discovered documents suggest much more than mere dereliction of duty by Cuffari. According to a letter from the two congressional chairs to Cuffari (emphasis supplied),
“These [new] documents raise troubling new concerns that your office not only failed to notify Congress for more than a year that critical evidence in this investigation was missing, but your senior staff deliberately chose not to pursue that evidence and then appear to have taken steps to cover up these failures.”
And now a whistleblower from inside Cuffari’s own office has emerged, telling Politico the following:
“Cuffari and his immediate staff are uniquely unqualified to lead an Inspector General’s office, and the current negative congressional and media scrutiny bear that out. The crucial oversight mission of the DHS OIG has been compromised, and there will be no course correction as long as Cuffari leads the DHS OIG.”
But it gets still worse.
According to an article in Politico, the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight (POGO) watchdog group has just “obtained a record showing that Cuffari’s team learned in February of this year about the disappearance of two top DHS officials’ January 6 texts….a potential similarity with the Secret Service messaging issue…and [it] did not try to find the officials’ texts.”
POGO thus submits that Cuffari did the same thing with respect to critical federal evidence held by DHS writ large as he did with evidence held by its USSS subunit. Which suggests a pattern of conduct consistent with a coverup and excludes “mere” negligence as the explanation for Cuffari’s behavior.
With the House select committee (the House January 6 Committee) that is currently unsuccessfully seeking Cuffari’s recusal from the January 6 investigation facing its forced disbandment in under 150 days if the GOP takes control of the House; with a large troupe of D.C. National Guard officials whistleblowing to Congress about the glaring falsehoods and omissions in Sean O’Donnell’s inspector-general report at the Pentagon, and getting no corrections to the said report in response; Americans may understandably wonder how they will ever get a thorough and comprehensive record of the many crimes apparently committed by former president Trump and his aides, allies, agents, acolytes, associates, advisers, attorneys, and accomplices on and before January 6.
And this crisis of confidence arises in the midst of the most damning evidence ever compiled of an audacious, national-security-threatening coup plot at the Pentagon.
17. The Coup Plot at the Pentagon
In an August 4, 2022 interview with CNN, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) allowed that it was “concerning” that the Pentagon had deleted so many texts and secure messages, specifically expressing concern about the deletion of electronic communications authored or received by Kash Patel—as noted previously, a key player in this author’s 2020 bestseller Proof of Corruption because of his role in trying to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 presidential election before it was even conducted.
Cheney’s concern is a start, but of course only a start. With respect to Donald Trump’s less dangerous coup plot inside the Department of Justice—less dangerous because even a rogue Attorney General can be hamstrung by a single honorable federal judge—the House January 6 Committee is so concerned that it has already held a two-hour public hearing with live witnesses to inform the American public of Trump’s designs at DOJ (and for that matter, DOJ has not only seized evidence from two men involved in the former president’s DOJ coup plot, Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman, but has even secured the testimony of Ken Klukowski, who held one of the scheme’s starring roles).
By comparison, both Congress and the DOJ appear to have done very little indeed to look into the Pentagon’s complicity with the January 6 coup plot—a complicity that, were it brought to fruition via a coup inside that federal entity, could have led to dire consequences in the United States that not even a federal judge would be positioned to alleviate. While the obvious loyalty to the U.S. Constitution of the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, gives most Americans, this author, and likely members of Congress a great deal of confidence that in January of 2021 Donald Trump was much closer to corrupting DOJ than the Pentagon (after all, just 72 hours before the attack on the Capitol, Jeffrey Clark really was the acting Attorney General of the United States, per the White House) this does not mean that the actions of Trump and his allies at the Pentagon are anything less than a five-alarm fire for our democracy.
Consider that, whereas Trump reversed his appointment of Jeffrey Clark on January 4, 2021, and whereas, at the time Clark was briefly made acting Attorney General, the “only” thing Trump was seeking from him was that he send a letter to the Republican state legislators of a single state (Georgia) to ask them to meet in a special session to consider de-certifying Joe Biden’s victory there—an action that likely would have been held illegal at least by the first two levels of federal courts to hear it—the former president never formally revoked or renounced his appointment of the considerably more controversial Sidney Powell to be a special counsel to the White House. And we consider, too, that Trump made this never-revoked appointment at a time when the “only” thing Powell had told her then-client (Trump) she was going to do was use the United States Armed Forces to illegally start seizing state property by force. Such a plan would have required the prior imposition of martial law by Trump—which, critically, is why it did not need to be put into effect before January 6, 2021.
In fact it was the events Team Trump had planned for that very day which would have, had they unfolded slightly differently, opened the door to the perfection of a coup plot at the Pentagon.
There’s a reason Adam Ciralsky of Vanity Fair wrote that, after Trump’s landslide 2020 election loss, the Pentagon was “the only institution with the reach and the tools—2.1 million troops and weapons of every shape and size—to counter any moves to forestall or reverse the democratic process.” There’s also a reason Ciralsky reported that he was “deeply concerned by what I witnessed [at the Pentagon]” in the lead-up to January 6.
Given that Trump made no known effort to do so, it was only because others besides the President of the United States stood in Powell’s way—for instance, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone—that she was unable to proceed with a scheme that she had already outlined to Trump in person and that he had implicitly endorsed by naming her his special counsel after he’d read it. The plan would’ve seen her contacting the Pentagon to ask that it begin preparations to (illegally) seize voting machines across the United States.
And who would Powell—a member of Team Kraken alongside Michael Flynn, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, top Trump presidential adviser Peter Navarro, pillow salesman Michael Lindell, and a few others—have contacted at the Pentagon? Well, we already know the answer to that question. We because Michael Flynn had already, by January 6, made perfectly clear who he believed Trump’s man in the Pentagon was.
Donald Trump’s and Michael Flynn’s sole shared protégé, Ezra Cohen-Watnick.
Moreover, we know which two men Donald Trump most wanted to get intelligence from on Insurrection Eve: Roger Stone, who could fill Trump in on Stop the Steal’s ongoing coordination with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and Michael Flynn, who could fill the President of the United States in on… well, what exactly? Trump certainly didn’t need Flynn to convey any information to him from his attorneys, so clearly Flynn had intelligence of another sort—information that neither Stop the Steal nor the main body of Trump’s legal team was involved with or perhaps even aware of.
Unlike anyone at Stop the Steal or representing Trump as his legal counsel, Flynn had been in touch with the Pentagon; he was connected to many former soldiers willing to do almost anything for Trump; he had a level of insight into Sidney Powell’s work that Giuliani had never had or sought; and he had foreign intelligence contacts who could well have been in a position (as Lindell hoped Eduardo Bolsonaro was) to produce new “evidence” of transnational hacking that perhaps would—in Trump’s mind; certainly in Flynn’s—justify the imposition of martial law and a seizure of voting machines by the Pentagon.
Recall here that the most shocking invocation of the Fifth Amendment by any January 6 witness so far was Michael Flynn’s refusal to answer what on the face of it should be the simplest question for any U.S. soldier—“Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?”
Flynn refused to answer that question on the grounds that he might incriminate himself.
So what made Flynn so special that he was the man Trump most wanted to speak to right before an armed attack on the Capitol the president had been informed of in advance? Unlike anyone else in Trump’s orbit, he appears to have been ready for war.
Trump certainly evinced no awareness that Flynn’s entreaties to the Pentagon had been rebuffed; indeed, his continued interest in receiving intelligence from Flynn would seem to suggest that the opposite had occurred, whether via Kash Patel or Ezra Cohen-Watnick or Chris Miller or someone else at the Department of Defense.
Recall that when Flynn contacted Cohen-Watnick—not once, but twice—in the final week of December 2020, he believed that Sidney Powell had been named a special counsel for the White House by Donald Trump (as did Powell herself). He believed that Powell was being blocked in her presidentially approved activities by a single man at the White House, Pat Cipollone, a man Flynn believed Trump was unwilling to stand up to even as he was (as Flynn saw matters) betraying the commander-in-chief.
So we should not understand Flynn’s calls to Cohen-Watnick as the desperate acts of a man who believed he’d failed in his plot to make common cause with the Pentagon—remembering here that Flynn formerly ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, so there’s no reason to doubt that he saw himself as a better man to be leading the Pentagon on January 6 than Chris Miller—but rather the calculated conduct of an only gesturally “retired” lieutenant general who did not believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States but did believe that that nation’s rightful commander-in-chief had authorized him and his co-conspirator Sidney Powell to pull an end-around on all the bureaucrats in the White House and stage a full military coup inside the United States.
Enter Ezra Cohen-Watnick, not just Flynn’s protégé but arguably the man to whom Cohen-Watnick owed his already illustrious and preternaturally accelerated rise in the federal government and the Trump administration specifically. (If Cohen-Watnick owed anyone else for his bountiful good fortune, it was the man who had just given Flynn’s co-conspirator Powell a job that at least arguably gave her some authority over Trump political appointees at the Pentagon.)
There’s likely a reason Flynn, in his first call to Cohen-Watnick, ordered him to return to Washington, D.C.
There’s likely a reason Flynn has now asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination rather than answer almost any substantive questions from Congress.
There’s likely a reason Cohen-Watnick’s texts and messages were illegally destroyed.
And there’s likely a reason that even after the coup attempt on January 6 failed, Michael Lindell, a member of Team Kraken alongside Powell and Flynn—the two of whom were, by then, blocked from any direct access to then-president Trump—met with Trump in the Oval Office on January 15, 2021 while carrying in his possession a plan of action for the president that summarized the plot Powell and Flynn had hatched and successfully pitched to Trump three weeks earlier in a six-hour White House meeting.
The document Lindell brought with him into the Oval Office on January 15, after he had been seeking “for days” to get an audience with Trump, did, however—if in small ways—expand on what Powell and Flynn had presented to Trump previously in a way that may reveal who inside the Pentagon was aware of (and supportive of) Powell and Flynn’s plan for a military coup. While the document Lindell submitted to President Trump in mid-January 2021 was only photographed by reporters from a distance, we know this much about it from a report on the subject in the New York Times:
“[the document] included a mention of Sidney Powell”:
“there was also a suggestion about invoking the Insurrection Act, by which a president can deploy active military troops into the streets”;
the document advised that Trump institute “martial law if necessary”;
“Among the items on [the document]…was replacing [Trump’s then-National Security Advisor] Robert C. O’Brien” with an unknown person (whose name may have appeared in the document but could not be captured by journalists’ photographs of it); and
“One line [in the document] appeared to suggest moving Kash Patel, currently the Department of Defense chief of staff and a Trump loyalist, [to] ‘C.I.A. Acting,’ which seemed to indicate the top job [at the Central Intelligence Agency].”
We also know, as the Times details, that Lindell immediately lied about the document to the press—insisting there was no mention of “martial law” in the document at a time he did not realize the document (which clearly had the words “martial law” in it at least once—had been photographed. And we know, of course, that Kash Patel’s texts and secure messages at the Pentagon have all been illegally deleted, and that it is these electronic communications in particular that House January 6 Committee vice chair Liz Cheney expressed concern about. And we know that at least some of what was on the document were things Trump had already contemplated of his own accord, far from being items only brought to him by outside advisers. As Vanity Fair writes, “An Axios story…asserted that CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign after learning that Trump planned to install [Kash] Patel as her deputy. ‘I’m not going to comment on what the president wanted to do or didn’t want to do, but there’s no conversations of that now or this week or this year [2021],’ [Patel told Vanity Fair]. But he seemed to be playing coy. The CIA gambit took place last year [2020]. In fact, when I had spoken with [Ezra] Cohen-Watnick about the matter, he had told me, ‘The idea was to put Kash in as the deputy, which doesn’t require Senate approval, and then to fire Gina the next day, leaving Kash in charge.’”
So both Cohen-Watnick and Patel were in the loop with Trump—in December 2020—on a secret plan that matched a key item from the very plan Team Kraken (including Flynn) presented to Trump that month (and again shortly after January 6). And who was the liaison between these two groups: (1) Team Kraken and (2) “Miller’s staff” (in the persons of Patel and Cohen-Watnick)? Michael Flynn, who Trump directed Mark Meadows to open a channel with just hours between the U.S. Capitol was attacked by force—an event that could easily have been used as a pretext for the invocation of the Insurrection Act or even the imposition of martial law on even broader terms. What’s more, Vanity Fair reports, both Chris Miller and Kash Patel met with Trump in the Oval Office on January 5, the very night that Trump suddenly demanded to speak to Flynn.
Is America to trust that Cohen-Watnick and Patel only secretly plotted with Trump as to a single item on Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Michael Lindell’s dastardly wish-list? Is it to trust that Cohen-Watnick never told his friend and colleague and fellow Trump loyalist at the Pentagon, Patel, about his multiple telephone contacts with Flynn? Is it to trust that Patel had no idea that individuals he knew personally were lobbying the President of the United States to make him the new director of the CIA?
And is America to believe that Cohen-Watnick and Patel weren’t thinking about these matters when they spoke to Pentagon Inspector General O’Donnell? Is it to suppose that in fact they told O’Donnell the full and complete truth—without exception—about all they’d seen and heard relating to Trump’s coup plot in December 2020 and January 2021?
If that’s true, why does Michael Flynn’s name not appear in the Pentagon Report even a single time across 152 pages? And why were Patel’s and Cohen-Watnick’s electronic communications illegally deleted? For that matter, why was Patel—who was subpoenaed by Congress in September 2021—not appear to give his testimony until December, waiting to do so until immediately after the Pentagon Report (in which his name, stunningly, appears not even once) was published? Why did he not testify in mid-October as he was initially scheduled to, according to a report by Salon? And why were Patel’s first words to the media after his four and a half hours of tardy testimony in December, “The DoD Inspector General, under the Biden Administration, found no wrongdoing in its report on January 6, as I shared with the Committee”?
{Note: President Biden made a campaign promise not to fire any Inspectors General during his presidency—a pledge he renewed this month—to avoid the appearance of the Watergate-level scandal his predecessor created by repeatedly firing Inspectors General who attempted to investigate him or his allies. That well-known conservative Sean O’Donnell was an Inspector General working under Joe Biden, after a lengthy spell working for Donald Trump, is therefore a red herring. Patel would be aware of this at the time he spoke to the media post-testimony.}
The confluence of the events itemized above—the destruction of all Patel’s electronic correspondence; followed by the inexplicable grant of anonymity he appears to have received in the Pentagon Report; followed by the revelation that much of the information supplied by anonymous witnesses like Patel to the said Report turned out to be false; followed by Patel boasting that he had used the findings of the Report to exculpate himself in his testimony before Congress—suggest a textbook government cover-up. When you add to this former top White House Russia adviser Fiona Hill’s accusation, in September 2021, that Patel was “running a secret backchannel to President Trump” during the latter’s administration, and the cover-up begins to seem like one that could implicate Donald Trump himself. Even former Trump National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism Joshua Geltzer—the man who had Patel’s job right before Patel had it—has said that Patel’s activity was the White House, if it was as described by Hill, was “[a] sort of activity [that] seems wildly outside the scope of anything a counterterrorism senior director at the National Security Council should be spending their time on…[and] it politicizes a piece of the NSC staff that administrations of both parties have worked for decades to keep as apolitical as possible.”
In other words, along with Cohen-Watnick, Kash Patel was exactly the sort of Trump loyalist Michael Flynn would have reached out to on Sidney Powell’s behalf after she encountered stonewalling from Pat Cipollone subsequent to her never-retracted presidential appointment as White House special counsel. And we would know all about the people Patel corresponded with in December 2020 and January 2021, but for the fact that all his electronic communications were illegally destroyed by the Pentagon.
Clearly the House January 6 Committee has its eye on Patel; CBS News reports that when Patel received his federal subpoena in September 2021, he “was among the first set of witnesses to be subpoenaed by the committee.” That it apparently required both the destruction of all his electronic communications and the issuance of an error-riddled Pentagon report that whitewashed his involvement in January 6 preparations to make him comfortable enough to testify before Congress is distressing, but the House January 6 Committee must not permit it to become distracting. Congress now knows far more about the events of January 6 than it did in 2021, and that includes the ways in which Patel and others from the Pentagon may have misdirected investigators in their prior testimony. All of these people can be brought in for questioning again by Congress, again put under oath, and confronted with the ample evidence that many of them may not have been truthful with Congress the first time around. CNN reports that during that first time around, Patel spent weeks and weeks “going back-and-forth with the panel over what day he would be coming in [to testify]”—a gambit that in hindsight seems intentional but which Congress must not allow to be repeated.
18. Meadows
While this report is not primarily focused on the goings-on in the White House on Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day, a little-remembered December 2021 report by Politico concerning Mark Meadows could change how we understand all of the data this Proof report has provided.
According to Politico, on January 5—Insurrection Eve, a day on which Chris Miller and Kash Patel visited then-president Trump in the Oval Office—Mark Meadows sent as email to an unknown party revealing “that the National Guard was on standby to ‘protect pro-Trump people’” on the following day, January 6.
This was consistent with an order (of sorts) that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley personally heard Trump give to Secretary of Defense Chris Miller—who he had pulled aside to speak with privately—on January 4.
Referring to January 6, General Milley heard Trump say to the only other man with the legal authority to deploy federal troops, “You’ve got enough people [soldiers] to make sure it’s safe for my people, right?” (emphasis supplied). Less than 48 hours later Trump would summon Miller to the Oval Office again, this time with Kash Patel alongside him but with the same intention as before: to speak to his Secretary of Defense about the possible partisan deployment of federal forces on January 6.
As all of Mark Meadows’, and for that matter Trump’s, information about the possible deployment of the D.C. National Guard on January 6 would have come from one of the two men (Miller and Patel) who met with Trump—and presumably Meadows—on January 5, the day of Meadows’ mysterious email, it is nearly impossible to imagine that Miller and/or Patel were not the source for the stunning assurance Meadows cites in his email.
If Miller and/or Patel provided Donald Trump with such an assurance before January 6, it would mean that they not only lied repeatedly to media about the content of their January 5 meeting with Trump but that they lied to Pentagon Inspector General Sean O’Donnell about it and possibly the U.S. House of Representatives as well. Certainly, we know that Mark Meadows fought hard—even risked federal imprisonment—to hide emails of this very pedigree from the House January 6 Committee. It now seems obvious why.
If Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon had secretly assured the President of the United States the night before an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol that they would only deploy the D.C. National Guard to “protect pro-Trump people”, it means that when these same men huddled in Chris Miller’s office during the January 6 attack to speak to one another rather than any of the Capitol’s under-attack defenders it was in part to determine whether the condition they had agreed upon with the president just hours earlier had been met. In other words, they were asking not whether members of Congress needed aid and protection, or whether members of law enforcement needed aid and protection, or whether innocent bystanders who happened to be in D.C. on January 6 for something other than an armed insurrection needed aid and protection, but rather whether the people the political appointees at the Pentagon knew were attacking the Capitol needed the Pentagon’s aid and protection. Presumably this would have been the chief subject of Patel’s own “nonstop” contact with Meadows on January 6, just one day after he’d summarized the only acceptable DCNG mission on January 6 as “protect[ing] pro-Trump people” (and from the sworn testimony of Mark Milley, we know that the only other thing on Mark Meadows’ mind on January 6 was the political optics of the day, which coincidentally appears to have been the sole preoccupation of both Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn on January 6 as well).
While there’s been a presumption—and at times even a direct allegation by members of the House January 6 Committee—that Trump never calling Miller on January 6 was a sign of his “dereliction of duty” on that day, the evidence uncovered by Proof offers a different view.
Trump had spoken with Secretary Miller about the D.C. National Guard on all three of January 3, January 4, and January 5 of 2021; he had made clear on at least two of these three occasions that his order to Miller with respect to the Guard was to deploy it if doing so on January 6 would aid “his people” (meaning those of his voters who were in D.C. to protest the 2020 election results); though Chairman Milley testified that Vice President Mike Pence called Miller on January 6 and was “very firm” about his demand that Miller call out the National Guard “now”, the only known responses to this attempted command were Miller trying to call Trump at the White House and Kash Patel continuing his “ nonstop” contact with Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows; and Miller ultimately deployed the Guard an hour after Trump had tweeted that the January 6 rioters needed to “go home”, meaning only when Miller (a) was sure that Trump wanted the Capitol cleared, and (b) had given the Capitol rioters an hour-long head-start to leave the building without any molestation by or engagement with the Guard.
Meanwhile, Milley’s contact with Meadows on January 6 makes clear that Trump intended to issue no orders to the Pentagon on that day almost certainly because he had already issued them in private with only his trusted operatives Chris Miller and Kash Patel present. Indeed, the only order Milley ever got from the White House on January 6 followed a highly suspicious sequence of three events:
By phone, Pence ordered Miller (who was with Patel and Milley and others at the time) to deploy the Guard;
Patel continued his mysterious texting with Meadows, even as Miller ignores Pence’s order;
Meadows sudden calls Milley—the only man in Miller’s office who was not in the loop about what Trump wanted to see happen on January 6—to tell him (per Milley’s) sworn testimony, “‘We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge and things are steady and stable.’”
Is it in fact the case, as it certainly appears to be from the above events, that instead of taking action in response to Pence’s call, both Miller and Patel did nothing at all—having already received marching orders from Trump in the days before January 6—except to alert Meadows (via a text from Patel to Meadows, destroyed by the Pentagon on Patel’s end and withheld from Congress by Meadows on Meadows’ end) to the fact that Pence was seeking to assert his authority, which alert led Meadows to call Milley and (in essence) underscore that Pence must be ignored because he wasn’t POTUS?
While Milley interpreted Meadows’ call to be “politics, politics, politics—no action”, it may be because no action was intended by Trump unless and until “his people” were threatened—a message Miller and Patel had already clearly received from their commander-in-chief on prior days and outside Milley’s presence. Indeed, why had Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to serendipitously “overhear” Trump giving a January 6 order to Miller? What was the need for Trump’s secrecy? Why did he not issue the order directly and outright and intentionally in Milley’s hearing?
Former Trump fixer, friend, employee, and lawyer Michael Cohen long ago offered us a very likely explanation for this:
Cohen makes clear that “most” people who “work for Trump” understand how he issues “orders”, which is never directly but merely through a recitation of his own desires. While Miller may not have had the experience with Trump to understand this “code”, his chief of staff—Patel, who Trump had installed as the Secretary’s Rasputin without ever asking for Miller’s input—had worked face-to-face with Trump in the White House for so long that he surely would’ve understood it perfectly and detailed it for his boss (Miller) as necessary. This explains not only what Mark Milley heard at the White House—by accident—on January 4, but also why he was absent from the meet-ups with Trump on January 3 and January 5 while Patel and Miller were not; why at least the latter of these was billed as a meeting on “Iran” in which Trump “casually” brought up what he wanted to see happen on January 6; and why Patel was deemed such a critical Trump-whisperer not merely by Trump himself, but by Team Kraken.
In all, the picture that is left here is not of an aloof or disinterested and disengaged POTUS but simply one who had already issued the only demands on the Pentagon—political ones—he intended to make before or on January 6. And Miller and Patel, who already had their marching orders on January 6, therefore knew to ignore anything they heard from Pence (though Meadows had to call Milley to make sure he would do the same) and were ready to deploy the Guard only if and when Trump had given some public signal to them (and the nation) that they’d no longer be countermanding his previously stated desires if they did so.
And indeed, the Pentagon did only relieve the Capitol on January 6 once it was clear that doing so would in no way harm the “pro-Trump people” inside or outside the building.
The question, then, is why this all happened as it did. Besides a potential delay of the joint session of Congress, what did Trump hope might result if the D.C. National Guard were kept away from the Capitol on January 6? We will return to that question shortly.
For the moment, it’s sufficient to return to Mark Meadows and his mysterious January 5 email to an unknown party (the one about the D.C. National Guard only being tasked with protecting Trump supporters on January 6). Politico offers some additional information about this particular email (emphasis supplied):
The [January 5] exchange [between Meadows and an unknown person] is of high interest to congressional investigators probing whether Trump played a role in the three-hour delay between the Capitol Police’s urgent request for Guard support and their ultimate arrival at the Capitol, which had been overrun by pro-Trump rioters. The comment also aligns with testimony from former Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who said that in a January 3 conversation with Trump, the then-president told him to “do whatever was necessary to protect the demonstrators that were executing their constitutionally protected rights.”
This, again, confirms that Miller got the same substantive order from Trump about the D.C. Guard on January 3, January 4, and January 5. The president’s directive was clear.
And we know from Vanity Fair that Kash Patel was with Chris Miller in the Oval Office when Trump said the words bolded above. We know, too, as Miller and Patel would have known from their intelligence-gathering, that the only “demonstrators” expected to be in D.C. on January 6 were the demonstrators Trump had personally and repeatedly called to Washington because he knew they loved him and he wanted them to march on the Capitol that day. In short, even in his own testimony Miller seems to agree that (a) he believed Trump, not he, had the final authority on D.C. National Guard deployment (despite the fact that historically and by convention that authority would have been his, meaning that he deliberately returned it to the Office of the President), and (b) on January 3, 2021, Trump, armed with the authority Miller had re-invested in him, made clear the Guard’s purpose on January 6 would be to “protect [pro-Trump] demonstrators.” Trump did not reference using the Guard for any other purpose—a message Patel, at least, would have fully understood from the beginning.
There are even some slightly ambiguous indications that Trump’s January 3 “order” may have eventually filtered down to various agencies with which Patel’s team was in contact on that day and the next, including the U.S. Capitol Police itself. As Politico reported in late April 2021 (emphasis supplied)
“The Capitol Police’s highest-ranking commander on the ground during the January 6 insurrection, Eric Waldow, is the official who urged officers to watch out for anti-Trump protesters in the massive pro-Trump crowd, according to congressional and Capitol Police sources.”
Given that there was no intelligence suggesting anti-Trump protesters were coming to D.C. for January 6, this clear directive from a law enforcement official does seem odd.
Who would have sent Waldrow bad intelligence indicating a likelihood of anti-Trump protesters swarming Washington on January 6? What executive-branch entity would have put out such intelligence (keeping in mind that the Pentagon Report confirms that Miller’s team repeatedly orchestrated interagency calls to spread its intelligence pre-January 6)? Who was in charge of intelligence at the Pentagon? Or—alternately—if Waldron was not working from bad intelligence but from some understanding he had received from his superiors about what the Trump administration was worried about with respect to January 6, who (or, rather, what federal agency) working with law enforcement in the days before January 6 would have put in Deputy Chief Waldow’s mind the idea that not only the D.C. National Guard’s prospective task but his task as a defender of the Capitol was primarily to look out for the well-being of pro-Trump demonstrators, who might face harassment from anti-Trump agitators?
Clearly, we don’t know the answers to many of these questions. Perhaps DC Waldow concocted his counter-factual understanding of January 6 on his own; perhaps he did not. But we cannot easily determine whether the Pentagon communicated a highly partisan reading of January 6 to Waldow or others pre-insurrection because—again—all of the top Trump political appointees at the Pentagon have had their electronic communications summarily wiped, and this happened before any federal investigator (let alone journalist) could see them.
To be clear, DC Waldow is not accused of any wrongdoing here or elsewhere. Indeed, many Capitol police officers deem his conduct during the Capitol attack to have been heroic. But his radio transmission to his rank-and-file subordinates on January 6—
“With regards to pedestrian traffic on the grounds today, we anticipate a large presence for pro-Trump participants. What we’re looking for is any anti-Trump counter-protesters.”
—suggests a pre-January 6 strategic determination that was unlikely to have been made by him. Did Meadows help Patel and the Pentagon broadcast Trump’s stated intention to have the Guard only intervene if doing so would protect his supporters? Is that what Meadows’ January 5 email to an unknown party was about? Or was Waldow merely surmising (though why he would do this is unclear) that the only dangers to be apprehended on January 6 were clashes between pro-Trump and anti-Trump forces, as opposed to the more obvious fact that an armed-and-livid mob was about to march on the U.S. Capitol—a location where they’d already constructed a scaffold for hangings?
Again, we don’t know.
But here’s what we do know: that sometime in November or December of 2020, per Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Meadows was in his office literally burning records.
The records in question appear to have been related to a meeting with Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), Chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, the group Meadows himself had chaired between January 2017 and October 2019. Perry is now infamous for his role in assisting Donald Trump in staging a coup inside DOJ; it was Perry who made the introduction of Jeffrey Clark to Donald Trump in the Oval Office. And of course Perry was also present at the December 21, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and the House Freedom Caucus—a meeting at which a strategy for January 6 was hatched and whose participants, to a man and woman, either asked Trump for a presidential pardon later on or saw someone else make such a request on their behalf, according to House January 6 Committee testimony. As noted above in this report, Sidney Powell was also in the White House on December 21, creating a possible nexus between her plot for a military coup and Perry’s own plotting with Trump and GOP House members.
Recall that Trump’s initial plan was to have DOJ, on the order of the Attorney General, seize voting machines, not the Pentagon. So it may be that Team Kraken’s “coup 2.0” plot was simply an advancement of a prior scheme in which Perry had participated. In any case, that Meadows was burning documents in his office fireplace—possibly even protected federal records in violation of federal statutes—and was doing so well prior to January 6 underscores that he knew early on that Trump and his intimates had enmeshed themselves in illicit activities from the start of the post-election period.
And yet, Meadows wasn’t just burning documents, withholding federally subpoenaed documents, facilitating Trump absconding from the White House with documents, and seeking a presidential pardon for his post-election conduct. He was also using encrypted-messaging apps in the White House to ensure that his communications regarding the plot to overturn the 2020 election couldn’t be preserved. As Politico has reported,
In a December 2020 text-message exchange the [House January 6] Committee included in an April court filing, [GOP representative from Pennsylvania Scott] Perry told Meadows he had “just sent you something on Signal”, referring to the encrypted messaging app popular with journalists and government officials.
Nor was Meadows alone in his suspect handling of critical federal evidence.
According to witnesses, Trump would sometimes consume official documents to destroy them, or throw them in the toilet, or simply tear them to shreds and toss them in a wastepaper basket despite having been told they needed to be preserved by law.
And most curiously, Trump would sometimes have aides put important documents in “burn bags” that would then be sent for immolation (or other types of handling we do not know about) to—of all places—the Pentagon. In short, destruction of evidence was not so much a habit in the Trump White House but a full-blown lifestyle. The news we have gotten recently about the destruction of evidence inside Trump’s DHS, Trump’s Pentagon, and Trump’s Secret Service must be received and understood in this context.
{Note: Proof adds here, too, that the White House either destroyed, hid, or simply prohibited call logs for a seven-hour period on January 6—meaning that not only DHS, the USSS, and the Pentagon have hidden critical federal evidence, but so has the White House writ large. In fact, perhaps the most consistent Republican response to the events of January 6 has been the destruction of records, which is an almost clichéd sign of what attorneys call “consciousness of guilt.” It may well be that among the lost January 6 call logs are indications of exactly how and when Mark Meadows was in touch with Kash Patel on January 6, though candidly we already know, from Patel’s own admissions, that their communications that day were near-constant.}
19. Ginni Thomas
Mark Meadows was a loyal—to a fault—Trump adviser in the period between Election Day and Insurrection Day in 2000. But he had not gotten his role by mere chance. One person in particular had not only lobbied for him but consistently sought to advance his career from the shadows, from the time he headed up the House Freedom Caucus that would later assist Trump in planning the events of January 6 to the moment he first stepped foot in the Oval Office as Trump’s new White House Chief of Staff.
That person was Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Proof has written about Thomas’ role in the events of January 6 repeatedly, including here, here, here, and here. Some of this coverage focuses on Thomas’ role as a top Trump presidential adviser whose particular self-tasked purpose—whenever she entered the White House, spoke to the President of the United States by phone, or communicated by various means with his chief of staff—was to help Trump purge his government of non-radicals and replace them with Trump loyalists who would exhibit for Trump the sort of fanatical loyalty he demanded from all those who serve him.
One person in particular who owed his job to Thomas’ backroom machinations was thirty year-old Trump body man John McEntee, who had been fired from that menial role by one-time Trump chief of staff John Kelly but later triumphantly returned to the Oval Office as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office—a role for which he had no qualifications whatsoever, but which he got because Ginni Thomas orchestrated the firing of his predecessor and his installation into the role. One imagines that, as with Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Trump (and his far-right off-campus advisers) liked the idea of an under-qualified, over-eager, profoundly indebted young person occupying an influential role at the center of the Trump administration.
{Note: Ginni Thomas has a history of promoting dubious job candidates. Most famously, she has dedicated herself—with enormous gusto and emotional investment, even—to advancing the professional career of Crystal Clanton, an ex-Turning Point USA “second-in-command” who sent a text to a colleague that read, “I hate black people. Like fuck them all…I hate blacks. End of story.” Thomas’ salvation of the fired McEntee must be read in the context of her routinely saving people who thereafter act in ways that suggest they feel indebted to her. It is, witnessed from the outside, a desperately cynical if admittedly ingenious modus operandi.}
It wasn’t long after McEntee assumed his seemingly undeserved role at the White House that he began inserting himself where he didn’t belong—on whose advice or orders is unclear—much like Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Kash Patel had each, in their own time in the White House, become famous for doing.
As Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, writing in the New Yorker, detail, McEntee took his rogue behavior to a new level as soon as Trump lost the 2020 election and the former president’s advisers—inside the White House and outside of it, as the unsettling post-election texts from Ginni Thomas to Mark Meadows reveal—began to get desperate.
Per the Glasser-Baker New Yorker article, on November 11, 2020—just eight days after Election Day—Kash Patel and Chris Miller came to Chairman Mark Milley’s office in the Pentagon and Patel “slid a piece of paper across [Milley’s] desk” that appeared to be a signed order from the President of the United States to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021 (an action which, when taken by President Biden, Trump would declare one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history and a possible justification for Biden’s immediate impeachment and removal).
Milley, as “the President’s adviser on military action”, was stunned by the note—as he had never discussed an Afghanistan withdrawal of this sort with the president. He was so incredulous at the note that he assumed it had to be a forgery. But it wasn’t.
As Milley soon learned, the order to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan in a precipitous way—in a matter of weeks rather than months—actually came from the very thirty-something Ginni Thomas had installed in Trump’s circle: John McEntee.
But McEntee wasn’t working alone. As the New Yorker reports, the stunning, outside-the-chain-of-command order from Trump to the Pentagon “was the work of a rogue operation inside Trump’s White House overseen by McEntee” (emphasis supplied).
Specifically, McEntee—who owed his jobs to outside civilian advisers to the president—had taken an order written by an ex-military officer who’d become a Fox News celebrity (a description that could fit many men, including Michael Flynn or Phil Waldron, but in this case refers to Douglas MacGregor, who had been a finalist for Anthony Tata’s Pentagon job as an adjunct to Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick) and delivered it directly to Trump for his signature, bypassing uniformed military personnel in precisely the way Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon would aim to do on January 6. McEntee had just hired MacGregor as a senior adviser to Secretary Miller alongside Patel and Cohen-Watnick two days earlier—and hadn’t even bothered to tell Milley.
After some significant wrangling—which involved the intervention of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to help undo the damage Trump’s new cadre of civilian Pentagon appointees had created—the MacGregor Order was rescinded. (Its existence would thereafter be written out of history by Trump as extremely inconvenient to his claim that he’d never have agreed to fully withdraw from Afghanistan as his successor did.)
After the McEntee-MacGregor crisis, Milley began to have two fears in particular about what Trump’s new cabal at the Pentagton—Miller, Patel, Cohen-Watnick, Tata, and now MacGregor—would do. And in the event, his two very specific fears turned out to be correct:
Milley feared “Trump might spark an external [foreign crisis]….to create a pretext for a power grab at home.” Milley was particularly concerned that Trump would try to leverage America’s chilly relations with Iran to stay in power beyond the end of his term. Milley was right, but it wasn’t a war with Iran Trump had in mind, as Milley apprehended, but a false claim that Iran had attacked the 2020 presidential election to aid Joe Biden (who openly supported America’s re-entry into former president Barack Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal, unlike Trump). Such an accusation, if someone like Kash Patel were to be installed at the CIA—as Trump, unbeknownst to Milley, was then considering—could become the locus of sufficient chaos to act as a pretext for the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807, and could even spark a war with Iran (which Trump had already come perilously close to doing, and quite deliberately, with his premeditated January 2020 assassination of wildly popular Iranian general Qasem Soleimani).
Milley further feared that “Trump would manufacture a domestic crisis to justify ordering the military into the streets to prevent the transfer of power.” Milley, aware of Trump’s wholly counterhistorial obsession with Adolf Hitler’s supposedly iron-fisted control over his generals, “feared that Trump’s ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of his own lies about the [2020] election would lead him to seek a ‘Reichstag moment’ [an excuse to declare martial law and seek dictatorial executive powers].” This fear, too, would come to pass, as we will see below.
The dual realization of Milley’s two well-warranted fears wouldn’t have been possible without the eldritch, aggressive, behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Trump adviser Ginni Thomas—including both the actions described above and those detailed in prior Proof reports. As Thomas sent increasingly frantic texts to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows in December 2020 demanding an overturning of the 2020 presidential election and the end of American democracy, Milley and Pompeo (the latter now, in the face of Trump’s growing obsession with remaining in office, far closer to the mainstream than Thomas had ever been on the matter of peacefully transfering power from a Republican president to a Democratic one) began holding daily phone calls with Mark Meadows. The two men called these discussions with Ginni Thomas’ top ally in the West Wing “land the plane” calls, in that they were part of an effort to ensure that Trump peacefully left office without using the Pentagon for a self-coup.
“Landing the plane” was, in Milley’s view, the Pentagon’s “obligation” to America.
The problem, as he told his staff in the midst of Trump’s seemingly ceaseless plotting, was that as January 6, 2021 approached, “both engines are out [and] the landing gear is stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.”
20. Trump
The notion that former president Donald Trump only transiently intersected with the coup plot inside the Pentagon—in fact on just a single evening: December 18, 2020—may be one of the most pernicious pieces of misinformation that is now being spread (if negligently rather than in bad faith) by some in major media. It has no basis in the evidence currently available.
According to a report in the New York Times, Phil Waldron admitted as much in a podcast interview:
[H]e and his associates [on Team Kraken] had managed to get a nascent version of the [Waldron Plot] proposal—to [have Trump] declare a national emergency and use the crisis to order a recount of [2020] paper ballots in eight key counties—to Mr. Trump around Thanksgiving [of 2020], far earlier than public accounts had suggested. On the podcast, Mr. Waldron said that he and his team had promised Mr. Trump that they could get preliminary results of the paper recount in ten days and have final results in a month.
In 2020, Thanksgiving was on November 26, suggesting that Waldron and his team got to Trump to pitch their claim that Dominion Voting Systems had helped China and Venezuela (and six other nations) hack the 2020 presidential election sometime between November 15, 2020 and the end of that month.
It is with this in mind that we must consider another report in the New York Times, this one noting that in “mid- to late November [2020]”—well within the time-frame of Trump’s first receipt of the Waldron Plot—the former president summoned then-Attorney General William Barr to the Oval Office to “raise[ ] the idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize machines.” Perhaps to hide the origin of this proposed plot being Phil Waldron and Michael Flynn, or perhaps because Sidney Powell was then his lawyer and Rudy Giuliani was working directly with all three of the foregoing insurrectionists, Trump told Barr, per the Times, that “his lawyers had told him that the department had the power to seize machines as evidence of fraud.”
Barr refused to authorize his DOJ seizing any voting machines. And Trump’s plot to launch a coup inside the DOJ began almost immediately thereafter, in a concurrence few investigators would find coincidental.
Indeed, just days after Barr—who immediately after his meeting with Trump about voting machines began making plans to depart DOJ—denied him, and as the plan for a coup at DOJ was underway through the recruitment of an associate of both Ginni Thomas’ Council for National Policy and Trump’s legal team (Ken Klukowski) to work at DOJ in furtherance of the scheme, President Trump, reports the Times, “tried to persuade state lawmakers in contested states like Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local law enforcement agencies to take control of [voting machines]….[but] the state lawmakers refused to go along with the plan” (emphasis supplied).
And as noted above, Phil Waldron was personally present in the White House at the president’s November 25, 2020 meeting with the Pennsylvania state lawmakers (a date that helps confirm that Waldron’s first contact with Trump was likely before that date, which in turn increases exponentially the odds that the pair’s first meeting occurred before Trump approached Barr in November 2020 about seizing voting machines).
It must be said, too, that just as the DOJ coup plot began as soon as Barr declined to seize voting machines for Trump, the plot to have state legislatures overturn election results through “fake electors” began almost immediately after his failed attempt to get the same state legislators to use local police to seize voting machines. And so a pattern emerges: Trump, following contact with Team Kraken, pushes a plot to seize voting machines; the plot fails but Trump does not give up, instead simultaneously (a) looking for a new entity to seize voting machines for him, and (b) a new way to exploit the entity that has just refused to seize voting machines on his behalf (in some cases, as with DOJ, by changing the players involved to persons who might be more amenable to his joint plot with Team Kraken). This pattern would play out with more than just DOJ and GOP state legislators—it would be repeated with DHS and the Pentagon.
In fact it was at the now-infamous six-hour Trump-Team Kraken meeting in the Oval Office and Presidential Residence on December 18, 2020 that Waldron’s group—then represented by Flynn, Powell, and Byrne—gave Trump these third and fourth options. Even as Trump’s internal coup plot at DOJ proceeded apace alongside John Eastman’s plan to have state legislators skip using local police officers to seize voting machines and simply overturn the will of their voters, Team Kraken proposed that either DHS or the Pentagon could be used to seize voting machines if neither DOJ nor any state legislatures would (yet) agree to do so.
Donald Trump responded to these two new options, according to the House January 6 Committee testimony of both Pat Cipollone and Sidney Powell, by orally agreeing to appoint Powell as a White House special counsel—explicitly understanding, at the moment he did this, that her stated plan (which she’d just revealed to him by showing him the two draft executive orders, one to DHS and one to the Pentagon, that Waldron and Christina Bobb had drafted, Friess had reviewed, and Flynn had helped edit) was to in the first instance attempt to direct the Pentagon to seize 2020 voting machines.
Howard Kleinhendler, a lawyer working with Powell at the time, told Reuters that in the 20 to 30 minutes Team Kraken spoke to Trump alone in the Oval Office before any members of the White House Counsel’s Office arrived, Trump “was receptive to the idea” that he should “deploy the U.S. government to make digital copies of the hard drives in some voting equipment to investigate the machines and conduct recounts in at least six counties.” The subunit of the “government” behind such an effort would have to have been either the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security, and at least a temporary seizure of 2020 voting machines would have to have occurred for such digital imaging to take place.
As noted above, Powell’s December 18 appointment as White House special counsel was followed by her reappearance at the White House the next business day (Monday, December 21), concurrent to Trump convening a meeting of the House GOP Freedom Caucus—a group that including Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who had long been an unabashed supporter of Waldron and Russell Ramsland’s conspiracy theories about pro-Democratic Party hacking of elections by hostile foreign powers (a support that began, perhaps not coincidentally, right after the “blue wave” 2018 midterm elections).
But Trump didn’t stop with authorizing Powell to begin working with his allies in the Pentagon (a process Powell’s co-conspirator Flynn immediately launched by calling Ezra Cohen-Watnick).
Trump simultaneously pursued the fourth option before him—the one involving DHS.
According to the reporting from the Times, during the period between Team Kraken leaving the White House in the wee hours of December 19 and the reconvening of at least some members of that team on December 21, Trump “directed his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. He wanted Giuliani to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary [Ken Cuccinelli], who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.”
The records of this call, and any other calls between Team Kraken members and DHS, now appear to be among those illegally destroyed by DHS and deliberately not sought—apparently even covered up—by DHS-IG Joseph Cuffari, the Trump loyalist whose long history of unethical partisan misconduct is discussed in detail above.
In light of the foregoing, the Times reports that “Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.” Indeed, just as Trump had responded to Barr’s refusal to aid him with a plot for an internal coup at DOJ; just as Trump’s failure to get state legislators to seize voting machines using local law enforcement as a political tool led to a plot for a legislative coup at statehouses across the country; just as the initial refusal by DHS to seize voting machines came even as Team Kraken had provided Trump with an executive order that sought to overcome any objection to machine seizures by Cuccinelli (“draft executive orders to seize voting machines came into existence…[with a] key role played by a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron”); Trump responded to claims by White House lawyers on December 18 that the Pentagon could not be used to seize voting machines by appointing Sidney Powell a White House special counsel for the express purpose of seeing what could be accomplished on this front without the aid Pat Cipolline—a plot that in short order led to not just the two phone calls between Powell’s co-conspirator Flynn and Cohen-Watnick but Trump ordering Meadows to help Powell get set up in her new role.
While Cohen-Watnick says now that his calls with Flynn led nowhere, by January 5, 2021—the first day on which it was clear that the plot to stage an internal coup at DOJ had failed, with Trump grudgingly conceding, the day before, that he had to keep Jeffrey Rosen on board as acting Attorney General rather than moving Klukowski’s boss Jeffrey Clark to that role—Waldron was briefing GOP members of Congress on his plan, which centered on the “idea of having a federal agency like the military or the Department of Homeland Security confiscate the [voting] machines [used in the 2020 election] to preserve evidence.” Waldron and his team exhibited no signs on that day or, frankly, any other that they believed their plan had been abandoned by Trump.
Indeed, throughout Insurrection Eve Team Kraken members were in and out of every Trump war room—at Trump International Hotel, at the Willard Hotel, in the VIP Tent of Stop the Steal’s rally in Freedom Plaza, in impromptu meetings in Pentagon City, even at the White House itself (in the form of Rudy Giuliani’s presence there on that night)—in no way acting like Powell’s appointment had been rescinded or that Trump had given any order for Team Kraken to stand down on the Waldron Plot, including its requirement of the involvement of the Pentagon. In fact, it appears that on January 7, 2021, the same day that Team Kraken bodyguard Robert Patrick Lewis (of the 1st Amendment Praetorians) says he was in meetings with members of Team Kraken all day “war-gaming” how Trump would remain in power, a document was produced that Team Kraken member Michael Lindell would finally get a chance to deliver to the White House on January 15. The document, as discussed above, called for martial law (which would require action by the Pentagon); a continued grant of awesome authority to Sidney Powell (who had secured her position as White House special counsel via a plan to use the Pentagon to seize voting machines); and the movement of Pentagon official and apparent Team Kraken member Kash Patel to the CIA. (And as we have already seen, Patel was at the White House on Insurrection Eve talking with Trump about the same topic—Iran—that Powell had discussed at the White House, in the context of supposed foreign election interference, during her last known visit there).
Reuters confirms that, despite Powell associate Kleinhendler saying that on January 7, 2021 he decided it was “pencils down” on Trump’s coup plot because “there was just nothing else to do [to keep Trump in power],” the “Flynn circle”—with Waldron at its center, bodyguarded by Lewis and other members of “1AP”—“wasn’t ready to let go.”
So not only was December 18 not Trump’s first meeting about the Waldron Plot, it was not his first attempt to green-light the seizing of voting machines, it was not his first consideration of the appointment of a White House special counsel (as the New York Times reports that “during a [December 2020] meeting on another matter, Trump asked [Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security] Ken Cuccinelli what he thought of appointing a special counsel to investigate election fraud”), and it was not the end of his involvement in the Waldron Plot—including its Pentagon component. And while most major-media accounts of the December 18 meeting position Trump’s most trusted adviser at the time, Giuliani, as categorically advising him against trying to use the Pentagon to seize voting machines on the grounds that doing so could ultimately leading to his imprisonment, in fact, per the Times, Giuliani did not categorically advise Trump against using the Pentagon to seize voting machines on that fateful night, he merely “told Mr. Trump that the military could be used only if there was clear-cut evidence of foreign interference in the election.”
In other words, Trump needed Patel inside the CIA more than ever, and needed Ezra Cohen-Watnick’s intelligence apparatus at the Pentagon more than ever, and needed Mike Lindell to work his connections to Eduardo Bolsonaro more than ever—noting here again that Bolsonaro also made two trips to the White House to see the Trumps during Insurrection Week—in order to get the sort of “clear-cut evidence of foreign interference in the election” that his lawyer had just told him he needed to produce.
Nor did Giuliani himself leave the December 18 meeting believing that Trump had given up on the Waldron Plot. According to the Times, a comment by Giuliani to a fellow Team Kraken member as they was leaving the White House in the wee hours of December 19 made clear just how acutely aware he was of the Plot’s continuation (and with Trump’s explicit approval, no less): “After Flynn and Powell left the Oval Office [on December 19], according to a person familiar with the matter, Giuliani predicted that the plans they were proposing were going to get Trump impeached.” Giuliani did not say that Team Kraken’s plans “would have” gotten Trump impeached if they had been accepted, but rather—acknowledging that Trump had just made Powell his special counsel at the White House, contrary to the advice Cuccinelli had given him days earlier—that they “were going” to get him impeached (which they ultimately did).
In the wake of Trump’s actions, Team Kraken was—understandably—emboldened.
Flynn contacted the Pentagon. Powell returned to the White House on the following Monday with additional “evidence” of foreign election interference, which Giuliani had said would be required for the Pentagon to begin seizing voting machines. Flynn associate Waldron continued giving presentations on the Waldron plot to members of Congress. A plan to move Kash Patel to the CIA proceeded apace before New Year’s Day, as Patel seems to have admitted in his interview with Vanity Fair, and as was later revealed in the Lindell Document given to Trump on January 15 (but created much earlier). Bolsonaro made yet another visit to the White House. Team Kraken, guarded by 1AP, retained its rooms at Trump International and the Willard Hotel and across the Potomac at a hotel in Virginia to continue “war-gaming” the Waldron Plot. And Giuliani (as we’ll see below) began publishing videos apparently aimed at justifying extraordinary legal measures by Trump—an end they pursued by falsely portraying the events of January 6 as a massive left-wing operation intended to destabilize the federal government.
In short, no component of the coup plot at the Pentagon was abandoned or put on hold on December 18, and in fact all the evidence suggests that the plan continued unabated until the demise of the DOJ coup plot on January 4, 2021—at which point the Pentagon coup plot ramped up rather than died off, with (as noted above) Waldron giving his largest briefing on his Plot to date and Team Kraken members being welcomed into Trump war rooms and command centers across the city of Washington on Insurrection Eve. No wonder Waldron told the Times that “We gave the president these solutions [iterations of the Waldron Plot] over time, some as early as before Thanksgiving and some all the way up toward the end of the process [January 20].”
Some observers may remark that because Trump did not execute a plan involving the Pentagon that may have constituted Treason, he did not in fact commit Treason. But of course, as with every federal crime, Treason can be charged in several ways: as an execution of the crime, an attempt to execute the crime, or a conspiracy to commit the crime. Conspiracy requires a “meeting of the minds” between two or more persons to take at least one “overt act” toward the accomplishment of an illegal end (in this case, Treason).
The Case for Treason
Donald Trump took so many overt acts in furtherance of the Waldron Plot that it is almost hard to enumerate them. They include the appointment of Powell after her presentation of the Plot to him; his conference with Meadows to ensure her proper onboarding to launch the Plot; his admission of members of the conspiracy into the Trump Town House (her personal residence in Washington) on Insurrection Eve so that they could liaison with other top supporters and decision-makers in his circle; his instruction to Giuliani to contact DHS and pursue Waldron’s second draft executive order (to have DHS illegally seize voting machines); his prior consultation with DHS deputy Ken Cuccinelli on that subject; his firing (or forcing out) of Attorney General William Barr after Barr refused to use the Department of Justice to effectuate the treasonous aims of the Waldron Plot; his meetings with lawmakers from Michigan and Pennsylvania, at least the latter of which occurred with Waldron in the room at Trump’s invitation, to urge them to illegally use government force (armed local law enforcement) to illegally seize voting machines; his agreement not just to meet with Waldron Plot co-conspirator Michael Lindell on January 15, 2021 but his referral of Lindell to other officials in the White House after he had seen the contents of the document Lindell had with him; his private conversations in December 2020 about installing Team Kraken member Kash Patel atop the CIA, apparently to ensure public provision of sufficient “evidence” of foreign election interference to justify the Pentagon’s seizure of voting machines under the standard for same articulated to him by Giuliani on December 18; his apparent invitation of Sidney Powell to the White House on December 21 to brief either him and/or members of the House Freedom Caucus; his meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Michael Flynn associate (and current top Flynn booster for a presidential run if Trump himself cannot run) Roger Stone in the last week of December 2020; his November 25, 2020 presidential pardon of Team Kraken member Michael Flynn, which came at the very moment Trump decided to authorize a multistate Team Kraken election-reversal strategy that might be aided by Flynn no longer having a criminal record as he approached individuals inside the U.S. intelligence community for aid; and much, much more.
An entirely separate category of potential overt acts would require additional DOJ or congressional investigation, including (but not limited to) the following actions: any knowledge then-president Trump had (or permission he gave) for Flynn to contact his and Trump’s longtime protégé Ezra Cohen-Watnick about the Waldron Plot; any knowledge he had, permission he gave, or assistance he provided to Waldron briefing key members of Congress on the Waldron Plot on Insurrection Eve; any aid that he provided Michael Lindell in both meeting and coordinating with Eduardo Bolsonaro during the latter’s Insurrection Week trip(s) to the White House, which trip saw Jair Bolsonaro’s son meet with Trump family members—and possibly Trump himself—twice, once between January 6 and once after; any steps he took beyond a conversation with Meadows to facilitate setting up Sidney Powell on the White House grounds or off-campus as a White House special counsel; his agreement to headline, and be the key speaker at, a January 2, 2021 national conference call in which members of Team Kraken presented the false findings that inspired the Waldron Plot to GOP state legislators (further connecting Trump’s efforts to persuade those legislators to aid him with his clandestine contacts with Team Kraken in November and December of 2020; his provision of VIP tickets to his White House Ellipse speech for Michael Flynn and other Team Kraken members, including an initial plan to also have Flynn be a featured speaker at the event (a plan eventually cancelled, but not necessarily with Trump’s foreknowledge of the cancellation, by Katrina Pierson); his issuance of a speaking spot at the White House Ellipse to Team Kraken adjuncts Giuliani and Eastman, during which address the two men repeated the false claims undergirding Waldron’s Plot; his mysterious January 5, 2021 meeting in the Oval Office with Kash Patel and Patel’s nominal boss Chris Miller, during which Miller says the three men discussed “Iran” (but he will say no more on the matter); his potential involvement in and/or approval of then-Defense Secretary Miller’s December 17, 2020 cancellation of more than two weeks of national-security-related meetings between president-elect Biden’s incoming staff and top officials at the Pentagon; his direct or indirect contacts with Steve Bannon and other members of (one of) Team Kraken’s Insurrection Week war rooms, the one in the Willard Hotel; and much, much more conduct in a similar vein.
Many of these events would also constitute adequate basis for a finding of a “meeting of the minds.”
Yet even all the foregoing is just the tip of an investigative iceberg. The New York Times reports that the Waldron Plot relied in part “on a report about foreign interference in the election that John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence at the time, was bound by congressional mandate to present by December 18 [2020]. If Ratcliffe pointed a finger at China, accusing [Chinese] Communist Party officials of having manipulated votes in the United States, Mr. Waldron said, Mr. Trump would be within his rights to declare an emergency and seize some voting machines to conduct a paper recount.” Did Trump seek to have any involvement in (or interfere in any way with) Ratcliffe’s report, which was ultimately delayed at a time—per Cassidy Hutchinson—Ratcliffe was concerned that Trump’s public actions and statements could lead to a domestic-terror event on January 6, 2021? Did Ratcliffe decline to issue his report because he knew what Trump and his co-conspirators planned to do with it?
Just so, the Times notes that the same week Team Kraken came to the White House, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—two groups Team Trump was in contact with via intermediaries during the post-election period—came to Washington for a massive mid-December 2020 rally at which, consistent with the Waldron Plot devised by a longtime Michael Flynn associate, they “push[ed] Trump to impose martial law”:
At [the] pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on December 12, [Oath Keeper leader Stewart] Rhodes and members of his group provided security for Flynn, who was speaking at the event. Helping the Oath Keepers, Rhodes said, was a shadowy group of former Special Forces operators called the First Amendment Praetorian. (Their leader, Robert Patrick Lewis, has also been subpoenaed by the House committee.)
{Note: Lewis has now joined his protectee Michael Flynn in pleading the Fifth Amendment, doing so in writing though his D.C. lawyer Leslie McAdoo to avoid answering any questions about January 6 in either federal-court investigations or January 6-related federal litigation.}
In his mid-December public events in D.C., Flynn bodyguard Rhodes—now charged with Seditious Conspiracy along with a dozen other Oath Keepers and a dozen Proud Boys, including Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio—seemed to have a strategic message synchronous with that of both Flynn and Waldron, per the New York Times:
During the rally in December, Rhodes gave a television interview in which he railed against China and urged Mr. Trump to fight against “traitors” at home. “He should drop the hammer with the Insurrection Act and wage war on the insurrection that’s going on in our country”, Rhodes said.
As we have seen, the Waldron Plot specifically (and falsely) accused China of working with domestic actors loyal to the Democratic Party to steal national elections. Flynn and Waldron wanted Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to seize voting machines, and indeed the evidence in Rhodes’ pending federal criminal case makes clear he and his fellow Oath Keepers attacked the Capitol on January 6—and had a massive stash of military-grade weapons in a hotel in Virginia not far from Team Kraken’s suite of hotel rooms in Arlington—in part because they believed, or perhaps had been led to believe, that Trump was pursuing a sequence of executive actions roughly answering to the phrase “the Waldron Plot.” Indeed, we cannot avoid one possible explanation for violent unfolding on January 6 (as opposed to “merely” a rowdy but generally peaceful protest near the U.S. Capitol on that date): far-right paramilitary entities, from the Oath Keepers to the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois (see, e.g. here) to the Three Percenters, believed that Trump’s Pentagon coup plot had not only been green-lit by the President of the United States but was set to kick off through the violence on January 6.
Proof has already reported on the ample evidence Team Trump—including members of Team Kraken—premeditated blaming the attack on the Capitol on “antifa” and Black Lives Matter partly to pre-exculpate Trump and partly to give him a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 (consistent with the Waldron Plot and Trump’s apparent pre-insurrection urging of the Pentagon to focus its attention, intelligence-gathering, and strategic planning on possible left-wing agitation on January 6).
Yet perhaps the most surprising thing about Trump’s repeated plots to get access to voting machines—plots that spanned from DOJ to DoD, from DHS to local police—is that in at least one instance this effort was successful, something we only know now because of a slip of the tongue by one of Trump’s lawyers. After Ramsland’s ASOG, working with Waldron, Flynn, Powell, Giuliani, Byrne, and the rest of Team Kraken to effectuate the Waldron Plot, won a court hearing on December 4, 2020 to conduct a forensic examination of a small subset of voting machines in Michigan, Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis accidentally let slip that ASOG was working as agents of the 2020 Trump presidential campaign. Specifically, shortly after Trump lawyer Giuliani celebrated the ruling on Twitter by tweeting, “BIG WIN FOR HONEST ELECTIONS”, Ellis went on Fox News as a representative of the Trump presidential campaign to congratulate “our team” for gaining access to voting machines in a battleground state. According to the Washington Post, Ellis’s statement clearly denominated the “ASOG examiners” as “our [the Trump campaign’s] team.” When the Post followed up with Attorney Ellis to get more information about the connection she’d just claimed between the Trump campaign and Russell Ramsland’s ASOG, Ellis refused to respond to any questions.
The Michigan judge who granted Trump’s campaign access to voting machines in that state’s Antrim County, Kevin Elsenheimer, was “a former Republican leader in the Michigan legislature”, according to the Post. When Elsenheimer granted ASOG’s motion to make a redacted version of its report on the Michigan voting machines public, “Trump tweeted about ASOG’s report several times, [falsely] claiming it exposed a ‘massive fraud’ that cost him the election and saying Elsenheimer ‘should get a medal’ for releasing it.” In his January 6 “incitement-to-insurrection” speech at the White House Ellipse, Trump not only “made reference to [the] Antrim County [case]” but “repeated Ramsland’s [false] claim that there were more votes than voters in Detroit.” Clearly Trump had not retreated even an inch from the lies undergirding the Waldron Plot by Insurrection Day.
{Note: Per the Post, on December 17, 2020, “three days after the court released the [ASOG] report, a hand recount of the county’s ballots showed that the presidential election results [in Antrim County, Michigan] were correct, off from the previously reported results by only 12 votes out of some 16,000 cast. Dominion’s machines had counted accurately.”
On August 7, 2022, Reuters reported that in late 2020 a subunit of Team Kraken led by current Republican Michigan Attorney General candidate Matthew DePerno had “gained unauthorized access to voting equipment [in Michigan] while hunting for evidence to support former President Donald Trump’s false election-fraud claims. [A Reuters] analysis shows that people working with Matthew DePerno—[now] the Trump-endorsed nominee for the state’s top law-enforcement post—examined a vote tabulator from Richfield Township, a conservative stronghold of 3,600 people in northern Michigan’s Roscommon County. The Richfield security breach is one of four similar incidents being investigated by Michigan's attorney general, Democrat Dana Nessel. Under state law, it is a felony to seek or provide unauthorized access to voting equipment.”
While Trump himself does not appear to have been involved in the alleged felonies in Michigan, “Trump lavished praise on DePerno before a large audience this weekend [August 6-7, 2022] at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas. ‘He’s going to make sure that you are going to have law and order and fair elections,’ Trump said, pumping his fist as DePerno stood up in the audience and waved.” This series of events underscores just how much more there is to learn about Donald Trump’s connections to Team Kraken and—even more to the point—its clandestine, repeated, and possibly even felonious efforts to gain access to 2020 voting machines.
Certainly, each new revelation America gets on this front is more shocking than the last. For instance, on August 15, 2022 the Washington Post published a breaking news report revealing that the sort of effort for which Team Kraken was responsible in Michigan appears to have been repeated in other states as well. Specifically, the Post reported that “a team of computer experts directed by lawyers allied with President Donald Trump copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia as part of a secretive, multistate effort to access voting equipment that was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported….As they worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the lawyers asked a forensic data firm to access county election systems in at least three battleground states [Nevada, Georgia, and Michigan] according to documents and interviews.”
In mid-December 2021, Waldron was subpoenaed by the House January 6 Committee. Politico reported in July 2022 that while “it’s unclear if [Waldron] ever appeared before the Committee”, he definitely “sue[d] [the Committee] in an effort to block the select panel from obtaining [his phone records].” According to the Washington Post, the Waldron and Powell source who the two claimed had proof of Venezuelan election interference was in fact a Dallas IT consultant and retired Army mechanic named Joshua Merritt, who had once upon a time “enrolled in a training program at the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion….but never completed the entry-level training course.” Meredith Mingledorff, a spokeswoman for the United States Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, which oversees the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, says of Waldron and Powell’s supposed star witness that “He kept washing out of [entry-level intelligence] courses. He’s not an intelligence analyst.” In March 2021, facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, Powell declared in a court filing that “no reasonable person”—including Trump—could have actually believed that any of her statements about the 2020 presidential election (many of them mere summaries of things said by Merritt, who was variously referred to by Powell fans who didn’t know his real identity as “the Kraken” or “the Spyder”) were factual.
As for Joshua Merritt, he had told the Washington Post on December 10, 2020 that the failure of Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” lawsuits would not deter Team Kraken. “We’re just going to supply the evidence [justifying the seizure of voting machines] through other directions”, he told the paper, referencing specifically (per the Post summary) both “lawmakers and members of the intelligence community” as instruments for Team Kraken—the latter a group that would include Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and the former most notably comprising the very House Freedom Caucus Trump would meet with in the Oval Office just eleven days later.
So what does Joshua Merritt, the would-be star of Team Kraken’s claims of foreign election interference, have to do with Donald Trump? Well, everything, apparently.
It was revealed by the Post in December 2020 that Joshua Merritt had in fact been an employee of ASOG since 2017, meaning—per the accidental confession about ASOG by Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis—that “the Kraken” himself was in fact a post-election agent of none other than the 2020 Donald Trump Presidential Campaign.
So it turns out the Waldron Plot—and the coup inside the Pentagon that it required—was from the very start an operation of the political campaign Donald Trump oversaw.
21. January 6: Part I
After the four years of the Trump presidency, it’s admittedly remarkable that there are still some who question whether Donald Trump would have used the United States Armed Forces to stage a military “self-coup” in which he seized voting machines and ordered an illegal national “re-vote”—to be conducted on his own, wildly capricious terms and literally at the barrel of a gun. Fortunately, if there were any remaining doubts about this, a New Yorker article published on August 8, 2022 should erase them.
Telling the harrowing story of Donald Trump’s contentious relationship with the Pentagon during his presidency, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker recount an episode in which Trump suddenly snapped at his then-chief of staff John Kelly, a retired United States Marine Corps general, over one of his long-standing complaints about generals in America:
The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“Which generals?” Kelly asked.
Trump responded, “The German generals in World War II….they were totally loyal to [Hitler].”
As if a sitting President of the United States voluntarily comparing himself to Adolf Hitler and wishing for the Pentagon to obey him with Nazi-like fanaticism weren’t bad enough, Trump made clear in private conversations during his presidency that he didn’t just want “yes-men” at the Pentagon—he wanted them to be everywhere in his executive branch.
[When then Chief of Staff John] Kelly made an unsuccessful last-ditch effort to persuade Trump not to replace him with Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina who was serving as Trump’s budget director, Kelly told the President, “You don’t want someone who’s going to be a yes-man.”
“I don’t give a shit anymore”, Trump replied. “I want a yes-man!”
….
[When] Mulvaney showed up at the White House for his first official day as acting chief of staff, he called an all-hands meeting and made an announcement: Okay, we’re going to do things different. John Kelly’s gone, and we’re going to let the President be the President.
Even this was not enough. Trump wanted a chief of staff who would not only let him be himself, but who would—for instance, in dealings with his insufficiently Nazi-like military—proactively advance his designs, no matter how illicit or illegal they might be.
When Trump finally got a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of his own choosing, Mark Milley, in fall 2019, his new pick almost didn’t last a full year—so shocked was he at Trump’s conduct and, specifically, the fealty Trump expected from the Pentagon in even his most shocking ambitions and schemes.
[On June 1, 2020], Trump…clashed with Milley, [the six-months-from-resignation/firing] Attorney General William Barr, and the [eventually fired] Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, over his demands fo a militarized show of force [in D.C. following the late May/early June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests].
“We look weak”, Trump told them.
The President wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and use active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted ten thousand troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne [Division] called up. He demanded that [General] Milley take personal charge [of dealing with left-wing protests in D.C.].
When Milley and the others resisted and said that the National Guard [rather than the United States Armed Forces] would be sufficient, Trump shouted, “You are all losers! You are all fucker losers!” Turning to Milley, Trump said, “Can’t you just shoot them [the Black Lives Matter protesters]? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
A mere seven months later, in January 2021, Trump would find himself in a situation in some ways different and in some ways the same as he had the preceding June.
Again there was to be a sizable protest in downtown Washington. The then-president expected—or perhaps simply hoped, for his own reasons—that there would again be left-wing protesters in the city. He again (in an eerie echo of June 2020) told his then-Secretary of Defense, now known a “yes-man” of the sort he had been looking for, that exactly “ten thousand” troops would be needed to put down the protest. Again there was talk of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and again there was good reason, in Trump’s mind, to apprehend that violence was coming, as in this instance the Secret Service had told him it was coming days before (and then again on the morning of his January 6 speech at the White House Ellipse, during which he learned that the 100,000 or more protesters assembling at the Ellipse were in a startling number of cases armed).
And yet the many differences between June 1, 2020 and January 6, 2021 are also critical.
Not only had Trump by January 6 fired his former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, for criticizing his actions on the former date—replacing him with Chris Miller, who presumably could be relied upon to act very differently if an even distantly similar situation arose, as Trump knew it would on January 6—but Trump had now installed two of his favorite yes-men, Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, atop Miller’s office to ensure (should it be necessary, which it might not be, given that Chris Miller was certainly no Mark Esper, let alone a Mark Milley) that Miller stayed in line with the sort of Nazi-like efficiency and fanaticism Trump had specifically and explicitly sought.
In early June 2020, Trump had hoped to use a protest in Washington as a pretext for a political maneuver, using the military—in the person of an unwitting Mark Milley, who walked much of the way with Trump to his political stunt at St. John’s Church before ducking out at the last moment—for a photo op in which he held a Bible that had just been handed to him upside-down and backward. It was a telling moment that would foreshadow January 6, 2021, as apart from the other similarities between June 1, 2020 and January 6 noted above, here, on both dates Donald Trump was a President of the United States using a massive protest in the nation’s capital for political gain.
The audacity of Trump’s conduct in Lafayette Square in June 2020 had not been lost on Chairman Milley. After Trump had enlisted the Pentagon to participate in a vile political stunt that involved significant violence against U.S. civilians executed—on Trump’s behalf—by the D.C. National Guard among other federal agents, Milley sat down to write his resignation letter. Thanks to the New Yorker, we now know what it said.
Milley wrote to Trump, in part, that the president was “doing great and irreparable harm to my country” by making “a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military.” Milley accused Trump of plotting to use the Pentagon “to create fear in the minds of the [American] people”, with the ultimate intention of having the Pentagon “turn [its] back on the American people”—a euphemism, one can easily imagine in retrospect, for a Pentagon that might act to undermine U.S. democracy in concrete and unprecedented ways before the end of Trump’s term.
Milley closed his letter by accusing Trump of not understanding that the United States Armed Forces stand against “tyranny”, “dictatorship”, “extremism”, and “Nazism”—adding that “you subscribe to many of the principles that we [the U.S. military] fought against [in the twentieth century].” It was as direct an accusation of the four evils listed above as one could ever imagine an American soldier leveling against his commander-in-chief, though given Trump’s open admiration for Hitler in past discussions with his staff even the last of Milley’s charges against Trump could not be deemed unwarranted. Tyranny, dictatorship, extremism, and Nazism also served—just as harrowingly—as a rreasonably good summary of what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was worried would emanate from the Trump administration in the rest of 2020 and early 2021 if it was left unchecked, which in the event (up until January 6, at least) it was.
According to the New Yorker, many Trump national security officials sought the advice of one man in particular as they labored to keep the United States from collapsing under Trump in 2020: former Secretary of Defense William Gates, whose home in Washington state many Trump officials traveled to in order to seek his counsel. As Glasser and Baker recount, the two questions they were always asking Gates about Trump remained the same: “How do I walk us back from the ledge? How do I keep this [specific Trump directive] from happening, because it would be a terrible thing for the country?” When Milley made his own entreaty to Gates for counsel in mid-2020, Gates told him that “given Trump’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior, he [Milley] needed to stay in the Pentagon as long as he could.” Gates had given Esper the same advice, and indeed Trump would ultimately fire Esper to better ensure unquestioning loyalty from the U.S. military’s civilian leadership.
{Note: The New Yorker observes that Lafayette Square was actually the second time Trump had used the military for a political stunt. The first time was when “he ordered thousands of troops to the southern border to combat a fake ‘invasion’ by a caravan of migrants.” It is therefore clear that by January 6 Trump had a history of finding an imaginary enemy to rile up his most ardent supporters, which enemy he’d then throw the U.S. military at in the interest of partisan gain. As the New Yorker writes, “Many considered Trump’s 2018 decision to use the military in his pre-election border stunt to be ‘the predicate—or the harbinger—of 2020’, in the words of Peter Feaver, a Duke University expect on civil-military relations, who taught the subject to generals at command school.” In the same way, it now appears June 2020 was the harbinger of January 6—a fact the Pentagon Report explicitly concedes.}
In short, there can be no question that the Pentagon saw disaster looming on the horizon in the months before Trump and far-right radicals like Ginni Thomas completed the president’s purge of executive-branch leaders to leave only radical loyalists in power—the sad state of the Pentagon in the days preceding January 6.
While many political observers focus overmuch on Milley is considering the dangers that may or may not have been posed by the Pentagon on January 6—Milley, who per the New Yorker had, by January 2021, decided “he would not going along with any further efforts by the President to deploy the machinery of war for domestic political ends”—this is a grave journalistic error. It wasn’t Milley who Trump met with in the Oval Office on Insurrection Eve and on both January 3 and January 4; it was the civilian leaders at the Pentagon, who Trump had hand-picked post-election with an eye toward attaining the Nazi-like loyalty from the Pentagon he’d long craved.
It was, in short, Chris Miller and Kash Patel.
Miller had gotten his job following Trump’s firing of Esper. And why—specifically—had Trump forced Esper out? Because the latter had, two days after Lafayette Square, “gone to the Pentagon pressroom and offered [an] apology [for participating in Trump’s photo op there], even revealing his opposition to Trump’s demands to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the active-duty military.” As the New Yorker adds, tellingly, “Trump later exploded at Secretary Esper in the Oval Office about the criticism, delivering what Milley would recall as ‘the worst reaming out’ he had ever heard. The next day, Trump’s latest chief of staff, Mark Meadows, called the Defense Secretary at home—three times—to get him to recant his opposition to invoking the Insurrection Act. When he refused, Meadows took ‘the Tony Soprano [mafia] approach,’ as Esper later put it, and began threatening him.” Esper resisted Meadows’ threats—and was summarily fired as soon as Election Day was over and Trump knew he could no longer face political fallout from a shake-up at the Pentagon.
It could not have been lost on Esper’s replacement Miller, therefore, that he had his new role specifically because Trump believed he would have a different view than his predecessor had had of using federal troops for political ends. Trump even sent his most loyal acolyte, Kash Patel, over to the Pentagon to be Miller’s chief of staff and ensure Miller’s compliance with Trump’s merest whims (and Miller would soon prove himself willing to comply—as we’ve already seen—with the MacGregor Order, which laid out a course for the Pentagon even the Republicans now call impeachment-worthy).
As the New Yorker helpfully notes—in a further implicit admonishment to those who focus on Milley and not Miller in analyzing the dangers posed by the Pentagon on January 6—“By law, the only person authorized to deploy troops other than the President is the Secretary of Defense.” So while Chairman Milley may have privately drawn up a four-point plan for himself after the debacle in Lafayette Square, one key part of which was “mak[ing] sure the military was not used in the streets against the American people for the purpose of keeping Trump in power”, it wasn’t Milley who had the power to ensure this, nor was it Milley who sat with Trump in the Oval Office just hours before an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol that Trump would falsely claim—even in a private January 6 phone call with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)—was the work of violent leftists (“Kevin, they’re not my people”, Trump lied.)
It was all an echo of June 2020—one that Trump and his most trusted operatives had carefully orchestrated.
The New Yorker reports that on November 9, less than a week after the 2020 election, one of Trump’s most obsequious and sycophantic Cabinet members, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, surprised Chairman Milley by asking to come see him at his home. Per Milley, Pompeo told him, “We’ve got to talk.”
When Pompeo arrived at Milley’s house, the following occurred, according to Glasser and Baker (working from their interviews with Milley; emphasis has been added, here):
“The crazies have taken over”, Pompeo told Milley when they sat down at Milley’s kitchen table.
Not only was Trump surrounded by the crazies, [the Secretary of State told General Milley]; they were, in fact, ascendant in the White House and, as of that afternoon, inside the Pentagon itself.
Just a few hours earlier, on the first workday after the election was called for Biden, Trump had finally fired Esper.
Milley and Pompeo were alarmed that the Defense Secretary was being replaced by Christopher Miller, until recently an obscure mid-level counterterrorism official at Trump’s National Security Council, who had arrived at the Pentagon flanked by a team of what appeared to be Trump’s political minders [Kash Patel, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, and retired general and Fox News commentator Anthony Tata].
For Milley, this was an ominous development. From the beginning, he understood that “if the idea [Trump had] was to seize power”, as he told his staff, “you are not going to do this without the military.”
And that military was, as of November 9, controlled—by law—by just two civilians: Donald Trump and Chris Miller. Worse still, the latter was closely advised by three political appointees with rock-bottom reputations among career civil servants in the government—and even some Trump appointees. Trump’s deputy National Security Advisor Charles Kupperman had once called Cohen-Watnick a “cancer” in the White House; while still in the White House, Patel had lied to Milley—and almost caused an international catastrophe in doing so—about whether a foreign country had approved a sensitive rescue mission on its soil intended to free an American hostage (one of several incidents only recently disclosed to the public that caused the entire CIA to “refuse to have anything to do with Patel”); and even as the long-time Trump skeptic Milley deemed Patel, Cohen-Watnick, and Tata to be a Trumpist “cabal” filled with “ill will”, long-time Trump toady Pompeo somehow held the very same views, perhaps even more ardent ones, deeming the three men (per a senior State Department official who spoke to Glasser and Baker) “wackadoodles, nuts, and dangerous.”
General Milley was so convinced that Patel and Cohen-Watnick had specifically been sent by Trump to help stage a military coup to keep Trump in power that in mid-November 2020 he brought both men into his office in turn and told them each that, “Whatever machinations they were up to…‘life looks really shitty from behind bars. And, whether you want to realize it or not, there’s going to be a President at exactly 1200 hours on the twentieth [of January 2021] and his name is Joe Biden. And, if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.”
Milley shortly thereafter told his staff that “he warned both Cohen and Patel that they were be watched: ‘Don’t do it [stage a pro-Trump self-coup from inside the Pentagon], don’t even try to do it. I can smell [your intent to do so]. I can see it. And so can a lot of other people. And, by the way, the military will have no part of this shit.”
{Note: Patel, seemingly confirming all of Milley’s worst fears, has since said that—in his view—in November 2020, December 2020, and January 2021 “[Milley] worked for me, not the other way around.” Those journalists who have considered the role of the Pentagon in January 6 through the lens of Milley’s unwillingness to bend to Trump’s will should understand that, at least from a certain perspective, Patel was right: on January 6 what mattered was what Trump, Miller, Patel, and Cohen-Watnick wanted to see happen, not what Milley hoped would occur.}
Nor was Miller himself perceived as any less of a threat. According to a Pentagon official who worked with Miller prior to the Trump administration, “Miller had changed in the Trump White House” and become “a guy willing to do their [Team Trump’s] bidding.” General Milley first observed that Miller was willing to entertain “illegal” conduct by the Pentagon—if doing so would please the president—during the latter’s very first week on the job (the second week of November 2020). Per Milley, Miller was willing to condone a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear arsenal if Trump wanted it, even though such an action could precipitate World War III. Milley would later observe that a number of the actions favored by Miller and his Trump-appointed advisory corps constituted “war crimes.”
Milley responded to the installation of Miller, Patel, Cohen-Watnick, and Tata at the Pentagon by telling “his [uniformed, non-civilian] staff that, if need be, he and all the chiefs [of the branches of the United States Armed Forces] were prepared to ‘put on their uniforms and go across the [Potomac] River [to the White House] together’—to threaten to quit en masse—to prevent Trump from trying to use the military to stay in power illegally.”
What Milley did not understand at the time, however—and this is a point that Glasser and Baker appear to miss in their interviews with him and their excellent reporting on his actions between Election Day and Insurrection Day—is that he had misconstrued the nature of the self-coup plot Trump was seeking the Pentagon’s aid in executing. In fact, what Trump needed from Miller, Patel, Cohen-Watnick, Tata, and MacGregor in the days before January 6 and on the day itself was just two things, neither of which involved ordering the United States Armed Forces to storm the Capitol on his behalf:
Undersell dramatically the threat of violence at the Capitol on January 6 in interagency meetings run by the Pentagon, thereby increasing exponentially the possibility of widespread violence and destruction in downtown D.C. on that day (a function Cohen-Watnick appears to have served, in the event); and
withhold the assistance of the Pentagon on January 6 for as long as possible, deploying the D.C. National Guard or other federal resources only under one of two conditions: (1) if the effort by Trumpist irregulars to violently storm the Capitol and occupy it for several days to postpone the certification of Biden’s election victory had already failed (thus requiring at least the appearance from the Pentagon and the White House of not being involved in the effort); or (b) if the violence and mayhem at the Capitol so spiralled out of control that the Trump campaign could credibly argue that it might have been instigated by left-wing agitators instead of Trump supporters, in which case Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, and use his new expanded executive authority to execute the Waldron Plot.
Miller, Patel, and McCarthy appear to have collectively seen to the first half of this second component of the plan, while the rest of it—as we will now see—had been delegated to the Trump campaign.
22. Funes
In a June 23, 2021 report entitled “Team Trump and Stop the Steal Premeditated Blaming the Insurrection on Antifa”, Proof published a video Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani recorded on January 8, under 48 hours after the January 6 attack. The video included supposed evidence that’d been delivered directly to Trump’s Willard Hotel war room suite on Insurrection Day. The evidence, Giuliani averred in the video, confirmed that after Trump’s “rally of love” at the White House Ellipse on January 6—where “really nice people” had gathered merely to express their “love” for Trump and has listened to speeches that aroused “no anger” in them whatsoever—a “horrendous” event occurred at the Capitol that was in fact a “pre-planned attack….that would have occurred rally or no rally, irrespective of anything that was said at the rally.”
{Note: The House January 6 Committee has since published video and audio of those at the rally—a sizable number of whom, it turns out, were armed—responding to Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech in real time with vocalized, unambiguously violent threats against the Capitol.}
Trump’s lawyer assured his viewers that the people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 were “skilled at doing this”—“professional rioters”, he called them, who were manifestly and inarguably “not Trump people.” They were “mostly let in [to the Capitol] by Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Police”, he added, later repeating that “most of the wrongdoers [on January 6] weren’t Trump supporters.” He even showed a video that—as he falsely proposed in introducing it—showed “State police” vehicles (it’s not clear what state is being referenced here or would have units in D.C., a federal jurisdiction) “escorting four antifa buses” to the “front of the line” at the Capitol, with “front of the line” meaning (as he went on to clarify) “the people breaking into [the building].”
If anything remotely like this had ever happened, it indeed would have constituted a massive attack on the United States from within. In fact, nothing like this occurred.
Yet this is exactly what what Giuliani broadcast to the nation within 48 hours of the Capitol being cleared, and just a day after Biden’s election victory was certified in the wee hours of January 7.
January 6, Trump’s chief legal spokesman announced to a national audience after the Trumpists’ attempt to occupy the Capitol had failed, was in fact “an attempt to try to stick—unfairly—this [event] on the Trump campaign and on Trump, in other words frame Trump.” Giuliani underscored that “they”—the American left— were behind the frame-up, specifically pinning most of the blame for the attack on “antifa.” And he went still farther than this, painting John Earle Sullivan—an amateur filmmaker and semi-professional apolitical trickster who was filming a “documentary” with his Proud Boy brother James Sullivan on Insurrection Day—as an antifa leader who intended January 6 to be a “revolution.” Giuliani does not explain why, fourteen days before Democrat Joe Biden was set to take office, a supposed leftist would stage a “Kick These Fascists Out of D.C.” event that was due to meet in the exact same time and place (the Washington Monument) as James Sullivan’s Proud Boys on January 6.
Giuliani concludes—on this simultaneously scant and manufactured evidence—that antifa had, prior to January 6, “advertised” a planned “riot” in D.C. to “cause trouble for Trump” and “set him up.” “There is plenty of evidence”, Giuliani falsely added, “that antifa and left-wing groups were leading this….in order to do what they could to affect what was going on in the Electoral College, particularly since four states had just the night before [January 6] submitted letters saying that they were convinced that the [2020] count in their state was inaccurate, false, and fraudulent.” The “Democrats were in a panic” that Biden’s win was going to be decertified, the then-president’s lawyer insisted, which is why, he claimed, there was a left-wing attack on the Capitol on January 2021. “And the major protagonists [actors] here sure weren’t members of the Trump campaign.” Giuliani was describing—as he well knew and intended to do—a leftist terror attack that (in the topsy-turvy terms of Trump’s post-election Big Lie)—was intended to steal the Oval Office from its rightful holder.
It was the sort of terror attack, in Giuliani’s telling of it, that might well have justified a President of the United States taking extraordinary measures in the wake of it.
As further “proof” of his audacious and erroneous claims, Giuliani showed a video (see 15:55 at this link) of an unidentified man in a Trump hat yelling into a camera outside the Capitol during the January 6 riot. The man’s shouted words were these:
“America, we are under attack! Not by these police officers here necessarily, but by the Deep State! Here we are in the middle of a militant, leftist, Deep-State, globalist operation trying to make Trump supporters look like idiots…[like] we’re violent agitators! When in truth and fact, there are people dressed up in MAGA hats and other [Trump] gear that are pretending to be MAGA supporters! And they’re instigating [violence]—they’re playing on the emotions of all Trump supporters! Listen to this {he motions to the mob behind him} these are people who love the cops! We love the police! But a few antifa dressed up as Trump supporters [today]!”
What Giuliani did not tell his viewers was that the man in the video, Jason Funes, was a 2020 Trump presidential campaign staffer and event coordinator and, moreover, was someone who—as CNN later reported—“coordinated event operations and security at pro-Trump events in D.C. after the election” (emphasis supplied). Nor did Giuliani reveal that the video of Funes falsely calling January 6 a left-wing operation was in fact delivered directly to the door of his Willard Hotel “war room” suite shortly after it was recorded by the very woman who shot the video, far-right activist Maryam Henein (an associate of Funes’).
It is “obvious” that the January 6 attack was “put together by the left movement [sic]”, Giuliani concluded his video in a somber tone. The perpetrators were both “antifa” and “others that were trying to do anything they can to destroy any attempt that Trump had to rectify the massive voter theft of the Biden campaign.” He added that the fact that “the National Guard is right nearby [the Capitol] and you can get resources [to the Capitol] like that {snapping his fingers}” was further proof that January 6 had been a left-wing operation and that “somebody had to have made a deliberate choice” to let the attack on the Capitol happen.
He did not say, of course, that in fact it was Trump’s deliberate choice.
It was Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon who had held back the National Guard from the Capitol because they’d been told by the president himself on each of the preceding three days not to deploy it unless and until it appeared that the Trump supporters attacking the Capitol were themselves in danger from imagined left-wing agitators.
Yet Giuliani, indulging in a particularly grotesque act of gaslighting, opined of Mayor Bowser, the U.S. Capitol Police, and the Metropolitan Police Department, “If you’re overwhelmed, ask for reinforcements! Even if they don’t get there immediately, they get there pretty quickly!” He added, melodramatically fuming, that with a competent (GOP) mayor, the Guard would’ve arrived at the Capitol to relieve it in “20 minutes.”
The gall of Giuliani’s words was almost unimaginable. But then the president’s lawyer went still further, saying that Bowser and the her police force had clearly “enabled” and “permitted” the January 6 attack in the same way—he falsely claimed, adding insult to injury—that they had aided and abetted the “riots of this [past] summer” in D.C. And then, in a claim that was bizarre even under the circumstances, Giuliani accused the January 6 attackers of being the same people who had protested in D.C. in June 2020, noting that they were “well-trained” for the January 6 attack as a direct result of their actions in Lafayette Square the previous summer. He offered no proof of this whatsoever, but presumably had the approval of his audience all the same, as he’d just blamed the actions of an army of white Trump supporters on a Black mayor who tried to protect her city but was stopped from doing so by several Trump political appointees, a Black commanding officer at the D.C. National Guard whose authority had been stripped from him on the eve of the Capitol attack by these same Trump appointees, and Black protesters who’d participated in Black Lives Matter protests the previous year but had been nowhere near the U.S. Capitol—or even Washington, D.C.—on the day tens of thousands of Trumpists launched a violent attack on the federal government.
Giuliani’s message was clear: Donald Trump had wisely foreseen a danger from the political left in June 2020, and had been right to want to deploy U.S. troops then; he was again correct in perceiving a danger from the political left in January 2021; and that meant (ipso facto) that he would again be within his rights to deploy U.S. troops in response to the events of January 6, which (Giuliani assured his viewers) had been premeditated as part of an effort to deny Trump a fair hearing for his stolen-election claims.
Even as Giuliani, arguably a representative of the more stable wing of Team Kraken, made the case via multimedia that America had just suffered a massive attack by left-wing radicals—precisely the sort of attack that Trump had 72 hours earlier said, in meeting with Miller and Patel in the Oval Office, would require the deployment of “ten thousand” federal troops (exactly the same number he had demanded in the face of an actual left-wing protest in D.C. on June 1, 2020)—the remainder of Team Kraken was writing a document that Michael Lindell would shortly bring to the Oval Office.
That document insisted that the post-January 6 period was an equally appropriate time for Trump to declare martial law. In fact, it used Giuliani’s narrative about January 6 being a left-wing terror attack intended to interfere in Trump’s honorable efforts to secure an accurate 2020 vote count as its justification for the immediate imposition of martial law. “Insurrection Act now as a result of the attack on the [Capitol]”, it read.
{Note: Images of the Lindell Document, including close-ups, can be found in Chapter 24.}
Meanwhile, Michael Flynn bodyguard Robert Patrick Lewis (of the 1st Amendment Praetorians) was publicly admitting, in a podcast interview recorded less than 24 hours before Giuliani published his video, that Team Kraken was still at the Willard and Trump International hotels “wargaming” how to keep Donald Trump in power.
It is worth noting here that Lewis’ 1st Amendment Praetorians group isn’t a political organization. It’s a paramilitary operation comprising former U.S. soldiers and law enforcement officers who offer military-grade advice and intelligence to civilian (and in some cases former military) actors. As Michael Flynn’s handpicked bodyguard unit, 1AP spend months protecting a former DIA chief who’d worked with Phil Waldron to execute the Waldron Plot—a self-coup requiring the active participation not just the Pentagon writ large but specifically a former Rudy Giuliani co-conspirator on the BLT Prime Team (Patel) and a former protégé of Flynn (Cohen-Watnick). As Reuters would report after January 6, the end of that day was not the end for Flynn’s cabal: “Flynn[’s] circle wasn’t ready to let go.”
The coup plot at the Pentagon, which had entered its primordial stage in November 2020 and from even its earliest days was known to then-president Trump, had sought to exploit January 6—but it had every intention of surviving beyond January 6 as well.
And so it did.
23. Document Flow
Given the disappearance of so much digital correspondence relating to January 6 at key federal agencies, it’s now worth asking whether paper records might reveal the truth about what Trump and his fellow coup plotters were doing at the Pentagon and elsewhere inside the federal government in November 2020, December 2020, and January 2021. For that matter, old-fashioned recordkeeping may be able to do more than just illuminate the dark corners of a coup plot: it may give us our best glimpse yet at why the men (and a small number of women) involved in those components of Trump’s coup that involved the Pentagon, DHS, DOJ, and the U.S. Secret Service seemingly felt it was important that their electronic communications be destroyed.
This chapter considers, as case studies, three locations where paper records have revealed secrets that the wholesale destruction of Trump political appointees’ texts and secure messages might otherwise have relegated to the permanently obscured margins of history: the Pentagon, the White House, and Mar-a-Lago. Each section focuses on one or two men in particular: at the Pentagon, Mark Milley and Ryan McCarthy; at the White House, Derek Lyons; and at Mar-a-Lago, Kash Patel and John Solomon. These locations—and the men who toiled at them with a paper trail we can still trace—answer some of the post-election mysteries that have thus far bedeviled the complex January 6 meta-narrative detailed here in Proof of Coup.
The Pentagon
In April 2021, seven months before the public release of Pentagon Inspector General Sean O’Donnell’s deeply troubled Pentagon Report, the Associated Press reviewed and reported on an internal Pentagon document regarding January 6 that it seemed nobody outside the Pentagon had ever seen before.
In its report on the document, the AP unfolded the story of what was functionally a pre-cursor to the Pentagon Report: a raw, perhaps dry, but seemingly politics-free account of what happened at the Pentagon on January 6, at once organized as an internal self-assessment and a “tick-tock” (that is, an annotated timeline of events).
In the event, this unassuming document would not only answer some of the most pressing questions about the Pentagon’s response—or “lack thereof”, as the report by the AP noted—on January 6, but also provide an up-front inoculation against some of the more obvious self-aggrandizing excesses, investigative infelicities, and self-exculpatory lacunas of the report that Mr. O’Donnell would public in November 2021.
Unfortunately, this April 2021 document was only lightly covered by major media, and many journalists don’t even realize it was ever published—relying, instead, on what the Pentagon Inspector General would establish as the “official” Pentagon statement on January 6, which Proof of Coup has thus far been at great pains to underscore (with specific examples of same) as unreliable. Had major media more robustly reported on this April 2021 internal Pentagon assessment, and if that media reporting had robustly informed the work now being done by the House January 6 Committee in 2022, the five mysteries detailed below would suddenly be seen—and widely so—as resolvable.
(1) Was Mark Milley with Trump’s political appointees in Chris Miller’s office for most or all of January 6 (making it impossible for his colleagues—Miller, Patel, Cohen-Watnick, McCarthy, Tata, and MacGregor—to hold conversations in his absence that revealed how politically minded their calculations on January 6 were)?
The report strongly suggests that Mark Milley was not—at least for much of January 6, 2021—in Chris Miller’s office keeping an eye on Trump’s political operatives inside the Pentagon. During either the three- or four-o’clock hour on January 6, the internal Pentagon assessment reports that the following occurred (emphasis supplied):
“We must establish order”, said General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a call with Pentagon leaders.
If Milley was on a call with “Pentagon leaders” in the timeframe alleged, it would seem to suggest that at a key point on January 6—sometime between 3PM and 4PM ET—he was not physically with those leaders. But we do not know where he actually was at the time.
(2) How can we resolve (a) Miller and McCarthy’s claim that the deployment of the D.C. National Guard was initiated early in the three-o’clock hour on January 6, and (b) the claim made by Major General Walker—the commander of the D.C. National Guard—that in fact this order did not come down until early in the five-o’clock hour?
As the AP makes clear, Miller’s historically unprecedented restriction of Walker’s January 6 authority—a move made shortly after the former met with President Trump—gave Trump’s political ambitions more of a boost than merely centralizing authority over the Guard in men fiercely loyal to Trump. It also created a bifurcated deployment scheme that allowed Trump’s operatives at the Pentagon to represent to the media and/or members of Congress that the D.C. National Guard had been deployed to the U.S. Capitol when in fact no such order had been given.
As the Pentagon’s internal assessment makes clear, it was indeed during the three-o’clock hour on January 6 that Secretary McCarthy took a step—but ultimately a meaningless one—toward deploying the Guard to relieve the beleaguered Capitol:
Shortly after 3PM ET, McCarthy provided “verbal approval” of the activation of 1,100 National Guard troops to support the D.C. police and the development of a plan for the troops’ deployment duties, locations, and unit sizes.
Minutes later the Guard’s emergency reaction force left Joint Base Andrews for the D.C. Armory. There, they would prepare to head to the Capitol once Miller, the acting defense secretary, gave final approval.
{Emphasis supplied.}
As you can see from the foregoing, Ryan McCarthy’s “activation” of the D.C. National Guard—made at a time when he had absented himself from any direct communication with the commander of that force (when one would think that such an activation order would be communicated to the said commander first, directly, and unambiguously)—did nothing to send even a single member of the Guard to the Capitol. Rather, it moved the Guard from approximately 11.5 miles from the Capitol to approximately two miles from the Capitol—which beyond shaving 15 minutes (at a maximum) off the Guard’s response time once it had finally been mobilized to relieve the Capitol, had no effect.
Indeed, Secretary McCarthy’s “approval” during the three-o’clock hour did no more than allow for the “development of a plan”—bureaucratic-speak for starting to talk about having a talk about actually doing something—as well as “preparing” the Guard to, at some unspecified time in the future, physically embark on a trip to the Capitol, which by then was overrun, smoke-filled, and in the most danger it’d been in since the War of 1812.
So who, then, had the authority to decide when (or if) the D.C. National Guard would cease “developing a plan” and “preparing to head [out]” and actually move with all deliberate speed to relieve the U.S. Capitol? Secretary Miller, of course. So McCarthy’s actions hadn’t brought Major General Walker any closer to being able to personally command his men; that authority was still in the hands of a Trump political appointee known as a “yes-man” willing to consider, if it was what Trump wanted from him, actions that his uniformed counterpart (General Mark Milley) deemed “war crimes.”
And when did Miller finally give the order for the Guard to move to the Capitol? Late in the four-o’clock hour—so late it had no chance (as Miller, like McCarthy, appeared to be inexplicably averse to speaking to Walker directly) of being received by Walker until the five-o’clock hour, just as the Major General would later testify to Congress.
Even here, though, there’s a slight twist worth noting. While Miller’s order for the Guard to move to the Capitol took some time to get to MG Walker (a delay on the Pentagon’s part that remains unexplained), the fact that Miller first gave the order for the Guard to go to the Capitol just thirteen minutes after President Trump told the rioters to “go home” suggests a connection between the two events that could be a critical component of the January 6 Pentagon scandal’s iceberg-tip.
While two events being separated by just 780 seconds during the course of a twelve-hour timeline doesn’t necessarily make them connected, given that Miller had spent January 6 unsuccessfully trying to get in touch with Trump for guidance, and had been instructed by Trump three times in the 72 hours preceding January 6 to make his deployment decision with partisan politics in mind—that is, to act only if “[Trump’s] people” were in danger—certainly suggests that Miller ending his hours of inaction on January 6 within thirteen minutes of his political patron making his desires clear to the nation and his political appointees at DoD was rather more than a coincidence.
(3) Do we know what Trump’s political appointees were discussing in Miller’s office?
Yes, we do—at least in part—and it’s troubling.
According to the AP, “At the Pentagon, officials were discussing media reports that the mayhem was not confined to Washington and that other state capitals were facing similar violence in what had the makings of a national insurrection.”
On the face of it, Pentagon officials expanding their view of the events of January 6 to get a national perspective would seem to be all to the good. But it also raises more questions than it answers. If Donald Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon apprehended that a “national insurrection” was nigh, wouldn’t that have accelerated their timeline for helping to secure the seat of the U.S. federal government against an onslaught of insurrectionists? And yet it seems the opposite occurred, almost as if the signs of the general uprising Trump had been angling for—and had even mentioned, hopefully rather than with concern, during his speech at the White House Ellipse—caused his Pentagon appointees to be more concerned about taking Congress’ part in its highly public tilt with the sitting President of the United States rather than less.
Complicating all of this is the fact that, while there were certainly pockets of violence across America on January 6—as Proof reported on in detail here—by no means were any of the crowds in any of the state capitals affected by Trump’s insurrection large enough, or even nearly large enough, to raise legitimate fears at the Pentagon that events had the “makings of a national insurrection.” Rather, this oddly paranoid and timid intelligence report, presumably brought to Miller by Cohen-Watnick or Patel, seems to have overstated the strengths of Trump’s political case in part as a way of justifying the Pentagon’s inaction—to wit, by allowing Miller and others to imply to the Capitol’s defenders that the Pentagon had much more to focus on than just D.C., which was untrue inasmuch as 120,000+ Americans had marched on the Capitol while no more than a few hundred had congregated in any state capital (with the spurts of extremely localized violence in a handful of capitals nothing on the order of the full-on armed assault the Capitol was experiencing).
(4) Is there direct evidence of Secretary Miller’s dereliction of duty? For that matter, is there direct evidence of misconduct within the Pentagon’s intelligence apparatus, presumptively controlled in tandem by Cohen-Watnick and Patel?
Absolutely. Consider this section of the AP’s summary of the Pentagon’s internal self-assessment:
By the morning of January 6, crowds started gathering at the Ellipse before Trump’s speech. According to the Pentagon’s plans, the acting defense secretary [Miller] would only be notified if the crowd swelled beyond 20,000.
Before long it was clear that the crowd was far more in control of events than the troops and law enforcement there to maintain order.
Trump, just before noon, was giving his speech and he told supporters to march to the Capitol. The crowd at the rally [at the Ellipse] was at least 10,000. By 1:15 PM ET, the procession was well on its way [to the Capitol].
In setting the size of the Ellipse rally at 10,000, the Pentagon was simply cribbing from the rally’s permit; no intelligence assessment that ever put the size of the Ellipse crowd at only 10,000—a level that, conveniently, “officially” put the rally well beneath the notice of Secretary Miller, and even farther from requiring any action by him.
In fact, even before the rally began, major-media reports—like this one from NBC News—were saying that “as many as 30,000” people were “expected” at the Ellipse, meaning that Miller should have been on full alert at the Pentagon during the nine- or ten-o’clock hour (i.e., four or five hours before the Capital was breached). And needless to say the Pentagon had, or should have had, far better intelligence than a before-the-event speculative article by NBC News. Given that, in the event, there were actually 120,000+ people at the Mall on January 6, it is inexplicable that Cohen-Watnick’s intelligence resources would ever have put the number at 10,000, instead. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times reports that on January 6 “Law enforcement said the crowd size ahead of the protest was possibly as much as 80,000, according to then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy” (emphasis in original).
If Secretary McCarthy knew this, why didn’t Watnick-Cohen? Or Patel? Or Miller?
But it gets worse.
The AP report reveals the following additional facts: Miller’s office is just “down the hall” from where Piatt and Flynn were on the phone with Walker and other Capitol defenders, making it even more inexplicable that neither McCarthy nor Miller ever got on the 130-minute call; while Miller was trying to get in touch with Trump and musing about whether Trump’s speech might have successfully inspired a “national insurrection,” he did find time to (at 3:37 PM ET) ensure that “Pentagon sent its own security forces to guard the homes of defense leaders”; and while the Pentagon told members of Congress at 3:19 PM ET that “the National Guard had been approved”, not only was that a profoundly misleading assurance but Miller knew as much—as the April 2021 Pentagon report reveals that between 3:19 PM ET and 4:49 PM ET, “Army leaders argued that sending [the Guard] into a volatile combat situation required additional instruction to keep both them and the public safe”—a snafu it does not appear Miller ever communicated to congressional leaders.
(5) Were the Pentagon’s astonishing intelligence failures—presumably to be laid at least in part at the feet of Cohen-Watnick—acknowledged on January 6 itself, given that the attack on the Capitol was so grotesquely laying them bare in real time?
Yes. The Pentagon’s internal self-assessment reveals that during one of the many calls from congressional leaders to the Pentagon on January 6—with the said leaders being successively more aghast at the Pentagon’s aloofness with each call—the subject of intelligence failures did arise. And it came up in the most uncomfortable way possible.
Per the AP, during a 4:40 PM ET call between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, “The congressional leadership on the call ‘accuse[d] the National Security apparatus of knowing that protestors planned to conduct an assault on the Capitol’” (emphasis supplied). While an astounding accusation, it retrospect its accuracy seems almost self-evident—as evidence online and off that the U.S. Capitol was the target of January 6’s pro-Trump events had been clear at least as far back as Michael Flynn’s Jericho March’s unmistakable Biblical analogy to destroying the walls of an enemy city.
More to the point, it now seems almost impossible that Schumer and Pelosi weren’t directing their accusations specifically at Trump’s two intelligence-obsessed acolytes at the Pentagon: Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick.
The White House
On December 15, 2020, White House Staff Secretary Derek Lyons surprised the White House by informing it that he wouldn’t be staying in his role until the end of Trump’s term in office on January 20, 2021—or, in the parlance apparently used in President Trump’s presence in late 2020, “on January 20, 2025”—but rather leaving the Trump administration “this month [December 2020].”
Lyons’ role at the White House was to control the “document flow” to the president, a difficult task given how many unauthorized persons found ways to get documents to Trump that hadn’t been vetted for accuracy, authenticity, or even their point of origin.
As Bloomberg reported at the time, Lyons’ departure was deemed “early”—and more than this, unusual. As the digital media outlet wrote at the time, “Few of Trump’s top advisers have left their posts, with the president still falsely insisting that he won re-election. Departures before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration are interpreted as implicit acknowledgment Trump’s time in the White House is coming to an end.”
Bloomberg noted that “one of the only other high-level officials to leave since the [2020] election” was White House communications director Alyssa Farah, who—it now seems not at all coincidentally—has since become one of Trump’s loudest critics on the right, and a constant foe of Trump in her political analysis as an on-air CNN contributor. All of which begs the question: if William Barr left the administration early because of his discomfort with Trump’s actions post-election, and Farah now indicates she left for the same reason, can the same be said for the man who had long controlled the flow of documents to Trump when he informed his boss on December 15, 2020 that he would be leaving his role “this month”? Certainly Lyons, like Barr, had always been considered a Trump loyalist. Had something changed post-election?
Here’s how Bloomberg describes Lyons’ relationship with Trump prior to the 2020 election:
Lyons is one of a handful of staffers who have been in the White House since the first day of Trump’s presidency. He frequently accompanied the president on foreign and domestic travel, and in May received the title of counselor to the president, a capacity in which he advised Trump on policy matters ranging from trade to coronavirus relief efforts.
So Lyons was a very old hand in dealing with Trump, and had just gotten a promotion.
So why would he choose to leave the Trump White House just a few weeks before an already inevitable departure? Why not just wait a few more weeks, to avoid burning any bridges with the leader of the Republican Party and one of the most powerful (and famously vindictive) men in the world?
One possible explanation for Lyons’ behavior may be that the period of time from November 3, 2020 to December 15, 2020 couldn’t have been easy for the man who controlled the flow of documents to Donald Trump.
As we have already seen in this account of Trump’s coup plot at the Pentagon, from the moment Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in a popular-vote and electoral-college landslide he’d been inundated with dodgy communiques by lawyers and outside advisers seeking to curry favor with him by coddling his willful self-delusion of a stolen election. And no group had been more aggressive in submitting such documents than Team Kraken. As noted above, Phil Waldron acknowledges that he began sending early versions of what would eventually become the Waldron Plot in November 2020; assuming no idiosyncratic access operation was being run by Team Kraken in November of 2020 (e.g., one of the sort Patrick Byrne would so vocally crow about in December of that year), the early drafts of the Waldron Plot would have gone through Lyons’ hands first. So too might certain communications from Trump lawyers like Powell and Giuliani and Bobb, or even more attenuated participants in Trump’s legal maneuvers like Russell Ramsland, Matthew DePerno, and Joe Oltmann. Content from these sources would have unsettled the nerves of anyone who loves democracy as it has been practiced in the United States for almost a quarter of a millennium.
But this book doesn’t reference Lyons here because of the documents he may or may not have seen in November 2020. Until Lyons himself speaks out much more on this subject—he has already testified under oath before the House January 6 Committee—it will be a matter of speculation to say that something Lyons saw in November made him quit his job.
What we can say is that something Lyons saw in December 2020 made him quit his job early.
On December 18, 2020—just 72 hours after he told Trump he’d be leaving the White House later in the month—Lyons was present in the Oval Office during the six-hour Trump-Team Kraken meeting in which Trump’s “document flow” included two draft executive orders authored by Trump lawyer Christina Bobb and Michael Flynn associate Phil Waldron . These orders would, per Rudy Giuliani, if Trump acted upon them, lead to his impeachment and possibly far worse. In this book and elsewhere, the possibility of the Bobb orders or concurrent Team Kraken plots like the “fake elector” plot constituting evidence of Seditious Conspiracy or Treason has been discussed.
As Trump’s staff secretary, Lyons might also have been responsible, starting on the next working day after the Trump-Team Kraken meeting on December 18, for aiding Trump and Meadows in onboarding new White House special counsel Sidney Powell in the face of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s refusal to do so. Presumably, any paperwork aiding and abetting Powell’s efforts to strong-arm the Pentagon into seizing 2020 voting machines would thereafter have gone through Derek Lyons as well.
All of this became moot, however, once Derek Lyons quit his job immediately after the December 18, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office.
While Lyons’ departure just 72 hours after telling the President of the United States he would be leaving the White House sometime “this month” certainly seems precipitous—especially as his final moments in the White House saw him fielding potential evidence of a major federal felony from individuals not in government employ who appeared to acknowledge no boundaries of law or decorum—that Lyons first made his decision to leave the Trump administration sometime before December 15 (the day after Trump lost his remaining legal options by virtue of the certification of Joe Biden’s victory by 50 states and D.C.) underlines that what Lyons had observed in the weeks before December 18 wasn’t just Trump’s ever-increasing entanglement with Team Kraken but also, as we now know, one of the most audacious courses of mass document removal from the White House in the history of the United States. As Business Insider reports, “Trump frantically packed up documents to take with him in the last days of his presidency after finally accepting he was leaving the White House.” While certainly this process would have sped up significantly after January 6, the former president’s first inalterable realization that he would not receive a second term beginning in 2021 (not to mention this realization suffusing even his most loyal staffers) should have arrived on December 14, 2020, the day before Lyons announced his departure.
Just as significant as the possibility that Lyons wanted nothing to do with his boss’s mysterious cardboard boxes of classified materials in the Presidential Residence is the fact that when Lyons left the White House Trump decided not to replace him. The result, as the Guardian has since reported, is that by January 6 President Trump was in a position to keep records or not as he chose; to permit tampering with government records on partisan grounds at will; and to have logs of his telephonic and electronic communications go dark in much the same way such archives have now disappeared at the Pentagon, DHS, and the U.S. Secret Sevice. As the Guardian explains (emphasis supplied),
Multiple current and former White House officials have noted that [after January 6], a copy of [then-President Trump’s January 6] call log—alongside the president’s daily schedule and the presidential line-by-line document—might be provided to Oval Office operations to help compile the presidential daily diary.
That could [in the absence of Lyons] lead to a situation where records [would be] vulnerable to tampering, since the presidential daily diary and call log needs approval by a senior White House official before they can be sent to the White House office of records management, the officials said.
And by the time of January 6, two former Trump White House officials said, there was [this sort of] scope for political interference in records preservation, with no White House staff secretary formally appointed after Derek Lyons’ departure on December 18.
A picture thus emerges of a three-step devolution of paper-records preservation at the White House in the days immediately before the worst attack on the U.S. Capitol in over 200 years: (1) Lyons observed his boss committing acts that could constitute Espionage (see below), and thereafter made a plan to inform the president that he would be leaving his service early; (2) after the now-infamous debacle in the Oval Office and the Presidential Residence on December 18, 2020, Lyons chose to make his departure effective immediately rather than waiting until later in the month to depart the White House; and (3) Trump’s decision to forego a staff secretary in the final 30 days of his term—at a time he was knowingly, carefully, even systematically turning his normal document flow into a criminal enterprise via which classified documents disappeared en masse into containers marked for his private residence at in Florida—enabled him to hide many of his communications during the most legally fraught weeks of his presidency, all of which led directly to a shocking seven-hour gap in his January 6 call log that’s reminiscent of the “18.5-minute” gap in the tapes at the center of the Watergate scandal.
Taken in full, this sequence of events puts the post-January 6 evidentiary cover-up at the White House on the same level of general suspicion of possible criminality as the erasure of records in other Trump-era executive-branch agencies—like the Pentagon.
Mar-a-Lago
No stash of paper records is being discussed with more vigor in the United States right now than the massive cache of classified documents America just learned Donald Trump has been hiding at his Florida country club, Mar-a-Lago, since he left office on January 20, 2021.
So far, four sets of classified documents marked “Top Secret” have been found at Mar-a-Lago pursuant to an early August 2022 search of the premises by the FBI, along with three sets of classified documents marked “Secret”, three sets of classified documents marked with a “Confidential” classification marking, an untold number of documents the removal of which from the White House may have constituted a serious violation of the Presidential Records Act, and even “various” documents at the highest level of classification in the U.S. government—“Top Secret-SCI”—a level of national security sensitivity at which a document’s exposure to unauthorized parties could lead directly to grave national security consequences for America. All of these documents were found in unsecured or lightly secured areas of Trump’s Florida golf club, with it being impossible to know at this point whether other classified documents previously in Trump’s possession were hidden, destroyed, defaced, given away, or even sold prior to the FBI searching Mar-a-Lago.
Per the most recent reporting on this situation, the federal search warrant of Mar-a-Lago met the U.S. Constitution’s “probable cause” standard before a federal judge as to three federal criminal statutes: The Espionage Act (link), Obstruction of Justice (link), and a statute called Concealment, Removal, or Mutilation of Government Records (link). The first of these is of course the most serious, and, importantly, for the purposes of Proof of Coup, relates to the illegal possession of “national defense information.”
Equally relevant to the subject of this book, however, is the fact that as an ongoing dispute between the National Archives and Donald Trump expanded toward the end of 2021 into a dispute between Trump and DOJ—ultimately leading to a visit to Mar-a-Lago by the FBI in February 2022, a federal grand jury subpoena in June 2022, and finally a court-authorized FBI search in August 2022, the former president ceased relying on the seven men he had officially delegated to handle (after the departure of Lyons) all post-term issues relating to his presidential records, and turned instead to two members from the BLT Prime Team—John Solomon and Kash Patel, the latter of whom of course has an extensive background at the Pentagon and in America’s national intelligence apparatus, making his selection by Trump at a time Trump was illegally in possession of many highly classified national-defense documents telling.
In a recent investigative report on this still unfolding drama, the Washington Post revealed just how ardently Trump has tried to hide from federal investigators the classified documents he took from the White House. In January 2022, the president turned over to the National Archives 15 boxes of materials wrongly taken from D.C., and in doing so averred that he had nothing more to turn over; in June 2022 it was discovered, pursuant to a federal grand jury subpoena, that Trump was in fact illicitly hiding between 24 and 36 additional boxes of critical government records, after which discovery Trump’s lawyers said to the FBI that they “had identified all the documents they believed could be considered government property.” Soon enough, however, the FBI determined that it had likely been lied to by one or both of Trump lawyers Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb (the former of whom, it is worth noting, is also a lawyer for Steve Bannon as the former top Trump presidential adviser seeks to hide from Congress documents and testimony related to his conversations with Trump before January 6).
As readers will be aware, lying to the FBI is a federal felony—indeed, one that many Trump advisers have run afoul of in the past.
After the representations by Trump’s attorneys to the FBI turned out to be incorrect, the result was an early August search of Mar-a-Lago that not only uncovered at least 11 additional boxes of taxpayer-owned materials illegally in Trump’s possession, but, as noted above, perhaps the most troubling subcategory of Trump’s hidden cache of materials to date: seized documents being marked as classified and therefore (it can be assumed) impossible for anyone to have believed could be legally kept from the FBI.
The total number of boxes of contraband (that we know of so far) that were taken by the former president after his failed coup attempt is somewhere between 50 and 62.
That Trump, while in office and possibly afterward, had more mechanisms for hiding and destroying documents and records then perhaps any U.S. president in history underscores the possibility that there may be many more stolen documents for the FBI to find in other locations besides Mar-a-Lago—for instance, Trump’s residences in Trump Tower and at his Bedminster (NJ) country club—or that certain documents may have been transferred to the possession of one of Trump’s newest official record-keepers, Kash Patel and John Solomon.
What is deeply concerning about Patel’s intersection with this developing news story is not only the fact that he’s one of the key figures in the present narrative about the January 6 coup plot at the Pentagon, but that he became a critical co-conspirator to Trump in the asportation and concealment of federal documents at Mar-a-Lago on June 22, 2022—the very day the FBI subpoenaed video surveillance footage from Mar-a-Largo to determine who, if anyone, had been rooting through or removing materials from Trump’s hidden cache of government property without the proper clearances.
The clear implication of the concurrence of a federal subpoena for surveillance data and Patel’s sudden appointment as a qualified keeper of Trump’s records eighteen months after he left office is that the footage now in the possession of the FBI may show Patel (or some agent of Patel) illegally accessing highly classified materials inside Trump’s country club. (Presumably, the same implication applies to Solomon.)
Since his addition to the list of Trump’s official recordkeepers, Patel has attempted in print interviews and television appearances to lend his testimonial support to an ever-growing list of transparently false excuses by Trump for having apparently committed federal crimes. CNN has helpfully compiled a list of a few of these attempted self-excupations, all of which are for one reason or another legally null and void, factually without support, morally and ethically bankrupt, or some combination of these three.
While to a certain degree Patel’s involvement in all of the above simply underscores the level of trust Trump has in him now—and appears to have had in him when he urgently sent him to the Pentagon in the immediate aftermath of his election loss in the 2020 presidential election—given the recent reporting that some of the documents apparently stolen by the former president included nuclear secrets, there’s reason to fear that Patel is entangled in this narrative on bases that extend well beyond a matter of trust.
As was exhaustively detailed in the 2019 book Proof of Conspiracy, Michael Flynn and Patel associate Derek Harvey (a former White House aide to Flynn) were both deeply involved, as was then-president Trump, in a multinational “grand bargain” that would have resulted in significant financial profit for Flynn and the transmission of sensitive nuclear technology to the strongmen-run countries of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and The United Arab Emirates. This nuclear technology would be capable of fulfilling the two major nuclear ambitions of Mohammed bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Abdel Fattah El-Sisi (Egypt), and Mohammed bin Zayed (UAE): (1) the gradual evolution of the Saudi, Egyptian, and Emirati energy markets away from crude oil and toward nuclear power (to be housed in new, Russian-built nuclear power plants) and (2) new nuclear weapons programs in these countries intended to aid them in a long-sought-after nuclear arms race with Iran. Other nations involved in this multinational grand bargain, each with their own set of priorities and anticipated positive outcomes, were Russia, Bahrain, and Israel (the last of which hoped to gain peace accords with Muslim nations in the Middle East by transferring sensitive military technology—particularly technology for spying—to “MBS” and “MBZ”, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, respectively).
Proof of Coup won’t go further into this complex web of interrelationships, as it has already formed the backbone of a 600-page work of nonfiction, but suffice to say that this clandestine arrangement regarding nuclear secrets would in 2019 also form the underlying premise of the Trump-Ukraine scandal detailed in Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020)—importantly for our present purposes, the scandal during which Kash Patel and John Solomon served on the BLT Prime Team as Trump agents who were seeking to steal the 2020 election with the illicit assistance of foreign nationals.
While we cannot yet know the contents of all the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI, let alone whether there are more materials or misdirections from Trump lawyers like Christina Bobb still to be discovered—and while it’s likewise impossible to predict whether the current criminal investigation into Donald Trump, which has already sailed past the lowest standard of proof in the criminal justice system as to at least three major federal felonies, will ultimately result in any indictments—what the current super-scandal at Mar-a-Lago certainly presents is the concurrence of several elements that have been central to the narrative of Proof of Coup: Kash Patel; national defense information; classified intelligence; the illegal handling (up to the willful destruction) of potentially incriminating federal evidence; a conspiracy of deceit or even criminal conduct jointly involving Patel and Donald Trump; themes relating to the theft of U.S. presidential elections; public and private misrepresentations by both Trump lawyers and associates; and, above all, the growing sense that Donald Trump is committed to turning his personal legal troubles and largely venal political ambitions into a cause célèbre that could plunge the United States into a full-blown civil war.
And this fast-gathering fire is being fueled by figures who were central to Trump’s post-election coup plot.
First and foremost among them, of course, is Patel, a man who is so fanatically devoted to Trump that he even wrote (and yes, this is real) a book that aims to teach Trump’s 2020 post-election “Big Lie” to schoolchildren. Entitled The Plot Against the King—a title that itself underscores Patel’s belief that Trump’s authority over America should in essence be absolute—Patel’s book may be one of the creepiest works of children’s fiction in the history of the United States, which this author observes as a longtime literary columnist and book reviewer at Huffpost. Certainly, it underscores why the former president would have wanted Patel at the Pentagon on January 6, at a time he knew that the actions (or inaction) of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership could well be the deciding factor in the success of a national coup plot, and why he simultaneously schemed to install Patel atop America’s intelligence community as the nation’s new CIA director.
Patel has now emerged, voluntarily, as a key defense witness in any future criminal prosecution of Trump. He insists that the former president had a standing order—albeit one never committed to writing or even verbalized, unless Patel should now claim under oath, for the first time, that it was—that any documents he removed from the White House were automatically declassified (an unlikely claim that is nevertheless irrelevant in this instance, as the statutes under which Trump is being investigated would apply to him whether the documents in his possession were classified or not).
But Patel is not alone among the Team Kraken co-conspirators who continue to do all manner of dubious legwork for the legally beleaguered Trump.
As Business Insider reports, Team Kraken adjunct member and former Peter Navarro aide Garrett Ziegler—the man who claims to have co-written the false election-fraud report Trump tweeted about the moment Team Kraken left his company in the early hours of December 19, 2020—recently published the names of all the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago. Similar information, reports Business Insider, was published by the Steve Bannon-associated website Breitbart, using documents that were apparently given to it by Trump with the aim of punishing the FBI via doxxing (thus endangering the lives of the FBI agents who recovered stolen government records at Mar-A-Lago).
And of course Trump’s December 8, 2020 pardon of Michael Flynn—which came as the latter was leading Team Kraken in pursuing a coup plot at the Pentagon—may start to loom larger than ever should Trump’s intentions with respect to the highly classified nuclear secrets in his possession at Mar-a-Lago have related to Flynn’s clandestine bargain with Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other foreign nations.
More broadly, the audacity of Donald Trump absconding from D.C. with at least 50 boxes of government records following the sudden resignation of White House Staff Secretary Derek Lyons—and in the midst of coup plots at DOJ, the Pentagon, and in at least six GOP-led state legislatures—underlines the core premise of Proof of Coup: that there is no evidence whatsoever that Donald Trump nixed his plans to misuse the resources of the Pentagon to stay in power on December 18, 2020, nor that he even has the capacity or wherewithal to brook his own ambitions in this way. Indeed, as long as there are men like Kash Patel, John Solomon, and Michael Flynn willing to participate in the seediest components of Trump’s various illicit schemes—such as Team Kraken or the politically compromised civilian-leadership cabal at the Pentagon on January 6—the forward momentum of the former president’s schemes to undermine American democracy will not be arrested.
24. January 6: Part II
All of the foregoing provides a critical context for Donald Trump’s planned use of the Pentagon on and before January 6. January 6 was, for President Trump, a chance to replay June 2020 in a way that would redound to his spectacular benefit, rather than, as had been the case in June, his detriment. All the key pieces were in place: a protest in D.C. that his team had premeditatedly plotted to frame as a left-wing operation; a night-before discussion of “ten thousand” troops in the streets with a pliant Secretary of Defense; weeks of prior discussion about the Insurrection Act, Trumpist irregulars in D.C. willing to instantly exploit any invocation of the Act that came to pass; and an opportunity to use a now fanatically devoted civilian leadership over at the Pentagon to score the biggest political prize a one-term president could ever hope for—a second term. In this view, it is stunning to think that Americans don’t already understand how large the Pentagon loomed in Donald Trump’s chaotic, byzantine plans for January 6.
But due to the awesome scope of the events on January 6—the violence, the chaos, and the desecrations of that day—it’s perhaps understandable that some Americans now suppose that Trump’s coup plot at the Pentagon was no longer extant by the time the Capitol was breached. There’s simply too much already “there” in the events of that horrible day to think about the pentagon-shaped building across the Potomac River.
But in fact, as we’ve seen, the evidence suggests the Pentagon was critical to Trump’s January 6 plans. And the evidence of this appears to be a bottomless fount for federal investigators.
Below, for instance, is an excerpt from the presentation on the Waldron Plot that Phil Waldron gave to GOP members of Congress on Insurrection Eve (January 5, 2021):
Recalling here that Waldron had repeatedly met with Trump and spoken with his new and uncommonly pliant chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days before this January 5 briefing, with the document above Waldron is telling the members of the Republican Party’s congressional caucus that in short order a single individual “will be appointed with authority from the POTUS to direct the actions of select federalized National Guard units”, and that this “Lead Counter” moreover “will be appointed [by Trump] with….support from DOJ, DHS, and other U.S. government agencies as needed to complete a recount of the legal paper ballots” from the 2020 presidential election.
Even this brief excerpt of a 38-page document presented, page-by-page, to members of Congress goes on to declare that certain components of the Waldron Plot “will” be directly aided by the U.S. Marshals Service as well as DHS and the National Guard.
While at first blush Waldron’s January 5 promises to Congress regarding what Trump “will” do may seem like mere bluster, they suddenly begin to seem like something else altogether when one considers where his presentation of these bold promises appears to have been made.
On January 5, Waldron attended Trump’s war room at the Trump International Hotel, which appears to be the location in which he gave his presentation of the document above (a conclusion we can reach on the basis of a confession made on the matter by Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, which confession Tuberville felt compelled to give in response to exclusive reporting here at Proof). And who was present in the war room on January 5, according to reporting at Proof and elsewhere?
Michael Flynn
Phil Waldron
Michael Lindell
Peter Navarro
Rudy Giuliani
Sidney Powell*
Eduardo Bolsonaro*
*Per reports and eyewitness accounts detailed at Proof here.
In short, most of the top figures on Team Kraken appear to have been present. And at least Michael Flynn was so concerned about being publicly associated with the Trump International Hotel war room on January 5 that in early February 2021 he threatened this author with a lawsuit. Navarro, directly contradicting war room attendee Charles Herbster—thereafter Trump’s pick in the Nebraska gubernatorial race—would also claim not to have been present, as would 2016 Trump Deputy Campaign Manager David Bossie (also placed at the event by Herbster). Giuliani would tell journalists he needed to “check his calendar” and would thereafter respond to no questions on the matter. It suddenly seemed like no one wanted to admit being in the Team Trump-Team Kraken war room on Insurrection Eve—perhaps because, as we now know (having seen the document Waldron presented to members of Congress on that date and in that place), what was discussed thereat was the Waldron Plot. And not even a modified form of it, but in fact exactly as it had always been. Indeed, it was the same when it was presented in Trump’s private residence on January 5, 2021 as it had been when presented in Trump’s government residence on December 18, 2020. And in both cases, every outward indication given by Trump was that it had his seal of approval.
That’s right: Donald Trump’s January 5 war room at the Trump International Hotel was held in his personal residence, the Trump Town House inside the hotel. This means that the excerpt of the Waldron Plot imaged above was delivered by Phil Waldron as an invited guest in Trump’s home, during an event attended by (among many others) Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and his wife-to-be (also a top presidential adviser) Kimberly Guilfoyle. Also present was Trump’s 2016 Campaign Manager, Corey Lewandowski and a number of still-unidentified U.S. senators. At some point during the meeting Guilfoyle even called Stop the Steal leader Ali Alexander. All—with the possible exception of Alexander, the time of whose call-in remains unknown—were in prime position to receive Team Kraken’s presentation of the Waldron Plot.
Of course, Donald Trump not only provided a space for Phil Waldron to present his insurrectionist briefing on Insurrection Eve, but owned the suite of rooms inside Trump International Hotel that had been rented out by Patrick Byrne (and been the main headquarters of Team Kraken) for—by January 5, 2021—at least two months.
And still more than this, on Insurrection Day Trump incorporated the alleged findings undergirding the Waldron Plot into his internationally broadcast speech at the White House Ellipse. This little-known synchronicity between Trump and Team Kraken is made all the more stunning when one considers some other text in the Team Kraken presentation Trump was citing (false) data from:
Recall here that, by January 6, Waldron had been in regular direct contact with Donald Trump (and Mark Meadows) and had spoken to GOP members of Congress on at least three occasions about all the things he said he knew the president was about to do. It is against this backdrop that on Insurrection Day Trump repeatedly cited Waldron’s presentation before a national and international audience, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the presentation included in its “recommendations” the expectation that Trump would “declare a national security emergency”—an apparent prelude to martial law.
Strangest of all, however, is not any of the above information—disturbing as it is—but the title of Team Kraken’s report:
That a report recommending Trump “declare [a] national security emergency” should be titled “Options for 6 JAN” is telling—indeed, almost at the level of a confession.
While one might at first think that Team Kraken’s January 5 recommendation that Trump initiate the process of martial law—a requirement for the National Guard or the U.S. Armed Forces being used to seize voting machines—related to its usual, haphazardly researched and presented allegations of election fraud, this would not explain why (a) Trump announced his endorsement of January 6 as a focal point for Trumpist rage within minutes of Team Kraken leaving his presence in the wee hours of December 19, or (b) why Waldron titled his summation of the Waldron Plot “Options for 6 JAN.” Taking these two facts in conjunction, it is clear that far from dropping plans to declare a national emergency and thereafter use the Pentagon to seize voting machines on December 18, 2020, Trump and Team Kraken’s plan was to use the events of January 6 themselves to weaponize the Pentagon. The declaration of a national security emergency was indeed “an option for [the expected riot on] January 6” rather than an option responsive to any supposed election fraud from three months earlier.
But it would only be an option if the Pentagon held back its forces from relieving the Capitol on January 6—a decision that would produce a national security emergency by permitting the Capitol to be overrun. Those who still don’t understand why Trump might have wanted Mike Pence hanged on January 6 (as we now know he did) do not appreciate, perhaps, how quickly the Vice President of the United States being killed on that day would have led to the declaration of a national security emergency of just the sort the Waldron Plot demanded. Indeed, under such horrible circumstances, who would even have questioned Trump for doing so?
Recall, here, that Trump’s apparent last meeting at the White House on January 5 was with his top two political appointees at the Pentagon: Chris Miller and Kash Patel.
Recall, too, that the only known subjects of their discussion were: (1) whether or not (i.e., under what circumstances) Miller and Patel would allow the National Guard to be deployed on the following day, and (2) Iran, one of the focuses of the false allegations of foreign election interference Team Kraken—led by Michael Flynn—was then using to justify the seizure of voting machines by the Pentagon.
Recall, also, that the last two men Trump wanted intel from on Insurrection Eve were Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.
The Waldron Plot Beyond Team Kraken
Remember that the primary motivating factor behind the Oath Keepers’ assault on the Capitol on January 6 was their belief—at a time they were in contact with numerous individuals from both Donald Trump’s inner circle (e.g., Stone) and Michael Flynn’s (e.g., Robert Patrick Lewis)—that Trump was going to declare a national emergency on January 6 precisely as the Waldron Plot had outlined in its “options for January 6.”
Remember too that the primary function of Trump’s sole Insurrection Day (as opposed to Insurrection Eve) war room—the “command center” (as Trump lawyer John Eastman called it) at the Willard Hotel—was to falsely put out the narrative that the Capitol was under attack by left-wing agitators, a narrative which if widely believed could have been a precursor to Trump announcing precisely the national emergency both Waldron and the Oath Keepers. Trump had already made clear to Miller and Patel on three successive nights leading up to January 6 that if there were any sign of leftist attacks on his supporters on that day he wanted the National Guard deployed.
It’s with all this in mind that Proof of Coup reiterates the stunning fact first reported on by New York Magazine and others in mid-January 2021: that the last known draft of Team Kraken’s plot, a plot still extant on January 15, 2021, held the following words: “Insurrection Act now as a result of the assault on the [Capitol]….[and] martial law if necessary….make clear this [stolen election] is [the responsibility of] China/Iran.”
25. Conclusion
How concerned were the uniformed personnel at the Pentagon about the infiltration of the Department of Defense by Trump sycophants in the run-up to January 6, 2021?
Very, it seems.
According to an investigative report by Vanity Fair, when Trump canned Secretary of Defense Mark Esper for questioning his (and William Barr’s) handling of the mid-2020 Lafayette Square protest, installed the careerist Chris Miller in his place, promoted Ezra Cohen-Watnick to oversight of much of the nation’s intelligence apparatus, and sent Kash Patel from the White House to stand at Secretary Miller’s side at all times,
the Joint Chiefs [of Staff] were creating their own “security compartments” [at the Pentagon] containing operational planning details “for the express purpose of hiding key information from career civilian and political leaders in the Pentagon”—up to and including the Secretary of Defense.
It’s impossible to overstate how unnerved the United States Armed Forces would have to have been about Trump’s politicization of the Pentagon—even before November of 2020—for them to act in this fashion.
Interestingly, it was Cohen-Watnick and Patel themselves who drew the attention of Vanity Fair to this phenomenon, which was subsequently corroborated by others at the Pentagon—including career civil servants (i.e., non-political appointees). The fact that Cohen-Watnick and Patel were the first to draw their interviewer’s attention to this tension between uniformed personnel and civilian leaders at the Pentagon is telling.
It further confirms, and from the mouths of the principals themselves, that on January 6 the triumvirate of Miller, Cohen-Watnick, and Patel—and quite possibly Miller’s immediate subordinate and fellow Trump political appointee Ryan McCarthy, also—saw themselves as being at war with Mark Milley and other uniformed personnel at the Pentagon. Cohen-Watnick even told Vanity Fair that he deemed his uniformed counterparts “dangerous and irresponsible”, which might give one some cause to be empathetic to Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon if, in fact, it was not the actions of they themselves and their political patron Trump that, as we’ve now seen, created the very real emergencies within the nation’s military complex (including the debacle in Lafayette Square) that led Milley and others in uniform to feel they had to “compartmentalize” some internal Pentagon processes.
This may explain why Donald Trump’s political appointees seem to have immediately disappeared into Chris Miller’s office once the Capitol came under attack. While Milley at some point joined them, we do not know for how long, and certainly none of the four chief Trump political appointees at the Pentagon joined the uniformed men who were on the 130-minute open call with the Capitol’s defenders—Piatt and Flynn—despite some of them apparently subsequently telling O’Donnell (falsely) that at least one of their number, McCarthy, had done so. Nor did Mark Milley appear to have any visibility into the conversations Patel was having “nonstop” with Trump’s chief of staff on January 6; for his part, Milley appears to have had no contact with Trump all day.
We now know what Patel was doing for at least part of the time he was with Miller on January 6 (coordinating political messaging with Meadows); what Miller himself was doing (trying to get Trump on the phone so that he could confirm that he was doing Trump’s bidding to his satisfaction); what Cohen-Watnick apparently had been doing prior to going to Miller’s office on January 6 (providing the Pentagon with an almost laughably erroneous intelligence assessment of the threat to the Capitol); and what McCarthy should have been doing on January 6 (overseeing the 130-minute open call with the Capitol’s defenders rather than leaving two soldiers outside the chain-of-command—one of them the brother of a man in open revolt against the United States government—running a conference call they’d no business being on in the first place.
Even putting aside all that Proof of Coup has now revealed, just this last fact alone—what Trump’s political appointees chose to do, and where they chose to be, and who they chose to correspond with (and not correspond with) after the Capitol was placed under immediate threat of an armed invasion—could well qualify as a coup inside the Pentagon far more robust in its dimensions and far-reaching in its implications than anything that happened with Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, and Ken Klukowski at the Department of Justice between early December 2020 and Insurrection Day. We know now that Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon saw themselves as being in a war with the rest of the Pentagon, and they made clear on January 6 that their side in that war was Donald Trump’s and not the federal government’s writ large or the U.S. Capitol’s in particular.
In the aftermath of January 6, some of these men may have felt ashamed about what they did on that terrible day, perhaps even apprehending that it was in the nature of a soft coup. One of them (Miller) began lying to media, both mainstream and far-right, about what had happened. Two others (Patel and Cohen-Watnick) somehow managed to ensure that there would be no record of their conduct on January 6 in the report of the DoD-IG. Presumably, someone in the civilian infrastructure of the Pentagon made sure that all of the electronic devices used by Trump’s political appointees on January 6 were wiped clean—even if it required breaking the law to do so. There was, in short, a concerted effort to clear the historical record of what appears to have been an earnest attempt to use the Pentagon to assist in a coup: not by deploying the National Guard, but by doing the equally unthinkable and refusing to deploy them when it was obvious to everyone in America with a TV that it needed to happen and immediately in D.C. on January 6.
We don’t know what would have happened had the planned multiple-day occupation of the Capitol succeeded; if the rioters had gotten their hands on even a single elected official; if police officers and guardsmen from Maryland and Virginia had not arrived to relieve the Capitol over an hour before the D.C. National Guard appeared; if the U.S. Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department had put up less of a fight; if the initial Capitol attackers had realized far earlier than they did that if they simply went around to the other side of the building—the front of the building—they would be able to enter the Capitol almost immediately; if the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms had been just a hair slower in evacuating most of the members of Congress to a safe room. But certainly we’ve no indication at all that, had all or any of these things come to pass, Donald Trump would have stood up in his private dining room at the White House—where he’d been watching Fox News for hours—and acted. Nor did Miller (or for that matter McCarthy, Patel, or Cohen-Watnick) give any indication on January 6 that they were willing to make decisions that directly affected their patron’s political fortunes before they’d gotten some sort of a public signal from him that they were cleared to perform their duties as their oaths required.
That some of these men subsequently blamed the Capitol defenders for their own seemingly politically motivated and highly calculated inaction—let alone that they also sought to blame peaceful anti-police brutality protesters from an event that had occurred more than half a year earlier—is a lasting stain on the Pentagon that won’t soon be removed.
The coverup at the Pentagon began so quickly after January 6 that by the time Michael Lindell showed up at the White House with a copy of a plan whose particulars—at least in part—Cohen-Watnick admits Trump’s political appointees at the Pentagon were aware of and on board with, Miller was implying to a Vanity Fair reporter that he didn’t even know who Lindell was. All the while, Team Kraken continued its work at two hotels and a suite of offices it had rented out many weeks earlier a short distance from the Pentagon—lush hidey-holes where it concocted eldritch plans coincidentally requiring the assistance and goodwill of Trump political appointees working in that very building. Some of those very appointees had, of course, been contacted directly by Team Kraken, for instance when Flynn called Cohen-Watnick twice (that we know of) in December 2020.
It wasn’t until August 3, 2022, however, that a non-partisan D.C. watchdog group—American Oversight—asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the deletion of critical January 6 evidence by the Pentagon. It’d be almost unthinkable if this didn’t happen, and immediately.
While we do not know the names of every Pentagon official whose phone was wiped, we can note certain commonalities among the names we do know: Miller; McCarthy; Patel; Paul Ney, former Pentagon general counsel; and James McPherson, former general counsel of the Army. This group represents—in short—Donald Trump’s top three political appointees at the Pentagon and their (government) lawyers. For his part, Attorney Ney has said that he “do[es] not know why” his phone was wiped after he turned it in upon leaving the Pentagon for the last time. Of course, one reason would be statements made to him or McPherson by Trump political appointees as they resolutely declined to aid the Capitol on January 6 in a timely fashion; another would be the fact that Trump’s political appointees a the Pentagon thereafter dealt with Pentagon Inspector General Sean O’Donnell in a way that casts abiding doubt on their honesty and integrity.
It remains clear that American major media does not understand the gravity of what happened at the Pentagon on and before January 6. In late April of this year, when 2,319 text messages received and sent by Mark Meadows were acquired by CNN, it didn’t highlight (or quote) even a single message between Meadows and the Pentagon.
This lack of attention to the actions of the Pentagon is made all the more stunning by a simple fact this book has repeated several times already: the Pentagon sent relief to the Capitol only after Trump’s coup attempt had failed. Indeed, as ProPublica details, “FBI SWAT teams [and] police officers from surrounding counties” arrived to relieve the Capitol at 4:00 PM ET—fully a hundred minutes before the Pentagon’s aid arrived.
The preceding sentence is worth reading twice, particularly for the phrase police officers from surrounding counties. That’s right: local police departments from the states surrounding the District of Columbia responded to Capitol Hill faster on January 6 than the Pentagon did, despite the latter being located just three miles from the Capitol.
As then U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund would say in a public letter, “I still cannot fathom why, in the midst of an armed insurrection which was broadcast worldwide on television, it took the Department of Defense over three hours to approve an urgent request for National Guard support.”
This is not, as Chief Sund implies, something that just happens. It takes a great deal of premeditation and malice to see a political opportunity in a domestic terror attack on America.
Fortunately, the tide is finally turning against a former president who has employed witness tampering, destruction of evidence, bribes, backroom political machinations, abuse of authority, refusals to cooperate, and dangerous public influence campaigns to escape accountability for his actions both in and out of political office. As CNN reports, a federal court has just granted a House committee access to Trump’s tax returns; Trump just pleaded the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times rather than answer questions about his business practices in an investigation by New York state Attorney General Letitia James; and Trump’s political fortunes have almost certainly taken a hit by a likely increase in public perception that he is hiding from the law. As CNN notes,
Another consideration that ha[s] been discussed [in Trump’s inner circle], the people familiar say, is the political implications of not answering questions [in his New York case] as Trump is widely expected to announce that he will run for president in 2024. While campaigning in 2016, Trump suggested not answering questions was a sign of guilt. At a campaign stop in Iowa in 2016, Trump said, “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”
The number of Americans who perceive Trump as innocent in any sense of the word is dwindling, to be sure, but what remains on the table is a robust presentation of how the crimes committed by the former president go well behind the financial crimes he has long been alleged to have committed, extending to include offenses exponentially more dangerous to America and the world: most notably, clandestine coordination with his civilian leadership at the Pentagon to end American democracy and install himself as an authoritarian ruler over America’s citizenry, with elections conducted under the conditions he selects and their results honored only if they favor him and his party—the latter of which is now almost entirely an extension of his capricious will. As journalist Frida Ghitis recently wrote about the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago,
When news broke this week that the FBI had executed a search warrant at former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, a wave of ominous warnings exploded across right-wing media, fueled by the former president and his acolytes.
Trump called it “the weaponization of the Justice system”, arguing that a criminal case against him threatened to unravel American democracy. It was a curious claim for a man who launched his 2016 presidential campaign on the chant of “Lock her up!”—calling for the imprisonment of his then-political rival Hillary Clinton.
The claim that enforcing the laws against a former president was a modern crossing of the Rubicon—a turning point in history that would inflict an unhealable wound on U.S. democracy—was one of two warnings [that has been] unsettling the country since Monday [August 8, 2022].
The second one is more of a threat: Trump’s most militant followers are openly calling for vengeance, even violence, while his suit-and-tie backers stoke their anger—much as they did before January 6—claiming the republic is under the gravest of authoritarian threats.
They warn, in their coda, that the GOP will retaliate against Democrats if and/or when Republicans take power again.
….
While we shouldn’t play into Donald Trump’s false claims of the weaponization of law enforcement, we should be fearful of how his supporters are responding to the FBI search. In fact, the threats of violence in response to an FBI investigation serve as proof—as if more were needed—that the ecosystem surrounding Trump is a danger to the nation.
Trump is now considered likely to announce a 2024 presidential bid in a matter of days. In September, the House January 6 Committee will launch a new set of public hearings about Trump’s misconduct on, before, and after January 6, and there is every reason to expect that some of the information to be disclosed will involve Trump and the Pentagon—a major preview of which evidence has just been supplied here. In November, Americans will go to the polls in what is unquestionably not a mere “mid-term” election but yet another national election in which Trump is effectively on the ballot. Americans have consistently voted against Trump: he lost the popular vote in 2016; his party was inundated by a massive “blue wave” of Democratic congressional wins in 2018 (a wave so big that CNN has termed it a “blue tsunami”); and he lost the popular vote in 2020 (indeed, by more than twice as much as he lost the popular vote in 2016). But given the draconian gerrymandering measures the Republican Party has enacted to ensure that its candidates get to pick their voters and not the other way around—to ensure, in short, that America’s government no longer reflects the will of its people, a catastrophically precarious and potentially terminally dangerous position for any democracy to be in—it’ll take a level of Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent turnout in November 2022 the likes of which the nation has never seen before in a so-called “mid-term” election for America’s small-d “democrats” to keep the authoritarian barbarians on the proper side of the gate of American democracy.
It is the hope of this author that Proof of Coup has taken a step toward illuminating for American voters the facts and circumstances of the idiosyncratic military coup the United States came perilously close to suffering just last year. No one should console themselves with the idea that it wasn’t a close call. It was; it was very close, indeed.
America may not get many more bites at the apple in its thus-far rather weak effort to save itself. If Donald Trump again occupies the Oval Office, every American should presume that he will never voluntarily leave it again. And with the awesome power of the American military at his disposal—and a plan authored by Steve Bannon to use “4,000 shock troops” to “dismantle” the federal government as soon as Trump is let back inside it, leaving in its wake nothing but Trump’s most fanatical and (as he has styled it) Nazi-like adherents—it’s not even clear who if anyone would be in a position to restore our democracy should it end with a second Trump inauguration in 2025.
Huge thanks for the work! Just got home from knee replacement surgery and not sure what hurts more, the knee or the knowledge that our democracy was being pulled apart by these miscreants. I'll read it with a combo of terror and interest.
There are other deliberate omissions concerning the direction of events leading up to the coup. Where was the FBI prior to and during this? Why did they not warn about the looming threat of right-wing extremists? Instead, they worked with Proud Boys to gather information about the threat of Antifa. Also, everyone on Twitter knew something was up for 1/6, and the FBI was warned about it as well, but they took no real action. The FBI appears to be complicit at the highest levels. What is needed is a massive after-action report on the entire actions of the government at the agency level, including agency shortcomings. I was a writer on the Gulf War Air Power Survey, which was a postmortem of the use of and effect of air power during the Gulf War. It was a study directed and paid for by DOD. Perhaps the President could direct a similar effort, staffed by reasonable, nonpartisan, experienced individuals not currently employed by the government. PS hope your work reaches the office of Jack Smith.