Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection
Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection
This fourth book in the New York Times-bestselling Proof series is a fully sourced 250-page exposé on the January 6 coup plot at the Pentagon—with hundreds of citations, photographs, videos, and more.
The first five chapters of this full-length book are free to read right now. But you can read the entirety of the book for free simply by trying Proof for a week. To do so, click the button below.
{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).}
Full Book Cover
Table of Contents
Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection contains the following chapters:
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: Though the order of the 25 chapters above is carefully arranged, readers can proceed directly to the chapter of their choice by typing into the Ctrl+F search box, in succession, a chapter number, a period, a space, and the first letter of the chapter’s title.}
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 public (i.e. taxpayer-owned) 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 all of his initial preparations (beginning in the summer of 2020) to steal the upcoming presidential election through false claims of election fraud and extended to the period immediately 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 by the many federal investigators who had in the past and would soon be again investigating him and 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 a Trump appointee (FBI director Christopher Wray), the agents weren’t just idly searching for any potential remnants of Trump’s secret stash of records in the aftermath of only some of them having been returned to the National Archives after months of tortured negotiations. Rather, CNN now reports, federal law enforcement had already demonstrated probable cause to a federal judge that Trump had not only not turned over all the documents he’d said he had (and had publicly committed to turning over), but in fact may even have instructed some of his agents—in the legal sense of the term—to lie to federal investigators about the sensitive, 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 very 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 preparation 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 would all directly (or indirectly, through one of their number, Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama) thereafter seek 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 had secretly 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 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, Trump ignored), leading some to speculate that his legal team now believes Meadows has become 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 know that both Trump and his lawyers are now baselessly accusing the FBI of planting evidence at Mar-a-Lago; we know 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, by confirming it’s something his father did while in office—of green-lighting a federal search of a former political rival (one that in fact the now-president first learned about via social media); we know that Trump and his lawyers are inexplicably hiding the “warrant return” (i.e., the record of documents sought and seized that Trump and his lawyers were given by the FBI on-site at Mar-a-Lago) even as they falsely claim to have no idea why Mar-a-Lago was searched; we know, as noted above, 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 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 two sequences of events in particular along with (it goes without saying) 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—false information whose would-be purveyors and would-be receivers 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 acting as a clandestine Trump political agent. (He’s long since been fired from employment in institutional media.) Kash Patel’s story is even more interesting, however, as 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.
The massive Proof report on the coup plot at the Pentagon aims to remedy this lacuna.
{Note: Per an exclusive Newsweek investigation released as this Proof report was in its final editing, the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago “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 of 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 report—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).