It was obvious that Donald
Trump was likely to lose the 2020 presidential election at 11:20 p.m. EST on
election night, when the Fox News Decision Desk called Arizona for Joe Biden.
Sensing that they’d been dealt a death blow, the Trump campaign had conniption fits when Arizona was called by their network of choice. Efforts to pressure Fox to take the projection back failed. By the end of the night, the AP followed suit.
Biden also won Nebraska’s 2nd district on election day, giving him 238 electoral college votes. To get to the magic number of 270, he just needed to win Wisconsin (10), Michigan (16), and Nevada, Georgia, or Pennsylvania.
With so many routes to 270, Biden’s likelihood of winning shot up to 80% at electionbettingodds.com by the morning of November 4. That afternoon-into-evening, pre-2016 patterns re-asserted themselves when Wisconsin and Michigan were called for Biden, the latter by over 150,000 votes. Trump’s campaign team made noise about challenging Biden’s 20,000-ballot Wisconsin win, but as former Wisconsin governor and Trump ally Scott Walker pointed out at the time, a recount was highly unlikely to change the result.
With Wisconsin and Michigan in Biden’s column, Democrats needed just six
more electoral college votes to retake the White House, exactly the number in
Nevada. Biden’s chances of losing Nevada (a state
Democrats had won in the previous three election cycles) were remote, and
Pennsylvania appeared to be a
really good bet for Biden, based on Trump’s
narrowing margin and the proportion of votes which remained to be counted in
heavily-Democratic precincts.
Joe Biden was officially declared the winner of Pennsylvania and
president-elect of the United States on Saturday, November 7, 2020.
Biden would go on to win Nevada and Georgia, giving him 306 electoral
college votes—well above the necessary threshold of 270—to go with a commanding
seven million-ballot popular vote win.
If anything, it was surprising that the race was
even close, given that Biden came into election day with an
8.4% national lead.
Among the possible causes for the polling errors
were GOP
voter suppression, the reluctance of some Trump supporters to talk to pollsters, and Trump’s
momentum at the end of the race.
Sifting through the election results, it was evident
that record
levels of culture war polarization stirred up by Donald
Trump turned right-leaning whites out in droves, making Iowa and Ohio (which
were predicted to be close) Republican blowouts, and Biden’s Wisconsin
win much
narrower than pollsters thought it would be.
At the same time, racial divisiveness backfired
among young voters, suburbanites, and people of color, driving Georgia and
Arizona to Joe Biden.
Given voter turnout demographics, the results of
the 2020 presidential election were relatively orderly and predictable. Biden’s
victory was more conclusive than either of W.
Bush’s wins and Trump’s 2016 victory, and his
popular-vote margin exceeded Obama’s 2012 re-election.
In any functional democracy, the Pennsylvania
call would have ended the election drama, triggered a graceful concession, and
set the presidential transition in motion.
But America had the unique distinction of being
governed by Donald J. Trump, a deeply wounded narcissist with an iron grip on
the levers of power.
***
Trump’s disinformation campaign had begun long
before the election with constant repetition of the false claim that mail
balloting was inherently corrupt and that the 2020 election would be “rigged” against him, a way to pre-emptively delegitimize a
potential loss at the polls. Trump repeated this flagrant lie
so often that many Republican voters took it at face value, prepping his
followers to believe the many lies to come.
Outside of the right-wing echo chamber, it was common
knowledge that Republican-leaning, in-person votes would be counted first in a
lot of competitive states, creating a “red
mirage” (the false impression that Trump was
going to win), after which there would be a “blue
shift” as more Democratic votes—mail votes in
particular—were counted. Three days before the 2020 election, on October
31, 2020 Trump strategist Steve Bannon told “a group of associates” that Trump was going to exploit his base’s programmed ignorance by
staging a big announcement not long after polls closed, while the red mirage
was at its peak:
“What Trump’s gonna do is just
declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s
a winner….He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Jonathan Swan of Axios broke a story about this strategy on November 1, two days before
the election. According to Swan, “President Trump has told confidants he'll
declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he's ‘ahead,’ according to
three sources familiar with his private comments. That's even if the Electoral
College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states
like Pennsylvania.”
Sure enough, egged on by a drunken Rudy Giuliani while ignoring more cautious advisors, Trump held a press conference early on the morning after election day. He claimed that his
shrinking leads in competitive states were fraudulent and said, “Frankly, we
did win this election.”
This would be the opening of an aggressive
campaign to steal the presidency through disinformation,
frivolous
lawsuits, abrupt
personnel changes, and pressure on state and local officials (and Mike Pence).
The core of the campaign was Trump’s
Big Lie, a baseless theory which slotted neatly into the white grievance narrative
believed by big portions of the Republican base. This sense of victimhood was
inflamed by Trump’s allies in state legislatures, Congress, the Republican
Attorneys General Association, right-wing media, and social
media.
While gullible
and crestfallen Republican voters were being conned, Trump’s
chief of staff Mark Meadows operated in
the shadows to keep Joe Biden out of the White
House. Meadows played a double game, assuring some administration members that
Trump would step down when the time came even as he was “directing
traffic” among conspirators to keep Trump in office.
In the two months between Trump’s loss and the insurrection, Meadows was conspired
with at least 34 far-right Republican members of
Congress.
The day after the election (November 4),
as it became obvious Trump would lose, Meadows received a text from Energy Secretary Rick Perry suggesting an “aggressive
strategy” to hold the White House. The plan was to convince at least three
Republican-controlled legislatures in states Trump had lost to shatter long-standing
legal precedent by ignoring the will of their voters and declaring electors
for Trump. Shorting Biden of three states would throw the election to the House
of Representatives, where Republicans had a majority of delegations in more
states than Democrats.
As reported at CNN.com, on November 5 Meadows received a text
from Donald Trump, Jr. which discussed “filing lawsuits and advocating
recounts to prevent certain swing states from certifying their results, as well
as having a handful of Republican state houses put forward slates of fake ‘Trump
electors.’
“If all that failed,
according to the Trump, Jr. text, GOP lawmakers in Congress could simply vote
to reinstall Trump as President on January 6.”
The will of the
American people was irrelevant, according to Trump, Jr.: “It’s very simple….We
have multiple paths. We control them all.”
Meadows received another fake electors
proposal on November 6 from Andy Biggs, a House representative of Arizona, to
which he texted back, “I love it!”
Also on the 6th, Representative Paul
Gosar of Arizona (who would later be tied
to the January 6 “Save America” rally) sent out widely-shared
tweets implying that his states’ tally was fraudulent
due to vote-flipping on Dominion voting machines, a talking point Republicans
would milk to death over the next two months—even though Trump’s lawyers knew
the claim was false. (Right-wing networks
Newsmax, Fox, and One America News would later be sued for presenting disinformation about Dominion’s machines).
While various Republicans publicly implied that
fraud was happening in America’s black and brown Democratic cities, Trump
spokesman Jason Miller texted Mark Meadows and a host of other top officials that the
narrative was false in Pennsylvania, which was about to be declared for Biden:
“One other key data point: In 2016, POTUS received
15.5% of the vote in Philadelphia County. Today he is currently at 18.3%. So he
increased from his performance in 2016. In 2016, Philadelphia County made up
11.3% of the total vote in the state. As it currently stands, Philadelphia
County only makes up 10.2% of the statewide vote tally. So POTUS performed
better in a smaller share. Sen. (Rick) Santorum was just making this point on
CNN - cuts hard against the urban vote stealing narrative.” Philadelphia’s
Republican city commissioner Al Schmidt would say
much the same thing to CNN a few days later.
Even as the deceitfulness
behind the fraud claims was becoming more apparent, Republican conspirators
were hard at work to overturn legitimate election results. On November 7,
2020, the day Biden was officially declared president-elect, Utah senator
Mike Lee texted Mark
Meadows with a suggestion that Trump meet with lawyer Sidney Powell, who “[had]
a strategy to keep things alive and put several states back in play.”
On November 9, Trump’s exceptionally
loyal attorney general, William Barr, sent a
directive to federal prosecutors to ramp up voter fraud charges before
state elections were certified, a change in Justice Department policy which
prompted the
resignation of Richard Pilger, who headed the
department’s election crimes division.
On the same day, Trump fired Defense Secretary
Mark Esper for not being “sufficiently
loyal.” Esper had fallen out of favor for
refusing to deploy troops to American cities
during the summer protests, supporting diversity, barring Confederate flags on
military bases, and keeping an eye on Russia. Esper was replaced with the underqualified Christopher Miller, who brought three
Trump loyalists with him, including Kash
Patel, a lawyer with no military experience.
This was an oddly consequential move for an outgoing administration to make. Suspicions were
further aroused when two administration officials told reporters from the New York Times that Trump was
considering firing FBI chief Christopher Wray and CIA head Gina Haspel. Haspel reportedly
told General Mark Milley (chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff), “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.”
Haspel was on to something. On November 10,
two Texas businessmen linked to Energy Secretary Rick Perry met
with Donald Trump in the Oval Office,
where they discussed the plan to have Republican-controlled state legislatures
ignore the will of their voters and unilaterally pick
the electors for their states.
According
to I Alone Can Fix It by Washington
Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Phillip Rucker, when hearing of the fake
elector plans circulating, Mark Milley responded that, “They may try, but
they’re not going to fucking succeed” because “You can’t do this without the
military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with
the guns.”
Speaking at a military installation in Virginia on
November 11 (Veteran’s Day), Milley told the assembled crowd, “We do not take an oath to a
king or queen, or tyrant or dictator, we do not take an oath to an individual….We
take an oath to the Constitution, and every soldier that is represented in this
museum—every sailor, airman, marine, coastguard—each of us protects and defends
that document, regardless of personal price.”
On November 13, Zach Parkinson (deputy director of communications
for the Trump campaign) asked
campaign staff to look into conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines
which were making the rounds on right-wing media. Staff gave Parkinson a memo
on November 14 which showed that most of the claims were false.
Though Joe Biden had been officially declared president-elect and was
presumably going to take office, the Trump administration made another significant
personnel move on November 18. Republican Chris Krebs, the Trump-appointed
head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency, was fired by tweet because he had publicly fact-checked false claims
of election fraud and gotten off-message by sharing his observation that 2020 was “the most secure election in
American history.”
That same day, Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro sent Jim Troupis (a Republican lawyer in Wisconsin) a memo detailing a plan to get Wisconsin’s legitimate electors
replaced with fake (pro-Trump) electors. This would
be “among the earliest known efforts to put on
paper proposals for preparing alternate electors” and one of several such memos Chesebro would send to GOP operatives in
swing states Trump had lost.
According
to reporters for the New York Times, “The memos show how just over two
weeks after Election Day, Mr. Trump’s campaign was seeking to buy itself more
time to undo the results. At the heart of the strategy was the idea that their
real deadline was not Dec. 14, when official electors would be chosen to
reflect the outcome in each state, but Jan. 6, when Congress would meet to
certify the results.”
Next door to Wisconsin, after pressure from Trump, two Republican members of the Wayne
County Board of Canvassers (covering Detroit, which is 78%
Black) tried to rescind their certifications of the county’s vote totals.
The 11th-hour reversal to placate Trump came too late and only delayed
the obvious, given Biden’s 154,000-vote
margin of victory in Michigan.
Refusing to let the will of the voters get in the way of raw power, on November
19 Trump’s outside attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and Jenna Ellis
had a surreal hair
dye-dripping press conference in which they served
up several false
claims to try to pressure the Justice Department
to open “a full-scale criminal investigation” of the election.
These lawyers were part of “Team Kraken,” second-string
attorneys who stepped up to push ludicrous legal claims as Trump’s official
lawyers stepped back to honor the rule of law. One GOP operative told a reporter for New York magazine, “Any time Rudy
Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis are leading your legal battle,
you are not in a good place….I wouldn’t let those lawyers represent me for a parking
ticket.”
Two members of Congress who were in regular text contact with Mark Meadows—senator Mike Lee of Utah and representative Chip Roy of Texas—were critical of the press conference. Roy told Meadows, “Hey brother—we need substance or people are going to break.” Lee said, “The potential defamation liability for the president is significant here….Unless Powell can back up everything she said, which I kind of doubt she can.” Meadows wrote Lee back that he agreed and was “very concerned” about the press conference. (Four months later, when Powell was sued by Dominion, her lawyers defended their client by claiming that “no reasonable person” would have believed Powell’s attacks on Dominion.)
On November 20, Trump continued the
campaign to flip states he’d lost when he invited Republican representatives from Michigan’s state
legislature to the White House. Trump was unable to cow
them into submission because there was no legal way for Republicans to overturn
Biden’s victory in the state.
After the meeting, the Michigan representatives made a joint statement to
the press in which they said,
“We have
not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the
election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and
follow the normal process regarding Michigan's electors, just as we have said
throughout this election.”
Trump
was at it again on November 21, tweeting “Why is Joe Biden so quickly forming a Cabinet when my
investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes, enough to ‘flip’
at least four States, which in turn is more than enough to win the Election?
Hopefully the Courts and/or Legislatures will have....the COURAGE to do what
has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United
States of America itself. THE WORLD IS WATCHING!!!”
On November 23, Trump
appointee Emily Murphy of the General Services Administration finally released money for the Biden Administration’s transition. This
unprecedented delay jeopardized national security (since Biden was not yet
receiving intelligence briefings) and containment of Covid-19, which was at
peak numbers due to Trump’s abject failure to address the pandemic.
With Michigan secured for Joe Biden, Trump turned
his attention to Pennsylvania. On November 25, Trump conferenced
in from the White House to a hearing/publicity
stunt in Gettysburg, where Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani issued—and Trump
backed—false claims about voter fraud in that state.
Trump later invited Pennsylvania legislators to the White House. Joining Trump
was Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who would
circulate a PowerPoint presentation chockfull
of outlandish conspiracy theories to Mark Meadows and Republican members of Congress. (Waldron would later say that he
spoke with Mark Meadows “maybe
eight to ten times” between election day
and the insurrection; they also exchanged texts.)
False claims continued on November 29,
when Trump spewed election
lies and whined about the FBI and the Justice
Department in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, who would go on to be
sued for promulgating disinformation about the presidential election.
Trump’s favored narrative took a major hit on December
1, when Attorney General William Barr told an AP reporter, “we have
not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the
election.” According to reporter Jonathan Karl, Barr felt that Trump’s fraud
allegations were “all bullshit,” but he’d agreed to the investigations to “appease his
boss.”
In a fit of rage at the breaking
AP story, Trump allegedly heaved a porcelain
plate of food through the air, leaving servants to wipe up the ketchup which
dripped down a wall of the White House dining room.
Another
Republican who refused to parrot Trump’s Big Lie was Gabriel Sterling. Sterling, who
worked for Georgia’s conservative Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger,
held a press conference to denounce the violent threats Georgia elections officials were
receiving as a result of Trump’s endless disinformation about voting machines
in the state:
“Mr. President, it looks like
you likely lost the state of Georgia….Stop inspiring people to commit potential
acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot,
someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”
(The United States
House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack—hereafter referred to as
“the January 6 committee”—would
feature testimony about the domestic terror campaign endured by Georgia elections workers Shaye
Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman after Rudy Giuliani publicly accused them of
rigging the vote in Joe Biden’s favor. As part of a settlement, the
extreme-right One America News network would later admit that there was “no widespread voter fraud by election
workers” in Georgia.)
On December 2, White
House Communications Director Alyssa Farrah Griffin told Mark Meadows she would
be putting in her resignation. According to Griffin, Meadows replied, “What if I could tell you we’re
actually going to be staying?”
Lawyer John Eastman was one of the central legal architects—along with Kenneth
Chesebro— of Trump’s extralegal efforts to stay in the White House. On December
4, Eastman emailed Russ Diamond, a far-right member of Pennsylvania’s House of
Representatives. Eastman proposed that Pennsylvania Republicans challenge and
disqualify enough absentee ballots in the state to “provide some cover” for the
GOP-controlled legislature to declare the election invalid and appoint fake electors
for Trump.
The
fake elector strategy continued on December 5, as Trump tried
to muscle conservative Republican governor Brian Kemp into throwing out Georgia’s electors
and pressured the Republican head of the Pennsylvania House of
Representatives, Bryan Cutler, to do the same in his state.
Convincing Republicans in at least three swing states to reject Biden’s
legitimate electors was still Trump’s only chance at holding onto the White
House, barring a Supreme Court decision to toss out Biden’s wins in several
swing states.
In a December 7 communication to Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn, Jim Troupis
(see November 18) said that this strategy revolved around getting false
electors on the books on December 14—the day the electoral college met—with the
long-term goal of getting these electors—as opposed to the legitimate
ones—accepted in the six most competitive states lost by Trump on January 6. In
Troupis’ words:
Twenty of Joe Biden’s electoral college votes were in Pennsylvania. Trump’s
maneuvering to overcome an 80,000-vote loss in that state was set back on December
8, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected
a lawsuit claiming a measure to expand mail voting passed by Pennsylvania’s Republican
legislature had been unconstitutional.
Legal setbacks notwithstanding, the plot continued. Arizona lawyer Jack
Wilenchik emailed Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn: “We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to [Mike] Pence so
that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting
votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted.”
This
was part of a multi-state effort among Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, and
Epshteyn, who was “a regular point of contact” for lawyer John
Eastman. Wilenchik further wrote that the plan should be “[kept] under wraps
until Congress counts the vote Jan. 6th (so we can try to ‘surprise’
the Dems and media with it).” (Wilenchik later corrected himself, typing in the same thread
that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” to
which he attached a smiley face emoji.)
Referring
to a suggestion proposed by Eastman ally Kenneth Chesebro (see November 18), Wilenchik said, “His
idea is basically that all of us (GA, WI, AZ, PA, etc.) have our electors send
in their votes (even though the votes aren’t legal under federal law — because
they’re not signed by the Governor); so that members of Congress can fight
about whether they should be counted on January 6th.”
These
efforts were coordinated through outside lawyer Rudy Giuliani; Trump’s official
White House lawyers saw the moves as illegal.
By the end of December 9, the District of
Columbia and all 50 states had certified their vote totals, and Joe Biden’s win.
Though Attorney General William Barr had already
issued his finding that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election,
Trump poked him again on December 10 with a retweet asking for a special prosecutor to investigate baseless allegations
of fraud.
A major personnel change was considered then averted on December 11. Trump planned to fire CIA director Gina Haspel’s deputy director and
replace him with the woefully-underqualified Kash
Patel (see November 9) in order to install a
loyalist near the top of the CIA. As with the post-election firing of Defense Secretary Mike Esper and (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency leader) Christopher Krebs,
this would be a consequential move for a lame duck administration to make.
In response, Haspel told Trump she would
resign if her deputy was let go. Afterward, Trump met with Mike Pence and other
senior aides, who recommended keeping Haspel happy. Trump left Haspel’s deputy
in place.
Another one of Trump’s machinations was thwarted when the U.S. Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit by the state of Texas challenging results in
four other states, saying Texas did not have “a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another
state conducts its elections.”
Outraged by the decision,
conspiracy-addled Trump supporters held protests across the country on December 12. The D.C. rally, which featured future January 6 paramilitary operators the
Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the 1st Amendment Praetorian, turned violent when counter-protesters
showed up, leading to four stabbings and 33 arrests.
One
protester told a reporter for the New York Times, “They
don’t want to deal with this…It’s going to have to go nuclear, using the Insurrection
Act and bringing out the military.” This comment referenced the wild card
possibility that Donald Trump would use the chaos of street violence (even
street violence provoked by his own supporters) to assert control over the
presidency by deploying troops domestically.
That
same day, Christina Bobb (an anchor for the far-right One America News) sent an email about Douglas Mastriano, Trump’s point person for
Pennsylvania’s fake electors: “Mastriano needs a call from [Rudy Giuliani].
This needs to be done. Talk to him about legalities of what they are doing,….Electors
want to be reassured that the process is * legal * essential for greater
strategy.”
One person who wasn’t convinced of the legality of this strategy was
Andrew Hitt, chairman of the GOP in Wisconsin. After being contacted by Rudy
Giuliani for a call, Hitt texted
a friend that “These guys are up to no good and its [sic] gonna fail
miserably.” (Despite his stated reservations, Hitt would later become
a fake elector for Trump).
On December 13, Kenneth Chesebro
emailed Giuliani about the campaign’s “President of the Senate” strategy.
The idea was to get false Trump electors accepted on January 6 by convincing
Mike Pence to “firmly take the position that he, and he alone, is charged with
the constitutional responsibility not just to open the votes, but to count them
— including making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.”
One
leg of this strategy involved flipping Georgia, where Trump operative Robert
Sinners instructed state Republicans to appoint
alternate electors in “complete secrecy” so that the media wouldn’t know what
they were doing:
“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process….Your duties are
imperative to ensure the end result – a win in Georgia for President Trump –
but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”
Emails from Christina Bobb to Trump lawyers and swing state operatives revealed that state Republicans had false electors ready in Arizona,
Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania.
(Not coincidentally, Special Counsel Jack Smith would later subpoena these states as part of his investigation into Donald Trump’s potential
criminal liability for the January 6 insurrection).
On December 14, the Electoral College met and certified Joe Biden’s victory.
According to Biden, seven Republican senators called to congratulate him. Trump
allies Mitch McConnell, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin publicly congratulated the president-elect.
While the rest of the civilized
world recognized Biden’s victory, 59 state-level Republican officials in seven
swing states signed fake electors in hopes that Vice President Mike Pence would reject the
legitimate electors on January 6.
Meanwhile,
Donald Trump’s obsessive attempts to find elusive “voter fraud” took on
new life.
As reported by CNN, “Trump's assistant sent [deputy attorney general
Jeff] Rosen and [Justice Department official] Richard Donoghue a document
claiming to show voter fraud in Antrim County, Michigan. An aide to Donoghue
forwarded the document to the US Attorneys for the Eastern and Western
Districts in Michigan. Less than an hour later, Trump tweeted that [Attorney
General William] Barr would be leaving the Justice Department just before
Christmas, elevating both Rosen and Donoghue to the top spots at [the Justice
Department].”
The
day after the electoral college validated Biden’s win, December 15, Trump tweeted, “This Fake
Election can no longer stand” and invited Jeff Rosen to the White House. At the
Oval Office, Trump pressured his next attorney general to put Justice Department backing
behind election lawsuits, 61 of 62 of which would be rejected by Democratic and
Republican judges—including Trump appointees—often with uncharacteristically scathing judicial
rulings.
On December
16, Senator Mike Lee told Mark Meadows, via text, that weeks of
failures to turn up concrete evidence of fraud were weakening party resolve. Referring
to senators objecting to the electoral vote certification, Lee said, “I think we’re now passed [sic] the
point where we can expect anyone will do it without some direction and a strong
evidentiary argument.”
Lacking an evidentiary argument, someone in the Trump orbit drew up a draft executive order to have the
military seize voting machines in Georgia. According to Betsy Woodruff Swan of Politico,
“The order empowers the
defense secretary to ‘seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines,
equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for
retention under’ a U.S. law that relates to preservation of election records.”
The order also “would have given the defense secretary 60 days to write an
assessment of the 2020 election. That suggests it could have been a gambit to
keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021.”
Variations on this plan included Rudy Giuliani asking the Department of Homeland Security to seize machines, Trump asking Bill Barr, and Trump asking Republican legislators in Pennsylvania and Michigan to summon local law enforcement. Memos were drawn up for both the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon to seize voting machines. The requests were not acted on.
A document
covering similar ground (dated December 17) was referenced in a privilege log provided to the January 6 committee by the attorney
for Bernard Kerik (see January 4 entry). The withheld document was titled, “DRAFT
LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR
THE 2020 ELECTIONS.”
On December 18, a memo
was drawn up advocating for the Department of Defense (DOD) to appoint a team
who would review data (collected by the National Security Agency) in search of foreign
interference in the 2020 election. The memo concluded
that the Trump Administration could take the law into their own hands,
depending on the findings:
“If evidence of foreign
interference is found, the team would generate a classified DOD legal finding
to support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to
current civilian-only judicial remedies (which should still be pursued in parallel).”
The
content of the documents drawn up December 16-18 dovetailed with a contentious six-hour
meeting at the White House that evening.
The
meeting began when Trump received “Team Kraken” (Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell,
Michael Flynn, and Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne), outsiders unaffiliated
with Trump’s official White House legal team who were happy to entertain—and
act on—the president’s ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Upon
finding out who was with the outgoing president, Trump’s lawyer Pat Cipollone “rushed” to the White House, purportedly
out of fear that Trump could receive advice which could put him at risk of breaking
the law.
According
to witness testimony before the January 6 committee, a
screaming match ensued between those who supported the rule of law and those
who did not.
Firmly
in the latter category were Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former national security
advisor, convicted
felon Michael Flynn, who had recently
said that Trump should declare martial law, seize
voting machines, and force a new election.
On the side of law and historical precedent were
White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann, and White House staff
secretary Derek Lyons.
Among the ideas Cipollone and Herschmann were subjected
to were Flynn’s claim that foreign countries had
rigged America’s election with Nest-brand
thermostats and suggestions
that Trump declare a national emergency (which could be used as a justification for martial
law), sign an executive order to have the National Guard seize voting machines
and/or oversee re-votes in the six states Trump was contesting, and name Sidney Powell Special Counsel to investigate voting
machines.
When Cipollone and Herschmann asked for evidence to support the fraud
claims, nothing substantial was offered. Unhappy with this line of questioning,
Trump griped about the White House lawyers not giving him “solutions.”
Giuliani accused
them of being “pussies.”
In an interview with Rachel Maddow, Politico reporter Nicholas
Wu said of the overlap between the potential
“smoking
gun” December 17 document (referenced in a privilege
log provided by Bernie Kerik’s lawyer) and the
controversial topics discussed on December 18, “It’s unclear exactly if these
two things are linked, but…that’s quite a coincidence.”
With lawyerly options to overthrow the election narrowing, Trump escalated
his tactics. At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, just a few hours after the
White House showdown, Trump tweeted “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big
protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Trump’s announcement set
far-right militants into motion.
According to New York Times reporters Alan Feuer, Michael S.
Schmidt and Luke
Broadwater, extremists “began to set up
encrypted communications channels, acquire protective gear and, in one case,
prepare heavily armed ‘quick reaction forces’ to be staged outside Washington.
“They
also began to whip up their members with a drumbeat of bellicose language, with
their private messaging channels increasingly characterized by what one called
an ‘apocalyptic tone.’ Directly after Mr. Trump’s tweet was posted, the Capitol
Police began to see a spike in right-wing threats against members of Congress.”
A
Twitter employee who monitored traffic on the site told the January 6
committee:
“It
felt as if a mob was being organized and they were gathering together their
weaponry and their logic and their reasoning behind why they were prepared to
fight prior to December 19….Very clear that individuals were ready willing and
able to take up arms. After this Tweet on December 19, again it became clear
not only were these individuals ready and willing, but the leader of their
cause was asking them to join him.”
According to reporters from CNN, “a Justice
Department court filing revealed that the Oath Keepers had extensive plans for
violence in the days surrounding January 6. Prosecutors say that at least three
chapters of the gang held military training camps focusing on ‘military-style
basic’ training, ‘unconventional warfare,’ and ‘hasty ambushes.’ At least one
of the Oath Keepers brought explosives, including grenades, to the quick reaction force (QRF) site outside Washington, D.C.” (Oath Keeper
leader Elmer Stewart Rhodes would later be found guilty of seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government).
The
forces of insurrection—the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three
Percenters, Bikers for Trump, Vets for Trump, members of QAnon, and others—were
banding together. The head of homeland security for the District of Columbia,
Donell Harvin, told the January 6 committee:
“We
got derogatory information from [open source intelligence] suggesting that some
very, very violent individuals were organizing to come to D.C. But not only
were they organizing to come to D.C.—these non-aligned groups were aligning….When
you have armed militia collaborating with white supremacy groups collaborating
with conspiracy theory groups online all towards a common goal, you start
seeing what we call in terrorism a blended ideology and that’s a very, very bad
sign.”
On December 21, Donald
Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Mark Meadows met with congressional allies at the
White House. According to Mark
Meadows’ aide Cassidy Hutchinson—one of the central witnesses
before the January 6 committee—this group included Republicans Paul Gosar, Jody
Hice, Scott Perry, Andy Harris, Brian Babin, Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene,
Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, and Jim Jordan.
The House
members had come in response to an email invite
from Mo Brooks (who would speak at the January 6 rally) with a subject line of
“White House meeting December 21 regarding January 6.” The topic, once again,
was how to get illegitimate electors from swing states Trump had lost accepted.
(Brooks would later ask for a pardon for himself and other members of this group. Biggs,
who exchanged at least 63 text messages
with Mark Meadows, would refuse to
appear before the January 6 committee.)
Trump’s
public communications that day included the
tweet that
he’d “won in a landslide” and “[needed] backing from the Justice Department.”
The propaganda continued on December 22, when Trump tweeted a video with the claim that “The rigging of the 2020 election was
only the final step in the Democrats’ and the media’s yearslong effort to overthrow the will of the American
people.”
In order to overthrow the will of the American people,
Scott Perry, one of the main collaborators, “arranged for [Jeffrey] Clark to meet Trump behind the back of senior
Department of Justice officials—and
contrary to long-standing department regulations—in the Oval Office.” Clark was
a largely unknown lawyer for the Environment and Natural Resources Division
(and head of the United States Department of Justice Civil Division) with no
legal purview over White House affairs.
While Jeffrey Clark was on the way
to becoming a key figure in Donald Trump’s coup attempt, Mark Meadows flew to
Georgia, where he hoped to crash signature-matching done by elections officials.
Per established protocols, Meadows was not allowed to observe the process. As a
consolation prize, Meadows wangled the phone number of Frances Watson, an
elections investigator at the site.
Donald Trump called
Watson the following day, December 23. He flattered her, trotted out
grievances about imaginary voter fraud, and said, “When the right answer comes out, you'll be praised….People will say ‘great,’
because that's what it's about, the ability to check and to make it right,
because everyone knows it's wrong.”
The big news that Wednesday was the resignation of Attorney General William Barr.
With Barr out of the way, Trump
called new
attorney general Jeffrey Rosen on December 24 to see if he could
convince him to issue fake findings of vote fraud. During the conversation, Trump
asked Rosen if he knew Jeffrey Clark. Rosen told the January 6 committee, “When I hung up I was quizzical as to how does the
president even knew Mr. Clark….I was not aware that they had ever met or that
the president had been involved in any of the issues in the civil division.”
While
Trump worked on Rosen, outside attorney John Eastman commented (in an email to
Kenneth Chesebro and “Trump campaign officials”) that there was
a “heated fight” on the Supreme Court about Trump’s lawsuit to overturn the
election. Chesebro responded that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will
become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’
chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
The email hinted that Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni—a board member of the far-right
Council for National Policy—may have given insider information to Eastman
about the status of Trump’s case before the Supreme Court. Ginni Thomas sent multiple
texts to Eastman, who had previously clerked
for her husband. Swaying Justice Thomas was seen as the
linchpin to blocking electors in Georgia, which Thomas oversaw.
(The texts to Eastman were just a small part of Ginni Thomas’ efforts
to help steal the election, which included conspiratorial
texts to Mark Meadows and pleas to Republican members of the Arizona
legislature to ignore the will of Arizona voters. Justice Thomas would be the
one member of the Supreme Court to support
Donald Trump’s effort to block White House communications documents from the
January 6 committee.)
While
much of the world celebrated Christmas, Donald Trump was on the phone with William J. Olson, a
Republican lawyer who would go on to represent MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Among
the ideas Olson advocated were declaring martial law and replacing Jeffrey
Rosen with an attorney general willing to revive the Texas Attorney General’s lawsuit to nullify electoral college
votes in other states (which had been rejected by the Supreme Court on
December 11).
On December 26, Trump
tweeted more lies about the election (calling it “the biggest SCAM
in our nation’s history”), attacked the FBI, the Justice Department, and the
courts for following the rule of law, and referenced his January 6 “Save America” rally.
The
rally was top of mind for Trump’s militant supporters. That day, the Secret
Service received intelligence that the Proud
Boys “think they will have a large enough group to march into DC armed and will
outnumber the police so they can’t be stopped.” Moreover, “Their plan is to
literally kill people.”
Meanwhile,
Trump ally Scott Perry texted Mark Meadows, suggesting that the administration elevate Jeffrey
Clark to attorney general if they hoped to overturn the election. This was one of
at least 62 texts with Meadows after the election
(in addition, Perry had dozens of contacts with Trump’s outside
lawyers).
Clark
was being mentioned because Trump’s attorney general of less than a week,
Jeffrey Rosen, insisted on following the rule of law. On December 27, Trump pressured Rosen to review “election fraud” in Pennsylvania and
Arizona that William Barr had already found to be inconsequential. Rosen
reportedly told Trump that the Department of Justice “can’t, and won’t,
just flip a switch and change the election.” In response, Trump told Rosen to “just
say that the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me and the [Republican]
congressmen.”
Trump’s allies were in on a
“Strategic Communications Plan,” a document detailing an aggressive
disinformation campaign filled with talking points about fraud in swing states,
messaging channels, and target audiences—even though Trump was told that the fraud talking points were false by “at least 11
aides and close confidants.”
Trump also tried to get
Rosen to sign on to a lawsuit (which had already been rejected by the
Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel) asking the Supreme Court to
toss out electoral college votes in six states Biden had won and order a “special election.”
Trump wasn’t the only one
badgering Rosen. Jeffrey Clark made five cracks at the new attorney general, trying to get him to challenge
election results in key
states lost by Trump.
Rosen’s second-in-command
also felt the heat. Coaxed by Trump, Pennsylvania representative Scott Perry called Richard Donoghue, the Deputy Attorney General, to try to
get the Justice Department to review debunked voter fraud claims in
Pennsylvania. Perry also tried to convince Donoghue to grant more power to Trump loyalist
Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to scour election results for any data which could be
exploited.
(Perry would later duck
the January 6 committee while citing his devotion to “the rule of law,” then play the victim
and file a lawsuit when the FBI
confiscated his phone at part of a Justice Department investigation of January 6).
On December 28, Clark
peddled conspiracy theories around the Justice Department and sent a message to Jeff Rosen and Richard Donoghue requesting their
sign-off on a letter (conveniently typed on official
Department of Justice letterhead) which asked Georgia’s Republican legislature
to call a special session to investigate election “irregularities” and choose a
slate of illegitimate electors for Trump.
In
the words of historian Heather Cox Richardson, “Clearly,
there was no time to actually conduct another investigation into the election
before January 6; the letter was designed simply to justify counting out
Biden’s ballots or, failing that, to create popular fury that might delay the
January 6 count.”
Donoghue
responded via email that signing such a letter was “not even in the realm of possibility.”
Without the backing of Justice
Department leadership, Clark worked with aide Ken Klukowski (who had started at the Justice
Department on December 15) to gather witnesses to provide “testimony” of voter fraud.
The January 6 committee revealed that voter suppression expert Ken Blackwell emailed Mike Pence’s
office to ask him to meet with Klukowski and John Eastman. According to Jeremy Stahl of Slate, “this email was the first piece of public evidence linking
Eastman directly to the efforts to use the [Department of Justice] to change
the outcome of the election.”
Another effort to change the outcome of the
election came from William Olson, the lawyer Trump had spoken to on Christmas. Warning
that “time is about to run out” for their plans, Olson sent a letter to Trump saying that the Office of White House Counsel
and Attorney General Rosen were failing the president. Olson suggested the
White House replace Rosen within 24 hours and re-file a case along the lines of
Texas
v. Pennsylvania, which would have nullified the electoral college votes of Georgia,
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If the Supreme Court didn’t rule
in Trump’s favor, the president could act unilaterally, since “that body was
never intended to be the final authority on matters of this sort.”
Mark
Meadows continued the full-court press on December 29 when he urged Rosen and Deputy
Attorney General Richard Donoghue to consider the right-wing myth that the
number of votes cast in Pennsylvania was larger than the number of registered
voters in the state and to take a look at “Italygate” (a theory that Biden
supporters in Italy had used satellites to change a decisive number of votes in
swing states from Trump to Biden).
Meanwhile,
Trump’s personal assistant Molly Michael emailed Rosen,
Donoghue, and Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall a legal complaint baselessly
claiming that the six swing states Trump had lost by the narrowest margins (Nevada,
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona) had violated the Electors
Clause of the Constitution, along with a request to file a case before the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Trump’s
outside attorney, Kurt Olsen, called Jeff Rosen on December 30 and said that Trump
expected him to file Michael’s Supreme Court lawsuit by noon that day. Rosen
refused.
Trump’s strategist Steve
Bannon called the president and suggested he lure Mike Pence back to
Washington (from a skiing vacation) in order to pressure him into refusing to
accept Biden electors during the January 6 certification. The goal was to convince
Pence to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”
As Trump worked on Pence, presidential aspirant Josh Hawley, a Republican senator
from Missouri, became the first senator to announce his intent to object
to electors for Joe Biden on January 6.
While
Hawley made a savvy play for future
Republican primary voters, Trump’s minions continued to pressure the Justice
Department (DOJ). In two of five known emails Mark Meadows sent asking the DOJ to
review tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories, Trump’s chief of staff that day sent Justice officials disinformation about alleged voter fraud in Fulton
County, Georgia. (Meadows also forwarded debunked
conspiracy theories to “the FBI, Pentagon, National Security
Council, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”)
Unable
to get the new attorney general to do his bidding, Trump invited Rosen and
Donoghue to the White House on December 31. At the meeting, Trump
reportedly said that he was considering replacing Rosen with Jeffrey Clark
because Rosen hadn’t been aggressive enough in investigating voter fraud. Trump
wanted voting machines seized by the Justice Department, but was told by Rosen
that the DOJ had “no legal authority” to do so. If any such authority existed,
it was held by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Once
the meeting had ended, “Trump then called Ken Cuccinelli, the DHS acting deputy secretary,
and falsely told him that the acting attorney general had just said that it was
Cuccinelli’s job to seize voting machines ‘and you’re not doing your job.’”
As Trump tried to cling to power, Chip Roy, a supporter of Trump’s election
challenges a few weeks earlier, texted Mark Meadows that it was time to give up:
“The president should call everyone off. It’s the only
path. If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by
congress every 4 years…we have destroyed the electoral college.”
On January
1, 2021, Jeff Rosen received a 13-minute YouTube video about
Italygate from Mark Meadows (which Meadows had gotten the day prior from Scott Perry). Meadows also asked Rosen to send Jeffrey
Clark to Georgia, presumably so that Clark could find something, anything which
could be construed as “voter fraud.”
Trump
loyalist and director of presidential personnel Johnny McEntee texted a memo to Greg Jacob, Mike
Pence’s chief of staff, headlined with the words “Jefferson Used His Position
as VP to Win,” a fanciful interpretation of the 1800 presidential election.
McEntee’s
memo took a hit when a Trump-appointed judge in Texas rejected Arizona representative Louie
Gohmert’s lawsuit claiming Mike Pence could pick and choose which electors to
accept on January 6.
Chip
Roy texted Mark Meadows that Trump’s plans
to overrule the will of the people could “[drive] a stake in the heart of the
federal republic.”
January 2, 2021 was a big day in the annals of failed election
theft.
Eleven Republican senators, including former and likely future
presidential candidate Ted Cruz, made a joint statement in which they referred
to ill-defined fraud
and advocated “an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the
disputed states.”
The senators’ public
pretense was that the audit was necessary in order to assuage millions of
Americans who had doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Polls cited
showed that one-third of independents, two-thirds of Republicans, and 39% of
all voters held the baseless belief that the election had been “rigged.”
In plain
English, the senators were contending that since four out of every 10 Americans
were gullible enough to believe ludicrous and self-serving Republican lies
about an election they clearly lost, a 10-day “audit” giving Republicans more time
to peddle ludicrous and self-serving lies about the election to gullible
Americans was necessary in order to “restore faith in American Democracy.”
While his congressional sycophants performed Kabuki theater, Trump made another
attempt to flip Georgia. After 18 requests
from Mark Meadows, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger consented to a
call with Trump. During an infamous
67-minute conference call, Raffensperger debunked Trump’s conspiracy
theories and pointed out that multiple recounts hadn’t come close to reversing
Trump’s Georgia loss. Unbowed by the facts, Trump tried to bully the Republican Secretary of State into “[finding] 11,780 votes” for him—just enough to give
Trump Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes.
Trump also called 300 Republican state legislators, telling them they
could overrule the will of the voters in their states and put forward fake
electors.
The Justice Department continued to refuse to bend to Trump’s will. Jeff Rosen
wrote Jeffrey Clark back
and asserted, as his second-in-command Richard Donoghue had already
done on December 28, that he was “not prepared to sign” a letter asking Georgia’s
Republican legislature to “investigate” trumped-up fraud.
Nonetheless,
plans continued for January 6.
According to Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson, “the terms ‘Proud Boys’
and ‘Oath Keepers’” came up “when [Rudy] Giuliani was around.” After a January
2 meeting between Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and other White House officials,
Giuliani told Hutchinson, “We’re going to the Capitol! It’s going to be great!”
Hutchinson asked Meadows for clarification. Meadows told her “There’s a lot
going on…things might get real, real bad on January 6.”
On January
3, 2021, Meadows received a text which said, “I heard Jeff Clark is [going to replace Jeff
Rosen] on Monday [January 4]. That's amazing. It will make a lot of patriots happy,
and I'm personally so proud that you are at the tip of the spear, and I could
call you a friend.”
Call
logs revealed by the January 6 committee showed
that Clark called the White House four times that day. By the fourth call—at
4:19 p.m.—Clark was officially referred to in the logs as the “acting Attorney General.”
In testimony before the committee, Jeff Rosen
said that Clark “told me that the timeline had moved up and that the president
had offered him the job and that he was accepting it.” Rosen “wasn’t going to
accept being fired by [a] subordinate,” so he arranged a meeting at the White
House.
Rosen told congressional investigators that Trump began the meeting
by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything
to overturn the election,” and implied that he could keep his job if he agreed to
send Jeffrey Clark’s letter (written
by Ken Klukowski, see December 28) to Georgia legislators.
For
two-and-a-half hours, Clark tried to convince Trump that he should become
attorney general while Richard Donoghue, Pat Cipollone, Jeff Rosen, and Assistant
Attorney General for the Office of Legal
Counsel Steven Engel argued against the elevation of Clark. Engel told the
January 6 committee:
“I
said, ‘Mr. President you’re talking about putting a man in that seat who has
never tried a criminal case, who has never conducted a criminal investigation,
and he’s telling you that he’s going to take charge of the department’s 115,000
employees, including the entire FBI, and turn the place on a dime and conduct
nationwide criminal investigations that will produce results in a matter of days.
It’s impossible, it’s absurd, it is not going to happen, and it is going to
fail.’
“He
has never been in front of a trial jury, a grand jury, he’s never even been to
[FBI Director] Chris Wray’s office. I said at one point, ‘If you walked into
Chris Wray’s office, one, would you know how to get there, and two, if you got
there, would he even know who you are? And do you really think that the FBI is
going to suddenly start following your orders?’ It’s not going to happen. He’s
not competent.”
Trump backed off of his threat to replace Rosen after “Donoghue
and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steve Engel made
clear that there would be mass resignations at [the Department of Justice] if
Trump moved forward with replacing Rosen with Clark.”
Though he left Rosen in place, Trump fired the U.S. attorney who covered the Atlanta area, Bjay Pak.
Trump said Pak hadn’t done enough to uncover fraud in his district. Pak’s
replacement, Trump loyalist Bobby Christine, later concluded that “There’s
just nothing to” Trump’s claims of voter
fraud in Fulton County, where Biden amassed a huge share of his Georgia votes.
While manipulating the electoral college certification was Trump’s main focus,
many political insiders had concerns that the president might fall back on the
Insurrection Act—especially if pro-Trump protesters clashed with left-leaning forces
on January 6. Earlier that day, all ten living defense secretaries, including
the recently deposed Mark Esper, penned an
op-ed in the Washington Post aimed at key players in the Trump
administration’s national security apparatus.
The signatories said that acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and
those working under him “are each bound by oath, law and precedent to
facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so
wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that
undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.”
Trump and his collaborators weren’t yet accepting that there would be a
“new team” on January 20.
On January 4, 2021, Republican senators were given a Team
Kraken pitch to seize
voting machines and delay the official January 6 certification. Kevin
Cramer, a conservative Republican senator who had voted with
Trump 94% of the time, disclosed that the presenters wheeled out “some of
the most fantastical claims” about interference from Venezuela or China as a
justification for the extraordinary step. Attending via Zoom was Wisconsin
senator Ron Johnson, who would try to pass
off fake electors for his state on January 6.
Another Wisconsin Republican who was in on the plot was Mark Jefferson,
executive director of the state party. In a text to a colleague, he said,
“Freaking Trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate
President….They’re going to call one of us to tell us just what the hell is
going on.”
As revealed during the January 6
committee hearings, here summarized by historian Heather
Cox Richardson: “on January 4, National Security
Advisor Robert O’Brien called [Mark] Meadows to warn of violence on January 6.
The Secret Service and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato, who
was in charge of security protocol to protect anyone covered by presidential
protection, also warned of coming violence.”
Despite these warnings, General
Mark Milley was turned down when he suggested to Trump cabinet
members that permits for a January 6 protest at the Capitol building be revoked
due to the possibility of violence.
Still hoping to avoid a messy, violent
coup in favor of a bloodless, lawyerly coup, Trump’s outside
attorney John Eastman presented Mike Pence with a six-step plan to toss
the electoral college votes from seven states Trump lost. If Pence carried out
the plan, neither candidate would have 270 electoral college votes, which would
throw the election to the House of Representatives, allowing Republicans to override
the will of American voters.
Eastman’s plan was in clear violation of the Electoral Count Act
passed after the 1876 election; Pence’s counsel Mark Jacob would later say that Eastman’s misreading of
130 years of election precedent was “essentially entirely made up.”
A second option was to have Pence adjourn the counting, allowing
time for states Trump had lost to send fake electors. Eastman had advocated for this scheme on a
Steve Bannon podcast two days earlier and sketched out its details in a two-page memo to Republican senators
Lyndsey Graham and Mike Lee, both of whom would later conclude that Trump’s fraud
claims were baseless.
Speaking to Jim Acosta on CNN, famous Watergate
reporter Carl Bernstein said
of the Eastman memo, “I think what we are seeing in these memos particularly are blueprints
for a coup….The actual blueprints in document form in which the
president of the United States, through his chief of staff, is sending to Mike
Pence’s, the vice president’s, staff a blueprint to overturn an election, a
blueprint for a conspiracy led by a president of the United States to result in
an authoritarian coup in which the election is stolen.”
The nerve center of the authoritarian coup attempt was a war room at the Willard Hotel, one block from
the White House. In the weeks before January 6, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani
led a team of conspirators who attempted to overturn Biden’s election victory.
Strategies included injecting disinformation about voter fraud into the right-wing media bloodstream, encouraging Trump supporters in swing
states to pressure their state legislators to block certification of
Biden’s win, pushing state legislators directly to block certification of
Biden’s victory, and trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the power to
deny state-certified electoral college votes.
At various times Giuliani was joined by Steve
Bannon, John Eastman, Bernard
Kerik, Phil Waldron (author of a 38-page
PowerPoint detailing ways to overturn the
election), and Roger Stone, who had
Oath Keepers as bodyguards along with
connections to both Stewart Rhodes (leader of the Oath Keepers) and Enrique
Tarrio (leader of the Proud Boys),
Details of the Willard team’s agenda were revealed in a document given to the January 6 committee by Bernard Kerik’s
attorney. (See December 17)
While Trump and his war room cabal brainstormed
ways to manipulate Mike Pence, other Republicans gave the vice president sound
interpretations of constitutional law. Conservative
judge J. Michael Luttig told Pence’s staff that there was no legal basis for him to
reject electoral college votes, advice also passed on by conservatives John
Yoo and former
vice president Dan Quayle.
That night, appearing
at a rally for two Republican senators facing
runoffs in Georgia, Trump told the audience Joe Biden
wasn’t “taking this White House. We’re going to fight like hell.”
The imminent threat to democracy was far greater than was known to the
U.S. public on January 5, 2021, the day before the official counting of
electoral ballots.
Mike
Pence’s attorney, Greg Jacob, released a three-page memo which pointed out that Pence’s rejection of Joe Biden electors
would be a flagrant violation of the 1887 Electoral College Act. Mike Pence’s chief of staff,
Marc Short, called
a meeting with Timothy Giebels, the head of the vice president’s security
detail. Giebels was told that due to Pence’s reluctance to meddle with the
electoral count, Donald Trump “was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and
there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.”
Oddly enough, an
article appeared that day about Trump ally and Republican senator Chuck
Grassley overseeing the electoral college vote if Pence somehow failed to show
up.
The Capitol was supposed to
be closed to the public due to Covid-19, but Republican House member
Barry Loudermilk of Georgia gave a tour of the Capitol that day. One of the people on the tour marched
to the Capitol the following day while threatening violence against Democratic members of Congress. The
January 6 committee would later tweet that “Individuals on the tour
photographed/recorded areas not typically of interest to tourists: hallways,
staircases and security checkpoints.” (Loudermilk would be
among the 147 House Republicans who would refuse
to certify Biden’s win.)
Though the Secret Service “warned
the U.S. Capitol Police that their officers could face violence at the
hands of supporters of former President Donald Trump,” Mark Meadows sent out an email demanding that the National Guard “protect pro-Trump people. A statement from the White House Office of the Press Secretary hyped the
threat of left-leaning protesters, saying “President Trump will not allow
Antifa, or any terrorist organization, to destroy our great country.”
Trump mirrored this with a tweet threatening members of antifa who showed up in D.C. on January 6. There
was speculation later that this messaging could have been put in place to
give Trump cover to declare a national emergency on January 6, if anti-Trump protesters
showed up to fight pro-Trump protesters. A national emergency would have
allowed Trump to seize voting machines according to Phil Waldron’s 38-page PowerPoint titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options
for January 6” (see November 25, January 4).
Mark Meadows continued to “direct traffic.” Among other things, he arranged secret White House meetings between Trump and his
conspirators (behind the backs of White House counsel) and contacted Michael Flynn and Roger Stone—convicted felons whom
Trump had recently pardoned that would be connected to the coup attempt. Flynn and Stone would appear that night at a Freedom Plaza event.
Republican representative Debbie Lesko was caught
on tape asking congressional leadership to
“come up with a safety plan for members” because “I’m actually very concerned
about this, because we have who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people
coming here. We have Antifa. We also have, quite honestly, Trump supporters,
who actually believe that we are going to overturn the election. And when that
doesn’t happen – most likely will not happen – they are going to go nuts.”
Washington D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser requested
National Guard backup, but Donald Trump’s Defense Department handcuffed the
Guard’s mission. According to Paul Sonne, Peter Hermann, and Missy Ryan of the
Washington Post, “the Pentagon prohibited the District’s guardsmen from
receiving ammunition or riot gear, interacting with protesters unless necessary
for self-defense, sharing equipment with local law enforcement, or using Guard
surveillance and air assets without the defense secretary’s explicit sign-off.”
In addition, “The D.C. Guard was also told it
would be allowed to deploy a quick-reaction force only as a measure of last
resort,” which forced local D.C. officials to get approval from Trump’s Defense
Department for rapid deployment, a bureaucratic hurdle which hadn’t existed
previously.
As D.C. girded for trouble, Trump riled his
supporters up with a 5 p.m. tweet which read, “Washington is being inundated with people who don’t want to see an
election victory stolen by emboldened Radical Left Democrats….Our Country
has had enough, they won’t take it anymore!”
This call out to the troops coincided with a pro-Trump event
at Freedom Plaza that night. Speaking at the rally were Trump allies who were
too extreme to speak at the main event on January 6—Alex Jones, Ali Alexander,
Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone. Stone told those in attendance they were in an “epic
struggle for the future of this country between dark and light, between the
godly and the godless, between good and evil. And we will win this fight or
America will step off into a thousand years of darkness.”
According to deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews,
during an Oval Office meeting which took place while music was booming at Freedom Plaza
(just half a mile from the White House), “[Trump] was in a very good mood. And
I say that because he had not been in a good mood for weeks leading up to that,
and then it seemed like he was in a fantastic mood that evening.”
Deputy
Press Secretary Judd Deere concurred, saying Trump was “animated” and
“excited about the next day. He was excited to do a rally with his supporters.”
At the
meeting, Trump discussed the march to the capitol which would follow his speech
at the Ellipse. Though it was known to pro-Trump activists and administration figures,
the march to the Capitol wasn’t public knowledge. As January 6 committee member
Stephanie Murphy would later say, “the evidence confirms that this was not a
spontaneous call to action, but rather was a deliberate strategy decided upon
in advance by the president.”
Late that
evening, Trump called
his apparatchiks at the Willard Hotel and strategized about how they could delay
the vote count long enough to get three swing states to reject Biden’s
electoral votes and send false electoral votes to the Capitol.
One of the key strategists at the Willard was Steve Bannon. Liz Cheney,
future vice chair of the January 6 committee, would later say,
“Based on
the committee’s investigation, it appears that Mr. Bannon had substantial
advance knowledge of the plans for January 6th and likely had an important role
in formulating those plans.”
On his podcast the night of January 5, Steve Bannon
concluded
ominously: “It’s not going to happen like
you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily
different. All I can say is, strap in….You made this happen and tomorrow it’s
game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready.”
***
Prior to January 6, 2021, the
electoral college vote count and certification had been purely ceremonial.
But since none of Trump’s
banana republic tactics to overthrow the election had worked, the president’s fundraiser Caroline
Wren, campaign operative Katrina
Pierson, chief of staff Mark
Meadows, Republican members of Congress, and right-wing
activists planned one
final, grand charade: a “Save America” rally followed by a march to the Capitol which wasn’t yet
public knowledge.
Activists involved in the planning bought
burner phones with cash to secretly communicate
with members of the White House, including chief of staff Mark
Meadows. It would later come
out that “Trump’s political operation reported paying more than $4.3
million to people and firms that organized the Jan. 6 rally since the start of
the 2020 election.”
According to Hunter Walker of Rolling Stone, event planners also
collaborated with fringe-right members of Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar (later to
become one of the biggest defenders of the insurrectionists), Madison Cawthorn (who spoke at the January 6 rally), Andy Biggs, and Lauren Boebert.
Two of Walker’s sources
(both event planners) said that Gosar—who allegedly made phone calls to the
sources on January 6—promised that Trump would grant them pardons if they incurred any legal
trouble as a result of the rally. Right-wing activist Ali Alexander, one of the organizers of the “Wild Protest,” had also mentioned collaborating with Biggs, Gosar, and Mo Brooks (who spoke at
the rally) in a video which was later deleted. Walker’s sources further
contended that Mark Meadows was warned in advance about potential violence; there’s no evidence he
did anything to stop it.
The rally and the march were a prelude to the
formal challenge by 13 Republican senators and 140 House members to Joe Biden’s
electoral college victory. The challenge would consist of regurgitated fraud claims
which had been rejected for lack of merit in more than 60 judicial cases,
by judges of all ideological stripes. Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro would
later brag about his role in recruiting members of Congress
for this cynical stunt. He and Steve Bannon came up with a plan called “the
Green Bay sweep.” The aim was to get challengers to delay the electoral vote
certification as long as possible in hopes that several hours of televised
hearings (full of Republican propaganda about a “rigged election”) would
pressure Mike Pence to reject electors from Biden states and end 232 years of American
democracy.
While the suits conspired, Trump’s ground troops stood by. Alongside the
Oath Keepers, who “were expecting
Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act” so that he could have a false pretense to
call up the U.S. military and maintain
control of the government by force, 250-300 Proud Boys had plans
to pre-empt the certification by seizing
government offices and making demands on behalf of the losing presidential
candidate. The leaders of the two groups had met
in a D.C. underground parking lot the day prior.
According to Mark Meadows’ aide Cassidy
Hutchinson, as of 8:00 a.m., “intelligence reports were already coming in that some of
the people near the Ellipse, where Trump was to speak, were dressed in body armor
and armed with Glock-style pistols, shotguns, and AR-15s, along with other
weapons.”
When deputy chief of
staff Anthony Ornato told Meadows about weapons confiscated
by law enforcement, “Meadows
appeared uninterested and didn't look up from his phone…saying: ‘All right,
anything else?’”
At
8:24 a.m., Eric Waldow, a deputy chief in the Capitol Police Force who was “responsible for directing officers’ movements,” sent a message
over Capitol Police Radio for his fellow officers to “watch out for anti-Trump
protesters in the massive pro-Trump crowd.” There was concern of violence
between Trump’s white supremacist followers and left-wing activists, but this
would turn out to be an empty threat. Prodded to stay home with hashtags #Jan6TrumpTrap and
#DontTakeTheBait, the left’s presence at the rally was minimal to nonexistent.
With
just over four hours to go before the certification was to start, Trump allies
continued their attempts to overturn the will of the American people.
The speaker
of the Arizona House, Rusty Bowers, received a call from House of
Representatives member Andy Biggs asking Bowers to reject Biden’s legitimate electors for the
state of Arizona. This was one of many requests from conspirators to Bowers (including
a call from Rudy Giuliani in which Giuliani admitted that “we have lots of
theories, we just don’t have the evidence”).
Bowers
refused, even as Trump supporters shouted epithets outside of his home while his daughter was inside dying
of cancer. (Bowers would later kill a Republican bill empowering the
Arizona legislature to override the will of the voters in choosing electoral
college votes. In retaliation, the GOP organized and defeated Bowers in a 2022 state Senate
primary).
One of the main conspirators was
Representative Jim Jordan. Jordan and Trump spoke for ten minutes that morning. Jordan would later gum
up the works during the certification—after the Capitol was cleared (then dodge
the January 6 committee and be coy about when he spoke with Trump that day.)
The most
momentous call Trump had was with vice president Mike Pence.
Around
11:20 a.m., Trump called Pence from the Oval Office while several witnesses
were present. Pence took the call. Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, estimated
that the call lasted 15-20 minutes. According to reporters Kyle Cheney and Betsy
Woodruff Swan, “Multiple people familiar with
the testimony given to the [January 6] committee about the call offered a
consistent account. One of those people — granted anonymity to speak candidly —
said witnesses described the conversation as beginning relatively pleasantly,
with Trump embracing the legal advice he was given about Pence’s ability to
send the election back to the states.
“Although people in the
Oval Office couldn’t hear him, Pence had clearly rejected Trump’s entreaties,
the person indicated. Witnesses have said listeners in the room were surprised
because it was the first time they recalled Pence saying no to Trump. The call
deteriorated and Trump grew frustrated.”
Trump told Pence “You can either go
down in history as a patriot…or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
Pence chose to go down in
history as a patriot.
Just before the count began, he released
a public letter confirming that he lacked
the constitutional authority to unilaterally decide which electoral college
votes to accept.
Preserving long-held democratic precedents were not a priority at the “Save
America” rally, which was simmering with latent violence. As reported by
historian Heather Cox Richardson, “Text messages between [Cassidy] Hutchinson and [Deputy Chief
of Staff Anthony] Ornato show that Trump was ‘furious’ before the Ellipse rally
because he wanted photos to show the space full of people and it was not full
because law enforcement was screening people for weapons before they could go
in. Trump wanted the screening machines, called magnetometers, to be taken
down.”
According
to Hutchinson’s testimony
before the January 6 committee, “I overheard the president say something to the
effect of, you know, ‘I don’t even care that they have weapons. They’re not
here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to
the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the f-ing mags away.’”
The speeches included several incitements to violence.
Lead-off speaker Mo Brooks, clad
in body armor, said, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking
ass!”
Addressing congressional Republicans who
intended to honor the will of American voters, Donald Trump, Jr. said, “We’re coming for
you, and we’re going to have a good time doing it.” If they didn’t change their
minds and oppose Biden’s certification “I’m gonna be in your backyard in a
couple of months.”
Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said,
“Let’s have trial by combat,” which was “an eerie reference to battles to the death in the series
‘Game of Thrones.’”
Donald
Trump headlined at noon. Talking tough from behind bulletproof glass, he
unleashed a torrent of self-serving lies about the election, “used the words ‘fight’ or ‘fighting’ at least 20 times,” and said “You’ll never take back our country with
weakness. You have to show strength. You have to be strong.”
Over
at the Capitol, with the clock running down, Republicans were still scheming to
get illegitimate electors to Mike Pence. At 12:37, an aide to Republican senator Ron Johnson texted a Pence
aide about “alternate” electors Johnson wanted to pass off. In response, the
Pence aide said, “Do not give that to [Pence].”
By 12:54 p.m.—six minutes before Nancy Pelosi was scheduled to bring
Congress to order—Trump supporters had busted
through barrier fences around the U.S. Capitol.
Five-ten
minutes after the formal count had begun, Trump finished his speech with a call
to action:
“We will never give up; we will never
concede….We will stop the steal. We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,
and we’re going to the Capitol…We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the
weak ones…the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our
country.”
The march
had been hidden—by design—from the general public. In a January 4 communication,
conservative organizer Kylie Jane Kramer had texted MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that “It can also not get
out about the march because I will be in trouble with the national park service
and all the agencies but POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’” Trump’s
advisors composed
a tweet which mentioned the march; Trump
read the tweet, but didn’t send it.
In the getaway car, the Secret Service refused to take Trump to the Capitol.
Cassidy Hutchinson told the January 6 committee that the outgoing president threw
a fit as he “attempted to grab the steering
wheel and then lunged at the agent driving” the vehicle. Trump’s demand (“I am
the fucking president, take me up to the Capitol now”) went unheeded.
At 1:14 p.m., vice president-elect Kamala Harris was evacuated
from Democratic National Committee headquarters, where a pipe bomb was found.
Another pipe bomb, placed by the
same suspect the night prior, would be found at the Republican National
Committee headquarters. The motive remains unknown, but it could have been to
draw law enforcement attention away from the Capitol.
Donald Trump was in
the White House dining room by 1:25, where he “was informed of violence at the
Capitol within 15 minutes of leaving the stage after his speech at the Ellipse.”
While
doing nothing to stop the insurrection, Trump got cozy in front of Fox News. He
“asked aides for a list of senators to call as
he continued to pursue paths to overturn his defeat,” according
to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Around the same time, Trump’s ally, Paul Gosar (who had collaborated with
the “Save America” organizers), began the GOP stalling tactics, objecting to
electors from Arizona. The two houses of Congress separated to “debate” Gosar’s
objection.
At 1:30 p.m., insurrectionists overtook police at the back of the Capitol,
forcing them inside the building. Unaware of the threat, Congress continued the
proceedings. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, who had voted with Trump 91%
of the time, said “Voters, the courts, and the states have all spoken — they've
all spoken….If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever.”
As McConnell spoke, a crowd of 8,000 equipped with “riot helmets, gas masks, shields, pepper spray,
fireworks, climbing gear...explosives, metal pipes, [and] baseball bats” surrounded the front of
the Capitol.
At 1:39 p.m., the president had a four-minute call with Rudy Giuliani, who would call several senators
that day to try to slow the certification down. They spoke again a half hour
later.
Because local officials’ authority
to call for backup had been taken away by the Trump administration one day before
the certification, it was left to Capitol police chief Steven Sund to beg Trump
allies in the Department of Defense for backup. Trump’s military officials stonewalled
Sund, who started calling at 1:49 p.m. for help.
According to testimony before the January 6 committee, here referenced
by Professor Heather Cox Richardson, “[Cassidy] Hutchinson went into [Mark] Meadows’s
[White House] office between 2:00 and 2:05 to ask if he was watching the scene
unfold on his television. Scrolling through his phone, he answered that he was.
She asked if he had talked to Trump. He said, ‘Yeah. He wants to be alone right
now.’ [White House Counsel Pat] Cipollone burst into the office and said to go
get the president. Meadows repeated that Trump didn't want to do anything.
Cipollone very clearly said this to Mark—something to the effect of, ‘Mark,
something needs to be done or people are going to die and the blood’s going to
be on your f-ing hands. This is getting out of control.”’
Back at the Capitol, as officer
Caroline Edwards later described it to the January 6
committee, “What
I saw was just a war scene….There were officers on the ground. They were
bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces.
I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was
carnage. It was chaos.”
At 2:11 p.m., Trump supporters—heavily represented by right-wing hate groups, including many former members of law enforcement and the military—busted
through a police line to storm the Capitol, the first hostile takeover of America’s seat of
government since 1814. By 2:13, they were inside the building.
Once inside, insurrectionists assaulted Capitol police officers, attacked journalists, traumatized members of Congress and congressional aides, and contributed to multiple members of Congress getting Covid-19.
Under the surface appearance of random chaos were a number of determined
seditionists with concrete goals. Some targeted the
offices of specific members of Congress in hopes of kidnapping them, or worse. Others ransacked the Senate parliamentarian’s office in
an apparent attempt to intercept electoral college ballots. There were allegations that
plotters may have had help
from members of the Capitol
police force and/or Republican representatives (including Barry
Loudermilk, who had conducted
a tour of the Capitol on January 5).
At 2:15 p.m., Pat Cipollone texted Mark Meadows that “we
need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to
be f’ing hung.”
Meadows responded that “You heard [Trump], Pat.
He thinks Mike deserves that. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
Cipollone’s reply: “This is f’ing crazy, we need
to do something more.”
Four minutes later, Hogan Gidley (the national press secretary for Trump’s
2020 campaign) texted
Hope Hicks (counselor to the president) with a suggestion that Trump put out a
request to his followers to be non-violent. Hicks replied that she had
suggested as much “several times” on Monday and Tuesday—this was Wednesday—but
“I’m not there.”
The Senate was called into recess at 2:20 p.m., right after Mike Pence was
escorted
out of the chamber by Secret Service.
The House soon followed.
At 2:24 p.m., while “America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of
lawmakers, breaking into offices and reveling in their own astounding
impunity,” Trump sent out what would become a notorious tweet:
“Mike Pence didn’t have the
courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our
Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not
the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously
certify….USA demands the truth!”
As Trump’s deputy press
secretary Sarah Matthews would tell the January 6 committee, this was exactly what wasn’t needed in
that moment, as Trump was “giving the green light to [the insurrectionists]”
who “truly latch on to every word and every tweet.”
While lawmakers hid from
rioters, Trump called Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville to ask him to stall the
electoral college vote certification whenever (or if) it could safely resume.
Trump reached Tuberville around 2:26 p.m. and was notified that Mike
Pence, his wife, his brother, and his daughter had been whisked away from the
Senate floor. Later reports showed that the seditionists missed Pence and his
family by one minute (or “five to 10 feet” by another account).
An excerpt from I Alone Can Fix It by reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker described the scene:
“At that moment, Pence was still in his ceremonial
office — protected by Secret Service agents, but vulnerable because the
second-floor office had windows that could be breached and the intruding thugs
had gained control of the building. Tim Giebels, the lead special agent in
charge of the vice president’s protective detail, twice asked Pence to evacuate
the Capitol, but Pence refused. ‘I’m not leaving the Capitol,’ he told Giebels.
The last thing the vice president wanted was the people attacking the Capitol
to see his 20-car motorcade fleeing. That would only vindicate their
insurrection.
“At 2:26, after a team of agents scouted a safe path
to ensure the Pences would not encounter trouble, Giebels and the rest of
Pence’s detail guided them down a staircase to a secure subterranean area that
rioters couldn’t reach, where the vice president’s armored limousine awaited.
Giebels asked Pence to get in one of the vehicles. ‘We can hold here,’ he
said.”
At 2:28, Mark Meadows received
a text from Republican representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (“Please
tell the president to calm people…This isn’t the way to solve anything”). Meadows
would continue to field desperate pleas to stop the violence from Trump allies (including
Laura Ingraham and Mick Mulvaney) over the next half hour.
Around 2:30, Capitol police chief Steven Sund asked Lieutenant Generals Walter Piatt and Charles Flynn (the
brother of Martial
Law advocate Michael Flynn) for permission to deploy the National Guard. Accompanying
Sund were Major General William Walker (the commander of the D.C. National
Guard), Walker’s counsel (Colonel Earl Matthews), and D.C. chief of police
Robert Contee.
According to Colonel Matthews, Piatt told Sund
he didn’t like “the optics” of “having armed military personnel on the grounds of the
Capitol,” though the Defense Department had had no concern for “optics” in June
2020, when they had deployed armed military personnel at peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.
After police chief Contee said he would ask D.C.
Mayor Muriel Bowser to have a press conference exposing Piatt and Flynn’s
suspicious delay, Piatt’s fallback
suggestion was to have “Guardsmen take
over D.C. police officers’ traffic duties so those officers could head to the
Capitol.”
This
too was baffling, as a hand-off would take more time than sending the Guard
directly to the Capitol. As reported by Politico, Colonel Matthews’ 36-page memo about January 6 said that “Every
D.C. Guard leader was desperate to get to the Capitol to help…then stunned by
the delay in deployment. Responding to civil unrest in Washington is ‘a
foundational mission, a statutory mission of the D.C. National Guard.’”
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy had been invited to the call but was
“incommunicado or unreachable for most of the afternoon,” according to
Matthews.
As Trump’s Defense Department officials let seditionists
ravage the Capitol, Trump allies—including former New Jersey governor Chris
Christie, senator Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy,
and former advisor Kellyanne Conway—called the White House to try to get Trump
to act.
But the commander-in-chief wasn’t taking calls.
He was wrapped up in watching the attempted coup
he’d fomented on Fox in the West Wing dining
room. As one aide told a reporter, “‘He was hard to reach,
and you know why? Because it was live TV….If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and
takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it
all unfold.’”
According to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Trump was also pressured
(in person) to ask the rioters to go home by “Fellow lawyers Pat Philbin and Eric Herschmann, Ivanka
Trump, Jared Kushner…Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, [Deputy Chief of Staff
for Communications] Dan Scavino, [Pence National Security Advisor] Gen. Keith
Kellogg, and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.”
Fulfilling the request would have required minimal effort. Sarah Matthews told
the January 6 committee, “It would
take probably less than 60 seconds to get from the Oval Office dining room to
the press briefing room. There’s a camera that is on in there at all times. If
the president wanted to address people, he could have done so.”
But Trump was unmoved, even when his daughter Ivanka initially asked him to stop the violence, likely because he felt the rioters kept his hopes alive by obstructing the vote
count.
Eventually, Trump took a call
from Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who was inside the Capitol. Republican
representative Jamie Herrera Beutler, who was with McCarthy, tweeted that “When McCarthy finally reached the president on January 6 and
asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the riot, the president initially
repeated the falsehood that it was anti-fascists that had breached the
Capitol….McCarthy refuted that and told the president that these were Trump
supporters. That's when, according to McCarthy, the president said, ‘Well,
Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’”
This was of a piece with a comment
from Republican senator Ben Sasse that Trump was “confused about why other people on his
team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to
get into the building.” Sasse also mentioned that Trump was talking to the
other people in the room about “a path by which he was going to stay in office
after January 20.”
Key to this path was
a delay in the certification. As they hid in an underground Senate loading dock, Trump’s deputy chief of staff (in charge of the Secret
Service) Tim Giebels asked Mike Pence to get into one of the Secret Service-protected
vehicles. According to reporting in I Alone Can Fix It, Pence
replied, “I’m not getting in the car,
Tim….I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that
vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”
Another
excerpt from I Alone Can Fix It indicates
that Pence had good reason to stay put. In the scene described, Mike Pence’s
national security advisor Keith Kellogg interacts with White House Deputy Chief of Staff/liaison
to the Secret Service Anthony Ornato. The exchange takes place shortly after
Pence’s refusal to get into the Secret Service car. Ornato’s loyalties—to Donald
Trump or democracy—are in question, as Trump had brought Ornato to the White
House from the Secret Service, a major
break with the non-partisan code of the Secret Service:
“Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing.
Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him that Pence’s detail was
planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews. ‘You can’t do that,
Tony,’ Kellogg said. ‘Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you
guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.’”
While Pence held firm, Ivanka Trump convinced
her father to make a half-hearted attempt to defuse the violence with a tweet at
2:38 (“Please
support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of
our Country. Stay peaceful!”). Loyal foot soldier Donald Trump, Jr. texted Mark Meadows in response (“He’s
got to condemn this shit ASAP. The capitol police tweet is not enough.”).
At 3:13
p.m., Trump sent another tweet (“I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol
to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order
– respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”).
But he wouldn’t ask the insurrectionists to leave the Capitol, which forced Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mike Pence to do his job
for him, with calls to the governors of Virginia and Maryland, the secretary of
defense, the attorney general, anyone who could help.
Around
the time of Trump’s 3:13 tweet, some of his supporters showed their dedication
to law and order by harassing the Capitol police who were protecting members of
Congress huddled in the Speaker’s Lobby. Once they convinced the officers to abandon
their posts, seditionists started smashing the windows inside the doors to the
lobby. Some of them continued even after an officer pointing a gun at them
appeared on the other side of the door.
One
of the insurrectionists who refused to back off was QAnon follower Ashli Babbitt. While a nearby rioter screamed, “He’s got a gun!
He’s got a gun!,” Babbitt tried to climb through a broken window in the
doorframe. Moments after Babbitt was fatally shot, tactical officers appeared, clearing the area and moving
the attackers away from the lobby.
By
3:45, Trump spokesman Jason Miller had come up with messaging which could end
the insurrection and appease the president by shifting the blame. Miller texted Mark Meadows and (Trump aide) Dan Scavino two tweet
suggestions:
1)
“Bad
apples, likely ANTIFA or other crazed leftists, infiltrated today’s peaceful
protest over the fraudulent vote count. Violence is never acceptable! MAGA
supporters embrace our police and the rule of law and should leave the Capitol
now!”
2)
“The
fake news media who encouraged this summer’s violent and radical riots are now
trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions. This
isn't who we are! Our people should head home and let the criminals suffer the
consequences!”
At
4:06 p.m., president-elect Joe Biden tweeted a speech in which he said, “I call on President Trump to go on
national television now, to fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution and
demand an end to this siege. This is not a protest. It is an insurrection.”
Since Trump’s
tweets had no discernible impact on the insurrectionists, his advisors came up
with a neutral, yet unequivocal statement:
“I urge all of my
supporters to do exactly what 99% of them have already been doing — express
their passions and opinions PEACEFULLY.
“My supporters have a
right to make their voices heard, but make no mistake — NO ONE should be using
violence or threats of violence to express themselves. Especially at the U.S.
Capitol. Let’s respect our institutions. Let’s all do better.
“I am asking you to leave
the Capitol Hill region NOW and go home in a peaceful way.”
Trump
agreed to ask his followers to go home, but ad-libbed disinformation which fed
the delusional rage at the heart of the insurrection. His video plea was posted
at 4:17 p.m., over
two hours into the breach
and over three hours after he became aware of the violence outside the Capitol:
“It was a landslide election.
And everyone knows it. Especially the other side. But you have to go home….There’s
never been a time like this when such a thing happened when they could take it
away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent
election….Go home. We love you. You're very special.”
As reported by Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix, “According to the Department
of Defense’s and U.S.
Army’s own timelines, it is only after President Trump publicly released [his
video statement] that [Defense Secretary Christopher] Miller approved [Army
Secretary Ryan] McCarthy’s plan for deploying the D.C. National Guard to the
Capitol and even later when McCarthy authorized [D.C. National Guard commander
William] Walker to deploy his forces to the Capitol.”
The National Guard finally arrived at 5:20 p.m.
The Capitol was cleared at 5:34 p.m.
At 6:01 p.m., Trump tweeted “These are the things
and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously
& viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly &
unfairly treated for so long….Go home with love & in peace. Remember this
day forever!”
Around 7 p.m., with an hour to go before the
vote count would resume, Rudy Giuliani called
what he thought was Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville’s cellphone and left a
voicemail. Giuliani mistakenly dialed the wrong
senator, who gave the
recording to The Dispatch.
In the message, Giuliani asked the senator to organize objections to ten
states won by Joe Biden in order to drag the certification out as long as possible,
preferably until the end of the following day. Giuliani said that the delay
would give Republicans more time to present evidence of “fraud” in key swing
states. Another goal could have been to impede the certification in order to
allow more time for the resolution of a longshot election lawsuit that was
before the Supreme Court (who would
refuse to expedite the claim on January 11).
After Mike Pence re-started the official vote count,
Trump’s lawyer John Eastman emailed Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, claiming that Pence was
breaking the Electoral Count Act because debate was going “past
the allotted time.”
Pence officially
certified Joe Biden’s victory at 3:42 a.m. on January
7, 2021.
Biden’s win was certified despite the objections of two-thirds of House Republicans and eight Republican
senators who came out of hiding to parrot election fraud lies
which had jeopardized their safety just hours earlier.
Remarkably, dead-enders continued to push
Trump’s cause after the sun came up.
According to
White House counsel Eric Herschmann, he received a call from John Eastman “asking for legal work ‘preserving something
potentially for appeal’ in the contested state of Georgia,” where Trump lawyer
Sidney Powell flew—that very day—to gather confidential voter data.
Herschmann reportedly told Eastman,
“You’re out of your effin’ mind” and “Now I’m going to give you the best free
legal advice you’re getting in your life: Get a great effing criminal defense
lawyer. You’re going to need it.”
Not long after this
conversation, Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani to ask if he could be added to the growing list
of pardon requests.
While some administration officials resigned
and others pondered using
the 25th amendment to force Donald Trump from office, Ivanka
Trump patiently fought
off temper tantrums as she tried to coax her father to make a statement
condemning the violence he had caused.
Trump couldn’t
admit he had lost. He cut
out language in a prepared speech about the importance of law and order,
one of his favorite themes during the campaign, removing his advisors’ verbiage
that “I am
directing the Department of Justice to ensure all lawbreakers are prosecuted to
the fullest extent of the law. We must send a clear message—not with mercy but
with JUSTICE. Legal consequences must be swift and firm.”
Trump
removed a line that could have insulted his fanbase: “I want to be very clear
you do not represent me. You do not represent our movement.”
Trump’s most feral supporters had done substantial
damage. They had inflicted severe trauma
on Capitol law enforcement. They had injured
more than 150 law enforcement officers and contributed to the deaths of five (an Iraq War vet who was bashed in the head with
a fire extinguisher and four who later committed
suicide).
Their rampage cost America’s taxpayers $480 million to
secure the Capitol (with 25,000 National Guard members) before Joe Biden’s
inauguration. Taxpayers spent another $1.5
million dollars to repair the citadel of American
democracy. The damage done to America’s long-standing tradition of
peaceful transfers of power was (and still is) incalculable.
Donald Trump expressed no contrition.
In fact, he embraced January 6. In a TV appearance in September of 2021, ABC reporter Jonathan Karl, who interviewed Trump for his book Betrayal: the Final Act of the Trump Show, said, “I was absolutely dumbfounded at how fondly he looks back on January 6th. He thinks it was a great day. He thinks it was one of the greatest days of his time in politics.”
***
Two years after the January 6 insurrection, there’s a lot
that we still don’t know.
GOP leadership saw no political benefit in angering
Trump’s base or holding hundreds of Republican officials—including dozens
of members of Congress—to account.
First, Senate Republicans killed an independent investigation of January 6.
When Democrats proposed a
bipartisan House committee, Republicans tried to plant two aggressive
perpetrators of the Big Lie on the committee: Jim
Banks and Jim Jordan, the latter of whom
was heavily
involved in Trump’s coup attempt.
Their hands tied by Republican ploys, Democrats did the
best they could to conduct an accurate investigation without a partisan
process, forming a select committee with two conservative Republicans who were
willing to take an honest look at what happened on January 6, 2021.
The select committee was hobbled in their mission by a
long list of Republican officials who refused
to appear before the committee or pleaded
the 5th Amendment when they did appear. Obstruction served as a
get-out-of-jail-free card for numerous Republicans who skirted the law in their
collaboration with Trump and his associates.
Communication gaps are another big hole in the story.
Encrypted
communications among Republican conspirators, among insurrectionist
organizers, and between
organizers and Republican conspirators have slipped into the ether.
Phone communications on January 6 among members of key government
agencies—the Secret Service and the
Defense Department—have
disappeared.
During the January 6 committee hearings, Representative Jamie
Raskin called Mike Pence’s refusal to get into the Secret Service vehicle (“I’m
not getting into that car”) “the six most chilling words of this entire thing
I’ve seen so far” and asserted that the efforts to get Pence out of the Capitol
were motivated by a desire to delay the vote certification: “[Pence] knew
exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was to do.”
The role of Secret Service members in Trump’s plot could
be a critical piece of the puzzle, but Secret Service texts from January 5 and January
6 mysteriously disappeared. The texts
disappeared after multiple House committees requested all such
records be preserved on January 16, 2021. The
Trump-appointed Department of Homeland Security inspector general Joseph
Cuffari discovered that these texts had been deleted in May of 2021 but
didn’t notify Congress until July 14, 2022. Officials in the inspector
general’s office wrote a memo notifying Congress of the missing texts in April of
2022, but Cuffari didn’t forward the information.
Not surprisingly,
Joe Biden hired a new Secret Service team on entering office.
Arguably the biggest
question still on the table is why backup deployment
to the Capitol took so long.
This delay happened despite the fact that chief of staff Mark Meadows, who
was with Trump, was in “non-stop” communication all day with Kash
Patel, the chief of staff for Defense Secretary Christopher Miller—whom Trump
had installed after losing the 2020 election.
One line
of thought is that Trump’s appointees handcuffed
D.C. police and conspired to delay Guard deployment to give the
insurrectionists time to stop the vote certification. Miller
was perfectly aware of how dire the situation was from early on and yet
reportedly didn’t sign
on to the emergency deployment until 4:32 p.m., two
hours and 43 minutes after Capitol police chief Steven Sund first asked for
backup.
And it’s hard to imagine Deputy Chief of Staff for
Operations General Charles Flynn (whose brother Michael Flynn was in Trump’s
inner circle of coup planners) being disappointed if the certification
didn’t happen; this could explain his odd concern about “optics” when Capitol police chief Steven Sund asked for permission to
deploy backup around 2:30 p.m. Colonel Earl Matthews, a lawyer for the
commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, said that Flynn and his cohort
Lieutenant General Walter Piatt were “absolute
and unmitigated liars” when they spoke to the
January 6 committee.
A second theory,
based on the testimony of General Mark Milley
(chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Christopher
Miller before the January 6 committee, is that deployment was held off out
of fear that the introduction of troops could create the chaos Trump needed to
invoke the Insurrection Act, just as the Oath Keepers hoped he
would. The timing of deployment—after Trump had asked his supporters to go
home in the 4:17 p.m. video—may support this theory.
Or maybe Miller and/or Milley were covering their asses before the
committee, after the fact. Maybe the deployment happened when it did because Mike
Pence and congressional leadership were pushing the Department of Defense to
act and Miller/Milley felt that Trump’s 4:17 p.m. video indicated that he no
longer expected their acquiescence.
Despite these major gray areas, two very important truths are
crystal clear.
One, The
Big Lie that fueled the coup attempt looks
even more preposterous now than it did two years ago, as swing state recounts
in 2020—and 2022 election results—reinforced Biden’s legitimacy.
Georgia did three recounts, one by hand. All three
verified a Biden margin of over 11,000 ballots. Biden’s
win was within .6% of the pre-election
projections at 538.com. In
2022, Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock beat Republican Herschel Walker by almost 100,000 votes in the
Peach State, despite aggressive voter suppression legislation passed by Republicans in 2021.
The final 2020 tally in Arizona was within .6% of the RealClearPolitics polling projection. An
independent audit of Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, found no
change in Biden’s margin of victory. Arizona’s
Republican legislature didn’t like this finding, so they hired Cyber Ninjas, a Trump-supporting
cybersecurity company, on the taxpayer dime. The
Cyber Ninjas’ audit increased Biden’s Maricopa margin by 360 votes. In 2022, Democrats
won the two most hotly-contested races in the state—for governor and U.S.
Senate—despite party-line Republican voter suppression legislation passed after the 2020 election. Incumbent Democratic senator Mark
Kelly won by almost six points.
A recount of Wisconsin’s two biggest Democratic
counties requested by Republicans padded Biden’s 20,000+-vote margin by another 87 ballots. In
2022, Democrat Mandela Barnes narrowly lost to incumbent U.S. senator Ron
Johnson (after being swamped by outside money), but Democrats won four out of the other
five statewide offices. Democratic governor Tony Evers, the bulwark against a complete Republican takeover of the state’s
election system, won by a comfortable 90,000
votes despite race-based GOP voter suppression
measures on the books.
Michigan’s recount validated Biden’s 154,000-vote margin. Biden’s win was small next to
Democrats’ victories in 2022, in which Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer won
by 11 points and Democrats regained
control of the state legislature.
Like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Biden won Nevada by enough of a margin—2.4 points in Biden’s case—to
negate the need for a recount. This margin was
within .3% of the RealClearPolitics’ pre-election projection. Nevada’s
Secretary of State put out a point-by-point
refutation of right-wing conspiracies just in
case.
A sample
audit of 63 counties in Pennsylvania after the
2020 election found results which were within “a fraction of a percentage
point” of the official tabulation. Biden’s margin of victory—1.2%—was the exact
same margin predicted by RealClearPolitics.com. Democrats
easily won the two big races in 2022: John Fetterman clinched the U.S. Senate
seat by five
points; Josh Shapiro won the governor’s mansion by almost 15 points. Democrats also
won
control of the state House of Representatives for
the first time in 12 years.
A thorough
AP study of the six closest swing states in 2020 found a total of
less than 475 potentially fraudulent votes. Not all of the ballots were
necessarily fraudulent (thus the word “potentially”), not all of the ballots
were necessarily counted, and the ballots came from Democrats, Republicans, and
independents. Joe Biden won each of these states by more than 10,000 votes.
A peer-reviewed
study published by the National Academy of Sciences concluded the
following:
“After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump
refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s
supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt
on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we
conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind
these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of
the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each
case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not
anomalous.”
“Lost, Not Stolen,” a paper published
by “a group of prominent conservative legal and political figures,”
concluded that “there is
absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the
magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation
as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a
single precinct.”
The
biggest takeaway from all of the evidence to emerge over the past two years is
that Donald Trump did nothing to clear the Capitol for over three hours.
In the words
of January 6 committee chairman Bennie Thompson, “For 187 minutes on January 6th, this man of unbridled destructive
energy could not be moved—not by his aides, not by his allies.…or the desperate
pleas of those facing down the rioters….He ignored and disregarded the
desperate pleas of his own family, including Ivanka and Don Jr., even though he
was the only person in the world who could call off the mob. He could not be
moved to rise from the dining room table… and carry his message to the violent
mob.”
January 6 committee co-chair Liz Cheney was one of the few Republican
officials willing to acknowledge the extent of Donald Trump’s efforts to end
democracy in the United States. The daughter of ultra-conservative
former vice president Dick Cheney and the former chair of the House GOP
Conference (the third most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives),
Cheney endorsed Trump twice, voted for him twice, donated to and raised money
for his 2020 campaign as a co-captain of the Trump Victory Finance Committee, and voted with Trump 93% of the time during his single term in office.
For refusing to go along with Donald Trump’s Big
Lie, Cheney was demoted from her leadership position in the party and replaced
with Trump
toady Elise Stefanik, who had called Trump a “whack
job” in private. Cheney was then primaried, where
she lost to an election denier.
In closing
remarks made in a January 6 committee hearing
last July, Cheney said, “In our hearing tonight, you saw an American president
faced with a stark and unmistakable choice between right and wrong. There was
no ambiguity, no nuance. Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his
oath of office.”
Claims that the committee was a partisan witch hunt were undercut by the
witnesses called: “The case made against him is not made by his political
enemies. It is instead a series of confessions by Donald Trump's own
appointees, his own friends, his own campaign officials, people who worked for
him for years and his own family.”
Looking to 2024, Cheney posed the question every American with a shred of
decency should ask themselves:
“Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made
during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in
our great nation again?”
This feature originally appeared at RawStory.
Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter
More political writing by Dan Benbow:
The Master of Low Expectations: 666 reasons sentient citizens
are still celebrating the long overdue departure of George W. Bush
The breathtaking stupidity of #BernieOrBust
Death of a President in the United States of Amnesia
(a review of the public life of George H.W. Bush)
Aliens, unicorns, and the narcissism
of voting Green
10 reasons Barack Obama is clearly
the best president in my lifetime
178 reasons Hillary Clinton is infinitely better
than Donald Trump (even on her worst day)
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