Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Stunning series of revelations': Erin Burnett astonished by texts sent by Trump allies during MAGA riot



On Monday, before recommending former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows be referred for criminal contempt of Congress, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) delivered a series of bombshell texts obtained by Meadows' disclosures, showing that a number of Trump's allies, from Donald Trump Jr. to Sean Hannity, begged the former president to intervene and stop the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

CNN anchor Erin Burnett was shocked by the new information.

"That was the pretty stunning series of revelations there when we consider what we heard ... and we had 55 pages earlier today," said Burnett, speaking to reporter Ryan Nobles. "We thought that they would be putting out new information and they did. The vice chair, Liz Cheney, adding a lot of new details to the January 6th committee."

"There's no doubt about that," agreed Nobles. "And it goes to show just how much information the Select Committee has as it relates to Mark Meadows that we haven't seen, because it seems as though every day, they can roll out some new bombshell of information that shows directly the role that Meadows played in the events leading up to and on January 6th. And tonight, they revealed some of the most damning yet."

Nobles went on to explain the significance of the messages.

"I don't think there's any doubt the text exchange from Donald Trump Jr. to the chief of staff imploring him to convince his father to go out and make a public statement to try to quell the violence on Capitol Hill, and we know that the timeline of everything essentially, the president ignoring even a plea from his son," he said. "This is all information that we did not have before."

"It also plays into this larger argument that the committee is making about the need for Meadows to come in and answer questions about what he knew about January 6th," continued Nobles. "And furthermore, about how his knowledge of the events is not in any way protected under executive privilege because ... he's offered up 6,000 documents, 9,000 pages worth of information, and he's written a book on the topic where he talks about his conversations with the president in and around that time. And so now he needs to fill in these gaps by coming and sitting in front of the committee for a full deposition."

Watch below:

Fox News hosts knew Trump fans were behind MAGA riots -- but still lied and blamed Antifa



Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) revealed during the Jan. 6 hearing vote on Monday that three Fox News personalities were hurriedly texting White House chief of staff Mark Meadows begging him to make President Donald Trump stop the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

On television that day and in the days that followed, however, those Fox hosts were saying something entirely different on air.

"I, for one, am shocked Fox News hosts were staying stuff in private different to what they say in public. Shocked," MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan said in reaction, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

Media Matters president Angelo Carusone described it as a "big deal" for two major reasons.

"One, this is a stunning illustration, and it is rare to use the word stunning in relation to something Fox does but this is a stunning illustration of the Trump-Fox feedback because it shows in real-time on Jan. 6 they knew there was a problem," he explained. "They tried to protect and advise Trump to address that problem in real-time. Then after Jan. 6 they ran cover for him and, to this day, continued to rewrite history. The second reason is that we actually have their words that they were saying on air at the same time they were sending these messages."

Hasan showed a video collection of twisting the situation to make it seem that Democrats were acting hysterically. The attack wasn't actually that big of a deal, they claimed.

"What we just saw — it is gaslighting," said Hasan. "Now, thanks to the texts, we have clear evidence for that gaslighting."

Carusone agreed, noting that on Jan. 6, the same day Fox News hosts were sending the panicked text messages, they were telling their viewers that those attacking the Capitol weren't Trump supporters but Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

"Laura Ingraham called in," he recalled. "Sean Hannity did a show that night. Brian Kilmeade did the same thing. So, they recognized in real-time that this was actually Trump supporters and yet they spent an enormous amount of effort that very day lying, explicitly saying, and blaming this on Antifa and Black Lives Matter."

Hasan wondered if Hannity would dedicate his 9 p.m. hour to his role in the conversations with Meadows on Jan. 6 and come clean about what he was saying and thinking.

See the video below:

[Rick Plant]

These are 6 ways to overturn a US election -- according to Team Trump memos



This past year, the House panel charged with investigating the Capitol riot has been diligently working to lay bare Donald Trump's failed election coup, subpoenaing his allies, interviewing agency officials, and requesting confidential documents. So far, the evidence suggests that Trump and his allies coordinated a far-reaching campaign of lies – spanning multiple agencies and branches – to cast doubt over the results of President Biden's win. Still, for many, the committee's body of evidence is amorphous and confusing. After all, it's a hodgepodge of damning memos, missives, messages, thus making it important to distinguish each one from the rest.

The Eastman memo

First unearthed by The Washington Post back in October, the two-page document, produced by conservative lawyer John C. Eastman, who was working with Trump's legal team immediately following the former president's defeat, outlined a step-by-step scheme aimed at undermining the 2020 election via various questionable legal pathways.

Central to Eastman's scheme was former vice president Mike Pence, who, according to the memo, would be required to throw out electors from seven key states that Trump lost. In doing this, the document erroneously alleges, Pence would be able to replace these electors with Trump-friendly substitutes, leaving no candidate with at least 270 electoral votes – a result that endows the House of Representatives with the final vote.

"The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court," the memo instructed. "The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind."

Both Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah reportedly rejected the Eastman memos of the time of their proposal. And Pence, for his part, refused to go along with the plot.

While the Eastman memos were drawn up after the election, there's also evidence that Trump's allies concocted similar plots in anticipation of his loss.

Jenna Ellis' memos (2)

In the days leading up to the 2020 election, Politico reported, Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis also wrote a memo broadly echoing Eastman's proposal. Claiming that a provision of the Electoral Count Act contains a provision that violates the Constitution, Ellis argued that Pence had the right to nullify the votes of certain electors by refusing to open their envelopes during the election electoral vote count. After Pence did this, Ellis continued in her plan, he would claim that the federal government failed to meet its own legal threshold for certifying its electors, "requiring a final ascertainment of electors to be completed before continuing."

"The states," she added, "would therefore have to act."

Ellis' plan, Politico notes, did not go quite as far as Eastman's. After all, Eastman had argued that Pence could secure Trump's victory simply by throwing out certain electors. Ellis' proposal would have simply required a state-by-state review of the "validity" of certain electors, which could have theoretically ended in then-candidate Joe Biden's victory.

One day before the Jan.6 attack on the Capitol, Ellis wrote another memo, Politico reported, arguing that Pence should stop the certification process once the count reaches Arizona.

Despite their wild ambitions, Ellis and Eastman were not the only Trump sycophants to draft election coup manuals lacking in constitutional substance.

The McEntee memo

Last month, The Atlantic reported on a memo drawn up by Johnny McEntee, Trump's director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, who after the election made a series of bogus claims about how Trump could retake the throne. The memo, drafted by "rogue legal advisors," alluded to the likes of Thomas Jefferson, who presided over his own election certification as vice president, securing a victory against John Adams in 1801. At the time of the historical dispute, the memo notes, Georgia's ballots had been declared defective. According to McEntee, Jefferson simply ignored this issue and "announced himself the winner."

"This proves that the VP has, at a minimum, a substantial discretion to address issues with the electoral process," McEntee claimed. But in reality, The Atlantic notes, "Jefferson didn't discard electoral votes, as Trump wanted Pence to do. He accepted electoral votes from a state that nobody had questioned he had won."

Eastman, Ellis, and McEntee's memos were for the most part consigned only to those within Trump's allies. However, other missives breached Trump's inner circle and went beyond making technical claims.

The Clark memo

According to a report released by the Senate Judiciary Committee in October, Trump also attempted to weaponize the Justice Department following his election defeat, enlisting the help of sympathetic officials to cast doubt over Biden's win. Key to this scheme was Jeffrey Clark, the then-head of the Justice Department's civil division, who sent a letter to the Georgia legislature, vastly overstating the agency's concern around the state's election results.

"The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia," Clark wrote at the time, even though the department found no evidence of election-altering fraud.

Clark's letter, however, needed an official go-ahead from then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue, then the Justice Department's second-in-command. And both men quickly shut the effort down.

Eye-opening as it was, Clark's letter appears tame compared to the most recently unearthed artifact of Trump's failed election coup.

Meadows memo

This week, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, on track to be charged in contempt for flouting a congressional subpoena, turned over a PowerPoint presentation detailing a number of outlandish conspiracy theories and executive actions Trump could have allegedly taken to undermine the 2020 election.

The presentation, titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN," instructed Trump to "declare a national emergency, declare all electronic voting invalid, and ask Congress to agree on a constitutionally acceptable remedy," according to The Guardian. In order to establish a precedent for such radical actions, the PowerPoint suggested spreading a baseless conspiracy theory that "the Chinese systematically gained control over our election system." Under the scheme, Pence was also given four options to abuse his ceremonial role in the certification process – none of which ultimately panned out.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-memo/

[Rick Plant]

’They played their audience for fools: CNN analyst says ‘Fox News feedback loop has been totally exposed’



CNN senior political analyst John Avlon on Tuesday explained how Fox News revealed itself as a propaganda outlet after Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) read text messages that the network's stars sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished," Brian Kilmeade texted Meadows.

“Can he make a statement. Ask people to leave the Capitol," Sean Hannity texted.

“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy," Laura Ingraham texted.

Avlon said "the Trump/Fox feedback loop has been totally exposed."

"All the people who have been trying to ritualistically downplay this attack on our democracy, saying it was a mostly peaceful protest, it was tourists on a -- you know, in areas they weren't supposed to be in times they weren't supposed to be there," he said.

"They were lying," he noted.

"They knew instinctively in real time this was a desperate moment, that the capitol was being attacked, they were pleading to the president, showing that they were really functioning as political functionaries, nothing resembling journalists in that administration. And so all their public denials — both in Congress and on TV — they're all lies," he explained. "They all knew the truth in real-time because it was self-evident and they've tried to create a false impression going forward to protect the president, protect the administration, and protect their reputations."

"They've played the audience for fools," Avlon said.

[Rick Plant]

Liz Cheney subtly implicated Trump in a potential felony: CNN's Jake Tapper



CNN's Jake Tapper on Tuesday noticed that Rep. Liz Cheney on Monday night used very specific language that potentially implicated former President Donald Trump in a felony.

While discussing the newly revealed batch of January 6th text messages, Cheney asked rhetorically whether they showed Trump "through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede congress' official proceedings to count electoral votes?"

As Tapper pointed out, "that's the same language for a federal felony law," and is in fact the same felony that many Capitol rioters have been charged with in the months after the attack.

Former U.S. assistant attorney Kim Wehle shared Tapper's analysis and said that Cheney deliberately raised the specter of criminal prosecution for Trump.

"Absolutely, this is a message that they are potentially seeing criminal action down the road against some of these organizers within government," she said. "We've seen people on the ground be held accountable, but no one behind the scenes."

During her presentation on Monday, Cheney emphasized that several of the president's own allies sent messages begging him to call off the rioters, but the president nonetheless refused to act for more than three hours.

Watch the video below:

[Rick Plant]

The GOP coup in full motion. This is what Meadows turned over to the Jan 6 committee.   

A right wing member of Congress suggested that the GOP controlled states anoint Trump electors BEFORE those states were even called. This wasn't just overturning the election, this was scrapping our democracy BEFORE the votes were even counted.

This was not only the apparent Trump plan in 2020 but is now also a blueprint for challenging any future election with an outcome someone doesn’t like. All they have to do is lie about "voter fraud" and have their cronies overturn their losses.   

[Rick Plant]

Treason Texts

Sean Hannity knew. Laura Ingraham knew. Brian Kilmeade knew. Donald Trump Jr knew. #TreasonTexts

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Trump’s rage is ‘peaking tonight’: MSNBC host recounts former president’s dismal week



Former president Donald Trump is undoubtedly livid about major developments of the last few days, according to MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell.

"Several deeply reported books have documented Donald Trump's rage," O'Donnell said at the outset of his show, The Last Word, on Tuesday night, adding that America has "never had a rage-aholic like Donald Trump" as president before.

"We can only imagine how high his rage is peaking tonight now that a federal judge who he appointed has dismissed Donald Trump's frivolous lawsuit to block the Treasury from handing over Donald Trump's tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee," O'Donnell said.
O'Donnell said Trump's anger over U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden's ruling is "accompanied tonight by his rage" that his longtime accountant, Donald Bender, testified recently before a New York grand jury investigating the former president's financial practices.

"And all of that rage comes on top of the more than 24 hours of rage Donald Trump has been experiencing about his last chief of staff Mark Meadows' texts, revealing that Fox hosts and congressional Republicans were all trying to tell him what to do when the Capitol was being attacked on Jan. 6."

"How livid is Donald Trump tonight about the public revelation that the cowardly Donald Trump Jr. on Jan. 6 finally said what Donald Trump Jr. may have been trying to say for his whole life, but because he is Donald Trump Jr., he was not allowed to say it to his father," O'Donnell said. "He was allowed to say it to a guy working for his father, Mark Meadows."

Trump Jr.'s message to Meadows during the insurrection read, "He has to lead now."

"That is the cry from the deepest part of Donald Trump Jr.'s shallow heart, the hopeless cry from a cowardly son to a cowardly father who has never known how to lead," O'Donnell said. "Donald Trump has never known how to lead anyone, not his children, not his company, which is now under criminal investigation ... and certainly not his country."

Watch it below:

Longtime Trump accountant testifies before grand jury in NY criminal investigation



A longtime outside accountant for the Trump Organization testified recently before a New York grand jury investigating former President Donald Trump's financial practices, and Trump's former Deutsche Bank banker, Rosemary Vrablic, has been interviewed by prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.'s office, The Washington Post and The New York Times report, citing people familiar with Vance's Trump investigation.

Donald Bender, a Mazars USA accountant who has handled Trump's finances for decades, was automatically granted immunity from prosecution by appearing before Vance's grand jury, the Post reports. "The appearances by Bender and Vrablic suggest prosecutors are seeking information about Trump's finances from a small circle of outside partners who handled details of Trump's taxes and real estate deals. Bender and Vrablic were never Trump's employees, but they knew more about his company's inner workings than many employees did."

Vance and New York Attorney General Leticia James (D) are running parallel investigations of Trump's finances. The James inquiry is civil, meaning it could end in a lawsuit, and has already included depositions of former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, Eric Trump, and other Trump Organization employees. James also intends to depose Trump himself in January. Vance's investigation, aided by James, is criminal, and has already charged Weisselberg with felony tax fraud. Vance is leaving office in January, to be replaced by Alvin Bragg (D).

Both investigations are looking into whether Trump or his organization committed fraud by intentionally overvaluing assets and excluding liabilities to get bank loans and publicly inflate Trump's wealth while claiming a fraction of that value to tax authorities. "If Vance or Bragg ever seeks to file charges against Trump himself, the burden of proof will be high," the Post notes. "They would need to do more than simply prove the Trump Organization's numbers were wrong."

Trump's legal team will likely point to disclaimers on the "statements of personal financial condition" Bender has prepared for Trump noting that Mazars has "not audited or reviewed" the information provided by Trump and is "aware of departures from accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America," the Times notes. Armed with those caveats, "Trump's lawyers would most likely argue that no one, let alone sophisticated lenders, should have taken his valuations at face value."

https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-longtime-accountant-banker-reportedly-081041444.html


Trump-appointed judge shoots down former president's bid to keep tax returns from Congress

A federal judge has dismissed former president Donald Trump's lawsuit seeking to block Congress from obtaining his tax returns.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, who was nominated by Trump, on Tuesday ruled in favor of the House Committee on Ways and Means, which is seeking Trump's tax returns from the IRS.

"Former President Donald J. Trump sues to keep the Treasury from giving his tax returns to the House Committee on Ways and Means, which can publish them," McFadden wrote in his memorandum opinion. "He marshals an array of evidence suggesting the Committee’s purported interest in the Presidential Audit Program, an IRS policy that requires audits of the sitting President, is a subterfuge for improper motives— like exposing his returns. He also raises legal arguments against the statute on which the Committee relies."

"But even if the former President is right on the facts, he is wrong on the law," McFadden wrote. "A long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference to facially valid congressional inquiries. Even the special solicitude accorded former Presidents does not alter the outcome. The Court will therefore dismiss this case."

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-taxes/

[Rick Plant]

Where was Ivanka? Calls grow for Trump daughter's texts after Lindsey Graham reveals Jan. 6 contacts



Ivanka Trump has been implicated in the Jan. 6 investigation by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and now calls are being made to see her text messages from that day.

The senator told CNN's Manu Raju that he asked former president Donald Trump's eldest daughter, then a senior White House adviser, to deliver a message to her father as his supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress was set to certify Joe Biden's election win, reported The Independent.

"Sen. Lindsey Graham said he didn’t text with [Mark] Meadows on Jan. 6," Raju tweeted, "but told me he spoke with Ivanka Trump to deliver a message to her dad. He said he wanted then-President Trump to 'tell his people to leave.'"

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) read a text from Donald Trump Jr. to Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, begging him to ask his father to call off the mob, but it's not clear what actions -- if any -- his sister took as Graham reportedly begged her to intercede.

“You need to get these people out of here,” Graham told her, according to the Washington Post. “This thing is going south. This is not good. You’re going to have to tell these people to stand down. Stand down.”

The newspaper has reported that Ivanka Trump went between her office in the West Wing, where she saw TV footage of the riot, and the president's dining room, where her father was watching news coverage and tweeted a message of support for law enforcement.

“Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement," Trump tweeted at 2:38 p.m. "They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

Ivanka Trump reportedly tried to get him to use more forceful language to calm his supporters, and thought she had convinced him at one point, but Meadows later called to say that wasn't the case.

“I need you to come back down here," Meadows told her. "We’ve got to get this under control."

Ivanka Trump retweeted another one of her father's statements, which aides reportedly didn't think was sufficient under the circumstances, although she quickly deleted that after she was criticized for referring to the rioters as patriots.

“American Patriots - any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable," Ivanka Trump tweeted at 3:15 p.m. "The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful.”

Other Twitter users are asking what Ivanka Trump and her husband, then-White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, were communicating with Meadows as the riot unfolded.

"I want to see what Jared and Ivanka were texting to Meadows," tweeted Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project.


The Paperwork Coup
A much more dangerous insurrection was underway in the inboxes of Trump's inner circle in the weeks before January 6.

This is a tale of two coups—or rather, two attempted coups.

One is the well-known January 6 insurrection, memorialized in iconic photographs, gripping videos, and minute-by-minute reconstructions, and followed by hundreds of arrests, more than 50 convictions, and a House select-committee investigation. The other attempt took place over weeks and was mostly waged in closed-door meetings, legal memos, and private phone calls; it has thus far produced little accountability.

In the days ahead of January 6, experts worried over what chicanery might happen inside the House chamber during certification, but that threat was quickly overshadowed by the violence outside. There are many reasons for this eclipse. One is the simple, disturbing drama of the insurrection, revived on Monday when Representative Liz Cheney read panicked texts from members of Congress, then under siege in the Capitol, and Fox News hosts, beseeching Mark Meadows to get then-President Donald Trump to stop the riot. Anyone can grasp what was going on immediately, regardless of how they feel about it, whereas a coup planned in dry legal language is more opaque and abstract. The violence was thus a natural messaging focus for Democrats who wanted to punish and, if possible, banish Trump. Meanwhile, information on Trump’s procedural efforts to steal the election has emerged only slowly and in small bits.

But this is a moment for reassessment. Evidence about the insurrection suggests that although the mob was an obvious threat to human life, it was never an especially serious one to American democracy. Coordination within the crowd seems to have been sporadic, and if White House officials were in touch with organizers, they weren’t likely directing them. Moreover, it’s not clear how the insurrection might have successfully kept Trump in office, even if it had managed to prevent certification that day. This was an inchoate moan, a spasm of despair for a cause already lost.

Meanwhile, we now have a better sense of how dangerous what we might call the “paperwork coup” was. The theory under which Trump and his cronies attempted to steal the election was not especially elaborate or persuasive, but it didn’t need to be. It was coherent, and if a few things had happened differently—most especially, if Vice President Mike Pence had gone along with it—the result would have been chaos at the least and possibly a second Trump term and widespread conflict at worst. The violence on January 6 broke a long string of peaceful transfers of power in the United States. If the paperwork coup had worked, though, peace might have prevailed—but the transfer of power might not have happened.

What Trump was trying to do is not in question. He has always understood, and demonstrated repeatedly throughout his presidency, that voters treat as scandalous what is hidden but are more apt to accept what is done openly. So this coup attempt was no secret. Trump made clear starting the night of the election that he intended to try to cling to the White House by hook or by crook. Because neither he nor anyone else has ever produced credible evidence that fraud shifted the results of the election, this would have been plain theft. The surprising thing, which more recent revelations help underscore, is that what looked from the outside like one of Trump’s classic chaotic improvisations was in fact a concerted effort, coordinated among multiple Trump loyalists over a matter of weeks.

Some of Trump’s veteran lieutenants, accustomed to accommodating his eccentricities and outrages, drew a line here. In the early days after the election, aides anonymously assured reporters that Trump’s refusal to concede was just a short-term denial. As it became clear that wasn’t true, and as Trump mounted more desperate efforts to halt the certification process, Attorney General Bill Barr, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, and the lawyers Jay Sekulow and Eric Herschmann were among the aides who had stuck with Trump through all sorts of dubious maneuvers but who now refused to get involved, recognizing that he had lost the election.

Rather than face reality, Trump tried to create his own—and the first step was to find lackeys who would make-believe with him. This proved easy. They included Rudy Giuliani, who had by then proved no ask was too far; the attorneys Jenna Ellis, who seems to have gone along despite having some hesitations, and Sidney Powell, who had none; the law professor John Eastman, who lent (and sacrificed) his long-standing credibility in conservative legal circles; Philip Waldron, a retired Army colonel turned cybersecurity consultant; and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

By the start of 2021, Trump was close to running out of options. No one had been able to turn up evidence of major fraud. Giuliani, Ellis, and Powell were being laughed out of courts around the country. State after state, including those run by Republicans, had certified the election results, closing off one of his great hopes for preventing Joe Biden’s swearing-in from going forward.

That left Trump with one last gambit: keeping Congress from certifying the election on January 6. Most legal scholars agreed that the day’s proceedings were meant to be a formality, but Trump’s kitchen Cabinet had decided they were a place to make a stand. One prong was a bid to get the Justice Department to simply say the election was corrupt “+ leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen” (as a DOJ official recorded Trump saying). It’s still not entirely clear what Trump hoped to do once he’d received that declaration, but in any case it came up short. Rosen refused, and Trump’s attempt to replace him with a loyalist atop the department crashed at a January 3 meeting, where Cipollone and top Justice Department officials threatened to resign en masse.

The second prong was to persuade Pence to block or delay certification on January 6. Eastman wanted Pence to declare that there were no valid slates of electors from seven states that Trump allies claimed had major fraud. Ellis wrote in a memo that Pence should refuse to open votes from six states with putative controversies, though Sekulow rejected the theory. (She claims she was simply laying out legal theories, not endorsing them.) Waldron wanted Pence to accept alternative slates of electors from contested states, or else ignore the contested states altogether.

It isn’t hard to spin scenarios about how this might have turned out, because the proponents did so right there in writing. Eastman imagined that Democrats would object, so Pence would say the matter had to go to the House of Representatives, where each state’s delegation would receive a vote. Because Republicans controlled a majority of state delegations, they would elect Trump. Ellis foresaw a different possibility: Pence would demand that states make a response, effectively kicking the question back to state legislatures. Waldron, who was more of an outsider but did manage to meet with Meadows and members of Congress in the days before January 6, had the most chilling suggestion: that Trump declare a national-security emergency, effectively bypassing democracy in the name of a manufactured crisis.

These scenarios are frightening because they’re so plausible. Perhaps some members of the House would have objected and refused to back Trump in a vote, but the pattern of the Trump presidency was that many members swallowed private objections and got in line publicly. The Ellis plan is perhaps even worse, because state legislatures are more likely to be full of fringe elements. Many state officials refused to endorse Trump’s attempts to cheat before January 6, but they could point to precedent. If Pence had tossed the matter back to them later, there would have been no precedent to use as a shield—and Trump’s supporters would have been baying at the doors.

Any of these matters would have immediately ended up in federal court, and courts did not look kindly on the suits that Trump allies brought alleging fraud. But the genius of the proceduralist track was that it didn’t depend on the allegations being true—it was constructed on the hysteria the allegations had created. The current Supreme Court seems loath to interfere with procedure, as its handling of a Texas abortion law this term has shown. Perhaps the Supreme Court would have shut the effort down promptly, but we can only speculate.

The mystery is why Pence didn’t go along with it, a question only he can answer fully. Pence had stuck with Trump over four and a half tumultuous years, only briefly flinching in October 2016, when a tape of Trump boasting about sexual assault emerged. His political future was, by now, inextricably bound up with Trump’s: Standing by Trump might not guarantee him the presidency, but breaking with him would almost certainly doom his political future. Pence seems to have been searching for a way to do what Trump asked. In late December, according to the journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Pence spoke with fellow Hoosier and former Vice President Dan Quayle, and pressed Quayle for whether there was some way to pause certification. Quayle bluntly shut him down.

For the first few days of the year, Trump did not speak with Pence, according to The New York Times. Then on January 4, Trump met with Pence several times in the Oval Office, where he pressured Pence hard to go along with the plan. But by then, Pence was apparently resolved, and met the arguments of Trump’s legal advisers with those of his own. Finally, on the morning of January 6, Trump called Pence and told him, “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy.” Trump was right about the choices, but not about which was which. Pence chose patriotism.

As the contours and scope of the paperwork coup become clear, we can better understand Trump’s enormous rage at Pence on January 6. As a mob stormed the Capitol, assaulted police, and chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump watched impassively from the White House, making barely any effort to quench the violence. “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!” he tweeted as the assault continued.

More recently, in an interview with ABC’s Jon Karl, Trump called the January 6 mob’s fury at Pence “common sense.” What else could he say? He remains furious. On SaPersonay, during an appearance in Florida, Trump brought up the idea of bouncing the election to states again. “Mike should have sent those crooked votes back to the legislatures and you would have had a different result in the election, in my opinion,” he said. Whereas the insurrection was doomed from the start, Trump knew how tantalizingly close he’d been to clinging to power.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/trumps-coup-before-january-6/620998/