To be honest, I’d forgotten about the Downing Street Memo. In taking to task major press outlets for giving “conservative legal heavyweight” John Eastman’s “Trump coup memo” the big ignore, Dan Froomkin recalls that Bush II-era document:
It all reminds me a little bit of the “Downing Street Memo.” That memo, which dated back to 2002, was essentially a smoking gun in which a British intelligence official asserted that George W. Bush was manipulating intelligence to build support for war with Iraq — and that he was already set on invasion long before acknowledging as much in public. The Sunday Times of London published a leaked version on May 2006. It took six weeks for the American mainstream media to touch the story, and even then, only with distaste.
The Trump coup memo “provides step-by-step instructions for a coup,” Froomkin writes, yet merited no coverage in the New York Times or network news. “Editors at the Times evidently feel the coup attempt is behind us, dealt with, old news,” Froomkin writes. He offers much more at Press Watch.
Media Matters noted Wednesday afternoon that ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news broadcasts all ignored the memo:
Reporters at The Washington Post and CNN obtained a two-page version of the memo, which CNN published on Monday. On Tuesday, CNN reported that Eastman claimed that document was a “preliminary” version and published a six-page version dated January 3 that the lawyer had provided.
That longer version lays out a series of “alternatives” using the Trump campaign’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and “illegal actions by state and local election officials” during the election as a pretext for Pence and congressional Republicans to throw out electors from as many as seven states that President Joe Biden won. His argument was legally preposterous, but dangerous ambiguities in federal law left the election vulnerable if Republicans were willing to act.
“BOLD, Certainly,” Eastman comments in the memo after laying out the plot. “But this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage; we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules, therefore.”
The “Trump coup memo” was not the only hard evidence this week of post-election treachery from the lame-duck president and his team.
Within two weeks of Joe Biden’s election, the Trump campaign investigated conspiracy theories about rigged electronic voting machines, the Washington Post reports:
The researchers soon returned with an answer: a 14-page memo that refuted various claims, including that Dominion Voting Systems worked with election software maker Smartmatic and Venezuela to defeat President Donald Trump, according to records that emerged in a lawsuit this week.
Nonetheless, days after that memo was circulated, pro-Trump lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a news conference in Washington to publicize the same conspiracy theory about Dominion, Smartmatic and Venezuela.
First reported Tuesday by the New York Times, the documents, which were included in a defamation suit in Colorado brought by a former Dominion executive against the Trump campaign and others, reveal that as early as mid-November, staffers for the Trump campaign formally vetted and disproved key allegations that later fueled efforts to overturn President Biden’s victory.
Coomer’s lawyers explain that it is not clear if Rudy Giuliani ever saw the memo. Nor do they know how widely it circulated within the campaign. But true to form, the boss wanted to run with the lie, known today as The Big Lie, that the 2020 election was stolen. From him, and only from him. The truth was not working, so he and his closest associates spread the stolen-election lie. For months. His campaign sat on its findings.
There was an insurrection. Perhaps you saw it on TV?
Neither Powell nor Giuliani responded to requests for comment by the New York Times for its Tuesday story. Nor did Trump’s representatives.
For the record, the Post adds:
The researchers noted that they could find no relationship between Dominion executives and antifa and no business relationship between the company and Venezuela. They also reported no evidence Dominion used Smartmatic technology in their voting machines in 2020, noting that the companies began a partnership in 2009 that ended in 2012 “on rocky terms.”
Five days after the memo was prepared, Giuliani and Powell held a news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in D.C. to advance an array of conspiracy theories, including the claims about Dominion and Venezuela.
There is no benefit of the doubt left to give Trump, his family, his lawyers, his campaign, or his supporters inside or outside government. Treachery is their first resort and lies their primary weapon. They can speak the truth but, like the Devil, only when it furthers their agenda.
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s now-famous new book ends with, “Peril remains.”
Yeah.