I wrote about the new documents provided to the January 6th Committee by Trump toadie Bernie Kerik a couple of days ago. In a nutshell, Trump “released” Kerik from attorney client privilege and told hims to cooperate with the committee. Keris is doing that (sort of) but has claimed attorney-client privilege anyway on some documents for which he nonetheless inexplicably provided a “log” to the committee. One of the documents he is not providing is very intriguing. Will Bunch discussed this in this Philly Inquirer column:
According to a letter from Kerik’s attorney, the document is called “DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS” — and it’s believed to have been written on Dec. 17, 2020. That was a critical time for the Trump insiders who were accelerating their schemes to deny the presidency to Biden, even after the Democrat won 7 million more popular votes and the Electoral College by a 306-232 margin.
Here’s the catch: While Kerik, a longtime close associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani, last week turned over some election-related materials to the House Select Committee tasked with getting to the bottom of Jan. 6, the draft letter from Trump is on a list of records that Kerik is refusing to turn over — claiming that the document is shielded as “attorney work product.” While some legal experts are already throwing cold water on that claim, the reality is that Team Trump has been remarkably successful for months in stonewalling — in keeping both key records and important witnesses out of investigators’ reach. In an echo of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the future of democracy may hinge on Trump’s ability to thwart the probe.
Understanding why the 12/17/20 document could be a “smoking gun” means understanding where the concept of a national emergency and “seizing evidence,” which could include paper ballots or voting machines from the 2020 election, fits into the growing body of data showing both that an attempted Trump coup was afoot — and why it failed.
First of all, the evidence that Trump had drafted a proposed “National Emergency” letter is completely in sync with last month’s bombshell revelation of a 38-page PowerPoint presentation that circulated among Trump’s inner circle and their allies in Congress just before Jan. 6. The PowerPoint laid out a scenario in which Trump would declare “a National Security Emergency” as a pretense to invalidate electronic voting and possibly prompt lawmakers to award electoral votes to the incumbent president in states that he’d in reality lost.
Of course, Trump didn’t ultimately declare such an emergency. But a series of new revelations has now deepened our understanding of what happened — and, just as important, what didn’t happen — on Jan. 6, and thus shed a lot of light on just how close America came to a full-blown coup attempt.
Nearly one year ago, there were a lot of loose threads about the events of Jan. 6 — and the violence that disrupted but didn’t prevent the official certification of Biden’s election victory — that didn’t seem to add up. Why was the Capitol so lightly defended, and why didn’t National Guard troops respond for hours as the building was overrun? Why didn’t the most militant groups, like the Oath Keepers, fight harder once the Capitol had been breached, and what was Trump himself doing as he watched the events unfold?
Now we know that learning what was happening behind the scenes at the Pentagon, which has operational control over the National Guard in Washington, D.C., may be the critical link to understanding how Trump’s inner circle thought it could stop the certification of Biden, and why it ultimately could not. A tell came exactly one year ago on Jan. 3, 2021, with a stunning op-ed from all 10 living ex-Pentagon chiefs warning against a role for the military in the election.
This came after Trump spent the weeks after Election Day replacing many Pentagon higher-ups with hard-core loyalists. But we now know the Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Mark Milley, and the permanent military brass worked hard to make sure the National Guard didn’t get involved on Jan. 6 — thus blocking any chance troops would support a coup, yet also raising understandable questions why they didn’t quickly respond to violent pro-Trump insurrectionists.
Trump wouldn’t invoke the Insurrection Act against his own people — but his team fully expected bloody clashes with left-wing counterprotesters whom POTUS 45 had been pumping up as a threat for weeks. We now know, from the House investigation, that Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows stated in an email on Jan. 5 that the Guard was expected to act to “protect” pro-Trump demonstrators. Likewise, hard-core armed members of the militarized Oath Keepers were making plans to wait in a staging area in an Arlington motel.
What were Meadows, the Guard, Trump’s embedded allies in the Pentagon, and the Oath Keepers all waiting for? Presumably what they’d seen throughout 2020, peaking with mayhem in D.C. streets during a kind of trial run on Dec. 12, 2020 — violent clashes between Trumpists and left-wing counterprotesters. But leftists smartly stayed home on Jan. 6, egged on by a social media hashtag #DontTakeTheBait. Lacking the expected trigger for invoking the Insurrection Act and perhaps declaring a “national emergency,” both Trump and the Pentagon-led National Guard both were AWOL for hours.
Until now, little has been made public that would tie these schemes to invoke the Insurrection Act directly to Trump — instead connecting allies like Meadows and ad hoc advisers like the ex-Army colonel and psyops specialist Phil Waldron, likely author of the PowerPoint. That’s why the draft letter described last week by Kerik should be seen as a potential “smoking gun,” because it would prove that Trump was personally involved in the planning for a scenario that could have shut down the Capitol on Jan. 6.
And evidence that Trump himself was an active participant in a plot that saw the disruption of Congress, and its Electoral College certification, on Jan. 6 as its ultimate goal would also, legal experts argue, place the ex-president in the middle of a felony conspiracy scheme. Indeed, a key figure on the House Select Committee — the rogue Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming — recently pointed specifically to Trump’s known or potential actions on Jan. 6 in the context of the federal law against impeding Congress.
Is this document a smoking gun? I don’t think we know. But the scenario Bunch lays out certainly does sound like it may be the direction th committee is heading.
It is very difficult for me to believe that they are going to be able to hold Trump criminally liable for what he did. Sure there are some laws on the books that could apply and maybe there’s evidence that we haven’t seen yet that make such cases a slam dunk.
But what is most unsettling, even beyond the fact that there seems to be no accountability, ever, for this man, is the fact that a very large minority of this country thinks what he did was right. They believe the violent insurrectionists were patriots. Tens of millions of Americans believe this.