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Last week a federal court agreed to schedule Steve Bannon’s contempt of Congress criminal trial for July of next year — just as the fall campaigns go into full swing. He must be very pleased. Bannon would like nothing more than to have a big show trial at that moment and be carted off to jail where he can write his Great Replacement manifesto.

With the news that there was a PowerPoint presentation called “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for JAN 6”, reported here by Brett Bachman, Bannon’s revolutionary proclamations on his Jan. 5th podcast have become clearer. Recall what he said:

“Mitch McConnell’s got to start taking care and focusing on these senators — because this is going to be very controversial. We are going into uncharted waters. We’re going into something that’s never happened before in American history. Tomorrow it’s going — we’re pulling the trigger on something that’s going to be, it’s going to be minute by minute, hour by hour, what happens. The stakes couldn’t be higher right now.”

“It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen …Okay, 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…It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow.”

It’s understandable that people would suspect that he was talking about the violence that took place when Trump incited his crowd to converge on the Capitol and he may very well have been. He and the others who were plotting at the Willard Hotel in the days before the insurrection were very close to groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who had an outsized role in the attack.

But it’s clear now that Bannon was also talking about the plans laid out in that PowerPoint presentation which included some of what we knew but also reveals some rather chilling recommendations that add more detail to what was undeniably a coup attempt. When he said, “We are going into uncharted waters. We’re going into something that’s never happened before in American history,” he wasn’t kidding.

The presentation indicated that Mike Pence had more than one way to overturn the election. As vice president, he could seat alternate Republican electors (which Rudy Giuliani and the boys were working feverishly to round up), he could reject the electoral votes of the states Donald Trump was disputing (with no evidence) or he could delay by refusing to certify until there was a recount of all paper ballots. That last coincidentally tracks with the fatuous proposal by Senator Ted Cruz, R-Tx, and 11 other senators who planned to delay the count in order to conduct an “emergency audit” in the states Donald Trump was disputing in order to “restore trust in the electoral system.” Finally, Pence could just throw up his hands and say there was no way to ever know the real outcome and throw it to the House of Representatives which would vote as if it were a tie and Trump would win under the rules that each state delegation has one vote.

None of those recommendations were remotely constitutional.

Meanwhile, the PowerPoint also recommended that Trump brief Congress on alleged foreign interference in the election, deem all electronic voting in the states invalid, declare a National Security Emergency and put the National Guard on standby. (Politico reported that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows did order the guard to be available to “protect pro-Trump people.”) Here’s a little flavor of what they had in mind:

https://twitter.com/BetsyStover/status/1470250917668605956?s=20

The PowerPoint also features some of the looniest conspiracy theories hatched in the wake of the election. One slide states that a “key Issue” is that “critical infrastructure control was utilized as part of ongoing globalist/socialist operation to subvert the will of United States Voters and install a China ally leading to another one advising the president to say the Chinese government interfered in the election as a pretext to declaring all the electronic votes invalid.

This presentation was released by the January 6th Commission because it turned up in former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ documents which he voluntarily turned over the committee. It took a day or so before the person who circulated it was identified — a former Army Colonel by the name of Phil Waldron, who told the Washington Post that he worked with Trump’s lawyers to put it together. Waldron said he contributed the stuff about foreign interference and he claims that he met with Meadows 8-10 times and helped to brief members of Congress before January 6th on what they had in mind, telling the Post that the presentation’s recommendations were “constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.” And he’s right — if you are plotting a coup in a banana republic.

Not one of the people who read this disgraceful betrayal of American democracy blew the whistle. Well, except for Lara Logan, the Fox News personality who recently compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to infamous Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. She tweeted out a version of the PowerPoint on January 5th but nobody paid any attention because she has no credibility. And yes, it was reported in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book “Peril” that Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina “vetted” the fraud claims and determined that it wouldn’t be prudent to overturn the election. I’m sure others clutched their pearls in the Senate cloak room, worrying about how risky the whole thing was as well. Not that they said anything publicly, of course.

We knew that Trump had many different plans to overturn the election. The memos prepared by right-wing lawyer John Eastman, Trump telling Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen” and threatening to replace him with a toady, Jeffrey Clark, if he refused were just a few examples. All of this was grossly unethical.

But this PowerPoint emphasizes just how desperate they were.

They threw everything at the wall in the hope that something would stick, that enough Republicans in Congress would grab on to one of the rationales they offered and agree to at least delay the certification or overturn it outright. When Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along, Trump tried one last gambit. He sent the angry mob he’d just whipped up to march to the Capitol to give the “weak” reluctant Republicans the “pride and boldness” they needed to stop the certification. It’s why he sat on his hands for hours as his supporters stormed the Capitol.

Let’s revisit that tale of the PowerPoint presentation for overturning the 2020 election that was in documents former Donald Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows turned over to House Jan. 6 investigators. The Washington Post has more this morning:

Phil Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN,” Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.

Waldron told the Washington Post he had visited with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed “several members of Congress” on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot.

Members of Congress? Which members of Congress? Waldron declined to identify them.

“The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here’s the proof,” Waldron said. “These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.”

The PowerPoint circulated by Waldron included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” or replace them with Republican electors. It included a third proposal in which the certification of Joe Biden’s victory was to be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops were to help “secure” and count paper ballots in key states.

A lawyer for Meadows claims Meadows did nothing with the PowerPoint after receiving it. But the “wild theories and proposals” circulating among Trump loyalists, plus Meadows asking Department of Justice heads to investigate baseless conspiracy theories, suggests Meadows “was more directly in contact with proponents of such theories than was previously known.”

Waldron, a cybersecurity consultant who specialized in psychological operations during his military career, said that a meeting he and others had with Meadows in the days around Christmas turned to questions about how to determine whether the election had been hacked. He said Meadows asked, “What do you need? What would help?” Waldron said his team developed a list for Meadows with information on IP addresses, servers and other data that he believed needed to be investigated “using the powers of the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus.”

Waldron “and others” on his “team”? Which others?

An unnamed source tells the Post that Meadows had “little or nothing to do” with Waldron or any of his documents, but simply passed along information to appropriate parties.

Eight to 10 times?

No one owns up to authoring the PowerPoint. Nor do they know who sent it to Meadows even though Waldron seems to know who provided input:

Waldron has said that the team behind the PowerPoint included former intelligence officers and military veterans and was supported by hundreds of “digital warriors” who provided research. Jovan H. Pulitzer, a Texas-based entrepreneur who is a vocal election denier, told The Post that he contributed material for it.

“It was a pretty wide variety of folks from around this country that jumped in to say how can we help,” Waldron told The Post.

“Violence is absolutely the last thing that anybody on our team espoused,” Waldron told the Post. Perhaps they should have told the losing candidate, The Three Percenters, The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and others.

Waldron also claims to have briefed Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in Meadows’s office with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani present and is known to have worked with Trump’s legal team and Giuliani at their Willard hotel war room.

No comments on this Post reporting from :

• Ben Williamson, a Meadows spokesman
• Rudy Giuliani
• Lindsey Graham
• A Trump spokesman

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (R) on Friday “did not directly address whether Waldron had briefed him and his staff.”

The Post has much more background on Waldron’s background and post-service involvement in cybersecurity. He had post-election involvement with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and advised Arizona Senate President Karen Fann on the hiring of Cyber Ninjas for the bamboo ballots recount in Maricopa County, Arizona.

We once had a major client who operated like these clowns. You knew it was him calling when you heard an office page for the process engineering team leader, then, after a pause, for someone else on the process team, then, after another pause, a page for someone on the piping team, and so on. He would not take responsibility for making his own decisions. He would call around our office looking for someone to tell him what he wanted to hear so he had someone to blame when the stupid thing he wanted to do went to hell. Team Trump, Giuliani, pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and others kept doing the same with 2020 election results.

How many court decisions and official recounts would it take to prove to Trump and his cadre of seditionists that there was no significant fraud in the election?

∞ x ∞

“There are very few things you can count on in this world, but one thing you can, with the consistency of a Swiss watch, is that at any given moment Donald Trump and his inner circle will be doing something both deeply corrupt and extremely stupid,” writes Bess Levin at Vanity Fair.

To wit, a 38-page PowerPoint document entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” was among the documents the Jan. 6 investigation received from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. The presentation included a string of Trump’s options for delaying certification of the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. Including declaring a national security emergency to stay in power.

It is, however, unclear that Trump aides prepared the document. A similar document circulated online on Thursday. The New York Times confirmed it was simlar to the document turned over to the House Jan. 6 committee. Business Insider found other versions had circulated online before, “including by Fox News’s Lara Logan on January 5 and other proponents of challenges to the 2020 election.”

The PowerPoint titled “Election fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” and dated Jan. 5 came up in an email Meadows gave to Jan. 6 committee about a briefing that was to be provided “on the hill”

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 9, 2021

The New York Times dug into the document’s origins:

Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and an influential voice in the movement to challenge the election, said on Friday from a bar he owns outside Austin, Texas, that he had circulated the document — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — among Mr. Trump’s allies and on Capitol Hill before the attack. Mr. Waldron said that he did not personally send the document to Mr. Meadows, but that it was possible someone on his team had passed it along to the former chief of staff.

It is unclear who prepared the PowerPoint, but it is similar to a 36-page document available online, and it appears to be based on the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who has appeared with Mr. Waldron on podcasts discussing election fraud.

Waldron and his associates briefed a group of sentors on Jan. 4. The next day, he himself briefed several House members, including on the (debunked) theory that foreign powers had gained control over the vote tallies.

The document also outlined means by which Vice President Mike Pence might delay or overturn the results, the Guardian adds:

Pence could pursue one of three options, the PowerPoint said: seat Trump slates of electors over the objections of Democrats in key states, reject the Biden slates of electors, or delay the certification to allow for a “vetting” and counting of only “legal paper ballots”.

The final option for Pence is similar to an option that was simultaneously being advanced on 4 and 5 January by Trump lieutenants – led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, as well as Trump strategist Steve Bannon – working from the Willard hotel in Washington DC.

The Willard Hotel war rooms were bound to turn up here. Meadows’ posession of the document makes it a stretch for him to claim he was unaware such plans were under consideration.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, has cited the 38-page PowerPoint as among the reasons he wants to question Mr. Meadows under oath.

Before coming to loggerheads with the panel, Mr. Meadows had provided some useful information to the committee, including a November email that discussed appointing an alternate slate of electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and a Jan. 5 message about putting the National Guard on standby. Mr. Meadows also turned over his text messages with a member of Congress in which the lawmaker acknowledged that a plan to object to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory would be “highly controversial,” to which Mr. Meadows responded, “I love it.”

Like the smell of napalm in the morning, eh?

It seems like it was only a month or so ago that the political establishment had decided the Republicans had found the electoral holy grail in the campaign of Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin. Out of 3.3 million votes cast, he had won with 63,000 votes and it was widely seen as a landslide victory that totally repudiated everything the Democratic Party stands for. The fact that Virginia has consistently elected a governor of the opposite party that holds the White House for more than 30 years (and usually by much wider margins than Youngkin’s) didn’t hinder the conventional wisdom in any way. The Youngkin campaign showed the way for the GOP to win again: All they had to do going forward was distance themselves from Donald Trump.

Fast forward just a few weeks later and it’s as if it all never even happened.

Donald Trump is firmly in the driver’s seat of the GOP and any thoughts of the party extricating itself from his grasp are but a faint memory. Of course, the notion was always ridiculous. Trump didn’t hold rallies for Youngkin but he made it clear to his base that he backed him. And Youngkin may not have gone down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring but he did make “election integrity” a centerpiece of his campaign, which was exactly the dog whistle Trump and his followers needed to see to prove that he was on the team. If any of those Biden to Youngkin voters thought they were voting for a Republican Party that had left Trump behind they were sadly mistaken.

It’s been obvious that Trump’s Big Lie would be the organizing principle of the GOP ever since January 6th. It’s a nice delusion to think that the party would sober up but if it wasn’t clear before, it’s certainly clear now that they are going to stay on their Trump bender for the foreseeable future. And it’s highly unlikely that Trump and his people are going to allow any more candidates to hedge on the Big Lie or pretend to distance themselves from their leader.

Earlier this week, former Senator David Perdue of Georgia threw his hat into the ring to challenge incumbent governor Brian Kemp in the Republican primary. You may recall that he lost his Senate seat in a runoff last January to Jon Ossoff. Most political analysts attribute his loss and that of former Senator Kelly Loeffler to Raphael Warnock to the fact that Trump suppressed the Republican vote by insisting the election system in the state was corrupt. If that’s so one might expect Perdue to harbor some resentment but apparently not. The formerly mild-mannered businessman’s announcement was so Trumpian you’d almost expect him to launch into a rousing chorus of YMCA at the end:

I’m running for Governor to make sure Stacey Abrams is NEVER Governor of Georgia. We need bold conservatives who will stand up to the woke left, not cave to their radical demands. Join me in this fight to Stop Stacey and Save Georgia. pic.twitter.com/iQMMV97ynw

— David Perdue (@DavidPerdueGA) December 6, 2021

Perdue later said that he would not have certified the 2020 presidential election in Georgia which really means that if he wins the Governor’s seat in 2022, he will do everything in his power not to certify an election for anyone but Donald Trump. Not only is Trump running his enemies out of the party, he’s demanding that anyone who wants to run for office also sign on to his Big Lie.

Trump remains obsessed with the 2020 election.

Jonathan Swan of Axios reported on Thursday that people who see him at Mar-a-Lago say “it’s impossible to carry out an extended conversation with him that isn’t interrupted by his fixations on the 2020 election” and he continues to insist that there should be more “audits” that will somehow overturn the results. He is obviously very disturbed at this point if he actually believes that.

But it doesn’t matter. Whether his delusional obsession is born of his narcissistic personality disorder or it’s a canny form of salesmanship to inspire his supporters to take over the election systems in the states he must carry in 2024, he’s reorganized the Republican Party around the belief that the 2020 election was stolen and he must be restored to the White House. This goes way beyond Trump himself picking and choosing officials who will help overturn the 2024 election or unseat disloyal Republicans. Swan reports that Trump’s allies have been working just as feverishly putting together institutional support (and not coincidentally providing nice sinecures for his most loyal acolytes.)

Former Trump administration officials founded a think tank, America First Policy Institute. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller runs America First Legal, challenging the Biden administration’s agenda in court.Former Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is driving education battles, heading up the new Center for Renewing America, a think tank that’s focused on cultural issues including “critical race theory.” America First Policies, a high-dollar advocacy group run by allies when Trump was in office, was recently refashioned America First Works and primed to activate at the federal, state and local levels on issues including education policy and “election integrity.”

Barton Gellman wrote a major cover story in The Atlantic on this subject that seems to have finally captured the mainstream media’s attention. He makes a compelling case that Trump and his cronies are literally laying the groundwork for a coup in 2024 using all the tactics outlined above including the use of an obscure, untried legal theory called the “independent state legislature” doctrine which holds that statehouses have “plenary” control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. (I wrote about it here last June.)

These are the acts of GOP officials, not Trump.

Yet it’s garnered not a peep of protest from the Republican political establishment. Where Trump comes in is another aspect of this potential coup plot: He has created a mass movement (some might call it a cult.) Gellman writes that Trump’s followers, numbered in the tens of millions, are people who have been convinced that they lost the White House and ” are losing their country to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power” — and they are ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed.

After January 6th, that threat of violence underlies everything else they are doing.

As The Hill reported, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina addressed the GOP Senate caucus this week as they debated whether to allow the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling to prevent the US from defaulting on its debt. Trump was apoplectic that they would do this because he believed the Democrats would suffer politically if the country defaults and the markets crash, which is his fondest hope. Graham counseled his fellow Senators against saving the country saying, “It’s pretty obvious to me that this will not be received well by the Republican faithful, including Donald Trump.” He said that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had led them up a hill and they were being shot in the back. 

What a metaphor. (It is a metaphor, right?) The Hill quoted another senator saying, “Graham was warning us about what Trump was going to do and ‘May God have mercy on your souls.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. 

He’s rewriting January 6th. Don’t think it won’t work on at least 40% of the country and lead another 10% or so to think there might be something to it. Mark Follman at Mother Jones reports:

As I reported in mid-November, the ex-president has been steadily building a campaign to rewrite the events of January 6, posting numerous statements online and making declarations at Republican fundraisers and in the media that commandeer the language of “insurrection” and aim to flip the reality of what happened on its head. Trump has been refining this message and grooming the Republican Party in his grip to help him continue delivering it: The “real” insurrection was the 2020 election itself, Trump claims, whereas January 6 was simply “the protest” against that supposedly nefarious day of invalid national voting.“I reverse it,” Trump now declares. “The insurrection took place on November 3rd.”

Trump is now pushing this propaganda more explicitly on television. For an interview broadcast in early December on UK channel GB News, the ex-president sat down at Mar-a-Lago with former right-wing British politician and dedicated Trump toady Nigel Farage, who asked Trump whether he thought it was “a mistake” to have held a rally at the White House Ellipse on January 6. It was during that rally that Trump directed his supporters to march to the Capitol Building and “show strength” against the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory or risk losing their country forever.

“It was a massive rally, with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people,” Trump claimed in response to Farage’s question. “I think it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken before. And the real—I reverse it—the insurrection took place on November 3rd, that was Election Day, and before and after. That was to me, the insurrection. And January 6th was a protest.”

Trump then reiterated his claims about crowd size along with another familiar tactic meant to deceive the public about the horrific events at the Capitol: “And then, unfortunately, some bad things happened,” he told Farage, “but also, the other side had some very bad things happen.”

This well-honed whataboutism from Trump, ascribing blame to a fictitious “other side,” aims to haze over lies from him and his congressional supporters: the notion that “antifa” was behind the Capitol siege—a falsehood debunked under oath by FBI director Christopher Wray and even by some insurrectionists themselves—or the bogus claim that a conspiracy hatched by the FBI was supposedly the cause of the mayhem. The utter lack of coherence to all of this is irrelevant. Trump and his backers have made just as many phony claims to the opposite effect, pushing the lie that January 6 was “a peaceful protest” by patriots rather than a violent attack by a heavily armed mob—a veritable “lovefest,” as Trump has described it, between his supporters and police at the Capitol.

The propaganda campaign led by Trump appears to have been effective to a profoundly disturbing degree. Polls indicate that many Republican voters continue to buy the election-fraud lies from Trump and the party, even condoning violence as a necessary means of “saving” the country. Moreover, Republican officials and operatives have exploited the animating lie of the January 6 insurrection to spread new voter suppression laws. And as the Guardian reported, Trump’s performances remain a cash cow for right-wing media; his GB News interview with Farage doubled the size of the channel’s usual audience, giving it “the symbolic victory” of overtaking Sky News and the BBC News channel during the time slot it aired on December 1.A sinister paradox now holds that Trump will soon run again—even though Trump, according to Trump, was in fact reelected in November 2020, a lie still tacitly endorsed by some Republican officials.

Trump has already made evident how he plans to use the whitewashing of January 6 within his broader narrative of political grievance as he eyes a GOP presidential nomination for 2024. In a lengthy interview aired on Fox News on Sunday, sycophantic host Mark Levin didn’t ask the ex-president about the grim assault on the US Capitol—but Trump still worked in some of his messaging about it amid his familiar demagoguery on immigrant invaders and the alleged evils of the Democratic Party.

“They’re using prosecutors all over the place to hurt people, to hurt Republicans… and hurt ‘em very badly,” Trump told Levin, apparently in reference to the charges against January 6 rioters and perhaps also a preemptive attack on possible criminal consequences at higher political levels. “They’re going after people, everybody.”

Trump is the first American president in history to permanently refuse to concede a clear election defeat. A sinister paradox now holds that he will soon run for the White House once again—even though Trump, according to Trump, was in fact reelected in November 2020, a lie tacitly endorsed by some Republican officials who still refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden is legitimately the president of the United States.

Trump declared to Levin in Sunday’s interview that the GOP would see major victories in 2022 and 2024 with himself leading the way. He also further emphasized his long-running message of divisive existential battle. “This country has tremendous potential,” he said, “but we’re giving it away, and there’ll be a point where the country can’t come back, and we can never allow that point to be reached.”

The Big Lie has officially expanded to include th Insurrection: it didn’t happen and the Deep State Communists are persecuting the patriots who were just protesting the real insurrection on November 3rd.

Just so you know.

That’s Trump, referring to the January 6th rally. A bunch of those loving, friendly people marched up to the Capitol to hunt down Nancy Pelosi and hang Mike Pence but he felt it was a beautiful time anyway:

Former President Donald Trump called January 6, the day of the Capitol riot, “a very beautiful time” in a March interview with ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, according to Karl’s forthcoming book. 

During the interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Trump praised the supporters who attended his speech in which he urged his loyalists to march to the Capitol and protest Congress’ certification of then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. 

When Karl asked Trump why he tweeted, “Remember this day forever,” hours after the deadly riot, Trump told him that Jan. 6 was “a very beautiful time with extremely loving and friendly people — the largest crowd that I’ve ever spoken before — with tremendous spirit. And I’m referring to that.” 

Trump went on, “I’m referring to when I made a speech which was perfectly fine. Some people thought it was mild-mannered …. it was a relatively mind-mannered speech.”

Karl said he wasn’t expecting Trump to express remorse for his role in inciting the deadly mob, but that he was shocked at how the former president recalled the day with pride. 

“I was taken aback by how fondly he remembers a day I will always remember as one of the darkest I have ever witnessed,” Karl writes in “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” an advanced copy of which was obtained by Insider. 

Trump also insisted that “the fake news” didn’t report on the large size of the crowd on the National Mall.  

“When I made that speech, it was a magnificently beautiful day,” he told Karl. “They never gave the credit to the size of the crowd when the crowd went all the way back to the Washington Monument.” 

Trump conceded that the day was “marred by what took place” after his speech. 

Even now, in spite of everything that happened, death and destruction, a riotous insurrection he’s still complaining that nobody gives him credit for his crowd size !!!!

This man is the frontrunner for the 2024 election and if the press has their way, he will win.

Will Steve Bannon wear an American flag as a shirt to his trial? Sorry, two shirts?

Former Donald Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon defied a subpoena to appear for a deposition on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and refused to turn over requested documents to a House investigation. Skeptics convinced that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice was toothless heard Friday that a grand jury had indicted Bannon on a charge of contempt of Congress. Sorry, two counts.

Bannon will turn any jail time into a meal ticket the way G. Gordon Liddy did after Watergate, and Oliver North did after his Iran-Contra conviction, and as Kyle Rittenhouse will if he walks free. But David Frum believes before that Bannon will turn his trial into a circus the way the Chicago Seven did:

They were a disparate group of radicals—some who knew each other, some who didn’t—who went to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 to spark trouble. Trouble did indeed erupt, although maybe not the exact trouble they had wanted. They were indicted and prosecuted. And then things went terribly wrong for the government.

The prosecution thought it was running a trial, a legal proceeding governed by rules. The defendants decided that they would instead mount a new kind of media spectacle intended to show total contempt for the rules, and to propagandize the viewing public into sharing their contempt. The prosecution was doing law; the defense countered with politics.

The indictment of Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress is the opening bell of a similar kind of fight over law, justice, and authority. The attack of January 6, 2021, to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power struck nearer the heart of American democracy than the disorder in the streets of Chicago had. In 1968, the worst of the violence was mostly initiated by police; in 2021, it was initiated by the pro–Donald Trump mob forcing a police officer to shoot to defend the officeholders whom it was his duty to protect. But though the details of the riots were different, there is a striking parallel between the gleeful contempt for legal authority of the far-left defendants of long ago and the pro-Trump authoritarian nationalists of today. Congress wants to hear from pro-Trump partisans about their advance knowledge, if any, of the January 6 attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election. At former President Trump’s direction, those partisans have adopted a no-cooperation strategy, pleading that the defeated ex-president should permanently enjoy the legal privileges of his former office.

That’s not a very smart legal strategy. But it’s not meant as a legal strategy. It’s a political strategy, intended, like the Chicago Seven’s strategy in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom all those years ago, to discredit a legal and constitutional system that the pro-Trump partisans despise.

Frum believes Bannon and Trump partisans could use the platform to further their attempt to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 and the 2020 election, to deny that Trump radicalized his followers into assaulting the Capitol, and to claim that if something violent (we all saw live) did happen, it was justified.

“Their argument doesn’t have to make sense,” Frum writes, “because their constituency doesn’t care about it making sense. Their constituency cares about being given permission to disregard and despise the legal rules that once bound U.S. society.”

Now, in 2021–22, the project is to repeat that kind of kaleidoscope shift of denial and justification. Like the Chicago Seven, Bannon understands the political power of ridicule and contempt. He’s not coming to trial to play by somebody else’s rules. If he does eventually testify about the events of January 6, he won’t play by the rules then, either.

Bannon and Trump’s strategy of distraction and denial won’t necessarily succeed. Most people recognize reality. But to prevent the strategy from working, it’s important to anticipate it and be ready for it.

There are limits to what the law can do. The Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin as well as the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial in Brunswick, Georgia will test what juries will accept as proof in criminal cases.

Bringing charges against someone as ethically stunted as Donald Trump will be even harder. Robert Mueller’s investigation demonstrated ” the inadequacy of the criminal process in a political context,” Frum explains:

… a businessman hoping for a giant payday from shady characters around a foreign dictator is not a prosecutable crime. A businessman lying on camera about his dealings with the shady characters around a foreign dictator is not a prosecutable crime. Being tipped off that the foreign dictator has potentially damaging information about a political opponent is not a prosecutable crime. Appealing on television to that dictator to hurry up and release that information is not a prosecutable crime. Once the statute of limitations has lapsed, even money laundering ceases to be a prosecutable crime.

Actions that a normal, functioning society recognizes as clearly unethical may not be illegal. Furthermore, Democrats are hamstrung by their own faith in the law in a fight against adversaries without any.

Frum concludes:

The fight to uphold law cannot be won by law itself, because the value of law in the face of violence is the very thing that’s being contested. The fight ahead is an inescapably political fight, to be won by whichever side can assemble the larger and more mobilized coalition. The Trump side is very clear-eyed about that truth. The defenders of U.S. legality and democracy against Trump need to be equally aware.

It is not clear that civil society — or what remains of it — yet comprehends what is going on any more than Judge Julius Hoffman did when he faced off against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale. Recall Al Gore sighing and rolling his eyes during debate with George W. Bush in what looked like a “You don’t deserve to be on stage with me” attitude but ended up more like “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” Civil society has yet to come to grips with the looking-glass nature of adversaries bent on tearing it down and the country with it.

This is not “Law and Order.” It’s professional wrestling. Expect Bannon to turn any public legal proceding into a MAGA circus. He won’t wear an American flag shirt (or two) but it would not be unprecedented.

Hoffman, one of the Chicago Seven, founded the Youth International Party (“Yippies”). Bannon means to lead the Trippies.

Former Vice President Mike Pence is trying to block the release of official photos of him taken on Jan. 6 as supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl told Stephen Colbert that he saw the images while working on his new book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” and said they are “wild.”

“He was in a loading dock in an underground parking garage beneath the Capitol Complex,” Karl said. “No place to sit. No desk, no chairs, no nothing. He was in this concrete parking garage.”

One photo shows Pence reacting to a tweet from Donald Trump attacking him in the middle of the siege.

“You can see, it kind of looks like Pence is grimacing,” Karl said. “But you can never really tell.”

Karl asked Pence if he could publish the pictures ― which were taken by the official White House photographer as part of his taxpayer-funded job ― but Pence blocked their release.

“I have a suspicion that the Jan. 6 committee is going to want to see the photos,” Karl said.

“Those aren’t his photos,” Colbert added.

“No, they’re your photos. They’re everybody’s photos here,” Karl replied, gesturing to Colbert and the audience.

“We paid for those photos,” Colbert added.

I guess the pictures must show him looking weak? Or angry at Dear Leader? What else could it be?

Pence is such a piece of work …

Holy shit:

The sun rises on January 6, 2021 while a nation is in crisis.

Michigan’s presidential electors are in dispute after a mysterious fire in Detroit destroyed thousands of mail-in ballots, ultimately throwing the election to Congress.

The nation’s capital is overwhelmed by riots organized by left-wing radicals.

A Republican member of Congress is attacked and critically injured in the violence, potentially depriving Donald Trump of the decisive vote.

However, the representative heroically insists on being taken to the House floor. “With IVs and blood transfusions being administered, the member casts the deciding vote, giving Trump 26 state delegations and the needed majority.”

This is the grisly climax of a report by the Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation’s (TPPF) called “79 Days to Inauguration,” prepared by “Constitutional scholars, along with experts in election law, foreign affairs, law enforcement, and media . . . coordinated by a retired military officer experienced in running hundreds of wargames.”

Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.

Other participants include Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”

That is an excerpt of a piece by Christian Vanderbrouk at The Bulwark about the Claremont Institute gaming out how they might be able to overturn the results. It is a stunner.

The author writes

[Despite] the authors’ pretensions to scholarship and rigor—“for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism”— the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right.

Here’s a bit more:

Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government—aided by citizen “posses” of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office.

The scenario begins late on Election Night. The networks have declared Joe Biden the winner, his campaign having upset Trump in the state of Texas. The call is withdrawn moments later, following reports of a cyberattack involving the state’s tabulation system. As it becomes clear there will be no definitive winner on Election Night, attention shifts to a few battleground states with large numbers of outstanding ballots.

Riots break out in more than a dozen major cities . . . 14 law enforcement officers are known to have been shot, with one confirmed death. There are unconfirmed reports of a car bombing of a police precinct building in Philadelphia.

The violence, as imagined by Claremont and TPPF, overwhelms police and fire officials.

Police recede to a defensive posture around their precincts, it is unsafe to maneuver police vehicles down the streets and responding to calls for service, even emergency calls, is suspended. Fire departments are unable to approach buildings on fire without police escorts, which are not happening.

The next day, the federal government announces Operation Spearfish, targeting

Leaders and agitators within the groups associated with BLM, Antifa, Boogaloo, and NFAC . . . with over one thousand arrest warrants issued using federal and state statutes from RICO to disorderly conduct… The decision to obtain arrest warrants even for the barest minimum of probable cause on the lowest of charges is meant to remove the players from the picture, at least temporarily. Social media sources and other intelligence sources were used to find any instances of incitement to violence, threats, or other criminal activity that met federal or local statutes and act on them.

Remember, this narrative is the result of a role-playing exercise in which the participants imagined themselves as key decision-makers in the federal government. The actions described, therefore, might be best understood as a combination of group therapy and suggestions for how they believe the federal government and law enforcement should behave in a moment of constitutional crisis.

Some of the report is revealing. Some of it is sad. Some of it is darkly funny. For instance, the authors’ recommendation for mass, politically motivated arrests “to remove the players from the picture” sits oddly next to the right’s outraged reaction to the prosecution of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

There’s more irony in how the task force imagines right-wing gangs would operate during such a period: with quiet discipline and in cooperation with law enforcement.

A lack of social media activity and overt action by the rioting by members of the Proud Boys draws the attention of law enforcement officials suspecting they may be operating covertly on the ground in several major urban rioting areas, but their exact involvement is unknown. Reports of militias moving into suburban areas is being monitored. Several groups affiliated with the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers have openly offered to assist law enforcement in putting down the violence via social media, touting significant current and retired law enforcement and military membership.

Which is . . . not how the Trumpist forces behaved during the actual crisis.

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In reading the report, it becomes clear that task force participants see law enforcement as a critical adjunct to the more traditional political actors and that they believe law enforcement could act with greater impunity and force, independent from—and at times in defiance of—elected leaders.

There are rumors that several sheriffs in conservative counties throughout the country are hinting that they may deputize regular citizens into posses should the lawlessness come to their counties. Social media is ablaze with volunteers from Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers and other Posse Comitatus groups to form posses.

This isn’t an innocent game of “what if?”

Earlier this year the Claremont Institute created a Sheriffs Fellowship program. Claremont claims that this program will offer “training of unparalleled depth and excellence in American political thought and institutions.” But then, this is the same group that produced a report hoping that “several sheriffs in conservative counties” would give groups like the Proud Boys actual legal authority.

Which is it?

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Law enforcement plays an openly insurrectionist role throughout the “79 Days” exercise, defying civilian leaders, refusing to offer them protection, and threatening them with arrest.

For example, the report imagines Chicago police (with vocal backing from their union) abandoning Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s residential block, permitting protesters to set up camp on her front lawn.

In imagined dialogue, the wargame quotes the city’s Fraternal Order of Police president as saying “We have officers risking their lives by not shooting people they should be shooting, or waiting too long because Lightfoot and her Soros-funded prosecutor Kim Foxx seem more interested in arresting cops than criminals.”

The union leader goes on to defend a police sickout (“Foxx and Lightfoot use this department and its officers as political scapegoats all the time, maybe they will enjoy not having us around”) and “excessive force” against rioters (“Take a look out the window there, you tell me, what the hell is excessive right now?”).

The authors use an imaginary appearance by former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke on Fox News to issue an open threat to elected leaders of the political opposition, which is imagined as going “viral”:

“The police are here to protect people and preserve the peace. They will do that. Politicians might get in the way for a while like they’re doing right now, but at some point, cops will remember their oath and will take back their communities for the good, law-abiding people in those communities. You won’t want to be on the other side of that once they have had enough of this nonsense.”

The National Fraternal Order of Police issues a partisan statement attacking Joe Biden’s “irresponsible” call for peaceful protests, “calling on President Trump to assist our men and women in blue in putting an end to the violence and anarchy and to restore law and order.”

At which point the “79 Days” report moves into truly authoritarian wishcasting:

Federal and local law enforcement officials “entered into meetings with Google, Facebook, and Twitter to discuss tracking phones and electronic communication devices that have been traveling together to various cities” to track various “agitator groups.”

Checkpoints are established “along major corridors entering Michigan, Texas, and Florida [to] stop and detain any suspicious caravans or large transport vehicles and to identify passengers for verification in the state fusion centers as members of Antifa and BLM are expected to descend on the capitol buildings in those states.”

The FBI’s elite counterterrorist Hostage Rescue Team is sent to “execute search warrants for weapons in and around Washington, DC… Seven Antifa members are killed by gunfire” during the simultaneous raids with “no injuries to the agents.”

A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report. During a battle with rioters at a Portland police precinct building, a:

SWAT sniper conducting overwatch shot and killed one of the arsonists as he drew his arm back to throw his device (captured on police surveillance video and released immediately: warning graphic). The Molotov Cocktail exploded when he dropped the bottle and covered several rioters in flames, three injured severely and one dead at the scene.

At a confrontation near the White House, a non-lethal directed-energy weapon called the “Active Denial System” is used against protesters “to great effect with limited, precise application to specific threats. Social media erupts with claims of abuse through military weaponry.”

The body count grows with “officer-involved shootings” related to the RICO-authorized Operation Spearfish, resulting in “at least three suspects dead.” However, “none of the agencies is releasing information on the circumstances or identities of the officers or suspects involved, citing the ongoing investigation.”

These raids, which operate with all the impunity of a death squad, “are executed in middle to upper class neighborhoods where the Antifa and BLM activists/leadership tend to reside.”

The exercise ends with crude myth-making: the noble and sacrificial decision by a “Republican member from an at-large delegation” suffering from “life-threatening wounds” who, “understanding what is at stake, demands to be transported to the House for the state delegation vote and arrives in a heavily guarded convoy.”

This isn’t a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.

And I thought Trump had a lurid imagination. (There’s more about this report at the link. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.)

Keep in mind that Trump was in close contact with the Claremont Institute’s John Eastman throughout the post election period. I would be very surprised if he never heard about this. Remember, when Pence said on January 5th that he didn’t have the authority to overturn the election, Trump gestured to the crowds that had gathered that night outside the White House and said, “What if they say you do?”

Following up on the post below, we now have a bit of a clue as to what Trump doesn’t want the January 6th Committee to see: messages like the ones described here:

As Vice President Mike Pence hid from a marauding mob during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, an attorney for President Donald Trump emailed a top Pence aide to say that Pence had caused the violence by refusing to block certification of Trump’s election loss.

The attorney, John C. Eastman, also continued to press for Pence to act even after Trump’s supporters had trampled through the Capitol — an attack the Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had described as a “siege” in their email exchange.

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Jacob, referring to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

Eastman sent the email as Pence, who had been presiding in the Senate, was under guard with Jacob and other advisers in a secure area. Rioters were tearing through the Capitol complex, some of them calling for Pence to be executed.

Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel, included Eastman’s emailed remarks in a draft opinion article about Trump’s outside legal team that he wrote later in January but ultimately chose not to publish. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the draft. Jacob wrote that by sending the email at that moment, Eastman “displayed a shocking lack of awareness of how those practical implications were playing out in real time.”

Jacob’s draft article, Eastman’s emails and accounts of other previously undisclosed actions by Eastman offer new insight into the mind-sets of figures at the center of an episode that pushed American democracy to the brink. They show that Eastman’s efforts to persuade Pence to block Trump’s defeat were more extensive than has been reported previously, and that the Pence team was subjected to what Jacob at the time called “a barrage of bankrupt legal theories.”

Eastman confirmed the emails in interviews with The Post but denied that he was blaming Pence for the violence. He defended his actions, saying that Trump’s team was right to exhaust “every legal means” to challenge a result that it argued was plagued by widespread fraud and irregularities.

“Are you supposed to not do anything about that?” Eastman said.

He stood by legal advice he gave Pence to halt Congress’s certification on Jan. 6 to allow Republican state lawmakers to investigate the unfounded fraud claims, which multiple legal scholars have said Pence was not authorized to do.

Eastman said the email saying Pence’s inaction led to the violence was a response to an email in which Jacob told him that his “bull—-” legal advice was why Pence’s team was “under siege,” and that Jacob had later apologized.

A person familiar with the emails said Jacob apologized for using profanity but still maintained that Eastman’s advice was “snake oil.” That person, like several others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

You can only imagine what the messages between Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan might have been. Or whether anyone was in contact with rioters.

In the previous post, the article states that the National Archives is in favor of releasing all the memos and documents pertaining to January 6th.

They’ve seen them.