By Jacob Crosse
Earlier this week, the January 6 House Select Committee charged with investigating former President Donald Trump’s attempted coup released an explosive slide show presentation turned over to the committee by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The slide show revealed Trump’s and his co-conspirators’ systematic plan for overturning democratic forms of rule in the United States.
The presentation, dated January 5 and titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan,” begins by citing false claims of “foreign interference” by China through Venezuela and Dominion Voting Systems software.
In response to the alleged “INFLUENCE and CONTROL” of “US Voting Infrastructure in at least 28 States as part of [an] ongoing globalist/socialist operation to subvert the will of United States Voters and install a China ally,” the slides describe in detail the multifaceted plot by Trump and his allies to declare a phony “National Security Emergency” in order to use US Marshals and the National Guard to seize election infrastructure nationwide and “declare electronic voting in all states invalid.”
After declaring the results invalid, the slides call for a “federalized” National Guard, under the command of a so-called “Trusted Lead Counter” appointed “with authority” from Trump to “direct the actions of select federalized National Guard units and support from [Department of Justice], [Department of Homeland Security] and other US government agencies.” These entities would “disqualify all the counterfeit ballots” (emphasis in original) and “then count all the remaining legal paper ballots.”
In a slide titled “Ballot Adjudication,” the document outlines the procedure for suspending the Constitution in order to facilitate the counting of “legal paper ballots.” After the National Guard finishes counting every so-called “legal” ballot in “5-10 days,” the ballots would then be approved by state legislators. Ballot exceptions, the document states, “will require an affirmative vote by the [Supreme Court of the United States] stating that Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 has been suspended. Otherwise all officials will follow the Constitution.”
The shoddy slide show presentation is a window into the thinking of an increasingly fascistic and desperate ruling class that is becoming further untethered from reality by the day. Its existence is further confirmation of the wide-ranging plot orchestrated by Trump, and supported by significant sections of the Republican Party, to overthrow the election of Biden and with it, what little remains of bourgeois democracy in the US. It is further proof that the storming of the Capitol on January 6, which the World Socialist Web Site alone warned the working class in the months following Trump’s electoral defeat, was not a spontaneous riot but the culmination of the dictatorial scheme orchestrated from the highest levels of the US government.
The presentation was part of a tranche of documents turned over by Meadows before he declared earlier this week that he would no longer be complying with the committee’s request. In a letter to Meadows’ lawyer Wednesday citing the presentation, Select Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (Mississippi-Democrat) wrote that the document was slated for distribution to those “on the hill,” that is, it was to be presented to members of Congress.
In the same letter to Meadows’ lawyer, Thompson noted that in the documents already turned over by Meadows to the committee, the former chief of staff is shown sending emails as early as November 7, 2020 suggesting Republican-controlled states send “alternate” slates of presidential electors to Congress on January 6.
Meadows also turned over to the committee “a November 6, 2020, text exchange with a Member of Congress apparently about appointing alternate electors in certain states as part of a plan that the Member acknowledged would be ‘highly controversial’ and to which Mr. Meadows apparently said, ‘I love it,’” Thompson said.
Thompson noted that in addition to the texts and slide show, Meadows turned over “a January 5, 2021, email about having the National Guard stand by.” This revelation is significant, given the ongoing cover-up within the Pentagon over the purposeful delay of sending National Guard soldiers to the besieged Capitol.
The plan to reject Biden electors and appoint new pro-Trump electors was further described in the presentation as part of three different “options” for Vice President Mike Pence on “6 JAN.”
These options included Pence unilaterally and illegally seating “Republican Electors over the objections of Democrats in states where fraud occurred.” Mimicking the arguments laid out previously in coup lawyers John Eastman’s and Jenna Ellis’s memoranda, the document also suggests that Pence “reject[s] the electors from States where fraud occurred causing the election to be decided by remaining electoral votes.”
The slide directed Pence to delay “the decisions in order to allow for a vetting and subsequent counting of all the legal paper ballots.”
The coup slide show is believed to have been written by retired Army Colonel Phil Waldron of the Allied Security Operations Group, according to professor and national security expert Karen Piper.
Waldron and co-owner of the Allied Security Operations Group, Russell Ramsland Jr., were frequent visitors at Trump’s Willard “war room” command center. The Washington Post previously noted that Waldron, who specialized in “psychological operations” with the Army, led a team of people that reported to Rudy Giuliani’s political crony, Bernard Kerik. This team allegedly provided Kerik with election data analysis supporting Trump’s fraudulent claims.
In a separate article by the Post they write that “to an extent not widely recognized, Ramsland and others associated with ASOG played key roles in spreading the claims of fraud. … They were circulated by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), a staunch Trump ally who had been briefed by ASOG. And Ramsland’s assertions were incorporated into the “kraken” lawsuits filed by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell who the Post learned had also been briefed two years earlier by ASOG…”
Confirming the authenticity of the slide show in an interview posted this past June was the recently subpoenaed founder of the fascistic 1st Amendment Praetorian paramilitary group, Robert Patrick Lewis. In an interview with Doug Billing’s “The Right Side,” Lewis, who boasts of providing security to Flynn, describes the “national objectives” and “intelligence” he claimed to be “delivering to the White House, directly to the President.”
“That was stuff based on China’s influence in the United States and specific propaganda that we were outlining…”
A month prior, Lewis gave another interview in which he cited the Maricopa County recount, which was conducted in Arizona earlier this year by Trump partisans as an example of what “we” were “suggesting to Trump” his last week in office.
“It’s interesting how the Maricopa recount … is extremely similar to what Patrick Byrne, General [Michael] Flynn and Sidney Powell suggested to President Trump there in the last week in the White House,” said Lewis.
“We said, ‘Bring the National Guard in, have a recount’ and livestream across the nation so that everybody can look and see that everything is above board.
“Minus the National Guard,” added Lewis. “Everything they (Byrne, Powell, Flynn) suggested is going on in Maricopa.”
There is no doubt that there remains a mountain of evidence left to uncover that will further implicate Trump, the Republican Party and elements of the police-intelligence-military apparatus in the coup.
Ranking member and one of two Republicans on the committee, Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, promised earlier this week that the committee will hold a series of hearings “next year” to lay out what has been uncovered, presumably after which the committee will wind down in preparation for the midterms.
Like the “bipartisan” 9/11 Commission that the Select Committee is modeled after, information revealing the widespread support for Trump’s coup within the Republican Party and the capitalist state as a whole will continue to be excluded and omitted. Despite claiming to have interviewed nearly 300 witnesses, the Select Committee has continued to hold hearings and depositions behind closed doors.
The chloroforming of the working class to the true danger of fascism by the Democrats, the pseudo-left and their media supporters continues. This coup memo was known to lawmakers and media sources, prior to Meadows turning it over to the committee.
In fact, the entire document was publicly tweeted out by current far-right Fox News host and former CBS correspondent Lara Logan on the morning of January 5.
The fact that its contents are only now being publicly broadcast by the committee and select news outlets, nearly a year after the coup and 10 months after Trump’s truncated second impeachment trial ended with his acquittal, is a testament to the scale of the ongoing bipartisan cover-up of Trump’s coup.
Published at www.wsws.org
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