Yet again, this is not shocking but the brazenness of compiling a mini-thinktank of treasonous scum to help you overtake an election is still kinda bold.
According to a report in the Washington Post, allies and lawyers employed by Donald Trump set up what was called a "command center" in a Washington D.C. hotel the week of the Jan 6th Capitol riot from which they coordinated efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The report states that the center headquartered at the Willard Hotel became home to Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and John Eastman -- the attorney behind the now notorious "coup memo -- among others.
According to the report, while the "Stop the Steal" rally and the ensuing riot was the most visible effort to stop the certification, "...an emerging picture of a less visible effort, mapped out in memos by a conservative pro-Trump legal scholar and pursued by a team of presidential advisers and lawyers seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate Trump for a second term," at the hotel.
"They sought to make the case to Pence and ramp up pressure on him to take actions on Jan. 6 that Eastman suggested were within his powers, three people familiar with the operation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations," the Post is reporting. "Their activities included finding and publicizing alleged evidence of fraud, urging members of state legislatures to challenge Biden's victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states."
Giuliani, Bannon and Eastman along with others all plotted to gin up evidence of “election fraud” with which to confront state legislatures into reversing their electoral results, then they applied pressure on Pence to get him to reject the vote from their targeted states back with a raucous crowd of rabid Trump supporters to drive the message home at the Capitol.
We have motive, we have opportunity — we have everything but the butler in the pantry with a kitchen knife.
Here's more from the Post.
"In those first days in January, from the command center, Trump allies were calling members of Republican-dominated legislatures in swing states that Eastman had spotlighted in his memos, including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, encouraging them to convene special sessions to investigate fraud and to reassign electoral college votes from Biden to Trump, two of the people familiar with the operation said," the report notes.
The report goes on to add, " [Bernard] Kerik and Giuliani set up shop in Washington in early November at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, according to Kerik, and in the third week in December moved to the Willard, closer to the White House. The Willard attracted many pro-Trump figures around that time, including 'Stop the Steal' provocateur Roger Stone. Stone was not part of the Giuliani team at the Willard and did not participate in the team's efforts, according to the three people with knowledge of the matter."
Seems pretty conclusive to me.
Meanwhile, they had quite a bit of help spinning the base into a frenzy and helping them plan and organize the assault on the Capitol via Facebook.
The Post's report is based on thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents that were turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission by whistleblower Frances Haugen.
"The SEC documents, which were provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen's legal counsel and reviewed by The Post and other news organizations, suggest that Facebook moved too quickly after the election to lift measures that had helped suppress some election-related misinformation," the newspaper reports. "The rushed effort to restore them on Jan. 6 was not enough to stop the surge of hateful, violent posts, documents show. A company after-action report concluded that in the weeks after the election, Facebook did not act forcefully enough against the Stop the Steal movement that was pushed by Trump's political allies, even as its presence exploded across the platform."
Various employees of Facebook had expressed serious concern at the wide berth the platform afforded Trump and his followers.
"This is not a new problem," one employee wrote on Facebook's Workplace messaging system, according to a new report from the Washington Post. "We have been watching this behavior from politicians like Trump, and the — at best — wishy washy actions of company leadership, for years now. We have been reading the [farewell] posts from trusted, experienced and loved colleagues who write that they simply cannot conscience working for a company that does not do more to mitigate the negative effects on its platform."
Another employee wrote bitterly on Workplace: "Never forget the day Trump rode down the escalator in 2015, called for a ban on Muslims entering the US, [and] we determined that it violated our policies, and yet we explicitly overrode the policy and didn't take the video down. There is a straight line that can be drawn from that day to today, one of the darkest days in the history of democracy and self-governance. Would it have made a difference in the end? We can never know, but history will not judge us kindly."
A third employee recalled the anger in June 2020, after Black Lives Matter protesters had been forcibly cleared from a park next to the White House before Trump walked through for a photo opportunity during which he denounced the demonstrations, the Post reports.
"Employees have been crying out for months to start treating high-level political figures the same way we treat each other on the platform. That's all we're asking for," the employee wrote. "Last we spoke, innocent protesters were tear-gassed under the orders of a political figure whose message was amplified. Today, a coup was attempted against the United States. I hope circumstances aren't even more dire next time we speak."
In fact, another recent whistleblower indicates that Breitbart and Steve Bannon were given free reign rein on Facebook.
Facebook reportedly exempted the right-wing site Breitbart and other "select publishers" from rules against spreading false news reports, according to a new whistleblower who filed a complaint against the social-media company with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.
The whistleblower, a former member of Facebook's Integrity team, told the Washington Post that Joel Kaplan, a former Bush administration official who led the company's Public Policy team, once defended the decision to "white list" Breitbart.
"When a person in the video conference questioned this policy, Kaplan, the vice president of global policy, responded by saying, 'Do you want to start a fight with Steve Bannon?'" the whistleblower told the Post.
Of course, Kaplan denies the claim.
So Eastman with Giuliani and Bannon loaded the gun, Facebook aimed it, and Trump pulled the trigger on January 6th directly at the Capitol.
This is how it went down, even though other persons and platforms such as Parler were involved, the core of the plot to reverse the election with Trump and his lackeys with the willing help of Facebook who used the increased online conflict to line their pockets with advertiser dollars.
It was a perfect plan, almost.
On the positive side, it appears that some Republicans — because of all of the death threats and what not — are starting to call ixnay on the “stolen election-ay.”
With Republicans trying to stay on the former president's good side by either echoing his unfounded claims or saying nothing at all, election officials in Florida just wish it would all go away so they will stop receiving death threats despite the fact that Trump won the state.
The memo stated, "The Great American Experiment, our cherished democracy, is under threat. Our nation is only as strong as the faith our citizens have that their voice, their vote, has a say in our government. In this hour, public trust in our elections is being systematically undermined, to the detriment of all Americans," before adding the supervisors "continuously strive to debunk false claims, and ensure voters have access to accurate election information."
"Many of us have been threatened by our fellow citizens who have been led astray by these deceptions," it continued before asking officials to "tone down the rhetoric and stand up for our democracy.
Let’s hope that after all the effort they put into firing this flaming screaming deluded cult at the heart of our democracy — things might just finally be beginning to calm down now that GOP is noticing that some of those custom nooses are for their own necks.
Maybe.