Ignorant Implausible Deniability.
So far there have been two separate and equal conspiracies involved in the events of January 6. Team A includes Trump, the White House and members of Congress who were plotting the various State GOPers to implement the “Green Bay Sweep”, to object to the Biden electors in swing states and potentially substitute their own set of alternate electors in order to reverse the results of the 2020 election and keep Trump in office. Team B includes the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, Patriot Front and thousands of vicious Trump supporters who had a plan to fight Antifa and attack the Capitol in an effort to disrupt the counting of electors and prevent Biden from taking office.
Team A has been repeatedly claiming that they had nothing to do with — and knew nothing about Team B. Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to make this claim from the witness stand saying that she knew “nothing about” the reports that there would be violence during the demonstration at the Capitol. This has been their “go to” claim. All that violence was just “spontaneous” and had nothing to do with what they were doing. Trump staffer Peter Navarro has even complained that Team B messed up the “perfect plan” being attempted by Team A who had hoped to spend all night with 140 members of Congress objecting to the electors from state after state,
Navarro recently published a memoir, and is now pushing out interviews to reporters, bragging of a scheme he dreamed up with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to overturn the results of the 2020 election. They even had a cringey name for it: the Green Bay Sweep.
The plot sought to keep Trump in office by exerting maximum pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of the Electoral College votes from pivotal swing states, by drawing out the proceedings on national television for as long as 24 hours. “It was a perfect plan,” Navarro told the Daily Beast. “We had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”
Navarro’s anti-democratic plot was intended to keep Trump in office without violence, he’s fast to insist. In fact, Navarro blames the bloody insurrection at the Capitol for what he calls the “inglorious” result of Congress certifying the (100 percent legitimate) election of Joe Biden, foiling the autogolpe that could have continued Trump’s reign of “populist economic nationalism.”
Well, now it appears that claim of ignorance has just been blown sky high — again.
For the second time, it appears that the White House received specific warnings the planned demonstration for January 6 was going to turn violent.
Former chief of staff to Donald Trump, Mark Meadows is suing the House and the Select Committee investigating Jan. 6, for what he calls an overly broad subpoena to appear and answer questions. As part of that lawsuit, however, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson revealed a lot of details about Meadows that are being released now.
According to a deposition Hutchinson gave in March, that was just released publicly late Friday night, she revealed that the U.S. Secret Service gave warnings about violence at the Capitol to the White House.
"I just remember Mr. Ornato coming in and saying that we had intel reports saying that there could potentially be violence on the 6th. And Mr. Meadows said: 'All right. Let's talk about it,'" said Hutchinson speaking of U.S. Secret Service special agent in charge Anthony Ornato.
The House Select Committee cited her deposition in their Friday court filing responding to the Meadows lawsuit.
"But despite this and other warnings, President Trump urged the attendees at the Jan. 6th rally to march to the Capitol to 'take back your country,'" the court filing said. "Despite urgent pleas from Capitol Hill and from many of President Trump's supporters, President Trump did not act immediately to publicly ask or instruct the violent rioters [to] leave the Capitol."
The filing also states that it is clear that Trump never contacted the Department of Defense that day to dispatch help.
They were warned and they didn’t pass this warning on to the FBI (who actually had flagged their own internal warning already — but didn’t share it with anyone). They didn't tell Homeland Security (who had a team outfitted and ready on the day of the attack, but they stayed at their offices). And they didn’t tell Capitol Police (who had planned to let their night shift stay over on Jan 6, but instead sent them home that day.)
But actually, Trump had already contacted the DOD the day before this — and requested the National Guard be available to protect the protestors.
May 12 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump wanted National Guard troops in Washington to protect his supporters at a Jan. 6 rally that ended with them attacking the U.S. Capitol, leaving five dead, Trump's former Pentagon chief testified on Wednesday.
Former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller told a House of Representatives panel that he spoke with Trump on Jan. 3, three days before the now-former president's fiery speech that preceded the violence and led to his second impeachment.
According to Miller's testimony, Trump asked during that meeting whether the District of Columbia's mayor had requested National Guard troops for Jan. 6, the day Congress was to ratify Joe Biden's presidential election victory.
Trump told Miller to "fill" the request, the former defense secretary testified. Miller said Trump told him: "Do whatever is necessary to protect demonstrators that were executing their constitutionally protected rights."
As we all know the Guard wasn’t deployed that day, instead after consultation with the Mayor, Miller had them placed on traffic duty without any combat gear or weapons. In fact, they weren’t fully deployed until several hours after the attack on the Capitol began. Why not?
Miller testified that the U.S. military was deliberately restrained that day when Trump's rally turned into an assault by hundreds of his followers that left five dead, including a Capitol Police officer.
Miller testified that he was concerned in the days before Jan. 6 that sending National Guard troops to Washington would fan fears of a military coup or that Trump advisers were advocating martial law.
Miller was resistant to deploying the guard even after he was contacted by the Chief of Capitol Police and the Mayor of DC who called as soon as the Capitol grounds were breached. It wasn’t until almost two hours later at 3 pm, after he’d also received calls from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that he finally authorized their deployment — and even then he first requested the head of the Guard draw up a deployment plan to ensure the Guard knew what they were supposed to be doing which took another 90 mins, during which he also received a call from Mike Pence. Trump never contacted him that day.
If Miller had deployed the Guard as Trump had originally requested three days previously, they would have been there protecting the protestors from anticipated BLM and/or ANTIFA counter-protestors while they were in the midst of attacking the Capitol police.
This means that ANTIFA — if they had shown up — would have been on the side of the cops while fighting the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers backed by the National Guard.
It would have been an unholy mess.
It would have been exactly the kind of mess that Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers hoped would happen in order to provoke Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Invoking the Insurrection Act was an idea sparked in conservative circles that spring as a means of subduing social justice protests and related rioting, a goal Trump seemed to embrace when he called for state leaders to “dominate” their streets. By the end of the year, it had become a rallying cry to cancel the results of a presidential election. Now, private and public discussions of the law stand as key evidence in the cases against the Oath Keeper,
Earlier this month, Rhodes was charged with seditious conspiracy, accused along with 10 members of his group of conspiring to use violence to try to stop Joe Biden’s certification as president. Rhodes has denied wrongdoing, saying he never wanted or told his group to enter the U.S. Capitol.
A court hearing in Plano, Tex., on Monday will determine whether he must stay in jail while awaiting trial.
Court filings and public statements leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, show how important the idea of the Insurrection Act became to Rhodes and other extremists, including followers of the ever-changing QAnon extremist ideology, and to Trump and people close to him.
“It is hard to put into words how mind-boggling this idea was, to use a statute designed to protect the country from insurrection to support an actual insurrection,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.
The act was last used in 1992 to quell days of protests and rioting in Los Angeles after four police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King were found not guilty. The 1807 law was used at the request of the governor to federalize the California National Guard units to quell the riots.
Indictments filed in the Jan. 6 investigation show Rhodes’s followers were drawn to Washington partly in the hope that Trump would invoke the law once more, transforming the Oath Keepers into a kind of shock troop militia to smite imagined rioters, government officials and anyone who tried to make Biden’s election victory a reality.
“If Trump activates the Insurrection Act, I’d hate to miss it,” Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins of Ohio wrote a week before the Capitol attack, according to court papers. Around the same time, Kelly Meggs, the head of the Florida chapter of Oath Keepers, allegedly predicted in a separate conversation that Trump would stay in power and “claim the Insurrection Act.”
Under this scenario, Rhodes and the Proud Boys become the shock troops backed by the National Guard in the attack on Congress preventing the electors from being counted and seizing the property so that all Congressional action is halted. Trump remains in power while the dust settles and his demands for the contested electors to be sent again back to the states gains legs for at least a few more days. How long that would last — is anyone’s guess.
All of this shows that Team A and Team B were actually on the same page. Trump and Mark Meadows completely ignored the Secret Service warnings about “violence” — just as they’d previously ignored warning from rally organizer Dustin Stockman that “things could get violent” — because that’s exactly what they wanted to happen. They wanted things to get “violent” and it really didn’t matter to them whether that violence was from BLM and ANTIFA — as they anticipated and Trump tried to claim when talking to Kevin McCarthy on the phone during the attack — or from their own supporters. Either one was good.
Either scenario would produce the chaos they hoped would stop Congress from certifying the electors, additionally, it might put the “Fear of God” into Mike Pence to get him to block the Biden electors in the contested swing states and keep Trump in the White House. Without Pence’s participation Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” couldn’t work even with 140 Congresspeople on their side — that’s not enough to win a vote to decertify a state. Trump would need at least 218 votes for that and they didn’t have it. Navarro’s plan was never going to work even though they already knew it was illegal they tried it anyway — but something else had to be done.
What this shows is that they can’t claim ignorance anymore. They can’t claim they didn't know or they weren't told. They can’t claim that they had no warning about what Team B was going to attempt. They knew.
And they let it happen anyway.