I’ve talked before about the Team A/Team B plan for the Insurrection. Team A including Trump and members of Congress planned to provide Alternate Electors for the contested swing states and then have members of Congress object to the certification of those states while Mike Pence would swoop in and chose the alternate electors making Trump the “winner.” We now know that they were told by the WH Counsel that this plan was illegal, but they pursued it anyway.
Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows was warned the effort to overturn the 2020 election with fake electoral college votes was not legally sound – and yet proceeded anyway, the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack said Friday.
In a court filing, the panel also said that Meadows went ahead with plans to have Trump speak at the Ellipse rally that descended into the Capitol attack, only days after being expressly told by the US Secret Service that there was potential for violence on 6 January 2021.
[...]
Hutchinson testified that Pat Cipollone, who was the White House counsel at the time, told Meadows and Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani that the scheme to have states send Trump slates of electors to Congress in states that he lost in the 2020 election was not legally sound, the panel said.
Hutchinson testified that she heard White House attorneys tell Meadows and other officials – including “certain” but unspecified congressmen – that trying to certify a Trump win in that manner “did not comply with the law” and “was not legally sound”, the filing said.
Nonetheless, it said, Meadows “participated in a widely publicized call” with the top election official in Georgia – the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger – “and other related efforts seeking to change the election results” there.
Team B included the crowd that was gathered at the ellipse to listen to Trump, Don Jr. and others speechify about the “Steal.” A crowd that included various White Supremacists, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Militias who had caused violence at both of the previous two DC rallies in December and November, including multiple people being stabbed.
Team A has disavowed that they had anything to do with Team B, we saw this very clearly with the memory-challenged testimony of Marjorie Taylor Greene who apparently did have a discussion about “Marshall Law” with members of Congress — even though besides the previously documented violence there have been two separate reports now that Mark Meadows was warned — first by rally organizer Dustin Stockman and then by Secret Service Agent Anthony Ornato — that there “could be violence" at the rally. Mo Brooks apparently knew this because he wore body armor for his speech.
Now, we have the third nail in the coffin linking Team A to Team B. The plan to send the crowd to the Capitol building wasn’t just a random idea that popped into Trump’s head at the spur of the moment during his speech.
“We’re going down to the Capitol, and I’ll be with you.”
It wasn’t spontaneous. It had been meticulously planned ahead of time.
Maddow discussed this last night and it sparked me to write this diary.
Rolling Stone has more specifics.
Johnston, who says he described the phone call to House select committee investigators, detailed his allegations in a series of conversations with Rolling Stone. Johnston says he overheard Mark Meadows, then-former President Trump’s chief of staff, and Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokeswoman, talking with Kylie Kremer, the executive director of Women for America First, about plans for a march to the Capitol. Johnston said the conversation was clearly audible to him since it took place on a speakerphone as he drove Kremer between the group’s rallies in the final three days of 2020.
“They were very open about how there was going to be a march,” Johnston says. “Everyone knew there was going to be a march.”
According to Johnston, Meadows, Pierson, and Kremer discussed the possibility of setting up a permit to make the march from the White House to the Capitol official. He says the trio decided against officially permitting the march, citing concerns about security costs and about the optics of a sitting president organizing a push towards Congress as lawmakers certified his loss in the 2020 election. Ultimately, Johnston tells Rolling Stone, they planned to “direct the people down there and make it look like they went down there on their own.”
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The president’s camp insists this wasn’t part of any pre-planned push. In the book where he recounted his time in the White House, Meadows called the Jan. 6 violence “the actions of a handful of fanatics across town.”
Johnston’s account suggests there was a deliberate strategy by Trump’s allies to have supporters descend on the Capitol. Such a connection would implicate top White House and campaign officials in drawing crowds to Congress without a permit — a step that could have required added security and may have allowed law enforcement to better prepare for the day’s events. Those crowds overwhelmed the Capitol police and engaged in an hours-long battle with law enforcement. Four people died during the attack.
According to Johnston, rally organizers were “constantly” using “burner phones” — cheap, prepaid cells that can be harder to trace because they’re not personally identified with a user or a user’s account — “to talk about” potential permits and plans for a march with Trump aides.
Johnston says that, in the key phone conversation he overheard, the group settled on ordering a march without an official permit. “Nobody wanted to do it because they didn’t want to pay for it,” Johnston says of obtaining a permit. “They didn’t want to have to provide security and all the other expenses.”
On Dec. 20, 2021, Johnston testified to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, and he provided Rolling Stone multiple pieces of documentation showing his interactions with the committee. Johnston also says he told investigators that he knew the call took place on a “burner phone” in the final days of 2020 because the discussion came right after Kylie Kremer directed him to purchase three phones for her group.
“I’m the one that bought the burner phones,” Johnston says.
The committee did not respond to an inquiry regarding Johnston’s allegations about the rally organizers and about his testimony. A source familiar tells Rolling Stone that committee investigators have asked Amy Kremer, Kylie’s mother and the chair of Women for America First, about their use of burner phones. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation, said Amy Kremer has denied using the devices. The source did, however, confirm that key phones used by the rally organizers were purchased in California. That corroborates the account from Johnston, who says he told committee investigators that he bought the phones at a CVS in Cathedral City, California.
So here we have Team A getting Team B all riled up at the ellipse, then sending them like a cruise missile aimed at the Capitol. If they didn't know what they were doing was potentially illegal - why were they using burner phones? If they didn’t know what they were doing might be a problem — why didn’t they get a permit for the march?
Sounds like it was all a not-that-smart plan to send a violent mob to the Capitol but also keep “plausible deniability” that they had nothing to do with RIOT and violent Insurrection that soon happened right after the speech.
These two teams were always on the same team.