(📢) MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump’s January 6 Coup Plot Infiltrated the Pentagon

This is the most important RETWEET I’ve ever asked for. I hope you’ll read this breaking-news-filled 250-pg. book—viewable w/ a $5 PROOF subscription—and follow this 🧵. https://t.co/S5VQyXyaGG

1/ The most important untold January 6 narrative is—without question—the coup plot at the Pentagon. There are many reasons the story has not been told in full until now, and I’d like to start this thread (which will be quite long) by enumerating some of the most important ones.

2/ Some of you will recall that the first House January 6 Committee hearings were actually in 2021, not 2022. But they were largely ignored. Why? Because they amounted to little more than confusing public squabbling between Pentagon officials and D.C. law enforcement officials.

3/ While those hearings were necessary, they were also premature. They quickly descended into recriminations and counter-recriminations about Capitol security on January 6, 2021—with the result that they did not actually contribute to any coherent *narrative* about January 6.

4/ Moreover, the hearings simultaneously focused on events at the Capitol and events at the Pentagon—which was confusing, as in many ways these were two separate narratives: separate casts of characters and political intrigues at the Pentagon only dimly understood at the Capitol.

5/ But it was also just too early in the January 6 investigation to tackle the most terrifying element of the January 6 insurrection: the fact—and it is a fact, as PROOF OF COUP makes abundantly clear—that the Pentagon was deeply involved in the coup conspiracy behind January 6.

6/ The April 2021 Pentagon self-assessment hadn’t yet been revealed. The November Pentagon Report hadn’t yet been published. Witnesses key to the coup plot at the Pentagon hadn’t yet been interviewed—or taken the Fifth, or dodged interviews or challenged their subpoenas in court.

7/ Though he meant well, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley was also an obstacle—as he spoke freely enough of January 6 that every account of what happened at the Pentagon that day in the media seemed to be told through his eyes. Which candidly were the wrong eyes.

8/ It seems impossible to believe the following until you understand that there was a coup plot inside the Pentagon on January 6: General Milley was on the outside looking in that day. And as you read more and more of his words about January 6, you can see that he now knows that.

9/ One reason we needed more data on the coup plot at the Pentagon than we had when the House January 6 Committee held its very brief hearings touching on the Pentagon is that with more reports and more witness testimony and more major-media reporting we could see who was lying.

10/ Who was lying? Kash Patel was lying. Michael Flynn was lying. Ezra Cohen-Watnick was lying. Charles Flynn was lying. The Pentagon was lying. Ryan McCarthy was lying. Chris Miller was lying. Walter Piatt was lying. These lies pointed to a coverup—which it turn revealed a plot.

11/ The narrative that unfolds in Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection is *vast*. There are chapters on Kash Patel, Ginni Thomas, Michael Flynn, Christina Bobb, Alex Jones, Mark Meadows, Trump, and a host of people less well-known but *just* as key to the story.

12/ One of the things you quickly discover as you read this book is that we’ve misconstrued the role for the Pentagon that Trump orchestrated—quite carefully—in advance of January 6. It wasn’t some Hollywood-style military coup with American troops in the streets of U.S. cities.

13/ In fact, Trump had engineered the entire day—January 6—as an event that would transform what it was possible to do with and through the Pentagon, and he prepared for that eventuality by arranging all the pieces at the Pentagon he needed immediately after he lost the election.

14/ The claim made by those in media who’ve done almost no research on the coup plot at the Pentagon—which is almost everyone—is that Trump first became aware of such a plot on December 18, 2020 and discarded it *immediately*. That night.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

15/ As PROOF OF COUP painstakingly details across 25 chapters, 250 pages, and hundreds and hundreds of major-media citations, the Pentagon plot began *within hours* of the end of Election Day and it extended until the final 120 hours of Trump’s presidency. https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-donald-trumps

16/ Just as we’d ultimately learn—sadly, far too late—that contrary to the evidence in Trump’s first impeachment trial the now-infamous Trump-Zelensky phone call in July 2019 was the tip of the iceberg of the Trump-Ukraine scandal, the December 18 meeting is just one data-point.

17/ Yes, it’s true, the six-hour December 18, 2020 Trump-Team Kraken meeting in the Oval Office and Presidential Residence was one of the craziest things *ever* to happen in the White House. It was a seditious-conspiracy strategy session that almost became an all-out brawl.

18/ And yes—it’s true—it was at the moment that that six-hour meeting concluded that Donald Trump sent out the most infamous tweet of his life and maybe the most infamous tweet ever sent, calling domestic extremists to DC for January 6 and promising that it “Will be wild!”

But.

19/ Just because the infamous December 18, 2020 White House meeting would be an absolutely jaw-dropping central scene in an imagined movie version of PROOF OF COUP does *not* mean that the story of the January 6 coup plot at the Pentagon began *or* ended on that day. Far from it.

20/ So let’s do it: let’s talk about the January 6 coup plot at the Pentagon, a plot that was almost successful. And let’s talk about it at a level of granularity worthy of major media—understanding here that I can’t unpack a dense, 250-page political thriller in a single thread.

21/ (And to be clear, PROOF OF COUP *is* a political thriller—you’ll learn so many things you didn’t previously know about January 6 that your head will spin. This is a dense, complex book that tackles the most under-reported element of one of the worst days in American history.)

22/ The first absolutely essentially thing to understand the coup plot at the Pentagon that PROOF OF COUP details with impeccable sourcing is that from the moment he knew for sure he’d lost the 2020 election—this was in early November—Trump *wanted access to the voting machines*.

23/ Trump was convinced that if he could get his hands on enough voting machines and find even one glitch that affected a single vote—or for that matter, if he could use fuzzy math and a team of hack mathematicians to falsely *claim* such a glitch existed—he could change history.

24/ Consider the fact that Trump never got his hands on any voting machine—though, and this is covered in PROOF OF COUP, some of his agents in Michigan may have committed felonies by semi-successfully trying to do so—and we’re in many respects on the brink of mass civil conflict.

25/ Now imagine the abject chaos that would have resulted if Trump had held a press conference—sort of like the one he held in 2016 with a table full of empty folders that he claimed were full of data—in which he displayed a voting machine he claimed had been proven to be hacked.

26/ If you can imagine such an event and compare it to the already distressing reality—a national insurrection that we’re facing because Trump and his lawyers simply *alluded* to such hacking at pressers without ever offering any proof—you can see why Trump wanted those machines.

27/ The first plan to seize 2020 voting machines was presented to Trump *under a week* after the 2020 election.

And he loved it.

28/ I should pause here to underscore how absolutely paltry and insufficient the phrase “seize voting machines” is to describe what we are actually talking about here

What we’re talking about is the *instant* end of American democracy. I mean *over*. And I’ll explain to you why.

29/ Voting machines are state—not federal—property. They’re among the most categorically “secure” objects on American soil. Messing with them in any way is a felony that usually puts you in prison. They’re under such tight restriction because they *shape the course of democracy*.

30/ You may recall that one (of several) bases for the American Civil War was a long-simmering battle over states’ rights (particularly on the matter of slavery). If you understand that basic fact, you understand what a state-federal showdown over voting machines would look like.

31/ Donald Trump wanted to seize state property with federal agents; he wanted to do so despite knowing that force might be required; he wanted to do so in order to steal a presidential election and illegally remain in power; and he knew he’d have to lie—and worse—to do all this.

32/ Specifically, Trump expected that he would have to declare martial law in the United States—likely through the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807—for him to get his hands on the voting machines he so desperately wanted.

*That’s* how hard they were going to be to get.

33/ But in Trump’s view, it would be worth it. As we saw when Trump and his lawyers secretly funded and staffed the fraudulent 2020 “audit” in Arizona—a whole different story—once you have ballots or machines in your hands you can lie about the evidence you have all day long.

34/ And that was, beyond any doubt, Trump’s plan: to get his hands on voting machines and lie about what was in and on them. And we know this was the plan because *even without the machines* Team Trump *ruthlessly* lied to America about supposed machine-based 2020 election fraud.

35/ So when we say—as would be accurate—that as soon as he knew he’d lost the popular vote and Electoral College in a landslide in early November 2020 Trump *lusted* for voting machines, understand that he *also* fully understood what historic chaos such a power-grab would cause.

36/ The members of “Team Kraken”—all of whom are listed in PROOF OF COUP but the list is so long I can’t name them all here (and many of them are names you’ve never heard before in major media)—also understood this. Especially former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

37/ It’s for this reason Team Kraken began discussing the imposition of martial law and the invocation of the Insurrection Act in November 2020. They fully understood that if Trump was going to get what he craved—those machines—America would have to enter a period of darkness.

38/ But Team Kraken was not the only entity that understood this implicitly.

39/ The Proud Boys understood it. The Oath Keepers understood it. The Three Percenters understood it. The 1st Amendment Praetorians understood it. The Eighty Percent Coalition understood it. The Boogaloo Bois understood it. Stop the Steal understood it. And so did Trump advisers.

40/ Roger Stone understood it. Michael Flynn understood it. Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell understood it. Bizarre characters like Team Kraken funder Patrick Byrne (present in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020) understood it, as did Team Kraken loose cannon Michael Lindell.

41/ How do we know this? Because the invocation of the Insurrection Act was *everywhere* in the Stop the Steal movement in November/December 2020. It was, in fact, I dare say, *commonly* understood that Trump could not remain in power without declaring martial law pre-January 20.

42/ The problem was the trigger.

Trump and the entities I just mentioned understood that there needed to be *a highly public event* that enabled Trump to declare martial law and thereby get the voting machines he wanted. He hoped it’d be a lawsuit but knew it likely wouldn’t be.

43/ In Michigan, Trump agents tried outright theft—they illegally tried to access voting machines. In court, they lied to judges and passed false data. But Trump also worked with Team Kraken to pursue even more unconventional and controversial means to get the machines he wanted.

44/ Trump’s first plot was to get DOJ to seize the machines, which—to be very clear here—Trump well understood would mean manufacturing an entirely fraudulent federal criminal investigation for political ends (think about how *ironic* that sounds now, given events at Mar-a-Lago).

45/ This first scheme was *so illegal*—{big breath here}—it led *William Barr* to resign.

Barr may well have been the most corrupt Attorney General in U.S. history—and Trump’s first (most legal, if you can believe it! and still wildly illegal!) voting-machine plot made him quit.

46/ But as most of you well know, Barr didn’t quit *right away* (he was hoping, and certainly his innate corruption had something to do with this, that he could continue to serve as a stooge to a man who would propose something to him like this). He stayed on until *December 23*.

47/ Trump was *so angry* that Barr would not enter this massive criminal conspiracy with him—one that, on its own, would *dwarf* Watergate—that, *because he didn’t know at the time when or if Barr would resign*, he began plotting a literal coup *inside* the Department of Justice.

48/ If I delve into the coup plot inside *DOJ* here—it is covered in PROOF OF COUP, but is not the focus of the book—this thread will be 500 tweets long, so suffice to say that the *entire* failed DOJ coup plot had as its aim the eventual seizure of voting machines by DOJ agents.

49/ But if you think Trump would stop at one illegal plot—or, spoiler alert, *2* or even *3* such plots—to get the voting machines he was so obsessed with getting, you really don’t understand Trump or how dangerous he is to the continuation of democratic life in America even now.

50/ *Before* the “fake elector” plot media (rightly) has reported on regularly—and which federal judge David Carter says more likely than not was a criminal conspiracy involving (at least) Trump and Team Kraken member John Eastman—Trump had a *different* ask for GOP legislators.

51/ Trump went to the GOP state legislators of at least two battleground states—Michigan and Pennsylvania—and, in the presence of members of Team Kraken (including the man who’d ultimately coauthor the Pentagon coup plot, Flynn associate Phil Waldron) Trump made a *crazy* demand.

52/ Worrying that federal agents like Barr would refuse to do his bidding—though was working on a DOJ coup to fix that—Trump sniffed out the level of government he deemed *most* corrupt: *local* government.

That’s right—Trump wanted *local cops* to start seizing voting machines.

53/ Like, do I even need to explain the *nationwide insanity* that would’ve resulted in?

If the guy who gave you a speeding ticket at a speed trap yesterday could interfere in federal elections because he loves Trump and believes that John F. Kennedy Jr. has risen from the dead?

54/ What I still can’t believe—truly—is that the Michigan and Pennsylvania legislators, who needless to say Trump has no respect for because they’re just state pols, turned him down flat.

Can you imagine how angry he was? You can be certain in 2024 there’d be a different result.

55/ And by *god* if this isn’t where things get *really* interesting.

(Incidentally, we’ve barely gotten to anything in PROOF OF COUP yet. I’m serious; this is all mostly *backdrop* to the 250-page, fully sourced book about the Pentagon I just published.) https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-donald-trumps

56/ So Trump had struck out with the only federal agency even *arguably* able to seize voting machines (though it’d require the FBI either planting or manufacturing evidence): DOJ.

And he had struck out with local police repped by state pols. So can you guess where he went next?

57/ Keep in mind that this is a desperate man—and a career criminal—who believes in nothing, doesn’t care about America, and apprehended (correctly) that if he lost the DOJ-OLC protections of being the sitting President of the United States he could be indicted on *many* grounds.

58/ If you guessed that Trump went *international*, you are correct.

Mind you, we’re still talking about November 2020 here. We haven’t even gotten to the month in which the meeting at the Oval Office with Team Kraken occurred (December). We’re around Thanksgiving at this point.

59/ Trump advisers associated with Team Kraken floated to him a wild—bad faith—reading of a federal regulation which, they said, would allow DHS to seize state voting machines if there was clear-cut evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election (note: this is all false).

60/ Here’s a list of nations Team Kraken thereafter told Trump, courts and voters had hacked into the 2020 election (I’m not making this up):

🇨🇳 China
🇮🇷 Iran
🇮🇹 Italy
🇵🇰 Pakistan
🇷🇺 Russia
🇪🇸 Spain
🇬🇧 The United Kingdom
🇻🇪 Venezuela

The claim was that they all worked together.

61/ But that’s *not* the best part.

It turns out that the anonymous source Team Kraken used for all this supposed intelligence was a Dallas-area IT consultant and former Army mechanic who’d washed out of basic intel courses and worked—through a subsidiary—*for* (wait for it)...

62/ ...the 2020 Trump presidential campaign!

Surprise!

63/ So early on (still November 2020) Trump went to political appointee Ken Cuccinelli, the sort-of-but-not-really acting DHS head—long story—and, convinced Cuccinelli would say yes because he’s one of the most rabid GOP partisans in America, asked him to seize voting machines.

64/ And in another 2020 miracle I still can’t believe, Cuccinelli *also* turned him down—which if such a thing is possible likely made him angrier than getting turned down by GOP legislators in Michigan and Pennsylvania (he could still use them—after all—for a fake-elector plot).

65/ The problem was that Trump and Team Kraken were getting some *really* great intel about foreign election interference in 2020—and they *should* have been, as they were the ones creating it from whole cloth—and they didn’t want to waste it. Who else could they turn to, though?

66/ In a sign of just how *early* Trump understood he would end up turning to the Pentagon, consider the moves he made within *days* of losing the 2020 election:

🔺 Moved Kash Patel to the Pentagon
🔺 Promoted Ezra Cohen-Watnick in the Pentagon
🔺 Fired his Secretary of Defense

67/ But that wasn’t all. He sent his 2016 presidential campaign manager (Lewandowski) and 2016 deputy presidential campaign manager (Bossie) to the Defense Business Board (appointments later nixed by Biden). And he installed a well-known yes-man—Chris Miller—as Defense Secretary.

68/ And with all these things done, talk turned—as November 2020 flipped to December—to the notion that if there were a *big enough national emergency* Trump could just declare martial law via the Insurrection Act and use the *Pentagon* to seize voting machines across the nation.

69/ The folks devising and/or editing such plans were Trump’s people. Trump lawyer Christina Bobb. Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Trump lawyer Katherine Friess. Trump surrogate Michael Lindell. Trump even pardoned Flynn on December 8 in part as compensation for his work on all this.

70/ Even Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani—often now said (falsely) to have been open to DHS interference but having *drawn* the line at the Pentagon—*actually* only told Trump that he couldn’t use the Pentagon to seize machines until there was “clear-cut” evidence of foreign hacking.

71/ And *that’s* when the *actual* foreign nationals started getting involved.

72/ (Just want to reiterate here that we’re merely skimming the surface of the story. PROOF OF COUP is the book that unpacks, fully sources, explains, and connects these pieces far more than I can do in a single thread on Twitter. See the first tweet in the thread for the link.)

73/ The two nations Team Kraken believed were most promising to develop fake but actually foreign-sourced intelligence from—sufficient, they hoped, to allow for the Pentagon to get involved—were China and Venezuela, which made sense for many reasons (e.g. they’re both Communist).

74/ There’s a reason that, when Michael Lindell wasn’t in Trump’s *personal residence in DC* on Insurrection Eve (January 5, 2021)—the Trump Town House at Trump International Hotel—he was in Pentagon City with a leading Chinese dissident and the son of Brazil’s fascist president.

75/ I mention January 5 because, of course, this was weeks after—per some in media—Trump gave up on using the Pentagon to impose martial law and seize voting machines. No—almost all the leaders of Team Kraken were in his home with Don Jr. and his top advisers on Insurrection Eve.

76/ If you’re wondering how Eduardo Bolsonaro of Brazil fits in, he’s a corrupt politician, career criminal and avid Trump supporter who happens to—along with his dad—both have access to Brazilian intelligence and have every reason to want conflict between the U.S. and Venezuela.

77/ Team Kraken—which included Trump lawyers, Trump advisers, Trump associates, even Trump *administration officials*—believed that if they could court China and Venezuela’s enemies they could get *something* credible-looking that Trump’s operatives inside the Pentagon could use.

78/ This is where things get confusing, but suffice to say that this wasn’t the only angle being played at the time—nor was Trump in any sense disengaged from the effort. And I don’t say this only because Bolsonaro visited the White House *twice* during Insurrection Week in 2021.

79/ For instance (returning to December) Trump and his inner circle, including members of Team Kraken, had devised a plot to install Kash Patel atop the CIA—moving him over from the Pentagon—in part to find/frame legit intel into something that could be a pretext for martial law.

80/ {Five-minute break. Then back to the story.}

81/ Given how many moving pieces there are in the fully sourced narrative of Trump’s coup plot inside the Pentagon, it’d be easy to forget that so-called “clear-cut” evidence of foreign election interference wasn’t the only pathway to the Pentagon and martial law Trump perceived.

82/ Instead, there were, in Trump’s view in late 2020, two options:

1⃣ Proof of foreign election interference (no matter how manufactured) from foreign sources—just as he’d sought in the Trump-Ukraine scandal—rather than secret campaign sources; or
2⃣ a major national emergency.

83/ But as Trump met with Team Kraken on the evening of December 18, 2020—for 6 hours—what possible “major national emergency” could be so big and so historic that it would justify the invocation of the Insurrection Act, martial law, and a 2020 “re-vote” overseen by the Pentagon?

84/ Here’s the tweet Donald Trump put out to tens of millions of his fans literal minutes—and I mean *literal minutes*—after Team Kraken left the White House in the wee hours of December 19, 2020: https://t.co/UfFINi1tc4

85/ Many people focus on the second part of this tweet—as you should; it was Trump’s first ever announcement that he endorsed January 6 as (in effect) a national day of rage—but the *first* part of the tweet is almost as important for understanding the coup plot at the Pentagon.

86/ Peter Navarro was one of the principals on Team Kraken. The Navarro Report Trump crowed about in his December 19 tweet a) sought to prove foreign election interference, and b) was co-written by Garrett Ziegler... who’d *orchestrated* the December 18 Trump-Team Kraken meeting.

87/ So it’s important to understand that Donald Trump didn’t merely *maintain* the Pentagon plot after December 18, he *ramped it up*. And in many more ways than just mentioning the Navarro-Ziegler fake-news election-interference report in a tweet to tens of millions of his fans.

88/ First, he *did*, in fact, appoint Sidney Powell as White House special counsel—a fact Pat Cipollone grudgingly acknowledges even as he says he *personally* chose not to recognize the appointment—and did so after she showed him a draft executive order she wanted him to employ.

89/ That draft executive order, 1 of 2 Team Kraken gave Trump that night—authored by Trump lawyer Bobb with help from then-Trump advisers Flynn and Waldron, reviewed by Trump lawyer Friess and to be executed by Trump lawyer Powell—commanded the Pentagon to seize voting machines.

90/ After reading the EO, Trump made Powell a White House special counsel.

He thereafter went to his chief of staff—Mark Meadows—and commanded him to on-board Powell as White House special counsel. If he did little more at the time, it’s because he jetted off to Florida for NYE.

91/ But that was *not* all Donald Trump did on December 18, because as I mentioned there was a *second* draft executive order in play: an order that depended not on a national emergency (like the Pentagon order) but evidence of foreign election interference. It was to go to DHS.

92/ Keep in mind that Trump’s equivalent of a DHS cabinet secretary—again, long story—Ken Cuccinelli had already told Trump *in no uncertain terms* that such an order would be *illegal*. What did Trump do? He commanded his most trusted servant, Giuliani, to go secretly lobby DHS.

93/ Those of us who see Rudy Giuliani as—candidly—a feeble and stupid and venal man who never qualified as much of a lawyer might laugh at the idea that Trump siccing Giuliani on DHS was bringing out the big guns. But you’d really be misunderstanding the Trump-Giuliani dynamic.

94/ When Trump sought to blackmail Comey into reopening Clinton’s email case in October of 2016—which he did, giving (per pollsters) Trump the Oval—it was Giuliani he entrusted with the task. When he sought to steal the 2020 election via Kremlin agents in Ukraine? Giuliani again.

95/ It doesn’t have to make sense to you or me. Giuliani is Trump’s closer—his most trusted toady and a man without scruples. Trump uses Giuliani to *steal elections* and trusts him (because of attorney-client privilege, which Trump gravely misunderstands) to keep his mouth shut.

96/ So Trump siccing Giuliani on Cuccinelli and DHS via an EO written by—did I mention?—a former DHS employee (Bobb) was Trump confirming that his desire to seize voting machines continued unabated post-December 18 and he wanted two avenues to remain “live”: the Pentagon and DHS.

97/ We thereafter see almost *endless* evidence of Team Kraken springing into action to pursue *both* of the paths Trump had set them on.

Powell returned to the White House *the next business day* with a document—photographed by reporters—alleging Iranian election interference.

98/ Flynn made a call.

To whom? A protégé and ex-employee, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who was in charge of all intelligence matters at...

...the Pentagon.

And how did a 35 year-old Trump loyalist get into such an exalted position? Because Trump put him there right after the election.

99/ Giuliani began lobbying DHS. Lindell helped set up a trip by Bolsonaro to the U.S. that’d be falsely billed as a “vacation.” Trump ordered Mark Meadows to onboard Powell. Patrick Byrne continued working at Team Kraken HQ, which—did I mention?—was in Trump International Hotel.

100/ Flynn protégé Cohen-Watnick, head of intelligence at the Pentagon, began putting out the word that there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that anything untoward of any kind was going to happen on January 6. (Hmm... that’s odd. We’ll return to that in just a little bit).

101/ Team Kraken fake-election-data impresarios Navarro and Ziegler—both in Trump’s employ at the White House—began working furiously on their second report falsely alleging election fraud, a work of grotesque fiction that was timed to drop 2 days before the big day (January 6).

102/ In Florida, Trump met with Roger Stone—who’d spent the last 45 days near-daily in the company of armed extremists in the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who wanted January 6 to go off in such a way that it’d give Trump the pretext he needed for martial law (the “Pentagon” plan).

103/ Stone convinced Trump to return to D.C., where he tapped Alex Jones (who’d spent the last 45 days with armed extremists in the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who wanted January 6 to go off in such a way it’d give Trump a pretext for martial law) to lead his big January 6 march.

104/ The point is, that while—as PROOF previously established via two exhaustive reports (e.g. the one below)—*one* option for Trump on January 6 was a medium-term Capitol occupation that postponed the joint session, the other was...chaos. Absolute bedlam. https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-previously-unreported-insurrection

105/ For instance, consider the mountain of evidence that Trump wanted his Vice President to be assassinated on January 6. Would that have postponed the joint session? Eh—maybe? For a day? But would it have let Trump declare a national emergency? Hell yes. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/25/trump-expressed-support-hanging-pence-capitol-riot-jan-6-00035117

106/ In contrast, what were the two tasks Trump’s sole Insurrection Day (as opposed to Insurrection Eve) war room—the one at the Willard—focused on?

1⃣ Lobbying DHS backchannel regarding (false) claims of foreign election interference.
2⃣ Blaming the Capitol attack on the left.

107/ The purpose of the first of these is clear enough: the Willard suite (run by Giuliani) had been sicced on DHS by Trump on December 18, as we know. This was the “DHS option.” But what’s this about blaming the Capitol attack on antifa? How does that advance *seizing machines*?

108/ Well, good news! Because PROOF OF COUP is a fully sourced 250-page ebook rather than a fully sourced 250-page hardcover, it can have videos! And one such video—a truly bizarre one—was recorded by Rudy Giuliani at the Willard on January 7 or January 8. https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-donald-trumps

109/ In the video, Giuliani uses false and manufactured evidence—and when you see how the book debunks it you will be greatly amused, I assure you—to suggest that the January 6 attack was a premeditated attack on the *2020 presidential election*. (Yes, I know... it’s... bizarre).

110/ Keep in mind by January 7 no “evidence” of foreign interference had come from Bolsonaro or Chinese dissidents and the mob had failed to assassinate Pence—nixing the “national emergency” ploy. But if Giuliani could frame January 6 as a terror attack... https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-team-trump-and

111/ But to be clear, Team Kraken didn’t give up on the DHS angle just because Giuliani was focused on the Pentagon angle. Indeed, it was on January 7 that Team Kraken produced a new plan for Trump—delivered to him on January 15—that focused on moving Kash Patel over to the CIA.

112/ And lest you think all this presidential-transition job-hopping is normal for a POTUS leaving office... well, you know it’s not. But the point is, PROOF OF COUP has the video of a Team Kraken member admitting that “war-gaming” continued unabated post-January 6. Which it did.

113/ (Did I mention that all of the government people involved in these schemes either had their texts and secure messages deleted by Trump-era executive-branch entities in direct violation of agency protocols, FOIA, the Presidential Records Act, and/or federal statutes....

114/ (...or else are fighting in court to keep their communications hidden? Well, they did and are. The coverup is real. Waldron is fighting subpoenas; so is Friess; the list of those pleading the Fifth Amendment or getting their stuff deleted or fighting in court is very long.)

115/ I’ll admit to some frustration with this thread, as I haven’t really gotten to the focus of PROOF OF COUP yet. While a lot of what I’ve discussed is in the book, it’s not what the book is primarily about.

It’s the backdrop to the book’s focus—which is *inside* the Pentagon.

116/ I mean can you imagine, against *this* backdrop, that Flynn’s brother—who works at the Pentagon but shouldn’t have been in the chain of command on January 6—was put in the chain of command; lied about it; lied about those lies; and all the while the *Pentagon* lied about it?

117/ And then a Trump-loyalist Pentagon IG who was (I’m not making this up) *illegally in his job* wrote a 152-page report that *continued* lying about Charles Flynn while—{takes a deep breath}—not mentioning Trump’s most powerful political appointees at the Pentagon *even once*?

118/ As you can tell, it’s hard to put into *one* thread even a fraction of the content of a 75,000-word nonfiction novel with photos, videos, hundreds of links and citations, 35+ chapters and subchapters... any who think this can be easily done haven’t written books. Or threads.

119/ So let’s simplify things (he says in Tweet #119): there was a premeditated plot inside the Pentagon to only deploy the D.C. National Guard if doing so would contribute to the narrative that Trump needed to declare a national emergency. And this plot was *on Trump’s orders*.

120/ As PROOF OF COUP details, there is no evidence—none—the Pentagon was going to release the Guard to the Capitol (as opposed to the Armory) *until* it had a green light from Trump to do so because either the coup had failed or the moment for a “national emergency” had arrived.

121/ The Pentagon was on *some* level of alert (a long story) for 13 hours on January 6, but the D.C. National Guard was finally deployed to the Capitol—after *hours* of delay...

...13 *minutes* after Trump announced the coup attempt was over (“go home”). https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-donald-trumps?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf

122/ But if you think the only evidence in PROOF OF COUP that this wasn’t a coincidence is the hands of a clock, you don’t—respectfully—understand what the Proof series is, why it’s become a NYT-bestselling series, or how I work as a journalist.

The evidence of a plot is legion.

123/ While I can’t go through all the evidence of premeditation in one Twitter thread—this is, after all, why I wrote a 250-page book (and a dense one with hundreds of critical linked citations, at that) rather than just a thread—suffice to say it includes private Trump meetings.

124/ It includes internal discussions at the Pentagon. It includes reports, documents, briefings, presentations, and—yes—it encompasses, too, the current document-destruction-and/or-removal scandals at the White House, Mar-a-Lago, the Pentagon, DHS, *and* the U.S. Secret Service.

125/ And yes, there is an extended discussion of Treason—the federal statute, not the lay concept—in PROOF OF COUP. https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-donald-trumps?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf

NOTE/ I’ll have more on all this soon—including a Q&A. I hope you’ll check out the book, which you can get with a $5 subscription at the link atop the thread. If you want to tip for the thread, that’s OK, too. You can use the button in my bio or go here: http://sethabramson.net/pp

PS/ I’ll answer some questions in the comments (i.e. of this thread) now. This isn’t the formal Q&A on PROOF OF COUP, which will be at PROOF, but I’ll try to clarify anything I can in the comment section below, here. http://sethabramson.substack.com