A dress rehearsal for fascism: The complete Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection timeline (Part I)
Today marks the one-year anniversary of a violent assault on the seat of U.S. democracy.
Like most one-year-olds who get scolded for bad behavior, Republicans aren’t owning up to their role in the insurrection. With the exception of a handful of brave souls who are willing to risk losing their seats for the greater good, congressional Republicans are either pretending January 6 never happened or spinning a fantastical victim narrative where the insurrection was a mere “protest” and the Big Bad Democrats (and Liz Cheney) are being unfair to their twice-impeached, one-term president. Right-wing media is singing from the same hymnal, feeding mass denial among the Republican base, two-thirds of whom still can’t accept that Biden won legitimately.
Numerous Republicans involved in the attack on democracy have refused to appear before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack (hereafter referred to as “the January 6 committee”), gone to court to try to dictate the terms of their testimony, pleaded the 5th in front of the committee, withheld public documents, or sued to block phone records which could provide key details about the insurrection and Team Trump’s extensive efforts to overturn the will of the people.
Despite epic stonewalling of the committee, a clear picture of the Republican Party’s full ownership of January 6 has come into view. With each new revelation, the circle of collaborators widens to include numerous congressional Republicans, Trump operatives, and high-level members of the Trump administration.
In a world governed by facts, logic, and data, the insurrection—and the story you’re about to read—wouldn’t exist. No one who was paying attention to polling in the weeks before the 2020 election was surprised when Biden won.
It was apparent by the evening of Wednesday, November 4, less than 24 hours after polls closed on election day, that Donald Trump was going to lose. With Wisconsin and Michigan called for Joe Biden that day, and Arizona and the 2nd district of Nebraska before that, Biden only had to win Nevada to amass 270 electoral college votes. His chances of losing Nevada, an effectively blue state Democrats had won in the previous three election cycles, was remote, and Pennsylvania appeared to be a really good bet for Biden, based on Trump’s narrowing margin and the number of votes which remained to be counted in heavily-Democratic precincts.
The projections proved correct. On SaPersonay, November 7, 2020, Joe Biden was officially declared the winner of Pennsylvania and president-elect of the United States.
If anything, it was surprising that the election was even close, given that Biden had an 8.4% national lead on election day. A number of theories would emerge for why pollsters had failed so spectacularly for a second straight presidential election, but it was evident that record levels of culture war polarization stirred up by Donald Trump turned right-leaning whites out in droves, making Iowa and Ohio (which were predicted to be close) Republican blowouts, and Biden’s Wisconsin win far smaller than pollsters thought it would be. At the same time, racial divisiveness backfired among most young voters, suburban voters, and voters of color, driving Georgia and Arizona—states a Democratic presidential candidate hadn’t won since 1992 and 1996, respectively—to Joe Biden. The Democratic sweep of 2020 Senate races in these states proved that Biden’s wins were no fluke.
Though the results of the presidential election were orderly and predictable based on voter turnout demographics, Trump and his allies in state legislatures, Congress, the Republican Attorneys General Association, right-wing media, and social media were lethally effective in manipulating that polarization in the eight-and-a-half weeks between Trump’s loss and the insurrection.
In fact, Trump’s disinformation campaign began months before the election with constant claims that mail balloting was inherently corrupt and that the election would be “rigged” against him, an attempt to suppress a voting method preferred by many Democrats and pre-emptively delegitimize a potential loss at the polls. Trump repeated these baseless talking points with such mind-numbing repetition that most Republican voters took them seriously, prepping his followers to believe the many lies to come.
Outside of the right-wing echo chamber, it was common knowledge that Republican-leaning, in-person votes would be counted first in a lot of competitive states, creating a “red mirage” (the false impression that Trump was going to win), when the reality was that there would be a “blue shift” as more Democratic votes—mail votes in particular—were counted.
Preying on Republican voters’ programmed ignorance, Trump held a press conference early on the morning after election day where he claimed that his shrinking leads in competitive states were fraudulent, and said, “Frankly, we did win this election.” This would be the opening of a full-court press to steal the presidency through disinformation, dozens of frivolous lawsuits, abrupt personnel changes, abuse of executive powers, and pressure campaigns on state and local officials.
Later that day, November 4, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows received a text (likely from Trump energy secretary Rick Perry) suggesting an “aggressive strategy” to hold the White House. The plan was to convince at least three Republican-controlled state legislatures to shatter long-standing legal precedent by tossing out the will of the voters and declaring their state’s electors for Trump.
Two days later, on November 6, a member of Congress texted Meadows with a similar proposal.
Meadows’ response?
“I love it!”
Also on the 6th, Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona (who would later be tied to the January 6 “Save America” rally) sent out widely-shared tweets implying that his states’ tally was fraudulent due to vote-flipping on Dominion voting machines, a talking point that Republicans would milk to death—even though Trump’s lawyers knew the claim was false.
On November 9, Trump’s exceptionally loyal attorney general, William Barr, sent a directive to federal prosecutors which allowed them to ramp up voter fraud charges before state elections were certified, a change in Justice Department policy which prompted the resignation of Richard Pilger, who headed the department’s election crimes division.
On the same day, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper for not being “sufficiently loyal” (i.e. for refusing to deploy troops to American cities during the summer protests, among other apostasies). Trump replaced Esper with the underqualified Christopher Miller, who brought three Trump loyalists with him, including Kash Patel, a lawyer with no military experience.
This was an oddly consequential move for an outgoing administration to make. Suspicions were further aroused when two administration officials told the New York Times that Trump was considering firing FBI chief Christopher Wray and CIA head Gina Haspel too; Haspel reportedly told General Mark Milley (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.”
According to I Alone Can Fix It by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Phillip Rucker, on or around November 10, Milley received a call referring to the likelihood that Trump and his allies would try to overturn the election. Milley responded that, “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed” because “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”
Speaking at a military installation in Virginia the following day (Veteran’s Day), Milley told the assembled crowd, “We do not take an oath to a king or queen, or tyrant or dictator, we do not take an oath to an individual….We take an oath to the Constitution, and every soldier that is represented in this museum—every sailor, airman, marine, coastguard—each of us protects and defends that document, regardless of personal price.”
One public official who paid a personal price for following the Constitution was Republican Chris Krebs, the Trump-appointed head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. On November 18, Trump fired Krebs by tweet because he’d had the gall to fact-check false claims of election fraud online and had gotten off-message by publicly sharing his observation that 2020 was “the most secure election in American history.”
Later that day, after pressure from Trump, the two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers (covering Detroit, which is 78% Black) tried to rescind their certifications of the county’s vote totals. They were denied in these efforts, which would have only delayed the obvious, given Biden’s 154,000-vote margin of victory in Michigan.
Unwilling to let objective reality get in the way of raw power, on November 19 Trump’s attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell had a surreal hair dye-dripping press conference in which they served up several false and misleading claims to try to pressure the Justice Department to open “a full-scale criminal investigation” of the election. (Four months later, when Powell was sued by Dominion, who manufactured the voting machines which Powell said had produced fraudulent vote tallies, Powell’s lawyers defended their client by claiming that “no reasonable person” would have believed Powell’s attacks on Dominion.)
On November 20, Trump continued his campaign to flip states he’d lost when he invited Republican representatives from Michigan’s state legislature to the White House. Trump was unable to cow them into submission because there was no legal way for Republicans to overcome Biden’s 154,000-vote victory in the state. After the meeting, the Michigan representatives made a joint statement to the press in which they said, “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan's electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”
With Michigan a long shot, Trump turned his attention to Pennsylvania. On November 25, Trump conferenced in from the White House to a hearing/publicity stunt in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani issued—and Trump backed—debunked claims about voter fraud in that state.
Trump later invited key Pennsylvania legislators to the White House. Joining Trump was Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who would circulate a PowerPoint presentation chockfull of outlandish conspiracy theories to Mark Meadows and Republican members of Congress. Waldron would later say that he spoke with Mark Meadows “maybe eight to ten times” between election day and the insurrection.
False claims continued on November 29, when Trump spewed election lies and whined about the FBI and the Justice Department in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. (Bartiromo would later be sued for promulgating disinformation about the presidential election).
Trump’s favored narrative took a major hit on December 1, when Attorney General William Barr told an AP reporter, “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election.” According to reporter Jonathan Karl, Barr felt that Trump’s fraud allegations were “all bullspombleprofglidnoctobuns,” but he’d agreed to the investigations to “appease his boss.”
Barr’s boss was busy on December 5, as he tried to muscle conservative Republican governor Brian Kemp into throwing out Georgia’s electors and pressured the Republican head of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Bryan Cutler, to do the same in his state.
Convincing Republicans in at least three swing states Joe Biden had won to send alternate slates of electors, or toss out electors for Biden, was Trump’s only chance. If neither presidential candidate amassed 270 electoral college votes, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans had a majority of the state delegations. If put into action, this plan would have allowed Trump to stay in office by effectively nullifying the presidential election and the votes of 159,000,000 Americans.
Twenty of Biden’s electoral college votes were in Pennsylvania. Trump’s maneuvering to overcome an 80,000-vote loss in that state was set back on December 8, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit claiming a measure passed by Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature to expand mail voting had been unconstitutional.
By the end of December 9, the District of Columbia and all 50 states had certified their vote totals, and Biden’s win.
Though Attorney General William Barr had already issued his finding that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, Trump poked him again on December 10 with a retweet asking for a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of fraud.
Chaos was averted on December 11. Trump planned to fire CIA director Gina Haspel’s deputy director and replace him with the woefully-underqualified Kash Patel (see November 9 entry) in order to install a loyalist near the top of the CIA. As with the post-election firing of Defense Secretary Mike Esper, this would be a significant and confusing move for a lame duck administration to make.
In response, Haspel told Trump she would resign if her deputy was let go. Following the meeting, Trump got together with Mike Pence and other senior aides who recommended keeping Haspel happy, so Trump left Haspel’s deputy in place.
Another one of Trump’s machinations was thwarted when the U.S. Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit by the state of Texas challenging results in four other states, saying Texas did not have “a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
December 14 should have put an end to Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election. On that day, the Electoral College met and certified Joe Biden’s win. According to Biden, seven Republican senators called to congratulate him. Trump allies Mitch McConnell, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin publicly congratulated the president-elect.
While some Republicans in swing states won by Biden engaged in kabuki theater by appointing legally-meaningless alternate electors, Trump continued his efforts to subvert democracy. As reported by CNN, “Trump's assistant sent [deputy attorney general Jeff] Rosen and [Justice Department] official Richard Donoghue a document claiming to show voter fraud in Antrim County, Michigan. An aide to Donoghue forwarded the document to the US Attorneys for the Eastern and Western Districts in Michigan. Less than an hour later, Trump tweeted that [Attorney General William] Barr would be leaving the Justice Department just before Christmas, elevating both Rosen and Donoghue to the top spots at [the Justice Department].”
The day after the electoral college validated Biden’s win, December 15, Trump tweeted, “This Fake Election can no longer stand” and invited Jeff Rosen to the Oval Office, where he pressured his next attorney general to put Justice Department backing behind election lawsuits, 61 of 62 of which would be rejected by Democratic and Republican judges, including Trump appointees.
A document dated December 17 would later become a potential smoking gun in the investigation of the coup attempt. Included in a privilege log provided to the January 6 committee by the attorney for Bernard Kerik (see January 4 entry), the withheld document was titled, “DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS.”
The timing and presumed content of the document dovetailed neatly with the meeting Trump held with top advisors on December 18. According to CNN, a screaming match took place in the Oval Office between those who supported the rule of law and those who did not. Firmly in the latter category was Trump’s former national security advisor, convicted felon Michael Flynn, who had recently said that Trump should declare martial law, seize voting machines, and force a new election. Not surprisingly, two of the suggestions which came up at the Oval Office were that Trump declare a national emergency (which could be used as a justification for martial law) and that Lin Wood (see November 19 entry) be named Special Counsel to investigate voting machines, which would require approval from the attorney general. In an interview with Rachel Maddow this week, Politico reporter Nicholas Wu said of the overlap between the December 17 document and the controversial topics discussed on December 18, “It’s unclear exactly if these two things are linked, but…that’s quite a coincidence.”
On December 19, according to reporters Kaitlin Collins, Kevin Liptak, and Pamela Brown, “Trump's campaign legal team sent a memo to dozens of staffers…instructing them to preserve all documents related to Dominion Voting Systems and Sidney Powell in anticipation of potential litigation by the company against the pro-Trump attorney.”
The same day, Trump tweeted “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
The drumbeat of propaganda continued on December 21, when Trump tweeted that he’d “won in a landslide” and “[needed] backing from the Justice Department,” and December 22, when he tweeted a video with the claim that “The rigging of the 2020 election was only the final step in the Democrats’ and the media’s yearslong effort to overthrow the will of the American people.”
Attorney General William Barr resigned on December 23.
On December 26, Trump tweeted more lies about the election (calling it “the biggest SCAM in our nation’s history”), attacked the FBI, the Justice Department, and the courts for following the rule of law, and referenced his January 6 rally. He also called Frances Watson, the top elections investigator in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, and employed flattery to try to get her to take another look at the ballots in a state he’d lost by over 11,000 votes.
As the date of congressional certification grew closer, Trump became increasingly desperate. On December 27, he pressured his new Attorney General, Jeff Rosen, to review “election fraud” in Pennsylvania and Arizona that William Barr had already found to be inconsequential. Rosen reportedly told Trump that the Department of Justice “can’t, and won’t, just flip a switch and change the election.” In response, Trump told Rosen to “just say that the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen.”
Trump also tried to get Rosen to sign on to a lawsuit (which had already been rejected by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel) asking the Supreme Court to toss out electoral college votes in six states Trump lost and order a “special election.”
Trump wasn’t the only one badgering Rosen. Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark (the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division in the Department of Justice) made five cracks at Rosen, trying to get him to challenge election results in key states lost by Trump.
Rosen’s second-in-command also felt the heat. Coaxed by Trump, Pennsylvania representative Scott Perry called Richard Donoghue, the Deputy Attorney General, to try to get the Justice Department to review debunked voter fraud claims in Pennsylvania. In addition, Perry tried to convince Donoghue to grant more power to Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark to look at election results. (Perry would later duck the January 6 committee, citing his devotion to “the rule of law.”)
On December 28, Clark peddled conspiracy theories around the Justice Department and sent a message to Jeff Rosen and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue requesting their sign-off on a letter which asked Georgia’s Republican legislature to call a special session to investigate election “irregularities” and choose a slate of electors for Trump. Donoghue responded via email that signing such a letter was “not even in the realm of possibility.”
Mark Meadows did his part on December 29 when he urged Rosen and Donoghue to consider the right-wing myth that the number of votes cast in Pennsylvania was larger than the number of registered voters and to take a look at “Italygate” (a theory that Biden supporters in Italy had used satellites to change a massive number of votes in several swing states from Trump to Biden).
Meanwhile, Trump’s personal assistant Molly Michael emailed Rosen, Donoghue, and Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall a legal complaint baselessly claiming that the six swing states Trump had lost by the narrowest margins (NV, WI, PA, MI, GA, AZ) had violated the Electors Clause of the Constitution, with a request to file a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The following day, December 30, Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon called the president and suggested he lure Mike Pence back to Washington (from a skiing vacation) in order to pressure him about the January 6 certification, in hopes that they could “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”
As Trump worked on Pence, presidential aspirant Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, made a savvy play for future Republican primary voters when he became the first senator to announce his intent to object to electors for Joe Biden on January 6.
Trump’s minions continued to pressure the Justice Department. In two of five known emails Mark Meadows sent to the DOJ asking them to review far-out conspiracy theories, Trump’s chief of staff that day sent Justice officials disinformation about Italygate and alleged voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia. (Meadows also forwarded debunked conspiracy theories to “the FBI, Pentagon, National Security Council, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”)
Trump’s outside attorney, Kurt Olsen, called Jeff Rosen and said that Trump expected him to file Molly Michael’s Supreme Court lawsuit (see December 29 entry) by noon that day. Rosen refused to comply.
Unable to get the new Attorney General to do his bidding, Trump invited Rosen and Donoghue to the White House on New Year’s Eve. At the meeting, Trump reportedly said that he was considering replacing Rosen with Jeffrey Clark because Rosen hadn’t been aggressive enough in investigating alleged voter fraud.
On January 1, 2021, Rosen received a 13-minute YouTube video about Italygate from Mark Meadows and a Trump-appointed judge in Texas rejected Arizona representative Louie Gohmert’s lawsuit claiming Mike Pence could pick and choose which electors to accept.
January 2, 2021 was a big day in the annals of failed election theft.
Eleven Republican senators, including former and likely future presidential candidate Ted Cruz, made a joint statement in which they referred to ill-defined fraud and advocated “an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states.” The senators’ public pretense was that the audit was necessary in order to assuage millions of Americans who had doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Polls cited showed that one-third of independents, two-thirds of Republicans, and 39% of all voters held the baseless belief that the election had been “rigged.”
In plain English, the senators were contending that since four out of every 10 Americans were gullible enough to believe ludicrous Republican lies about the election, a 10-day “audit” giving Republicans more openings to spread ludicrous lies about the election to gullible Americans was necessary in order to “restore faith in American Democracy.”
While his congressional sycophants stretched irony past the breaking point, Trump made a heavy-handed attempt to flip Georgia. During an infamous hour-long conference call, Trump tried to bully conservative Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into “[finding] 11,780 votes” for him—just enough to give Trump Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes.
Trump also called 300 state legislators, telling them they could overrule the will of the voters in their states.
In another Justice Department setback for Trump, Jeff Rosen wrote Jeffrey Clark back and asserted, as his second-in-command Richard Donoghue had on December 28, that he was “not prepared to sign” a letter asking Georgia’s Republican legislature to investigate alleged fraud and send an alternative slate of electors for Trump.
On January 3, 2021, Mark Meadows received a text which said, “I heard Jeff Clark is [going to replace Jeff Rosen] on Monday [January 4]. That's amazing. It will make a lot of patriots happy, and I'm personally so proud that you are at the tip of the spear, and I could call you a friend.”
Because Rosen insisted on following the rule of law, Trump held a meeting that Sunday with Clark, Rosen, and Donoghue to decide if he wanted to replace Rosen with Clark, who would be certain to abuse the powers of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to try to push voter fraud lies and pressure Georgia to give their electors to Trump. This was one of nine times Trump tried to get his DOJ to undermine democracy, according to a Democratic Senate Judiciary report.
Rosen told congressional investigators that Trump began the meeting by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything to overturn the election,” and implied that he could keep his job if he agreed to send Jeffrey Clark’s letter to Georgia legislators.
Trump backed off of his threat to replace Rosen after “Donoghue and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steve Engel made clear that there would be mass resignations at DOJ if Trump moved forward with replacing Rosen with Clark.”
Though he left Rosen in place, Trump fired the U.S. attorney who covered the Atlanta area, Bjay Pak, because Trump felt Pak hadn’t done enough to investigate alleged fraud in his district. Pak’s replacement, Trump loyalist Bobby Christine, later concluded that “There’s just nothing to” Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Fulton County.
Earlier that day, all ten living defense secretaries, including the recently deposed Mark Esper, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post in which they advocated for an orderly transition of power and said that acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and those working under him “are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.”
Trump and his collaborators weren’t yet accepting that there would be a “new team” on January 20.
According to Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, on January 4, 2021, General Mark Milley was turned down when he suggested to Trump cabinet members that permits for a January 6 protest at the Capitol building be revoked (due to the possibility of violence).
That same day, Trump’s lawyer John Eastman presented Mike Pence with a six-step plan to toss the electoral college votes from seven states Trump lost. If Pence carried out the plan, neither candidate would have 270 electoral college votes, which would throw the election to the House of Representatives, allowing Republicans to ignore the voters. A second option was to have Pence adjourn the counting, allowing time for states Trump had lost to send alternate electors. Eastman had advocated for this scheme on a Steve Bannon podcast two days earlier and sketched out its details in a two-page memo that had been sent to Republican senators Lyndsey Graham and Mike Lee, both of whom would conclude that Trump’s fraud claims were baseless.
Speaking to Jim Acosta on CNN, famous Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said of the Eastman memo, “I think what we are seeing in these memos particularly are blueprints for a coup….The actual blueprints in document form in which the president of the United States, through his chief of staff, is sending to Mike Pence's, the vice president's, staff a blueprint to overturn an election, a blueprint for a conspiracy led by a president of the United States to result in an authoritarian coup in which the election is stolen.”
The nerve center of the authoritarian coup attempt was a war room at the Willard Hotel, one block from the White House. In the weeks before January 6, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a team of conspirators who attempted to overturn Biden’s victory by injecting disinformation about voter fraud into the right-wing media bloodstream, encouraging Trump supporters in swing states to pressure their state legislators to block certification of Biden’s victory, pushing state legislators directly to block certification of Biden’s victory, and trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the power to deny state-certified electoral college votes.
At various times Giuliani was joined by Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Bernard Kerik (see December 17 entry), and Phil Waldron (see November 25 entry), author of a 38-page PowerPoint detailing ways to overturn the election.
Exhaustive details of the Willard team’s disinformation and public pressure strategies were revealed just this week in a document given to the January 6 committee by Bernard Kerik’s attorney.
While Trump and his war room cabal brainstormed ways to manipulate Mike Pence, other Republicans gave the vice president sound interpretations of constitutional law. Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig told Pence’s staff that there was no legal basis for him to reject electoral college votes, advice he also received from conservatives John Yoo (who’d authored the Bush Administration torture memo) and former vice president Dan Quayle.
That night, appearing at a rally for two Republican senators facing runoffs in Georgia, Trump told the audience Biden wasn’t “taking this White House. We’re going to fight like hell.”
The imminent threat to democracy was far greater than was known to the U.S. public on January 5, 2021, the day before the official counting of electoral ballots.
Mark Meadows received a text from Ohio congressman Jim Jordan advocating for Pence to question electoral votes and sent out an email demanding that the National Guard “protect pro-Trump people.”
The Secret Service “warned the U.S. Capitol Police that their officers could face violence at the hands of supporters of former President Donald Trump.”
Washington D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser requested National Guard backup, but Donald Trump’s Defense Department handcuffed the Guard’s mission. According to Paul Sonne, Peter Hermann, and Missy Ryan of the Washington Post, “the Pentagon prohibited the District’s guardsmen from receiving ammunition or riot gear, interacting with protesters unless necessary for self-defense, sharing equipment with local law enforcement, or using Guard surveillance and air assets without the defense secretary’s explicit sign-off.” In a directive that would have disastrous consequences, “The D.C. Guard was also told it would be allowed to deploy a quick-reaction force only as a measure of last resort,” which forced local D.C. officials to get approval from Trump’s Defense Department for rapid deployment, a bureaucratic hurdle which hadn’t existed previously.
As D.C. girded for trouble, Trump riled his supporters up with a tweet that read, “Washington is being inundated with people who don’t want to see an election victory stolen by emboldened Radical Left Democrats….Our Country has had enough, they won’t take it anymore!”
Sensing that Pence wasn’t going to intervene on his behalf, Trump called his apparatchiks at the Willard Hotel late in the evening and strategized about how they could delay the vote count long enough to get three swing states to de-certify Biden’s electoral votes or send alternate slates of electoral votes to the Capitol.
One of the central figures at the Willard Hotel was Steve Bannon. Liz Cheney, the future vice chair of the January 6 committee, would later say, “Based on the committee’s investigation, it appears that Mr. Bannon had substantial advance knowledge of the plans for January 6th and likely had an important role in formulating those plans.”
On his podcast the night of January 5, Steve Bannon concluded ominously: “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say is, strap in…. You made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready.”
Dan Benbow has been an online political features writer since 2003. His work has appeared at Salon, Truthout, RawStory, AlterNet, BuzzFlash, BeyondChron, AddictingInfo, GetUnderground/KotoriMag, and his boutique blog, “Truth and Beauty.” He can be reached at benbowauthor@gmail.com and followed @danbenbow on Twitter.
