Immediately after losing the 2020 election, Donald Trump decapitated the civilian leadership structure at the Department of Defense and installed a group of corrupt, unqualified, anti-democratic operatives that would take the necessary steps to effectuate a coup before Joe Biden could be inaugurated.
As discussed in Part I, II, and III of this series, Plan A to overturn the will of the American people and keep Donald Trump in power was to use Executive Order 13848 concerning foreign interference in elections as a pretext to take over vote counting in swing states and flip the race to Trump. Like all dictators, Trump knew he needed his own executioners.
The idea was to use the military and USAID to administer these fraudulent recounts under the administration of Mike Flynn — who touts his experience taking over other countries and running elections overseas.
Draft Order Would Have Given Armed Trump Supporters Power to Seize Voting Data
When Plan A failed to materialize because the DNI Report on Foreign Interference did not support the invocation of EO 13848, the newly installed leadership at the Pentagon set out to ensure that Plan B, a physical insurrection of the Capitol, would succeed.
This Memorandum for the Secretary of the Army ensuring that the National Guard would not be able to adequately respond to violence on January 6th is a smoking gun proving that the Secretary of Defense knew exactly what was going to happen and wanted it to succeed.
This document specifically prevents the National Guard from doing what the Guard are there for, which is to respond to incidents on American soil that require military-level force or operational capability, and puts it under the thumb of Christopher Miller, Acting Secretary of Defense — who was installed after Trump lost the election despite Miller having no qualifications for the job.
Miller’s Memorandum worked in tandem with this Presidential Memorandum published the next day that was about “Antifa” being involved in “organized criminal activity.” It was part of Plan B that violent leftists would show up to the January 6th insurrection so they could blame “Antifa” and institute Martial Law.
Note that the authors of this piece and many others anticipated this plan ahead of time and actively warned the left about it. The lack of participation by anyone in the anti-fascist movement on January 6th thwarted this part of the plan.
Parts of the military command cooperated with civilian leadership
On January 3rd, 2021, three days before the insurrection, this extraordinary piece was published in the Washington Post. It should be seen as a major red flag when Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Leon Pannetta and seven other living SecDefs agree on anything, much less a joint hair-on-fire warning about using the military in election disputes.
At a minimum, these men were aware of a serious, imminent plan to attempt to use the military to interfere with elections. But more than that, they seemed to be intentionally drawing attention to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and making clear to him and anyone in the chain of command that they were watching.
Despite this, the memo to stand down the National Guard to facilitate the breaching of the Capitol building to interfere with the peaceful transition of power, came the day after ten living secretaries of defense wrote a letter warning Miller he and his subordinates were “each bound by oath, law and precedent…” not to interfere with the elections.
Two active members of the Armed Forces, Secretary of the Army General Ryan McCarthy, and his deputy General Charles Flynn, ran interference for Miller while the Capitol was being overrun and the mob was murdering cops. They successfully delayed the deployment of the National Guard until it was clear that the insurrection wasn’t going to work. Then the Army lied about it:
Made worse, the DOD Inspector General came out with a report that was factually and substantively wrong. It came after the inauguration, and pointed the finger at the head of the DC National Guard William Walker rather than at Charles Flynn, Ryan McCarthy and Christopher Miller where the blame belongs.
Charles Flynn was given his fourth star and his new assignment as Deputy Secretary of the Army on the same day that Mike Flynn got his illegal pardon from Donald Trump. It was this position that gave Charles Flynn the authority to interfere on 1/6.
It is a failure of our military leadership that the same Charles Flynn who lied to the DOD IG about the fact that he intentionally helped his brother Mike Flynn try to take over the US Government is still in charge of 90,000 American troops as Commanding General of the US Army Pacific.
Civilian “leadership”
By all appearances, Christopher Miller was a figurehead, and a patsy, for the “brains” behind it all — Mike Flynn allies Ezra Cohen(-Watnick) and Kash Patel who were given the positions of Undersecretary for Intelligence and Pentagon Chief of Staff respectively.
Ezra Cohen is a very well-trained and elusive operative who covers his tracks well despite doing numerous “missions” for Mike Flynn aimed at dismantling democracy since 2016.
Cohen trained in psyops and intelligence at “The Farm” with Mike Flynn’s son Matt. Cohen was in the Defense Intelligence Agency which Mike Flynn led until he got fired by Barack Obama in 2014. Like Flynn, Cohen was rejected by the CIA and hated it.
It should be noted that Trump’s appointee, Scott Berrier, who was fingered by Ezra Cohen for executing an intelligence operation in a friendly nation to support the “ItalyGate” election conspiracy theory, is still currently head of the DIA.
Ezra Cohen was installed at the National Security Council by Mike Flynn at the beginning of the Trump administration. When Flynn got caught lying to the FBI about his communications with the Russian government and was fired a few weeks in, Flynn sent Cohen on a “mission” to find out who had been investigating him.
Cohen obtained classified material through his access at the NSC and illegally passed this information to then-Devin Nunes aide Kash Patel. This was all an effort to create a scandal out of the investigation into 2016 election interference, rather than the interference itself. Four years later, Patel was Cohen’s partner at the Pentagon while they oversaw the near-death of democracy.
Patel is a propagandist and an agent of an enemy foreign power who worked with Rudy Giuliani to try to influence Ukraine to generate fake oppo for Trump against the Bidens. Kash Patel, like Cohen and Nunes, knew all about QAnon and fed information to Flynn and “Q,” including the fact that Nunes was going to sue Twitter before Twitter knew about it.
Patel’s current activities include helping Nunes run failed Twitter clone Truth Social which is recapitulating QAnon.
The infiltration of the military
Donald Trump spent four years undermining American institutions. One of his primary targets was the military chain of command.
He believed he could corrupt military leadership the same way he corrupted everyone around him. That’s why he called them “my generals” — until he insulted and demeaned them when they failed to meet his whims. Despite this rejection by military leadership, the President of the United States attempted to use the DOD for a coup.
While it’s true that the chain of command held and military force was not used to steal the election, it may have taken an extraordinary intervention by every living Secretary of Defense to prevent it. In the seventeen months since the insurrection, major efforts have been made to continue to infiltrate and radicalize the military.
Retired military officers, especially Army PSYOP personnel, play a major role in the creation and distribution of the propaganda and psychological operations currently endangering American democracy.
Both active and retired military made up an oversized proportion of January 6th insurrectionists, many of whom called themselves “digital soldiers” — a QAnon slogan coined and trademarked by Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn in November 2016.
The thin green line
The United States military is the most powerful kinetic force on planet Earth, a deadly weapon capable of destroying anything in its path, or incinerating every one of us if it gets into lawless, unconstitutional hands.
Corruption and radicalization of our military ranks, from recruit to general officer, represents one of the most dangerous objectives of our enemies. The freedom of Americans and the rest of the world rests on the shoulders of our service members, the vast majority of whom serve honorably.
Extremists have long sought out American service members for their skillsets and training. At all levels of government, we must hold accountable those who seek to weaponize them for ideological or personal goals by strengthening the systems that support our men and women when they leave active service to prevent recruitment and radicalization by those who seek to harm democracy.
American institutions must make certain our military remains true to its mission and oath, "to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." This means to adhere to Constitutional purposes of our government to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and provide for a common defense against our enemies.
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Some cheerful news: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-06/doj-charges-proud-boys-members-with-seditious-conspiracy?sref=6lCKa2D6
Found this Hudson Institute YouTube last night from your and gal’s work on this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m6NGQB-skj4