brian T kennedy Claremonster
ntbcw brian J (boehner fti)
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MMA
Steve Bannon’s guest admits that a national emergency declaration on elections would likely be overturned by the Supreme Court
Brian Kennedy threw cold water on a central pillar of MAGA’s efforts to subvert the midterm elections, the latest setback for the movement and a sign they don't believe they'll get an emergency declaration before the midterms
Written by John Knefel
Published 09/16/26
A guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast acknowledged on September 16 that if President Donald Trump is going to declare a national emergency and try to seize power over election systems, the order would definitely be challenged in court and would almost certainly be overturned.
Brian Kennedy, senior fellow at MAGA-aligned think tank the Claremont Institute and frequent War Room guest, argued that Wayne Allyn Root, another Bannon favorite, was wrong in claiming that a national emergency declaration would be unreviewable by courts.
“With all due respect to Wayne Allyn Root — I myself have said we need very firm executive action, I’ve said it last year and I said it this year — but I always thought it would be challenged legally and taken to the Supreme Court,” Kennedy said.
“And Wayne Allyn Root and that national security emergency memorandum would almost — excuse me, would certainly — certainly be challenged by the Supreme Court,” he continued. “There's no mechanism by which the president has unilateral authority over this."
Video
Citation
From the September 16, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room.
Bannon later returned to Root’s theory — including a reference to Peter Ticktin, a lawyer aligned with Root — only for Kennedy to repeat his earlier analysis of the flaws to their approach.
“Wayne Allyn Root — the underlying thesis of him and Ticktin and these people is that if the president declares a national security emergency and lays out his reasons for it, that’s virtually bulletproof in the courts,” Bannon said. “You don’t buy that?”
“No, I think they misread the underlying court case that justifies their position in doing so,” Kennedy replied.
“Doing a national security emergency declaration like this would immediately cause one state to sue another state, or states to sue the federal government in combination, and that would immediately go to the Supreme Court,” Kennedy added. “And we saw what the Supreme Court did with Brett Kavanaugh. He said there wasn’t time."
“The court itself is not on the side of the president,” Kennedy said. “It’s going to take the side of the states in this regard. This is something that needed to be hashed out over the last 18 months, and waiting until the last, you know, six weeks before the election is simply — is reasonably speaking not going to be enough time, the court is going to argue, for this to happen."
Kennedy concluded: “I applaud Wayne Allyn Root and Peter Ticktin for their overall thrust here, but when it comes to the actual application of the law here I think the other side is going to win out."
Bannon and guests seem resigned that Trump won’t issue a national emergency declaration before the midterms
For months, Bannon, Root, Ticktin, and others have been openly plotting to subvert the midterms by falsely claiming China has interfered in U.S. elections, then using that manufactured evidence as justification to declare a national emergency and seize control of election systems.
Kennedy’s remarks are the latest evidence that the election denial movement is faltering and appears to be pivoting to a new tactic: preemptively blaming the courts for any future Republican losses. After the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s efforts to limit mail-in ballots, election denier Cleta Mitchell acknowledged the headwinds her movement faced on Bannon’s September 15 episode.
“I don't see that there's anything that can be done on a broad scale before this election, unfortunately,” Mitchell said, adding: “There's so much wrong with this, but honestly I'm pretty tired of these weenies on the U.S. Supreme Court who keep siding with the Marxist girls."
Bannon sounded a similar note in closing out his September 16 episode, following his interview with Kennedy.
“We’ve got to get maniacally focused on this because November could be a wake-up call,” Bannon said. “We’ve just got to be honest with the people at the coalition — all of it, all these hard workers about voter integrity — we didn’t get the voter integrity that we want. So November is going to be what November is, and we’re going to have to live with it and deal with it after that.”
===
tiptoes on violence
note mult intertwined conspir eg deep state, media bias...
tech bromances ~ gubmint
mma
Project 2025 partner blog: “If Kamala Harris does win, it will, as of today, be because of a stolen election”
The Claremont Institute's Brian Kennedy: “Americans can be a very rough lot of people when they want to be. You can rig one election before their eyes, but can you rig two?”
Written by Madeline Peltz
Published 10/28/24
A Project 2025 partner blog published an op-ed titled “What if Harris Gets Away with It?” claiming Vice President Kamala Harris could win the 2024 election only if it is “stolen,” which would turn the United States into “an ungovernable country” that might involve “political disintegration."
In The American Mind, published by Project 2025 partner the Claremont Institute, Claremont senior fellow and board member Brian Kennedy claimed, “Over the past two decades we have been living through a slow-motion Communist revolution,” and the “corruption of our election system” has been “the most devastating."
He continued:
So, if Kamala Harris does win, it will, as of today, be because of a stolen election. Under these circumstances, America will become an ungovernable country. Large groups of Americans will believe their vote no longer counts. We have the experience this summer of Venezuela, where it was clear the opposition party won—so said the Biden Administration—only to have the Maduro regime keep hold of power by affirming the fraudulent results and gutting it out publicly against domestic and world opinion. One imagines the Harris campaign learned a lesson from that.
Kennedy then imagined a violent civil war scenario that might follow:
Americans can be a very rough lot of people when they want to be. You can rig one election before their eyes, but can you rig two? And can you rig the second one so openly and brazenly, and expect that the American people will not push back? How they push back is another matter, but it would serve the interest of America’s enemies to face a nation even more deeply divided than ours already is. Violence is not an option. But a political disintegration of Red America from Blue America is not impossible.
He recommended potential preventative measures to guard against a Harris win, including a “whistleblower program that offers a multi-million dollar reward for real evidence of” election fraud, “either through counterfeit mail-in ballots, fraudulent election day ballots, overseas ballots, or cyberattacks against our electronic voting system.”
He also suggested:
A second tactic could be to create a “Decision Desk 2024” on X both in Spaces and on the “America” video platform. It cannot be left to the legacy broadcast media to announce the winner of the election as if they have some divine authority. The mainstream media, from Fox News to MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS, have devolved into pure propaganda arms of the American Deep State. As such, they have disqualified themselves.
> Elon Musk can build a team of respected journalists and analysts to perform their own calculations and judgments about who won the election. He and his platform have a greater reach both nationally and internationally than the “mainstream” media. Imagine Elon Musk with Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the like examining the results. Not only would they be better trusted, but the democratization of the results by all the users of X would serve the American people better as well.
“Finally,” he wrote, “Americans must prepare themselves and their families for what could be great societal dislocation,” without offering specific recommendations about what that might mean.
A recent Media Matters analysis found significant ties between authors, contributors, and partner organizations involved in Project 2025 and the ongoing right-wing efforts to disenfranchise voters and sow confusion about the 2024 election.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote about this strategy recently:
By way of preparing my own audience: It is possible none of this will ultimately matter. With numerous swing states polling within the margin of error, and the chance of a systemic poll error in play, Trump could very well win legitimately in November.
But if the election returns show that Harris has triumphed, Trump has a backup plan ready to go: He can attempt to subvert the election, as he did in 2020.
While elements of that plan could be different, the broad strokes of declaring victory, presenting himself as the victim of election fraud, filing pretextual lawsuits, and ultimately leaning on Republican officials at the local, state, and federal levels to hand him the presidency remain unchanged.
This strategy rests on Trump being able to convince the Republican base that he won the election. In 2020, he had the support of a vast right-wing media ecosystem that, with few exceptions, had already prepped its audience to disbelieve the results of the election if Trump won. The result was a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol that threatened American democracy.
Since then, the right has purged media figures and Republican politicians who had stood in the way of the plot. And now, in 2024, the same players are again laying the groundwork for a Trumpian subversion effort.
https://www.mediamatters.org/real-americas-voice/resurfaced-footage-raises-questions-about-frequent-steve-bannon-guests-role
no lnx vid
Resurfaced footage raises questions about a frequent Steve Bannon guest’s role in Trump election data scheme
New reporting appears to implicate Claremont Institute senior fellow Brian Kennedy in the Trump campaign’s wide-ranging attempt to access Dominion voting machines
WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL
PUBLISHED 08/17/22
Resurfaced interviews from late 2020 have raised new questions about the role that a right-wing pundit played in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn election results by accessing and copying data from election systems in several battleground states.
Brian Kennedy, a senior fellow at the MAGA-aligned Claremont Institute, frequently appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in the days and weeks following Trump’s loss in 2020. He regularly detailed his on-the-ground presence in areas where Trump’s team was challenging the results of the election in court, amplifying conspiracy theories and calling into question the integrity of local vote counts with flimsy or nonexistent evidence. Kennedy was also reportedly involved in a separate initiative to seize control of state election infrastructure by running far-right candidates for secretary of state.
Those projects were part of a multi-pronged effort by Trump and his allies to remain in power despite his electoral defeat. Their court challenges, like the ones Kennedy was involved in, have been a complete, unmitigated failure, with 61 of 62 getting thrown out by judges. But a new report from The Washington Post shows that though the efforts were legally unsuccessful, their attempts to uncover evidence of vote tampering may have actually violated election security measures, undermining the very systems they were supposedly auditing for security flaws.
On August 15, The Washington Post reported that lawyers and activists allied withTrump hired a digital forensics team as part of a far-reaching effort to “access voting equipment” in at least three states. In Georgia,the forensics team “copied sensitive data from election systems,” according to the Post. They were also able to gain access to data in Michigan, but apparently not in Nevada.
Breaches like that can lead to serious legal charges, as in the case of Tina Peters, an election official in Colorado who was indicted on felony charges related to improper copying of election data.
The Post story makes only a passing mention of Kennedy, and his involvement in the scheme outlined by the Post remains unclear. Still, Kennedy’s public comments on War Room and the new information paint a picture of someone deeply involved in efforts to subvert the election results.
On November 30, 2020, former intelligence official Jim Penrose contacted executives at the Georgia-based forensics firm SullivanStrickler, arranging for them to travel to Nevada. Trump campaign lawyer Jesse Binnall invoiced the company that evening. On December 3, Paul Maggio, chief operations officer at SullivanStrickler, responded with a bill for “the 2 days we spent in Las Vegas, NV in support of this matter.”
The following day, Kennedy, who had been copied on some of the correspondence, responded to that email. “I spoke to Jesse and he said the payment is in process,” Kennedy wrote to Maggio, according to the Post.
The nature of the work that SullivanStrickler did in Nevada isn’t publicly known. In an early version of the piece, the Post reported these details:
A person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss litigation, said Binnall hired SullivanStrickler to forensically examine election systems in Clark County after Trump’s team won a court order on Nov. 30 granting access to “testing equipment and programs” there. But the firm’s investigators were only allowed to do a cursory examination of machinery, the person said, and Binnall’s efforts to compel access to additional equipment were rejected by the judge in the case. The case was later dismissed.
The Post then removed much of that section without including an explanation, leaving only that the judge dismissed Binnall’s efforts and that the case was ultimately dismissed.
SullivanStrickler also did work for the team in Arizona, though the scope is publicly unknown.
Later, after Maggio also copied Binnall on another email about data examinations elsewhere, Penrose emailed him to say: “Please do not communicate about any additional forensics work in AZ to the other legal teams. Keep that in confidential channels with me, Sidney, and Doug only.” It is unclear what work in Arizona he was referring to.
The Post doesn’t say whether Kennedy was included in those emails.
War Room interviews
Kennedy appeared on Bannon’s War Room at least three times in November 2020, including once from Nevada on November 13 and once from Arizona on November 30, the day Penrose first contacted SullivanStrickler. On November 26, Bannon credited Kennedy with helping “the president focus on Nevada and Arizona.”
Kennedy appeared on War Room at least six times in December 2020, including three consecutive days from December 3-5, a period covered in the Post’s reporting relating to Kennedy.
On December 3, Kennedy said that he and his colleagues hadn’t been able to investigate voting machines in Clark County, Nevada, to their satisfaction, despite what he believed to be a court order allowing access to them.
“The campaign actually had a court order to go look at the Dominion voting systems on Wednesday, and I joined them and spent six hours standing in [the] Clark County Registrar of Voters Office looking at Dominion voting systems,”Kennedy said. “And they would let us look at them, but the court order said we could inspect them and we were hoping that we could actually figure out what's going on in a Dominion voting system.”
“But all they would let us do is look at them,” he continued. “And so we – we had a bunch of tech experts there that were trying to dig into them, but that wasn't possible.”
He went on to detail the work his team had tried to do:
BRIAN KENNEDY (CLAREMONT INSTITUTE SENIOR FELLOW): We had a team of forensic experts go in there and they looked at all the paperwork and they looked at the machines themselves. They even got out a bunch of the machines for us to look at, and they even booted them on. But you couldn't really touch them and you couldn't use any kind of devices to actually find out forensically what transpired in the election. And when we asked to actually hook our computers up to theirs, to actually monitor, you know, what might have transpired in the election, they said, no, that's – you know, we can't do that.
Kennedy didn’t say who those “forensic experts” were, but that time period is when the Post initially reported that SullivanStickler investigators were in Nevada but only allowed to perform a “cursory examination” of the machines.
Video file
CitationFrom the December 3, 2020, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic with Steve Bannon
On December 4, Kennedy reiterated his frustration with his team’s inability to “look into the Dominion voting system and see how it actually operates” in Nevada. He added that “part of our cyber team flew to – flew back to Georgia, part of it is still in Nevada.”
Video fileCitationFrom the December 4, 2020, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic with Steve Bannon
On December 5, Kennedy again complained that “we got to look at the physical outside of the machine, but not the inside of the machine.”
“What you’re seeing in Arizona and Georgia and elsewhere is the ability to look into the machine and to look into the software,” he added.
CitationFrom the December 5, 2020, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic with Steve Bannon
A subsequent audit of Dominion systems by the federal government found that they had never been exploited to alter the outcome of an election, including in 2020. Dominion is now suing multiple Trump associates and right-wing media outlets, including Fox News, One America News, and Newsmax, for spreading false election claims.
On the December 14 edition of War Room, Bannon introduced Kennedy as “one of the organizers of the cyber team that’s gone in and looked at Antrim, Michigan.” The Post reported that SullivanStrickler did extensive work for Trump’s team in Antrim throughout December.
As the Post reports, SullivanStrickler investigators “copied the hard drive of an elections server in Antrim on Dec. 6, 2020,” and told Penrose and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell that “the Antrim files would be made available to download from a secure online folder once the firm was paid.” (That data was later made public at an August 2021 “cyber symposium” convened by right-wing donor and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.)
The following month, one day after the attempted fascist coup on January 6, 2021, Trump’s team sent SullivanStrickler to Georgia, according to the Post. Maggio told Powell that the job was “going well.” Like in Michigan, but apparently unlike in Nevada, the effort was successful, as the forensic team was able to gain access to nearly everything that had previously been denied to them in Clark County.
“The data obtained by the investigators included copies of virtually every component of the county voting system, including the central tabulation server and a precinct tabulator, according to a directory of file names that Maggio’s lawyer sent the plaintiffs in the Georgia case,” the Post reported.
Although Maggio told Powell the next day that he would share the data they’d collected, more than three months passed before they sent it to the Trump team. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has now reportedly opened a criminal investigation into the January 7 breach.
The degree to which Kennedy is implicated in the successful copying of the data in Michigan and Georgia, and what appears to be a failed attempt to do the same in Nevada, is unclear. But his inclusion in at least one set of emails about Nevada – and his repeated statements on War Room about his involvement in the broader effort to gain access to Dominion voting systems – raise serious questions about his apparent participation in the Trump team’s efforts to breach voting systems following the 2020 election.
china hawk not pombo spox?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/the-claremont-institute/
no lnx twt
How a little known right-wing think tank continues to add fuel to Trump's 'Big Lie'
Meaghan Ellis November 05, 2021
Former President Donald Trump may have had an overwhelming number of supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol to "stop the Steal, but one conservative think tank is still helping to perpetuate the big lie.
According to Vice News, the Claremont Institute and its top-ranking members played a dominant role aiding Trump as he attempted to overturn the presidential election.
Per Vice:
"Claremont Institute leaders' actions leading up to, during, and after Jan. 6 are the culmination of five years of increasingly alarmist rhetoric and calls to action from the think tank, whose embrace of Trump and Trumpism have helped mainstream fringe views into the Republican Party ecosystem by positioning themselves as the vanguard in an existential "cold civil war" between true Americans and anti-American progressives."
One leader in particular was Trump loyalists and lawyer John Eastman. Not only did he attempt to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election but he also echoed many of Trump's biggest lies about the election being stolen.
Like many of the conspiracy theorists, Eastman claimed "dead people voted" and Dominion Voting Systems' "'machines contributed to that fraud' by 'unloading the ballots from the secret folder,'" Vice reports.
“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at 1 o'clock he let the legislators of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not," Eastman claimed. “We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can't get the answer to this question. This is bigger than President Trump. It is the very essence of our republican form of government and it has to be done. And anybody that is not willing to stand up and do it does not deserve to be in the office."
As proof of the think tank leaders' actions, the publication also pointed to tweets and messages that made their stance quite clear. Vice highlighted a tweet shared by Claremont Institute president emeritus and senior fellow Brian Kennedy's tweet just one day before the Jan. 6 insurrection.
"We have been on Capitol Hill all day. We are in a constitutional crisis and also in a revolutionary moment," Kennedy tweeted on Jan. 5. “We must embrace the spirit of the American Revolution to stop this communist revolution. #HoldTheLine."
Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams also echoed similar claims in a YouTube video saying, "The mission of the Claremont Institute is to save Western civilization."
Welcome to the Claremont Institute
www.youtube.com
Political analysts have weighed in to explain just how disturbing the Claremont Institute's actions are as there are concerns about similar incidents occurring in the future.
"Laura K. Field, a political theorist at American University, recently explained why it is so disturbing.
"It's incredibly concerning. They're desperate to take on the role of leading the charge in terms of providing arguments for the anti-democratic populism of Trump, Field explained. "They really want to do everything they can to keep Republicans in power, even if it means manipulating through bad-faith measures the levers of power."
There are also concerns about the future because ongoing attacks leveled at America's voting systems "could lead to more distrust and division and skepticism about various institutions in the medium-to-long run."
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brian T. Kennedy is the president of the Claremont Institute, a rightist policy center based in Claremont, California, that has hosted a number of high-profile neoconservative figures and acolytes of the political theorist Leo Strauss.[[1]](https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/brian-t-kennedy/#_edn1) Kennedy also serves as a senior adviser to the Bill Bennett-founded Americans for Victory over Terrorism.[[2]](https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/brian-t-kennedy/#_edn2)
According to his Claremont website biography: “Mr. Kennedy has been with the Institute since 1989 and has written on national security affairs and California public policy issues. His articles have appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, National Review, Investor's Business Daily, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous national newspapers. In addition to his duties as President, Mr. Kennedy serves as Publisher of the Claremont Review of Books and also directs the Institute's Ballistic Missile Defense project, which examines the missile threat to the western United States and the need for a national missile defense.”[[3]](https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/brian-t-kennedy/#_edn3)
oddly no real bio?
https://www.claremont.org/scholar-bio/brian-t-kennedy/
encounter
communist China’s War Inside America
BRIAN T. KENNEDY
The People’s Republic of China and the United States are today at war. It is being fought with the use of information, politics and finance. The Chinese believe that, as in all war, it would be better to win without engaging the enemy on the battlefield or having to resort to the likes of nuclear weapons if it can be avoided.
duck 4 22
rian T. Kennedy - Claremont Review of Books
Brian T. Kennedy is President of the American Strategy Group and a Senior Fellow and Board Member of the Claremont Institute. Mr. Kennedy served as the Claremont Institute's fourth president from 2001-2014. His articles have appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, National Review, Investor's Business Daily, The Wall Street Journal, and ...
Interview: Brian Kennedy on Election Fraud Research and ...
In this special edition of The American Mind Podcast, Ryan Williams, President of The Claremont Institute, interviews Brian Kennedy, President of The American Strategy Group. Kennedy talks about his experiences on the ground in contested states during the 2020 election cycle and carefully breaks down the current state of play, pinpointing what issues he thinks are most likely to bear fruit for ...
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Vice highlighted a tweet shared by Claremont Institute president emeritus and senior fellow Brian Kennedy's tweet just one day before the Jan. 6 insurrection. "We have been on Capitol Hill all day....
Brian T. Kennedy - Encounter Books
BRIAN T. KENNEDY is president of the American Strategy Group, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, and a board member and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, where he served as president from 2002 to 2015.
Meet the Obscure Think Tank Powering Trump's Biggest Lies
We are in a constitutional crisis and also in a revolutionary moment," Brian Kennedy, the president emeritus and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, tweeted on Jan. 5. "We must embrace the...
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Brian Kennedy, President, American Strategy Group; Board Member & Senior Fellow Claremont Institute . Mr. Kennedy is the chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, founded in March of 2019. He is also a member of the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense. Mr. Kennedy is the author of Communist China's War Inside America by ...
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Description: Victor Davis Hanson (left) receives the Claremont Institute's Statesmanship Award from President Brian T. Kennedy. On November 10, 2006, the Claremont Institute held its annual dinner in honor of Sir Winston Churchill at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.
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