cohen-watnick
Ezra Cohen-Watnick
what does it mean when THIS GUY cuts bannon off at knees?
bogus trump ltr releSED from exec priv when trump has never asserted and can't now?
judge tossed case, liar said i have no defense left (4 parts all) , judge said yup.
an 7 22
If you are tired of waiting for Attorney General Merrick Garland to indict Donald Trump for seditious conspiracy, insurrection, obstruction of Congress, or any other crime involving the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, I have some words of consolation: Steve Bannon’s trial for contempt of Congress has begun. If convicted, he will likely go to jail.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t take pleasure in the prospect of anyone doing time, as our penal institutions are shamelessly overcrowded and do little in the way of rehabilitation or deterrence to lower our outrageously high crime rates. But apart from Trump himself, there might not be any other person more deserving of a stint in the pokey than Bannon, the loud-mouthed propagandist and podcaster who led Trump’s 2016 political campaign to victory, and subsequently served as the disgraced ex-President’s chief strategist and senior counselor for nearly eight months in 2017.
The facts of the case against Bannon are straightforward and, from a legal perspective, devastating.
On September 23, 2021, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol issued a subpoena commanding Bannon to produce documents on October 7 and sit for a sworn deposition on October 14. Bannon defied both requests.
On October 20, the committee voted to hold Bannon in contempt. Three days later, the full House, with the support of nine Republicans and every Democrat, passed a contempt resolution against Bannon and forwarded a request for prosecution to the Department of Justice.
On November 12, a federal grand jury returned a two-count indictment against Bannon for disobeying the subpoena. The first count cites him for refusing to testify, and the second for failing to turn over documents.
Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor, but a very serious one. Conviction carries a mandatory minimum sentence of thirty days and a maximum of one year in jail. There is no possibility of probation, according to a 2011 federal court ruling interpreting the contempt statute.
The committee set forth its reasons for seeking Bannon’s cooperation in a succinct one-page letter that accompanied the subpoena. The letter reads in part:
“The Select Committee has reason to believe that you have information relevant to understanding important activities that led to and informed the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For example, you have been identified as present at the Willard Hotel on January 5, 2021, during an effort to persuade Members of Congress to block the certification of the election the next day, and in relation to other activities on January 6....Moreover, you are quoted as stating, on January 5, 2021 [on Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast] that ‘[a]ll hell is going to break loose tomorrow.’ Accordingly, the Select Committee seeks both documents and your deposition testimony regarding these and multiple other matters…”
The subpoena itself lists seventeen categories of records and communications. In addition to the items highlighted in the letter, the list includes all discussions that Bannon had with Trump about the planning, financing, and staging of the events of January 6, and any communications that Bannon had with Trump between November 3, 2020, and January 20, 2021, “concerning efforts to contest the election results or delay or impede the electoral vote.”
The list also includes communications Bannon may have had with any third parties about the insurrection. The subpoena specifically names attorney Boris Epstein, who worked as a strategic adviser on Trump’s 2020 election campaign; Kash Patel, a one-time aide to former GOP Congressman Devin Nunes of California; and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, an intelligence officer who briefly served as the acting Under-Secretary of Defense in 2020.
Initially, Bannon reacted to the subpoena with tough-guy bravado. Following his first court appearance in November, he told a small crowd of supporters and reporters, “This is going to be the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden. Joe Biden ordered Merrick Garland to prosecute me from the White House lawn when he got off Marine One. And . . . we’re going to go on the offense.We’re tired of playing defense. We’re going to go on the offense on this and stand by.”
Bannon might have been emboldened by the fact that contempt of Congress prosecutions arerelatively rare, and because his case was assigned to Federal District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee who was narrowly confirmed by the Senate in 2019. In March, Nichols dismissed a felony obstruction charge brought against a Texas man accused of storming the Capitol.
Nichols, however, has been anything but lenient with Bannon. On June 15, Nichols deniedBannon’s motion to dismiss the case, rejecting his claims of executive privilege and his contention that the select committee was established illegally in violation of House rules.
As Bannon’s July 18 trial date approached, he apparently had a “come-to-Jesus moment” typical of many criminal defendants faced with imminent defeat. In an email sent to committee chairman Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of South Carolina, by one of his lawyers on July 9, Bannon offered to testify after all. The email also cited a rambling letter written by Trump, waiving claims of executive privilege.
Neither Judge Nichols nor the DOJ was swayed by Bannon’s change of position. On July 11, Nichols denied Bannon’s request to postpone his trial to October.
Nichols also ruled that Bannon will not be permitted to argue executive privilege as a defense at trial, and that he will not be allowed to subpoena House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or other members of the select committee to testify. The rulings left attorney David Schoen—who represented Trump in his second impeachment trial and later joined Bannon’s legal team—so exasperated that he remarked in open court, “What’s the point in going to trial if there are no defenses.”
Unlike seditious conspiracy or obstruction cases, contempt of Congress cases do not involve complex issues of intent. All that the prosecution needs to prove is a willful or deliberate intention not to respond to a Congressional subpoena. Evil motives or corrupt purposes need not be shown.
Bannon’s eleventh-hour offer to testify likely won’t save him, either. As the DOJ noted in a recent court filing, Bannon’s crime was committed and became complete in October, when he dodged the committee’s subpoena.
What this means, bottom line, is that Bannon had best hope he isn’t housed with the general population at the infamous D.C. Central Detention Facility, where he will probably serve his sentence. The same goes for former Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has also been indicted for defying a select committee subpoena. Navarro’s trial is set to begin November 17.
And who knows—a victory in the Bannon and Navarro cases might even encourage Garland to find his spine and prosecute Trump for attempting to overthrow what remains of our damaged democracy.
The 30-year-old National Security Council official is a member of the “Flynnstones,” as the dwindling cadre of Flynn loyalists on the NSC are known. After Flynn’s firing, incoming national security adviser H.R. McMaster attempted to remove Cohen-Watnick from his position, but top Trump advisers Kushner and Steve Bannon intervened to save his job. Cohen-Watnick—known for his hawkish views on Iran and for clashing with CIA staffers—was among a trio of White House officials involved in an effort to lend credence to the president’s baseless claim that he had been wiretapped by the Obama administration. The NSC staffer—along with White House lawyers Michael Ellis and John Eisenberg—helped provide Rep. Devin Nunes with access to classified documents that the House Intelligence Committee chairman cited as evidence, wrongly, that Trump associates had been inappropriately “unmasked” in surveillance intercepts.
kos
New York Times has tracked down the people who slipped info to Devin Nunes, and the reason he was never, ever going to reveal his sources seems clear enough.
A pair of White House officials played a role in providing Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.
The two sources turn out to be Michael Ellis, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office who used to work with Nunes at the House Intelligence Committee, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who is the Senior Director for Intelligence at the National Security Council.
If you’re thinking that Cohen-Watnick’s name in this pairing redeems Nunes’ statement that he had gathered his secret info from an intelligence official, note that Cohen-Watnick is in his position under very unusual circumstances.
National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster had informed Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence programs, that he’d be moving to another position on Friday, Politico reported. McMaster reportedly made the decision after receiving complaints from several career officials about the 30-year-old intelligence operative. …
After they informed Trump of the situation Sunday, he overruled McMaster and told Cohen-Watnick he could stay put.
Cohen-Watnick knows Nunes because they were both members of the Trump transition team. How did he get on the NSC? MIchael Flynn put him there....
Mr. Cohen-Watnick is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who was originally brought to the White House by Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser. The officials said that earlier this month, shortly after Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter about being wiretapped on the orders of President Barack Obama, Mr. Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.
So, a lawyer from the office of White House Counsel, and a guy who was put in place by Michael Flynn, who the professionals on the NSC wanted to get rid of, but who Donald Trump personally intervened to keep in place and who got access to the information he fed to Nunes specifically in a desperate attempt to shore up Trump’s unsupported Tweet.
ref
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2017/03/14/report-trump-overrules-mcmaster-on-nsc-aide-s-ouster.html
President Trump has reportedly overturned a personnel decision made by his national security adviser at the behest of Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster had informed Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence programs, that he’d be moving to another position on Friday, Politico reported. McMaster reportedly made the decision after receiving complaints from several career officials about the 30-year-old intelligence operative. But Cohen-Watnick went to Bannon and Kushner—with whom he’d apparently formed an alliance while working on the president’s transition team—and fought the move, two sources close to the matter told Politico. After they informed Trump of the situation Sunday, he overruled McMaster and told Cohen-Watnick he could stay put.
Cohen-Watnick was brought to the council by retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser forced to step down over his communications with Russian officials. The move seems likely to fuel tensions between Trump and members of the intelligence community, many of whom have expressed concerns about the president’s dismissive attitude toward intelligence agencies’ findings on Russian election meddling. The White House deferred questions about the incident to the NSC, a spokesman for which declined to comment. Cohen-Watnick, Kushner, and Bannon have not commented on the matter.
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https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-the-coming-collapse-of-donald-50c
no lnx jan 30
The McMaster Plot and Barbara Ledeen
Ginni Thomas’s story takes a turn toward possible sedition in 2018, just as Trump and his team were gearing up for the 2020 election by seeking to ally themselves with pro-Kremlin Ukrainians promising manufactured dirt on the man Trump believed would be his November opponent: Joe Biden.
{Note: All of this is covered in exhaustive detail in the nearly 600-page nonfiction book Proof of Corruption, published by Macmillan in 2020, so I won’t unpack it further here.}
It was in 2018 that, according to the New York Times, Ginni Thomas conspired with one of the most prominent members of Groundswell, Barbara Ledeen, to formulate a conclusive “enemies list” for Trump to use in targeting opponents outside (but even more so, inside) the federal government. Ledeen is married to Michael Ledeen, the co-author of Michael Flynn’s first book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies(St. Martin’s / Griffin, 2017).
ABOVE: Barbara Ledeen (second from left) in the U.S. Capitol in 2003.]
Flynn—the former highly controversial intel official (at the DIA) and Trump National Security Advisor, a federal indictee, and now an open insurrectionist—is very close to the Ledeens, and has been for years. Indeed, in May of 2021 Proof published the “lost chapter” of Proof of Corruption, entitled “Flynn and the Ledeens”, which detailed how Flynn turned to the Ledeens in 2016 after Trump ordered him to get Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails, even if doing so meant conspiring with or paying Russian criminals. Barbara Ledeen’s work with Flynn on this clandestine project—which continued after it was universally known that the Kremlin was waging cyberwar on the United States and using “cut-outs” to dump data it had stolen from federal officials—underscored her willingness to skirt the line of legality in trying to help Trump win a presidential election (and Flynn’s equal willingness in this regard). Indeed, Ledeen ultimately made contact with individuals she believed to be Russian hackers on the “dark web”, and—despite America being in a cyberwar with Russia—sent materials transmitted to her by these “Russians” to Erik Prince. Ledeen has since posted on Facebook, “We owe a lot to Erik Prince.”
That the wife of a Supreme Court Justice would have any professional contact with someone like Barbara Ledeen, let alone secretly conspire with her to draft a “list” of the sort held by the the corrupt, nearly-impeached U.S. president Richard Nixon—who avoided impeachment only by resigning from office—is stunning. But in fact Ginni Thomas’s work with Ledeen appears to have gone much deeper than even this.
At a time when she was a “close friend” of Ginni Thomas, per the Times—and had worked with Thomas on at least one secretive plot (the “enemies list”) intended to aid Trump—Barbara Ledeen acted as a “messenger” in a national security–implicating plot to blackmail the nation’s sitting National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster. The plot mirrored Kremlin intelligence operations, inasmuch as it intended to use a “honey trap” (an attractive woman tasked with seducing the plot’s intended victim) to gain info from McMaster that could be used to extort him into resigning from one of the top national security positions in the U.S. government. Though the criminal plot, as reported by the Times, was run by “a network of conservative activists…[who had] mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government”—precisely the project Ginni Thomas was then working on with the implicated Barbara Ledeen—Ginni Thomas’s name was never brought into reporting on the scheme. This may be for the simple reason that the scheme was never executed; McMaster resigned his job before the unnamed “network of conservative activists” could run their counterintelligence op on him, so that illegal scheme was never the subject of the sprawling federal criminal investigation that would undoubtedly have turned up everyone who was involved in it.
Anyone inclined to think Ginni Thomas was unaware of what “close friend” Barbara Ledeen was doing—as part of a broader gambit (regarding Trump’s enemies) Thomas is now confirmed to have been involved in with Ledeen—would be hard-pressed to maintain that view in light of a second “undercover operation” the Times uncovered, this one also of dubious legality and spearheaded by a Ginni Thomas associate: James O’Keefe. Per the New Yorker, this plot “targeted government employees, including F.B.I. agents, suspected of trying to thwart Trump’s agenda.” The magazine notes that Thomas had given O’Keefe an “Impact Award,” just as she had Mark Meadows.
The Times report notes that the O’Keefe operation was styled as an intelligence plot—a “sting operation” involving “secret surveillance” and “undercover operatives”—which means it mirrors the “warlike” intelligence ops run by the Groundswell group (to which O’Keefe was tied via his association with Ginni Thomas, its chairwoman). Indeed, in a seeming echo of Thomas’s own political obsessions, this second scheme targeted, the Times reports, individuals who likely were on the Thomas-Ledeen-built “enemies list,” as it betrayed the “obsession some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy ‘deep state’ trying to blunt his agenda.” There could be no more precise recitation of O’Keefe associate Ginni Thomas’s own post-2016 political obsession.
Anyone who doubts whether it is appropriate to call these operations run by people so close to Ginni Thomas “intelligence” operations must read the New York Times article in full, as it explains (emphasis supplied) that
[c]entral to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.
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Last year, The New York Times reported that Mr. Seddon ran an expansive effort to gain access to the unions and campaigns and led a hiring effort that nearly tripled the number of the group’s operatives, according to interviews and deposition testimony. He trained operatives at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming.
So how high up did these Ledeen- and O’Keefe-involved intelligence operations go? The Times reports that “Ledeen…said she was brought on by someone ‘with access to McMaster’s calendar’”—a telling detail, given the grave national security implications of the minute-by-minute whereabouts of one of the nation’s foremost intelligence officials. The fact that Ledeen has been unwilling to name any of the others who were involved in the plot she participated in raises the real possibility that a top adviser to Trump who ran one of the foremost civilian intelligence-gathering ops in D.C., Ginni Thomas, would have been revealed as at least one of the individuals with knowledge of the operation.
Lest this seem mere inflammatory speculation, consider what the New York Times has to say on who recruited Ledeen to the McMaster operation, as well as Ledeen’s clear unwillingness to reveal that person’s name: “Who initially ordered the operation is unclear. In an interview, Ledeen said ‘someone she trusted’ contacted her to help with the plan. She said she could not remember who.” Ledeen added that her role in the events reported on by the Times was to “pass[ ] [a] message to a man she believed to be a Project Veritas operative during a meeting at the University Club in Washington” (a place it appears Ginni Thomas has frequented).
What sort of meeting in D.C. was it that Ledeen both (a) refused to identify, and (b) saw then–congressional staffers meeting with far-right activists to share intelligence? It’s certainly possible that other groups besides Groundswell answered to this description in 2018, but Ledeen’s involvement in that group, her “close” friendship with its chairwoman, her unwillingness to speak about the provenance of the meeting, and the known activities of Groundswell all suggest that Ginni Thomas’s operation may well have been the original epicenter of the McMaster sting. Much more investigation would be required to confirm this, of course, but it is noteworthy that—consistent with the caution that Ledeen’s Groundswell group displayed in revealing the names of anyone who attended its meetings—Ledeen claimed to the Times (rather improbably) that not only could she not remember who had passed her intelligence about McMaster’s schedule, but that the person she gave that intelligence to had used a “fake name”, so there was no point in repeating it. Would a Project Veritas employee really have used a fake name at a private gathering with friendly congressional staffers like Ledeen? One would be hard-pressed to see why—or, for that matter, why Project Veritas’s founder would’ve been working closely with Groundswell’s longtime chairwoman in 2018 and 2019 but for some reason eschewed her intelligence-gathering operations in 2018—but these too remains unsolved mysteries that no one appears to be looking into at the moment.
We do, however, have some indications about the role Ginni Thomas may have played in the McMaster operation.
In early 2020, the perpetually arch Wonkette attributed McMaster’s ouster to Ginni Thomas and Groundswell, writing that “After Groundswell’s early success [in] getting rid of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster….[Ginni] Thomas scored a meeting with the president in January 2019, where he ‘listen[ed] quietly as members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.’” Salon issued a similar verdict, reporting that Groundswell “led a successful effort to oust former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who [had] replaced [Michael] Flynn.” The unstated implication to be taken from these and other similar reports, in view of reporting on the Project Veritas sting operation against McMaster, is that the operation allegedly intended by Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was “Plan B” to a more conventional lobbying/disinformation action by Thomas and Groundswell.
Additional evidence in this regard comes from reporting by Axios, which dates the beginning of the formalized Ginni Thomas-Barbara Ledeen “hit list” to approximately the middle of 2018, only a matter of weeks after McMaster’s April 9, 2018 resignation (and a matter of days after the last known email regarding the McMaster plot, which the Times reports was inexplicably still a going concern in May, well after its target had left the Trump administration). Times reporting indicates that at that time Ginni Thomas associate James O’Keefe was just beginning what he publicly claimed would be a “series” of undercover operations against “deep state” figures; the list Thomas and Ledeen were then compiling certainly included prime candidates for a project of that sort, and therefore represents a temporal nexus between the two efforts. Just so, Ginni Thomas’s “Crowdsourcers” partnership with O’Keefe reportedly unfolded at some point between mid-2018 and the end of 2019, meaning that it likewise coincided with the “series” of undercover operations against Trump enemies O’Keefe promised.
So was Groundswell’s success in pushing out McMaster one of the inspirations for Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen formalizing their partnership—or even expanding it into new partnerships with associated parties like Project Veritas? Describing the enemies list Groundswell’s leader began producing in 2018, Axios reports (emphasis supplied) that
[b]y the time President Trump instructed [John McEntee], his 29-year-old former body man and new head of presidential personnel to rid his government of anti-Trump officials [in February of 2020], he’d [already] gathered reams of material to support his suspicions.
While Trump’s distrust has only intensified since his [early 2020] impeachment and acquittal, he has long been on the hunt for “bad people” inside the White House and U.S. government, and fresh “pro-Trump” options. Outside advisers have been happy to oblige.
In reporting this story, I have been briefed on, or reviewed, memos and lists the president received since 2018 suggesting whom he should hire and fire. Most of these details have never been published.
A well-connected network of conservative activists with close ties to Trump and top administration officials is quietly helping develop these “Never Trump”/pro-Trump lists, and some sent memos to Trump to shape his views, per sources with direct knowledge. Members of this network include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.
The big picture: since Trump’s [February 2020] Senate acquittal, aides say the president has crossed a psychological line regarding what he calls the “Deep State.” He feels his government—from Justice to [the] State [Department] to [the] Defense [Department] to [the Department of] Homeland Security—is filled with “snakes.” He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.
This reporting strongly contradicts any notion—pushed exclusively, to this point, by anonymous White House insiders seeking to (for unknown reasons) distance Trump from Ginni Thomas—that Trump saw Thomas as a “wacko” he listened to only out of concern for her husband’s opinion of him. Rather, it suggests that, as the 2020 Trump presidential campaign churned into high gear in February 2020, both Ledeen and Ginni Thomas were deemed critical Trump advisers who could regularly liaison with the White House—in the person of McEntee or with Trump directly—to advance the then-president’s ongoing “war” on the “Deep State.”
It was this war that Trump would frame as being continued in the “protest” he helped orchestrate on January 6, 2021. As he said in his White House Ellipse speech that day, speaking of government employees around the country, “In every single swing state, local officials, state officials…made illegal and unconstitutional changes to election procedures without the mandated approvals by the state legislatures. These changes paved a way for fraud on a scale never seen before. I think we [have to] go a long way outside of our country [to find fraud on this scale].” He called what “they” were doing a matter of “national security”, adding that he’d committed himself—in an imagined second term in office—to “drain[ing] the Washington swamp…[and] clean[ing] up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We’ve done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy? It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there [in Washington].” Not long after Ginni Thomas posted on Facebook her support for the armed mob gathered before Trump at the Ellipse, Trump told that mob that it was an unnamed “group of people” who were then trying to “illegally take over our country.”
All of this may explain why, when major media outlets write about Groundswell even in passing, it is referred to as a “network of conservative activists…[with] close ties to Trump and his senior officials.”
The Fallout From Ginni Thomas’s “Groundswell Purge”
Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen’s influence over Trump’s administration, via John McEntee and direct contact with Trump, had more far-reaching an impact than many realize. By pushing Trump to launch a comprehensive sweep of his administration—which effort the president initiated by first rehiring McEntee (who had previously been let go because he couldn’t pass a national security background check)—Thomas and Ledeen helped usher in a new era of the Trump administration, one that would have profound implications for the post-election period that began in November 2020.
As the New York Times reports, the Groundswell-backed purge led to a “freeze on all political appointments across the government” and a new Trump policy under which “cabinet secretaries [were to be told] that the White House would be choosing their deputies from now on.” This latter policy was be in evidence just nine months later, when Trump installed two young and ill-prepared—but unwaveringly loyal—political operatives, Kash Pateland Ezra Cohen-Watnick, as top deputies inside the Pentagon.
Patel thus became the chief of staff for new Secretary of Defense Chris Miller—who wasn’t permitted to choose his own top aide—with Cohen-Watnick becoming Miller’s acting undersecretary for intelligence and security. Both men were in their roles by January 6, when the Pentagon inexplicably failed to relieve the Capitol for nearly four hours, doing so only after the building had already been cleared of the insurrectionists who had intended to occupy it. It is reasonable to ask, now, whether Patel and Cohen-Watnick would have been in a position to influence the conduct of the United States military on January 6 if Ginni Thomas had not led a clandestine effort to ensure that only unflinchingly loyal Trump acolytes were serving under Trump cabinet members.
As CNN reported at the outset of McEntee’s purge, which extended through Election Day and encompassed the installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon,
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Trump has told aides he wants fewer people working for him in the White House and only loyalists installed in key administration positions, several people familiar with the matter say. Trump’s allies have provided him lists—not always solicited—of people they’ve identified as disloyal and of names they say would work better toward advancing his agenda. The lists have been generated over the past three years, but some are being dusted off in the post-impeachment purge.
….
[A]fter hearing for three years from acquaintances and confidants about various people deemed disloyal, [Trump’s] efforts seem to have newfound urgency. Trump told people recently he wants to take action on removing some people who he’s been “warned about,” according to one person who’s spoken to him. Some of the conservative activists who have been working on the effort to compose the lists include Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen.
(Emphasis supplied.)
Most tellingly, however—with respect to the connection between the Groundswell-pushed purge and the Patel and Cohen-Watnick appointments—is this reporting from CNN: “McEntee indicated he plans to first focus his efforts on personnel at the State Department and Defense Department.” As Proof has reported, at the very moment Patel and Cohen-Watnick were dithering at the Pentagon on January 6, a militant associated with Donald Trump’s legal team, Joe Oltmann, was in the State Department lobbying loyalist Trump political appointees to seize voting machines.
It may not be too much to say, therefore, that the insurrectionist government Trump headed on January 6—“insurrectionist” as to its leadership cadre—was one that had been orchestrated by Ginni Thomas over a years-long lobbying effort that involved multiple meetings with President Trump himself. Indeed, in a February 2020 NPR interview, Axios reporter Jonathan Swan indicated that Trump had been an active partner of Thomas’s, rather than merely a passive recipient of her work product. According to Swan, who had by then reviewed never-before-seen administration documents to compile his report, “Over the last 18 months [a period of time ranging from the first Thomas-Ledeen ‘enemies list’ to the hiring of McEntee], the president has been asking for names of people within his government who are disloyal, who are, quote-unquote, ‘Never Trump’ or anti-Trump, or, quote-unquote, ‘the bad people.’
He’s told aides that he feels that there are ‘snakes everywhere,’ quote-unquote” (emphasis supplied). Swan added that Trump was specifically targeting DOJ, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security, but “also…the White House. He has a network outside the White House, which is comprised of very well-connected conservative activists. One of them in particular is Ginni Thomas, who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.” Axios even explained that it was a Groundswell memorandum that had first aimed its sights at the then-head of the Presidential Personnel Office, Sean Doocey, whose eventual ouster led to his replacement with none other than John McEntee.
In other words, it now appears that Ginni Thomas didn’t just want to direct Trump’s government-wide purge from outside the government, she wanted to influence who would execute the purge from inside the government. And she was successful in these clandestine efforts.
Swan summarizes his early 2020 findings—issued well under a year before the attack on the Capitol—by observing that “Ginni Thomas has put an extraordinary amount of energy and time into a project of shaping the president’s thinking on the staffing of his government.” Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, one of the most highly respected Court-watchers in U.S. media, would go even farther the following day, writing that Ginni Thomas “is paid to staff up the Trump administration with [her] friends and cronies, even as her husband [Justice Clarence Thomas] sits on cases that involve [Trump] and the agencies she seeks to reshape.”
{Note: As Proof has reported, in addition to the now-infamous Trump plot to install Jeffrey Clark as Attorney General, Oltmann’s lobbying of Trump loyalists in the State Department, and Trump’s installation of Patel and Cohen-Watnick at the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security was critical to the insurrectionbecause Trump’s legal team had tasked Christina Bobb—a former DHS employee—with lobbying her former boss to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And so it was that every Trump administration unit targeted by Ginni Thomas for purging, from DOJ to DHS, became part of the administration’s coup plot.}:
Barbara Ledeen and January 6
At the time Barbara Ledeen was involved in the plot against the nation’s National Security Adviser, she was—incredibly—also a federal employee herself. Specifically, she was a staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was then led by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Reports indicate that though Ledeem served the Committee generally, she was deemed to be a staffer for Senator Grassley in particular.
Given that Ginni Thomas’s lobbying of President Trump focused on appointments, and that Ledeen was a regular collaborator with Thomas on secretive Groundswell projects, it is deeply concerning to learn that Ledeen was in the “judicial nominations unit” of Grassley’s office up until 2019, whereafter she continued this work (for the same Senate committee) under Trump golfing partner Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
{Note: Just prior to January 6, Ledeen returned to service with Grassley. More on this below.}
One reason Proof calls this coincidence concerning is because when Donald Trump rushed Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination to a vote virtually on the eve of the November 2020 presidential election, he did so, and openly, with an eye toward cases that might come before that Court in the near term—including post-election cases addressing an issue Trump had had with the conduct of the election since before Election Day: mail-in ballots.
None of these interrelationships and power dynamics would matter much to a probe of the January 6 insurrection were it not the case that the recent article on Chuck Grassley at Proof was continually forced to refer to anonymous persons in the Senate office of Chuck Grassleymaking critical decisions about how to respond to reports Grassley may have been involved in the January 6 coup plot in some way. Proof was forced into this position because only the official spokesman to Grassley, Taylor Foy, would speak to the press for attribution on this issue. Other Grassley staffers refused to speak for attribution, even as they repeatedly made claims to the media that turned out to be untrue.
So who was one of the leading staffers in Chuck Grassley’s office in September 2021, when he faced his toughest questioning yet over his actions on Insurrection Eve?
Barbara Ledeen.
Chuck Grassley and Barbara Ledeen: Two Experienced Republican Operatives with a Very Long History
The questions Grassley faced last September focused on one issue in particular: what did his staffers or others tell him about Trump’s coup scheme prior to January 6? What did he know about the plot, and from whom did he hear it, and when? But a second question—one raised by Grassley staffers’ unproven, self-aggrandizing claims that in September 2021 they had sifted through Grassley’s January 2021 correspondence and found no evidence of wrongdoing—was this one: why would reporters take Grassley’s staffers’ word on this point, when some of the people doing the searching may well have been the same operatives who initially briefed Grassley on Trump’s coup plans?
There is, of course, a necessary (and a far more specific) third question, as well: what role did Barbara Ledeen play in either briefing of Grassley prior to Insurrection Day—during which time she was a staffer for Lindsey Graham but still working for the Senate Judiciary Committee (on which Grassley was the senior Republican)—or in aiding Grassley’s ultimately self-exculpating September 2021 search of his files for potentially incriminating documents?
In answering these three questions, it’s important to first understand that the “purge” project Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen were leading from outside the White House was being led inside the White House, per reporting from CNN, by top Trump adviser Peter Navarro. Navarro was also one of the authors, with Trump attorney John Eastman, of the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot that in September 2021 Grassley’s staff—including Ledeen—assured the press Grassley knew nothing about.
With this denial, the suggestion must be, therefore, that either Peter Navarro kept from Ledeen his ambitions for January 6 despite them being the central players (with Ginni Thomas) in a massive, government-wide pro-Trump project to eliminate non-loyalists from Trump’s inner circle, or that Ledeen was briefed by Navarro or Eastman about the “Green Bay Sweep” but decided to hide that information from her boss in the United States Senate. Worth noting here, too, is that only two people (out of more than two dozen) who appear to have attended theTrump International Hotel war room on Insurrection Eve felt the need to lie about that attendance and maintain that lie over time: (1) Peter Navarro, and (2) Barbara Ledeen’s close friend, Michael Flynn. While this could be mere coincidence, it could also indicate that two insurrectionists in Ledeen’s orbit fear with great particularity any inquiry into what they were doing on the day Chuck Grassley attempted to remove Vice President Mike Pence from the January 6 equation.
{Note: In identifying these connections, Ginni Thomas’s orbit cannot be forgotten, either. Thomas appears to have been essential in pushing Mark Meadows into Trump’s inner circle, and it is Mark Meadows who, the New York Times reports, led a “band of loyalists…[who] fought to keep Trump in power….[by] taking on an outsize role in pressuring the Justice Department [over the election results], amplifying conspiracy theories and flooding the courts in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.” Trump’s man at DOJ, Jeffrey Clark, has already asserted the Fifth Amendment to protect himself from self-incrimination, as has Eastman, who sent his coup outline to Meadows. So in considering how ignorant Ledeen would have to have been of a plot advanced by those in her orbit, we must also consider how ignorant Thomas would have to have been of a plot likewise advanced by those in her orbit.}
For his part, Grassley has vacillated on his own degree of knowledge of the coup plot.
As Proof has reported, when Grassley was pressured, in September 2021, on whether Trumpist partisans “approached” him with the Eastman-Navarro coup plot prior to his declaration that he would be in charge of the January 6 joint session—a claim made in the 2021 book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa—Grassley’s hedging could only be described as epic. “I [was not] ‘approached’ in the situation as you described it”, he replied cagily (emphasis supplied). By leaving the door open, indeed wide open, to the implication that he had been approached about the coup plot in some way other than the precise one Woodward and Costa had detailed, Grassley allowed the implication that he might have been briefed on the plot by either his own staffers (many of whom were connected to Barbara Ledeen via the Senate Judiciary Committee), Judiciary Committee staffers like Ledeen herself, or outside agitators like Thomas. Grassley’s denial of the reporting in Peril appeared to cover only an approach from Trump’s legal team (e.g., Eastman) or administration advisers (e.g., Navarro). All of which only heightens the scrutiny on those Eastman or Navarro might’ve thought to use as interlocutors with Grassley—a list of people that undoubtedly has Thomas and Ledeen at its top.
Recall, now, that in the days leading up to Grassley’s astonishing declaration that Pence would not be at the Capitol on January 6, Ginni Thomas was in contact with John Eastman—her husband’s former law clerk—via the Thomas Clerk World listserv.
In short, if, as Grassley implies, he caught wind of Trump’s coup plot before he took a public action that clearly aimed to advance it, there are no more obvious suspects in the matter of who briefed him on that plot than Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas—which makes it astonishing that thus far it seems neither have been interviewed by the House January 6 Committee. That public records appear to indicate that Grassley rehired Ledeen on January 3, 2021—the day the post-election Congress was sworn in—underscores that he would have been in contact with her in the days leading up to his Insurrection Eve gambit, and also that it was during this period of time that Ledeen would have been in the position of wanting and needing to underscore to Grassley her utility to his staff. Her ready access to Trump’s inner circle, and intelligence regarding its January 6 designs, would surely have been one of her primary chits in this regard.
As indicated above, Ledeen has a very long history of being interested—much like Ginni Thomas is—in clandestine intelligence-gathering, and in the dissemination of such intelligence. That she would have wanted to pass on Eastman and Navarro’s plans to her new (or, rather, both former and “new”) boss Grassley cannot be doubted, if in fact she had access to those plans. Consider the sort of schemes we have seen from Barbara Ledeen in the past:
ABOVE: Just one example of Barbara Ledeen seeking to position herself as an intelligence intermediary between individuals in positions of power and influence.]
On the other end of Ledeen’s second stint as a Grassley staffer, it must be noted that, as the New York Times has reported, Ledeen “retired” from her position with Grassley almost immediately after Grassley’s staff was forced to answer questions about which of them, if any, had briefed the senator about Trump’s coup plot. Given that Ledeen’s first employment with Grassley lasted for seven years, the fact that her second was cut short after only a matter of months is certainly worthy of some additional investigation.
Telling, as well, is Michael Flynn’s confession to federal investigators that Ledeen acted as a “conduit” between Trump and the late Peter W. Smith in the plot to buy stolen documents from Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign. This mirrors Ledeen’s claim of being a “messenger” in the scheme to blackmail Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster. So it is that when, two days after hiring Ledeen, Grassley seemed to quote from the Eastman Memo (see below) only to later be cagey about who had acted as a conduit or messenger to him from Eastman’s ring of coup plotters, it would be understandable if the suspicion of federal criminal investigators were to fall on a repeat interlocutor in several criminal schemes: Barbara Ledeen. This is especially so given that Ledeen’s closest political associate, Ginni Thomas, was in contact with Eastman during the period he was drafting his now-infamous memo.
ABOVE: Step 1 in the Eastman coup plot noted the advantage of having Grassley replace Pence as overseer of the January 6 joint session. Grassley thereafter unilaterally announced that he would indeed take on this role.]
There is, too, the broader context of Ledeen’s career—and her husband’s—to consider.
Much as this publication has often said of Trump lawyer Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, Esquire reports that “there scarcely has been a Republican presidential scandal in the past 40 years that Michael Ledeen hasn’t had a hand in.” The same might be said, in the Trump era, of the Ledeens’ good friend Michael Flynn, or the originator of the Stop the Steal “movement,” longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone. It is Stone who, of all the political operators in Washington, is most associated with the word ratfucking (popularly defined as “political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections”). In writing of the Ledeens, Esquire notes that “Michael Ledeen’s family has made ratf[u]cking a generational enterprise.”
Statements from Grassley spokesman Taylor Foy have only further confused the issue.
As reported by a popular Iowa politics website, which was itself working off research done by celebrated independent investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler, the origin of Grassley’s knowledge of the coup plot (below referred to as “the PowerPoint”) seems to have remained deliberately murky even through December of 2021:
Foy’s hair-splitting is telling in too many ways to count. But here are a few indications that this topic is one Chuck Grassley’s office feels a need to dissemble in addressing:
While Grassley may not have chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from early January 2019 to early January 2021, he was on it, and Ledeen was working for its chairman (Senator Graham) as a means of serving the entire committee—so yes, Ledeen was doing work for Grassley “in the [two] years leading up to January 6.”
Prior to working for Grassley indirectly from 2019 to 2021, Ledeen worked for Grassley directly from 2012 to 2019, making Foy’s attempt to suggest that Sen. Grassley was at a distance from Ledeen disingenuous at best.
Grassley did, in fact, rehire Ledeen 72 hours before the insurrection, so Foy clarifying that Ledeen wasn’t rehired to be part of Grassley’s Judiciary Committee staff—but rather was serving him in some other capacity—goes beyond mere disingenuity, as Foy seeks here to leave the impression that Ledeen wasn’t working for Grassley at all during Insurrection Week. In fact, she was.
That Ledeen’s retirement from the Senate came under circumstances worthy of additional investigation is underscored by Foy’s use of that retirement as a sort of rhetorical “get-out-of-jail-free” card in dealing with reporters. Despite the fact that Ledeen leaving the Senate in precipitous fashion makes the incident more rather than less worthy of investigation, Foy attempts to fashion it as a means for Grassley and his team to avoid significant questions about her.
Given that Foy worked alongside Ledeen for a very long time, his efforts to put distance between himself and her border on the comical: “you’d have to ask her”; “I don’t have her contact information”; “I can’t speak to her [knowledge].” In fact, not only would Foy almost certainly have her contact information (given that she only just recently left Grassley’s office), but he should be able to tell media whether Ledeen exhibited any awareness of “the PowerPoint” during the three quarters of a year—at a minimum—that he worked alongside her in Senator Grassley’s employ.
But Foy’s most telling evasion, bordering on pure deceit, is his last one: “She didn’t work for Senator Grassley at the time.” Foy here takes advantage of the fact that Woodward and Costa’s reporting about the Eastman plot covered a several-week period of time, from mid-December 2020 through Insurrection Day. Ledeen did work for Grassley during part of that time, but not for all of it, which Foy here exploits to imply that she didn’t work for Grassley for any of it.
Conclusion
As a former federal criminal investigator, I was trained to consider the relationships between all parties to a given event, the histories of all parties to an event, and the motives that these histories and relationships may disclose. I’m trained to deem past conduct a possible precedent for future conduct; lies as illuminating as truths; and the opportunity for a malfeasor to misbehave as the obvious and necessary precursor to a finding that they did. With all this in mind, and on all of these grounds, there is simply no doubt that Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen are presently the foremost (if not the only) suspects in the matter of who transmitted to key members of Congress the coup plot John Eastman and Peter Navarro had devised with Donald Trump’s knowledge.
Incredibly, the other chief suspects in this are all connected to Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen by various means: Ali Alexander, a participant in Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell group; Erik Prince, the man who helped train Project Veritas (run by Thomas’s partner James O’Keefe) in intelligence-gathering; Michael Ledeen, Barbara Ledeen’s politically well-connected husband, who has been involved in scandals in every Republican administration since Nixon’s; Michael Flynn, a close friend of the Ledeens, and Michael Ledeen’s co-author;
Mark Meadows, whose Trumpist career was advanced in aggressive terms by Ginni Thomas, in part (but only part) by the awarding of an laurel Thomas devised to celebrate and advertise her favored political instruments; Cleta Mitchell, another participant in Groundswell, and one who also participated directly in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election; John Eastman and Peter Navarro themselves, the former of whom was in contact with Ginni Thomas in the weeks and months before the attack on the Capitol and the latter of whom spearheaded a “purge” effort inside the White House that was masterminded by Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen outside of it; Presidential Personnel Office director and former Trump “body man” John McEntee, who assumed a position for which he was entirely unqualified because of a clandestine disinformation campaign against his predecessor Sean Doocey by—you guessed it—Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen;
Steve Bannon, whose media operation was hopelessly entwined with Thomas and Groundswell and who was himself a privileged guest of Thomas’s secretive group on at least one occasion; and Donald Trump, who met with Thomas on a number of occasions to discuss the very topic at issue here: locating and positioning loyalists in government who would do anything Trump demanded of them. A small number of other tangential figures, like Jeffrey Clark at DOJ, would not have been key liaisons themselves, but were nevertheless somehow located and selected via a murky process run by Trump partisans; Thomas and Ledeen had spent years plucking men like Clark from obscurity for the sake of getting them to do Trump’s bidding, and in the search for those who recruited Clark to participate in a coup plot in December 2020, Thomas and Ledeen would likewise be the prime suspects for any federal criminal investigator.
In short, as the House January 6 Committee seeks to connect three spheres of coup plotting—grassroots activists and political insiders, Congress, and the White House—there is no map of the key players within these spheres in January 2021 that does not have both Ginni Thomas and Barbara Ledeen at or near the center of it. The House January 6 Committee would be wise to subpoena these two women immediately in order to find out what they know as soon as possible. Proof is confident that if such a subpoena is issued, one or both women will take the same tack that their associates already have, either by asserting the Fifth Amendment (like Eastman and Clark), defying their subpoenas (like Meadows and Bannon), fighting document production vociferously (like Flynn and Trump), issuing statements filled with half-truths (like Foy and Navarro), or testifying under circumstances that suggest perjury (Alexander).
It is deeply regrettable that Ginni Thomas’s association with Turning Point USA as an advisory board member led to a false rumor that she directly aided that organization’s leader, Charlie Kirk, in organizing buses to transport Trump voters to Washington on January 6. While Thomas’s indirect involvement at both ends of Kirk’s operation—on the front end she advised it, and on the back end the Turning Point buses were aimed at aiding the efforts of Alexander, a previous participant in her Groundswell group—the fact that Ginni Thomas was not working the phones ordering up buses (a task well below her pay-grade) obscured the fact that she appears to have been involved in January 6 in more complex and troubling ways. It is little wonder that after cheering on the events of January 6 on the morning of Insurrection Day, she thereafter did the bare minimum to justify her conduct, adding a non-apologetic note to her Facebook page before making it invisible to the public, and then sending a private apology to a private listserv regarding private missives none of us have ever seen. There remains no sense that Thomas regrets her role in January 6 or is even willing to speak about it.
All of the foregoing puts in an entirely new light Ginni Thomas’s husband—who, we are assured from those who know them both, she directly lobbies on matters before the Supreme Court—being the only member of the Supreme Court to rule that Donald Trump should be able to keep secret documents related to his contacts with advisers in the run-up to January 6. That Ginni Thomas appears to have been one of Trump’s key advisers in 2019 and 2020, and that during this period she was working hand-in-glove with one of the most notorious election-year “ratfuckers” in the Republican Party, raises the question of whether Clarence Thomas had reason to apprehend (either under his own steam or at his wife’s urging) that Ginni Thomas or her closest associates might well be implicated in January 6 plotting if all of Trump’s presidential records are disclosed to Congress. Unless we assume that Ginni Thomas hid from her husband the nature of her contacts with Trump and her work on Trump’s behalf—which would be impossible, given that Clarence Thomas was present at intimate gatherings with his wife and the former president; it is also not, according to friends of the Thomases, how their marriage has been structured for many decades now—Justice Thomas was aware of his wife’s proximity to coup plotters like John Eastman when the issue of Trump’s records being released to Congress came before the Court.
While the Supreme Court ruling releasing Trump’s records to Congress was an 8-1 decision—meaning that Thomas’s dissent was ultimately immaterial as a practical matter—in the months and years to come other issues touching upon Donald Trump’s ongoing insurrection will come before the Court. One or indeed many more than one may end up as 5-4 decisions favoring the protection of Trump’s borderline seditious conduct. These majority rulings will depend upon the vote of a man who is surely well aware of what his wife did or did not know about the January 6 coup plot in advance.
If House members do not determine what Ginni Thomas knew between now and the presumed Republican takeover of Congress in January 2023, it will be impossible for the case to be made that Clarence Thomas cannot sit on any Supreme Court case that involves Trump or the January 6 insurrection now or in the future. That is how urgent the immediate issuance of federal subpoenas to Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas is.