war game plan scenario

===

ripoff mirror of bipartisan Transition Integrity Project's (TIP) exercise on "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,"

ginni?

Eastman claremonster in OG

===

ginni j6 depo says she knew about war game and all evil dems wd do?! says did not see 79 report

===

an july 24

Election law expert and Democracy Docket publisher Marc Elias has been warning that if President Joe Biden or another Democratic candidate wins the 2024 election, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and his allies will do everything they can to overturn the election results — only they will be better equipped this year than in 2020.

Now, the Heritage Foundation is claiming, without evidence, that Democrats are planning to steal the election.

The Washington Post's Isaac Arnsdorf reports that Heritage made that claim during a "war game" presentation at their headquarters on Thursday, July 11.

"Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas, Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility, the FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election — these were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased on Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation," Arnsdorf explains. "The presentation, delivered at the Foundation's Washington headquarters, stated as a given that the Biden Administration was already engaged in a sweeping conspiracy to use multiple forms of federal power to influence the presidential election. It did not supply any evidence."

Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage's Oversight Project, claimed, "As things stand right now, there's a zero percent chance of a free and fair election. I'm formally accusing the Biden Administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election."

Arnsdorf notes that the July 11 simulation, billed as the "2024 Transition Integrity Project," is "technically independent of the Heritage Foundation but included multiple Heritage employees."

Heritage has recently been drawing a great deal of scrutiny over Project 2025, its 900-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. The proposals range from severe abortion restrictions to giving the U.S. federal government's executive branch considerably more power, and Project 2025 is so controversial that even Trump himself is trying to distance himself from it.

READ MORE:['Toxic': Experts mock Trump’s sudden and strident Project 2025 denial

Kevin Roberts, the far-right Chrisitan nationalist who heads the Heritage Foundation, is also being criticized for some recent remarks that his detractors say were promoting violence.

During an appearance on Real America's Voice, Roberts said, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

In response, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch argued, on X (formerly Twitter), "The author of Project 2025 is calling for revolution and suggesting bloodshed if liberals dare oppose them."

Conservative/libertarian former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Virginia) warned, "Kevin Roberts is threatening violence to anyone not following his dear leader. Every network should cover this. All of this happening while Dems whinge and play new candidate lotto."

*Read the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

ref wapo no lnx

Trump allies at Heritage declare 2024 election illegitimate in advance

A “war game” presented at the right-wing foundation imagined far-fetched scenarios for election interference to justify preemptive measures.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, speaks with members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus during a news conference on Capitol Hill in September. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Isaac Arnsdorf

:{July 11, 2024

Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas. Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility. The FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election.

These were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The presentation, delivered at the foundation’s Washington headquarters, stated as a given that the Biden administration was already engaged in a sweeping conspiracy to use multiple forms of federal power to influence the presidential election. It did not supply any evidence.

“As things stand right now, there’s a zero percent chance of a free and fair election,” said Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project. “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”

The report said a key finding was that the sitting president is the greatest danger to the peaceful transition of power, with no mention of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss. Instead it offered that conclusion as justification for doubting the outcome of the 2024 election and trying to reject anything other than a Trump victory. Trump himself has repeatedly declined to say he will accept the results or rule out a violent response. He has told his supporters that he can only lose through cheating.

Howell said the exercise would lead Heritage to file more litigation over election procedures. He also said it should help the public resist “psychological operations” that he claimed were used in 2020 and are being used again. He didn’t say who supposedly ran the operations.

“The upshot is that we will see a contested election the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Adam Ellwanger, a rhetoric professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who helped lead the simulation. “If we see the kind of manipulations that we saw in 2020, I wonder if average Americans who are supporters of the president [Trump] will swallow that so easily as they did in 2020.”

The simulation, known as the “2024 Transition Integrity Project,” is technically independent of the Heritage Foundation but included multiple Heritage employees. The full list of participants was withheld, which Howell said was for their safety. Another participant present Thursday was Josh Findlay, who was until recently the Republican National Committee’s director of election integrity operations. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts spoke at the end of the event.

The Heritage Foundation, a longtime bastion of conservative orthodoxy that has more recently reinvented itself for the Trump era, has become a lightning rod in the campaign because of its role in convening “Project 2025.” That project published detailed policy proposals for every federal agency, ready for the next Republican administration to implement. Some of the most controversial ideas including banning abortion medication, facilitating White House involvement in law enforcement and rolling back legal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans.

As some of those proposals have garnered scrutiny, Trump and his campaign have repeatedly distanced themselves from the effort. Many of the proposals were written by alumni of his administration and are likely to be appointees if he wins another term.

The Republican National Committee has its own election integrity operations, including litigation.

Attendees on Thursday walked past a mobile billboard criticizing Trump and Project 2025, which the Democratic National Committee positioned outside Heritage’s headquarters. Biden campaign spokesman James Singer called Thursday’s presentation “nothing more than an attempt to justify their efforts to suppress the vote, undermine the election, and ultimately another January 6.”

Howell said the election threats project was devised in response to a 2020 bipartisan group of academics, former officials, journalists and others that tried to anticipate and prepare for ways that then-President Trump might try to disrupt the election or the peaceful transfer of power. Their report raised concerns about violence but did not imagine the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol that temporarily disrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

Both that effort and the 2024 project used tabletop exercises, also known as “war games,” that assign participants various roles to simulate how they might interact. In the 2024 project at Heritage, President Biden was played by former senator Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.). Those war games included contemplating surprise emergencies such as the Streisand kidnapping. (In the war game, she was rescued the next day.)

Howell accused the Biden administration of a “coordinated invasion over our southern border for the purposes of impacting this election.” As evidence, he said a camera crew went door to door in an apartment complex outside Charlotte, asking people whether they were noncitizens registered to vote, with 10 percent responding yes. Howell said his team did not verify those registrations. Noncitizen voting is extremely rare.

One scenario in the war games involved people flooding the FBI with reports of civil rights violations as a staged provocation for the Justice Department to take over local election authorities. Howell and Ellwanger objected to those observers using a version of arguments that have been consistently made against civil rights legislation since the Civil War.

“To put it simply, the federal government should have a very limited role in our election systems. They should be left to the states to decide,” he said.

===

Finally, riffing off the above mention in the Washington Spectator excerpt of “private intelligence services,” I wish to call attention to a suspicious tidbit from the Oversight Project of the Heritage Foundation. Ostensibly this group exists to serve as a watchdog on governmental functioning, something every non-profit in DC smart enough to file a Freedom of Information Request should do.

But the Oversight Project is doing more than collecting, analyzing, and distributing information.

Esquire columnist Charles P Pierce:

It has long been plain that the folks at the Heritage Foundation want their Project 2025 agenda and will do pretty much anything, fair and foul, to enact it. They, and their various intellectual chop shops, are the American franchise of a worldwide movement to create corporate autocracy and political authoritarianism that has taken different forms all over the world and is only now facing political pushback in places like France and the United Kingdom. But this seems extreme evenfor the claque of budding Silvershirts.
The Oversight Project is Heritage’s legal ratf*cking operation. Now, it seems, it has turned its attention to developing “data” indicating that Thomas Crooks did not act alone in his attempt to assassinate the former president.

Oversight took to social media on July 17to claim they had tracked Trump shooter Thomas Cooks’ movements for an entire year prior to the assassination attempt.

Via Huffington Post:

“We found the assassin’s connections through our in-depth analysis of mobile ad data to track movements of Crooks and his associates,” the Oversight Project wrote on social media on Monday, explaining that it had identified nine “devices that were located at Crook’s home and his work within the past year.”
The organization suggested that Crooks may have had some connection to the FBI before the shooting, writing: “Someone who regularly visited Crooks home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place. This is in the same vicinity of an @FBI office on June 26, 2023. Who’s device is this?”
The post was catnip for MAGA conspiracy theorists who believe the “deep state” — entrenched bureaucrats in federal agencies and law enforcement — has been trying to sabotage, arrest and now kill Trump.

This sort of data collection would be cross referenced in some manner (evidence?) if the group actually meant to do something besides stir the fire.

***

The spring, the Oversight Project ran academic exercises(The Transition Integrity Report) “to educate the public regarding crises that may arise in relation to the upcoming presidential election in the United States.”

It’s clear from reading this report that the intention was to establish a foundation (legally and propaganda-wise) for challenging the 2024 Presidential election results on behalf of groups ideologically aligned with Donald Trump.

The background section of this report starts with:

TIP 2024 was conceived in January in response to the Biden Administration’s weaponization of government against their domestic opposition and the President’s record of violating norms and constitutional limitations on executive power.

All TIP’s scenarios ended with Donald Trump winning the vote in November. All assumed massive left wing violence in the aftermath of the elections; that leftist forces had compromised security agencies; big tech would actively seek to give Democrats an advantage; and that China would interfere in the election in some way.

The scenarios “suggest that President Biden and his allies—with assistance from a weaponized governmental bureaucracy and loyal proxies in corporate media—are well-equipped to undermine electoral procedures or to challenge results that run counter to their interests.”

Notably, the TIP report doesn’t suggest any violence or voter fraud coming from right wing sources. Other than some lawfare type suggestions, there is no plan offered other than perhaps private individuals calling for protests in support of Trump.

Of course, now that President Biden has withdrawn from the electoral contest, there might be scenarios where Trump doesn’t win, something inconceivable in these exercises.

Last month on the far-right channel Real America’s Voice, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts he was ready to take up arms in the fight against the “radical left.”

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

---

But the Oversight Project is doing more than collecting, analyzing, and distributing information.

Esquire columnist Charles P Pierce:

It has long been plain that the folks at the Heritage Foundation want their Project 2025 agenda and will do pretty much anything, fair and foul, to enact it. They, and their various intellectual chop shops, are the American franchise of a worldwide movement to create corporate autocracy and political authoritarianism that has taken different forms all over the world and is only now facing political pushback in places like France and the United Kingdom. But this seems extreme even for the claque of budding Silvershirts.

The Oversight Project is Heritage’s legal ratf*cking operation. Now, it seems, it has turned its attention to developing “data” indicating that Thomas Crooks did not act alone in his attempt to assassinate the former president.

Oversight took to social media on July 17 to claim they had tracked Trump shooter Thomas Cooks’ movements for an entire year prior to the assassination attempt.

Via Huffington Post:

“We found the assassin’s connections through our in-depth analysis of mobile ad data to track movements of Crooks and his associates,” the Oversight Project wrote on social media on Monday, explaining that it had identified nine “devices that were located at Crook’s home and his work within the past year.”

The organization suggested that Crooks may have had some connection to the FBI before the shooting, writing: “Someone who regularly visited Crooks home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place. This is in the same vicinity of an @FBI office on June 26, 2023. Who’s device is this?”

The post was catnip for MAGA conspiracy theorists who believe the “deep state” — entrenched bureaucrats in federal agencies and law enforcement — has been trying to sabotage, arrest and now kill Trump.

This sort of data collection would be cross referenced in some manner (evidence?) if the group actually meant to do something besides stir the fire.

The spring, the Oversight Project ran academic exercises (The Transition Integrity Report) “to educate the public regarding crises that may arise in relation to the upcoming presidential election in the United States.”

The background section of this report starts with:

TIP 2024 was conceived in January in response to the Biden Administration’s weaponization of government against their domestic opposition and the President’s record of violating norms and constitutional limitations on executive power.

Of course, now that President Biden has withdrawn from the electoral contest, there might be scenarios where Trump doesn’t win, something inconceivable in these exercises.

Last month on the far-right channel Real America’s Voice, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts he was ready to take up arms in the fight against the “radical left.”

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

---

DAGA

NEW EMAILS SHOW REPUBLICAN AGs ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY PLANNED FOR MONTHS

In case you missed it, as part of a report by a Missouri organization called “Take Back Missouri” new emails released via a public records request uncovered alarming planning meetings by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), its policy arm the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), and Republican Attorneys General to attack our country’s democratic institutions.

According to reporting by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, there was a two-day summit in Atlanta, Georgia at the end of September ahead of the 2020 election. The meeting, which occurred in-person, consisted of more than 30 senior staff members from Republican Attorneys General office from across the country, 12 senior staffers attending virtually, and high-ranking staff from RAGA. It was described by former RAGA Executive Director as, “WAR GAMES.”

In the first email to Republican AGs on September 24^th RAGA’s then Executive Director described the summit as, “WAR GAMES – 32 AG Staff Members are huddled in Atlanta for a series of conversations planning for what could come if we lose the White House.”
In the second email to Republican AGs on September 25^th– which noted an increase in attendance – RAGA’s then Executive Director wrote, “Thank you to the 30+ AG Staff members who came the Atlanta and the other 12 who participated virtually. It was a fast paced, productive series of war games, which hopefully will not have to be utilized in November.”

This new information comes as Republican Attorneys General continue to deny that they, their senior staff, or RAGA staff knew about the sponsorship of – and robocalls to promote – the January 6^{th “rally,}” that resulted in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and lives lost. In fact, once again RAGA and RLDF refused to answer questions when pressed by reporters.

What is becoming clear though is the Republican AGs defense of not knowing what RLDF/RAGA was up to regarding the attacks on the election – including the January 6^th rally turned deadly insurrection – is crumbling....

===

Here’s a quick overview of what’s included in this blog post:

August — October: Republican AGs attack voting rights and refuse to protect democratic norms.

November — December: Republican AGs try to overturn the results of the election multiple times.

January: Republican AGs and RAGA’s connection to the Jan 6th deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol exposed.

February: Republican AGs continue pushing the lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Below is a detailed timeline to help illustrate the un-American campaign waged by the Republican Attorneys General and the Republican Attorneys General Association:

AUGUST 2020

Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Harris County (largest county) over their plan to send all voters in the county mail-in ballot applications.

Republican Attorneys General FAIL to take action to protect the U.S. Postal Service after President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy alter mail delivery — with a goal of negatively impacting vote-by-mail.

SEPTEMBER 2020

Republican Attorneys General and the Republican Attorneys General Association FAIL to combat significant disinformation being put forth by President Trump:

Republican Attorneys General and RAGA do not correct President Trump for telling supporters to “vote twice.”

Republican Attorneys General and RAGA do not correct President Trump for attacking the vote-by-mail process.

Republican Attorneys General do not take action to protect voting rights that came under attack in more than 10 states.

Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton files an appeal to block Harris County from sending mail-in ballot applications to voters across the county. Later, indicted Texas AG Ken Paxton asks the Texas Supreme Court to weigh in on the case — hoping they would block millions of people from safely voting during a pandemic.

September 24–25: Republican Attorneys General Association & Rule of Law Defense Fund hold a two day summit in Atlanta to discuss “election integrity.” Now resigned RAGA Executive Director Adam Piper refers to this meetings as “WAR GAMES — 32 AG Staff Members are huddled in Atlanta for a series of conversations planning for what could come if we lose the White House.” This information becomes public as part of a public records request by a Missouri organization [see Page 56]. Read more about this alarming preparation to attack democracy here:

Missouri AG's office had invite to Jan. 5 conference call by group urging Capitol march

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt's office had an invitation to a conference call the day before the deadly…

www.kansascity.com

OCTOBER 2020

In the lead up to the election, Republican Attorneys General Association Executive Director Adam Piper says of Republican AGs, “No group of elected officials have been more supportive of President Trump.” This comes after Trump repeatedly attacks the U.S. electoral system, refused to denounce white supremacy time and time again, and went through an impeachment trial.

===

beware BS

https://www:{.claremont.:(style="background-color:#ff9900ff"):}:org/79daysreport.pdf

...Purportedly aiming to make sense of this fraught election year, in early August, the Transition

Integrity Project (TIP) released a report suggesting that President Donald Trump would not

likely leave office without an unprecedented struggle. The TIP, a self-proclaimed “bipartisan”

group of some 100 people, was entirely composed of those utterly opposed to President Trump.

Their purpose wasn’t so much gaming out plausible post-election scenarios as much as it was to

generate breathless propaganda suggesting that no matter the outcome, President Trump would

refuse to leave the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, Inauguration Day.

:{:{}:

TIP’s effort marks a lost opportunity, one that the Claremont Institute in partnership with the

Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), sought to remedy with their own simulation of election

night and what might be a highly charged and competitive aftermath—a contest after the contest.

For the task, Claremont and TPPF assembled a taskforce of 35 people, and over the course of

seven days, these Constitutional scholars, along with experts in election law, foreign affairs, law

enforcement, and media, made decisions as to how they would react to fast-moving events. The

entire operation was coordinated by a retired military officer experienced in running hundreds of

wargames.}:

:{:{}:

The Claremont-TPPF effort produced a detailed roadmap of the likely challenges at the state

level, how those might be adjudicated in the state and federal court, how domestic unrest and

foreign adventurism might intensify, and, in the unlikely event that the Electoral College cannot

determine a winner, how a President and Vice President could be constitutionally determined.}:

:{:{}:

The team foresees three basic scenarios, one of which was gamed out in detail:}:

:{:{}:

• A clear victory for President Trump, winning 32 states and 322 Electoral College votes,

better than the 304 Trump won in 2016, but, due to the massive use of mail-in ballots,

especially in the five states in which counting cannot commence until Election Day,

victory likely won’t be formally declared until days or weeks after election day as

Trump would only have 248 Electoral votes known for certain.}:

• A clear victory for Vice President Biden, winning 26 states and D.C. for a total of 342

Electoral College votes. Again, because of the six states that cannot count mail-in

ballots until Election Day, even in this scenario, victory won’t be known for certain as

Biden may only have 268 Electoral votes late into election night.

:{:{}:

• An ambiguous result, with several states’ final election results delayed and subject to

intense court fights resulting in a struggle right up to the Jan. 6 joint session of

Congress where the Electors’ ballots are unsealed. Uncertainty could extend even

beyond this as decisions for both the presidency and vice presidency are battled out in

Congress and before the U.S. Supreme Court.}:

:{:{:{It is this last scenario that the team simulated}::{ }::{in detail}::{. The key takeaways from the effort}:

include...}:}:

...Comparing the TIP wargame to the Claremont-TPPF simulation

In August, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) issued a report regarding the “results” of its

“wargame” conducted over the summer. The “wargame” was conducted by about 100 Democrats

and so-called “Never-Trump” Republicans, allowing it to be characterized as “non-partisan.”

TIP’s four scenarios were:

• Ambiguous. The first game investigated a scenario in which the outcome of the election

remained unclear from election night and throughout gameplay. The results from three

states are in contention and ballots are destroyed in one of the states, making it unclear

who should have won that state. Neither campaign is willing to concede.

• Clear Biden Victory. Biden wins both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Trump

alleges fraud and takes steps to benefit himself and his family but ultimately hands the

White House over to Biden.

:{:{}:

• Clear Trump Win. The third scenario started with an Electoral College victory for

President Trump (286 to 252), but a popular vote win (52% to 47%) for former Vice

President Biden. In this scenario Biden refused to concede, convinced the Democratic

governors of two states that Trump won to send separate slates of electors to the Electoral

College, encouraged three states to threaten secession and convinced the House of

Representatives to refuse to certify the election and declare Biden the victor.}:

• Narrow Biden Win. The final scenario explored a narrow Biden win where he leads with

less than 1% of the popular vote and has a slim lead at 278 electoral votes. The Trump

campaign sows chaos but Senate Republicans and the Joint Chiefs of Staff eventually

signal that they accept Biden's win. Trump refuses to leave and is removed by the Secret

Service.

:{:{}:

In response to TIP’s 2020 election wargaming, the Claremont Institute and the Texas Public

Policy Foundation brought together 35 Constitutional, legal, political, foreign affairs, and law

enforcement experts to simulate the post-election period, carrying the contest to the furthest

Constitutional endpoint.}:

:{:{:{}:

The TIP effort appears to have labored under a serious Mirror-Image Fallacy in that it assumed

that Republicans under President Trump would routinely violate the law to win, threaten mass

demonstrations in the streets, seize the assets of political opponents, and start a conflict overseas

to divert attention from the highly-contested post-election period.}:}:

:{:{:{:{}:

In contrast, the Claremont-TPPF simulation featured vigorous use of the courts by both sides,}:

with the Biden team seeking to negate state election law to maximize the counting of late or

flawed mail-in ballots while the Trump team sought to have state election law followed. As with

the TIP wargame, our simulation also featured the Biden team calling protesters to the streets.

The TIP effort hinted at how this might get out of hand, noting on page 9 of their report,

During TIP’s exercises, Team Biden almost always called for and relied on mass

protests... participants in the exercise noted that racial justice activists and others will

likely act independently of the Biden campaign...}:}:

:{:{}:

This is TIP’s candid admission of the high likelihood of Team Biden encouraging street

demonstrations that might spiral out of control. The Claremont-TPPF team simulation also saw

this left-wing street violence as a near-certainty. :{:{Instructively, the TIP organizers urged}:

Democrats to coordinate with the leadership of “recent demonstrations”—presumably, Black

Lives Matter and Antifa—while meeting their demands (Reparations? Defund the Police?),

writing,}:}:

:{:{}:

If anything, the scale of recent demonstrations has increased the stakes for the

Democratic Party to build strong ties with grassroots organizations and be responsive to

the movement’s demands.}:

:{:{}:

Lastly, there are two areas where the TIP team admits they didn’t do a lot of work [legal and ...]}:

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/john-eastman-2020/

The Trump advisor who wrote the infamous pseudo-legal justification for overturning the 2020 election also helped to create a blueprint for what Donald Trump could do to hang onto power by force.

John Eastman joined a couple dozen right-wing operatives in simulating the aftermath of a closely contested election. The report was published in mid-October 2020 and co-sponsored by the Claremont Institute, the think tank where Eastman works.

The authors of the report are clear their simulation had a very serious purpose: to prepare real public officials for real violence in the event of a disputed election. The authors say they fully expected the necessary preparations to crush dissent would be perceived as the run-up to a military coup. But in their view, that couldn't be helped. It was important to come up with legal justifications for overwhelming political violence before the election, they said.

The report is a blueprint for how Donald Trump could fuse federal power, local police and criminal gangs like the Proud Boys to hang onto power. It seems to foreshadow Eastman's plan for a procedural coup on January 6, except projected onto Biden supporters.

The Claremont simulation started from the assumption that left wing violence was a "near-certainty" and that Trump's Defense Department, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security must be prepared to crush Biden supporters in the event of a contested election.

The simulation starts from the following half-baked premise: All the networks call the contest for Biden on Election Night, because he appears to have won Texas, bringing his electoral vote total to 270.

Somehow, all the networks fail to notice that Russia had taken the entire electoral apparatus of Texas offline before all the votes came in. (This wouldn't get past Steve Kornacki, let me tell you.) Texas goes back in the "too close to call" column. Biden is still two electoral votes ahead, but the nation explodes with rioting and arson by "antifa" and Black Lives Matter. Fourteen police officers are shot on election night.

Thus begins Choose Your Own Adventure: Death Squads. There's an elaborate procedural and legal backstory about how an uncertain Election Night metastasizes into a constitutional crisis to be worked out probably by the Supreme Court, but I won't bore you with it because it's obviously a figleaf. This is a manual for state violence.

With the nation in flames, the players have Trump's Department of Defense deploy military personnel carriers to multiple states, which local mayors rudely call "tanks." These pesky mayors aren't cooperating with the Trump administration's desire to clamp down on dissent.

So, their police departments go completely rogue and join forces with the Trump administration. The NYPD seems to have overthrown Bill De Blasio. The Chicago Police Union refuses to protect Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Federal law enforcement with no identifying insignias encircle the White House to defend it with heat rays.The Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers form posses to "assist."

Tellingly, Eastman and his fellow players assume that pro-Biden forces will try to gather at the Capitol on January 6. So they thwart their political adversaries by tracking their phones, setting up police checkpoints and using Trump's Homeland Security fusion centers to identify and detain their leaders. The players protect the Capitol with an army of federal agents, snipers and of course more heat rays. Trump's FBI hunts down more antifa leaders in the DC suburbs.

War games often reveal more about the players than they do about the future, and this exercise is no exception. The report shows that John Eastman and his confederates expected a disputed election would set off a wave of civil unrest that would culminate in the US Capitol on January 6, supported by insurrections at key state houses that same day. The report projected this strategy onto Biden supporters, but that's exactly what Trump confederates did on January 6.

A showdown on January 6 might feel inevitable in retrospect, given the horrific events of that day. But it wasn't an obvious choice. January 6 was the date of the certification of the presidential election, which has historically been a pro-forma affair. Results have already been decided.

The states have certified their election results, the Electoral College already has voted and all that's left to be done is the little ceremony during which the Congress counts the electoral votes. It doesn't make sense to have your last stand to win a contested election after the results are already set in stone, unless you think you can change them.

John Eastman did in fact come up with a crackpot legal excuse for how Mike Pence could throw the election to Trump. His argument was to the law as creationism is to biology, but it was good enough for Trump. We know Trump pressured Pence to act on Eastman's advice. Eastman shared a dais with Trump as well as Rudy Giuliani at the rally immediately before the siege. The crowd was chanting "Hang Mike Pence," because Pence had refused to comply with Eastman's scheme.

Eastman later claimed he wasn't serious about the memo, but the results of this simulation suggests he and fellow right-wingers had sized up the certification of the presidential election as their moment to stage a procedural coup with physical reinforcements waiting.

11 21 an

On January 2, Trump lawyer John Eastman called into Steve Bannon's War Room podcast to explain how to steal the election. Eastman told Bannon that Vice President Mike Pence could still overturn Biden's victory. The interview was part of an extremely public campaign by Trump and his closest allies to lobby Pence to steal the election during the certification ceremony.

One of Eastman's crackpot theories was that the vice president has the unilateral power to accept or reject electoral votes at his whim, or failing that, to somehow "send the election back" to Republican-controlled swing state legislatures that would disregard the will of their people and replace Biden's electors with Trump's.

Eastman was Trump's master of self-serving constitutional bafflegab. His job was to spin elaborate pseudo-legal theories to justify Trump's assault on democracy. It was Eastman who wrote the notorious memos outlining his fanciful legal arguments for why the vice president has the power to unilaterally reelect himself. Eastman also co-wrote a blueprint for how Trump could use the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power after a disputed election. Eastman even spoke at Trump's rally on the Ellipse, making wild allegations of election fraud before Trump set the mob on the Capitol.

To understand January 6, you have to think in terms of an inside game and an outside game. The inside game was to steal the election procedurally. The outside game was to gather a mob to terrorize officials into going along with it. Eastman was a conceptual architect of both the paper coup attempt and of the plan for the political repression that Trumpists expected to follow in the wake of the theft.

READ:A growing threat is emerging from the theocratic wing of the GOP — but many liberals are missing it

It all comes back to the Big Lie of massive Democratic voter fraud in the swing states. Trump used the fantasy of a stolen election to gather his supporters in Washington for a "wild protest" on January 6, whip them into a rage and set them on the Capitol. Eastman used the same lie to justify his schemes to overturn the election procedurally.

In his various memos and public appearances, Eastman presented several paths to overrule the will of the people, but his ultimate justification was always the same: Democratic "fraud" in the swing states invalidated their certified slates of Biden electors.

Therefore, he maintained, Mike Pence was entitled to unilaterally cast aside the electoral votes and count alternate slates of fake electors in their place or discard the votes from those states altogether, denying either candidate the necessary 270 votes and throwing the election to the state delegations in the House.

As Eastman wrote in his second memo, Trump would prevail, "if the Republicans in the State Delegations stand firm." At the time, the GOP caucus was deeply divided over whether to back Trump's paper coup, and Pence was signalling he was not willing to play his assigned role.

READ: ['Whole case is a mess': Internet stunned as judge lets Rittenhouse choose final jurors in raffle system

Hence the need for extra muscle on the outside.

This fits with what another key conspirator has said about his reason for gathering a mob on January 6. "We […] schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting," said Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, regarding his motives. He wanted to "change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside."

After an extended rant about the cowardice of Mike Pence, the last order Trump gave the mob before sending them down Pennsylvania Avenue was that they must give "boldness" to "weak Republicans."

Trump's command echoed Eastman's language in the longer of the two memos in which he described his own scheme as "BOLD, certainly."

Read:'Conspiracy nuts': DeSantis is in the hot seat after his aide gets caught pushing anti-Semitic theory

The label "coup" conjures up images of a military takeover, but a procedural coup under the threat of violence is still a coup.

Denialists try to mislead by pointing to the insurgents' relatively light weaponry and saying: "You don't think they meant to overthrow the US government with that, do you?" But the plan was never to physically seize control of the government. Insurgents just had to bully Pence and House Republicans into reversing the election for Trump.

Trump's advisors were well aware that reversing a free and fair election would provoke national outrage and widespread protests. Eastman's blueprint for leveraging the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power would work as well or better after a procedural coup as it would after an uncertain Election Night (the scenario nominally entertained in the report). A stolen election would putBiden supporters in the streets where the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers would be waiting for them, prepared to start or escalate violence wherever they could. This kind of unrest was exactly what Eastman warned local officials to be prepared to suppress.[see war game bs?]

We eagerly await what Bannon and Eastman will tell the January 6 committee, but what they've already said is utterly damning.

READ: Ocasio-Cortez gives an impassioned speech blasting Kevin McCarthy after Gosar's 'incitement of violence'

===

omg yikes

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/trump-2655520362/

no lnx

'Barely concealed bloodlust': Claremont Institute laid out detailed plan for using cops to overturn Trump’s election loss

Travis Gettys and Raw Story November 08, 2021

The right-wing Claremont Institute published a report in mid-October 2020 that gamed out a scenario where Donald Trump would remain in office through an alliance between law enforcement and militant extremists.

The report was prepared by attorney John Eastman, who authored a memo laying out another strategy for keeping Trump in office, and former Trump deputy national security advisor K.T. McFarland,[FIRED BY LEDEEN?] as well as Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, alt-right figure Jeff Giesea and right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, reported The Bulwark.

"Despite the authors' pretensions to scholarship and rigor — 'for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism' — the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right," writes columnist Christian Vanderbrouk. "Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government — aided by citizen 'posses' of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office."

Most of the predictions in the report, titled "79 Days to Inauguration," did not come to fruition, such as the authors' belief that some states' voting results would be fatally tainted by cyber attacks and suspicious fires, and left-wing mobs did not converge on Washington, D.C., to incite violence, and police did not execute antifa/Black Lives Matter leaders as part of a federal operation.

"A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report," Vanderbrouk writes. "This isn't a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries."

The report was produced in response to the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project's (TIP) exercise on "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition," which considered the prospect of Trump refusing to concede an election loss and made recommendations for avoiding a crisis -- which seems to be the opposite intent of the Claremont Institute's exercise.

"To the extent that the Claremont-TPPF report offers recommendations, they are mostly focused on how to emerge victorious from the chaos, including preparation 'for destructive urban unrest [with] potential targets includ[ing] ballot counting facilities, government buildings, especially state capitols and city halls, as well as television and radio studios,'" Vanderbrouk writes. "The Claremont task force seems either resigned to—or perhaps energized by—the view that 'prudent steps are likely to be spun as preparations for a military takeover or coup and may result in negative consequences either way.'"

"Either way. It's as if they're steering into the violence instead of trying to avoid it," he adds. "The message is clear:do whatever it takes to crush your opponents and all will be forgiven in the second Trump term."

===

https://www.thebulwark.com/notes-on-an-authoritarian-conspiracy-inside-the-claremont-institutes-79-days-to-inauguration-report/

ref 1

sun rises on January 6, 2021 while a nation is in crisis.

Michigan’s presidential electors are in dispute after a mysterious fire in Detroit destroyed thousands of mail-in ballots, ultimately throwing the election to Congress.

The nation’s capital is overwhelmed by riots organized by left-wing radicals.

A Republican member of Congress is attacked and critically injured in the violence, potentially depriving Donald Trump of the decisive vote.

However, the representative heroically insists on being taken to the House floor. “With IVs and blood transfusions being administered, the member casts the deciding vote, giving Trump 26 state delegations and the needed majority.”

This is the grisly climax of a report published in mid-October 2020 by the Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation’s (TPPF) called “79 Days to Inauguration,” prepared by “Constitutional scholars, along with experts in election law, foreign affairs, law enforcement, and media . . . coordinated by a retired military officer experienced in running hundreds of wargames.”

Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.

Other participants include Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”

The distinguished wargamers.

Yet despite the authors’ pretensions to scholarship and rigor—“for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism”— the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right.

Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government—aided by citizen “posses” of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office.

When Trump refused to accept the outcome of the election, he cooked up a scheme…

The scenario begins late on Election Night. The networks have declared Joe Biden the winner, his campaign having upset Trump in the state of Texas. The call is withdrawn moments later, following reports of a cyberattack involving the state’s tabulation system. As it becomes clear there will be no definitive winner on Election Night, attention shifts to a few battleground states with large numbers of outstanding ballots.

Riots break out in more than a dozen major cities . . . 14 law enforcement officers are known to have been shot, with one confirmed death. There are unconfirmed reports of a car bombing of a police precinct building in Philadelphia.

The violence, as imagined by Claremont and TPPF, overwhelms police and fire officials.

Police recede to a defensive posture around their precincts, it is unsafe to maneuver police vehicles down the streets and responding to calls for service, even emergency calls, is suspended. Fire departments are unable to approach buildings on fire without police escorts, which are not happening.

The next day, the federal government announces Operation Spearfish, targeting

Leaders and agitators within the groups associated with BLM, Antifa, Boogaloo, and NFAC . . . with over one thousand arrest warrants issued using federal and state statutes from RICO to disorderly conduct… The decision to obtain arrest warrants even for the barest minimum of probable cause on the lowest of charges is meant to remove the players from the picture, at least temporarily. Social media sources and other intelligence sources were used to find any instances of incitement to violence, threats, or other criminal activity that met federal or local statutes and act on them.

Remember, this narrative is the result of a role-playing exercise in which the participants imagined themselves as key decision-makers in the federal government. The actions described, therefore, might be best understood as a combination of group therapy and suggestions for how they believe the federal government and law enforcement should behave in a moment of constitutional crisis.

Some of the report is revealing. Some of it is sad. Some of it is darkly funny. For instance, the authors’ recommendation for mass, politically motivated arrests “to remove the players from the picture” sits oddly next to the right’s outraged reaction to the prosecution of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

There’s more irony in how the task force imagines right-wing gangs would operate during such a period: with quiet discipline and in cooperation with law enforcement.

A lack of social media activity and overt action by the rioting by members of the Proud Boys draws the attention of law enforcement officials suspecting they may be operating covertly on the ground in several major urban rioting areas, but their exact involvement is unknown. Reports of militias moving into suburban areas is being monitored. Several groups affiliated with the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers have openly offered to assist law enforcement in putting down the violence via social media, touting significant current and retired law enforcement and military membership.

Which is . . . not how the Trumpist forces behaved during the actual crisis:

---

In reading the report, it becomes clear that task force participants see law enforcement as a critical adjunct to the more traditional political actors and that they believe law enforcement could act with greater impunity and force, independent from—and at times in defiance of—elected leaders.

There are rumors that several sheriffs in conservative counties throughout the country are hinting that they may deputize regular citizens into posses should the lawlessness come to their counties. Social media is ablaze with volunteers from Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers and other Posse Comitatus groups to form posses.

This isn’t an innocent game of “what if?”

Earlier this year the Claremont Institute created a Sheriffs Fellowship program. Claremont claims that this program will offer “training of unparalleled depth and excellence in American political thought and institutions.” But then, this is the same group that produced a report hoping that “several sheriffs in conservative counties” would give groups like the Proud Boys actual legal authority.

Which is it?

---

Law enforcement plays an openly insurrectionist role throughout the “79 Days” exercise, defying civilian leaders, refusing to offer them protection, and threatening them with arrest.

For example, the report imagines Chicago police (with vocal backing from their union) abandoning Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s residential block, permitting protesters to set up camp on her front lawn.

In imagined dialogue, the wargame quotes the city’s Fraternal Order of Police president as saying “We have officers risking their lives by not shooting people they should be shooting, or waiting too long because Lightfoot and her Soros-funded prosecutor Kim Foxx seem more interested in arresting cops than criminals.”

The union leader goes on to defend a police sickout (“Foxx and Lightfoot use this department and its officers as political scapegoats all the time, maybe they will enjoy not having us around”) and “excessive force” against rioters (“Take a look out the window there, you tell me, what the hell is excessive right now?”).

The authors use an imaginary appearance by former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke on Fox News to issue an open threat to elected leaders of the political opposition, which is imagined as going “viral”:

“The police are here to protect people and preserve the peace. They will do that. Politicians might get in the way for a while like they’re doing right now, but at some point, cops will remember their oath and will take back their communities for the good, law-abiding people in those communities. You won’t want to be on the other side of that once they have had enough of this nonsense.”

The National Fraternal Order of Police issues a partisan statement attacking Joe Biden’s “irresponsible” call for peaceful protests, “calling on President Trump to assist our men and women in blue in putting an end to the violence and anarchy and to restore law and order.”

At which point the “79 Days” report moves into truly authoritarian wishcasting:

Federal and local law enforcement officials “entered into meetings withGoogle, Facebook, and Twitter to discuss tracking phones and electronic communication devices that have been traveling together to various cities” to track various “agitator groups.”
Checkpoints are established “along major corridors entering Michigan, Texas, and Florida [to] stop and detain any suspicious caravans or large transport vehicles and to identify passengers for verification in the state fusion centers as members of Antifa and BLM are expected to descend on the capitol buildings in those states.”
The FBI’s elite counterterrorist Hostage Rescue Team is sent to “execute search warrants for weapons in and around Washington, DC… Seven Antifa members are killed by gunfire” during the simultaneous raids with “no injuries to the agents.”

A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report. During a battle with rioters at a Portland police precinct building, a:

SWAT sniper conducting overwatch shot and killed one of the arsonists as he drew his arm back to throw his device (captured on police surveillance video and released immediately: warning graphic). The Molotov Cocktail exploded when he dropped the bottle and covered several rioters in flames, three injured severely and one dead at the scene.

At a confrontation near the White House, a non-lethal directed-energy weapon called the “Active Denial System” is used against protesters “to great effectwith limited, precise application to specific threats. Social media erupts with claims of abuse through military weaponry.”

The body count grows with “officer-involved shootings” related to the RICO-authorized Operation Spearfish, resulting in “at least three suspects dead.” However, “none of the agencies is releasing information on the circumstances or identities of the officers or suspects involved, citing the ongoing investigation.”

These raids, which operate with all the impunity of a death squad, “are executed in middle to upper class neighborhoods where the Antifa and BLM activists/leadership tend to reside.”

The exercise ends with crude myth-making: the noble and sacrificial decision by a “Republican member from an at-large delegation” suffering from “life-threatening wounds” who, “understanding what is at stake, demands to be transported to the House for the state delegation vote and arrives in a heavily guarded convoy.”

This isn’t a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.

---

The “79 Days Report” was created as a rejoinder to the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project’s (TIP) exercise on “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition.”

Founded in June 2020, the TIP gathered more than a hundred experts (including Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of The Bulwark) to game out a number of scenarios, including the worrying prospect that a refusal by President Trump to concede defeat would lead to violence.

The TIP final report also included detailed “recommendations to avoid a crisis,” such as educating state and local officials about their constitutional responsibilities, combating misinformation, and ensuring that protests were not hijacked by violent actors or agent provocateurs.

“Peaceful protesters will need specialized training on de-escalation and non-violent techniques—and on how to document the non-violent nature of their protests, given the likelihood that agitators will attempt to blame any violence on them,” goes one TIP recommendation.

Another TIP proposal is for “military and law enforcement leaders to be particularly attuned to the possibility that partisan actors will seek to manipulate or misuse their coercive powers for inappropriate political ends.”

To the extent that the Claremont-TPPF report offers recommendations, they are mostly focused on how to emerge victorious from the chaos, including preparation “for destructive urban unrest [with] potential targets includ[ing] ballot counting facilities, government buildings, especially state capitols and city halls, as well as television and radio studios.”

The Claremont task force seems either resigned to—or perhaps energized by—the view that “prudent steps are likely to be spun as preparations for a military takeover or coup and may result in negative consequences either way.”

Either way. It’s as if they’re steering into the violence instead of trying to avoid it.

The message is clear: do whatever it takes to crush your opponents and all will be forgiven in the second Trump term.

Indeed, the wargamers expect readers to find their work heartening precisely because the bloodshed and strife will lead to the outcome they desire:

We hope that our work will reassure the American people that our system of government is resilient—having been crafted by the Founders to withstand crises and to emerge through the turmoil with a government of the people, by the people, for the people, that shall not perish from the earth, but endure to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our children.

---

Establishment conservatives like to pretend they can insulate themselves from the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election.

But the Big Lie doesn’t stand up all by itself. It requires the supporting architecture of smaller lies and evasions, like the claim that our republic was never really threatened because Donald Trump lacks sufficient competence.

The particular focus on Trump the man misses the movement for its leader.

Given the weight of the evidence against that larger movement, one wonders if the myopia is intentional.

===

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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