In a new report, the Washington Post has shed further light on Donald Trump’s wide-ranging scheme to overthrow the 2020 election and establish a presidential dictatorship with the aid of Republican lawmakers and the US military and intelligence apparatus.
Exploding all claims that Trump’s failed coup was a spontaneous riot, the Post revealed Thursday that on January 4, 2021, two days prior to the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol, Republican lawmakers gathered at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C. for a meeting organized by Trump accomplices and fascist conspiracy theorists. Among the organizers were MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.
The Post reports that the well-attended meeting included at least three sitting Republican senators. Lindell presented a proposal, based on a December 18, 2020 document titled “Counter-Election Fraud,” for Trump to instruct Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller to impanel a three-person “inquiry” with dictatorial powers to “reverse the fraud” and overturn the election of Joe Biden.
Like the previously reported December 16, 2020 draft executive order, the document alleged, without presenting any evidence, that there was “foreign interference” in the 2020 presidential election. In order to find the nonexistent “evidence,” the document called for the “inquiry” to “be done confidentially and ... completed in several days.” The document would then be declassified, and Trump would be declared the winner.
Unlike the unsigned executive order, which granted power to Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to deliver a pre-ordained “intelligence assessment” declaring Trump the winner, the newly reported document recommended that three people, handpicked by Trump’s co-conspirators, be granted authority under National Security Presidential Memo 13 to undertake cyber warfare operations in the United States to seize and analyze “NSA (National Security Agency) unprocessed raw signals data.”
The document stated that these “targeted inquires” would “likely identify hard evidence of foreign involvement in DoD data, which will support all other efforts to reverse the fraud.”
In essence, the aim of the proposal was to give Republican lawmakers political cover for voting against certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6. In an interview with the Post on the meeting, Lindell said the idea was to delay congressional certification of the electoral vote—normally a ceremonial formality—to give Trump and his fascistic allies sufficient time to allow Republican-controlled legislatures in swing states to override Biden’s popular vote victory and approve pro-Trump slates of electors.
“We were hoping that the senators would give it 10 more days to give it back to the states,” Lindell told the newspaper.
Last year, Lindell, a multi-millionaire fascist, hosted a “cyber symposium” heavily attended by far-right politicians, where he failed to present any evidence to support Trump’s claims of a “stolen election.”
The memo proposed that “POTUS instruct acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller to bring these three, cleared individuals to form a core advisory team to the White House ...”
The three men cited in the memorandum are Frank Colon, Richard Higgins and Michael Del Rosso. Colon and Higgins have extensive military and intelligence experience, while Del Rosso is a failed Republican congressional candidate. North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer confirmed to the Post that Del Rosso sent his office a copy of the December 18 memo after he attended the meeting with Del Rosso at the Trump International Hotel on January 4.
At the time the memo was written, Colon, according to a personal résumé attached to the memo, was serving as a senior legal counsel to the Army. An Army spokesperson confirmed to the Post that Colon is currently serving as a “civilian legal adviser assigned to a military intelligence brigade headquartered at Fort Meade in Maryland.”
As the Post writes: “Colon’s name first surfaced publicly on January 15, 2021 ... that day, Post photographer Jabin Botsford took a picture of Lindell ... exiting the White House with a coffee cup and a document that mentioned ‘martial law’ and the ‘insurrection act.’ The portions of the document visible in Botsford’s photograph called for Trump loyalist Kash Patel to be installed as acting CIA director and for Colon to be named ‘Acting National Security’ adviser.”
Richard Higgins is a former member of Trump’s National Security Council. He was forced out of the White House in 2017 after he circulated a memo to White House staff claiming that Trump was the target of a “deep state international globalist cabal” of “Islamists” and “cultural Marxists” inside and outside of the US government.
“Globalists and Islamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be the destroyed,” Higgins wrote.
A frequent guest on the far-right Sean Hannity program, Higgins previously alleged that the Obama government was subservient to the Muslim Brotherhood.
No evidence has been presented in the 15 months since the November 2020 election that China or any other foreign power interfered in the election on behalf of Biden. That has not prevented Trump and his far-right allies from insisting that the “real insurrection” occurred not on January 6, 2021, but on Election Day, November 3, 2020.
Campaigning on the “stolen election” lie, Trump and his allies are inciting fascistic violence on a near-daily basis against their political opponents who, they claim, are under the control of Jews, Black Lives Matter activists, communists, liberal and left-leaning billionaires and the Chinese Communist Party. These forces allegedly conspired to use fake mail-in ballots and Dominion Voting Systems software to manipulate vote totals.
These conspiracies, among others, were advanced in the months following Trump’s defeat by his coup lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis. The lawyers operated out of the Willard Hotel, located in Washington D.C. less than a block from the White House.
While the Willard Hotel served as one nerve center of fascist conspiracy, the Post reports that two days before the attack on the Capitol, North Dakota Senator Cramer, Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis and “some two dozen others” were “crammed into a ground-floor hotel conference room” at the Trump International Hotel, located less than a mile from the White House, “to discuss election fraud allegations” and listen to the presentation from Trump’s co-plotters.
Pro-Trump Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson attended the meeting as well, albeit virtually. Johnson, who recently announced he would be running for re-election, was one of the earliest proponents of the fascist conspiracy theory, first advanced by former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, that January 6 was not an insurrection orchestrated by Trump with the support of a majority of the Republican Party, but a “Fedsurrection,” i.e., a sting operation concocted by FBI “deep state” agents to entrap pro-Trump supporters at the Capitol.
The Post noted that the January 4 meeting at the Trump International Hotel was “similar to a briefing held in a congressional office building the next day for members of the House.”
The newspaper also noted that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn extended an “invitation to at least one senator and his staff, according to a person familiar with the meeting.”