Mark Meadows Was Directly Involved In The Trump Coup D’etat Plot

ABC News reports on an excerpt from Jonathan Karl’s new book “Betrayal: The Final Act of The Trump Show,” Memo from Trump attorney outlined how Pence could overturn election, says new book:

In a memo not made public until now, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed to Vice President Mike Pence’s top aide, on New Year’s Eve, a detailed plan for undoing President Joe Biden’s election victory, ABC News’ Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl reports.

The memo, written by former President Donald Trump’s campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, is reported for the first time in Karl’s upcoming book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show” — demonstrating how Pence was under even more pressure than previously known to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Ellis, in the memo, outlined a multi-step strategy: On Jan. 6, the day Congress was to certify the 2020 election results, Pence was to send back the electoral votes from six battleground states that Trump falsely claimed he had won.

The memo said that Pence would give the states a deadline of “7pm eastern standard time on January 15th” to send back a new set of votes, according to Karl.

Then, Ellis wrote, if any state legislature missed that deadline, “no electoral votes can be opened and counted from that state.”

Such a scenario would leave neither Biden nor Trump with a majority of votes, Ellis wrote, which would mean “Congress shall vote by state delegation” — which, Ellis said, would in turn lead to Trump being declared the winner due to Republicans controlling the majority of state delegations with 26.

The day after Meadows sent Ellis’ memo to Pence’s aide, on Jan. 1, Trump aide John McEntee sent another memo to Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, titled, “Jefferson used his position as VP to win.”

Although McEntee’s memo was historically incorrect, Karl says, his message was clear: Jefferson took advantage of his position, and Pence must do the same.

What followed during that first week of January was an effort by Trump, both personally and publicly, to push his vice president to take away Biden’s victory.

“I hope Mike Pence comes through for us,” Trump said at a roaring Georgia rally on Jan. 4, a day before Republicans would also lose their Senate majority. “I have to tell you I hope that our great vice president comes through for us. He’s a great guy. Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him quite as much.”

At a March 18 sit-down interview with Trump for the upcoming book, Karl asked the former president about a report from The New York Times that on the morning of Jan. 6, Trump pressured Pence with a crude phone call, reportedly telling his vice president, “You can be a patriot or you can be a p****.”

“I wouldn’t dispute it,” Trump said to Karl.

“Really?” Karl responded.

“I wouldn’t dispute it,” Trump repeated.

Later on the morning of Jan. 6, as Trump took the stage for his rally at the Ellipse prior to the Capitol attack, he publicly called on Pence to take action.

“If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” Trump told the roaring crowd. “Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.”

Foreshadowing “Hang Mike Pence!” by the MAGA mob? Malice aforethought?

Hours later, after rioters had attacked the Capitol and the building was being evacuated, rioters were heard shouting “Hang Mike Pence” as they left the complex. But Trump told Karl that he never contacted his vice president to check on his safety.

“No, I thought he was well-protected, and I had heard that he was in good shape,” Trump told Karl. “No, because I had heard he was in very good shape.”

Pressed about the chants, Trump told Karl that Pence made a mistake in certifying the vote.

“He could have — well, the people were very angry,” Trump said. “If you know a vote is fraudulent, right, how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress? How can you do that?” Trump said.

“Nice necktie you got there, Mike. You deserve it, for not doing as I asked you to do.”

Asked by Karl if, had Pence done as Trump wanted, Trump would still be in the White House, Trump replied, “I think we would have won — yeah.”

This goes to state of mind and intent for a charge of sedition.

Trump also couldn’t say if he would ever forgive Pence for certifying the election — a rare act of dissent from an otherwise loyal vice president.

“I don’t know,” Trump said. “Because I picked him. I like him, I still like him, but I don’t know that I can forgive him.”

And asked by Karl if Pence was on his shortlist for vice president should Trump run again in 2024, Trump wouldn’t say.

“He did the wrong thing,” Trump said of Pence. “A very nice man. I like him a lot. I like his family so much. But … it was a tragic mistake.”

Phillip Bump of the Washington Post has more on “Team Kraken” Lawyer Jenna Ellis. Another lawyer, another memo offering advice on stealing the presidency (excerpt):

As it turned out, Trump got his Roy Cohn — several of them, attorneys who were willing to defend him at the expense of the institution he represented and to offer him sets of rules to get him where he wanted to go. Specifically, to an unearned second term in office.

On Sunday, ABC News reported on the existence of a memo written by Trump’s campaign attorney Jenna Ellis at some point in December or January. It delineated a plan for seizing a second term in office, centered on the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6. That day, Vice President Mike Pence would reject the submitted electoral votes from a number of states, demanding that they return revised votes — presumably for Trump — by Jan. 15. If they didn’t do so, neither Trump nor Joe Biden would have enough electoral votes to constitute a majority of the 538 available, so the election would be settled by the House. And, by extension, potentially (though not necessarily) to Trump.

You may have been familiar with Ellis before this new report. She was a close ally of Trump’s attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani in the weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election. She joined Giuliani in presenting nonsensical, unfounded and false claims about rampant fraud at hearings convened by Republicans in various states. She stood by his side during the infamous hair-dye news conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in mid-November. She also had a link to a right-wing legal group that was actively trying to undercut confidence in the results of the 2020 election.

If Ellis’s plot sounds familiar, it should. It mirrors in broad strokes the plan offered by John Eastman, another attorney linked to a right-wing legal group, in a pair of memos written after the election. The first of those offered a simple, four-part plan for Trump and Pence to reject the cast electoral votes and secure a second term in office. At some point after that memo was written (and after it was shown to at least one incredulous senator), Eastman wrote a longer version. It was a sanitized version of the same thing: If Pence does these things, a Trump victory might result. It was a spoonful of sugar drizzled around the same medicine.

Giuliani, of course, was everywhere at once, trying to get people to listen to his various claims about the election. There was almost no theory that he wouldn’t elevate, doing everything in his power to whip up doubt about the election results, even as his claims repeatedly and uniformly amounted to nothing. The “almost” in that sentence leaves a small gap, but it’s one that was filled. Attorney Sidney Powell was also at the RNC news conference, where she made claims about election fraud that were so wild and obviously nonsensical that even Giuliani and Trump eventually moved away from her.

But Trump came back. As The Washington Post’s Robert Costa and Bob Woodward reported in their book “Peril” (where Eastman’s memo was first revealed), there was a meeting in the White House in mid-December during which Trump advocated for Powell to be made a special counsel by the Justice Department so that she could investigate her surreal claims of fraud.

“Sidney Powell had a new idea to expand the power of the presidency: Trump could issue a presidential order to take control of the vote count,” Costa and Woodward wrote. “The states were rigged, the media was rigged. Trump had to act.”

Trump’s White House aides “privately thought Powell’s ideas were insane, dangerous, and that she drew out the worst in Trump,” they wrote. Even Giuliani didn’t support the idea. But Trump was receptive, saying, “at least she’s giving me a chance.”

That’s the Cohn role. The point of a Cohn lawyer is that, no matter how dire the situation, you have someone fighting relentlessly on your behalf. Truth isn’t important. Stability isn’t important. Winning is important. If that means making your own rules — such as about how the vice president can reject electoral votes — that’s what you do.

Had Pence acquiesced to Trump’s plan, listening to Eastman or Ellis, it’s highly unlikely that Trump would have seized a second term in office. It’s more probable that an already unbalanced country would have erupted into massive protests and that the political dynamics on Capitol Hill would have been buffeted by the national outrage. But every journey begins with a first step, and for Trump on Jan. 6, the first step was rejecting the electoral votes. To guide that step, he finally had lawyers who would draw him the maps he wanted to see.

I am not aware of any outward signs that the Department of Justice is conducting a criminal probe of Donald Trump and his inner circle of co-conspirators for the attempted coup d’etat on January 6. But from what has been publicly reported in the media to date, I see enough evidence to file charges against the coup plotters for seditious conspiracy, sedition, and inciting an insurrection.

I honestly don’t understand why Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice have not already taken this action. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol investigation does not determine what the Department of Justice does (although the weight of the evidence produced by the committee’s investigation could force the Department of Justice’s hand to bring charges).

As has often been said, a failed coup d’etat is just a practice run for the next coup d’etat. The Sedition Party has been working overtime to lay the groundwork to steal the next election, but Senate Democrats are still “having discussions” about what to do about the Senate filibuster rule in order to pass election reforms. WTF is wrong with you people? Don’t you understand the clear and present danger from the Sedition Party? Where is your “fierce urgency of now” to do your constitutional duty and to defend the Constitution and the Republic against all enemies foreign and domestic?