It was a Coup - Excerpt of my Jan. 6 Foreword

Read some of my Coup Breakdown here (whether you get the 1/6 Report or not)...

Dec 18, 2022

Hi, Ari here — below is an exclusive excerpt of my Coup Conspiracy breakdown from The January 6 Report, being published this week.

This email is actually the first time any of my foreword has been released. I wanted to share it with newsletter subscribers like you…

Foreword to the Jan. 6 Report (Harper Collins Edition)

They attempted a coup.

That is the most important fact about what happened.

Donald Trump led an effort to overthrow the lawful government of the United States.

He lost an election, exhausted the legal options to challenge it, and then tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power to the incoming administration of the President-Elect.

The goal was illicit: Stealing an election.

Trump's chosen methods were unlawful: Trying to overcome his loss with fraud, obstruction, election meddling, abuse of power by government officials, and even plans to have the military intercede. Trump did not always act himself. He often demanded other people break the law. Sometimes that worked, and he got people to commit crimes. Sometimes they refused.

Indeed, many of the most brazen, gruesome, and well-known crimes were committed by the supporters Trump summoned to Washington -- not by Trump himself.

He did not personally go storm the Capitol (though he tried). He did not attack police officers with his hands. He did not physically obstruct and delay the January 6 certification. He did not sign documents created to commit elector fraud.

Those distinctions are based on the factual evidence, but they do not resolve Trump's actual and legal culpability.

Criminal organizations typically shield the boss, sparing him from most "dirty work," let alone actual combat. So how should the United States fairly determine potential accountability for Donald Trump, who encouraged and sought to benefit from an attempted coup, and an actual (but failed) insurrection? There are legal and technical aspects to this process. The fundamental questions, however, are actually straightforward:

Did Trump intentionally lead the plots to stage an insurrection and coup?
Did he lead a coup conspiracy?

That is a question America now faces – both as a nation and government. (The nation votes; the government administers justice.)

In a democracy, voters regularly evaluate both the ideas and venality of candidates. People tend to be pragmatic about what they can really get from politicians. Some lies, hypocrisy, and even corruption is expected in the aggregate. The insurrection goes way beyond that.

Never. Vote. Again.

If you determine a politician is an actual, proven authoritarian – willing to rule by coup and violence – voting that person into office can be a path to never voting again.

So the question matters for the nation. Before Americans reach questions about prosecuting or jailing a former leader, there's the lower bar of whether that leader is an authoritarian, and should never be elected to any public office. Theoretically, that is an apolitical and empirical question, though some people use politics to pick their “facts.”

For the law, prosecutors determine if the evidence proves that Trump deliberately, corruptly led this conspiracy. That means taking deliberate action to corruptly stage the insurrection or coup. That does not mean musing about crimes out loud, or screaming at meetings, or lying to the public about the election. Those things don't cut it, and are typically legal. If there is overwhelming evidence of a conspiracy, however, hatched and pursued at the highest levels of the government, then prosecutors have a duty to prosecute the conspirators and their leader.

So, the United States, as a nation and government, is facing a test. The US can assess the evidence that Trump led this conspiracy - or turn away. It can reach conclusions and confront them in public, to redress an authoritarian, anarchic attack on democracy with the best attempt at truth and justice – or it can devolve into a muddle of competing claims.

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What Happened?

The government has led much of the fact-finding about the insurrection. When federal officials began this process, in those first days after the attack, they began with some mistakes.

The task is much broader than accountability for what happened on one day. Yet the insurrection was initially viewed – by both its opponents and "soft" allies in the Republican Party – as largely a single-day event. A one-day attack.

The conventional premise viewed this as a gathering where insurrectionists went to a "rally" in the morning, then marched and stormed the Capitol in the afternoon, violently attacking police, obstructing the vote counting, and searching for lawmakers to murder – with the perpetrators mostly home by nightfall. This was also the initial view of the Democratic Congress. The news moves fast. It may be easy to forget now that Congress impeached then-President Trump for one thing: "Incitement of insurrection" on January 6.

To be fair, that impeachment trial did serve several functions. It swiftly laid down a marker against the attack; compelled Congress to go on record; made Trump the only twice-impeached President in history; and secured the most bipartisan coalition to convict a President in the last century. The trial's entire thrust, however, was stuck in a flawed framework of "one day only."

The Senate jurors were basically asked: Legally, did Trump's speech that morning incite the attack in the afternoon?

As one Democratic impeachment manager summarized the case in the pivotal closing argument: When Trump "took the stage on January 6, he knew exactly how combustible the situation was," with a crowd ready to "engage in violence," and "he aimed them straight here."

The summation literally boiled down to: Convict Trump because he went on stage, gave a speech, and exhorted people to storm the Capitol.

Less than two years later, that prosecutorial "accusation" is so cramped, it almost sounds like someone downplaying Trump's actions and guilt.

The 2021 Article of Impeachment did not mention, let alone charge: plots for elector fraud, state election meddling, military intervention, DOJ interference, seizing voting machines, or the long-running lies that recruited so many people to travel to Washington.

During the impeachment and Senate debate, it often seemed like Trump was on trial for a speech. The law makes it hard to pin an insurrection on one speech -- as it should. True freedom of speech sets a very high bar for convicting any politician, in the Senate or in court, for words in a speech.

Trump coup lawyer John Eastman is under criminal investigation, but he did not physically storm the Capitol in the insurrection.

The Attack

The Congress of January 2021, which impeached Trump, was not very different from the Congress of July 2021, which formed a Committee to investigate. The House created this special Committee "to investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol," as its authorizing resolution states. The conception, goals, and very name are about January 6. The authorizing resolution states the probe has three "purposes" -- "investigate" the January 6 "terrorist attack"; "evaluate evidence" from the government about the "terrorist attack"; and "build" on any other investigations while "avoiding unnecessary duplication."

In other words: Go investigate what went down that day.

That assignment quickly proved too narrow, however, for the range of plots and crimes revealed – and sometimes confessed – in the ensuing months. It would be like trying to investigate "state-sponsored racism in the Jim Crow Era" by probing only the May 7, 1965 attack on Selma protesters. The attack is significant, but it cannot be accurately, substantively split from the long path leading up to it.

At the same time, evidence for this wider view of the threat – a long-running plot against democracy, not 'one terrible day' – emerged from this Committee's work.

That is a credit to its fact-finding. A competent investigation follows leads, sources, and facts. It adapts to new information, rather than sticking to an initial perception formed before new evidence, witnesses and facts were gathered and tested.

Here's why this matters: The results of the Committee's work suggest a threat greater than the physical insurrection of January 6. The committee initially devoted to investigating that terrible day helped reveal truths that go far beyond it.

That is Congress. Then there is a co-equal branch of government, the Justice Department, which enforces the law.

The federal prosecutors working the case have focused on the storming of the Capitol. As the 117th Congress prepares to release its report, the DOJ is mostly prosecuting insurrectionists who physically trespassed on January 6. The DOJ has indicted over 900 people in this probe (UPDATE later); every single charge is for people who stormed the Capitol that day or helped them do it. Some later subpoenas turned to gathering evidence and testimony from Trump aides. As the Committee prepared to release this report, however, the Justice Department's indictments overwhelmingly prioritized the one-day framework. Over 320 defendants have been convicted. It is an open probe and could certainly change, as prosecutors move up the line. Attorney General Garland has stressed the "purposeful" way that "in complex cases" like this probe, "initial charges are often less severe than later charged offenses… as investigators methodically collect and sift through more evidence." But he said that back in January 2021.

A Conspiracy, Not a “Riot”

The attempted coup, and the road to the insurrection, transpired over several months. The January 6 Committee's dense hearings and evidence, plus other independent reporting, show the plots to overthrow the election were broader and more organized than some one-day-crime-spree.

The attack was one of several plots pursuing the same goal. The evidence shows it was not a spontaneous “riot,” or burst of aimless anger. It had a purpose: Prevent or delay certifying the election results to reinforce a much wider coup operation.

That truth is at odds with Trump defenders' main arguments – boiling any offense down to a day of violence, then pinning it on the people who stormed the Capitol. (These are the main defenses of Trump allies, including some implicated in the coup; they are distinct from Trump's rhetoric defending some insurrectionists or talking about pardoning them.)

The evidence shows the people at the Capitol were mostly "pawns” - not leaders who worked with Trump or for his administration. They responded to Trump publicly summoning them. They went to a rally organized and funded by MAGA leaders and Trump aides. They executed one prong of a wider conspiracy strategy – to hijack the certification on January 6 – hatched and written down by Trump lawyers.

As a companion to the testimony and evidence in the Congressional Report, it is important to confront the plots in that planned Trump conspiracy…

[End of excerpt]

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Afterword

The piece goes on — this excerpt is about 20% of my foreword. The remainder documents eight plots to overturn the election, and tackles the path to accountability. You can order the entire foreword and report now:

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