The J6 committee has been laying out a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, while leaving all other Republicans elected on the same ballots in place. The wide-ranging conspiracy did not culminate in the storming of the capital on January 6th, the riot was a violent Hail Mary when everything else had failed. Trump continually lied (and continues to) about massive voter fraud, pressured state electoral officials from Michigan to decertify Michigan electors. He did this openly and publicly. Slates of fake electors from several states Trump lost were submitted on official looking falsely sworn papers, a plan was hatched to seize voting machines, impose martial law, Sidney Powell was poised to become a special counsel to prosecute voter fraud that didn’t exist in any significant numbers, legal memos were drawn up advocating illegal actions to keep the angry losing candidate in power, actions their author admitted even this supreme Court would rule 9 to 0 against. The head of Trump’s Secret Service detail, a lying scumbag named Tony Ornato, was promoted to Deputy Chief of Staff while still working for the Secret Service which Trump had converted into his personal praetorian guard. Oddly all Secret Service texts from January 5th and 6th have been permanently deleted. In a lucky coincidence for the deranged former president, all of Trump’s phone records and burner phones from those days were also lost. Whoops!
The conspiracy has too many tentacles to list here, but at the center of each one was the personal ambition of one man, Individual One, to do everything imaginable to stay in power after losing an election. This kind of conspiracy, with many arms and many disparate actors who don’t necessarily know each other, all working toward the same goal is called a hub and spoke conspiracy and Glenn Kirschner has been describing exactly this for many months in regard to prosecuting Trump’s many pronged attack on democracy.
Former DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that DOJ must begin a hub and spoke conspiracy investigation and begin prosecuting some of these malefactors, several of which are running for reelection. Should have been done a year ago, but in a couple of months Garland will demure because of the DOJ policy of not interfering with upcoming elections. Here’s Weissmann, explaining why this is not a typical top down pyramid conspiracy simply to storm Congress and Stop the Steal:
Instead, what the hearings have revealed is evidence of a plot orchestrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the White House and elsewhere — including players from the Mueller investigation like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani as well as new players like Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman. The “spoke” of the Jan. 6 riot should be seen and investigated simultaneously with the other “spokes”: orchestrating fake electors in key states, pressuring state officials like those in Georgia to find new votes, plotting to behead the leadership of the Justice Department to promote a lackey who would further the conspiracy by announcing a spurious investigation into election fraud, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to violate the law.
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