Thread by @SethAbramson

(🆚) BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump's top aides are lying about the events of January 5—Insurrection Eve—yet again, but this time it's the former Secretary of Defense, and the lies were told to Congress. I hope you'll subscribe to PROOF, read on, and RETWEET. sethabramson.substack.com/p/breaking-new…

1/ I was a criminal investigator in the federal criminal justice system in DC. Then I practiced criminal law—up to first-degree murder cases—in two jurisdictions. And I'm telling you now, as I've said for months, that the events of January 5 are *critical* to those of January 6.

2/ January 5—in the PM—is the most lied-about sequence of events in the whole insurrection timeline. More lies have been told by Trump agents about January 5 than about January 6, and when you read the dozens of articles at PROOF on this subject, you develop a clear sense of why.

3/ Each time there's a new lie, I write an article. The number of liars has now reached *11*—though this time it's the former Secretary of Defense and lies were told to Congress. And each time the media ignores the lies and says that the only events to focus on were on January 6.

4/ THIS ISN'T HOW CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION WORKS. You don't investigate an insurrection by reducing it to a Trump rally on January 6 and a march on the Capitol on January 6. If there was White House-insurrectionist coordination—and there was—almost all of it happened pre-January 6.

5/ While there was *also* White House-insurrectionist contact on January 6—Ali Alexander and Alex Jones were in Trump's VIP area dealing with Secret Service at the White House's demand, and Alexander was texting with the Trump campaign *from the Capitol*—January 5's the key date.

6/ The other key dates in the insurrection timeline are three White House meetings in the latter half of December 2020; the Stone-Trump meeting at Mar-a-Lago in the final 72 hours of December; January 3 and January 5. Chris Miller's lies touch on *both* of these latter two dates.

7/ I don't know why major media believes itself to be covering the insurrection by only covering the events of January 6. I don't even know—as a journalism professor—how this is considered "coverage" of how an insurrection came about rather than hard-news reporting on an *event*.

8/ Right now U.S. major media has hard-news reporters who simply tell us what happened on January 6; correspondents who cover the (more or less across-the-board) useless congressional hearings on the subject; and investigative journalists who're... waiting on the FBI, apparently.

9/ But FBI investigations are often leak-free, and certainly not conducted in public. So investigative journalism on the insurrection just... doesn't exist.

It's not there.

There isn't any.

And so the biggest domestic uprising since the Civil War goes essentially... uncovered.

10/ In any case, this is the back story to today's breaking news at PROOF—and the dozens of other such 1/6 stories there. As a former criminal investigator, lawyer, working journalist and journalism prof, I think *someone* has to be doing investigative journalism on this subject.