Thread by @SethAbramson

(🆚) BREAKING NEWS: Trump-Brazil Plot to Steal 2020 Election Appears to Have Been "Plan B" After Failure of Trump-Ukraine Collusion

This news is big—and a PROOF exclusive. I hope you'll consider subscribing to PROOF, reading the exposé, and retweeting it. sethabramson.substack.com/p/breaking-new…

1/ This report builds on two PROOF reports—linked to in the first paragraph, above—that made national news in Brazil and led to a congressional inquiry there, as well as the shocking Ch. 12 ("Trump-Venezuela") of the bestselling Proof of Corruption.

Link: amazon.com/Proof-Corrupti…

2/ All of the evidence now suggests that the Trump-Ukraine election-theft scheme Trump ran in 2019-2020 was followed by a likewise failed 2020-2021 election-theft scheme involving the governments of Venezuela and Brazil.

In almost every contour, the two plots mirror one another.

3/ The Trump agents involved were the same. Trump made contacts with a foreign counterpart in the same way. He sought personal gain in the same way. He undercut US policy in the same way. He conducted dark diplomacy in the same way. He sought manufactured evidence in both cases.

4/ Both cases involved allies of Russia. Both cases involved pleasing allies in Saudi Arabia and UAE. Both cases involved secret meetings in the U.S. and abroad. Both cases involved conspiracy theories and an attempt to destroy the Bidens. These were *intimately* related efforts.

5/ One led to Trump's impeachment. One has hardly been covered. And the one hardly covered involved an armed insurrection against our government and an ongoing domestic insurgency. I insisted on a Trump-Venezuela chapter in Proof of Corruption because I knew this day would come.

6/ When Trump develops an ally, they *must* offer him a benefit that's personal and profound. That was true with Putin. That was true with MBS. That was true with MBZ. That was true with Duterte. It was true with Bolsonaro. And paradoxically, it may have been true... with Maduro.

7/ Even the ongoing discussions over a proposed January 6 Commission don't come close to this deep a dive into how the January 6 attack came about. The foreign component has been entirely ignored, as media wrongly thinks "that was the first impeachment." No—it was *both* of them.

8/ We tend to think that the fact that Trump and his legal team lost in front of 80 judges—some of whom Trump himself appointed—means that their effort itself (while foolhardy) was a legal one. In fact it appears to have been as illicit in its origin as the Trump-Ukraine scandal.

9/ I've spent years researching Trump's M.O. in illicit foreign schemes. That's why I insisted on a Trump-Venezuela chapter in Proof of Corruption when the inclusion didn't make sense to anyone else involved in the project. I saw the signs of a massive foreign corruption scandal.

10/ Brazil—one of the world's largest nations—is taking the reporting at PROOF seriously, indeed its Congress is investigating and its media is doing so as well (and citing PROOF throughout). Meanwhile, here in America, our media and Congress are silent on Trump-Brazil collusion.

11/ The reason a nation with a free press needs working journalists and journalism professors (both things I am) is so that neither our government nor our media can use the excuse that they didn't have the time or resources to investigate something. I have done the work at PROOF.

12/ I neglected to mention (but I think everyone presumed it, anyway) that the other startling similarity between the Trump-Ukraine (2019-2020) and Trump-Brazil (2020-2021) election-theft scandals is that everyone involved in each has lied about every aspect of their involvement.

13/ Bolsonaro kept every aspect of his trip to the U.S.—its timing, its purpose, its itinerary—a *secret* from the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then lied to the nation of Brazil by insisting it was merely a vacation and a chance to introduce his newborn to Ivanka Trump.

14/ If it weren't for the loose lips of Michael Lindell and ill-advised Facebook posts from January 5 meeting attendees Daniel Beck and Charles Herbster, it's possible we wouldn't know about any of this. Because everyone else involved has lied about it to the media and to voters.

15/ Of course Herbster thereafter desperately tried to edit—then delete—his Facebook post, while Beck was such a true believer, and so certain that media wouldn't cover the January 5 meeting, that he's acted bemused at the whole affair even as he refuses Brazilian media requests.

16/ This new reporting underscores that the ongoing federal criminal investigation of Rudy Giuliani is desperately essential to American democracy, as it may only be through Giuliani's cooperation that we get a detailed accounting of the actions of Michael Flynn and Erik Prince.

17/ As I note in the article, we don't know what the Becks did or didn't do, only what they were in a position to do and had the motive to do and what from a distance it certainly appears they might have done. Why they are refusing to speak to media remains a significant mystery.

18/ More sinister is the fact that there are still at least two GOP senators in the Senate who received a presentation on manufactured Venezuelan "evidence" against Biden and the Democratic Party via Team Kraken and Eduardo Bolsonaro. And we don't yet know who those senators are.

19/ Lindell claims the attitudes of the senators were changed by the special election losses in Georgia, but they'd also have had the benefit of an expert on Venezuela—and several bad actors peddling disinformation about Venezuela—in deciding whether to aid the 1/6 insurrection.

20/ Remember, the FBI already knows the identity of every member of The BLT Prime Team, the Venezuela Gang, and Team Kraken. They raided the home and office of a man on all three teams (Giuliani) as well as the home of Erik Prince's lawyer (she and Prince were each on two teams).

21/ DOJ has a pending federal criminal referral on Erik Prince it ignored under Barr but presumably will now resuscitate. Three members of the BLT Prime team—the first also a member of the Venezuela Gang—have been indicted: Parnas, Fruman, Correia. Correia is in a federal prison.

22/ So when people ask, "Why isn't anyone doing anything about any of this?", the answer is, much has been done, is being done, and will be done—but none of it has been covered by the media in a way that underscores its connections to South America, election theft, and January 6.

23/ Some may think Lindell is the easiest person to turn in this operation, and there's an argument to be made there—putting aside his belief he can become Governor of Minnesota with Trump's aid in the same way Herbster is now running to be Governor of Nebraska with Trump's aid.

24/ The issue with Lindell is that he's the Carter Page of the whole scheme—meaning that he probably has a lot that he could disclose, but is so manifestly unwell and inarticulate and incomprehensible and bizarrely transfixed by his own belief that he wouldn't be useful in court.

25/ My sense is that Trump's agents and allies (here and abroad) are relying on exactly this: that Lindell—like Page—is so poorly socialized that while he's a weak link in the chain, he's also not likely to be someone with whom the FBI can create any sort of reliable partnership.

26/ I'd also note what I've long said, indeed said to an reporter from the Washington Post years ago: those involved in Trump's schemes are in many instances not just venal but fairly stupid, protected from consequence by the fact that the FBI doesn't often go after the powerful.

27/ My hope has been, with the mountain of evidence of wrongdoing, that the FBI will make an exception to its usual policy of protecting itself by avoiding run-ins with those who could harm it. I feel an armed insurrection and ongoing domestic insurgency justifies a policy shift.

28/ There are signs of a shift under Garland, but the DOJ is now years behind in pursuing this discrete band of criminals. And that's how it should be perceived: as a small band of international criminals. The scope/depth of their interconnections is almost impossible to diagram.