Thread by @SethAbramson

(🆚) NEW: The Arizona audit. #KremlinCruz. The Oath Keepers. Trump's January 4 speech in Georgia. The Three Percenters. The mystery 19th and 20th attendees at Trump's January 5 war council. It all comes together here. I hope you'll subscribe, read, and RT. sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-new-re…

1/ ICYMI, here's Part I (also "🆚", via subscription): sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-new-re…

2/ And ICYMI, here's Part II (also "🆚"): sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-new-re…

3/ Media has refused to cover the January 5 war council and nobody—not anyone I've talked to in media, nor anyone I've talked to outside media—can explain why. It is unquestionably a necessary focus of any federal or congressional investigation into the events of January 6, 2021.

4/ The AP mentioned the meeting once, as part of an unrelated article. It was given stunning information by Doyle Beck, but never followed up on it. The Omaha World Herald has mentioned it twice and the Alabama Political Reporter (working from the reporting at PROOF) three times.

5/ As soon as the Alabama Political Reporter looked into the event, it was lied to by a sitting US senator. The Omaha World Herald likewise found Charles Herbster had lied to it about where he went after the January 5 meeting—not home to Nebraska, but to Florida with the Trumps.

6/ The AP wasn't even reporting on the event and it was lied to: Doyle Beck left out 15 of the event's 20 attendees; Navarro contradicted Herbster and said he wasn't there; Giuliani pretended—just weeks after the meeting—he couldn't recall it, and would have to "check his diary."

7/ Giuliani then never got back to the AP.

Of course he didn't, because—as PROOF has detailed across dozens of articles on the event, literally the only media outlet in the United States covering it—the number of lies told about that meeting *dwarfs* any other of Trump's career.

8/ More lies—and indeed more audacious lies—have been told about this January 5, 2021 pre-insurrection war council at Trump International Hotel in Washington than even Trump's meetings with Vladimir Putin in Europe. Team Trump was *more* forthcoming about *those* secret meetings.

9/ I've now spent hundreds of hours developing an attendee list for the meeting; a catalogue of the lies told about it and why they matter; and every piece of the event's logistics. The one remaining mystery is who the 19th and 20th attendees were. We know they were US senators.

10/ Of the attendees we *do* know about, two—Doyle Beck and Daniel Beck—at first blush made no sense as attendees at what was clearly the most important, secretive, and exclusive Trump political strategy session of the 2020 election cycle. So I've written a *lot* about these two.

11/ What this massive, three-part exposé at PROOF has done is a deep dive into never-before-reported facts about these two mysterious January 5 meeting attendees. And what I discovered was that their ties to events surrounding January may be *more* interesting than anyone else's.

12/ There are several January 6 plotlines these men may help us understand:

🟥 Stop the Steal's January 6 text-messaging network
🟧 Contact between Team Trump and Stop the Steal
🟨 Contact between Team Trump and the Oath Keepers
🟩 Team Kraken conspiracy theories about Venezuela

13/ But that's not it. This exposé argues that the presence of Doyle and Daniel Beck at Trump International could also help us unravel two more key January 6 mysteries:

🟦 The identity of the 19th January 5 meeting attendee
🟪 The identity of the 20th January 5 meeting attendee

14/ That's not all, either, because the story of Doyle and Daniel Beck also holds fascinating narrative intersections with these two key topics:

🟫 The ongoing Arizona "fraudit"
⬛️ The end-times, secessionist, and faux-anti-Communist ideologies at the heart of Trump's insurgency

15/ It's increasingly clear—from the interviews with Ali Alexander and the Doyle Beck social media feed discussed in this exposé—that in service of his ego, Trump has unleashed terrifying extremist ideologies/forces he can't control. These people believe we are in a Holy War now.

16/ And #KremlinCruz is at the center of this.

He's at the center of it in a way even I hadn't realized until I published these three articles at PROOF.

17/ Nearly all these committed insurrectionists were first Cruz supporters. Trump was seen as not smart enough, not religious enough, not principled enough, and not competent enough to lead the Holy War that these people wanted to bring to America.

It was supposed to be *Cruz*.

18/ Now we hear the insurrectionist leaders are done with Donald Trump because he abandoned them. The leader they never really wanted is now seen as a turncoat in the Holy War—which, where secular, is about white supremacy—and it's created a power vacuum. usatoday.com/story/news/pol…

19/ The insurrection is a can't stop/won't stop freight train. It continues whether Trump is indicted in New York or DC or Georgia or at the federal level or not. And there's one man who has positioned himself—selling out his wife and father to do it—as the next insurgent leader.

20/ I'm not talking about whether America will *elect* Ted Cruz—as it's now conventional wisdom on CNN and MSNBC and increasingly elsewhere that the GOP doesn't intend on having America continue with free and fair elections. GOP legislatures won't accept Democratic victories now.

21/ Cruz isn't electable; he *is* installable. He's the insurrectionist leader the insurrection wanted, and if these "election integrity"—voter suppression—bills pass in many of the 45 states they're pending in, the question will only be who the GOP *base* wants as POTUS in 2024.

22/ So the question of whether Ted Cruz didn't just object to Biden's electors on January 6 but was part of the plot to stoke insurrection in the United States is now central to the future of American democracy. The #KremlinCruz meme is deadly serious, because Cruz is dangerous.

23/ On the left, we laugh at Cruz because of his Cancun trip and his emasculation at the tiny hands of Trump and his obvious fraudulence—but nothing even close to perfection is a requirement on the Right anymore.

They want a smart, conniving, *focused* zealot. Which Ted Cruz is.

24/ As a Trump presidential historian and a journalist, editor and journalism professor who runs a media outlet focused primarily on January 6, I'm telling you that—crazy as it seems to those of us who aren't in a cult—Ted Cruz may now be one of the most dangerous men in America.

25/ Too many political analysts failed to take Trump seriously. Some of us wrote on the day he announced his campaign that he was a threat to America.

Too many analysts now think the next insurrectionist leader will be a Trump clone. But it may well be an "improvement" on Trump.

26/ Insurgencies evolve. What they require in their early stages is different from what they require in their middle ones. If—as appears to be the case—paramilitaries and secessionists are abandoning Trump (in part because they see indictments may now come) where do they go next?

27/ And critically, where does the insurrection go now if a) GOP establishment support—the establishment hates Cruz—is irrelevant, as the insurgent base is running the show, and b) it doesn't matter if someone's "electable" because free and fair elections are a thing of the past?

28/ Cruz isn't, finally, just silly or fugly or unctuous or sleazy or slippery or any of the other things many of us consider him to be if—in fact—he's the next big insurrectionist leader, and was on the ground floor of the January 6 insurrection well *beyond* what we saw on TV.

29/ It's easy to forget Cruz came in second in the GOP in 2016—with no one else even close. It's easy to forget that, unlike Trump, he's not facing possible indictment, is actually—not complicatedly—loved by evangelicals, and threw over his own family to be next in line to Trump.

30/ All the evidence we have now places Ted Cruz as the 19th attendee at Trump's pre-insurrection war council—an event apparently so seditious no one's told the truth about it yet. Though there are other candidates—and I rank them by the evidence we have—Cruz is a runaway first.

(END) I beg you, America, don't sleep on #KremlinCruz or the forces he's been massing behind him since 2014—forces that don't give a damn about democracy or free/fair elections, and are ready for violence. The insurrection is evolving, and as it evolves it becomes MORE dangerous.

(PHOTOS)

(UPDATE) For those rightly mentioning Ron DeSantis as a viable 2024 Trumpist candidate if Trump is indicted and/or decides not to run, I agree with you. But the chance the Gaetz case splashes back on DeSantis is non-zero, and Cruz already has a national base that DeSantis lacks.