Thread by @SethAbramson

MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump Is Now Privately Confirming His Support of a Summer Coup of the Biden Administration; If the Former President Has Engaged in Even a Single Act to Advance This Treacherous Plot He is Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy and Must Be Arrested Immediately

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1399707794375426051

1/ Journalists need to be very careful in how they discuss this breaking news. Individuals who have provided cover for Trump repeatedly in the past—like Maggie Haberman—are reporting evidence of a possible seditious conspiracy as mere loose talk from an addled man. Sorry, but no.

2/ There are efforts afoot now in GA, AZ, NV, and WI to delegitimize Biden's victories there. Meanwhile, Trump advisors Flynn and Powell are saying that once those victories are delegitimized, the military should move in. If Trump is in on the conversations, it's a coup attempt.

3/ As anyone who has ever read a book or watched a movie or taken a history course knows, the most important element of a coup is the agreement of the individual who'll be installed as a nation's new president to participate in the installation. Without that there can be no coup.

4/ What Trump is privately doing, according to the NYT, is the *opposite* of what Lyndon Johnson famously did in saying that even if nominated he wouldn't run for president. Trump is telling the coup conspirators that he *will accept a re-installation* if they can make it happen.

5/ By confirming his willingness to participate in a coup, Trump allows the coup plotters to continue in their activities—but it's much more than that. If/when the plotters reach out to individuals in the military, any soldier's first question will be, "Is Donald Trump on board?"

6/ To be clear, I have *consistently* said that I do *not* believe the military would ever participate in a coup. The point of this thread isn't to suggest a coup will happen, but that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators must be investigated for seditious conspiracy immediately.

7/ We've been around this mountain with Trump before—and specifically on the question of conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and attempted crimes. You can be arrested for certain inchoate federal criminal offenses even if the crime you ultimately want to see committed doesn't occur.

8/ We don't have a federal criminal justice system that says a crime is only a crime after it's successful. I suspect that even a child would be able to see why. If that were how the system worked, criminals would *succeed* before we could start trying to undo what they had done.

9/ Instead, we have state/federal criminal justice systems that try to cut off criminal conspiracies at the pass once law enforcement has evidence the conspirators have taken at least one discrete step toward achieving their illegal ambitions.

That appears to have occurred here.

10/ Those of us who've practiced criminal law and also written political histories of Donald Trump's career in American politics know that his consistent means of trying to avoid criminal conspiracy charges is to have his discrete acts only be *words*—and words he can/will deny.

11/ The legal theory here is that a conspiracy requires both a "meeting of the minds" and a "discrete step" toward commission of the crime that is the object of the criminal conspiracy. The meeting of the minds is usually achieved through words—whereas the act is usually an act.

12/ As an attorney, I think law enforcement is likely to see this case incorrectly. A "meeting of the minds" occurred if Trump spoke approvingly with Flynn, Powell and Lindell—or any subset of these—about being reinstalled at the White House. The question is what happened *next*.

13/ If—as the NYT reports—Trump followed up on a series of meetings or calls with Team Kraken with conversations with third parties about his willingness to be reinstalled in the White House if the military can make it happen following "audits" in various states, that's an "act."

14/ No one plotting to participate in the first attempted U.S. coup since the Civil War is going to accept Powell's word on what Trump is willing to do. Or Lindell's. Or perhaps even Flynn's. People in a position to aid the coup are *going to need to hear from Trump themselves*.

15/ It's in this context—having already achieved a meeting of the minds with the coup plotters—that Trump picks up a phone and makes a phone call to DC people who are well-connected and tells them that he's willing to accept the U.S. presidency again if it can be secured for him.

16/ If you find this confusing, as clearly Haberman does, consider an alternative scenario: Trump learns that his top advisers are planning and advocating for a coup and he immediately goes to his blog and declares that he'll under no circumstances accept the presidency pre-2025.

17/ If Trump does that—I literally mean if he types about 10 words on his blog, which he could do in the next 5 minutes—the coup plot is officially dead. Over. Impossible. Irrelevant. A non-starter. There's literally no longer a fear of a coup in the United States in that moment.

18/ Instead, Trump starts making phone calls saying he's game. Trump starts volunteering information in private conversations saying that he's game. Trump makes sure that his co-conspirators are authorized to tell people that he's game.

Legally, these are "acts" in a conspiracy.

19/ Now imagine that, in this moment, a NYT "access journalist" who has repeatedly reported in a fashion friendly to the Trump family—including using sources she knows are untrustworthy—releases information she knew would get out anyway in a way that makes it seem utterly benign.

20/ And imagine this happens in the context of an ailing FBI establishment that's become terrified of its own shadow, unable to act against anyone rich, powerful, and/or famous who is in a position to hurt it, sadly willing only to arrest Trumpist *foot soldiers* by the hundreds.

21/ Imagine that this access journalist is so respected by major media that when she implies there's nothing surprising in historically stunning news about an ex-president's willingness to participate in a violent coup, the media takes her view as gospel. And the FBI is relieved.

22/ This is why America is in such danger. This should be *major news* nationwide. The FBI should be launching a seditious conspiracy investigation. There should be agents walking the lawn at Mar-a-Lago right now. Instead, it's just indie journalists on Twitter waving their arms.

23/ Access journalists like Haberman, cowards at the FBI who just want to protect the FBI—not America—and Republicans in Congress who only care about re-election have *so moved the Overton window* that the news Haberman reported can be reported *blithely*. Like it's just hot air.

24/ But it's worse than that, as when indie journalists and attorneys wave their arms and say "this is big" and then the NYT ignores it and Congress ignores it and the FBI ignores it people on social media say, "Hmm—I guess those indie journalists and attorneys were wrong, then?"

25/ Ask any American from 2014 if it's legal for a former president to have a "meeting of the minds" with coup plotters about a summer coup and then start making phone calls letting everyone know he's down for a coup, and what the *hell* do you think they'll say?

*It's illegal*.

(SOURCE) Please understand that the "August re-installation" plot comes from Team Kraken (which includes Powell, Flynn, Lindell, and others). Here's Lindell advocating this *specific plot* more than a month ago: newsweek.com/mike-lindell-s…

(SOURCE) Here's Lindell, of Team Kraken, saying the same thing in March: newsweek.com/mike-lindell-s…

(SOURCE) Here's Powell, of Team Kraken, saying the same thing this past weekend: newsweek.com/sidney-powell-…

(PS) So Trump isn't calling people up to make a joke. He's not just confused about how America works. He's calling people and making *specific reference* to a plot hatched by people he's met with repeatedly—people (like Flynn) who say a coup can succeed with military involvement.

(PS2) Trump *could* come out on his blog and say, "my references to being re-installed in the White House in August related to my anticipated success in future court cases I believe will be heard by SCOTUS, and I will not return to the White House under any other circumstances."

(PS3) And indeed, Team Kraken's wholly illusory litigation offers plausible deniability to what is actually—as Flynn made clear this past weekend—a plot involving the January 6 schemers/foot soldiers to complete a coup by force. But an FBI investigation would pierce that defense.

(PS4) When Team Kraken convenes a conference in its home base—Dallas—to declare to a room of angry insurrectionists that a violent military coup "should" happen, it's crystal clear to FBI agents that Lindell's fake litigation isn't the only thing now afoot. But the FBI won't act.

(PS5) You'll recall that Team Kraken member Lin Wood—a former Trump legal adviser—told an insurrectionist crowd that was demanding "someone do something [about getting Biden out of office]" that Trump is president and the military still obeys him. (Twitter has deleted the video.)

(PS6) Key to Team Kraken's plot is the idea—per Wood—that Trump signed the Insurrection Act in secret (he didn't) and can trigger it as he likes. Guess what Trump soldiers say is going on, per a new indictment? If Trump says "insurrection," the coup is on. independent.co.uk/news/world/ame…

(PS7) So you see the fire Trump is playing with: he gets deniability because of some fake Team Kraken suit; Team Kraken makes clear a coup is needed; Kraken tells the insurrectionists that if'll just get violent, Trump will declare an "insurrection" and the military will step in.

(PS8) To my knowledge, the first/only media outlet to report that the Proud Boys—by their own admission—dressed up as antifa on January 6 was PROOF. Their plan (and per Vanity Fair, Trump's) was to call up 10,000 troops on 1/6 if "antifa" violence erupted. sethabramson.substack.com/p/videos-point…

(PS9) Trump has created a ticking time bomb that even major-media analysts now admit—Liz Cheney admits; federal judges write in rulings—is likely to lead to another January 6 or (as Cheney says) worse. Yet no one does anything about it—and Haberman reports sedition as loose talk.

(PS10) I thought that, after January 6, we'd be done pussyfooting around Trump's sedition. Apparently we're not. Apparently we're going to watch as the pieces are put in place for another January 6—even as the FBI does no more than arrest foot soldiers and not coup plotters. /end

(NOTE) Don't tell me Trump's "plausible deniability" narrative is solid. He has no case before SCOTUS or headed to SCOTUS. He's 0-84 in election cases. There's no evidence of fraud. There's no legal mechanism to undo an election. Only a coup accomplishes what he says will happen.