Thread by @JJohnsonLaw

HOW ARE WE TALKING ABOUT ANYTHING BUT THIS???

https://twitter.com/jjohnsonlaw/status/1454879618109001729

Come to Washington, Trump tweeted to his supporters on the Saturday before Christmas, issuing a clarion call for them to gather and protest on Jan. 6: “Be there, will be wild!”

His supporters immediately responded on the pro-Trump forum TheDonald.win under a thread titled “TRUMP TWEET. DADDY SAYS BE IN DC ON JAN. 6.”

As Jan. 6 neared Trump ratcheted up his calls for action & the pressure on Pence, whose role was to preside over the joint session. Trump embraced a cast of renegade lawyers who argued that Pence could reject electors from a handful of states &, ultimately nullify Biden’s victory

Trump primed his base to see Pence as either a hero or villain. “I hope Mike Pence comes through for us,” he said at a rally Jan.6. “If he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him as much.” Supporters knew where the president wanted them to gather on Jan. 6 & whom to target.

Again and again, as the pivotal day approached, top law enforcement officials fielded warnings of what was to come, but failed to respond in kind.

The violent events of Jan. 6 had been months in the making.
Trump’s first allusion to the notion that Congress could determine the winner of the presidential race came more than a month before voters went to the polls, on Sept. 26, at a rally outside Harrisburg, Pa.

After rattling off his usual tropes, Trump offered a new line: “I don’t want to go back to Congress either, even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress. Does everyone understand that? I think it’s 26 to 22 or something because it’s counted one vote per state.”

While the line didn’t register in Harrisburg, congressional Democrats in Washington took note. In early August, Nancy Pelosi had quietly instructed members of her leadership team to begin contingency planning should Trump attempt to overturn the election in Congress.

3 days after Harrisburg Trump made a more menacing declaration at the 1st debate. Asked by Chris Wallace if he would condemn white supremacists & militia groups for their part in deadly violence during the summer Trump insisted the violence was coming from the left not the right.

Biden pressed Trump to specifically condemn the Proud Boys, a far-right group known for street brawls with liberal protesters. When Wallace sought an answer, Trump said, "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”

On Parler, the social media network popular with conservatives and hate groups, the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, responded almost immediately:

Enrique Tarrio@NobleLead
So Proud of my guys right now.

Parler
Enrique Tarrio@NobleLead
Standing by sir.

In the wee hours of the morning after the election, as it appeared that he could be in danger of losing, Trump stepped before supporters in the East Room and falsely claimed that the election was rigged.

The tweets and other social media posts by Trump, his son Eric Trump and members of his campaign began to activate his supporters, especially in the must-win battleground states that he was on track to lose. Mentions of “stop the steal” exploded online.

Trump spokesman Tim Murtaugh claimed without evidence that there were shenanigans at a ballot-processing center in Detroit preventing Trump’s votes from being counted fairly. By that afternoon, the president’s supporters had converged on the facility.

By nightfall, protesters had also congregated outside government offices in Maricopa County, Ariz., where over 300,000 ballots remained to be counted.

Protests organized under the hashtag #StopTheSteal soon spread to Atlanta, Harrisburg and Las Vegas. The movement was being promoted on a website called stopthesteal.us, which listed all of the protests in each state.

The site was run by Ali Alexander, a far-right activist who had been invited to the White House social media summit in 2019 after questioning whether then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) should be called a Black American.

As Trump refused to concede, angry supporters and self-styled militias geared up to fight. Quickly, plans for a “Million MAGA March” in Washington on Nov. 14 galvanized figures known for their hard-edge rhetoric.

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the anti-government Oath Keepers, who declared in September that “civil war is here, right now” because of violence rattling Portland, Ore., said he was prepared to engage in violence on Trump’s command should he invoke the Insurrection Act.

Days before the march, Rhodes appeared at a Stop the Steal rally in Northern Virginia. Live-streaming the event on the Oath Keepers’ YouTube channel, Rhodes told the audience that Trump supporters “must declare that Joe Biden is not … anyone’s president. He’s a usurper.”

Extremists associated with the Three Percenters planned to join the Oath Keepers on Nov. 14. Nicholas Fuentes, leader of the white-nationalist “Groyper” movement who was present at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, called on his allies to join him in DC

A key set of Trump’s grass-roots supporters also jumped in. Former tea party activist Amy Kremer helped rebrand the pro-Trump group Women for America First into a Stop the Steal planning engine, propelling a wider audience of Trump supporters into action.

Trump was growing more agitated by the day as informal advisers and outside allies fed him increasingly wild claims, including that the vote may have been manipulated from overseas and that some voting machine software had weighted Biden ballots to count more than Trump ones.

Trump gave Giuliani and Powell an ample platform to promote their claims, sidelining his campaign lawyers. On Nov. 19, the duo stepped before reporters at the Republican National Committee and laid out a dizzying explanation of how the election was rigged.

In the end of November, some Senate Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, privately pressed Barr to make a public statement knocking down baseless claims about massive voter fraud. Barr put them off, but on Nov. 23, privately told Trump the claims of fraud were nonsense.

In Georgia Trump’s claims led to threats against election officials. A technician for Dominion in Atlanta who was on video transferring routine files between computers was targeted by QAnon accounts with a GIF of a swinging noose & calls for him to be hung. He went into hiding.

“Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone is going to get killed,” said Gabriel Sterling, a top Republican official in GA.

Days later, Alexander, the Stop the Steal activist, raised the stakes in a tweet: “I am willing to give my life for this fight,” he wrote. The post was retweeted by the Arizona GOP (🚨) — which asked its followers whether they, too, were willing to die.

On Dec. 12 thousands of pro-Trump supporters & protesters converged on D.C., including what police estimated were — as advertised in advance by extremists — about 700 Proud Boys.
“This isn’t over, this is just beginning,” Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson told the crowd.

At the rally, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was urging the president to declare martial law and redo the election, urged the crowd to keep fighting. “There are still avenues” for a Trump win, he said ominously.

Trump flew over the crowd in a helicopter and cheered on his supporters.

Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA

Dec. 12, 9:59 a.m.

“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” the president tweeted on Dec. 19, sending out the pivotal message that set the congressional certification as the final showdown: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

The exhortation, more than almost any other words or action by Trump after the election, seemed to electrify his most devoted followers in chat groups and websites like TheDonald.win. Some took it as an order.

A confidential informant sent his FBI contact dozens of exchanges the next day between self-described members of the Three Percenters. Trump’s tweet, combined with a video the president later posted, titled “Fight for Trump,” were “literally” taken together as a “call to arms.”

Ali Alexander’s team was launching multiple websites, including MarchToSaveAmerica.com, to promote rallies in D.C. on Jan. 6. The site called on supporters to march from the White House to the Capitol at 1 p.m. “Take a stand with President Trump and the #StopTheStealCoalition.”

The site listed groups backing the effort, including Women for America First; Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, who promised to send 80 to D.C. on Jan. 6; & the Rule of Law Defense Fund, the nonprofit fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association.

Pence and his team were being lobbied by a clutch of pro-Trump lawyers including John Eastman, a conservative attorney who had written an op-ed questioning Harris’s U.S. citizenship and whether she was eligible to run for vice president.

In tweets, interviews and statements, Trump harangued the FBI, governors, state lawmakers & local election officials. “The 2020 election was rigged. It was a scam and the whole world is watching and they’re laughing at our country. They’re laughing at us,” Trump said.

Behind the scenes, Trump focused on 3 maneuvers to overturn the election. He pressed DOJ officials to SAY there were voting irregularities. He goaded state officials to reopen the counts. And he kept lobbying his vice president to simply cast the results aside on Jan. 6

Trump’s supporters followed his lead, bombarding Republican officials in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona to take action. “It’s pretty apparent you don’t know everything that is going on,” Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R) reassured one constituent in a Dec. 29 email.

Police found a pig’s head, smeared with fake blood, on Pelosi’s driveway in San Francisco, along with the message “Cancel rent, we want everything” scrawled on the garage door.

On Twitter, Trump hyped the January 6 event.

I will be there. Historic day!

BE A PART OF HISTORY!

January 6th - arrive by 9AM

White House Ellipse

Trump met with Pence and John Eastman in the Oval Office. Eastman wrote that Pence could exercise unprecedented powers over the certification process. He argued the vice president could set aside the electoral college votes and gavel Trump in as the next president.

On Jan. 5 Trump again pressed Pence to forestall Biden’s confirmation: Just delay the vote to certify the election; send it back to the states, the president urged. Pence told Trump he would talk to him again in the morning.

As Trump watched on tv as rioters broke into the Capitol, he raged about Pence. At 2:24 p.m., the moment that Pence & family were endangered by violent marauders calling him a traitor — “Hang Mike Pence!” some of them chanted — Trump made clear in a tweet whose side he was on:

Kevin McCarthy called Trump and said, “You have to denounce this.” “You know what I see, Kevin? I see people who are more upset about the election than you are. They like Trump more than you do,” the president replied.

At the White House, Trump issued an unambiguous instruction at 8:17 a.m. to Pence, who was preparing to preside over the joint session of Congress at 1 p.m.

About the rioting crowd, Guilfoyle said to Trump that the swelling crowd outside represented a national consensus. “They’re just reflect the will of the people. This is the will of the people.”

At 11:39 a.m., Trump departed the White House by motorcade for the quick drive to the Ellipse, where he gathered with aides, allies and family members beneath a white tent before taking the rally stage.

And still more warnings appeared.

Graham, one of Trump’s closest friends in Congress, called Ivanka Trump repeatedly with suggestions for what the president should say. “You need to get these people out of here. This thing is going south. This is not good. You’re going to have to tell these people to stand down.”

Trump still did not address the crisis on camera or instructed his supporters to go home when, at 4:05 p.m., Biden appeared on television from Wilmington, Del.

Senators from both parties watching from their secure room at the Capitol complex applauded. “It was like, wow, we have a leader who said what needed to be said,” Romney said.

Finally, Trump videotaped a statement but he did not stick to the script his speechwriters had composed & had to record at least 3 takes to get one his aides felt was palatable enough to share with the public. “That was actually the best one,” a senior White House official said.

Trump chimed in at 6:01 p.m. with a new tweet that, much like his Rose Garden video message, propagated his election fraud lie while telling the “great patriots” to “go home with love & in peace.”

“Remember this day forever!”

At 9:02 p.m. Pelosi gaveled the House into session. After everything that happened, all the death and destruction, nearly two-thirds of the Republican conference, 121 members, voted against counting Arizona’s votes. 138 members voted against counting the tally from Pennsylvania.