Thread by @SethAbramson

(🔒) MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Evidence Mounts of Team Trump Plot to Occupy the Capitol on January 6

This is without a doubt both the longest and most important report PROOF has ever issued. I hope you'll subscribe, read, and share. A thread follows hereafter. sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaki…

1/ I think I have to start by saying that the article atop this thread likely will take over an hour to read and process. There is no possibility I can do justice to it here, and I hope me threading on it now will not give the misimpression that its revelations can be summarized.

2/ Having said that, I deliberately gave the article an unambiguous title. All the evidence we have—every scrap, all taken from public records and major-media reporting—indicates the plan on January 6 was to force a postponement of the joint session via occupation of the Capitol.

3/ And every scrap of evidence indicates that this plan was jointly established by Trump's legal team and Stop the Steal, and that Trump was aware of the plan and took concrete actions constituting a criminal conspiracy in support of that plan. The plan required paramilitary aid.

4/ To say that the plan required paramilitary aid is *not* to say that those who devised the plan knew in advance whether or not violence would be required. As to that, the view appeared to be that the less said the better. It was simply known that the Capitol had to be occupied.

5/ The article above gathers a mountain of evidence—testimonial, documentary, curatorial—establishing that both Trump's legal team and the Stop the Steal leadership, who together hosted Trump's January 2 pre-insurrection conference call, have confessed to planning an occupation.

6/ The article also goes through Donald Trump's actions before and during the attack, establishing that his actions were explicitly, repeatedly, and unambiguously focused on one thing and one thing only: ensuring that the occupation of the Capitol went on for as long as possible.

7/ Prior to this reporting, it was presumed that Trump's actions were merely spiteful—he wanted Congress (and perhaps the country) to suffer his wrath, through the instrument of his supporters, for as long as possible.

Trump may indeed have been wrathful, but he also had a plan.

8/ As a Trump biographer, I've always said Trump isn't particularly bright, he just has great instincts for self-preservation and self-advancement—the way that I say of my rescue hound Scout, who doesn't even seem to know her name, that her IQ jumps 50 points if food is involved.

9/ So when I say that the evidence confirms "Trump had a plan," I'm not saying Trump devised the plan—he did not—or even fully appreciated all its *implications* (which he may or may not have been able to do, but it's a moot point, as he really didn't care about all the details).

10/ Indeed, the dry run for the occupation plan was masterminded by Ali Alexander—head of Stop the Steal—in Georgia in November. While Alex Jones of InfoWars and Stop the Steal was part of that dry run, as were the Proud Boys, and while Roger Stone would then be brought aboard...

11/ ...for the second dry run in Washington in December—not with more Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—it is not clear that Trump even became *aware* of what was possible until he was alerted to it via Alexander's contacts with the White House in late November and throughout December.

12/ It was during those contacts—and Trump's contacts with his legal team and political advisers in the Oval Office in mid-December—that the bones of a plot involving January 6 emerged. The plot was simple—have GOP-led state legislatures decertify Biden's win by legislative fiat.

13/ PROOF subscribers who've visited the "Podcast" section of the publication and listened to the "November Nightmare" episode of my 2020 limited-run podcast—PROOF: A PRE-ELECTION PODCAST SPECIAL—will know this plot is broadly the one I predicted before the election...in October.

14/ What Trump *hadn't* counted on was that it would be as difficult as it was to get state legislatures to convene "special sessions" to investigate and/or immediately decertify Biden's win in the battleground states, particularly these three: Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

15/ The Trumpworld expert on interfering with or forcing special sessions—technically, by January 6 Trump needed both—was Ali Alexander of Stop the Steal. Alexander had spoken to Trump enough times pre-election and immediately post-election that he'd gotten a nickname from Trump.

16/ (That nickname—perhaps for obvious reasons—was "Sammy." Alexander announced it at the January 5 Freedom Plaza rally he helped Matt Couch to MC. If you see pictures of Alexander you'll understand that Trump wasn't being at all creative here, and in fact was being a bit cruel.)

17/ It'll blow your mind—it did mine—when you hear the strategy Alexander had developed, by mid-November, regarding how to *force* a special session *or* disrupt the proper governmental functions of a legislative body. Here's the strategy he'd devised, and shared with Team Trump:

18/
1⃣ Attract a giant mob to the Capitol where the legislators work.
2⃣ Surround the building.
3⃣ Breach the building.
4⃣ Occupy the building.
5⃣ Disrupt all functions occurring within the building until you are (in Alexander's words) "appeased" in all of your political demands.

19/ If that sounds familiar, it should. It's what happened in DC on Insurrection Day.

It'd already happened in Georgia seven weeks earlier, though it wasn't successful—which is why Alexander honed his methods in December and why Trump had to try to coerce Raffensperger by phone.

20/ By January 2 Trump had taken his Raffensperger plot to galactic dimensions, addressing a group of 290 state legislators in a private conference call about which (and I just can't emphasize this enough) his political and legal teams thereafter lied as to *every single detail*.

21/ Trump believed the January 2 call could be enough to force special sessions in sufficient states to decertify Biden's win—he was legally/politically/logistically wrong about every part of that, but he didn't know it or wouldn't see it—so he needed the joint session postponed.

22/ So his team—indeed, he *specifically*—turned to Alexander, who knew how to get that done. But he also turned to his Willard Hotel "war room," and OAN, and his allies at the Pentagon, in ways that make how all this played out between January 2 and January 6 incredibly complex.

23/ There's no need to take my word for it—everything here, as in all PROOF articles, is fully sourced; you can review the sources yourself.

Any PROOF subscriber will tell you—having read prior PROOF reports and (soon) this too—that they know the answer to the January 6 mystery.

24/ I'm thrilled that members of the House January 6 Committee follow the PROOF project. I'm honored that the Committee cited PROOF in its action against Bannon. I hope I've given all readers some sense of what's happening with all this. And PROOF subscribers have the full story.

25/ The 150+ articles at PROOF related to the insurrection are the product of hundreds and hundreds of hours of work. The publication has a $5 subscription—the lowest Substack allows—and if you read all of it, there will be no mystery left as to January 6. sethabramson.substack.com