Thread by @SethAbramson

(🔐) NEW: Trump Addressed Extremists Via Zoom 96 Hours Before the Capitol Attack—Some of Whom Thereafter Trespassed on Capitol Grounds

This is by far the largest and most complex report ever published at PROOF. I hope you’ll subscribe, read, and RETWEET. sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-trump-ad…

1/ I am not really sure what to do, here, thread-wise. This is a novella-length work that probably takes a few hours to read and covers so many topics that there are individual parentheticals in the text that I think entire investigative reports could be written about. Seriously.

2/ There’s no summarizing this report—at least not accurately. But I’ll say (and no one who reads this will disagree, I promise) that it covers, as *one* of its topics, what is unquestionably the greatest and most immediate threat to the United States today. And I can prove it.

3/ One of the people discussed in this novella is my former law school constitutional law professor—Ronald Reagan’s former Solicitor General. The man who gave me the lowest grade of my entire law school career. There’s not a single thing this very smart man and I ever agreed on.

4/ 72 hours ago, this man, who I haven’t spoken to for 25 years—and with whom I agree on nothing—called what I’ve just termed the greatest threat to our democracy a “slow-moving coup d’état” that’s likely to end our democracy in 2023. It is the first thing we have ever agreed on.

5/ Lest you think I’m somehow being coy here—trying to avoid revealing what this new PROOF article is about—I think you’ll now see how this anecdote ties into the best summary I can possibly offer of what this report covers. First, it’s *partly* about ISL. brennancenter.org/our-work/resea…

6/ But as all of you know, PROOF primarily covers January 6—a major event from 2021—*not* events that are coming in 2023. So how am I writing about the greatest threat to democracy but *also* writing about an event that happened more than a year and a half ago?

Well, here’s how.

7/ America is over starting in Summer 2023. The Supreme Court will rule 5-4 for the North Carolina General Assembly in a case that makes voting purposeless—as state legislatures gerrymandered to within an inch of their lives can choose the next POTUS in 2024. Which will be Trump.

8/ But what no one realizes is that Donald Trump and his lawyers wanted what we now know as Moore v. Harper (the 2023 case I mentioned, to be argued in December 2022) to be a different case entirely—one they brought in January 2021.

And they were *so close* to getting their way.

9/ They were close in part because they had the votes. And they *knew* they did. Let me repeat: ISL could have given Trump the White House in 2021; all five (some would say six) of the coup teams he had operating pre-January 6 knew it; and they were *right*. They *had the votes*.

10/ The only thing they didn’t have is time. It’s hard to get something scheduled to happen in mid-2023 to actually happen in early 2021—even if you have the votes. On the other hand, you can’t possibly imagine what Ginni and Clarence Thomas were willing to do to reinstall Trump.

11/ Roberts won’t vote for ISL. This is known. (Despite his hatred of voting rights.) So the vote now is 5-4; the votes are locked in from past public statements. Which means that if Clarence Thomas isn’t impeached for being an insurrectionist before next summer, America is over.

12/ Am I being clear enough? I hope so.

13/ The apex of the post-election/pre-insurrection plot to use ISL to reinstall Trump as president came on January 2, 2021, during a national conference call Trump held with hundreds and hundreds of insurrectionists. PROOF is one of the few media outlets to ever report this call.

14/ But Trump had the votes in SCOTUS on January 2. So why did he need a call allegedly only for GOP state legislators? He had already created seven slates of fake electors which if (as Bannon predicted) SCOTUS “sent the election back to the states,” those legislators would pick.

15/ You will recall that I said that the one thing Trump was missing was *time*. And the only way he could get that time was for the Capitol to be overrun and occupied. Which is why he lied about who was on that January 2 call. Many more people than just legislators were on it.

16/ The number of Trumpworld figures who appear in this report is almost beyond counting. Trump. Don Jr. Bannon. Alexander. Stone. Jones. Raffensperger. Finchem. D’Souza. Eastman. Giuliani. The Thomases. Roberts. Gorsuch. Navarro. The Kremers. Many others. It is a sweeping story.

17/ And then there’s what *isn’t* here, but what this report directly informs. If you never fully understood why the “Georgia Letter” that Klukowski and Eastman and Clark schemed up getting the DOJ to send out on January 3 *matters*, this PROOF report answers that for you. Fully.

18/ In short, Trump spent the 120 hours before the attack on the Capitol trying to ensure that as many *radicals*—not just legislators—as possible understood that he had a real chance to remain President of the United States if he just had enough time to get to the Supreme Court.

19/ Did you ever wonder why the primary Trump January 6 war room was filled with lawyers? Why it was *lawyers* calling the Capitol in mid-attack demanding more delays, why it a *lawyer* (Eastman) shrugged when the White House Counsel’s Office warned him he was fomenting violence?

20/ Trump’s lawyers were willing to do/cause anything they had to to buy themselves the time they felt they needed to get to *Clarence Thomas*.

That’s why nearly all of them are now on the road to being disbarred and/or have pleaded the Fifth Amendment under federal questioning.