US Officials Turned Regime Change Tactics Developed Abroad Against Trump, Evidence Suggests
US Officials Turned Regime Change Tactics Developed Abroad Against Trump, Evidence Suggests
US intelligence and security agencies appear to have used the “color revolution” playbook, including “lawfare” and street protests
This week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump is disqualified from holding office and cannot be on the state’s ballot in the 2024 Republican primary. The court’s ruling, journalists and legal experts said, was justified because Trump incited the January 6 “insurrection” in which a violent mob stormed the Capitol to assist Trump in overthrowing the government. This event was, Democrats have argued, nothing less than an attempted coup.
Yet as Public’s reporting over the past year has shown, the January 6 Capitol riot was not a premeditated action that rises to the level of a “coup” or “insurrection.” There were dozens of confidential informants and undercover agents present at the riot, some of whom allegedly encouraged the rioters. And former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund has also claimed that key leaders decided not to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol despite warnings that the rally could get out of hand.
This information, along with video evidence from recently released January 6 tapes, suggests that the storming of the Capitol was the result of a major security failure, and that law enforcement informants or officers may have allowed, or even encouraged, it to happen.
What’s more, the January 6 prosecutors have failed to produce evidence clearly linking the rioters to Trump or his associates. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, in choosing not to indict Trump for inciting an insurrection, tacitly conceded that Trump’s words leading up to the riot were legal speech, however false and inflammatory.
Many Democrats argue that Trump’s guilt is not because of his rhetoric, so the First Amendment does not protect him. “The problem was not Trump’s speech, but his alleged actions,” wrote David Cole, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Ben Wizner, ACLU’s Director of Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, in August.
These actions, the ACLU attorneys said, included Trump’s attempt to get states to invalidate election results and to send alternative slates of electors, as well as his effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results.
“Of course, many of these actions involved communication,” wrote Cole and Wizner.
“But the fact that a crime includes speech does not turn the First Amendment into a defense. A conspiracy is an agreement to commit a crime and almost always takes the form of words.”
But Trump’s efforts to contest the election were political maneuvers that Democrats had previously proposed in both 2016 and in 2020. In 2016, liberal journalists implied that competing elector slates were legal, and pushed elector schemes that would allow Hillary Clinton to win.
And as Public reported on Wednesday, political operatives and journalists held a summit called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) in 2020. During the TIP simulation exercise, the players plotted how to challenge the election results in the event of a Trump victory, and in one of their simulations they had states send alternate slates of electors. Yet when Trump and his team attempted this strategy, Democrats decided it was a criminal felony.
Democrats’ “insurrection” narrative rests on manipulative arguments and cynical language games, and this narrative is being used to destroy a foundation of our democracy: the people’s right to vote for the candidate of their choice.
As much as we may dislike it, whether it’s Clinton saying that Trump is an illegitimate president because of “Russian disinformation,” or whether it’s Trump saying that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president because of vote-by-mail and ballot harvesting schemes, losers have a legal right to deny, challenge, and contest elections. This right is actually part of what makes our elections free and fair.
The idea of imprisoning political rivals or preventing candidates from running is something Democrats justifiably condemned seven years ago when Trump threatened to jail his opponent Hillary Clinton. Said CNN’s Dana Bash in 2016, “What makes this country different from countries with dictators in Africa or Stalin or Hitler or any of those countries with dictators and totalitarian leaders is when they took over, they put their opponents in jail.”
Before the 2016 election, CNN compiled a list of country leaders who had imprisoned their political opposition. Doing this in the United States, CNN suggested, would be to follow in the footsteps of Augusto Pinochet, Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, Robert Mugabe, and Kim Jong Un. “A line was crossed that I don’t know has been crossed in my lifetime, maybe ever. He threatened to jail his opponent,” CNN’s Van Jones said.
If Trump had really led a “coup,” he would have seized the means of communication (i.e., the legacy media and social media) and secured the support of high-level military and intelligence officials. This “coup” would have involved attempts to take political prisoners and to control major civil society institutions.
What the Democrats have done since 2016, and what they continue to do now, much more closely resembles a coup d’état than what Trump and his allies accomplished. Through their soft coup, the Democratic Party and government bureaucrats worked with the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to control communications and construct a vast censorship complex across social media. Since 2020, they have issued extremely harsh sentences for hundreds of Trump’s January 6 supporters, many of them for non-violent offenses. And now, in 2023, Democrats are trying to prevent their only real political challenger from ever taking office again.