https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/politics/trump-insurrection-act-protests.html Trump Aides Prepared Insurrection Act Order During Debate Over Protests President Donald Trump never invoked the act, but fresh details underscore the intensity of his interest last June in using active-duty military to curb unrest. Responding to interest from President Donald J. Trump, White House aides drafted a proclamation last year to invoke the Insurrection Act in case Mr. Trump moved to take the extraordinary step of deploying active-duty troops in Washington to quell the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, two senior Trump administration officials said. The aides drafted the proclamation on June 1, 2020, during a heated debate inside the administration over how to respond to the protests. Mr. Trump, enraged by the demonstrations, had told the attorney general, William P. Barr, the defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, that he wanted thousands of active-duty troops on the streets of the nation’s capital, one of the officials said. Mr. Trump was talked out of the plan by the three officials. But a separate group of White House staff members wanted to leave open the option for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to call in the military to patrol the streets of the capital. They decided it would be prudent to have the necessary document vetted and ready in case the unrest in Washington worsened or the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, declined to take measures such as a citywide curfew, which she ultimately put in place. According to one former senior administration official, Mr. Trump was aware that the document was prepared. He never invoked the act, and in a statement to The New York Times he denied that he had wanted to deploy active-duty troops. “It’s absolutely not true and if it was true, I would have done it,” Mr. Trump said. But the new details about internal White House deliberations on a pivotal day in his presidency underscore the intensity of Mr. Trump’s instinct to call on the active-duty military to deal with a domestic issue. And they help to flesh out the sequence of events that would culminate later in the day with Mr. Trump’s walk across Lafayette Park to St. John’s Church so he could pose in front of it holding a Bible, a move that coincided with a spasm of violence between law enforcement and protesters camped near the White House. Although the main elements of what happened in and around the White House on June 1, 2020, have been well established, some aspects remain a subject of dispute. A federal watchdog concluded this month that the United States Park Police had been planning to clear protesters from Lafayette Park well before they learned that Mr. Trump was going to walk through the area. And a federal judge this week partly dismissed claims in a civil suit accusing the Trump administration of abusing its power in clearing the park. A Trump adviser, echoing the former president’s insistence he did not want to deploy active-duty troops, said that Mr. Trump rejected the option when presented with it by advisers, and maintained that had he done so, he would have “owned the problem” politically. Despite being convinced not to invoke the act, Mr. Trump continued to bring up the idea of deploying active-duty military in the weeks that followed, as unrest unfolded in major cities including New York, Chicago, and Portland, Ore., the officials said. Their accounts comport with others, including one in a forthcoming book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender that says Mr. Trump repeatedly urged General Milley and other top military and law enforcement officials throughout the summer to confront the protesters physically, according to excerpts from Mr. Bender’s book published by CNN. The basic facts of Mr. Trump’s deliberations about how to respond to the protests that broke out after the killing of Mr. Floyd have been widely reported. NBC News reported on June 1, 2020, that Mr. Trump was considering invoking the Insurrection Act. CNN later reported the White House wanted to deploy 10,000 troops onto the streets but that Mr. Esper and General Milley pushed back on the idea. But the new details help illustrate the intensity of Mr. Trump’s demands for militaristic action to curb the protests. In the Oval Office on the morning of June 1, 2020, Mr. Trump was furious about the televised images he had seen of the unrest in Washington and elsewhere. For roughly 20 minutes, according to the former officials, Mr. Trump went on about how to contain the protests. General Milley and Mr. Esper appeared particularly stunned by Mr. Trump’s eruption, according to one of the officials. Throughout Mr. Trump’s presidency, he had a broad view of his powers as president, claiming that he could take an array of aggressive actions using federal authorities and military personnel to handle problems typically left to local authorities. But invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used authority allowing presidents to use active duty military for law-enforcement purposes, would have been a dramatic escalation. The act has only been invoked twice in the past 40 years — once to quell unrest after Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and once during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. “We look weak,” Mr. Trump said, according to one of the officials. He complained about having been taken to the bunker below the White House on the night of May 29 when the barricade outside the Treasury Department was pierced. The New York Times had reported the bunker visit a day earlier, infuriating Mr. Trump. But all three officials pushed back against the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act. Mr. Barr, who had been Mr. Trump’s attorney general for a year and a half and had been increasingly clashing with the president, told Mr. Trump that civilian law-enforcement authorities had enough personnel to manage the situation and that a drastic move like invoking the Insurrection Act could spawn more protests and violence. Mr. Esper agreed, according to the two former officials. Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Barr, Mr. Esper and Mr. Milley was marked by his rage at being embarrassed on the world stage, according to two of the officials. Mr. Trump grudgingly went along with their counsel not to deploy active-duty troops, according to the officials. Immediately after the meeting, Mr. Trump joined a call with governors around the country, some of whom were seeing protests increase in their states. Mr. Trump urged them to “dominate” the protesters, as he said the National Guard in Minnesota had. Mr. Esper told associates that he was so concerned that Mr. Trump would deploy active-duty troops that he echoed the need for them to get control of their states, hoping he could encourage governors to deploy the National Guard to head off federal action. Using Pentagon terminology that he later told associates he regretted, Mr. Esper told the governors to “dominate the battle space,” a sentiment stemming from concern about Mr. Trump’s intentions. But one backdrop for the drafting of the Insurrection Act proclamation was that discussions between the White House and city officials about containing the protests remained contentious throughout the day. At one point, White House officials suggested taking over the city police force to tamp down the unrest and impose order. That idea stunned Washington city officials. Mr. Esper — who, associates said, so feared the situation was spinning out of control that two days later he publicly said he opposed invoking the Insurrection Act — later tried to again communicate the gravity with which he feared Mr. Trump would act when he held a handful of private calls with specific governors that afternoon, according to the former senior administration official. Mr. Trump delivered a Rose Garden address later that evening, saying he was prepared to deploy the military if the rioting did not cease. “If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Mr. Trump said. Active-duty military, including from the 82nd Airborne Division, were airlifted to bases outside Washington, but Mr. Esper mobilized a National Guard deployment in the city in an effort to thwart them being deployed. By June 5, they were all ordered to return to their home bases.
My my, all the Trump threads. The stench of desperation permeates all of leftist land. So obvious the pathetic attempt at distraction from the miserable performance by the current administration.
GOP candidate claims Michael Flynn hoped to blackmail U.S. officials into pro-Trump "audits" Pennsylvania Senate candidate Everett Stern made the bombshell accusation in a press conference Saturday https://www.salon.com/2021/10/31/ca...xtortion-scheme-on-us-officials-to-reinstall/ A Republican Senate candidate alleged over the weekend that Michael Flynn, the retired general and former national security adviser, has sought damaging information on elected officials in a number of states, with the apparent goal of blackmailing them into supporting conspiratorial election audits meant to reinforce Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Everett Stern, a businessman who owns a private intelligence firm called Tactical Rabbit and is running for the open U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, held a press conference Saturday to share his purported findings, later tweeting out a link to the video of his remarks titled, "Everett Stern Releases New Evidence of Ongoing Domestic Terror Threat Links to General Michael T. Flynn." "I'm here today not as a candidate running for U.S. Senate, I'm here as a citizen who is genuinely concerned about our country, sincerely concerned about the undermining of our democracy," Stern said in the opening moments of his statement. He also claimed to be in touch with federal law enforcement about the situation. Stern claims that at least two people representing a Flynn-linked group called "Patriot Caucus" approached him earlier this year after a public speech, offering to hire his firm to gather "dirt" on officials and recruit others to assist in the plot. One of the men allegedly told Stern that they had retained the services of active intelligence officials "both domestic and foreign." "They wanted to gather intelligence on senators, judges, congressmen, state reps, to move them towards the audit," Stern said. "The word 'move' was emphasized tremendously. It was clear to me what they wanted was not traditional opposition research — what they wanted was to extort and to literally move people towards the audit with dirt." Stern claimed he was targeted because of his political ties in Pennsylvania, a key swing state targeted by election conspiracy theorists who longed to overturn Joe Biden's 2020 electoral victory there. Patriot Caucus apparently wanted Stern to focus on two Republican state officials in particular: Sen. Pat Toomey and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick. (Toomey is retiring, and Stern is now a candidate for his seat). "He said to me, 'PA GOP better move towards the audit, or we will crush them,'" Stern said, alleging that he feigned interest in order to gather documents and audio recordings that could be used to expose the group. According to Stern, Patriot Caucus is funded largely by billionaire Texas real estate mogul Al Hartman, and has operations in Oklahoma, Nebraska and Virginia, among other places. Hartman became controversial recently as an early crusader against basically any form of COVID-19 precautions: lockdown orders as well as mask and vaccine mandates. Beyond the goals that Patriot Caucus was chasing, Stern claimed, it was the methods Flynn's group encouraged Stern that made him uncomfortable. He claims that he was told to "accomplish the mission even if you have to use domestic terrorism." "I believe that Gen. Flynn has committed treason against the United States," Stern said on Saturday. "Based on what I have seen and witnessed, I truly believe that's the case." Stern said he was moved to expose Flynn's alleged plot out of a moral imperative — something he said he was also familiar with as a corporate whistleblower at HSBC, where he exposed the bank's billion-dollar money laundering scheme. The case ended with a $1.92 billion fine against HSBC. This is just the latest controversy around Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency and was later pardoned by Trump after his conviction on charges of lying to the FBI. He was pictured last summer purportedly swearing allegiance to QAnon, the conspiracy theory positing that a group of cannibalistic, pedophile Satanic elites control much of the U.S. the government. (Flynn's family later denied the video in question had anything to do with QAnon.) He also appeared to advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, saying that a military coup like the one in Myanmar-style coup "should" happen here following Trump's loss to Joe Biden last November. (Flynn later claimed he had been misunderstood.) Flynn did not respond to Salon's request for comment. Watch Stern's full remarks here via YouTube:
GWB posting from Salon. Can Mother Jones be far behind? That's one less article I need to read. GWB we acknowledge that you are happy with yourself for going lefty, but jeeesuzzzz do you have to go all the way over into soy-boy territory?