Tag: trump coup plot
Juicy Columns -- Like This Gift From Meadows -- Keep Landing On My Doorstep

Juicy Columns -- Like This Gift From Meadows -- Keep Landing On My Doorstep

Case in point: ABC News is reporting that former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been granted immunity by Special Counsel Jack Smith and is ratting out his former boss, Donald J. Trump. After the Georgia plea deals of Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and earlier yesterday, Jenna Ellis, is it possible to get any better? What could be next? Testimony about Trump laughing off his loss to Joe Biden and contemplating ways to turn Stop the Steal into a cash cow?

Actually, that testimony might be on the horizon after we learn more about what Meadows has told Special Counsel Smith during three meetings he had with prosecutors earlier this year.

Listen to this from ABC’s breaking news about the Meadows immunity deal: “Sources said Meadows informed Smith’s team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump's prolific rhetoric regarding the election.”

The ABC report continues, “According to the sources, Meadows also told the federal investigators Trump was being ‘dishonest’ with the public when he first claimed to have won the election only hours after polls closed on November 3, 2020, before final results were in. ‘Obviously we didn't win,’ a source quoted Meadows as telling Smith's team in hindsight.”

Wait. There’s more: “Meadows privately told Smith's investigators that -- to this day -- he has yet to see any evidence of fraud that would have kept now-president Joe Biden from the White House, and he told them he agrees with a government assessment at the time that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure election in U.S. history.”

Thunk. That is the sound of my jaw hitting the little piece of my desk in front of my keyboard.

And the thunkscontinue. ABC reports that its reporters have found numerous assertions about the 2020 election in Meadows’ 2021 book, The Chief’s Chief, that “appear to be contradicted by what Meadows allegedly told investigators behind closed doors.”

Meadows, in other words, who in meetings with Smith’s prosecutors detailed the grift behind Trump’s denials that he lost the 2020 election, has been part of the grift himself, profiting off the lies he and Trump told by publishing a book that knowingly repeats some of those lies.

Another thunk: After spending the month of November and part of December in 2020 passing along allegations of fraud in the election Trump lost, “Meadows said that by mid-December, he privately informed Trump that Giuliani hadn't produced any evidence to back up the many allegations he was making, sources said. Then-Attorney General Bill Barr also informed Trump and Meadows in an Oval Office meeting that allegations of election fraud were ‘not panning out,’ as Barr recounted in testimony to Congress last year.”

That little burst of truth telling got Barr fired, but not Mark Meadows, who stuck around for the whole thing, right up until Jan. 6. On that ignominious day, testimony to the January 6 Committee by his assistant, Cassidy Hutchinson, revealed that when White House Counsel Pat Cippolone rushed into Meadows’ office and told him, “The rioters have gotten into the Capitol, Mark. We need to go see the President now,” Meadows responded calmly, while staring at his phone, “He doesn't want to do anything.” Cippollone told Meadows, “Something needs to be done, or somebody is going to die and this is going to be on your effing hands.” By that time, Trump had already sent out a tweet essentially telling his followers that Vice President Mike Pence was a coward.

"They're literally calling for the VP to be effing hung," Cipollone told Meadows. “You heard him, Pat,” Meadows replied, still staring at his phone. “He thinks Mike deserves it.”

ABC News reports that part of what Meadows told prosecutors confirms what others, such as his assistant, Cassidy Hutchinson, have already testified to. Sources told ABC that Meadows confirmed a widely-circulated story that while the assault on the Capitol was ongoing, Trump took a call from Kevin McCarthy, who urged him to do something to calm the situation. Meadows confirmed that Trump told McCarthy, “I guess these people are more upset than you are, Kevin.”

Meadows was in the West Wing during the entire time the assault on the Capitol was underway and can doubtlessly provide more information to prosecutors about what Trump was doing and who he spoke to in his private dining room just off the Oval Office as he watched the Capitol assault on TV. It is obvious from the ABC report that Meadows has more information on Trump’s statements after he lost the election and what meetings he had and with whom about his attempts to overturn the election. The testimony Meadows can give about Giuliani alone would be voluminous, and the same goes for others who met with Trump in Meadows’ presence, such as John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and others.

Meadows is still facing trial on racketeering charges brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Anything Meadows tells prosecutors in Washington under a grant of federal immunity could be used against him at trial on state charges in Fulton County, so you can definitely expect that Mark Meadows will cop a plea there, too.

Splat. That’s the sound of Mark Meadows’ teardrop falling in Georgia.

Click. That’s the sound of me locking my front door so the pile of gift columns doesn’t break it down.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Tearful Jenna Ellis Pleads Guilty, Apologizes, And Dumps Trump (VIDEO)

Tearful Jenna Ellis Pleads Guilty, Apologizes, And Dumps Trump (VIDEO)

On Tuesday, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis became the latest Trump associate to cut a plea deal with prosecutors in Georgia regarding her role in the racketeering case to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The bluster Ellis has been known for was gone on Tuesday as she semi-sobbed through a brief statement to the court during which she sort of took responsibility for trying to help reverse the decision of millions of Georgians while squarely blaming others for misleading her.

I endeavored to represent my client to the best of my ability. I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information, especially since my role involved speaking to the media and to legislators in various states. What I did not do, but should have done, your Honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true.[...] If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post election challenges.”

Ellis finished by claiming some responsibility: “I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado Bar who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Why Rudy Giuliani's Drinking Problem Isn't Really So Funny

Why Rudy Giuliani's Drinking Problem Isn't Really So Funny

In much the same way I know a lot about the Army from a not terribly distinguished career, I know a lot about drinking from the same grievous perspective. Let me assure you that when your drinking earns you an above-the-fold front page story in the New York Times that jumps to a full page inside the paper, as Rudy Giuliani’s drinking did on Thursday, it’s not funny.

Sure, there is a temptation to point fingers and snicker at the photos of Giuliani from 2020 with hair dye cascading in sweaty rivulets down his cheeks as he was attempting to captain the listing ship of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign. After all, Giuliani was failing spectacularly at the time, losing 60 court challenges to election results and holding a press conference in the parking lot of a firm in Philadelphia known as Four Seasons Total Landscaping – get it: same name as the luxury hotel? – seemingly oblivious to how ridiculous he looked.

See, that’s one of the signature effects of, well, let’s call it what it is – alcoholism. You’re so deep within the warm embrace of whatever alcohol you’re consuming, Scotch in Giuliani’s case, that you can’t see yourself as the pathetically loud, grandiose, grandstanding drunk that you are. Think of it from within the alcoholic fog: You don’t sound loud to yourself; you’re not grandstanding, you’re standing up for a principle or a principal, either one will work when you’re so used to being governed by your addiction to alcohol that it’s impossible for you to see yourself as you appear to others.

There are a couple of what you might call alcoholic set-pieces in the Times story about Giuliani’s drinking. In one, he is wandering through the main dining room in a restaurant in East Hampton, probably the clubbish Nick and Toni’s, “as if waiting to be stopped by anyone, while the rest of his party dined in a back room,” according to a witness who described the scene for the Times. “He would walk back and forth like he wanted everyone to see him, more than once. He just wanted to be recognized.” In the other, the Times notes that Giuliani was such a regular drinker at the Trump International Hotel in Washington while his mentor/friend was president that “a custom plaque was placed at his table: ‘Rudolph W. Giuliani Private Office.’” I’ve known a few people who had their names on plaques in Village bars or on the backs of barstools. They’re all dead.

One of the worst things about an addiction to alcohol is that you don’t know you’re addicted. Why, all you have to do is sit down in a restaurant or hail a bartender, and you’re brought the exact thing you want. It’s called, “ordering,” the behavior that is so commonplace it’s able to conceal from the alcoholic what it really is: the satisfaction of a craving, the maintenance of an alcohol blood content which has risen to the level of a need. But you aren’t aware of that. In the case of Giuliani, his honorary plaque tells him otherwise, as does the back-slapping and approbation of those around him.

They are also the ones who can see the pathos that alcohol massages away. That you are as blinded as you are cushioned by the effects of alcohol tells you all you need to know about the sadness and loneliness of what medical science calls an “active alcoholic.”

People around Giuliani willing to speak with the Times did so in a manner that was “careful…and with considerable nuance,” the paper reported. This is commonly known in circles knowledgeable about alcoholism as tip-toeing around the elephant in the room, Giuliani’s huge consumption of alcohol being the elephant, and the rest of them being enablers.

That’s another problem faced by alcoholics – everyone is willing to help when all help costs is the price of single malt scotch or a cigar that Giuliani frequently “enjoyed” before his appearances on Fox News at the Grand Havana Room, described by the Times as “a Midtown cigar club that still treated him like the King of New York.” The Times described a patron “out of the former mayor’s line of sight…as he signaled the rest of the club, tipping back his empty hand in a drinking motion.” Patrons of the club were described as “slipping away to find a television, clenching through his [Giuliani’s] rickety defenses of Trump.”

There is the life of an alcoholic neatly described in a single scene: Gloriously celebrating in the throes of your friend, the glass you just picked up, while behind you, everyone else sees your bloodshot eyes or your running hair dye or hears your slurred words and says nothing, unwilling to interrupt your drinking for fear they’ll be seen as breaking the spell of your “fun.”

The Times couched much of its lengthy story about Giuliani’s drinking in terms of what he did for and with Donald Trump, pointing out that the special counsel has become interested in the levels of his “inebriation” at key moments like election eve, or during meetings he attended in the Oval Office. But excessive, habitual drinking doesn’t need to be seen in conjunction with anything or anyone except the person who has lost control over themselves to their addiction to alcohol. It’s not fun, and it’s not funny, for Rudy Giuliani or any other alcoholic living in the loneliness of addiction. It’s hell inside that bottle and crawling out of it is the hardest thing in the world.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

What's Really Going On With That 'Smoking Gun' Tape Of Trump In Bedminster

What's Really Going On With That 'Smoking Gun' Tape Of Trump In Bedminster

The big story last night and all day today has been the audio tape obtained by CNN of Defendant Trump bragging about the top-secret plan to attack Iran during an interview for a book Mark Meadows was writing about his big, difficult, arduous 11 months as White House chief of staff. We already knew that Special Counsel Jack Smith had the tape, apparently obtained from either the writer and publisher for the Meadows book, or from one of the two staffers who were present during the interview.

The big deal was hearing Trump’s voice on the tape. Comparisons were made to the Watergate tapes, when we finally heard Nixon’s voice telling John Dean something like “we can do that” when Dean mentioned a fairly high figure being demanded by the Watergate burglars for their silence. The words “smoking gun” were used to describe the revelation on the tape, but they applied to Nixon’s voice, as well, because there just wasn’t anything like listening to a man of Nixon’s stature – he was president of the United States – committing a felony.

And now here was the voice of Defendant Trump talking about a top-secret plan to attack Iran with a roomful of people who were not cleared to hear anything about such a document, even that it existed at all, much less references to its content. The mere fact that what the document contained was top-secret was itself a secret. We lesser mortals aren’t supposed to know that our government has prepared plans to attack another nation – any nation, much less our sworn enemy, Iran.

And yet, according to what we already knew from the 37-count indictment of Defendant Trump, there he was, sitting out there at his golf club in New Jersey, bragging about having this top-secret document in his possession – in fact, right there in the room with him.

The big revelation from CNN was hearing the sound of Defendant Trump waving around a sheaf of papers and saying on the tape, “These are the papers!” Those words had been missing from the indictment of Defendant Trump, which had included most of the rest of the conversation during the interview. This had allowed Defendant Trump to trumpet in an interview on Fox News last week, “There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Defendant Trump said on Fox. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”

Talk about a gotcha moment! We had been able to read it before, but now, here he was on tape, talking in his Queens-accented braggadaccio way, saying this: “Look what I found! This was Milley’s plan of attack. Read it, and just show…this is interesting,” Defendant Trump says to his rapt audience of aides and interviewers. “He said that I wanted to attack Iran, isn’t it amazing?” (The sound of papers shuffling can be heard.) “I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him. All sorts of stuff…pages long. Look,” Trump says, as more shuffling of papers can be heard. “Wait a minute. Let’s see here.” A staffer is heard laughing. “I just found. Isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is, like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look. Look at this…by the way, isn’t this incredible?”

Listening to the tape, you can hear comments attributed in the special counsel’s indictment to “STAFFER” and “WRITER” interjecting such encouragement as “wow,” and “uh-uh” and “you did.” But then we get to what politicians like to call the red meat, the real stuff, and in Watergate days, the smoking gun:

“I was just thinking, because we were talking about it. And you know, he said you wanted to attack Iran and…these are the papers!”

There is is! Zingo! Bam! Ka-boom! He’s got them in his hand, and he is clearly showing them to the assembled lackeys and wannabes! He continues, explaining again, in case they didn’t hear him the first time -- Defendant Trump is, if nothing else, a master of repetition, once he’s got an audience in his thrall:

“This was done by the military and given to me! Uh, I think we can probably [use it] right?”

A staffer answers hesitantly, “I don’t know, we’ll have to see. I think we’ll probably have to…”

“Declassify it. See as president, I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” says Defendant Trump.

Double Zingo!

Okay, I thought to myself. I’ll go along with the conventional wisdom that the tape, and especially hearing his voice, proves that, for want of a better phrase, we’ve got him. It is, by God, a smoking gun.

But then I looked again at the date of the Bedminster interview: The indictment tells us it took place on July 21, 2021, less than six months after Trump left the White House.

Then I began to wonder why all the stories about the audio tape begin with reporting about how upset Defendant Trump was with a book written by the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser and the New York Times’ Peter Baker and published more than a year later: The Divider: Trump in the White House. The book portrayed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley as so alarmed by the behavior of Defendant Trump after he lost the election in November 2020 that Milley began making daily morning phone calls between himself and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

“Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the ‘land the plane’ phone calls,” Baker and Glasser wrote. “‘Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January,’ Milley told his staff. ‘This is our obligation to this nation.’ There was a problem, however. ‘Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.’”

The book goes into paranoia among the top Pentagon brass that Defendant Trump would order a strike against Iran. The week that Defense Secretary Mark Esper was fired, just a few days after Defendant Trump lost the election, the book reported, “Milley was called to the Oval Office to present various military options for attacking Iran and encountered a disturbing performance by [Christopher] Miller, the new acting Defense Secretary…Trump kept asking for alternatives, including an attack inside Iran on its ballistic-weapons sites. Milley explained that this would be an illegal preëmptive act: ‘If you attack the mainland of Iran, you will be starting a war.’”

The book goes on to report that Trump “continued pushing for a missile strike on Iran even after that November meeting. If Trump said it once, Milley told his staff, he said it a thousand times. ‘The thing he was most worried about was Iran,’ a senior Biden adviser who spoke with Milley recalled. ‘Milley had had the experience more than once of having to walk the President off the ledge when it came to retaliating.’”

But an excerpt from the Glasser/Baker book was published on August 8, 2022, more than a year after Defendant Trump gave the Bedminster interview in which he appeared obsessed with Milley thinking that he was going to start a war with Iran.

Then there was the other book that got Defendant Trump’s ire up: Peril, by Washington Post writers Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. CNN headlined a story on the book the day it was published on September 14, 2021, titled “Worried Trump could ‘go rogue,’ Milley took secret action to protect nuclear weapons.” “Two days after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump’s top military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, single-handedly took secret action to limit Trump from potentially ordering a dangerous military strike or launching nuclear weapons,” CNN reported.

After the attack on the Capitol, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called Milley, sounding alarmed. “What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do?” Pelosi said to Milley, according to a transcript of the call obtained by Woodward and Costa. “And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?” Pelosi continued. “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.”

Milley responded, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.” CNN reported that after the call with Pelosi, “Milley decided he had to act. He told his top service chiefs to watch everything ‘all the time.’ He called the director of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone, and told him, ‘Needles up … keep watching, scan.’ And he told then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, ‘Aggressively watch everything, 360.’”

Woodward and Costa reported that Milley “felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump and believed it was his job as the senior military officer to think the unthinkable and take any and all necessary precautions.” Milley told Woodward and Costa it was the “absolute darkest moment of theoretical possibility.”

So, there is a lot of stuff out there about General Mark Milley for Defendant Trump to be pissed off about – but every sentence was published well after the day the tape was made at the Bedminster golf club in July of 2021.

One thing we can be certain of is that Trump would never have given an interview to the ghost writer and publisher of a memoir by Mark Meadows if he had known back in July 2021 that Meadows had been on the phone almost daily after November 2020 with Milley and Pompeo talking about “landing the plane” on January 20, 2021, so there would be a smooth transition of power.

Nor would he have given an interview to help out his former chief of staff if he had known that Meadows would give testimony before grand juries in both Washington D.C. and Atlanta about Defendant Trump’s attempts to overthrow the election of 2020. Rolling Stone reported last week that members of Trump’s legal team have been using a rat emoji when referring to Meadows. Other reports have said that nobody close to Trump has been in touch with Meadows “for months.”

So, there are at least two questions about that interview in Bedminster: One, what was Defendant Trump doing with a top-secret document he described as a plan to attack Iran given to him by General Mark Milley? And two, why was he so exercised about Milley on that particular day, months before the Woodward/Costa book would expose the split between him and Milley, and over a year before the Glasser/Baker book would first note that Defendant Trump had asked Milley for a plan to attack Iran just days after he lost the election, and Milley had become so concerned, that he instituted the “land the plane” phone calls?

According to the tape obtained by CNN, Defendant Trump began the interview by calling unnamed people “bad” and “sick.” A staffer who was present during the interview jumps in and says they had tried a “coup” against him. Defendant Trump responds, “Like when Milley is talking about, ‘Oh you’re going to try to do a coup.’”

“No, they were trying to do that before you even were sworn in,” the staffer chimes in.

So the whole thing was touched off by Defendant Trump’s allegation that Milley had accused him of attempting a “coup.” And to rebut Milley, Trump launches into his detailed discussion about the top-secret plan to attack Iran that he alleges Milley gave him.

None of it adds up, especially when you consider that all of this happened before the National Archives had even begun bugging Defendant Trump for the documents and materials they believed he had removed from the White House on January 20 as he left office. And most especially when you consider that Defendant Trump had moved the top-secret document he was waving around twice – first from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and second, from Mar a--Lago to Bedminster in May 2021 when he relocated for the summer.

There are even more questions: how many other top-secrets documents did Defendant Trump take with him that spring from Mar-a-Lago to Bedminster? And why, for crying out loud? He probably didn’t know in May that Meadows would contact him in July and ask him to talk to his ghost writer and publisher. So, what was he doing with a top-secret plan to attack Iran that he could simply pull from a pile of papers on his desk and describe for his drooling crowd of suck-ups? Did he want to have his secret documents with him in in Bedminster so he could impress his golfing buddies?

Or was there more going on that we don’t yet know?

For the time being, we’ve at least got Trump’s voice committing a felony on tape, exposing some of the nation’s most sensitive national security and military secrets to a gaggle of adoring goofballs, not one of whom had so much as a “confidential” security clearance, much less the clearance needed to see or hear about a document with markings labeling it Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information – for the eyes only of the man who gave it to him, General Mark Milley, and probably a half-dozen other top Pentagon commanders.

If I were Ayatollah Whoever-the-hell-is-in-charge over in Iran, I would be rubbing my hands together with glee. The rest of us can join him at our leisure as the jaws of justice clench tighter and tighter around the ankles of Defendant Trump.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.