Politics - News Analysis

Former Trump Admin Official: ‘Firmly Believe Trump Provoked Jan 6th to Declare Martial Law’

There has been a lot of reporting in the last week, some of it as a result of Bob Woodward’s new book “Peril” and some of it coming from the House Select Committee, which is back in Washington and working full time after the summer recess.

There is a growing consensus coming from the reporting and the committee.

It all springs from the belief that Trump not only “knew of” the plans for January 6th but also knew what he intended to do as a result. We begin here, with this tweet, but the more important quotes are below:

Donald Trump is a man who used the power to pardon his friends more liberally than any president could ever have dreamed. During the protests in the summer of 2020, Trump talked openly about sending the military into cities to declare martial law. Martial law, obviously, is the first tool of fascists.

But there is more, much more. From Pulitzer Price winning reporter Carole Leonnig, we have this insightful quote:

“[T]he most central unanswered questions sort of circle around the drain that Miles Taylor is smartly focusing on. And that is, the days before January 6th.”

“This is why, to me, subpoena power is so powerful and I wish as a journalist I had it. We need to know about the conversations that Republican lawmakers, Donald Trump, and White House staff had with each other and with organizers of the protest. We need to know those conversations in detail — their communications about what they plan to do.”

“We already know from very good reporting that — unfortunately, not with a subpoena — that there were protest members who were warning the senior White House folks that there was going to be a likely storming/march on the capitol. So, the White House should have been on alert.”

Alert might be another word for anticipating. If the White House did not want the Capitol overrun, it certainly had the capability of preventing it. We have also found it odd that while the Capitol was under siege, no one did anything to increase security at the White House. Telling.

And then the quote from Adam Schiff from the committee itself, one of the people who can issue subpoenas:

“In some cases, we’re making requests we think will be complied with. In other cases, we’re going straight to subpoenas where we think we’re dealing with recalcitrant witnesses.”

Subpoenas are the only means by which we’ll get the truth. Warrants from law enforcement would do it, too. But one gets the feeling that the FBI’s heart just isn’t in it. Merrick Garland doesn’t seem to have much interest in preventing yet another attempt to grab democracy from the world’s oldest and arguably most stable government. Let bygones be bygones. Perhaps we’ll be made fools of in the next six months as arrests are made and cases filed. But it just seems like that’s not in the cards.

Fortunately, the two entities that do seem interested in getting to the truth are slowly but surely getting there. Unfortunately, the only entity that can prosecute a case seems uninterested. They would rather prosecute people who broke windows.

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[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak

meet the author

Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He now enjoys life as a single dad raising a ridiculously-loved young girl on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He is very much the dreamy mystic, a day without learning is a day not lived. He is passionate about his flower pots and studies philosophical science, religion, and non-mathematical principles of theoretical physics. Dogs, pizza, and love are proof that God exists. "Above all else, love one another."

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