Scott Johnston bought the burner phones. That’s important.

One of the most disturbing details we learned regarding the plan for Trump’s rally speech on January 6th (beyond the fact that Trump told the crowd they better fight harder than ever before or they won’t have a country), was the fact that Rolling Stone reported that rally organizers told an aide to buy three “anonymous phones” (aka burner phones), because… why the ffff does someone need an anonymous phone if one is just planning a regular old rally?

It is like the new kool kid meme on the net; “Tell me you’re committing a crime without telling me you’re committing a crime” things. A good answer? “I bought three burner phones just like I was told, and used cash, just like I was told.”

Scott Johnston bought the phones. Specifically, Scott Johnston bought the phones at a CVS in Cathedral City, California, which just sounds so “wholesome America,” circa 2021. How do we know that Scott Johnston bought the phones when he did and where he did? He told the Committee, and he also told Rolling Stone in a new report out today. He told them a lot more than just buying the phones. This was no “spontaneous burst of energy toward the Capitol.”

Scott Johnston — who worked on the team that helped plan the Ellipse rally — says that’s just not so. He claims that leading figures in the Trump administration and campaign deliberately planned to have crowds converge on the Capitol, where the 2020 election was being certified — and “make it look like they went down there on their own.”

That’s ironic because that’s exactly what it looked like on television. Even weirder, it sounds like every damn thing we’ve heard since.

Johnston, who says he described the phone call to House select committee investigators, detailed his allegations in a series of conversations with Rolling Stone. Johnston says he overheard Mark Meadows, then-former President Trump’s chief of staff, and Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokeswoman, talking with Kylie Kremer, the executive director of Women for America First, about plans for a march to the Capitol. Johnston said the conversation was clearly audible to him since it took place on a speakerphone as he drove Kremer between the group’s rallies in the final three days of 2020.

So if Scott Johnston, the man who was given cash to buy the burner phones, overheard a speakerphone conversation between the President’s chief of staff about descending upon the Capitol on the day that Congress was set to vote on Trump’s successor, that almost sounds like planning a coup, or at least it would in any other country. “We are going to have a whole mass of people push the light security over, and then ransack the building so they cannot vote Biden in. Then it will go to the House and we will win.”

Sounds like a coup if you say it in Spanish… or Russian.

Johnston’s account suggests there was a deliberate strategy by Trump’s allies to have supporters descend on the Capitol. Such a connection would implicate top White House and campaign officials in drawing crowds to Congress without a permit — a step that could have required added security and may have allowed law enforcement to better prepare for the day’s events. Those crowds overwhelmed the Capitol police and engaged in an hours-long battle with law enforcement. Four people died during the attack.

So, the reason they did not apply for a permit for the march was, in part, because they would have to arrange for security…

According to Johnston, rally organizers were “constantly” using “burner phones” — cheap, prepaid cells that can be harder to trace because they’re not personally identified with a user or a user’s account — “to talk about” potential permits and plans for a march with Trump aides.

Yes, when you are planning a crime, you do not want to spend the money to hire security because they will either A) Stop you, B) Join you, thus proving your guilt. You’re sort of trapped into doing the “March to the Capitol” without a permit.

This is big stuff, linking the President’s Chief of Staff to a pre-arranged “rally-incursion” into the Capitol? Sounds like a coup. And you don’t arrange coups on your family plan.

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[email protected] with Nicole Hickman