(🧵) THREAD: Today the House January 6 Committee made the most direct appeal it’s ever made to a prospective witness: Rep. Cheney (R-WY) called for former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to agree to testify live. I know why and explain it here. I hope you’ll RETWEET and follow.
1/ Two things to note before I offer this narrative—a sequence of events uncovered in 16 months of research at PROOF. First, let’s be clear: there are *many* things Cipollone can testify to; there’s a reason he repeatedly threatened to resign. Cipollone saw a *lot* of misconduct.
2/ But one thing in *particular* Cipollone saw hasn’t yet been testified to in any way before the House January 6 Committee—a 3-hour late 2020 meeting that began in the Oval Office. Many journalists and historians deem it the craziest meeting ever to occur in the Oval in history.
3/ PROOF reported on this December 18, 2020 meeting at length—and with exclusive video evidence—in two major reports. Both are for PROOF subscribers, and are far too long to be summarized here. So I will simply link to them in this thread and then move on.
sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaki…
4/ What I *can* do here is offer a brief summary of this deranged December 2020 meeting, why it matters, and who was a witness to it. I can also write about how it came about. And then if you want to know more, you can read a whole tome about it at PROOF.
sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaki…
5/ This is the story of how “Team Kraken” infiltrated the White House with the help of a paramilitary unit and an aide to Green Bay Sweep coup co-author Peter Navarro. Almost everyone in this story has been subpoenaed by Congress—and some have pleaded the Fifth under questioning.
6/ We sometimes refer to Trump’s legal team like it was an actual legal team—in fact, as we saw in *both* the Trump-Russia scandal *and* the Trump-Ukraine scandal *and* every major pre- and post-politics scandal Trump has ever been in—he usually asks his lawyers to commit crimes.
7/ Trump believes that if your lawyers commit crimes for you, you get off scot-free because your lawyers can’t testify against you (note that this is false, due to the "crime-fraud exception" to attorney-client privilege). That’s one reason he wanted Cipollone to be "his" lawyer.
8/ Throughout his presidency, Trump wanted his White House Counsel to act as a personal lawyer (he often used the example of the late criminal Roy Cohn, one of his mentors) rather than the attorney for the Office of the President. It was so that he could get him to commit crimes.
9/ Giuliani often admits that his relationship with Trump as Trump’s "personal attorney" is an odd one. Trump rarely pays him (Giuliani just profits off selling access to Trump) and Giuliani often struggles to describe *any* legal component to what he does for Trump. Indeed...
10/ ...throughout the Trump-Ukraine scandal—as Giuliani went around the world committing crimes (detailed in Proof of Corruption, Macmillan, 2020)—he couldn’t even explain what *case* he was working on or what *legal* tasks he was executing in doing Trump’s political dirty work.
11/ But the easiest summary I can give—after the 2500 pages of the bestselling Proof Trilogy I wrote between 2018 and 2020—is this: Giuliani helps Trump steal elections. That’s what Giuliani did in 2016; it’s what he was doing in Ukraine in 2019; it’s what he did for all of 2020.
12/ In all that time, there was no crime Giuliani wouldn’t commit for Trump, and I mean to the point of acting as a foreign agent, fraud, election fraud, witness tampering, the list goes on and on. There is a *reason* Giuliani is about to be disbarred everywhere he was licensed.
13/ But Joe Biden so thoroughly *cleaned Trump’s clock* in the 2020 election—he beat Trump by *such a landslide*—that even Giuliani was stumped. He started filing cases without any evidence whatsoever, and saying things he knew he would never *ever* be able to prove to *anyone*.
14/ And when I say this, I mean of course Giuliani *always* was all about manufactured evidence used for political purposes to steal an election—that’s what the whole Trump-Ukraine scandal was—but after the 2020 election Giuliani didn’t even have that. He had *literally* nothing.
15/ So in the sprawling offices in Virginia of Trump’s quote-unquote legal team—the team that was essentially tasked with stealing the 2020 election for Trump using largely illicit means—Giuliani came to be known as a defeatist who was *not radical enough* for Trump’s purposes.
16/ There was a feeling that Giuliani was willing to file bogus lawsuits, but he was OK with *losing* them, too; he just wanted Trump to feel like he was doing *something* so that Trump would keep granting him the access that Giuliani and his agents were selling around the world.
17/ So a *new* team arose *within* the Trump (quote-unquote) legal team: Team Kraken. Team Kraken was willing to *make up* deranged international conspiracies and use paramilitary radicals to help them strategize bizarre "intelligence" operations that were just... 100% bonkers.
18/ Those on Team Kraken included Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne, Michael Lindell, a few people working for Powell and a group of unnamed intel experts Byrne called "whisperers." Security for the team was given by the First Amendment Praetorians—a paramilitary group.
19/ Some team members met with dangerous foreign nationals (Lindell); others spun theories they’ve since been sued for for billions (Powell); others called for a coup at a QAnon event in Dallas (Flynn); others wanted to offer a coup plot to Trump (all these but especially Byrne).
20/ Throughout, Team Kraken was in regular contact with John Eastman and his ring of dodgy lawyers and cyber-intel "experts", and liaisoned with those who’ve aided Trump with election ratfuckery in the past, e.g. Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing (who the FBI has since raided).
21/ All these folks were based in an office inside a hotel in Virginia; this hotel was about a mile, if I have my math right, from the hotel in Virginia where the Oath Keepers ultimately stored their weapons on January 6 for the possibility of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.
22/ And maybe this is a good point to note that the *main thing* Team Kraken wanted Trump to do was invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, seize voting machines, and re-run the whole 2020 national election essentially at gunpoint (with the Guard monitoring all sites).
23/ I hope it goes without saying that the "rules" of this re-vote would be just as Trump wanted: no absentee ballots, no early voting, no extended hours, IDs required. Essentially it would’ve been a *literally* rigged election at gunpoint that no nation on Earth would recognize.
24/ Once every state and D.C. certified their electoral votes on December 14, 2020—locking in Biden’s landslide win—Team Kraken went *bananas*. Or, *more* bananas. They decided Giuliani was a traitor to Trump and they had to go around him to get an audience with Trump himself.
25/ The plot to get a direct audience with Trump began immediately after the nationwide vote certification deadline. Why was a plot needed? Because Mark Meadows and even Giuliani deemed Team Kraken *so crazy* that they weren’t to be allowed an audience with the President himself.
26/ Imagine how disturbed—I use the word colloquially, not clinically—one must be to have two men who are fighting congressional subpoenas and/or facing federal indictment trying to *hide* the President of the United States from you because you will get him to do something dire.
27/ And when I say "dire," let us be clear: they wanted Sidney Powell to become a special prosecutor for the White House; they wanted martial law; they wanted a literal takeover of our government by radicals who would effectively end our democracy—not over a year but *overnight*.
28/ Team Kraken knew it didn’t have White House access. But it needed it. So on the night of December 18, 2020, it sprung its plan. It was driven by the head of the First Amendment Praetorians—Robert Patrick Lewis, now under federal subpoena—or an agent of his to the White House.
29/ (This latter point is unclear because Lewis has not yet testified publicly. I don’t know if he has honored his subpoena yet or not. We only know he has boasted about contact with indicted Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes—charged with Seditious Conspiracy—with John Eastman...
30/ ...who pleaded the Fifth 100+ times in reply to his subpoena, with Flynn—who’s also pleaded the Fifth in reply to all queries—and Byrne, who acknowledged orchestrating what amounts to a coup plot, and has bragged about doing security for Ali Alexander as the Proud Boys did.)
31/ Powell, Byrne, Flynn, and a Powell assistant only got into the White House because an aide to Peter Navarro let them in; it is unclear what this aide knew or did not, but he has since revealed himself to be a far-right radical and that is an *understatement*. But they got in.
32/ In the two recorded confessions and one recorded inculpation of Byrne by an eyewitness that PROOF published—see the links early in this thread—we learn that it took a *long* time for Team Kraken to sneak its way into the Oval. And it did—it *snuck*. This was a clandestine op.
33/ It ultimately, by hook and by crook, wound its way through various offices—where did the Navarro aide go, we wonder? Good question!—to the Oval Office, where it found Trump. And it got at *least* 30 minutes alone with him there with no one else present (with a key exception).
34/ That exception was Giuliani, who’d been in the Oval that day and who Trump now brought back via speakerphone. Why? Because Trump had crimed with Giuliani; he didn’t know these others as well. Flynn he didn’t much personally care for; Byrne had been a political enemy of sorts.
35/ So the then-president didn’t want to have a conversation of the sort Flynn, Powell, and Byrne wanted without Giuliani present. But also—keep in mind—the Trumps wrongly think that if an attorney is present in *any* conversation, that conversation is a secret (this is *false*).
36/ It’s clear from reporting that Giuliani had *not* known this December 18 nighttime impromptu Oval Office cabal was going to occur—and that in fact Team Kraken had been going around his back. It’s also clear he didn’t really support their coup plot, which involved martial law.
37/ So if you wonder why Giuliani is willing to talk to the HJ6C, there’s your likely answer—he’s hedging bets. He thinks it’s *possible* that Seditious Conspiracy charges can be hung on others (Team Kraken) rather than on him or (say) Jenna Ellis. So he tries to play both sides.
38/ After 30+ minutes of God-knows-what—or Giuliani-knows-what—being said by Team Kraken to Trump (remember Flynn has pleaded the Fifth, we don’t know if the 1AP driver for this event has honored federal subpoenas issued on the same day in November 2020 as to Tarrio and Rhodes...
39/ ...nor do we know what the status of Byrne and Powell are except that the latter is in the process of being disbarred and the former recorded the deranged confession videos PROOF published) all hell broke loose. Why? The White House lawyers suddenly broke into the meeting.
40/ Because the meeting was a coup plot, it was secretive. No one in the White House knew it was coming. Byrne says even *Trump* did not know in advance. So of *course* the Responsible Adults in the White House did not know. But then they found out and rushed to the Oval Office.
41/ Pat Cipollone was there. So were others from the White House Counsel’s office. What ensued was a shouting match in which Patrick Byrne now says he almost clocked Cipollone, and Michael Flynn was yelling, calling everyone not on Team Kraken a traitor to Trump. It was *insane*.
42/ Cipollone heard enough to know what had been discussed in his absence—or at least some of it—which again, and I cannot stress this enough, was essentially turning America’s democracy into an autocracy overnight, with Trump becoming a military overlord rather than a president.
43/ What’s scary is that folks don’t realize something critical... ...which is that the meeting *didn’t end in the Oval Office*. PROOF reports—with full eyewitness sourcing—that after the Oval Office meeting ended Trump took the insurrectionists *to the Presidential Residence*.
44/ Think of it: (1) Insurrectionists seeking a violent coup sneak into the Oval. (2) Trump hears them out for 30+ minutes. (3) The Adults break in and shout, this is madness! (4) The Adults leave. (5) Trump sneaks the insurrectionists up to his private residence. *Terrifying*.
45/ The cabal continued discussing the End of America for another *hour*. No one knows what was said because no one involved in any of this, down to the paramilitary-unit driver to assisted Team Kraken in getting to the White House, *appears* to be talking (that we know of).
46/ But there are three exceptions to that. (1) Giuliani is saying *something* to the Committee. We don’t know if it’s the truth or not. (2) Patrick Byrne has released the deranged videos that PROOF reported on and analyzed at length—all about that night. And... (3) Cipollone.
47/ Now of course Cipollone doesn’t know as much as Powell, Flynn (Fifth), Byrne and Powell’s aide know. Or Giuliani—who appears to have hurried to the White House to participate in the secretive final hour of the cabal meeting. And we don’t know how much Lewis knows of all this.
48/ But here’s what we *do* know (and keep in mind here that Lewis had been acting as security for Ali Alexander; Powell had appeared on stage with Ali Alexander; Flynn had appeared at events with Ali Alexander; well, you get the idea): just *one hour* after the cabal broke up...
49/ ...Trump sent out a tweet saying the White House was giving its imprimatur to a January 6 event being held on the Capitol grounds by none other than Alexander—a domestic terrorist who’d openly threatened political violence across Georgia and Arizona as part of Stop the Steal.
50/ And that tweet—sent in the middle of the night, right after Team Kraken left the Presidential Residence—cited a report by Navarro, the boss of the man who’d let Team Kraken into the White House. It’s a series of events more stunning than *anything* in the Watergate timeline.
CONCLUSION/ America needs Michael Flynn to talk. And Robert Patrick Lewis. And Sidney Powell. And Patrick Byrne. And Powell’s assistant. And Peter Navarro (indicted for Contempt) and Navarro’s aide. But in lieu of that—and it ain’t looking good—we need *Pat Cipollone* to testify.
