Reaction & Commentary
Column that you wrote it’s uh it’s really something else it’s entitled is the electoral fix already in now a lot of us Matt I think are thinking whatever is going to unfold this year it hasn’t happened yet I mean I can imagine we’re about to embark on all kinds of
Censorship um I just got done talking about war Matt I mean historically you would be you would be forgiven for being cynical about an Administration launching War efforts in an election year because it normally plays into the incumbent’s hands I’m not sure if that’s the case anymore but you would be
Forgiven for being cynical about International adventurism during an election year but whatever it is man something is coming and you have really written through that this isn’t going to be halfhazard this has actually been War gamed what’s coming to stop Donald Trump yeah it’s really interesting I
Mean I’ve spent a lot of my career covering presidential campaigns I’ve been doing this since 2004 I did it five times for Rolling Stone and normally at this time of year all the attention is on voters and what they’re thinking um I’m still going to Nevada in a couple of
Days and it’s still important to talk to people and find out what they’re thinking but this year there are all these factors that have nothing to do with what voters think that are going to play dominant roles and whether or not um who’s who the next president is going
To be and this includes things like the lawsuits about uh Trump’s eligibility in places like Colorado and Maine uh the lawsuits and Technical complaints against third party groups like No Labels or Robert F Kennedy Jr the suppression of intermural challenges within the democ within the Democratic
Party and this is all going to be done by lawyers not by voters and that’s something that we haven’t seen before and so the the the report that you referenced that I wrote um kind of goes over some of that but also goes over an exercise that was done in 2020 called
The transition Integrity project which as you say War gamed out what happens in a contested election scenario and gave us kind of a preview of what the thinking might be about these things and some of those things are sort of coming to pass a little bit let’s talk about those things you
You lay out in this column is the electoral fix already in the four ways the four things they considered War gaming out what could be um I guess a threat to the transition Integrity project by the way Who’s involved in this I don’t want to like Loosely use
The word they throughout this but it’s I mean I think the they is very illustrative of what we’re talking about right before you came in I’m talking about like disrupting the I just don’t think Matt and you and I’ve talked about this we’re on this bipolar Spectrum
Anymore of left and right and what Republican and Democrat mean anymore and when you look at Who’s involved in the they I think it’s pretty illustrative yes it’s highlevel Democrats but not just highlevel Democrats yeah you’re right I mean I heard your intro I’m also one of those people who’s been kind of
Knocked off the axis of Party politics I mean I and you having to learn all over again although reporter should never have to learn this because it’s supposed to be the first order of business but we don’t just get our messaging in a crackerjack box from one party or the
Other um but in this case in the Trump era we’ve had to learn some pretty hard lessons about um you know where things really rest what left and right really mean whether they’re meaningless or meaningful um and that comes out with this tip project there are a hundred people involved in the transition
Integrity project or there were uh there were 67 active participants according to their own report and only about a dozen have been identified uh we know who some of them are there’s former DNC chair Donna Brazil uh John podesta who was the campaign chair for the Hillary Clinton
Campaign but there’s also Michael steel uh who was the RNC campaign shair uh there are a number of Republicans or like Bill Crystal and David from who were neoconservatives and Ardent supporters of the Iraq War invasion um and yeah it’s it’s a bipartisan group there there are a lot of Democrats there
But there are also a lot of defense and intelligence officials whose political affiliation is not 100% clear so loosely speaking it’s more of like ins insiders versus Outsiders than it is left versus right all right and the this group was put together I think the timeline’s kind of not just interesting but important
You said it was in 2020 so it here’s why that timing is important this is pre January 6th right this is pre a lot of the things that they wore gamed out we’re going to go over them together in just a moment actually came to pass but this was put together when in
2020 looks like it was in June of 2020 probably uh the the pr campaign about the group’s work they started to do a kind of a launch uh about their you know about the group The idea behind that was to to let people know that there was
There were a lot of serious people who were worried about the possibility that Trump might not leave office and so there were news stories everywhere in July and August of 2020 at that point most of the exercises had already been conducted then they there was sort of an
Error uh somebody leaked the most embarrassing part about the report which is that John podesta who was playing the role of Joe Biden in this exercise in one simulation that involved the quote unquote clear Trump win uh he decided not to concede and instead had five states secede threaten
Secession and create a constitutional crisis and so this leaked out to the New York spe the specifics of that were something so the theory was podesta was playing Biden um Biden loses to Trump or Trump refuses to leave the office wasn’t it that and then Biden would send unique
Electors to certain States uh special electors that would not follow the results of the democratic election and it resulted in California seceding several west coast states seceding Wisconsin seceding as part of this war game I don’t know about Wisconsin I remember that it was all the west coast states which they renamed
Cascadia um and had had all of them secede from the Union then they entered into negotiations about whether or not they would accept the results of Trump’s election remember this was in the case of a clear Electoral College Victory by Trump uh sort of a similar sitation as
2016 and they used the threat of secession to extract concessions like uh the elimination of the Electoral College and and some other um you know reforms that they were looking for uh but well adding DC in Puerto Rico as States was one of the concessions exactly yes adding DC in Puerto Rico as
States I think there was another thing about the Supreme Court in there um but the important part of this is that it was kind of embarrassing because they were complaining about the possibility that uh the Trump might not go along with the election results and of course
We can all talk about whether or not that happened uh after 2020 um but in advance of that it’s a it’s a little bit embarrassing embarassing to have people from quote unquote your own side already planning to defy the results of of an election and you know there’s a lot of
Stuff in this report that talks about how concerns about uh Trump’s willingness to not leave office or to use extra legal measures might provoke an illiberal response even from Democrats um and that also that Democrats cannot rely on quote unquote Norms or Elite norms to prevent uh a
Coup so that means that they were already preparing to kind of go color Outside the Lines a little bit this is it’s kind of an extraordinary document that that only leaked out because somebody talked to Ben Smith at the New York Times uh and it’s really interesting to look at in retrospect and
A little scary too very scary and part of me Matt wants to be like okay well it’s a war game exercise and you know you should red team certain scenarios you know you should always play L out extreme so you you nothing comes as a surprise to you
Like part of me wants to think okay that’s what’s going on but I think that that you can’t give as much credit to that again as we go through the four scenarios together that they laid out you’re going to see why but if and I think you wrote in your column like this
Was part of at Barack Obama’s encouragement podesta went down that path of secession I think he wrote that um what’s I think interesting about it Beyond simply Beyond simply like oh they’re just trying to war game is is a they’re considering that possibility meaning it’s it’s a consideration while
Accusing everyone else of breaking the norms and B if they considered it in 2020 is it considered in 2024 right also you have to look backwards too did they consider it in 2016 um you know because they they get they go on to list an extraordinary number of quote unquote abuses that
They’re worried about Trump committing that sounding awful out like things that happened after 2016 like uh a series of classified leaks politicized investigations uh you know things like that but I imagine that’s what you’re going to go over want to go over but yes there all those things are concerning
Plus in 2024 the reason this is now relevant is because we there was just this mysterious story in uh NBC in the middle of January talking about how yet another loose knit group of officials uh sponsored by one of the same umbrella groups that was behind the transition Integrity project is now reviewing
Possibilities and War gaming uh ideas for what to do if Donald Trump makes an legal order after re-election um with regard to the Pentagon so they’re already talking about what to do about perhaps creating some kind of resistance to Trump direction of the military uh which is like like one of the things
That you suggested is uh forcing the president to seek Congressional approval with the deployment of military of the military domestically right exactly so they’re already talking about the the improper use of the Insurrection act now there’s already a bill um that’s been proposed that’s probably not going to go anywhere
Uh but that just tell it’s it’s an indication of what the thinking is um one of the groups that’s involved with all this is called protect democracy uh they’re bankrolled largely by the L um a couple of groups including the LinkedIn billionaire Reed Hoffman uh and you know they’ve been looking at this
Very issue that in fact a couple of their lawyers wrote a story uh for the New York Times earlier uh in September of last year talking about how um you know it’s not unusual that uh people would be looking to use um insur the Insurrection Act uh in prosecutions of
Donald Trump and there’s a whole long essay about the the history of it of the Insurrection act and how this was interrupted uh the use of kuku’s Clan act suits and how they can be used as a as a tool for for social reform so their
Heads are very much in the space of there is this big uh extra legal gray area involving the Insurrection act and what can we do with it what could somebody else do with it Matt well do you think this is more me asking you to pontificate on this do you think
Um do you think we’ve arrived at sort of this this inevitable evolution of a polarized and divided society that that we’re at this moment where you know you got to ruin democracy you got to destroy democracy to save democracy like we’re we’re we’re headed towards this Zero Sum
Game of politics and we always were or do you think there was something unique about Donald Trump that forced this moment where as we mentioned it’s left it’s right it’s neocon it’s farle whatever all the bedfellows are all mixed at this point but it all seems to be unified against one man Donald
Trump I think we have to conclude that there’s something unique about Trump we we did see after 911 that there was a concered effort to knock down a lot of liberal traditions and rule of law traditions with respect to America’s Behavior overseas um even domestically you know
Bush did things like there there was there were incidents at least one involving an arrest without a warrant which is something we hadn’t seen since the Lincoln years uh but we also saw the elimination of habus Corpus uh you know drone assassination all these things were revived after 911 but it was all
Overseas when Trump came along is when we started to see uh a change in thinking domestically and this is why know for me all of this is so shocking you know I grew up sort of a polit classic ACLU political liberal and all of a sudden all the people who I used to
Think of as my friends and colleagues they’re for instance against Free Speech they they think we must have censorship or else the you know we’re headed towards Peril in order to save democracy we have to kind of curtail the First Amendment and then you start talking about other amendments they want to they
Want to cut back on the Fifth Amendment the 14th Amendment I mean there it’s it’s right on the line and I think this is something that goes back to 2016 before that we just didn’t see this okay well then that forces us into this then what is it about Donald Trump
And and I don’t want to give you the answer and you’re independent-minded enough that you won’t let me ask you a leading question but I think about this and I think I’ve already offered up an opinion today that I think any listener could could follow where I think he did
For whatever reason did represent a thre threat to the way things had been done for a long time probably since post World War II the way things had been done in Washington DC I mean he’s the first true Outsider and when we say Outsider sometimes that I think we
Almost think of that almost too stylistically you know but like he just didn’t think about things the way that anyone steeped in politics thought about things and and so therefore he did represent a true threat to the way business was done in Washington DC that’s a option a and then I’m just try
To be real with myself Matt like let’s consider option b option b red team this like let me I often think even the craziest person you have to listen to it for a minute because maybe there’s a kernel of Truth you know so I sit there
And ask myself well do they have any kernel of truth that Donald Trump represents everything that they say a true threat to democracy and I’d really true try to do try to ask myself that um and I I I think I obviously I come back
To option A that’s the answer I think is true but not without asking myself B but I ask you then why what is it about Donald Trump yeah I’ve come around to um option A and this started with my experience as a campaign reporter I mean I covered the
Campaign for years and as a actually as an investigative journalism story it’s kind of boring and the reason it was always boring is because the answers are pretty much decided in advance um there were there’s a triumphant of interests uh the press the two political parties and the donors uh they’re
Basically impenetrable they always had been going back decades if they did not agree on a candidate that candidate did not get a major party nomination it just was impossible it couldn’t happen the closest that we would ever come was 1992 when Ross perau spent $18 million and
Got himself on the ballot but he didn’t really sniff the presidency in this case in 2016 uh Donald Trump overcame all of those uh influences and I covered that campaign I disliked Donald Trump enough to write a book called Insane Clown president about that campaign but when
People said well this is a failure of democracy I I thought well that’s crazy this is this is a huge Vindication of democracy because he defeated all these oligarchical elements that were trying to prevent him from getting elected uh he had half the money that Hillary
Clinton had so he didn’t have the donors his own party was manifestly against his nomination and the Press was absurdly against him I mean I think the the um you know the endorsements it was some ridiculous number like 97-2 of the the of the major newspapers so he beat all
That it was a it was a crack in the system I think that’s what that’s the norm that they were really concerned about him um you know breaking now after 2020 and January 6th and stop the steel I think the argument becomes more serious but you have to remember that
They were making all these arguments way before January 6 way before any of that episode uh any of those episodes so I I think it’s option a uh almost entirely maybe you know you get a little bit more on the other side now after 2020 but you know
Yeah yeah but even after 2020 to to your point and this is not what I’m about to say isn’t reporting it’s more like Follow The Logical if if whatever this if it’s an oligarchy that then is capable of kind of perpetuating a scop on the American public of high it’s it’s
S up in that you some stuff is manufactured some stuff is like giving increased or outsized importance to inconsequential things in the end his personality whatever it may be um you convince a great amount of the public that the oligarchy is you know right about Donald Trump um if they believe
This stuff and I don’t know if they really TR believe truly believe that he is a threat to democracy the way they talk they would do anything and I’m not even talking about the election results Ian we do know what they did do we do know about the censorship regime
Honestly man the way that they speak I mean comparisons to to Hitler and Nazism and these kind of things like if you really believe that America was on the verge of losing its constitutional republic its democracy that it was on the verge of Falling Away into hitlerism then I don’t know what
You wouldn’t do to stop the man that you think is responsible well right and and they’ve been pretty unequivocal about that almost unembarrassed about it I mean uh Robert Kagan who’s a very influential uh neoconservative thinker uh his wife Victoria nuland is also a very influential Diplomat and security
Official uh with a lot of um influence on the prosecution of the the war in Ukraine he wrote an incredible 6,000 word piece in the Washington Post comparing Trump to Caesar uh and saying you know that that our democracy is in great Peril and no other ordinary um
Avenue of resistance is going to work I mean it’s almost it’s as close as you can come to calling for an assassination without doing it it had this ridiculous picture of a bust of Caesar on on the front of the of the article but they’re all basically saying you know we have to
Do whatever it takes to prevent this person from from getting into office and this is also reflected in the view of of journalists I mean infamously uh Sam Harris who’s you know a very influential podcaster was saying yeah we go we we have to do whatever whatever it takes um
To to get rid of trump and this was for a little while anyway at least the debate within the journalism Community there were a few of us who were saying we can’t just lie about the guy like you know that that’s not done that that that will destroy our profession it will ruin
Us as an institution but I would say 90 95% of the people in the business were on the other side of that debate uh from the beginning they just something about Trump is so triggering to this group of people uh that you know it’s still kind of a mystery to me
Actually I I don’t really fully understand it it’s shocking honestly Matt that there hasn’t I mean I hate to say this it sounds so inflammatory when you talk about this like you just step back for a minute you go it is kind of shocking there hasn’t been an attempt on his life
I mean you got you know it’s you you could argue by the way it undercuts all the conspiracies of assassination because all of the powers that be behind the scenes are marshaled against against Trump and it hasn’t manifested in that you know and on the on the front end
You’ve also jened up a great amount of like you know populist or anti-populist hatred of trump that could could inspire a mass Lone Wolf right I it that you just kind of look at this from a distance and you go it’s shocking that this hasn’t been the final step in stopping Donald
Trump yeah I mean I think they’ve already been very successful in getting people to go Way Beyond the confines of what their normal behavior AV haviors would be you know it starts with stuff as simple as you know the censorship issue there are people who would never have considered uh you know interfering
On a mass scale with speech who suddenly became very Ardent converts to that idea after 2016 uh this this sort of law fair conversion of the left liberal advocacy space I mean I came up again I I did a lot of stories with groups like The ACL
You crew you know back in the day the League of Women Voters the all these groups that were pursuing sort of issue driven uh initiatives to try to do things like integrate the workplace or prevent housing discrimination or whatever it is all that’s gone the it’s
All partisan Warfare now that you have a this huge flowering of these little bureaucracies that do nothing but but stuff like generate nuisance lawsuits against Republican politicians or Trump related politicians or try to generate Bar complaints against uh Trump connected lawyers they’re doing the same thing to some of the third party groups
Now this is Warfare this is not this is not advocacy anymore and who knows where it will lead that it’s it’s kind of scary you you brought up yeah it’s very SC you brought up this um letter I think it was obtained by semaphore it was sent was this sent to
The No Labels party people talking about third party Zoom meeting where where they were talking about this is what we need to this is the message we need to put out um thir party candidates or third party part it like one of the lines is basically if you have one fingernail
Clipping of a skeleton in your closet we will find it we’re going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find that’s that’s a threat to the Jill Stein of the world to the RFK Juniors of the world to the No Labels of the world yeah
It it’s incredible I mean the no labels for people who don’t know it’s this new kind of third party group it’s interesting it’s got the former NAACP director in it Joe lieberman’s in it the former Republican governor of North Carolina’s in it so it’s it’s sort of a
Hodgepodge of both left and right ideas but it just wants something different um they had there was a former Democratic party uh lawyer named Holly pagee uh they ended up sending a letter to the Department of Justice complaining about the harassment they’d received she was visited by another former Democratic
Party lawyer who basically said you’ll never work in this town again uh you know you have to get you have to stop being involved with this group and then then mentions you know I wonder what your your biggest client Connie thinks about all this and mentions that you
Know one one of This Woman’s uh firm’s biggest clients within weeks she gets a call from the client saying sorry we’re we’re not going to be using your services anymore because you’re Persona nonr at the White House so this is how they’re operating this this is like you know bottom line
Politics if you don’t go along with the program we’re going to hit you in the wallet we’re going to hit you in you know your ability to use the internet I mean it’s a million different things this is this is all new this is stuff we did overseas not domestically it’s just it’s
Incredible so I want to I’ve teased it several times but in that um transition integrity project they laid out four threats that they worried about Donald Trump committing right that that predicated um I don’t know predicated every every response necessary to save democracy um I want to go through them
Really quickly with you because again remember this was done this this project was put together in the summer of 2020 so the hunter Biden laptop story had begun to percolate but hadn’t yet made its way into the full censorship mode meaning John Paul Ma had already reached
Out to the FBI that it happened but but summer of 2020 so a lot of as I read this you’re going to realize nothing had yet happened so one thing they worried about Don uh Donald Trump doing is restricting internet access in the name of National Security they worried about
Him embarking on a censorship regime yeah I mean and I wrote there all I could all my side can do is laugh at that I spent the last year you know doing with the Twitter file stuff going through how you know how Democratic party officials and their Associated um
Advoc advocacy groups spent eight years doing this stuff so yeah it’s laughable that they would think that and then and then obviously afterwards they they used it heavy-handedly in the years after 2020 number two they were worried that Donald Trump would allege foreign interference in an election in order to
Cast doubt on its outcome which is EXA this is exactly well that was what was done after 2016 2016 2018 2020 I mean I actually got to a point where I couldn’t count anymore the number of news articles that came out where unnamed or even in many cases named officials came out and
Warned that the Russians were going to interfere in the election um after 2016 of course there was a there was an intelligence Community assessment there’s going to be some reporting that’s going to come out about that soon um you know concluding that Russians interfered to help Trump then there were
Years there was years and years of reporting about that um that ended up collapsing mostly then in 2018 they said the Russians are going to interfere until the elections went a certain way after which they said they they didn’t succeed then in 2020 the same pattern happened again so there’s so much of
This it’s just laughable that they would talk about it that way number three they said uh they’re worried about a classified intelligence release now I’m not this is where your reporting comes in is I see you already shaking your head is that something is that a sin they’ve already committed in
The past three years since this three four years since this was released massively yeah um there you know the the use of classified leaks uh and leaking those to reporters um was a constant feature of the of the Trump era it started really before uh he was even
Elected there there was the intelligence Community assessment there was language from uh the intelligence Community assessment about Russian interference which got um published on January 6 2017 there was language from that that was in news reports in the month before that so they were already leaking news of a classified intelligence assessment um
Long before it came out uh then there was the Trump right yes um then the incident involving Michael Flynn talking to the Russian Ambassador that was classified signals intelligence that you’re not allowed to leak to reporters actually it’s one of the few areas where reporters aren’t even allowed to publish
The stuff um technically uh then there was a series of leaks there was one to the New York Times about um about Trump having repeated access to contacts with Russian intelligence uh there were there were others involving you know the Eric Prince and the sells having contacts
With Russians it just went on and on and on over and over again it was a massively underreported story throughout the Trump years and then finally number four of the things they were concerned Trump would do is that he would launch investigations into his political opponents that’s again laughable
Considering what’s happened to him uh all these investigations launched against him but again I think the point Matt is like this is what they were talking about in 2020 then we know what happened afterwards so all the and all the big concerns and hand ring they had
About Donald Trump are things that they actually did it’s not unlike what we talk I actually I think people that accuse other people of being racist often Harbor the most racist uh thoughts internally or whatever it may be I it’s like accuse your opponent of the sins
You are committing and here we have it they War gamed out the worst of trump and then did the worst of trump right and on one hand as he was a candidate I can see being concerned about about that in 2016 CU I remember being at his rallies where he would
Start it off by saying lock her up lock her up right which suggests that he’s going to get into office and launch a criminal investigation against Hillary Clinton but that never happened I mean he never did that stuff Donald Trump people have to go penetrate the talk
With Donald Trump and get get down to the reality of what he is some of the things that he says are outrageous and outrageously offensive but when you get down to what he actually did it it it turns out to be a much smaller story in many cases and you’re absolutely right
The history of politicized Investigations there just aren’t a lot of them you could argue maybe the the first impeachment case was a was an instance of them trying to Jin up an investigation against Hunter Biden but that’s pretty mild compared to the stuff that that concretely demonstrably happened in the other
Direction so the purpose of looking back to this thing in 2020 is to a point out the ways in which this was all done you know in order to save everything they worried about they were willing to commit in order to quote unquote save democracy but also to look forward to
2024 in the next couple of months the next year essentially because I think it’s it’s probably going to bleed over post elction as well is what will be done I mean what will be done this year I think we can count on censorship but what else will be done to stop Donald
Trump I mean there will certainly be legal actions I mean we’ve already seen we’ve got 120 criminal accounts however many of them um they’re already out there the the argument that he’s uh an insurrectionist needs to be kept off the ballot those cases are still ongoing uh
But there’s also the the ongoing issue of who’s going to be on the ballot in what states remember this is this could very easily be a decisive factor in the election if no labels gets a candidate on there if R Robert F Kennedy Jr gets on the ballot um both of those uh
Parties have enough money to do the job of actually getting collecting the signatures so there’s going to be an awesome effort to try to prevent that from happening because there’s a strong belief in Washington that that would swing the election to Trump if they were
To to to to do that so that’s something you have to worry about and you know you have to worry about other things like intimidation of local officials are are they are they going to be worried about getting you know cast out of or losing clients if they get involved in in
Certain kinds of Defense of uh you know politicians or or being tied to a group like the green party um you know this this is all stuff that’s very real and it’s not going to have anything to do with what voters think that’s that’s the
Key part to keep coming back to is that you know they don’t want this thing to be settled at the polls I mean I know I hate to use that generic they but I think it’s true in this case yeah yeah that’s the point in the end it’s killing democracy in the name
Of saving democracy um it’s it’s an incredible column again is the electoral fix already in it’s like a lot of Matt work it’s something you absolutely need to check out at racket. newws go subscribe it’s if you care about the truth it’s it’s where you should spend
Your money uh Matt always appreciate you coming on man thanks so much will and thanks thanks for having me on it’s it’s great to talk to you
to Pressure Biden Over Crossings 
Texas
