Bart Stinson
Overturning Election Results
I was shocked last month to read that Hillary Clinton said Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden should not concede the election this year “under any circumstances.”
She explained that she believes this “because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe (Biden) will win if we don’t give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is.”
But “any circumstances” means no matter what. It would include a Trump landslide, and it would include Trump winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote. Surely, I thought, Democrats will abide by the election results. Even Al Gore eventually conceded.
But there’s a new plan now. The same people who believed the Constitution was a “living document,” subject to drift and re-interpretation, now believe that they needn’t take vote-counting literally. Not if they’re relentless enough.
Just 10 days into the new Republican presidency in 2017, Foreign Policy published “Three Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020,” by George Soros protégé Rosa Brooks.
We ordinarily get rid of presidents by voting them out after their first term, but Brooks objected that “four years seems like a long time to wait,” and laid out plans for overturning the election results of 2016 much quicker.
One of her options was impeachment. What she liked about that plan is that “Congress doesn’t need evidence of actual treason or murder to move forward with an impeachment: Practically anything can be considered a ‘high crime or misdemeanor.'”
But the downside was that “impeachments take time: months, if not longer – even with an enthusiastic Congress.”
There’s always the 25th Amendment, which is the Constitutional procedure by which half the Cabinet and a two-thirds majority of Congress can declare a president unfit, and empower the vice president with presidential authority. 
Brooks called this “an appeal to Vice President Mike Pence’s ambitions. Surely Pence wants to be president himself one day, right?”
In the snakepit of Washington DC, this proposition apparently strikes people like Brooks as plausible. Pence’s loyalty, his friendship with the president, must seem utterly foreign to them.
Finally, she floated the possibility of a military coup, or at least a mutiny. This is not as far-fetched as it seems at first blush.
President Obama’s notorious purge of the armed forces left Trump with a left-leaning senior officer corps. BLM Marxism and critical race theory have made inroads among young officers via mandatory sensitivity training and indoctrination.
A flyer distributed at mandatory Army race training recently described the “Make America Great Again” slogan as a covert statement of white supremacy. If an officer believes that, it’s not a major leap for him to join the mutiny against a president he believes to be illegitimate.
Brooks has penetrated the military-academic complex. She is an adjunct scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and a senior fellow in Arizona State University’s Future of War program. Her second husband (whose name she did not take) is a retired Army colonel.
For all these reasons, Brooks can speak of a military conspiracy against the president without inspiring laughter.
Nearly four years have passed without Trump-haters getting rid of the president, but the game has been good to Brooks. One website estimates her personal net worth at around $10 million, roughly the same as Boris Becker or Clint Eastwood.
Brooks co-founded the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) in December. That organization convened about 67 elite Trump antagonists in June to role-play four possible election outcome scenarios. We needn’t speculate about the proceedings, because TIP published its report online for all to see.
The heavy hitters were cheek by jowl: erstwhile Republican John Kasich played his nemesis Trump. Clinton Chief of 
Staff John Podesta played Biden. There were roles for former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, neoconservative editor William Kristol, former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, Al Gore’s 2000 campaign chair Donna Brazile and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
The Deep State was well represented with “former career officials from the intelligence community, the Justice Department, the military and the Department of Homeland Security,” according to Brooks. She wrote that there were roles for political strategists, polling experts, tech and social media experts, as well.
In the Biden victory scenarios, the simulation was a vehicle for attributing the most sinister intentions to “Team Trump.” There was considerable inoculation, as it preemptively accused Trump supporters of the foulest prospective misdeeds in such detail that its authors are almost certainly planning to commit those deeds.
It rehearsed the participants in dismissing any suggestion of voter fraud as a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory. The accusation of voter fraud will be especially potent, the TIP report warned, in states where there is an apparent election-night Trump victory that is reversed in due time by late-arriving mailed ballots. Democrats will rely on allies in the news media and social media, in that case, to assure voters there is “nothing nefarious” about it.
There was, of course, no brain fog for Podesta’s Joe Biden character, no petulant meltdown or challenge to fisticuffs. He was a model of decorum and sober judgment in the make-believe situations in which he prevailed. Then they ran the scenario in which Trump won. Podesta stunned fellow role-players by refusing to concede. “I don’t think my party will allow me to concede,” Podesta explained. After collecting their thoughts, the role-players went to work brainstorming ways that he could prevail despite losing the election.
It was a walk-through of a plan for a coup d’etat against an elected American president. According to the report, this crisis would not be settled in the courts but in the streets. Leftist mobs would pour into the streets to set the stage for high-level hardball negotiations to win concessions from the besieged president. Democratic governors and legislatures would send unelected delegations of challengers to disrupt the Electoral College. California, Oregon and Washington would threaten secession. The insurgents might demand Constitutional amendments.
Podesta forecasted that if conservatives rally to Trump and take the streets, he (Biden) would let the military “handle it.” Quiet alliance-building could ensure that the Secret Service will forcibly escort Trump out of the White House during a disputed election showdown.
This is not the hallucination of a Berkeley student between bong hits. It is dead-serious contingency planning by seasoned political elites who think it can work. Brooks writes that we need to discard the obsolete concept of “election night.” Election outcomes in the future will be determined over a longer period, perhaps stretching 11 weeks beyond election day.
Kamala Harris has already enthused to an interviewer (Stephen Colbert) that the current street chaos will not and should not stop on election day. She apparently sees it as part of the Progressive repertoire from now on.
Once such operations lurch into motion, they take on a logic and authority of their own. It won’t be possible to talk many people out of it after it starts. Now is the time to challenge Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to disavow any threats of secession, to assure us that they will not leverage street violence to demand any Constitutional amendments or fundamental reorganization of our republic. Ask them now, when razor-thin victory margins are at stake. The incentive to moderate their views is ephemeral. After the election, their incentives shift irreversibly toward extremism.
