US Officials Turned Regime Change Tactics Developed Abroad Against Trump, Evidence Suggests

by Alex Gutentag

This week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump is disqualified from holding office and cannot be on the state’s ballot in the 2024 Republican primary. The court’s ruling, journalists and legal experts said, was justified because Trump incited the January 6 “insurrection” in which a violent mob stormed the Capitol to assist Trump in overthrowing the government. This event was, Democrats have argued, nothing less than an attempted coup.

Yet as Public’s reporting over the past year has shown, the January 6 Capitol riot was not a premeditated action that rises to the level of a “coup” or “insurrection.” There were dozens of confidential informants and undercover agents present at the riot, some of whom allegedly encouraged the rioters. And former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund has also claimed that key leaders decided not to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol despite warnings that the rally could get out of hand.

This information, along with video evidence from recently released January 6 tapes, suggests that the storming of the Capitol was the result of a major security failure, and that law enforcement informants or officers may have allowed, or even encouraged, it to happen.

What’s more, the January 6 prosecutors have failed to produce evidence clearly linking the rioters to Trump or his associates. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, in choosing not to indict Trump for inciting an insurrection, tacitly conceded that Trump’s words leading up to the riot were legal speech, however false and inflammatory.

Many Democrats argue that Trump’s guilt is not because of his rhetoric, so the First Amendment does not protect him. “The problem was not Trump’s speech, but his alleged actions,” wrote David Cole, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Ben Wizner, ACLU’s Director of Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, in August.

These actions, the ACLU attorneys said, included Trump’s attempt to get states to invalidate election results and to send alternative slates of electors, as well as his effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results.

“Of course, many of these actions involved communication,” wrote Cole and Wizner.

“But the fact that a crime includes speech does not turn the First Amendment into a defense. A conspiracy is an agreement to commit a crime and almost always takes the form of words.”

But Trump’s efforts to contest the election were political maneuvers that Democrats had previously proposed in both 2016 and in 2020. In 2016, liberal journalists implied that competing elector slates were legal, and pushed elector schemes that would allow Hillary Clinton to win.

And as Public reported on Wednesday, political operatives and journalists held a summit called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) in 2020. During the TIP simulation exercise, the players plotted how to challenge the election results in the event of a Trump victory, and in one of their simulations they had states send alternate slates of electors. Yet when Trump and his team attempted this strategy, Democrats decided it was a criminal felony.

Democrats’ “insurrection” narrative rests on manipulative arguments and cynical language games, and this narrative is being used to destroy a foundation of our democracy: the people’s right to vote for the candidate of their choice.

As much as we may dislike it, whether it’s Clinton saying that Trump is an illegitimate president because of “Russian disinformation,” or whether it’s Trump saying that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president because of vote-by-mail and ballot harvesting schemes, losers have a legal right to deny, challenge, and contest elections. This right is actually part of what makes our elections free and fair.

The idea of imprisoning political rivals or preventing candidates from running is something Democrats justifiably condemned seven years ago when Trump threatened to jail his opponent Hillary Clinton. Said CNN’s Dana Bash in 2016, “What makes this country different from countries with dictators in Africa or Stalin or Hitler or any of those countries with dictators and totalitarian leaders is when they took over, they put their opponents in jail.”

Before the 2016 election, CNN compiled a list of country leaders who had imprisoned their political opposition. Doing this in the United States, CNN suggested, would be to follow in the footsteps of Augusto Pinochet, Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, Robert Mugabe, and Kim Jong Un. “A line was crossed that I don’t know has been crossed in my lifetime, maybe ever. He threatened to jail his opponent,” CNN’s Van Jones said.

If Trump had really led a “coup,” he would have seized the means of communication (i.e., the legacy media and social media) and secured the support of high-level military and intelligence officials. This “coup” would have involved attempts to take political prisoners and to control major civil society institutions.

What the Democrats have done since 2016, and what they continue to do now, much more closely resembles a coup d’état than what Trump and his allies accomplished. Through their soft coup, the Democratic Party and government bureaucrats worked with the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to control communications and construct a vast censorship complex across social media. Since 2020, they have issued extremely harsh sentences for hundreds of Trump’s January 6 supporters, many of them for non-violent offenses. And now, in 2023, Democrats are trying to prevent their only real political challenger from ever taking office again.

Such a situation should create intense cognitive dissonance for Democratic leaders and activists due to the contradiction between their behavior and their proclaimed belief in democracy. And yet there are few signs of such dissonance. Why is that?

A Domestic “Color Revolution”

In August 2020, two former military officers, John Nagl and Paul Yingling wrote an open letter to General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In it, they urged the military to forcibly remove Trump from the White House on January 20, 2021. “Due to a dangerous confluence of circumstances, the once-unthinkable scenario of authoritarian rule in the United States is now a very real possibility,” wrote Nagl and Yingling.

This open letter provided a window into the mentality of the national security and foreign policy establishment and adjacent think tanks. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security should be arbiters of the election, they determined, not the electorate or the courts.

Public has previously reported that, as the CTIL Files and other documents show, military contractors used counterterrorism tactics against the American people to control narratives and censor citizens after 2016. Now, it appears that tactics security agencies have used to interfere in foreign countries’ affairs may have also been employed by government operatives in the 2020 election.

The 2020 TIP simulation, organized by a former Defense Department senior official, stated in a report that, “Planners need to take seriously the notion that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle; technocratic solutions, courts, and a reliance on elites observing norms are not the answer here.” TIP also suggested taking advantage of Black Lives Matter protests to secure a victory for Democrats.

In September 2020, Michael Anton, a conservative essayist and national security official in the Trump Administration, wrote that some of these developments resembled a “color revolution,” or “the exact same playbook the American deep state runs in other countries whose leadership they don’t like and is currently running in Belarus. Oust a leader—even an elected one—through agitation and call it ‘democracy.’”

The “color revolution” playbook, used in Eastern Europe, is characterized by controversial election results and mass civil unrest. Color revolutions are a form of US-led regime change that has become a more common alternative to violent, costly, and unpopular military invasions. In 2004, Ian Traynor reported in The Guardian that the US was behind the color revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet countries.

Supposedly organic political movements in Eastern Europe were actually “an American creation” and “a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing,” Traynor wrote. Color revolutions in Ukraine and Serbia, reported Traynor, were “Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations.” These operations were “engineering democracy” through contested elections and civil disobedience.

There are clear parallels here with the 2020 American presidential election, which was preceded by months of violent protests and which was “fortified” by what Time magazine called a “well-funded cabal.” In addition to these parallels, some of the same individuals and organizations involved in securing American interests through interference abroad are also linked to Democrats’ crusade to oust Trump and vilify his supporters.

The campaign to bar Trump from the ballot in Colorado was brought forward by the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). One of CREW’s co-founders, Norm Eisen, participated in the TIP exercise and served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump’s impeachment. Eisen was previously the US ambassador to the Czech Republic under President Barack Obama.

In 2020 Revolver News and Darren Beattie, a former speechwriter for Trump, reported that Eisen and his colleagues had written a report called “The Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding.” The report recommended steps in European nations that could be considered typical color revolution measures, including a heavy focus on “unfair” elections, encouraging protests, and collaboration with NGOs. This report suggests that Eisen, one of the main architects of Trump’s impeachment and delegitimization, was closely connected to American intervention efforts overseas.

Eisen is not the only official linked to both counterpopulist initiatives in the US and influence work abroad. Several witnesses for Trump’s impeachment also had national security and bureaucratic positions related to Eastern Europe during the era of color revolutions. Additionally, Nina Jankowicz, the proposed head of Biden’s “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was to operate from DHS, formerly worked on “democracy assistance programs” for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), which receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, and the State Department to promote “democracy” in foreign countries. Experts have long understood NED to be a public-facing partner to the CIA.

The pattern that has emerged from Public’s reporting and research is that, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, state security and intelligence agencies adapted strategies once used to combat foreign threats, and employed them against US citizens. This was the case for both domestic narrative control and censorship initiatives, as well as for initiatives to “protect democracy,” which appear to be linked to the country’s regime change strategies abroad.

Democrats’ constant assertions that Trump and his supporters are violating democratic norms is projection, a process through which they are displacing their own anti-democratic attitudes and desires onto their enemies. This projection is characterized by a lack of self-awareness and a distorted perception of reality. Government bureaucrats and advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic Party are guilty of the very same acts Democrats project onto Trump, namely attempting to inappropriately interfere in elections and stage a soft coup to displace and disempower their political opposition.

Saving Democracy For Real

Despite the troubling political implications of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, it was met with approval from the vast majority of Democrats. One poll from YouGov found that 84 percent of Democrats agreed with the court’s decision, and only 8 percent disagreed.

But some prominent Democrats vocally opposed the decision. After California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis requested that the state look into “every legal option” to remove Trump from the ballot in California, Governor Gavin Newsom expressed his disapproval. “There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy. But in California, we defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction,” Newsom said.

Preventing Trump from running will not protect democracy. This is how democracy will end. Democrats and independents who do not support Trump but who oppose the Colorado ruling must call out this assault on the democratic process, as my colleague Michael Shellenberger did yesterday.

Just as important is our work to fully investigate what has happened to our democracy since 2016. It is increasingly evident that, in a counterpopulist soft coup, national security and intelligence techniques were repurposed to quash and criminalize political dissent.

Many liberal journalists claim that the “deep state” is a conspiracy theory, but the events of the past seven years have demonstrated that career bureaucrats in security and intelligence agencies have immense power over the executive branch of government. These unelected bureaucrats may even be able to prevent a presidential front-runner from ever holding office again. Whether termed as the “deep state” or not, it is clear that a large group of individuals across the government and the military worked hand-in-hand with civil society to keep Trump out of office in 2020. Today, this group is continuing to improperly subvert the will of American citizens with more desperate and extreme measures.

We know that exposing these kinds of operations is a way to stop them, and we have already been successful in severely curtailing the censorship work of DHS and its partners like the Stanford Internet Observatory. We also know that groups engaged in anti-democratic activities often use public relations strategies to normalize and promote their work. This is part of why we need neutral investigative journalists to continue covering these issues. The tools these anti-democratic forces have weaponized to shape public opinion and conduct “lawfare” are also available to those who favor democracy, and we need to use them.

We at Public have already made calls for whistleblowers to expose censorship projects, and we are grateful for the whistleblowers who have reached out to us. A whistleblower helped us, along with Matt Taibbi at Racket, to inform the public about the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, a key “cognitive security” initiative that was a missing link in our understanding of the Censorship Industrial Complex. We can expect that more and more censorship whistleblowers will come forward because courage is contagious.

Now, we ask that whistleblowers with knowledge of state agencies’ anti-democratic domestic counterpopulist efforts also come forward. It is only by documenting the deep state’s activities that we can hold government agencies accountable and work toward reform.

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