Transition Integrity Project: Final Fallback Before Military Coup
Sept. 14, 2020 (EIRNS)—In so many ways, the coup against President Donald Trump has been ongoing since before he got elected, only intensifying with every failure. So it is with the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), the final stop before the military are mobilized, or the assassins.
On Jan. 30, 2017, then Georgetown University Law professor (with strong ties to the Pentagon), Rosa Brooks, wrote her column in Foreign Policy, “3 Ways To Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020.” Perhaps not (yet) willing to go as far as British, and raise the issue of actual assassination, Brooks eventually—after examining and dismissing impeachment (either by Congress or the 25th Amendment) as being too slow— comes around to the “unthinkable” idea of—a military coup.
“The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” Although posited in the negative—as officers refusing to follow the Commander-in-Chief’s orders—the issue was now on the table, by an American journalist, a military coup against a duly-elected President. In January of 2017.
Not surprising, then, to find that this Soros-trained, State Department advisor (1999-2000), and former Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy (2009-2011), co-founded with Nils Gilman the delphically-named Transition Integrity Project (TIP), whose July 2020 report “war gamed” post-election chaos under any condition short of a Biden landslide in November (“Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” Aug. 3, 2020). A July 26 article in the Boston Globe describes how “Brooks got the seed of the idea for the Transition Integrity Project after a dinner where a federal judge and a corporate lawyer each told her they were convinced the military or the Secret Service would have to escort Trump out of office if he lost the election and would not concede.”
Brooks partnered with “historian” Nils Gilman, who leads research at the Berggruen Institute, a new-age “think and action tank” on the West Coast and deputy editor of its publication, Noema. While TIP, officially headed by Zoe Hudson, has no website—and therefore no official record of who was involved in the “game”— the Globe article described “a slate of players including a former swing state governor, a former White House chief of staff, and a former head of the Department of Homeland Security” all taking part in the project. While stating that the “game” was played under “the so-called Chatham House Rules—in which participants can discuss what was said, but not who was there; some participants were willing to be named,” including Bill Kristol (who reportedly played Trump), former (2008 and 2016) head of the Democratic National Convention Committee Leah Daughtry, former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, and progressive Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson.
In a Sept. 7 article in the liberal Nation magazine, author Sasha Abramsky turns the situation around, 180 degrees. Under its title, “Is Trump Planning a Coup d’État?” she seeks to paint Trump as the bad guy. Not too eager to name Democrats, she reveals others involved (descriptions by author) including:
Republicans:
Charles Fried, Harvard professor and former Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general
Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee
Tom Coleman, a former Republican representative for the Sixth Congressional District of Missouri and now a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises
Trevor Potter, ex-chairman of the Federal Election Commission and currently president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and prominent critic of both U.S. foreign policy and Donald Trump [former chief of staff of Colin Powell, as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State—ed.]
Democrats:
Jennifer Granholm, former Michigan governor, and Democratic operative Donna Brazile.
As Wilkerson admitted to the Boston Globe, “The Constitution really has been a workable document in many respects because we have had people who more or less adhered to a code of conduct. That seems to no longer to be the case. That changes everything.”
