{Note: It’s neither the role nor intent of Proof or its author to allege with certainty violations of federal criminal statutes by particular individuals. While this article, and other articles at Proof, note possible statutory violations worthy of additional investigation, a final judgment on whether federal criminal offenses have occurred—and if any such crimes were committed by persons discussed here—can only be made by prosecutors at the Department of Justice.}

Introduction

Donald Trump adviser and ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has just inadvertently admitted knowledge of an illicit January 6 coup plot in a bizarre—and videotaped—confession.

For this entry in the “Coming Collapse” series, we’ll jump almost immediately into what we just learned—as it’s voluminous, confusing, and critical to America’s future.

A Very Brief Prelude to A Historic Post-Insurrection Confession

The one Patrick Byrne video that everyone must be aware of before reading his just-released confession is this one from February 3, 2022, in which Byrne speaks briefly about a man Proof exclusively revealed as a key member of Donald Trump’s Willard Hotel “war room” on Insurrection Eve in 2021: Joe Oltmann. In the video, Byrne, an associate of Oltmann in private meetings about Trump’s Big Lie, says the following about the man (who has threatened to sue this author for publishing Oltmann’s own words in this publication):

Every time I’ve seen Joe Oltmann in the last six months [the latter half of 2021], when we’re together sitting at the table…he will find the first opportunity he can in the conversation to lean over [to me] and say, “What I want to know, Patrick, is when are we going to say we’ve had enough? When are we taking to the streets?” [And I say to him], “What do you mean, ‘When are we taking it to the streets?’” [And Oltmann says], “[I mean] when are the bullets going to start flying? When are we going to get—when are we going to do what has to [be done]?”

Every single time, I shut the guy off in his track {sic} [and] I chew him out. I say, “Don’t even think that way, blah blah blah.” But I’m just telling you, there’s not a conversation that guy’s been around [about the 2020 election]—in six months I’ve seen, or nine months—that he [Joe Oltmann] is not looking for the opportunity to try to draw people into [something like], “So, what I want to know is when are we going to talk about how we’re going to do what needs to be done? We really have to take care of business [by force]. When are the bullets going to start flying?”

Joe Oltmann: every conversation that guy’s ever in, that is what he’s trying to get people to talk about.

This statement by Byrne, covering—given his self-correction as to date range, above—at least the period from April 2021 through January 2022, is vital to understanding all that follows because, as Proof has reported, Oltmann was invited inside Trump’s inner circle in the lead-up to January 6, 2021. So too were other known militants, such as Robert Patrick Lewis of the 1st Amendment Praetorian paramilitary and violent, unstable ex-Pentagon assets like Phil Waldron (who Proof wrote about in detail in April of last year). Michael Flynn, the ex-con and ex-soldier who called for a coup of Joe Biden’s administration in Dallas last year, wasn’t peripheral to the plot that Byrne details below but central to it—and as readers of this article will ultimately learn in more detail, is the man a cadre of Flynn co-conspirators, including Byrne, now hope will pick up the pieces of the failed January 6 coup and make another go of it soon.

So some of the plotting Byrne describes in the confession linked to below occurred in the presence of, and with the aid of, men who were quite open in their belief that not overturning the 2020 presidential election would—and should—lead to a Second Civil War. Therefore, the supposed naiveté about both consequences and the nature of his compatriots that Byrne repeatedly floats below ought not be credited. If Byrne himself was forced to spend Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day preaching non-violence in impromptu interviews (which this author can attest he was, having watched several interviews with him from that span of time) it is in part due to the fact that he, and more importantly Trump and his legal team, chose to consort with a small group of ex-soldiers and intelligence operatives whose means of addressing political complaints is violence or covert disinformation operations. Neither Byrne nor his co-conspirators can disassociate themselves from such militants now.

The Ten Revelations in Byrne’s 85-Minute Confession

(1) Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn were engaged in a covert attempt to swing the 2020 election to Trump by using an illegally acquired computer allegedly owned by Hunter Biden to claim—falsely—that there was some sort of collusion between the Bidens and China.

Rudy Giuliani and Flynn tried this same tactic as an “October surprise” in October of 2016, except that that time the laptop at issue belonged to Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner, and the crime alleged by Giuliani and Flynn and co-conspirator Erik Prince against the then-Democratic presidential candidate wasn’t Bribery but Child Trafficking and several other unstated (and equally illusory) offenses. Having succeeded in extorting then-FBI director James Comey into reopening the Hillary Clinton email case in 2016—which cost Clinton the election—and having faced no consequences for their conduct, it’s unsurprising that Giuliani and Flynn, this time with the aid of a new Trump adviser in place of Prince (Trump lawyer Sidney Powell) would again try to use manufactured evidence of profoundly problematic provenance to install Donald Trump in the White House.

As we saw during the Trump-Ukraine scandal, during which Giuliani used “clients” of his (notably, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman) to commit crimes, on the theory that it is easier to keep a crime under wraps if you enjoy attorney-client privilege with your co-conspirators, Byrne begins his confession by admitting that Giuliani sought the aid of a “client” from Queens in doing something other than quickly turning over an illegally acquired laptop to federal law enforcement.

That Giuliani knew he was engaged in illicit conduct by holding on to the ill-gotten laptop appears to be confirmed by Byrne’s acknowledgment that when Giuliani convened a cadre of Trump supporters to break into this illegally acquired computer, he brought his own personal attorney with him as a witness. (I will note, as a former criminal defense attorney myself, that Giuliani’s lawyer is by no means exempt from criminal investigation because it was a client who invited him to the scene of a crime.)

As Giuliani, Powell, and Flynn were plotting a 2016 “October Surprise” redux using the alleged Hunter Biden laptop, Byrne says that Powell was obsessed with “getting to” Donald Trump (presumably through his then-attorney, Giuliani); this obsession echoes the January 2016 obsession future Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had with “getting to” Trump—his words—to advance his own schemes and ambitions.

Byrne implies that, like Manafort’s, Powell’s efforts were successful, inasmuch as he says that in very short order Powell’s ambition changed from simply meeting with Mr. Trump to wanting to “be next to him on November 3 [Election Day]”—the biggest day of his political life, given that if he lost the election and the White House he knew (as did the criminal defense attorney Powell, best known for representing Flynn) that as an ex-president he would be newly open to criminal investigations for which he’d quickly need exhaustive, aggressive, and expensive criminal-defense representation.

It is therefore, in view of this eyewitness account from Byrne, impossible to imagine that Trump did not know, prior to the November 2020 election, that his attorneys had illegally acquired a laptop owned by the son of his political rival. There’s no evidence that Team Trump quickly returned the laptop or surrendered it to law enforcement, but the “belief” (whether pretextual or earnest) Trump and his allies developed during this period that the Biden family had been secretly colluding with the Chinese would reappear in mid-December as part of fantastical theories about foreign interference in the presidential election—all of which turned out to be not just false, but dangerous.

Byrne at first indicates that Flynn did not know Giuliani had sought his and Powell’s help with the Hunter Biden laptop scheme. However, Byrne also—rather improbably—suggests that Powell hid this obscenely valuable political intelligence from her former Defense Intelligence Agency chief client even as he was traveling regularly to D.C. to see her. This claim does not comport with what we know about Michael Flynn’s past, his relationship with Powell, or his public statements regarding the Bidens and China.

(2) This failed “October Surprise” plot gave rise to the coup attempt that began several weeks later.

Prior to the election—during the period of time that Patrick Byrne reached out to this author through an intermediary, claiming he had urgent intel to impart (a request for a conversation this author ignored)—Byrne was apparently so invested in the Hunter Biden laptop scheme that he rented a “block of suites” in Trump International Hotel.

Byrne says that he did so without Trump’s knowledge, though how and when Trump is informed about internationally known businessmen renting a block of suites for an indefinite period in his Washington hotel is a process wholly invisible to Byrne. Byrne also claims he chose Trump International Hotel solely because it was “the hotel most likely to be attacked”—he doesn’t say by whom—and therefore the one he felt would have the best security. Byrne’s insistence that Trump never knew or learned about his Trump International war room, even as he concedes that there were “a lot of people coming and going” from his suites in the hotel for a “couple months”, including some Trump lawyers, is bizarre. Indeed, it is the sort of activity one would expect Trump to eventually hear about given that, besides his own lawyers, one of the people who was coming and going from his hotel was his controversial first National Security Advisor.

According to Byrne, the Hunter Biden laptop scheme gave Powell an excuse to (a) be in Washington long-term, (b) get close to Trump’s inner circle, and (c) become a key member of that inner circle in the weeks following Trump’s landslide election loss.

Byrne now says that Powell was so enamored with her position in Trump’s orbit and her newly won access to national political media that “over the river in Alexandria and Arlington [Virginia]”, the “same sort of thing started happening” that already had happened in Trump International: the creation of a series of connected war rooms paid for by Trump’s allies, advisers, associates, agents, attorneys, and/or aides. “There was a Westin Hotel”, Byrne helpfully explains—referring, it would appear, to either the Westin Arlington Gateway or the Westin Crystal City—where Giuliani’s laptop-analyzing “client” suddenly chose to decamp by renting a block of suites that were quickly transformed into long-term shared office space for “Sidney Powell and her team” and unnamed others.

Note here that there was no reason for a client of Giuliani to expend such resources to house Giuliani and Powell—as opposed to these two Trump lawyers being paid by the Trump campaign or even Trump himself for their legal services—unless either (a) the intent of the Giuliani client’s payments was to hide the war rooms (and their funding) by having them be paid for by someone who could claim on later tax documents that he was simply billing his lawyer (Giuliani) for services rendered (and indeed, Giuliani has been known to accept significant in-kind payments, and to allow others to pay him for work he’s actually doing for Trump; see the Trump-Ukraine scandal for more), and/or (b) the aim was to make in-kind contributions to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign that could plausibly escape the notice of the FEC (though it might require the commission of several federal crimes to ensure that it would be so). In either case, the arrangement Byrne describes is ethically dubious and warrants more investigation by federal authorities.

{Note: It appears that Rudy Giuliani also traveled to Virginia on occasion, despite his own haunt being the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington during the immediate post-election period. As the New York Times has reported, “Byrne told [the Times] that he and Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, met with Trump’s legal adviser Rudy Giuliani in Arlington, Virginia, shortly after the election to offer their assistance.” Why Giuliani chose to hold any key meetings outside of D.C. and—as it happens—in the shadow of the Pentagon is unclear.}

What is clear that the Westin-based operations in Virginia went beyond just a dubious means for President Trump to get legal services—and maybe some in-kind campaign contributions—under the radar of federal agencies. As Byrne says (emphasis supplied):

[Rudy’s client] showed up [in Washington], and he’s a business guy, [so] he did the same thing [I’d done at Trump International]: he rented a block of rooms [and] he created office spaces for some people to be working together. He created rooms for Sidney Powell and some of her people.

[But] there was another group on a different floor [of the same Westin Hotel].

On a different floor [was]…the Amistad Project, or a different project, [and] there was even another group that was a group of retired federal prosecutors, somewhere [in the Arlington/Alexandria area of Virginia] on the other side of the river [from Washington].

And they called.

So there were these different camps—at least three camps—scattered on the Virginia side of the river, well two [at the Westin] and one [elsewhere in the area], and then there was what I was doing with these [cyber-intelligence analysts] in a block of rooms at the Trump [International Hotel]. So that’s the layout [in the two months after the election].

So in that context, Sidney Powell was over there with…she got mixed up very quickly with Rudy and all of this. I’m talking about November 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th. Somewhere in there General Flynn is coming in [to Powell’s new offices at the Westin]…

Regular readers of Proof will know it was the Amistad Project that created the pretext for Trump’s now-infamous January 2, 2021 conference call, which call included several groups of people:

• Several hundred Republican state legislators (Oath Keeper member, Stop the Steal leader, and Ali Alexander mentor Mark Finchem believed to be among them);

• presidential adviser Peter Navarro, who was just subpoenaed by the House January 6 Committee);

• the leadership of the Amistad Project, including former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, who now stands accused of “le[ading] the effort to promote fake Trump electors in 2020”; and possibly

• other members of Stop the Steal’s leadership cadre (as it is known that Stop the Steal leadership was represented on the call, but it remains unclear if this is a reference to Finchem, who was also present as a state GOP representative from Arizona—as would have been another insurrectionist Oath Keeper, Wendy Rogers, who is likewise a state GOP representative from Arizona).

One purpose of this call appears to have been for Trump to get grassroots organizers like Finchem—who would shortly be co-leading a march on the U.S. Capitol—on the same page as the GOP state legislators Trump needed to somehow “decertify” Biden’s electors in six battleground states if he could buy them seven to ten days via January 6 machinations. These machinations depended on two groups: the domestic terrorists of the Stop the Steal “movement”, chief among them Finchem’s mentee Ali Alexander, and a separate group of people who Team Trump would address en masse on January 4 at Trump International Hotel: Republican members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives.

The reason the two groups whose aid Trump most needed on January 6 were the Stop the Steal foot-soldiers and members of both houses of Congress—in other words, the reason this list does not include the several hundred GOP state legislators who Trump addressed on January 2—is because this latter group could only be of utility to Trump if the January 6 joint session were pushed by not just a day or two but at least a week.

A week-long—or even longer—postponement of the statutorily mandated January 6 joint session of Congress could only be accomplished by a combination of two forces: (1) Republican members of Congress from both houses standing in unison to demand two hours of statutorily required congressional debate on their joint objections to ten states contested during the 2020 presidential election (in fact, Team Trump only had pseudo-coherent complaints about six states, but on January 6 Giuliani and Trump chose, in mid-riot, to expand this roster to “ten” to ensure a greater delay in the joint session), and (2) the previously publicly declared “Operation Occupy the Capitol” coup plot schemed up by Trump’s three Stop the Steal allies—Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the aforementioned Alexander—which plot Trump had, by January 2, repeatedly endorsed in the public square. This combination of disruptive, longer-term protests inside the chambers of Congress and in public areas across the Capitol grounds was required for Trump to get the seven- to ten-day delay of the congressional joint session he needed.

Preceding Trump’s Amistad Project–orchestrated January 2 conference call (recalling that the Amistad Project comprised one of the Trumpist “camps” in the Westin Hotel in Virginia) were weeks and weeks during which, Byrne says, the Westin camps were getting calls from pro-Trump local officials warning of election “mischief.” It is not clear how or why local elections officials would have known that a Giuliani client had just paid an enormous sum of money to create ad hoc law offices for Donald Trump’s legal team at a Westin hotel in Virginia. That Byrne insists they did indeed know this suggests that Powell and other members of what would come to be known as “Team Kraken” quickly began putting out feelers to pro-Trump government employees nationwide, hunting for evidence of something that they were publicly claiming had happened without yet having any evidence that it did: a “stolen” presidential election.

Byrne explains that the link between the Westin operation(s) in Virginia and his own at Trump International Hotel was that of an intelligence pipeline: Trump’s lawyers in Virginia (whether Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova were among them is unclear, though it is certain that they were public members of Team Kraken) were tasked with feeding to Byrne’s small army of intelligence experts at Trump International Hotel any intelligence they received from pro-Trump officials around the country (here, too, we cannot yet know whether Ginni Thomas’s Groundswell group participated in this act of intelligence-gathering and interlocution—the specialties that group was known for—even as many of its past allies and participants would keep showing up as essential intelligence sources for Team Trump’s Westin and Trump International Hotel offices).

Were the pro-Trump local officials who passed intelligence to the Westin and Trump International Hotel lawyers and intelligence operatives legally entitled to pass on the sensitive election data they shared? We don’t know—though Byrne now claims his team wouldn’t have looked at intelligence they weren’t entitled to look at. Whether this vague gesture toward “due diligence” amounted to more than just ensuring that any intelligence they received came from a bona fide elections official remains unclear.

There is evidence, however, that Byrne’s team may have done even less due diligence than just described.

In his confession, Byrne says that he and his team would only look at intelligence that had been “approved”, but “what that meant” (per Byrne) was that he and his team had “thought” that Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s legal team would be leaning on local elections officials to let Byrne and his team look inside voting machines all across the country, suggesting that whenever any such permission was granted—howsoever it was obtained—Byrne and his team of intelligence experts quickly sprung into action.

Was it legal for the lawyer of one of the two 2020 presidential candidates—Giuliani—under the presumed color of being an agent of the President of the United States, to lean on government employees around the country to get them to agree to let private experts and a former CEO poke around in public voting machines? Experts in election law would have to weigh in on this, but it certainly isn’t the sort of post-election audit of ballots that any intelligence expert concerned about professional ethics would want to be involved in, let alone a private citizen (with no intelligence training) like Byrne.

Byrne confesses that his experts were concerned—and expressed their concerns to him directly—that the president’s agents, including Giuliani, would receive election data to which Trump and his lawyers were not entitled: that is to say, stolen election data it would be illegal to possess. That Byrne’s experts had and voiced this concern, and that they were relying on the integrity and lawfulness of a completely separate “camp” across the river in Virginia to ensure that they weren’t participating in a criminal conspiracy, is stunning in its own right. But given that Giuliani had infamously just been involved in not one but two major conspiracies to tamper with a presidential election—one in 2016, involving the Weiner laptop, and another in 2020, involving pro-Kremlin Ukrainians and eventually the “Hunter Biden laptop”—it’s incomprehensible that anyone would trust Giuliani to act with integrity with regard to a federal election, let alone when he was being paid (by someone, if not Trump) to represent Mr. Trump’s legal and political interests.

According to Byrne, his intelligence experts even expressed to him their fears about “going to jail”—confirming that they understood just how close to the line even their presence at Trump International Hotel had caused them to get.

It turns out that they were right to be concerned.

Patrick Byrne confesses that Phil Waldron—apparently with support from Trump lawyer Sidney Powell—did suggest that election data be acquired via federal felonies, which Byrne euphemistically refers to in his confession as a “black ops” plot. So was Waldron quickly separated from Team Trump upon proposing a criminal conspiracy?

No.

In fact, the opposite occurred.

Waldron was thereafter invited to Trump’s Insurrection Eve war room at Trump International Hotel, and was even tapped by Team Trump to make an (ultimately failed) bid to run a recount in the State of New Hampshire. And of course Byrne himself continued to work with Waldron despite the latter having put a criminal conspiracy on the table, even calling Waldron—in his 85-minute confession—a “wonderful man” whom he “love[s].”

Byrne confesses that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani didn’t issue a final judgment on Waldron’s criminal conspiracy scheme immediately. Rather, he brought in a former NYPD police commissioner (and ex-convict) named Bernie Kerik to get a second opinion. So why didn’t Giuliani ask his own lawyer for advice, given that we know from Byrne that Giuliani had the man close to hand as he was trying to overturn the 2020 election? One might guess—or, rather, I as a former criminal defense attorney might guess—why a man who has repeatedly been under criminal investigation over the last five years (Giuliani) and been suspended from practicing law in his home state would rather seek strategic counsel from a known criminal than a respected attorney.

But to be clear, Waldron didn’t just raise the possibility of a criminal conspiracy once.

Byrne confesses that Team Trump stalwart Waldron was discussing illicit “black ops” so frequently that it was clearly “too much” and Byrne (he says) had to dress him down for it. So apparently Powell’s encouragement, Giuliani’s slow rejection of the idea, and Byrne’s own continued fidelity to Phil Waldron somehow didn’t dissuade the man from continuing to aggressively push for Team Trump to commit crimes.

{Note: The Oath Keeper HQ in the run-up to the insurrection—and the location of their so-called Quick Reaction Force armory—was in Virginia, apparently at the Comfort Inn Ballston, according to court documents. That hotel is approximately a half a mile from the Westin Gateway, which is worth noting given that two of the key allies of the Westin camps were the aforementioned Oath Keepers Mark Finchem and Wendy Rogers. We do not yet know whether any of the Trump war rooms in Virginia had contact with the armed militants’ war room just a stone’s throw away, but we do know this: militants ended up inside Giuliani’s Willard Hotel war room once he’d moved to that hotel from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington and the Westin in Virginia—among them Robert Patrick Lewis, Joe Oltmann, and Philip Luelsdorf—and for years there’d been regular live-on-television contact between the head of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, and Alex Jones, the very Stop the Steal leader Trump asked to lead the march on the Capitol during the weekend of January 2. That was the weekend he spoke to Stop the Steal leaders in a call set by the Westin-based Amistad Project.}

(3) After six weeks of the intelligence pipeline described above, Biden’s landslide victory was certified by fifty states and D.C. in mid-December 2020, an event that caused a splintering within Team Trump.

According to Byrne, this post-certification splintering divided the Trumpist coup effort into three separate but parallel efforts:

1. The Bureaucratic Plot: Per Byrne, Powell told him that Giuliani had given up on Trump’s campaign and wanted to just file some pro forma court motions he knew would lose before calling it a day. This uninspired and purely gestural scheme was dubbed by Byrne a “bureaucratic” strategy.

2. The Digital Plot: Per Byrne, he and Powell remained focused on gaining access in some fashion to election data and (via imaging) voting machines and election servers. From November 3 through mid-December, this data had apparently been flowing through Giuliani’s camp—as presumably he was more persuasive in getting such data from local officials, as an attorney for the sitting president implicitly or explicitly using the power of the Oval Office to command respect and compliance—so we can presume from Powell’s description of Giuliani’s strategy (see above) that she felt Giuliani had begun to do too little to act as an intelligence pipeline once Biden’s November election victory was certified in mid-December. Byrne emphasizes the “digital” nature of Powell’s evidentiary interests.

3. The Political Plot: Per Byrne, at the time Peter Navarro—and, we would later learn, Trump attorney John Eastman—was working on the “Green Bay Sweep”, in simpler terms a self-coup-by-fiat (when the results of a democratic election are overturned because the losing party has a majority in a sufficient number of legislatures to block and overrule the democratically acquired final vote tallies).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Powell’s description of Giuliani’s activities was misleading—and in fact Giuliani’s “bureaucratic” plot, Byrne says he soon discovered, was aimed at dovetailing with Navarro and Eastman’s political coup. According to Byrne, it turned out that Giuliani’s plan was to “dig up enough” doubt about the election results that it would stiffen the backs of the federal and state GOP politicians who would be asked by Trump (as indeed they were on January 2) to overturn the results of a democratic election in which not a single court in the United States had found any systemic fraud.

Byrne at one point slips and seems to inadvertently admit that Peter Navarro and John Eastman’s plan was a coup plot contrary to conventional democratic norms (e.g., the Supreme Court-set precedent of “one person, one vote”): he says that under the Green Bay Sweep plot “the state legislatures [would] look at all the facts…and then they make their decision [about who should be POTUS]….it’s still a democratic process, it’s the People deciding—{NB: he corrects himself}—it’s the elected officials deciding…”

At approximately the same point in his confession, Byrne makes a second admission that may be even more significant, saying, “What I knew by November 10th [2020]…[is that] these elections [in November 2020] were so hopelessly compromised that there’s no way to know who won. There’s no way to know who won….I knew by November 10th that this [the 2020 election] was an egg that could not be unscrambled, and there was no way to ‘Encyclopedia Brown’ your way down to the bottom of it [to] really figure anything out [about who won] and get to it [an answer to that question].” (Emphasis added.)

This admission is significant because when Byrne made his way to the Oval Office 38 days after his big realization—see below for more—he did not tell Donald Trump that “there’s no way to know who won” the 2020 election, or that the final results were “an egg that could not be unscrambled.” Rather, he admits that what he said to Trump, verbatim, was “Put us in, Coach…we [me, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn] will win this [election for you]. We’ll win this.”

There can be no clearer confession that Byrne intended on achieving a specific result for Trump—a “win”—he knew by November 10, 2020 may have been the wrong result.

(4) It was during this “splinter” period that Patrick Byrne, Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell—the so-called “digital” team—used a top Peter Navarro aide, Garrett Zeigler, to get an audience with Trump that they had not scheduled in advance.

The revelation that Navarro’s camp was responsible for getting Team Kraken into the Oval Office comes from this recent New York Times report.

At the “raucous”, Axios-reported December 18, 2020 Oval Office meeting, Giuliani (who was at that point not on the same page as Powell or the rest of the “digital” team, per Byrne) was brought into the conversation only after-the-fact—as the Byrne-led plot to get to Donald Trump deliberately left him out of the loop. This, in itself, is telling.

Byrne has already confessed that Giuliani was the one who shut down the “black ops” plan “presented” to him by Phil Waldron and Sidney Powell, which plan Byrne had clearly not objected to in advance because (a) he was briefed on the failed presentation immediately after it was concluded and was apparently not at all surprised that the presentation had occurred or what its contents were, and (b) he confesses that “at the time” he didn’t really understand his own team’s unwillingness to participate in such “black ops”—a federal criminal conspiracy—which unwillingness he now says his intelligence experts explained to him but for some reason he could not comprehend.

{Note: The very fact that Byrne concedes he could not comprehend his team’s unwillingness to follow Waldron and Powell’s plan confirms that he at some point was advocating for conduct on their part that they had to explain—repeatedly—was unacceptable and perhaps illegal.}

So for Byrne to decide, shortly after the failed Powell-Waldron presentation, (a) that he, Powell, and Waldron’s former Defense Intelligence Agency boss Michael Flynn needed to get to President Trump immediately; (b) that Giuliani could not be told of this meeting; and (c) that some portion of the meeting should be held—for unknown reasons—in the president’s private residence in the White House rather than the Oval Office, and outside the presence of Trump’s White House Counsel rather than with him present, certainly leaves the impression that Powell and the Waldron-connected Flynn wanted a second crack at pitching “black ops” to the president rather than merely the “political” plot they by then understood Navarro had drafted (the “Green Bay Sweep”).

The example Byrne gives of “digging up enough” doubt about the 2020 election that it would give GOP state legislators cover for taking voting for president out of the hands of voters—the Green Bay Sweep, of which Byrne says that, by the end of November, he had come to believe it was the “best” option for Trump—is “the hearings in Maricopa County [Arizona].” Byrne believed a public spectacle on the order of a televised audit in Maricopa, even though he’d already decided it had no chance of determining who’d won, would be enough to put pressure on GOP legislators to give the election to Trump.

In other words, the truth didn’t matter to Byrne and his compatriots. Rather, all that Donald Trump needed was someone who could go to Arizona and create a spectacle, or—failing that, as a spectacle-forward recount could take some months to execute—any person who would promise to go to Arizona and speculate publicly about mischief in the vote count there, and be willing to so speculate in a way compelling enough for GOP legislators to hand Trump the election even before any Arizona “audit” had finished.

Fortunately, Team Kraken already had the man for the job.

CNBC and the New York Times report that by the end of November 2020, pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood was hosting at his South Carolina plantation, for strategy sessions aimed at overturning the 2020 election, the whole of Team Kraken—including Byrne, Flynn, and Powell—as well as Doug Logan, the Trumpworld-connected head of an obscure southern Florida cyber-intelligence company called Cyber Ninjas.

As the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported a few weeks ago, after the election “Patrick Byrne, Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell all were involved with nonprofits that spent millions funding CEO Doug Logan’s audit work in Arizona.”

{Note: Proof previously published a lengthy exposé on Doug Logan’s Trumpworld connections and the “audit” in Arizona he and his under-resourced “Cyber Ninjas” ultimately conducted.}

In other words, as soon as Byrne realized that (in his own view) there was no way to know who won the 2020 election, he began pouring money into an effort that could not possibly have been completed by the January 6 joint session of Congress intended to certify the election—in the event, Logan’s partisan, fraudulent “audit” of the vote in Arizona took many, many months—but was guaranteed, based on Logan’s past willing participation in the secret conspiracy hatched at Wood’s plantation, to draw enough light (if not heat) to the vote there that it would persuade GOP legislators in Arizona to hand Trump an election Byrne now concedes he never had any idea if Trump won.

Those Republican legislators in Arizona are the very same ones domestic terrorist Ali Alexander infamously said he “owned”—through his Stop the Steal operation—as of the time that Team Kraken was hatching its plot at Wood’s South Carolina plantation.

Byrne now admits that, in the run-up to directly lobbying the sitting President of the United States in the Oval Office, “a lot” of people—some not just ideating but writing up ideas that Byrne now finds objectionable—were “floating around” Powell’s camp at the Westin Hotel, along with a group of “very active outsiders” who had a much greater level of access to Powell, Giuliani, and other (as Byrne terms them) “insiders” because they were “closely tied in” to that circle of insiders. He does not name any of the members of either group in his 85-minute statement, though he surely knows the names and backgrounds of these individuals sufficiently to characterize their place in the Trumpworld firmament. Byrne admits, even, to yet another group with access to Trump’s legal team being involved with the November and December 2020 operations at the Westin and Trump International Hotel, this being individuals from “all across the country” who were—quite clearly derisively, whatever Byrne now says—referred to by Team Kraken as “the boys from Oshkosh” (that is, men Byrne, Powell, Flynn, and Giuliani deemed to be yokels but to whom they nevertheless granted access to their time and energies. This latter group of individuals who had such surprising access to the legal team of then-president Trump were, Byrne says, “staying at hotels all over the city [D.C.]”, which underscores how widely Team Kraken had broadcast its illicit activities at the Westin within Trumpworld, and how widely it cast its net for new political intelligence—no matter how dubious or ill-informed the source of it.

The result was that, as Patrick Byrne describes it, what we’d now deem to be seditious “memos” were “bouncing around” Byrne, Giuliani, Flynn, and Powell’s operation for weeks between the time that Team Kraken decamped from a former slave plantation in South Carolina (for another state in the Old Confederacy, Virginia) and the time the group’s leading members gained access to the Oval Office.

Byrne’s narrative about how he gained direct access to Trump inside the Oval Office is facially preposterous, but it nevertheless warrants a robust analysis.

Despite the fact that Powell had routinely had access to Trump prior to December 18, 2020; despite the fact that Powell and Byrne’s team included Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer (and a regular visitor to the White House who could easily have arranged access to Trump for Team Kraken at any time); and despite the fact that the third leading member of Team Kraken was an ex-Trump National Security Advisor and a one-time candidate to be Trump’s 2016 running mate; Byrne says that he and his team were able to get to Trump only because an aide in the most insurrectionist camp in the Trump White House—Peter Navarro’s office—was duped into thinking that ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne simply wanted a “tour of the White House” at 7:00PM on a Friday night.

That Navarro’s office would have been well aware of Byrne’s team and their work—and well aware that no one could expect to be granted an impromptu tour of the People’s House on only 45 minutes notice on a Friday night—is clear. But Byrne’s implausible narrative exculpates Peter Navarro and his aide Garrett Ziegler from responsibility for getting Team Kraken into the White House, even though Ziegler has since confessed, in a shocking interview with insurrectionist New Mexico State University law professor David K. Clements, how upset he was in December 2020 that then-president Trump wasn’t getting to hear from far-right Trump loyalists but only the White House Counsel’s office.

The notion that Ziegler would bring Patrick Byrne, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn to within a few feet of the Oval Office without first alerting his boss and mentor Peter Navarro can’t be credited—but it appears to be Byrne’s present claim. Just so, it is not clear why Trump would have agreed to meet with Byrne, Powell, or Flynn off-schedule—let alone for four and a half hours (see below)—if he hadn’t anticipated that they had something good for him. Proof questions whether any President of the United States in the modern era has ever held a four and a half hour meeting with individuals whom he never agreed to meet with ex ante.

{Note: Notably, Byrne only says that Trump had “no idea” that Team Kraken was coming to him on that particular day and at that particular time, not that Trump was surprised that the members of Team Kraken wanted to speak with him. While at various points in his narrative Byrne insists that Trump was unaware of certain schemes being hatched by Team Kraken, in every case Byrne is evidently speculating—as he had no idea what Trump had been told by his lawyers, Giuliani and Powell, or by persons close to Trump from inside Michael Flynn’s circle.}

That Byrne had decided to drop Giuliani from the chain of communication being used by Team Kraken at exactly the moment Giuliani had declined to greenlight any black ops is telling, as is the fact that following Giuliani’s declination Byrne became committed to seeing the one man in Trumpworld in a position to gainsay Giuliani: Trump himself. It cannot be underscored sufficiently that the December 18, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office was only attended by Rudy Giuliani because then-President Trump brought him into the meeting via speakerphone; in fact, Team Kraken’s goal was to get Trump alone, which offers some indication of the sort of ideas they hoped to put before him.

According to major media, those ideas included martial law.

Team Kraken ultimately had the presidential-schedule equivalent of an eternity alone with Trump. Per Byrne, it was “twenty minutes to a half-hour” during which the only people in the Oval Office on the night of December 18—and therefore the only people who can say what was said during that span—were Trump, his lawyer Sidney Powell, Powell’s client Michael Flynn, an associate of Powell who undoubtedly would claim that (like Powell) she enjoyed attorney-client privilege with Trump, and Patrick Byrne.

The problem with Byrne’s timeline is that he says the total length of the meeting with Trump was four and a half hours, and that Trump’s White House advisers and Giuliani were only present for two hours of the meeting. In total, then, Team Kraken had two and a half hours alone with Donald Trump just a matter of hours before he tweeted out to tens of millions of supporters, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In determining whether anything may have been said to President Trump late in the evening of the 18th that would have explained his now-infamous tweet on the 19th, we can say that we know where Team Kraken had come to land, by the 18th, on the issue of what Trump should do to stay in office. What they’d settled on was Peter Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” plot.

The very Peter Navarro whose mentee managed to get Team Kraken into the Oval—and who Trump tweeted about gleefully on December 19 (see the screenshot above).

The Navarro plan, endorsed by Team Kraken, required that a series of spectacles be staged in order to convince GOP state legislators to hand Trump the election, but also required that the January 6 joint session be postponed by some means that no one had publicly articulated—until, that is, December 19, when Trump suddenly, after meeting alone with Team Kraken for two and a half hours in total, touted a “wild” protest very close to the site of the joint session he needed postponed. A protest he would headline.

{Note: During this same period of time—mid-December 2020—Ali Alexander, who Trump ultimately asked to lead the march with Alex Jones, told a crowd in Arizona that he was in touch with “people from the White House.” Trump had retweeted Alexander on Twitter as early as June 2019, thereafter inviting him to a “social media summit” at the White House. Trump is well-known for making non-memorialized calls on a non-secure cell to unapproved persons from the White House residence, making it impossible to know whether Alexander or any other person joined in the portion of the December 18, 2020 meeting in the presidential residence. This is certainly a question for Congress to ask Patrick Byrne under oath, however.}

If the December 18 Oval Office meeting can now be said to have had three stages—(1) the meeting in the Oval Office involving only Team Kraken and Donald Trump (20 to 30 minutes at a minimum); (2) the meeting in the Oval Office involving Trump, Team Kraken, and a set of Trump advisers either in person or on the phone (2 hours); and (3) a meeting in the president’s private residence in the White House with Trump, Team Kraken, and possibly others (2 hours)—it’s notable that Byrne now concedes that during Meeting #1 he kept quiet and permitted the presentation to Trump to be made by two people he knew were then in favor of what Byrne calls “black ops”: Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, the latter Phil Waldron’s friend and former boss. It would have been deemed critical for Powell and Flynn—Flynn as a Waldron proxy (or vice versa)—to make their case to Trump without Rudy Giuliani present, and therefore as quickly as possible, before Giuliani could be brought in. But equally telling is that after Meeting #2, which involved both Giuliani and a number of Trump aides who likewise could be relied upon to oppose any “black ops,” Trump himself decided that what he wanted was to spend two hours of private discussion in his White House residence not with his top White House advisers but with the pro-black-ops squad: Powell; Powell’s attorney-client-privileged associate; Phil Waldron boss Flynn; and a man who had been unable to understand why his intelligence experts wouldn’t engage in black ops on Waldron’s suggestion, Patrick Byrne.

These are the people Trump spoke to last, voluntarily, and privately. And within hours of this meeting, the president was all-in on making sure that the January 6 protests Ali Alexander—the man who “owned” the Arizona GOP—was planning would be “wild.”

(5) By the time of the three-stage White House meeting Team Kraken held with Trump on December 18, 2020—most of it alone with the president—the conversation focused on alleged foreign intelligence, martial law, and the seizure of voting-machine data.

So what was it that Team Kraken wanted to talk to Trump about that no one else did—or would? Thanks to Byrne’s lengthy confession, we now know. What Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn wanted to talk to Trump about was one thing in particular: foreign intelligence.

In a sense this is unsurprising, as the team Powell and Flynn had assembled at Wood’s South Carolina plantation was almost entirely made up of intelligence experts, as was Byrne’s team, as was the team of Michael Lindell—another member of Team Kraken.

As Byrne explains in his confession, Team Kraken’s December 18 plan was simple:

1. Convince Trump that a foreign nation had tampered with the 2020 voting; and

2. convince Trump to issue an executive order seizing election data on that basis.

Per Sidney Powell’s public filings, the country Team Kraken lit upon as having most directly tampered with voting machines—in their narrative, at least—was Venezuela. Powell and the rest of Team Kraken claimed they had intelligence out of Venezuela confirming an election-interference plot by the Communists there that would (mirabile dictu) justify Trump doing what they desperately hoped he would: seize election data.

So how did any of these people have access to intelligence coming out of Venezuela?

There are three likely explanations, all of which are worthy of additional exploration:

1. One of Rudy Giuliani’s only clients is a Venezuelan multimillionaire with ties to Venezuela’s government but even stronger ties among the resistance to that government—precisely the class of persons from which Powell claimed she was getting all her intelligence (albeit she used the term “defector” in filings).

2. One of Michael Lindell’s closest friends is Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and a man Brazilian media strongly suggests would have access to high-level Brazilian intelligence about the alleged activities of its chief geopolitical enemy, Venezuela. Proof has reported on the many clandestine Trump-Lindell-Bolsonaro contacts here, here, and here.

3. Erik Prince, a Trump ally with ties to Flynn who is—like Flynn—obsessed with amateur intelligence-gathering efforts, made a secret trip in 2019 to speak to the government of Venezuela, which trip he both subsequently lied about and claimed had been authorized by the Trump administration (see the Trump-Venezuela chapter of Macmillan’s 2020 book Proof of Corruption for more).

It is important to remember that, by December 2020, Trump had already sought, prior to both the 2016 and 2020 elections, political intelligence from nations hostile to the United States. In both cases he did so as part of his efforts to win election to office.

In 2016, it was Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and far-right interests in Israel (see Macmillan’s 2019 book Proof of Conspiracy for more).

In 2019, it was pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine (see, generally, Proof of Corruption).

In 2020, prior to the presidential election, it was China (see the Trump-China chapter of Proof of Corruption).

So the notion that Trump’s most radical advisers would seek to convince him to do an end-around on America’s intelligence services and accept “evidence” benefitting him politically—even, or perhaps we would do better to say especially, political intelligence coming out of a hostile foreign country—isn’t just plausible but a modus operandi that Trump had engaged in seven times before December 2020 and often with the aid of Flynn and Giuliani in particular.

Yet Byrne’s 85-minute confession underscores that the Powell-Flynn plan was little more than a gestural intelligence operation, as all it needed to produce was sufficient specter of foreign interference to justify Trump seize voting-machine data. By the same token, once such voting-machine data had been seized, all that was needed was the sufficient specter of a problem with the data to get Republican politicians at both the state and federal level to move to overturn a democratic election. After all, as Byrne had long since realized—he now admits—the truth of the matter was unknowable.

More specifically, Team Kraken knew, after a month at Wood’s South Carolina home, that if Trump could get voting machines—or just images of their contents—using the excuse of foreign-intelligence whispers provided to him by Giuliani or Flynn or even Lindell (which whispers had been provided to Giuliani or Flynn or Lindell by dubious, possibly foreign sources), the machines could quickly be declared as being in some way compromised by a man allied with all three of these Trump advisers: Doug Logan. If this effort were to begin, as planned, in Arizona, it would only have to convince a set of state GOP legislators who Trump ally Ali Alexander already “owned” in full.

And there appears to have been a belief that if the Arizona legislators did what Team Kraken was hoping they would do, other states where Trump had narrowly lost would be quick to follow.

While it is unclear whether this component of Powell’s presentation occurred during Meeting #1 or Meeting #3, according to Byrne Powell produced for Trump an October 23, 2020 CISA letter indicating that Iran had made efforts to compromise the election. While of course CISA also found that the Iranian efforts had failed—and had no effect on the election whatsoever, with CISA chief Chris Krebs in fact announcing that the 2020 presidential election was America’s most secure election ever—Team Kraken apparently believed Trump could be persuaded by the notion that an entity Trump had long believed favored Joe Biden’s candidacy over his (Iran) had stolen the election.

But Byrne’s confession includes another telling slip, which is that Team Kraken also appears to have provided Trump with intelligence regarding foreign interference in the election that (as Byrne puts it) “we [Team Kraken] had found”—which evidence does not appear to involve Iran. Rather, according to public filings on this topic later made by Sidney Powell, it instead involved, as noted above, the nation of Venezuela.

While the intelligence on Iran that Powell and Flynn provided to Trump would not have been a surprise to him, as he would have known of it from his briefings months earlier, any Venezuela intelligence—or, rather, intelligence purporting to be genuine and from Venezuela—would have been new to him, requiring a novel briefing from Powell and Flynn.

{Note: Patrick Byrne slips again in his confession, later admitting that the conversation about foreign intelligence took up the first “45 minutes” of the Oval Office meeting, suggesting that what is here being called “Meeting #1” may well have lasted that long—rather than the 20 to 30 minutes Byrne had claimed earlier in his confession. At another point in his statement, Byrne says that “after 30 or 45 minutes [in the Oval Office] there was a pause, and he [Trump] said [to Byrne and Flynn and Powell], ‘What are you telling me? What are you folks saying?’” The way Byrne relates this part of the story seems to indicate that it occurred before any other Trump advisers had been brought into the room, but it also underscores that Trump felt he was being given information on foreign election tampering that he hadn’t heard before—increasing the odds it involved “new” findings about Venezuela from Team Kraken rather than “old” information about the Iranians from CISA. Indeed, Byrne concedes that the conversation with Trump on December 18—at least the part Team Kraken led—focused on the team’s theory that a foreign power had “‘jujitsued’ [altered]…[the election results] in six counties” in six battleground states].” Because we know this particular Team Kraken theory involved Venezuela rather than Iran, we can conclude that Venezuela was the focus of at least Meeting #1 and Meeting #3 in December, if not also the part to which Giuliani and the White House Counsel’s office were ear- and/or eyewitnesses.}

(6) In the lead-up to January 6, Trump was clearly game—ready to instrumentalize vague claims of foreign election interference to seize voting-machine data using federal soldiers and/or federal law enforcement officers.

On January 31, 2022, the New York Times published a report with this headline:

This report appears to confirm Byrne’s claim that Trump was, on December 18, 2020, intrigued by the idea of “seizing” voting-machine data—an action that would have launched a historic self-coup but that Byrne now dismisses as insignificant because Team Kraken existed in “reality world, not legal world” (meaning Team Kraken, as Byrne now confesses, was operating in an extra-legal mindset despite being headed by a former prosecutor). It appears that the only disagreement amongst Donald Trump’s mid-December 2020 late-night amateur “briefers” was which federal agents were best for seizing voting-machine data for the first time in U.S. history: the United States Armed Forces, the National Guard, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Marshals Service, or the Department of Homeland Security.

It is during his discussion of how—not why—election data could be seized by federal agents acting on behalf of a losing presidential candidate that Byrne mentions the presence in the Oval Office on December 18 of anyone besides Team Kraken, namely White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. So Meeting #2 may well have begun only after Team Kraken had successfully “briefed” Trump on alleged foreign intelligence never seen, vetted, or confirmed by any U.S. intelligence agency (either at the time or since).

This same point in Meeting #2 is when Byrne first acknowledges the presence of Rudy Giuliani via speakerphone. Giuliani’s contribution, claims Byrne, was not to object—despite being Trump’s personal lawyer and adviser—to the unprecedented seizure of election data, but merely to urge Trump to not use uniformed federal agents to do it.

This suggests that by this point in the conversation either Trump had already stated his intention to seize the data (leaving his attorney to only quibble with him about the details) or Giuliani had come to be earnestly on board with almost the whole of Team Kraken’s unprecedented plan, which raises the harrowing question of what parts of that plan Giuliani had previously been against (which opposition had led the members of Team Kraken to hide the December 18 meeting from him in the first instance).

That Byrne was indeed, as this Proof account surmises, every bit as militant as Powell and Flynn is underscored by his confession that even after Trump had declared that only the FBI or DHS should be allowed to handle election data, he (Byrne) was “pushy” with the president and tried to get soldiers to be the one handling the data, instead.

Trump’s response, as Byrne interpreted it, was (per Byrne), “I [Trump] have made my decision [about seizing election data]—we’re talking about either DHS or the FBI [doing it].” Byrne claims that Trump explicitly said during this part of the meeting, “If I think this [the 2020 election] was a foreign attack on our country….that it’s been hijacked by a foreign government, can I really [leave office on January 20]?” (Keep in mind that Trump had no evidence at the time—nor has he received any since—that the 2020 election results were tampered with by a foreign power in any way.)

{Note: Byrne says he knows Flynn “privately” agreed with him about using soldiers. Byrne now says, “I will defend to my dying breath that that [using soldiers to seize election data] would have been the right thing to do.”}

Byrne thus casually testifies (albeit not under oath) that then-president Trump adopted Team Kraken’s plan to seize election data, which data would then have been analyzed by Team Kraken’s intelligence officials with an eye toward getting state legislators to decertify Biden electors: in other words, Peter Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot.

It is little wonder, now, that Peter Navarro’s most trusted personal aide was the one who made sure Team Kraken could get into the Oval Office on December 18, 2020.

(7) The recently discovered secret strategy meeting held at Trump International Hotel on January 4, which featured presentations to GOP members of Congress by Team Kraken member Mike Lindell, Barbara Ledeen’s business partner Don Berlin, and other members of the coup plot in fact occurred in Trump’s private residence in Washington: the Trump Town House in Trump’s D.C. hotel, where his Insurrection Eve war council would be held the following night.

When this January 4 meeting was recently reported on by the New York Times, it was placed inside a first-floor “conference room” at Trump International Hotel that was not part of the Trump Town House. Byrne says this is incorrect, and that in fact the Team Kraken pitch meeting—following up on Trump’s call to GOP state legislators 48 hours earlier, which had been arranged by the same Amistad Project that was a floor above Team Kraken at a Westin in Arlington—occurred in the Trump Town House itself. Tellingly, it occurred the same day Eduardo Bolsonaro arrived in D.C. and the same day Bolsonaro met with at least one Trump (Ivanka Trump) at the White House.

As Proof has already reported, the use of video conferencing during this January 4 meeting confirms that individuals located at the White House—including Trump—could have attended the meeting, as well as the meeting that was held in the same space the following night. This would also include Eduardo Bolsonaro and various other individuals placed at the January 5 meeting by Trump administration official Charles Herbster in a Facebook post who now claim to not have been physically present in the hotel: Peter Navarro, Michael Flynn, and Corey Lewandowski business partner David Bossie (the latter a 2016 Trump deputy campaign manager who is now attempting to become the chair of the RNC, and authored a recent RNC resolution declaring the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol “legitimate political discourse”).

Per Byrne, the January 4 meeting ran for three hours and focused almost wholly on an intelligence analysis of the 2020 presidential election—confirming that the focus of the “Team Trump pitch” in the 48 hours before the attack on the Capitol (called such here at Proof because the January 4 meeting occurred in a space the Trump campaign had rented out for the week) was on false claims of foreign interference in the election, not the scattered instances of minor vote-counting brouhahas Trump’s legal team had fruitlessly focused on in court. Indeed, it appears that nearly everything presented to members of Congress on January 4 (and possibly to the GOP state legislators Trump spoke to on January 2) was information that had deliberately not been put before any court due to its preposterousness and the simple fact that none of it could be proven.

{Note: I won’t repeat Team Kraken’s Venezuela-based conspiracy theory here, except to say that it positions as its mastermind a Venezuelan dictator who passed away many years ago.}

What’s surprising about the joint Team Trump-Team Kraken event on January 4, 2021 is that, per Byrne, two-thirds of its roughly three-hour run-time focused on crafting a “strategy” for overturning a democratic election, not establishing a justification for it.

This is how Byrne describes the “strategy” Team Kraken crafted with GOP members of Congress:

And here was the strategy [for January 6]: the strategy was to have [Republican] senators and congressmen—

{NB: Byrne here cuts himself off and starts a new train of thought.}

…

The Constitution treats the Vice President’s job [during the joint session of Congress to certify a presidential election] as like a bureaucratic job, just a ministerial position: he’s going to open the envelopes [with the elector tallies from each U.S. state] and read them.

The 1887 law [the Electoral Count Act of 1887] provides mechanisms for, “This is how we’re going to work through disputes [over electors].” Which tells you—tells me—it no longer envisions the Vice President’s job as just opening envelopes and reading [them]. Because if that’s all you’re doing, how can there be disputes?

Note here that, as any lawyer could have told Patrick Byrne and perhaps did, elector disputes requiring the invocation of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 arise when state-level authorities entitled to do so send documentation to Congress establishing that their state has certified two separate slates of electors. This did not occur on January 6, 2021, though it is what Trump was hoping would have occurred by that date. When it did not, he and his allies (such as Byrne) sought a delay of the joint session by order of either Vice President Mike Pence or Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa.

Byrne continues:

So the discussion [on January 4 in the Trump Town House] was—and the desire was—….the idea was, on January 6, to have enough objections brought by enough senators that the whole thing [the joint session] would have been bought a week or ten days. And the idea was everyone would go back to their states, [and] each state could have its own quickie hearings like happened in Maricopa [Arizona], [and] state legislators could do anything they wanted: have hearings, call witnesses, do anything they want for a week, and then they just have a new vote.

To be clear, the largest number of states Trump and his team ever proposed to contest on January 6 was ten, with two hours of debate being the maximum allowed for each dispute. What this means is that Trump and his team never had more than 20 hours of delay available to them via lawful means; it would require, instead, some extraordinary event for a 20-hour delay (which translates to a maximum delay of one or two days) to somehow transform itself into a seven- to ten-day delay. Byrne does not explain, nor could he, how “enough objections brought by enough senators” on January 6 would have led to a seven- to ten-day delay in the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, let alone how there would be any natural connection between such a delay and ten state legislatures immediately going into special session to hold “quickie hearings.” There is nothing in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that imagines that the issue of who has won an election must leave Congress the very moment Congress begins to debate it.

Byrne’s reference to a “new vote” is also telling, as of course it is not state legislatures that vote for president, and therefore there is no “old” vote of such bodies that could ever be replaced by a “new” one. Rather, it is the individual voters of each state who vote, with the popular-vote winner in each state getting awarded all (or in two states, at least some) of the state’s electors. That a Team Trump-Team Kraken strategy session held in Trump’s private residence 48 hours before the attack on the Capitol envisioned Republican politicians simply holding a “new vote” for President of the United States after “quickie hearings” on an issue Byrne had determined was terminally irresolvable on November 10 confirms that the “Green Bay Sweep” was just a brute-political-force coup plot using the pretext of foreign election interference as a triggering mechanism.

In short, Trump and his team, having found a way to take advantage of real foreign interference in 2016, sought to manufacture the appearance of such interference in 2020 to benefit from the same playbook a second time. Given the suffering America went through after the very real foreign election interference it experienced in 2016—and given that Trump spent years calling that interference a “hoax”—it is nauseating to think that the same men who benefited from the real 2016 interference now sought to gin up a hoax of foreign interference in 2020 so they could again take office under dubious circumstances.

Byrne continues:

And they [the state legislatures] would take account of everything they’ve learned in Pennsylvania, everything they’ve learned in Wyoming, everything they’ve learned in Arizona, in that extra seven days, and then they vote again and re-commit their electoral votes.

Of course, Team Trump and its agents had just spent over two months ginning up precisely the “everything they’ve learned” that Byrne wanted this “new vote” to be based upon, while the 2020 Biden campaign had done no such legwork because there was no reason at all to do it. Just so, not only had Byrne and his team already lined up their witnesses for these unprecedented “quickie hearings” but they in fact had fully populated the hearings that had already been held with members of their own cabal: Rudy Giuliani, Phil Waldron, Sidney Powell, and members of the various categories of hangers-on that the Westin crowd had been hobnobbing with from the moment that Donald Trump lost badly in the popular vote and the electoral college on Election Day.

By implying that “evidence” from non-battleground states could be considered in battleground states—as we see in the quote above, information produced by GOP operatives in Wyoming could certainly have been considered by GOP legislators elsewhere—Byrne indicates that Team Kraken’s goal was simply to execute a “do-over” scenario in which the two 2020 presidential candidates would spend a week in mid-January 2021 lobbying state legislatures to vote their way. Needless to say, the Trump team hoped, and very much expected, that Trump would get the “win” that Byrne had promised him via party-line votes at the state level and then, if necessary, a party-line vote (by delegation) in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the states where state-legislature votes would be most hotly contested, the GOP had so artfully gerrymandered the districts that it ensured ironclad Republican rule would translate into a second Trump term—without the nicety of American voters being consulted.

Byrne again:

And everyone’s back in D.C. by January 13 or 16, and Congress is meeting and doing their thing, and making its decision, and the new president—the new term—starts on January 20.

Byrne is, by this point, making no sense at all. Under this coup plot, there would have been no “decision” for Congress to make. The only question would be whether Trump had successfully lobbied enough Republican-led state legislatures for him to have more electoral votes than Joe Biden the second time around. But what is also clear in Byrne’s account is that the only purpose of the farcical process described therein was to reinstall Trump as president; there is no sense that any of the objections made by members of Congress on January 6 would have been anything but a delaying tactic, nor is there any sense that the “quickie [state] hearings” (as Byrne calls them) could get to the truth of an issue in seven to ten days that Byrne had long ago deemed to be permanently irresolvable. None of what Byrne suggests involves any fact-finding by established fact-finding institutions like CISA or the FBI, both of which Byrne freely concedes are staffed by “real investigators”; rather, it’s about brute political strength bolstered by vague and fanciful innuendo regarding foreign election interference.

Summarizing the above coup plot, Byrne confesses, “One could argue that [the plot he proposed to Trump on December 18, 2020] provides some insult to the rule of law.” He underlines that the very law violated—the Electoral Count Act of 1887—is the same law that Team Kraken had relied upon (at least its own benighted, legally bankrupt interpretation of it) in arguing that Vice President Pence had the power to single-handedly postpone a joint session of Congress simply because a debate the Electoral Count Act of 1887 explicitly contemplated had begun. Byrne justifies what he concedes is an “insult to the rule of law” by noting that Team Trump’s disinformation campaign has now led to popular doubt nationally about the result of the 2020 election—but only the presidential election, of course—reaching “70 to 75 percent.” Byrne then falsely insists that only “20%” of Americans believe Biden was legitimately elected; in fact, the actual number is 58%.

That Byrne would seek—even disingenuously—to use polling data his intelligence operation helped produce as a justification for the intelligence operation is dystopic.

To me, the plan of pushing things back to the states for a week to ten days, let everybody—in a week—look into whatever they want to look into, then they vote, [and] if they want to re-commit to Joe Biden [they can], if they want to change to Donald Trump, [they can] change to Donald Trump—it’s a little bit of an aberration from the originally foreseen process, but anything you do at that point was an insult [to the rule of law]. At least this wasn’t insulting the Constitution. Yeah, it was letting a date slide that was set in an 1887 law. That date would have had to slide ten days.

No one in America who supported Joe Biden on November 3, 2020 had anything they “want[ed] to look into” regarding the 2020 election as of January 6, 2021, and therefore giving state legislatures across the country the chance to “look into whatever they want to look into” was a naked partisan play to get local Republican politicians to overrule their neighbors’ votes. Byrne’s minimization of a coup plot as “a little bit of an aberration” and just “letting a [statutorily mandated] date slide” is horrifying, of course, as is the idea that he and his team were lobbying Congress to issue objections to electors not on the basis of any demonstrated fraud but rather—and this is key—to help launch scattered future hearings into that question 65 days after Election Day.

Byrne says he told Trump, “Put us in, coach, we have a plan. We can have an answer in a week.” To get that answer, all Trump had to do was “sign” certain “papers” that had been brought to him by Sidney Powell, the existence of which papers ironically established that Team Kraken had already found the “answer”—it just needed Trump to magic, via executive order, a fig leaf of legitimacy to cover its public announcement.

(8) White House actions caused January 6 to turn violent—and the actions were intentional.

Byrne begins the final half-hour of his confession by noting that the original form of the coup plot would have seen Trump’s allies calling for January 6-like protests in “capitals across America”, with the aim of forcing the “new vote” that Team Kraken wanted to see from state legislatures. This is the same tactic that was being pursued at the time by domestic terrorist Ali Alexander and the Stop the Steal “movement,” for instance in its infamous November 2020 march on the Georgia State Capitol building.

Byrne claims that, in private conversations with his co-conspirators, he was derided as “tedious” for publicly insisting that any state or D.C.-based pro-Trump protests be “peaceful”, suggesting that underscoring this was not as high a priority for the other members of Team Kraken (presumably to include one or more of Rudy Giuliani, who demanded “trial by combat” on January 6; Mike Flynn, who would later call for a coup of the Biden administration; Mike Lindell, who promised that by some unclear means Trump would retake the Oval Office in 2021; or Sidney Powell, who describes the 2020 presidential election as an act of war). It is unclear if persons closer to Trump’s inner circle also found Byrne’s emphasis on peacefulness to be tedious, but we can certainly judge from the actions of the White House that it strongly felt January 6 should be as rowdy (“wild”) as possible.

On Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day, Byrne says that he got “some of a look into” several of the organizations orchestrating the January 6 “protests”—including Women for America First—and discovered that Proud Boy supporter Cindy Chafian of the Eighty Percent Coalition was involved in “real mischief” with Ali Alexander, inasmuch as (says Byrne) the two were by trying to wrest control of the Women for America First events on January 5 and January 6 from Amy Kremer and her daughter Kylie Jane Kremer.

Unfortunately for Byrne, this has already been widely reported by major media—but not with the implications Byrne gives it. In fact, it does appear the Kremers went to the White House several days before the attack on the Capitol to complain about Ali Alexander, and specifically to express their group Women for America First’s concern that Alexander’s Stop the Steal operation wanted to see January 6 get violent. What we know is that the White House responded to this expression of concern about violence by Donald Trump directly asking the three leaders of the Stop the Steal group—Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and Ali Alexander—to lead the march on the Capitol on January 6.

Arguably, there can be no clearer evidence for any federal investigators than this that Donald Trump knew, by the weekend of January 2, that the joint session could not be postponed as long as he needed it to be through statutorily permissible parliamentary objections alone.

Of Chafian and Alexander, Byrne warns darkly, “Something’s wrong there. They aren’t what they seem to be. They aren’t what they pretend to be.” This—that is, the openness to mischief evident in the composition and leadership of the Eighty Percent Coalition and Stop the Steal— was well known to Kimberly Guilfoyle when she called Ali Alexander from the Trump Town House during the second Team Trump-hosted strategy session held there in two days. This was known when Alexander and Alex Jones were admitted to Trump’s VIP area on January 6 and when Jones (at a minimum) spoke to Trump on January 3. So when Byrne says, “Someone in the Republican Party is behind that [attempt by Alexander and Chafian to take over the orchestration of pre-insurrection events]”, he’s correct—but that “someone” is a group of people in the White House who wanted Alexander and Chafian excised from any public event Trump would be involved in even as Trump himself was privately elevating their role from mere participants in the events of January 6 to the day’s very visible leadership.

Says Byrne,

[On January 5, 2021], this guy named Ali Akbar shows up—Ali Akbar, a.k.a. Ali Alexander, but his real name is Ali Akbar—and it was [Cindy Chafian] and Ali Akbar who kind of snaked [the January 5 Freedom Plaza rallies] away from the Kremer sisters {sic} [of Women for America First]. That’s where the mischief is. And so that little sleight-of-hand—they [Alexander and Chafian] got a hold of [those rallies]—and took it over. They tried to take it over for two days [January 4 and January 5], [though] it is the case that the Kremer sisters {sic} actually got back in the picture for the next morning [January 6]…for the thing [the Trump event] that happened at the White House [Ellipse].

But those two people [Alexander and Chafian]—who I had just enough interaction with to know that there’s “wrong” [there]; it’s wrong, something’s wrong there—they aren’t what they seem to be. They aren’t what they pretend to be. They snaked it away from the Kremer sisters {sic}. And someone in the Republican Party is behind that. So I’ve seen the sleight-of-hand, and I see the sleeve, [but] I don’t know where the sleeve leads, other than that it leads into the Republican Party. And if you want to know what happened [on January 6], and how things evolved as they did on January 6, I do think that there was mischief in place.

Readers of Proof will know whose “sleeve” Byrne is tracking here, whether he accepts it or not: Donald Trump’s. The evidence is overwhelming that during the very period Byrne says that control over the events of Insurrection Week was being “snaked” away from Women for America First, Trump and his top advisers, including his son’s fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle, were behind the scenes delegating authority to Alexander and his allies. Women for America First, having indeed—as Byrne says—gone to the White House and expressed concern about the possibility of violence on January 6, were thereafter sidelined by Team Trump in all particulars except the one event Team Trump needed to be free of the taint of militarism: the only event Trump planned to appear at himself.

(9) Byrne is spreading “the Big Lie within the Big Lie”—that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol disadvantaged Donald Trump.

The day after the Capitol attack, I watched Alex Jones insist over and over on his daily InfoWars program that Trump “had the votes” to achieve his ambitions on January 6, and that therefore any disruption to the joint session of that day was only detrimental to his designs. I had no idea what Jones was referring to then, and I do not know what Byrne is referring to now when he says, “What happened on January 6 destroyed any chance he [Trump] had” to get his way on that day.

As detailed above, and as indeed we saw on January 6, Trump had at most—even sans the changes in voting inclinations wrought by the attack on the Capitol—sufficient Senate support in the GOP caucus to get, at most, three states ineffectually contested for a total of six hours of delay. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) opposed Trump’s effort to challenge the 2020 presidential election, and had lobbied most of his caucus to his view. The result was that even if the attack on the Capitol had not occurred, Joe Biden would have been certified the winner of the 2020 election almost exactly when he was: in the early morning hours of January 7, 2021.

If Trump had viewed the attack on the Capitol as destroying his plans, he would have called out the National Guard immediately and issued a video demanding the rioters go home immediately. He did not.

He did not because he needed, as Byrne’s confession admits, a seven- to ten-day delay in the joint session of Congress scheduled for January 6. The only way to achieve such a historically unprecedented delay was for either Vice President Mike Pence to adjourn the proceedings unilaterally or for some other event to force a sudden adjournment of the proceedings. No amount of GOP delay through unwarranted challenges to six (or even ten) slates of battleground-state electors would have gotten Trump the delay he required. Even a ten-state dispute would have extended Trump’s hopes for a second term only one or two days—and only cosmetically, at that, as the electoral-vote tallies wouldn’t have changed, and one or two days wouldn’t have been enough time for any of the state legislatures Trump needed to meet in special session to hold hearings on overruling the will of their voters. Again, Byrne freely concedes all of this; he seems to envision no scenario in which state legislatures would have been able to act on the “Green Bay Sweep” in under seven days, and notes this even as he assures the viewers of his confession that he was more aggressive in pushing Peter Navarro’s scheme than anyone else on Team Kraken.

So when Byrne says—catching himself in mid-sentence in a wild overstatement—that without the Capitol attack Team Trump and Team Kraken had “a plan that had a real likelihood—a real possibility—of working”, he fails to explain how this is possible. His timeline doesn’t add up, which is something Trump (who Byrne repeatedly lauds as very smart) surely would have been able to realize for himself as he was telling a mob at the White House Ellipse that only their actions could save him. If he already had all the votes he needed on Capitol Hill to get the delay he required, why in the world would he have needed a march on the Capitol at all? Indeed, those who heard Trump’s January 6 speech heard him repeatedly imply that he did not have the votes in Congress he needed to win re-election.

According to Byrne, within 24 hours of the January 4 strategy session held in Trump’s private residence, twelve U.S. senators, all of whom Byrne implies were in attendance themselves on January 4—live or via video—or else using staff proxies, had “agreed” to challenge a number of state slates of Biden electors. We know that the number of challenges agreed upon could not have exceeded six, as per major-media reporting both Trump and Giuliani had to call Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) in the midst of the January 6 riot to demand that he up the number of challenges (which was then at approximately three, it appears) from “six” (which is the number Trump and Giuliani had been perhaps quixotically anticipating) to “ten.” Regardless, by the morning of January 6 neither Team Kraken nor Team Trump anticipated there being anything beyond six congressional challenges to slates of Biden electors, meaning no more than twelve total hours of additional congressional debate. Given that the January 6 joint session began at midday on January 6, even twelve hours of debate would have seen Biden’s win certified exactly when it ultimately was: in the morning hours of January 7.

So there can be no credible claim, from Byrne or anyone else, that the January 6 riot—which Trump precipitated and then refused to stop—did anything but increase his odds of getting a longer delay in the joint session.

Yet in fact, a riot alone would not (as we ultimately saw) have given Trump the seven- to ten-day delay his plot required. Only the following events, on January 6, could have effectuated the coup timeline that Patrick Byrne has just outlined in his confession:

(1) A long-term occupation of the Capitol and/or the Capitol grounds. Proof has repeatedly reported on evidence that Stop the Steal leadership, which was on the January 2 Trump conference call in which he outlined the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot, planned a long-term occupation of the Capitol and/or the Capitol grounds. Ali Alexander, who was delegated authority over the march on the Capitol by Trump himself, had over and over referenced this as his plan for January 6, even calling his scheme “Operation Occupy the Capitol.”

(2) A formally sanctioned postponement of the joint session of Congress. “Step 1” in the coup memo authored by Trump lawyer John Eastman called for either Mike Pence or (if he refused to do it) Senate president pro tempore Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to use their authority as the presiding officer at the joint session to adjourn the session for a period of time they themselves would announce. While any such attempt at a delay would likely have been met with stiff resistance from other members of Congress—perhaps even some GOP senators—Trump allies in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate might well have found parliamentary maneuvers sufficient to briefly uphold any ruling from the chair on January 6 that the joint session had to be postponed for several days.

(3) Either the murder of a sitting member of Congress or the taking of congressional hostages. Trump himself, having been told days earlier by the Secret Service that the Capitol and Capitol grounds would be so dangerous on January 6 that he couldn’t even travel there—and that they would be this dangerous regardless of anything he said or did on January 6 or before that—gave a speech on January 6 intended to whip the mob before him into a violent frenzy. His intentions were realized; once the mob he had sent to the Capitol (whose leaders he had handpicked the weekend before) got there, they chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” and hunted Pence in the hallways of the Capitol, getting within minutes of capturing him and his family. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), two other foci of Trump’s ire on January 6 and before, were likewise actively hunted by rioters—confirming that they wished to do more than simply parade through the Capitol. Not only were many of the rioters armed, but some had plastic zip ties with them for use as handcuffs in taking hostages.

As we see above, all three of the possibilities that would have led to a seven- to ten-day delay in the January 6 joint session were actively facilitated by Trump and his top agents, even as Trump handpicked the leaders of the march on the Capitol, refused to call out the forces necessary to quell the resulting riot quickly, watched the chaos at the Capitol unfold with (per numerous witnesses) evident glee, and even added to the chaos by contacting members of Congress mid-riot to demand they increase the number of disputes they were planning to ten—a number well beyond anything Team Trump had previously contemplated or ever provided even manufactured/fraudulent “evidence” to support.

So when Patrick Byrne says in his 85-minute confession that “a dozen [GOP] senators” objecting to several states on January 6 was going to “buy the week [Trump needed]”, not only is that claim empirically false, but the very fact that it is being made points federal investigators to the truth of what Trump and his allies intended—and the only pathways to “victory” they still had on January 6, 2021. And all of them involved either federal crimes (ranging from Obstruction of a Congressional Proceeding to First-Degree Murder) or flagrant attacks on the rule of law (both the Electoral Count Act of 1877 and the fundamental rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution). Patrick Byrne’s confession makes all of this clear. Far from, as Byrne now claims, “utterly destroying” the “Green Bay Sweep” coup plot, the January 6 Capitol attack was its only chance of success. This would’ve been clear to every one of the coup plotters, including Trump, on Insurrection Day—if only because any one of them could multiply 6 (six states) by 2 (two hours of debate permitted per state) and come up with 12 (twelve hours of delay), rather than the 168 to 240 hours of delay (seven to ten days) their coup plot required.

That some portion of Byrne’s confession is an attempt to exculpate himself and enact vengeance on Trump’s enemies is confirmed by what may be the single most stunning statement of Byrne’s 85-minute public appearance: that while he does believe there was “mischief” in the plotting of January 6; that while he does believe this mischief came from “the Republican Party”; that while he does concedes that that Republican Party’s mischief “may lead to the White House”; if Republican Party mischief based in the White House did exist in the days leading up to January 6, 2021, “it leads to some people around Mike Pence” (emphasis supplied). Byrne later in his video listens with great interest to a “reporter” who seems to imply that former Pence chief of staff Nick Ayers and his replacement, Marc Short—the latter a man so reviled by Trump that he was banned from the West Wing—may have been the masterminds of January 6, a violent attack in which the politician to whom both men were and are deeply loyal almost faced assassination. The “Team Pence did it” allegation is incomprehensible, but does draw attention from Trump and, as importantly, Trump advisers like Byrne.

{Note: In the same exchange, the “reporter” in question, identified only by her first name, also floats the possibility that one of Trump’s other enemies—The Lincoln Project—may have masterminded January 6, an event that sought to overturn the election of the Lincoln Project’s favored candidate. The “Lincoln Project did it” defense may be even more incomprehensible than its predecessor.}

From my experience as a federal criminal investigator, I would say that Byrne’s pre-concession that the trail of criminal evidence will lead to Republicans in the White House underscores his certainty that the coup plotters are now being investigated aggressively by Congress and possibly—though this is less clear—by the Department of Justice. In pinning January 6 on Team Pence, Byrne’s effort to steer suspicion from Team Trump is palpable. But it is also likely fruitless, as it comports with none of the evidence presently available. In this view, Byrne’s confession is not an exculpation but a desperate bid to deflect blame for a historic crime—blame which is almost certain to eventually come down on him and his compatriots.

(10) During the “Q&A” portion of Byrne’s 85-minute presentation, Byrne spoke at length—and refused to answer almost every question asked of him. But he did—seemingly accidentally—make some additional admissions.

An Associated Press reporter asked for more information from Byrne about the identities of the participants in the January 4 meeting, and he refused to answer.

The same reporter asked for Byrne to detail with specificity the sort of “evidence” Byrne and his team presented to members of Congress on January 4. He would not.

Oddly, Byrne appeared to want to prove to reporters that he was well aware of the language of the Electoral Count Act of 1877—even though he routinely forgot its name—which was odd given that he also routinely neglected to mention the debate time limits that flow from the Act. What Byrne does do in the Q&A portion of his video is reveal that Trump and his allies didn’t so much hope that there would be enough hours of debate to draw out the joint session for seven to ten days but hope that there would simply be enough hours of debate to convince Pence to unilaterally postpone the joint session for that period of time. Why Byrne or anyone else believed (or now claims to have believed) that statutorily mandated debate would somehow self-implode into a statute-defying, unprecedented postponement of the joint session—and the taking of the certification out of the hands of Congress, i.e. the opposite of what the Act at issue demands—is unclear. It remains incomprehensible, and perhaps deliberately so.

As to the attendance at the January 4 meeting—the key element of the question from the Associated Press—Byrne said, “I’d rather you get that from articles. I’m not in the business of—I’m talking about the important stuff that happened.” In fact, no articles provide the data the AP requested, and Byrne’s answer only underscores the need to subpoena him and put him under oath. Indeed, it is notable that Byrne did not claim not to know who had been present on January 4, but rather that he would not say. At a minimum, Byrne says, he “recognized a couple of the [GOP] senators” who were at the meeting either live or via video.

Byrne’s answer to the second question asked of him—whether Powell’s “Hammer and Scorecard” conspiracy theory was raised on January 4—is more revealing, inasmuch as Byrne firmly states that that theory was “too speculative” to be raised at the events on December 18 and January 4. The problem here is that, as Proof has reported, after the January 4 presentation Don Berlin, a business partner of Senate staffer (for Chuck Grassley) Barbara Ledeen and (as the Washington Post reports) “a private intelligence operative who has held a high-level security clearance, worked for a time as an expert at the Defense Department, and has performed classified work for the U.S. government on behalf of defense contractors”, contacted unnamed “Senate staffers” about providing “additional evidence” of a stolen election.

Given Berlin’s lengthy intelligence background and his participation in the work done by Team Kraken, this “evidence” would have been additional intel gathered by Byrne and his compatriots—for instance, precisely the “Hammer and Scorecard” theory that Byrne says was not initially raised at Trump International Hotel on January 4. So there is no way to know whether information Team Kraken may have (if Byrne is telling the truth) held back in its initial presentation was subsequently provided via email. But we do know, from Byrne, that a GOP staffer from the Senate Intelligence Committee was present at the meeting, suggesting that Berlin’s follow-up email not only was intel being sent by an intelligence expert but may have been sent, at least in part, to some of the GOP members of Congress dealing with foreign intelligence as elected officials.

{Note: Byrne’s claim that Powell’s conspiracy theories “played no role whatsoever” in her private presentations to Trump and his allies is difficult to accept, given that Powell had no qualms or hesitation about making her accusations public. Why she would have publicly made allegations that she then refused to repeat in the fora where they would have mattered most and been most influential is never explained by Byrne, nor is it clear that it could be. Indeed, Byrne says that Team Kraken presented Trump with evidence of foreign involvement in the election—which is, in essence, Powell’s “Hammer and Scorecard” conspiracy theory—so what could all that evidence have entailed, if not the only “evidence” that Powell had on this score?}

The third question asked of Byrne during his Q&A was the most direct: which foreign country do you believe interfered in the 2020 election? Byrne’s response: “I don’t want [to say].” Why this critical information would have been offered to the President of the United States at a historic moment for our country, but now can’t be repeated to the public during a statement Byrne insists was intended to tell America the full story of what happened in the lead-up to January 6, is unclear. Byrne told his audience that he now wanted to “set[ ] aside” the question of “who” stole the 2020 presidential election and focus only on “how” it was done. The problem with this is that Byrne’s December 2020 presentation to Trump depended on any election interference Team Kraken had found being the product of machinations by a foreign power, lest (per Byrne himself) Trump lack even the arguable legal authority to seize voting-machine data. That the justification for this component of the coup plot now can’t even be spoken of in public is telling—and inculpatory. “I really don’t want to go into theories of what happened on November 3” is not an acceptable response to the revelation of a coup plot that aimed to use those very theories to justify the overturning of a democratic election.

While Byrne did repeat that “I think there was foreign involvement”, he also said “I don’t really know [who it was]” and admitted some of his earlier “theories” turned out to be “false.” The casual admission that he went to the President of the United States in December 2020—having no background in intelligence whatsoever—and promised Trump an election “win” on the basis of theories he now admits the truth of which he didn’t know is stunning.

Almost as telling as Byrne saying “I don’t want to answer that question [about which nation was involved]” is what he does say: he mentions the SolarWinds hack, which was believed to have been perpetrated by Russia; and he mentions China by name; and he repeatedly references election interference by Iran during his statement. What we can presume from him saying “I don’t want to answer that question [about which nation was involved]” seems to be that the nation whose name he dare not speak is one that is not among those three. Given that his co-conspirator Powell repeatedly cited a fourth country not in the list Byrne provided—Venezuela—it seems to point toward this being the country Byrne now won’t name. He even hints at a possible reason for his hesitation on this score, confessing that the “sources” he and Powell and Flynn used for their foreign intelligence weren’t ones he’s sure they could (or should) have “trust[ed].” This indicates that were he to name the nation he believes was behind the allegedly stolen 2020 election, he might also be pointing toward the dubious “sources” who provided this intelligence to Team Kraken in an effort to tamper with an election.

All of the evidence Proof has gathered indicates that the source Byrne will not name is Eduardo Bolsonaro, and that the nation whose government sought to tamper with the 2020 presidential election by providing dubious intelligence to Team Trump and Team Kraken is Brazil—one of the six largest nations on Earth, and nominally a U.S. ally. Whereas accusations against Russia or Iran or China would not be shocking, as the federal government has made them many times before, Byrne’s refusal to say the word “Venezuela” could be readily explained by the fact that doing so would launch, in fact, the sort of scandal involving a U.S. ally (and a Venezuelan enemy) the likes of which American politics has not previously dealt with.

{Note: While Byrne does say “China is involved in this”, it is clear that this is not the nation whose name he refuses to speak in answering reporters’ questions. Note also that Venezuela is a close Chinese—as well as Russian—ally. “China has a hand in this”, Byrne says, “but there are a lot of other—anyway, let’s not get into the geopolitics of this.” That Byrne is protecting his sources, or his source’s sources, seems clear. And yet these are the people Congress should most want to speak with, as they were seeking to influence unstable Trump allies like Byrne to try to overturn America’s democracy. Any such effort would be akin to an act of war. Even so, Byrne cagily says, “I don’t want to go into, yet, the forces behind [the ‘stolen’ election].”}

In one of his many digressions, Byrne casually admits to being in contact with current law enforcement officials who he claims are investigating foreign interference in the 2020 election. “I think that you will see handcuffs on people”, he says, and then, “there’s no way you’re not going to see people picked up [arrested]” over foreign election interference. The idea that Byrne would so blithely confess that Trump’s allies (and possibly Trump himself) are receiving illegal leaks from law enforcement—unless Byrne is lying again, and has had no such contacts or information—is difficult for Proof to process, and yet it’s precisely the sort of lie Erik Prince told on Trump’s behalf back in October 2016, and that Rudy Giuliani then told in speaking of the FBI.

In a final, rambling monologue, Byrne observes that one of the problems Trump was facing in January 2021—and in Byrne’s view, faces still—is that he’s only gotten rid of “half the swamp rats” surrounding him as aides an advisers. This reference to the “purge” of Trump’s government that occurred in 2019 and 2020, which purge was led by Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas and the aforementioned Barbara Ledeen (a good friend of Michael Flynn), is unmistakable as such—especially as it accompanies Byrne’s recommendation that Trump appoint Flynn as a sort of post-election tzar to get to the bottom of alleged foreign interference in the 2020 election. This dovetails with the effort now being made by Stop the Steal leader Roger Stone to recruit Flynn as the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States in 2024.

Given that Flynn was apparently one of the actual masterminds behind the 2020 coup attempt Patrick Byrne aided, the drumbeat for him to be Trump’s successor is chilling.

Conclusion

As you have seen above, Proof has not simply credulously adopted Byrne’s proposed narrative—nor will federal investigators. As a former federal criminal investigator, I will say that the most reliable of the information given by a witness tends to be that which the witness deems the least important, as they have the least motivation to lie about that which they don’t think could harm them. Throughout his confession, Byrne seems to have very little sense of how much what he is saying could hurt both himself and others, though at points this willful or artful or negligent naiveté gives way to an evident anxiety about what he is saying—and it is these portions of Byrne’s confession to which Proof has given the least credence.

Toward the end of his confession, Byrne says, continuing his self-admitted attempt to direct “real investigators” (it is unnerving that he doesn’t consider anyone in his camp a real investigator, given their 2020 actions) away from Trump and Team Kraken—that the question that needs to be asked about Ali Alexander of Stop the Steal and Cindy Chafian of the Eighty Percent Coalition is, “[Given that] I think this side [the GOP] was penetrated by all sorts of bad actors and all kinds of mixed motives [prior to January 6], how [did] Cindy Chafian grease[ ]—snake[ ]—that [January 5 rally] permit away from her bosses [at Women for America First], and [bring] in Ali Akbar? What happened there? And who was pulling their strings? Who was behind them? And I think you will find Republican [Party] hands were involved in this.”

He is right. And all of the evidence confirms that the hands in question belonged to the man who ran the Republican Party—indeed, with an iron fist—on January 6, 2021.

Byrne closes his confession with a direct appeal to the House January 6 Committee: “Why don’t you just have me in? I think I know more than anyone. I was in the middle of it all….[and] I’ll tell them everything….I’d be happy to tell any of the people looking into this [January 6]…the exact truth….I know far more information [than I’ve given here], and I’m happy to talk to any congressional committee.” It’s an offer that may ultimately be accepted—and surely should be extended as soon as possible.