We now have reports of a 38-page PowerPoint document laying out a plan for Trump to declare a national emergency and continue in office. That’s 38 pages, not likely something just scrabbled together by some bozo whose mind is infected with conspiracy theories. But, whatever the case there, the document, or versions of it, apparently has been circulating on the internet for a while. Where on the internet, and when and by whom, is a bit fuzzy in the media reports.

What is significant about this report is not that such a PowerPoint exists. It has been clear throughout Trump’s presidency and during the coup attempt near its end that there are around the country numerous people, many holding public office and many just out there is the woods somewhere, who believe, without rational or evidentiary basis, that the election was stolen by various fraudulent means.

No, what is important here is that the document sets out [with the same excitement as the 8^th item in food recipe] that members of Congress – both senators and House representatives – received briefings based on the document two days before the January 6 insurrection! https://nyti.ms/31Hho6N

But let’s back up. The title of the New York Times article is “Jan. 6 Committee Examines PowerPoint Document Sent to Meadows.” Sufficiently bland to be easily passed over. But, in case your interest is piqued, the summary deck beneath the headline seems further calculated to prime you to think nothing all that important is going on.

Mark Meadows’s lawyer said the former White House chief of staff did not act on the document, which recommended that President Donald J. Trump declare a national emergency to keep himself in power.

Well, of course, Meadows’ lawyer said that. What else was he going to say?

If you were still interested enough to read it, the article explains that the PowerPoint contained “extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election,” the idea being to have Trump declare a national emergency that would delay certification of Biden’s win. It relied upon claims that “China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states.”

We’ve heard about those types of claims before. FOX “News” and Trump’s team of lawyers promoted such claims repeatedly, without investigation or plausible evidence, and have been sued and sanctioned by courts for filing frivolous suits based on such nonsense.

As reported in NYT, the provenance of the PowerPoint is this:

Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and an influential voice in the movement to challenge the election, said on Friday from a bar he owns outside Austin, Texas, that he had circulated the document — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — among Mr. Trump’s allies and on Capitol Hill before the attack. Mr. Waldron said that he did not personally send the document to Mr. Meadows, but that it was possible someone on his team had passed it along to the former chief of staff.

You can almost hear the theme song from the Twilight Zone playing in the background.

The actual author is unknown but “it is similar to a 36-page document available online, and it appears to be based on the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who has appeared with Mr. Waldron on podcasts discussing election fraud.”

More Twilight Zone.

NYT reports further that,

On Jan. 4, members of Mr. Waldron’s team — he did not identify them — spoke to a group of senators and briefed them on the allegations of supposed election fraud contained in the PowerPoint, Mr. Waldron said. The following day, he said, he personally briefed a small group of House members; that discussion focused on baseless claims of foreign interference in the election. He said he made the document available to the lawmakers.

NYT notes that Rudy Giuliani, sometimes known on Twitter as Rudy Colludy, has cited Waldron “as a source of information for his legal campaign.” That would likely be the “legal” campaign that led to Giuliani’s law license suspension in New York.

But wait, stop the music. Where in this article are the names of the House members and Senators who received these briefings two days before the insurrection and attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol? You won’t find them.

Why not? How can the New York Times, one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers report a story saying that members of Congress were briefed by private parties seeking to overturn the presidential election two days before the coup attempt that took lives and inflicted massive damage on the Capitol and there is no reference to the names of those members of Congress and no explanation as to why they are omitted?

And note how casually the article reports that Meadows, a founder of the ludicrously named Freedom Caucus and later Chief of Staff for Trump’s White House, has told the House Select Committee that “he had turned in the cellphone he used on Jan. 6 to his service provider, and that he was withholding some 1,000 text messages connected with the device.” Given Meadows’ central role in the effort to keep Trump in office despite having lost the election, could there be a clearer case of evidence tampering? Why would Meadows turn in the cell phone he used on January 6 if not to hide evidence it might contain? No plausible explanation appears in the article.

And at the same time the article gives Meadows a pass with this: “Even though Mr. Meadows did not appear to act on the PowerPoint….” Why? Because Meadows’ lawyer said so? Really? Meadows is clean because his lawyer says he is?

This article was written by seasoned award-winning reporters. Are they really content with this treatment? Were these details in the article but removed by editors?

Almost simultaneously, the Washington Post, my hometown rag, added more shocking details to the story. https://wapo.st/3lX90Xz Waldron is reported to have said he visited the White House multiple times after the election and “spoke with President Donald Trump’s chief of staff “maybe eight to 10 times.”” He also said he “briefed several members of Congress on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot.”

But, again, no names. No mention of efforts to get the names. Why not?

The names are particularly significant because,

The PowerPoint circulated by Waldron included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” or replace them with Republican electors. It included a third proposal in which the certification of Joe Biden’s victory was to be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops were to help “secure” and count paper ballots in key states.

In short, the document set out a plan to overthrow the legitimate government, prevent the transfer of power and install Donald Trump as de facto dictator of the United States.

 These “briefings” of members of Congress are not casual affairs. Anyone who has practiced law/politics in Washington for any length of time will confirm how difficult it is to get direct access to members of Congress and especially to a group of them. Someone inside had to be helping arrange all of this and multiple staff would have known about it. Yet, here we are, almost a year from the January 6 attack and we’re just learning that members of Congress were briefed two days beforehand.

The WAPO report goes along with the “both sides” narrative by assuring us that,

it is not clear how widely the PowerPoint was circulated or how seriously the ideas in it were considered. A lawyer for Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that there was no indication that Meadows did anything with the document after receiving it by email. “We produced it [to the committee] because it was not privileged,” Terwilliger said. A Meadows spokesman, Ben Williamson, declined to comment. Waldron said he was not the person who sent the PowerPoint to Meadows.

Nevertheless, the Post report recognizes that Meadows’ efforts to disappear himself in the post-coup investigation are fading in light of these revelations and the previously reveal fact that Meadows had personally “pressed senior Justice Department leaders to investigate baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud.”

According to Waldron, Meadows sought to help his group pursue their conspiracy theories about foreign interference, quoting Meadows as, “What do you need? What would help?” Of course, the Post also reports comments from an unnamed “person familiar with the matter” purporting to exonerate Meadows from any responsibility. Despite Meadows’ critical role in the White House, he is presented as someone who just received and passed around documents without paying attention to their content. If so, Meadows is monumentally incompetent or monumentally stupid.

Then there is the Giuliani connection.

Waldron said that he and Meadows “weren’t pen pals” and that their communication was often through Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who sometimes asked him to “explain this to Mark” over the phone.

Unsurprisingly, “Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.”

Waldron’s explanation of events included a claim of a meeting with Trump himself (November 25) and some Pennsylvania legislators in the Oval Office. Waldron also claimed to have briefed Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) “at the White House, in the chief of staff’s office, with Giuliani present.” Naturally, Graham also had nothing to say about that meeting. And Trump, of course, had no comment about the November 25 meeting.

Still, no disclosure of the attendees at the January 4 briefings. The Post did get one thing right,

The role played after the election by Waldron is another example of how the president aligned himself with a cast of fringe personalities as he worked to sabotage the U.S. democratic process

But the issue of members of Congress meeting with, and possibly conspiring with, a person like Waldron to overturn the election is a matter of the utmost national importance. The revelations in the New York Times and Washington Post articles about meetings in the days immediately leading to the attack are evidence suggesting that members of Congress knew about, likely approved of and possibly participated in the planning of the attack.

It is very hard to understand why the Times and WAPO would treat so cavalierly the issue of which members of Congress attended briefings about thoroughly debunked election fraud just two days before the deadly attack on the Capitol. These are FACTS, and the papers owe readers an explanation of why this information was so casually ignored.

Closing Note: I have been told that this post is uncomfortably close to the kinds of attacks Trump routinely levels against the mainstream media with his “fake news” trope. Not so, I say, because I am not saying the news reports are false, only that information crucial to complete reporting has been omitted without explanation. I want the media to tell the whole important truth and when it cannot find it, explain why not.