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And they publicly promoted their coup plans through the Washington Post, as discussed here during the election by Rosa Brooks ( -> Michele Flournoy -> WestExec Advisors, Pine Island Capital -> Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, et al.):

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/03/trump-stay-in-office/

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3880588/posts

What’s the worst that could happen?
The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis

Bendik Kaltenborn for The Washington Post
By Rosa Brooks
September 3, 2020

Rosa Brooks @brooks_rosa is a law professor at Georgetown University and co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project.

We wanted to know: What’s the worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential election? President Trump has broken countless norms and ignored countless laws during his time in office, and while my colleagues and I at the Transition Integrity Project didn’t want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail, we realized that identifying the most serious risks to our democracy might be the best way to avert a November disaster. So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what they’d do in a range of election and transition scenarios.

A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.

Picture this:

On the morning of Election Day, false stories appear online claiming that Biden has been hospitalized with a life-threatening heart attack and the election has been delayed. Every mainstream news organization reports that the rumors are unfounded, but many Biden supporters, confused by the bogus claims, stay home.

Still, by late that night, most major networks have called the election for Biden: The former vice president has won key states and has a slender lead in the national popular vote, and polling experts predict that his lead will grow substantially as Western states count an unusually high number of mail-in ballots. The electoral college looks secure for Biden, too.

But Trump refuses to concede, alleging on Twitter that “MILLIONS of illegal ALIENS and DEAD PEOPLE” have voted in large numbers and that the uncounted ballots are all “FAKE VOTES!!!” Social media fills with posts from Trump supporters alleging that the election has been “stolen” in a “Deep State coup,” and Trump-friendly pundits on Fox News and OAN echo the message.

Soon, Attorney General William P. Barr opens an investigation into unsubstantiated allegations of massive vote-by-mail fraud and ties between Democratic officials and antifa. In Michigan and Wisconsin, where Biden has won the official vote and Democratic governors have certified slates of pro-Biden electors, the Trump campaign persuades Republican-controlled legislatures to send rival pro-Trump slates to Congress for the electoral college vote.

The next week is chaotic: A list of Michigan and Wisconsin electors for Biden circulates on right-wing social media, including photos, home addresses and false claims that scores of them are in the pay of billionaire George Soros or have been linked to child sex-trafficking rings.

Massive pro-Biden street protests begin, demanding that Trump concede. The president tweets that “REAL PATRIOTS MUST SHOW THESE ANTIFA TERRORISTS THAT CITIZENS WHO LOVE THE 2ND AMENDMENT WILL NEVER LET THEM STEAL THIS ELECTION!!!” Around the nation, violent clashes erupt. Several people are injured and killed in multiple incidents, though reports conflict about their identities and who started the violence.

Meanwhile, Trump declares that “UNLESS THIS CARNAGE ENDS NOW,” he will invoke the Insurrection Act and send “Our INCREDIBLY POWERFUL MILITARY and their OMINOUS WEAPONS” into the streets to “Teach these ANTI-AMERICAN TERRORISTS A LESSON.” At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff convene a hurried meeting to discuss the crisis.

And it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.

. . .For obvious reasons, we couldn’t ask Trump or Biden — or their campaign aides — to play themselves in these exercises, so we did the next best thing: We recruited participants with similar backgrounds. On the GOP side, our “players” included former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, conservative commentator Bill Kristol and former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson. On the Democratic side, participants included John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a top White House adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; Donna Brazile, the campaign chair for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential run; and Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan. Other participants included political strategists, journalists, polling experts, tech and social media experts, and former career officials from the intelligence community, the Justice Department, the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

In each scenario, Team Trump — the players assigned to simulate the Trump campaign and its elected and appointed allies — was ruthless and unconstrained right out of the gate, and Team Biden struggled to get out of reaction mode. In one exercise, for instance, Team Trump’s repeated allegations of fraudulent mail-in ballots led National Guard troop to destroy thousands of ballots in Democratic-leaning ZIP codes, to applause on social media from Trump supporters. Over and over, Team Biden urged calm, national unity and a fair vote count, while Team Trump issued barely disguised calls for violence and intimidation against ballot-counting officials and Biden electors. . .

. . .Meanwhile, military and law enforcement leaders can prepare for the possibility that politicians will seek to manipulate or misuse their coercive powers. Partisans, including Trump, may try to deploy law enforcement, National Guard troops and, potentially, active-duty military personnel to “restore order” in a manner that primarily benefits one party, or involve troops and law enforcement in efforts to interrupt the ballot-counting process. The federal response to this summer’s protests in D.C.’s Lafayette Square and Portland, Ore., suggests that this is not purely speculative. To avoid becoming unwitting pawns in a partisan battle, military and law enforcement leaders can issue clear advance statements about what they will and won’t do. They can train troops and police officers on de-escalation techniques and on the vital need to remain nonpartisan and respectful of civil liberties.

The media also has an important role. Responsible outlets can help educate the public about the possibility — indeed, the likelihood — that there won’t be a clear winner on election night because an accurate count may take weeks, given the large number of mail-in ballots expected in this unprecedented mid-pandemic election. Journalists can also help people understand that voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, and, in particular, that there’s nothing nefarious about voting by mail. Social media platforms can commit to protecting the democratic process, by rapidly removing or correcting false statements spread by foreign or domestic disinformation campaigns and by ensuring that their platforms aren’t used to incite or plan violence.

Finally, ordinary citizens can help, too — perhaps most of all. As the jurist Learned Hand said in 1944, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it . . . while it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.” This is as true now as it was then: When people unite to demand democracy and the rule of law, even repressive regimes can be stopped in their tracks. Mass mobilization is no guarantee that our democracy will survive — but if things go as badly as our exercises suggest they might, a sustained, nonviolent protest movement may be America’s best and final hope. . .

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https://keywiki.org/Rosa_Brooks

Rosa Brooks
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Rosa Brooks
Template:TOCnestleft Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks was a senior advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy.

In 1970 Rosa Brooks was born to prominent socialist activists Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich[1]. She was named after Rosa Parks and Rosa Luxemburg, the German revolutionary, as well as a great-grandmother[2].

Until her appointment to the Obama administration, Professor Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks served on the Georgetown Law full-time faculty. Brooks, who wrote a weekly opinion column for the Los Angeles Times, holds degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School.

Education
Rosa Brooks received her A.B. from Harvard in 1991 (history and literature), followed by a master’s degree from Oxford in 1993 (social anthropology) and a law degree from Yale in 1996.

Leftwing teen
In the mid ‘80s, teens Rosa and Benjamin Ehrenreich were active in Students Against Drunk Driving on Long Island. “They both consider themselves leftwing.”[3]

Career/activism
From 2001-2006, Brooks was an associate professor[4]at the University of Virginia School of Law. In 2000-2001, she was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a consultant to the Open Society Institute and to Human Rights Watch.

Rosa Brooks worked at the U.S. State Department until 1999, where she was senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Before joining the State Department, Brooks was a lecturer at Yale Law School, where she also served as acting director of Yale’s Schell Center for International Human Rights Law and faculty supervisor of the Lowenstein Human Rights Law Clinic. Her current research focuses on human rights, terrorism and the law of war, and post-conflict rule of law issues.

Her government and NGO work has involved field research in Iraq, Indonesia, Israel, Palestine, Kosovo, China, Russia, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Sierra Leone, among other places.

Kerry/Edwards campaign
In 2004 Brooks served as director or the Kerry-Edwards campaign’s task force on democracy, development & human rights.

Soros connection
On November 29, 2006 Open Society Institute held a roundtable discussion entitled “How Do Progressives Connect Ideas to Action?”

Individuals and organizations with similarly progressive goals often dilute their power by working alone or even working at cross-purposes. As Americans who are politically left of center move forward, questions of infrastructure, communication, and collaboration are particularly important.
Participants included several key leaders of the “progressive” movement[5];

Deepak Bhargava Center for Community Change
Robert Borosage Campaign for America’s Future.
Rosa Brooks Open Society Institute
Anna Burger Service Employees International Union
Eric Foner Columbia University, Department of History
Michel Gelobter Redefining Progress
Hendrik Hertzberg The New Yorker
Alan Jenkins Opportunity Agenda
Gara LaMarche Open Society Institute
Jal Mehta New Vision Institute for Policy and Progress
David Moss The Tobin Project
Iara Peng Young People For
Stephanie Robinson The Jamestown Project at Yale
Joel Rogers University of Wisconsin Law School
Andrea Batista Schlesinger Drum Major Institute for Public Policy
Katrina vanden Heuvel The Nation editor.
John Podesta Center for American Progress
Michael Waldman The Brennan Center for Justice
Matthew Yglesias The American Prospect
Service
Brooks has also served as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, a fellow at the Carr Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a board member of Amnesty International USA, a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a lecturer at Yale Law School, a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on fragile States. She currently serves on the board of the National Security Network and on the Steering Committee of the White Oak Foreign Policy Leaders Project.

Writing
Rosa Brooks’ book, “Can Might Make Rights?” (Cambridge, 2006), was co-authored with David Wippman and Georgetown Law professor Jane Stromseth, the book looks at the difficult issue of restoring the rule of law in the wake of military interventions.

References
Template:Reflist

http://www.allbusiness.com/information/publishing-industries/698569-1.html
http://www.allbusiness.com/information/publishing-industries/698569-1.html
Democratic Left, March/April 1986, page 4
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/releases/august.24.2006.html
http://www.soros.org/resources/events/progressives_20061129