As the January 6th House Select Committee continues to deepen their investigation surrounding the infamous Capitol siege, Americans have become more and more aware of just how serious the situation truly was, as well as the magnitude of the events surrounding the riot — most specifically the behaviors and actions of the then-President Donald Trump.
However, legal expert and longtime attorney Philip Rotner recently penned a new column with Bulwark and took the deep dive to truly highlight how scarily close the now-former president was to a genuine coup in the United States. In fact, Rotner feels that all it would have taken was just a little more cooperation and help, coupled with just a bit more planning, and we would be suffering under yet another 4 years of Donald Trump in the White House after he successfully overturned Joe Biden’s win.
In his column, Rotner highlighted Trump’s former personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, as a prime example of your standard Donald Trump “sycophant” that’s willing to cross all the lines to keep their Dear Leader in power another day, and went on to claim that the now-x-president was truly only short about “five more Rudy’s.” well-placed, to pull his coup plan off without a hitch.
Rotner is quick to admit in his piece that he believes the “attempted coup came much closer to succeeding than many would admit and was just a dress rehearsal for 2024.” The attorney goes on to note that he’s part of the “worried camp” of individuals who feel that Trump’s plan could eventually be successful, given how ridiculously close the nation came to just that on January 6th.
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“Over two years ago, I wrote that Donald Trump’s failure to recognize, until it was too late, that he needed to corrupt the executive branch all the way down to the level of inspectors general had put him on a fast track to impeachment,” Rotner penned in his column before going on to add that Donald Trump, fortunately, failed to realize that he needed to install more of “his people” to be successful in his attempted coup.
“Despite Trump’s failure to thoroughly corrupt the federal and state governments, he came frighteningly close to overturning the election or, at the least, throwing the nation into the mother of all constitutional crises. How close? Trump fell five Rudys short,” the legal expert penned, adding, “Substitute Rudy Giuliani—or Sidney Powell or Jim Jordan or any other Trump cultist—for just five people who held state or federal office at the time of the 2020 election and think about what might have happened.”
“Put a Rudy in the place of Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia who stood his ground in the face of hellish pressure from the president of the United States and certified Joe Biden’s win in the state. Replace Michigan Board of State Canvassers member Aaron Van Langevelde, who bucked GOP pressure to provide the swing vote to certify Biden’s win in Michigan, with a Rudy,” the column reads. “Make a Rudy the secretary of state of Pennsylvania instead of Kathy Boockvar, who certified Biden’s win in that state. That puts 42 electoral votes in play in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania alone. Forget about Arizona and Wisconsin—Trump wouldn’t need them. He only lost by 38.”
Rotner also notes that Trump would have had far more success in paving his way to more power had he replaced former Attorney General Bill Barr, after Barr downright refused to help him steal a presidential election.
“Replace Attorney General Bill Barr with a Rudy and have him declare that the Justice Department had determined that massive fraud tainted the results in all of the swing states that went for Biden. Team Trump had an actual plan to do just that, replacing Barr with a brainwashed nobody named Jeffrey Clark, but Trump never pulled the trigger,” Rotner pens, “Or blow the whole thing out of the water in one shot. What if, rather than Mike Pence, a Rudy had been vice president—someone who would refuse to even open the certified electoral ballots, much less count them.”
The legal expert goes on to note that it’s truly impossible to know with certainty what would have transpired with a few tweaks to Donald Trump’s already heinous plan. However, he asserts, “If the five Rudys had been in place in 2020, at a minimum, three states with more than enough electoral votes to overturn the vote of the people would have been in play, quite possibly with their final vote certifications being decided by highly partisan Republican legislatures. And we know that if Trump had had Rudys in the offices of the attorney general and vice president, they might have created enough chaos to throw the election into the hands of the U.S. House of Representatives where, because the vote would be state-by-state rather than by individual representatives, a strict party-line vote would have installed Trump, not Biden, as president.”
You can read Rotner’s full column here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
