More than a year after the Mueller report, The Bad King is still wedded to the fiction (lie) “No collusion. No obstruction.” and he uses the slogan at rallies—with good effect—to promote the staggering falsehood among his gullible supporters.
Because he is trailing in almost every poll against leading Democratic contenders, the president is Tweeting everyday about voter fraud, how the election will be stolen from him by the Democrats and the Deep State forces opposed to his presidency. He uses his rallies to drive home the point to his voters that the election will be rigged, and that people (the MAGA hats, the rabid nationalists, and racist white supremacists who support him) should take to the streets.
This Paul Revere call to action always gets a loud cheer at rallies from the dedicated, gun-loving (NRA) MAGA supporters who—to a man, and woman—see themselves as a patriotic, elite minuteman force. The president of the United States is out on the stump in the heartland—rural cities and towns across America—fomenting a rebellion. Project: Red Dragon, however—treasonous as it maybe—has a following among a small cadre of insiders in the White House, the NSC (National Security Council), and key military members of the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff).
White House Situation Room
Seated around the long table in the White House Situation Room are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of staff of the Army, chief of the National Guard Bureau, the chairman of the NSC (National Security Council) and his new special counsel (the lawyer who replaced the now dead Scott Franklin), the commandant of the Marine Corp, and the newly appointed acting defense secretary. Notable for their absence are the chief of Naval Operations, and the chief of staff of the Air Force.
The president comes into the room and the chiefs, the generals, and the acting defense secretary start to respectfully rise from their chairs. The president though directs them to remain seated while he stands imperiously at the head of the long table. Behind him is the seal of the United States on the wall. The Situation Room is a SCHIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), secure from any electronic surveillance or eavesdropping equipment. At this point in his presidency, The Bad King is paranoid about leaks. The generals, in fact, were made to suffer the indignity of being scanned by the lowly Marine guard corporals for any recording devices they might have carried on their person before they entered the secured space of the Situation Room. The president and those in his White House involved in the plot are taking no chances. Project Red Dragon is too sensitive. There can be no leaks.
The military men look nervous. They know the president—their commander in chief—is about to outline a plan that will involve them in a direct violation of the law, make them violate their personal oaths of service to the country. He has broken many laws in his first three-and-half years. Now he’s going to break one very major, long-standing prohibition—the use of the military for domestic political and police purposes.
The Bad King laughs to himself. After all, he thinks, what are the Democrats going to do? Impeach me? They are already trying to do that. After months of hesitation and political handwringing (near the end of 2019) Nancy Pelosi has finally moved herself and her divided caucus to start hearings prior to voting out a formal bill of impeachment. The House Speaker had viewed this as a possibly perilous path that could backfire on the Democrats to the benefit of the Republicans and the president. She’d held her recalcitrant caucus off as long as she could, but public opinion—following the whistle blower’s revelation of The Bad King’s phone call where he tried to shakedown the Ukraine president for a political favor to get dirt on a political opponent, and the damning witness testimony of a string of corroborating state department officials—has now shifted just enough in favor of impeachment to give her the little opening she needs. A formal bill of impeachment was voted out in early December, before the Christmas break, and the proceeding has moved into the Senate for trial.
The Bad King has just come from the Oval Office and is fresh off the phone with his Russian counterpart, Tsar Peter (his commander in chief). He glances down at the men seated somberly at the table, military men, and career public service officials he is about to ask to throw away their careers and their reputations to support him in what will essentially become a coup to take over control of the government. He indicates a single sheet of paper on the table in front of each man.
Stern-faced, the president says, “I’m going to require a sworn pledge of absolute loyalty from each of you—not to the country, and not to the constitution, but to me personally as your duly elected president and commander in chief.” The possibility that he might legitimately lose the upcoming election is not raised. Such a request by a commander in chief is extraordinary, entirely unprecedented in the history and annals of the U.S. government.
Solemnly the men (soon to become co-conspirators, a group he has come to disdainfully regard as his chain-of-command sycophants) take up their pens and, with eyes downcast and sheepish looks of surrender on their faces, sign, and date the pledge in the required space—their act of treason complete. When all the pens are back on the table, in almost ceremonial fashion, the president himself goes round and collects the signed pledges.
He returns to his place at the head of the table, the great seal of the United States again at his back. With a look of smug self-assurance on his face, he hands them to the NSC’s special counsel who puts them into a plain manila folder that he then secures away in his briefcase.
“Good,” the president says with a satisfied look around the table. “Now we can proceed.”
Project Red Dragon is held in the strictest confidence. There is to be no elaborate visual display, no power-point demonstration. This is the kind of policy paper that you keep confined to a half-dozen bullet-points on a single page, a very secret document disseminated on the strictest need-to know basis.
The president speaks first. “You’ve all been briefed on Project Red Dragon,” he says. The grim-faced chiefs all nod in silent unison.
The Bad King looks triumphantly from one to the other. “Again, gentleman, I’m going to require your complete loyalty in this,” he says, just to re-emphasize the point.
The JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) operate only in an advisory capacity to the president on military matters and cannot issue direct orders to the command structure. They cannot start a war. Their direct complicity, however, will be required to set in motion the Project: Red Dragon plot.
Again—nervously, and somewhat self-consciously—the three men nod. The president looks to his newly appointed acting secretary of defense.
“Yes, sir,” the man dutifully responds. He is a devoted, subservient acolyte of the president
Only the president can start a war. Orders for preemptive military action or defensive response originate with the president and flow through the secretary of defense to the branch commanders of the various services. When the time comes for military action, the order to “go” originates at the top of the command structure. Officers down the command chain do not know their mission (what is going down) until they get their orders. In the Congress, only Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham in the Senate have prior knowledge of the president’s plan (for constitutional officers—this is a betrayal of their sworn oaths to uphold the constitution and support the laws of the land) and that was limited to the partial knowledge that there would be troop deployments to some major U.S. cities to quell the violent disturbances caused by the liberal, left-wing protesters and dissidents. The word dissidents has now come to be a new favorite word with the president—one that he uses consciously and volubly in all his rallies.
The Bad King then looks around the table. “Again, let me emphasize that there can be no leaks. Project: Red Dragon must be held in the strictest confidence.” Some might call this treason—even though it does not meet the technical (legal) definition of that term. It is certainly a betrayal of country.
Again, there is universal agreement around the table. The president of the United States does not bother to tell the generals that the imported Russian provocateurs (mercenary contractors)—with the support of his nationalist, racist, xenophobe, white supremacist backers—will be the ones instigating the violence. Neither does he bother to tell them that a-la his mentor, Tsar Peter, he might be required to order acts of domestic terrorism— bombings of apartment complexes or large public buildings, committed by government agents—that could possibly kill hundreds of people in order to conveniently blame the dissidents, the liberal protesters, in order to spark a public outcry and the demand for a strongman dictator to forcibly seize control of the government and quell the violence, a role that The Bad King obviously would be only too happy to step-in and fill.
“If I lose the election,” the president starts in a somber voice, “. . . it will be because of widespread voter fraud and a conspiracy by the Democrats and the Deep State to see me removed from office. The Democrats will try to steal the election to keep me from a second term. If that happens, my supporters will rise up and take to the streets to defend democracy.”
He now stands and forcefully pounds the table with his fist for further emphasis. The generals and chiefs are startled but remain mute.
“There will be riots and demonstrations in major cities across the country, and my supporters—the good and lawful people of America—will rise up and be supported by the police,” the president of the United States says, making it all sound like a patriotic mission. In his Fascist way, he now characterizes the peaceful protesters at his rallies as ANTIFA extremists and violent criminals.
The president turns again to his generals. With his jaw jutting out, he strikes what he assumes is a presidential, properly martial, Hitler-like, authoritarian pose and pompously delivers his final directive. “As president, I will invoke the Insurrection Act and expect the Army and National Guard troops under your respective commands,” he nods in turn toward the Army chief of staff, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, and the Marine Commandant, “. . . to back and reinforce the police in their actions against the radical, anarchist, left-wing demonstrators who want to destroy our democracy.”
The country is divided politically, but the government is divided within itself. While the president is soliciting the director of the National Security Council, the secretary of defense and a coterie of Department of Defense generals to help him unconstitutionally (dictatorially) destroy the country’s democracy, others within the Pentagon—patriotic civil servants—are working to thwart the president’s illegal, treasonous acts. Shane has told Billy that career professionals at the Pentagon had—back in 2019—failed to inform the president of a cyber op against the Russian power grid because they didn’t trust him, thought he might reveal the program to the Russians. This is happening throughout the government. Large segments of dedicated civil servants no longer trust the president.
As Shane relates it to Billy, the CIA and FBI are under withering attack by the president—called out routinely at rallies, reviled in alt-right blogs and the conservative media (Fox News)—as part of the hated Deep State conspiracy dedicated in its mission to undermining him and destroying his presidency.
“He cannot be trusted to even do his constitutional duty to protect and defend the country.” Shane tells Billy. “He is a Russian agent working with a foreign dictator to thwart and destroy our American democracy!”
Besides Project: Red Dragon, The Bad King has already opened an old familiar front and weaponized an already proven asset—the IRA (Internet Research Agency) in his war to get re-elected president. The IRA was the internet troll farm in St. Petersburg owned by the oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and operated at the direction of Tsar Peter to meddle in and disrupt our 2016 presidential election to influence the outcome in favor of The Bad King. The internet trolls in St. Petersburg are again on social media spreading disinformation (lies) and Kremlin propaganda to help the president against his Democrat contenders.
Even more ominous, the president is quiet about a detachment of RIM (Russian Imperial Movement). This is an insurgent paramilitary group—a gift from Tsar Peter, funded through a company owned by his oligarch crony Yevgeniy Prigozhin, known as the Tsar’s Chef—that has been in the country since the time The Bad King was elected. It has clandestinely trained more than 500 domestic sympathizers—ultra right-wing nationalists, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists—at a secret base in South Carolina. These would-be domestic insurgents are armed and equipped by the Russian government.
In front of the Republican convention, a group of fifty of these trained insurgents will be dispatched to Miami to organize MAGA sympathizers. Their purpose will be to confront and carry out violence on the peaceful liberal protesters. If The Bad King loses the election, other small cadres will be deployed to major U.S. cities across the country to aid and assist the Russian provocateurs in inciting violence. These local militias will bear no identifying markings and wear no insignia—but, reminiscent of the Russian invasion of the Crimea, will be the little green men in the United States. This is all according to Tsar Peter’s plan and the Project: Red Dragon plot to keep The Bad King in office even if the election goes awry. Also, in addition to these military active measures used to up-end our American democratic process, there will be a massive cyber warfare campaign conducted from Russia on social media to promote the fiction of voter fraud and convince the public of a plot by Democrats to steal the election.
The president concludes the meeting and collects the single sheet briefs on the table in front of each of his JCS generals. “You will all be told of my decision and the actions to be taken when the time comes.” Then he turns and peremptorily leaves the room.
Mueller in his 2019 report said that his committee did not find sufficient evidence to bring charges of collusion against The Bad King and his campaign team according to federal criminal standards. However, as early as the summer of 2016, the intelligence community had already observed enough suspicious activity between Republican campaign officials and Russians connected to the Kremlin to launch an official counterintelligence investigation against The Bad King and his campaign. The question: was he a witting agent (or unwitting, “useful idiot”) of the Kremlin and the president of Russia? In 2017, former CIA director John Brennan, when queried by a House Intelligence Committee member whether he saw evidence of collusion between The Bad King’s campaign and Russia, the intelligence chief answered, “. . . [I] encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the campaign.”
On the campaign trail, at the rallies that Rosie and Billy attend, The Bad King echoes the now familiar refrain, provided to him by his corrupt AG, Bill Barr:
“No collusion. No obstruction.”
Again, there is evidence of a massive active measures campaign by the Russians to influence the election in favor of the incumbent president. With information provided to her by Elena Kutsayva (Shane’s CIA analyst), Rosie has written several newspaper articles (appeared in numerous MSNBC news segments) identifying Russian social media Bots and their ads posted online. As part of a public information effort, in order that people can understand and recognize the threat, Shane has arranged for the publication of Rosie’s pieces in all the major newspapers.
The Bad King continues to deny election meddling by the Russians, both in 2016 and now in front of the 2020 election. At a rally in Tampa, Rosie asks him about Russian involvement in our elections. “. . . maybe there is no meddling,” he dismissively responds to the question. Yet he repeatedly publicly states that he would welcome any help from a foreign leader. He even invited China to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and his son.
The Republicans in both houses of Congress tend to support him in his denial. The current majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, refuses to bring to the floor any legislation to deal with Russian election interference, so nothing has been/or is being done to protect the country’s electoral process.