Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

This week we heard from a Secret Service agent who says there was more than one shooter at Dealy Plaza in Dallas back in November, 1963. JFK’s top aide, Dave Powers—who was in the car just behind JFK at the time of the assassination—told me the same thing, as Lamar Waldron and I reported in our book Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination.

While people may disagree on their favorite theory of who was behind and who executed the killing, there’s broad agreement across America that we still don’t know the entire story (and the CIA and FBI continue to refuse to declassify thousands of pages of documents).

Will January 6th be like the Kennedy assassination? Will we never know the whole story?

Andrea Junker recently tweeted:

“Anybody else still curious who planted the pipe bombs, disabled Mike Pence’s key card, removed the panic button in Ayanna Presley’s office, and shared the locations of non-reinforced Capitol windows?”

Inquiring minds want to know.

In a troubling turn, a new biography of Mitt Romney by McKay Coppins dropped this week, with a fascinating excerpt published in The Atlantic. In it, Coppins tells the story of Romney hearing, on January 2nd, from Maine Senator Angus King that a high-ranking Pentagon official had just given him a mind-blowing warning:

“Law enforcement has been tracking online chatter among right-wing extremists who appear to be planning something bad on the day of Donald Trump’s upcoming rally in Washington, D.C. The president has been telling them the election was stolen; now they’re coming to steal it back.

“There’s talk of gun smuggling, of bombs and arson, of targeting the traitors in Congress who are responsible for this travesty. Romney’s name has been popping up in some frightening corners of the internet, which is why King needed to talk to him. He isn’t sure Romney will be safe.”

Alarmed, Romney reached out to Mitch McConnell with a text message:

“In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th.

“There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”

Romney’s concern was prescient. But the interaction (Mitch McConnell never replied to Romney) leaves us with more questions than answers.

For example, why did Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller issue a memo on January 4th explicitly saying that the DC National Guard was:

• Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.
• Not to interact physically with Trump’s protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.
• Not to employ any riot control agents.
• Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.
• Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.
• Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.
• Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.
• Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

Why didn’t our federal police, investigative, and military agencies do anything when they knew full well in advance that an armed mob was coming to the Capitol to try to overthrow our government, and that many within the mob were armed and willing to kill (and did) to try to accomplish their goal?

Why, afterward, did the Secret Service and the Department of Defense wipe their phones so the data could never be retrieved?

Why has there never been a public examination of most of this? What did then-and-now FBI Director Christopher Wray know, and when did he know it?

It’s as if a small-town police force was warned that a gang of bank robbers was on their way into town on the following Saturday, and that weekend the entire police force decided to leave their phones off the hook and go fishing. And after the bank was robbed, they all said they didn’t realize they’d really intended to rob the town’s bank. And then destroyed the note warning them the robbers were coming to town.

Why are so few people openly speculating that corrupt individuals—possibly only a handful—within the FBI, Secret Service, and Department of Defense may have participated in a plot led by Donald Trump to overthrow our government? And how many of Trump’s stooges are still in our government, perhaps waiting for his return?

Why isn’t our media pursuing these questions?

Is it simply because treason is such an unimaginably heinous act? Does journalistic integrity require them to await “smoking gun” evidence that, at the very least, some people within these organizations were knowing or unknowing participants in Trump’s plot to become America’s last president? Is it fear of losing sources in these agencies?

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself—as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence”—Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again begging for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and have the military seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has been reported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December, 2021 that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

Then we discovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel, and Ryan McCarthy were all wiped of all conversations and text messages they had on and in the lead-up to January 6th.

Most of the communication-based evidence was destroyed. Completely destroyed. By coincidence, they said. And the FBI, still run by Trump appointee Wray, seems to have never followed up on any of it.

Why was the riot gear for the Capitol Police stored—after they were warned a mob would be coming for them—in a locked bus? As The Washington Post reported:

“As a mob incited by President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol, officers scrambled to get the body armor. But the bus was locked, and no one could find the key. They were forced to defend the complex, and themselves, in their regular uniforms. All told, about 140 officers reported suffering injuries during the most significant breach of the Capitol since the War of 1812.”

Was it the same person or people who disabled Presley’s panic buttons?

How did the mob know the secret hideaway that Jim Clyburn used for most of his work when they came looking to possibly lynch him with the noose they had outside? He told CBS News:

“They knew where to go. … Yes, somebody on the inside of those buildings were complicit in this.” Adding, “The office with my name on the door was not touched. But the office where I do most of my work in, they were on that floor and outside that door.”

Why has there been no follow-up to Lauren Boebert live-tweeting the location of Nancy Pelosi as she was being hunted for assassination?

Why haven’t we heard any more about the members of Congress who were giving tours to insurrectionists? Why has there been no investigation whatsoever—at least that the public knows anything about—into complicity at the highest levels of our government?

And now we’re watching with jaws agape as Tommy Tuberville is holding open hundreds of senior military positions in a fashion similar to the way Mitch McConnell held Merrick Garland’s seat on the Supreme Court open for well over a year before Trump took office in 2017.

That would be the Senator Tuberville whose hometown newspaper printed pictures showing him in Trump’s private residence the evening of January 5th, 2021, at what appears to be a planning session just hours before the Capitol was invaded.

As the Alabama Political Reporter newspaper reported at the time:

“The night before the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville and the then-director of the Republican Attorneys General Association met with then-President Donald Trump’s sons and close advisers, according to a social media post by a Nebraska Republican who at the time was a Trump administration appointee.

“Charles W. Herbster, who was then the national chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Advisory Committee in Trump’s administration, in a Facebook post at 8:33 p.m. on Jan. 5 said that he was standing ‘in the private residence of the President at Trump International with the following patriots who are joining me in a battle for justice and truth.’ …

“Among the attendees, according to Herbster’s post, were Tuberville, former RAGA director Adam Piper, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, adviser Peter Navarro, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and 2016 deputy campaign manager David Bossie.”

Tuberville has denied to the press that he was at the meeting, but the Alabama Political Reporter noted not only the pictures of him there but also reprinted Facebook and Instagram posts from others who attended citing Tuberville as being part of this particular war room event planning for January 6th.

One, a rightwing tech CEO named Daniel Beck, even wrote on Instagram just before midnight January 5th (with a picture at the hotel) that he’d just:

“[S]pent the evening with Donald Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Tommy Tuberville, Michael J. Lindell, Peter Navarro, and Rudy Giuliani. We talked about the elections, illegal votes, court cases, the republics’ status, what to expect on the hill tomorrow. TRUMP WILL RETAIN THE PRESIDENCY!!!”

Remember, it was the military that apparently refused to go along with Trump’s plan for them to seize voting machines and help him overturn the election and appoint himself dictator-for-life.

Is Tuberville holding those seats open for a second Trump term so Trump can appoint leaders to our military who will go along with the next seditious attempt?

The excerpt from the new Romney biography is alarming, but when put into the context of these other revelations it becomes outright shocking.

It’s been 60 years since JFK was murdered, and we still don’t know the whole story. We can’t afford to wait 60 years to find out who was in on the attempt to overthrow our government on January 6th.

Americans deserve some answers.