The former senior counsel to the former HHS secretary John Kelly has
spoken out in regard to the indictment against Donald Trump
in his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Now, Kevin Carroll, of course, is not a Democrat.
He's not a liberal individual.
Of course he's been in the military, worked for John Kelly,
hardcore Republican in.
But after reading the indictment, he says that his blood ran cold, especially in
regard to two elements of that indictment that he wants to draw attention to.
So in a piece that he wrote for the Dispatch, he explains what his concerns
are, how Trump and his cronies attempted to turn the or were considering
turning the American military against civilians and the American people.
So let me give you a few excerpts from his piece, and we'll discuss.
So he writes that as a veteran, my blood ran cold reading two particular
passages in Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment.
They suggest that part of the former president and his co conspirators
autocratic plan to remain in power despite knowing that they lost the 2020 election,
was to make the United States military choose between subservience to civilian
control or refusing to undertake an antidemocratic domestic political role.
He continues to write that.
"It appears that when a deputy White House counsel warned
Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark that if Trump remained in
office despite the absence of any evidence of outcome determinative,
election fraud, riots would break out in US cities." Clark responded,
that's why there's an insurrection act.
So I remember when all of this was happening, the idea that, well, of course,
I mean, if Trump tries to overturn the results of the election and
go against the will of American voters, there very likely would have been riots.
And the idea of using the United States military against actual civilians
was very much in the bubble.
Definitely something that they were considering here.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, look, there's some things that I go nuts over, and
I'm always surprised that people don't pay more attention to.
So when the Hang Mike Pence chant, it took forever for the rest of the media to go,
yeah, they were thinking of murdering his vice president.
The minute it happened, I'm like, that's the biggest thing there.
They were gonna execute his own vice president.
That's amazing, right?
So now people have generally caught onto that good, right.
And then the fake electoral scheme.
You guys have seen me, say, a thousand times on this show,
why aren't they doing something about the actual coup attempt?
And finally, Jack Smith did.
I was like, my God, what a relief.
That's when I was like, okay, we finally have a real prosecutor,
someone who knows what they're doing.
And before, like, nobody was talking about it.
That's why when he released the indictment, everybody was shocked.
They're like, it turns out there was a fake electoral scheme.
Of course.
Why don't you pay attention to the news drives me crazy.
>> Speaker 1: I mean, you're right.
That's the more substantive charge here.
Everyone was hyper focused on what transpired on January 6, which was bad.
But the reason why there was so much focus on that is because optically speaking,
that's gonna grab way more attention.
I mean, rioting in the Capitol?
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, I never agree with that.
I hear you.
And so video is alluring and that's what TV cares a lot about.
And that's definitely why they focused on what they focused on.
But doing a coup against America is kind of a big deal.
That's an attention grabber.
So thank God Jack Smith actually knows what the hell he's doing because
otherwise media and Democrats were barely talking about it at all.
Now, this is the new part where everybody's shocked and chagrin, but
you can go back and watch Old Young Turks shows where I'm like,
they're talking about the Insurrection Act.
That's martial law.
They're gonna use the military.
I was saying it while they were discussing it because these leaks have been around
forever,right?
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right.
>> Speaker 2: And so I'm like, guys, you have no idea how close we are to them
actually doing a full blown coup with tanks, right?
And then when we found out the extent of the conversations,
one of those conversations took 3 hours in the White House, Trump was leaning in
their direction, had him you know how they talked him out of it.
Every single person that was not part of the Coup lawyers,
including White House counsel and everyone else said, we're going to resign.
If you say we're gonna use the military to basically do a coup,
we're all gonna resign, okay.
By the way, and I've said this in the past, too, credit to those officials.
They're so massively right wing.
They were still with Trump till the very end.
But even they had a line.
Trump didn't have the line, but they had a line.
They're like, no, we're not gonna do a coup against America and
roll out tanks against our own citizens.
Finally, someone has noticed that it's in the indictment.
>> Speaker 2: It is indictment.
>> Right and so this guy was legal counsel for Homeland Security, and he's like,
yeah, no, that's what the Insurrection Act means.
That's what it means to do martial law.
You roll out the tanks and
you order the military to fire against your own citizens.
>> Speaker 1: And he would know. I mean, he's a former military officer.
He also talks a little bit about so
here what I've shared with you already had more to do with Jeffrey Clark.
Which, again, assistant Attorney General during the Trump administration.
He definitely had some loyalists within his administration who were willing to
carry out this coup.
But when it came to the Kooky lawyers, john Eastman is certainly one of them.
And so he draws some attention to what John Eastman was up to as well.
In the second the indictment reports that when similarly warned of the risk of
riots, Trump's outside counsel, John Eastman, responded that there were
points in American history when violence was necessary to protect the Republic.
But understand that this wouldn't be using the military or
using violence to protect the republic.
This would be using the military against the Republic,
against our democratic process, in order to install an authoritarian
dictator who does not value democratic elections.
>> Speaker 2: Yeah, John Eastman was the same guy who said, we better get a pardon,
otherwise we're gonna have to get lawyers,
because he knew that they were giving him ridiculous legal advice and
one that was not gonna hold up in court and was criminal.
So, yeah, doing a coup against America.
So that's why the Republicans are like, it's just freedom of speech, man.
We just planned a coup.
We're just talking, right.
And we were talking about rolling out the tanks and
murdering American civilians that protested us stealing the election.
Just talking?
No, not just talking that's planning a coup.
And it's totally illegal and unacceptable.
And even one of the authors, John Eastman, knew it.
That's why he was desperate to get a pardon before they left office.
>> Speaker 1: That's right. Yep.
Finally, I'm gonna go to the last graphic here.
He writes that generals would be forced to choose whether to abandon
an unbroken tradition of American military obedience to civilian control or
turn their guns on civilians to facilitate a losing candidate remaining
in the White House beyond Inauguration Day.
So I'm glad that it didn't get to that point, but
I do wonder what would have happened?
If the military generals were met with and
asked to do just this to basically carry out the will of
Donald Trump against the will of the American people, right.
What would they do?
And I don't know the answer to it.
That's the terrifying part.
>> No, it's we just saw this happen fairly recently, a couple years ago in Turkey,
and there was a coup attempt.
They rolled out the tanks and the civilians came out.
And in that case, it was a coup attempt against a right winger, Erdogan.
And Erdogan told everybody to go in the streets, and they listened to him,
his supporters did, and they climbed all over the tanks and
they killed a whole bunch of Turkish civilians.
And then it got to a point where they're like, we just can't kill more civilians.
So they gave up.
>> Speaker 1: That's in Turkey?
>> Speaker 2: That's in Turkey.
And that's a good case scenario.
Even though the coup was against the right winger.
It isn't about politics you don't do coups right.
You don't do coups against right wingers or left wingers.
You don't do coups period.
And so but if it happened in America, I mean, here we know then at this point,
we're a banana republic where our democracy is no longer special and
might not even exist if one of these coups wins.
And if he doesn't get punished for this, guys legally,
if there aren't ramifications, it's gonna be a giant green light to
anyone else that ever wants to do this again.
And then we're all in a world of trouble.
Because whether it's a Democrat, which seems incredibly unlikely,
or any other right winger, they think, what's the downside?
Trump tried to do a coup and got away with it.
>> Speaker 1: True. >> Speaker 2: So we might as well give it
a shot, because we've already lost anyway.
Maybe we'll win through the coup.
So it's a near guarantee that they'll do it again if he isn't prosecuted.