Five years ago, the plan to overturn an election was drawn up by outsiders and stopped by insiders. Rudy Giuliani ran it from a suite at the Willard. Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne pitched martial law and seizing the voting machines in the Oval Office on 18 December 2020. John Eastman wrote the memos. Jeffrey Clark drafted the letter telling Georgia’s legislature to convene. Kenneth Chesebro built the elector scheme. Every one of them needed a government official to sign something, and the officials said no.
The country drew the wrong lesson from that. We decided the system held. What held was five lawyers and a secretary of state, all in jobs the president couldn’t take away. Not a system. Six people.
But in Trumpworld, they drew the right lesson. They never touched the laws. They moved people. Out, and in.
Pat Cipollone, Jeffrey Rosen, Richard Donoghue, Steven Engel, Pat Philbin, and Eric Herschmann sat in the Oval Office on 3 January 2021 and told Trump they would resign together if he made Clark the acting Attorney General. “I would resign immediately,” Donoghue testified. “I’m not working one minute for this guy.” Cipollone called it a murder-suicide pact. Trump backed down, and all six served to the last day.
Todd Blanche has Rosen’s chair now. Senator Amy Klobuchar asked him on 15 July to commit to keeping armed federal agents away from polling places; he would commit only to following the law, “no matter what it includes.” Will Scharf took Cipollone’s chair this morning. In June, the New York Times published a confidential memo Scharf had written on invoking the Insurrection Act and reported that the push to use it had alarmed the White House Counsel’s office.
Richard Pilger resigned as director of the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch on 9 November 2020, four days after the election, rather than run the fraud inquiry Bill Barr had just authorised. His job has been empty since February 2025. The Public Integrity Section that supervised it had thirty-six lawyers. It has two. The Voting Section that enforces the Voting Rights Act had about thirty. It has three.
Nothing was repealed to do any of this. Every statute is exactly where it was.
The motley crew of Mike Lindell, Powell, Flynn, Stone, and Giuliani are all mostly gone, but a few Jan 6 operatives have quietly assumed power inside the government: Natalie Harp, John Solomon, Kurt Olsen, Heather Honey, and of course, Kash Patel.
In 2020, she anchored a show at One America News and sat on the campaign advisory board — outside the government entirely, with no power to sign anything. She published more than 150 posts on 6 January and deleted them. Twenty-one months later, she wrote the president’s fourteen-page answer to the committee investigating that day. She does the same job now from inside the building, for $150,000 a year, and decides what he reads.
Kurt Olsen was an outside lawyer in December 2020, telling Rosen to file at the Supreme Court “by noon today” and, when Rosen balked, threatening him: “You’re going to force me to call the president and tell him you’re recalcitrant.” Rosen didn’t file. Olsen is now Director of Election Security and Integrity, a post that did not exist before him.
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