Newly revealed PowerPoint suggests Trump’s chief of staff was making the case that China rigged the election for Biden
The most hair-raising revelation in the 36-slide PowerPoint deck that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows refers to in an email he has shared with the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection, titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN,” is not its assertion that vote counting was halted election night, while President Trump appeared to be winning in many states, so that fake votes could be “injected” into the tallies. Nor is it the deck’s libelous claims that Dominion Voting Systems, the maker of many of the voting machines used in key states, was the willing agent of the fraud.
It also isn’t the fact that Meadows’ PowerPoint, which he was allegedly circulating among Republican senators and congressmembers, called on President Trump to “declare a national security emergency” and to “declare electronic voting in all states invalid,” with federalized National Guard units and US Marshals deployed to do a recount solely of paper ballots. And it’s not the specific plan for Vice President Mike Pence to either seat Republican electors over the objections of Democrats, or reject the electors from states where fraud supposedly occurred.
It’s how close Trump and his minions brought us to war with China.
The deck Meadows’ refers to begins and ends with an outrageous claim, that “the Chinese systematically gained control over our election system constituting a national security emergency.” Its final slide, shown below, couldn’t be clearer. About a third of the deck is devoted to explaining how the Chinese Communist Party supposedly took control of Dominion’s voting machines, through a network of holding companies, giving it control of elections in at least 28 states, all to supposedly throw the election to a “China ally.”
In the annals of foreign affairs, this is what diplomats call a “casus belli,” a cause for war. President Trump’s chief of staff, the highest ranking official in the White House, was, in the days before January 6, actively blaming China for stealing the election for Joe Biden.
Now recall the biggest revelation from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril, that on October 30, 2020 and again on January 8, 2021, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley secretly called his Chinese counterpart, the head of the People’s Liberation Army, to assure him that the United States was not planning a military strike against China.
The first call was at Milley’s initiative, because of intelligence that suggested that China was worried about an attack on them. In Peril, Woodward and Costa situate Milley’s second call in the context of the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, which had happened two days earlier and which “Milley knew from extensive reports” had “stunned and disoriented” the Chinese leadership. Going back to October, they report, China was already worried that a desperate Trump “would create a crisis, present himself as the savior, and use the gambit to win reelection.” Milley saw it as important to reassure them that no attack was underway, because, as he told his own senior staff, “We don’t understand the Chinese and the Chinese don’t understand us.” The January 6th insurrection had only intensified Chinese fears, hence the second Milley call, according to Woodward and Costa.
We now know that January 6th was not the reason for that second call. According to Milley’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee this past September, it came because his Chinese counterpart had already requested it. That request, he said, came on December 31, 2020. According to an unclassified background memo he gave the Armed Services Committee, the call time was confirmed on January 4th and was scheduled for January 8th.
It’s probably safe to assume that if Meadows was sharing this deck with Republican members of Congress, the Chinese government knew about it. This tweet from Fox’s Lara Logan suggests that it was “briefed on the Hill” on January 5th. While the deck itself is dated January 5th, the level of detail in it suggests it was probably compiled over several days. (It’s still a mystery why the deck has been sitting on a strange website since last July seemingly run by a bunch of ex-military types.) Because Meadows is now refusing to cooperate with the House Select Committee, we don’t know the contents of more than 1,000 contemporaneous personal text messages or hundreds of other documents that his lawyer has refused to hand over.
The Chinese leadership had every reason to be worried that it was about to be vilified. And Chinese and other Asian people living in the United States were already reeling from a wave of bias attacks triggered by Trump and other Republicans racist references to the China virus or the Wuhan virus. Had Trump and Meadows gone any further with any plan to blame China for his election loss, there could have been a massive wave of grassroots violence against Chinese-Americans and others here.
Nations usually do not go to war deliberately; conflict flares up when relations are already tense and military forces face each other on hair-trigger alert. That’s when misunderstandings can escalate dangerously.
We are only beginning to learn how close the United States came to a coup last winter. Now we also need to learn more about how close we came to a war.