Friday Round Up! 9/29/23

The connection between General Milley's retirement speech and the first person to strike a plea deal in Fulton County.

Last week I recommended an article from The Atlantic, detailing former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley’s ongoing effort to restrain Donald Trump, while president, from (ab)using his Article II Commander in Chief authority over the armed forces for political ends (or to commit war crimes, like “shooting protesters in the legs”). As with anyone who doesn’t demonstrate complete and unconditional loyalty to him, Trump has responded to Milley with vitriol, characterizing the general’s actions as “treasonous” and suggesting that Milley deserves to be put to death. Milley, for his part, stood up against these threats in his recent retirement speech:

In what might possibly be the dumbest take on the whole exchange I’ve seen so far, the director of foreign policy and defense at the American Enterprise Institute, Kori Schake, tweeted yesterday that Milley’s words made the “military seem more political”:

Apparently, Schake believes that both Milley should have remained silent in the face of Trump’s, and his allies’, increasingly violent rhetoric. (ICYMI, our Substack guest speaker last week, Professor Jennifer Mercieca, explained why appeals to violence, or ad baculum, are so effective for demagogues, and therefore so dangerous.) This facile view ignores how bad actors weaponize institutional norms, especially norms about remaining “apolitical,” as a way to silence critics and coopt the information space. I wrote earlier on Substack about this “information asymmetry” in the context of the Justice Department, but the same analysis applies to the military as well.

The importance of Milley’s speech is highlighted by a seemingly unrelated development in the Fulton County case, namely that according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, former bail bondsman and defendant Scott Hall is cooperating with the Georgia prosecutors. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because Hall was allegedly part of a complicated subconspiracy , along with defendants Sidney Powell, Cathleen Latham, and Misty Hampton, to illegally access and copy voter data in Coffee County, Georgia. I link to a good background explainer on that conspiracy in the recommended reading below, but the illegal intrusion into Coffee County’s voting equipment was an outgrowth of a much larger plan to try to gain access to voter data in states across the country. One of the ways some coup plotters wanted to do this was to have the military seize voting equipment pursuant to an executive order that had been drafted by Powell’s team. (You’ll recall that Powell wanted Trump to name her as a “special counsel” to investigate voter fraud.) That executive order wasn’t ever formally issued, but it speaks to how so many in Trump’s orbit envisioned the military playing a key role in the events and aftermath of January 6; Trump had installed his loyalists, Kash Patel and Chris Miller in the Pentagon after the election, I suspect for precisely this purpose. (This aspect of the entire coup plot has not been investigated or explained enough, in my opinion.) Against this backdrop, Milley’s statements are not only appropriate, but ought to be echoed more loudly and frequently by other military officers.

Renato and I discussed the implications of the threats against Milley after unpacking the charges against Senator Bob Menendez on this week’s podcast:

My articles this week:

• I co-authored a piece this week for Just Security with former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos on the ongoing national security threats posed by Senator Menendez in light of the facts revealed in his indictment

Other articles worth reading:

• This Lawfare article by Anna Bower offers a comprehensive chronology of the Coffee County conspiracy (which will end up featuring heavily in the upcoming trial of Sidney Powell, who is being tried alongside Kenneth Cheseboro, so it’s worth brushing up), and how it connected with the broader coup plot in Washington, D.C. and other states

• This chilling piece from The Washington Post on how the Modi regime uses disinformation and social media to exploit religious cleavages as a way to maintain power. This article hit especially close to home because it focuses on my family’s home state of Karnataka — I happen to be on a list serve of a bunch of relatives who have completely bought into these narratives hook, line, and sinker. It’s a good warning for where we are rapidly headed here in the U.S.

Upcoming events:

• Freedom Academy Book Club discussion with Steve Vladeck, author of The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic, Tuesday, October 17, 3 p.m. EDT. Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at noon, and a recording of the discussion will be posting the following day. (Please check out the new Freedom Academy Book Club tab, where I will collate our book club discussions!). Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at noon.

• DATE/TIME TBA: Class guest speaker Colin Clarke, Director of Research for The Soufan Group. I thought of Colin as I was writing my last post on Yevgeny Prigozhin, as he has followed and written about Prigozhin’s The Wagner Group over the last several years. He will offer some great insight connecting what we are covering in class with the war in Ukraine and Russia’s global operations.

Have a great weekend!