The report shows that John Eastman and his confederates expected a disputed election would set off a wave of civil unrest that would culminate in the US Capitol on January 6, supported by insurrections at key state houses that same day.
War games often reveal more about the players than they do about the future, and this exercise is no exception. Trump's FBI hunts down more antifa leaders in the DC suburbs. The players protect the Capitol with an army of federal agents, snipers and of course more heat rays. So they thwart their political adversaries by tracking their phones, setting up police checkpoints and using Trump's Homeland Security fusion centers to identify and detain their leaders. Tellingly, Eastman and his fellow players assume that pro-Biden forces will try to gather at the Capitol on January 6. The Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers form posses to "assist." Federal law enforcement with no identifying insignias encircle the White House to defend it with heat rays. The Chicago Police Union refuses to protect Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The NYPD seems to have overthrown Bill De Blasio. So, their police departments go completely rogue and join forces with the Trump administration. With the nation in flames, the players have Trump's Department of Defense deploy military personnel carriers to multiple states, which local mayors rudely call "tanks." These pesky mayors aren't cooperating with the Trump administration's desire to clamp down on dissent. There's an elaborate procedural and legal backstory about how an uncertain Election Night metastasizes into a constitutional crisis to be worked out probably by the Supreme Court, but I won't bore you with it because it's obviously a figleaf. Thus begins Choose Your Own Adventure: Death Squads. It seems to foreshadow Eastman's plan for a procedural coup on January 6, except projected onto Biden supporters. The report is a blueprint for how Donald Trump could fuse federal power, local police, and criminal gangs like the Proud Boys to hang onto power. It was important to come up with legal justifications for overwhelming political violence before the election, they said. But in their view, that couldn't be helped. The authors say they fully expected the necessary preparations to crush dissent would be perceived as the run-up to a military coup. The authors of the report are clear their simulation had a very serious purpose: to prepare real public officials for real violence in the event of a disputed election. The report was published in mid-October 2020 and co-sponsored by the Claremont Institute, the think tank where Eastman works.
John Eastman joined a couple dozen right-wing operatives in simulating the aftermath of a closely contested election. The Trump advisor who wrote the infamous pseudo-legal justification for overturning the 2020 election also helped to create a blueprint for what Donald Trump could do to hang onto power by force.