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Twelve Days in June is a work of speculative fiction. The Lodestar

magazine and Max Ezer are fictitious entities. Public figures and entities are
depicted in a fictitious context—their actions and statements are presented
hypothetically as satirical political commentary protected
under fair use and the First Amendment. All other characters are wholly
fictitious, and any resemblances to persons, living or dead, or events that
take place after the publication of this work are purely coincidental.

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The Lodestar

Twelve Days in June

The untold story of the American Spring
MAX EZER | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 ISSUE | _U.S._

This is the first story in a five-part series on the greatest crisis in American democracy since the Civil

War, as it unfolded over just twelve days in June 2021. Drawing on newly available sources and

exhaustive research, Max Ezer recounts the gripping drama of those events from the perspectives of

key participants, and places the violence in the context of the political turmoil that preceded it. This

issue’s story, “Prelude,” places special emphasis on clarifying the events of the eight months leading

up to the crisis, about which there has been much confusion and disinformation.

Part I: Prelude

T
HE BURNER PHONE buzzed in the darkness. In a seventh-floor room

at the Four Seasons Los Angeles, Julia Glazer snapped awake. From
the clock on her bedside iPad, it was going on four in the morning.
She fumbled for her glasses and switched on the lamp. Groggy and squinting
from the sudden glare, she knocked the phone off the nightstand, and by the
time she found it on the floor and unlocked it, the screen was showing 1
missed call. Her regular phone was showing a string of text messages from
her husband, Washington Post reporter Michael Glazer: “[3:36 a.m.] turn on
the TV; [3:39 a.m.] i know its early there but turn on the TV now; [3:40 a.m.]
are you awake? we need to talk right now.” Heart pounding, Julia managed to
remember the number for Michael’s burner and pressed dial. It rang and
rang and rang, with a recording finally announcing that the person she was

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trying to reach was unavailable now. Then she tried his regular phone on her
own, but it went straight to voicemail. Only then did she turn on the
television.

The large flat screen on the opposite wall blazed to life, and the first words
she heard were her husband’s name. CNN’s John Berman was speaking with
a Democratic strategist about some new outrage by the president, while the
chyron at the bottom of the screen promised an impending comment from
the White House. “Let’s put that tweet back up there,” Berman said, “because
although President Trump has a long history of attacks on the press, this
morning’s tweet takes those attacks into new, darker territory.” They
splashed the tweet up onto the screen, and Julia felt herself going numb as
she read the words of the most powerful man in the world: “Very un-
American reporter Michael Glazer (hack) stirring up violence in our cities.
BIG lies. If someone shot him, many would cheer. — @realdonaldtrump, 6:33
AM - 7 Jun 2021.”

When they cut to commercial, Julia flipped through the other networks and
saw everyone talking about the same story: “reporter Michael Glazer … story
by Michael Glazer … to threaten Michael Glazer.” It was utterly surreal.
Michael had warned her the day before that there would be blowback when
his front-page article came out in the morning, but she’d imagined right-wing
trolls, not the commander-in-chief.

The burner phone buzzed again. Julia answered on the first ring. “This is
Lois.”

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“And this is Clark.” They had just exchanged a prearranged greeting, their
own private joke, signaling that both were speaking freely and in private.
“First of all, we’re safe,” Michael said. “I’m going to work from home today,
and the Warners are going to drive Gabby to school.”

But his voice seemed urgent and full of alarm. He asked Julia if anything had
happened to the thumb drive he had sent with her for safekeeping. She said it
was fine. He told her that a Buzzfeed reporter named Noah Feldstein would
be coming to her room within an hour to pick it up from her. Then, he said,
she should call her office and arrange to stay out in L.A. until everything blew
over. But she already had flights up on her laptop. “I’ll get into Reagan at
about 4:30 this afternoon and Uber straight home.” They exchanged love-
yous and that was it.

On the opposite side of the bed, Julia’s main phone was blowing up.
Concerned friends and family just waking up on the East Coast were reaching
out to make sure she and Michael were okay, but there was no way to respond
to everyone. She sent a brief message to their daughter Gabby, still asleep
before the last Monday of her high school career—telling her not to be
frightened and letting her know she’d be home that night for dinner. Then,
she called down to alert the front desk about her visitor and jumped in the
shower. While she was getting ready in the bathroom, Julia dictated a few
notes to key people by speech-to-text, asking them to share the word with
other relatives and colleagues. As a managing partner at Magill Partners, a
leading PR and communications firm, she had client meetings scheduled that
day in Century City, but emailed her assistant to cancel everything.

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Julia was dressed and almost all packed when there was a knock at the door.
She almost jumped out of her skin. More knocking. She hurried barefoot
across the spacious room. “Who is it?”

From outside the heavy door: “Noah Feldstein.” Julia undid the locks and let
him in. There wasn’t much small talk. Julia reached into the zippered breast
pocket inside the jacket hanging in the closet and pulled out a large ballpoint
pen. Holding it up to Feldstein, she twisted and tugged on both ends, pulling
the pen apart to reveal a USB connector jutting out of the rear half.
Feldstein took the hidden drive and screwed the pen back together. It
contained encrypted copies of story notes and documents that had been
wiped from Glazer’s computer in case investigators seized it in an effort to
expose his sources. “I realize you don’t know me,” Feldstein told her on his
way out the door, “but I just want you to know that your husband is the
bravest reporter I’ve ever met.”

M
ICHAEL SAMUEL GLAZER was born on February 7, 1964 in

Larchmont, New York—son of Albert, an IBM executive, and

Barbara (née Adler), a piano teacher. His sister Laura arrived
three years later, and the family enjoyed a prosperous upper-middle class
existence. Michael won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New
Hampshire, and then enrolled at Dartmouth, where he studied history and
wrote for the conservative Dartmouth Review before graduating summa cum
laude in 1986.

Fresh out of college, he got a job writing for Newsweek, and went to the
Persian Gulf in 1990 to cover Operation Desert Shield. The following
January, he embedded with Eagle Troop, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Armored Cavalry

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Regiment for its thrust into Iraq during the ground war, and was present at
the decisive Battle of 73 Easting, in which a U.S. tank force crushed the cream
of Saddam’s Republican Guard with virtually no losses. In the aftermath of
that battle, Glazer wrote the first national profile of then-Captain H.R.
McMaster, who would later become President Trump’s second National
Security Advisor.

After the war, Glazer spent ten months reporting on defense issues from
Brussels and London before returning stateside to take a job first as a White
House speechwriter, and then as a campaign speechwriter for George H.W.
Bush’s reelection bid. Following Clinton’s victory, Glazer went to work for
Bush’s ex-chief of staff John Sununu, who had recently gone over to CNN to
host Crossfire.

One of Crossfire’s producers was Julia Collins, a brilliant and vivacious

beauty fluent in five languages, who’d come to the network after graduating
Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service at the top of her class. He was
smitten instantly. It took a year for him to work up the courage to ask her out,
and another year for her to say yes—but when she did, their first date was a
weekend in Paris. The chemistry was incandescent. CNN colleague Ellen
Landry recalls she’d “never seen two people who complemented each other so
perfectly … they looked at the world through the same eyes.”

They dated for almost five years and were married on August 28, 1999 at her
parents’ Methodist church in Chicago. They got an apartment on New York’s
Upper West Side, and Michael, now working as a political reporter, was
tapped by CNN brass as a potential anchor in the making. On the evening of
September 10, 2001, they checked into Lenox Hill Hospital as Julia went into

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labor. At 3:22 a.m., they welcomed a daughter, Anna Grace, and soon fell fast
asleep in their maternity room.

They woke to nurses crying in the hallway, and turned on the television to see
the South Tower coming down. Through the fog of exhaustion, they couldn’t
believe it wasn’t just some bizarre nightmare, or an eerily realistic disaster
movie. But by the time the North Tower collapsed 29 minutes later, reality
had set in, and both immediately understood that that world had changed
dramatically and permanently. “It is overwhelming to consider the challenges
of making such a savage, savage world a safe and hopeful home for new life,”
Julia wrote in her diary on September 15. “But I have to try.”

Work for Michael got suddenly more intense. CNN staffers worked round the
clock trying to make sense of the catastrophe and chase down the avalanche
of leads and tips about what might happen next. Julia was home with the
baby, and worried as rumors swirled about follow-up attacks. Missing U-Haul
trucks. Terrorists posing as UPS drivers. Poisoned Halloween candy. Michael
spent long nights down at Ground Zero covering rescue and recovery
operations. Within a couple weeks, his bosses were getting indications that
the U.S. would invade Afghanistan soon. His warzone experience was
valuable. Would he be willing to go? He talked it over that night with Julia. As
gut-wrenching as it was, they agreed that this was all much bigger than their
young family. It was Michael’s duty to be there. On October 4, he flew into
Uzbekistan with the 10th Mountain Division, and entered Afghanistan with
them at the end of November, reporting on U.S. efforts to consolidate
Northern Alliance control of Balkh province following the liberation of
Mazar-e-Sharif.

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Over the next seven years, he spent 27 months in Afghanistan and Iraq,
primarily doing features. He was home for the birth of another daughter,
Gabriella Elizabeth, on August 20, 2003, but flew back to Baghdad in October
to cover the insurgents’ Ramadan offensive. He was there for President
Bush’s historic Thanksgiving visit to the troops, and back in New York on a
cold March afternoon in 2004 when little Anna’s nanny brought her inside
saying she had vomited and was suddenly sleepy. They rushed her to St.
Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where doctors diagnosed bacterial
meningitis. She had seizures during the night, and despite aggressive
treatment, slipped away early the next morning.

The death was shattering. Michael and Julia were virtually bedridden for
months. Both of their mothers flew out to help care for baby Gabriella. In
June, though, the network asked Michael to return to Iraq to cover the
handover of sovereignty to the Interim Government—and he threw himself
back into work to take his focus from the grief. In between stretches overseas,
he focused on defense-related stories, and was often on the road in
Washington covering the Pentagon and intelligence community. He
cultivated an almost unparalleled network of sources from janitors to
generals, and brought a rare depth of insight to his reporting. In 2006, his
coverage of Iraq’s first parliamentary elections shared the prestigious Lowell
Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, and he was honored at a dinner
with CNN president Jim Walton and New York City mayor Michael
Bloomberg. Still, the travel was wearing, and at Christmas 2007, he asked
Julia if she’d be willing to relocate to D.C. that summer after Gabriella
finished school. She hated to leave their charming brownstone apartment,
but the move made sense, and she agreed.

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On his last trip to Iraq, covering the Surge in spring 2008, Glazer was talking
with a group of U.S. soldiers next to a supply truck in Baghdad’s Green Zone
when his satellite phone rang. It was Julia. In Manhattan it was still very
early. His mind raced to Gabby. Was she sick? He excused himself to take the
call at a private distance. Julia was relieved to hear his voice. She said she had
heard that an American journalist had been killed by an IED, and just wanted
to make sure he was safe. While they were speaking, a Shiite mortar round
impacted the exact spot he had been standing in by the truck, mortally
wounding one of the soldiers. The close call shook him, and Glazer decided
that night that he would stay stateside after the tour was over.

His bosses at CNN weren’t happy when he told them his intentions. The
network was prepared to offer him plum opportunities leading its overseas
coverage, but didn’t have much fulltime opportunity for him in the capital,
where he’d be stepping on the toes of lead Pentagon correspondent Barbara
Starr. Before Glazer could decide on a way forward, a bizarre coincidence
interceded. Longtime Washington Post executive editor Len Downie, in his
last month on the job, asked his secretary to contact a CBS producer named
Andrew Glazer, to ask him some questions about one of his recent segments
for Dan Rather. By mistake, the secretary gave Downie the unrelated Michael
Glazer’s number—and Downie rattled through several minutes of Rather-
related questions before realizing his error. Then he laughed uproariously. As
it turned out, Len and Michael had known each other well back in the ‘90s,
but hadn’t spoken in years. They talked like old friends for more than two
hours, and by the time they hung up, Glazer had a job offer in principle to
join the Post as a senior national security correspondent.

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They moved down to D.C. that summer, finding a spacious 5-bedroom
redbrick home in the stately Rosemont neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia.
Glazer covered the McCain campaign’s foreign policy advisors for the Post,
then profiled the defense staff assembled by the Obama transition team. He
quickly won praise for bolstering the paper’s national security reportage, with
analysis drawing on intimate access to top decision-makers. Glazer’s desk
featured an enviable collection of challenge coins—custom-designed
medallions often given out by senior commanders as tokens of appreciation.
In a drawer, he kept a handwritten note from General David Petraeus,
commending him on the personal risks he’d endured to document his men’s
efforts during the Surge, and saying that he’d “miss having one of the best in
the business” around his headquarters. Glazer sometimes wryly lamented
that he’d even gotten the scoop about bin Laden’s death in 2011, but a WiFi
outage had prevented him from announcing it on Twitter until four minutes
after former Rumsfeld staffer Keith Urbahn broke the news to the world.

During the Obama administration, Glazer authored notable stories on

excessive secrecy rules within the Department of Defense, friction between
the CIA and DoD during the Libyan Civil War, and the evolution of the White
House’s program of targeted drone killings. He interviewed Donald Trump
briefly for a 2011 story on an Army doctor imprisoned for refusing to deploy
because he believed that Obama was a Kenyan ineligible to serve as
commander-in-chief—but none of Trump’s quotes made it into the finished
piece. In 2015, Glazer was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his in-depth
explanation of U.S. efforts to help Baghdad turn the tide against the sudden
expansion of ISIS the previous year. He’d made a one-week trip to Iraq for his
research, but assured Julia that he was never in harm’s way.

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Just a few months later, Trump exploded back onto the political scene and
raced out to a polling lead over the crowded Republican field. Glazer didn’t
take him seriously at first, and told Post colleagues he would surely flame out
before the first votes were cast. But soon, he noticed a disturbing trend.
Although most military officers saw Trump as a crass buffoon, the enlisted
folks Glazer talked to—privates and NCOs from working-class backgrounds—
admitted they liked the guy. When Trump said “I know more about ISIS than
the generals do,” and promised “I would bomb the shit out of them,” the
officers gagged—and the grunts cheered. Glazer had never heard U.S.
servicemembers seriously advocate war crimes, but when Trump proposed to
“take out their families” to deter terrorists, and “bring back waterboarding
and … a hell of a lot worse” not even for intelligence but because “they
deserve it anyway,” a lot of the rank-and-file guys decided that he was their
man. It was as if Trump had given them permission to express dark impulses
that military discipline had always kept in check, and they loved that
uninhibited feeling.

At a March 3, 2016 GOP debate in Detroit, moderator Bret Baier asked

candidate Trump what he would do if, as commander-in-chief, the U.S.
military refused to carry out unlawful orders he gave. Trump’s response:
“They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me… I’m a
leader… If I say do it, they’re going to do it… When I say they’ll do as I tell
them, they’ll do as I tell them.” That night, Glazer texted a source, a Marine
sergeant, for his reaction. The reply alarmed him: “Hell yeah.”

Glazer shared the exchange with a group of fellow journalists on the

messaging app Slack, and connected it to Trump’s long and public admiration
for authoritarian regimes. He reminded those in the Slack thread about

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Trump’s December 2015 remarks on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, after host Joe
Scarborough brought up Vladimir Putin’s history of having journalists who
criticize him assassinated: “At least he’s a leader… I think our country does
plenty of killing also.” Glazer posted Amazon links to Karen Stenner’s The
Authoritarian Dynamic, Hannah Arendt’s classic The Origins of
Totalitarianism, and It Can’t Happen Here—Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel
about a populist authoritarian who is elected President of the United States
and turns the country into a quasi-fascist state. “Are you guys seeing what I’m
seeing?” Glazer asked. “Chilling,” replied a prominent Wall Street Journal
columnist.

During the 2016 general election campaign, Glazer wrote a series of stories on
the growing perception among senior foreign policy officials—in both
parties—that Trump wasn’t merely a bad choice, but fundamentally unfit for
office. His articles provided a voice for defense and intelligence leaders, who
couldn’t speak on the record, but wanted to communicate to the public how
scared they were by the prospect of an authoritarian demagogue storming
into the Oval Office within a few months.

These pieces put Glazer in the crosshairs of the ragtag army of right-wing
online trolls that had mobilized to support Trump’s candidacy. Glazer, a
registered Republican, was branded a “cuckservative”—a conservative sellout
who allows America to be raped by liberals just like a cuckold allows other
men to have sex with his wife. He started to get regular death threats on
Twitter, and someone mailed a chicken blood-soaked hatchet to his office at
the Washington Post. The week before the election, an unknown number
texted him photos of himself shopping at the Whole Foods in Crystal City,

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and warned him to stop writing about Trump. He turned the messages over
to police, but never heard back. Colleagues had similar stories, and worse.

O
N NOVEMBER 8, Glazer voted for a Democrat for president for the

first time in his life. After Trump’s stunning victory, many hoped
that he would dial back the incendiary rhetoric, but instead he
doubled down. During a pre-inauguration press conference in January 2017,
he shouted down CNN’s Jim Acosta, denouncing the network as “fake news.”
Then in February, he tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes,
@NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the
American People!” Even for Trump, that was stunning language. “Wow.
Wow, wow, wow,” Glazer marveled to his Slack buddies. “Enemy of the
People,” Glazer knew, had been coined during the French Revolution to send
innocents to the guillotine, and made most infamous during the Stalin era
when Soviet leaders applied it to those they wanted to purge. The phrase
became so synonymous with mass executions and the terror of the gulags that
even Nikita Khrushchev and his successors forswore its use. Soon after
invoking such an inflammatory term, Trump told CPAC, the Conservative
Political Action Conference, that journalists should not be allowed to use
anonymous sources, and promised “we’re going to do something about it.”

Glazer still harbored hope that Republican leaders would step in at some
point to rein Trump in or pressure him to resign. But those hopes evaporated
in August 2017, when GOP leaders made only token statements of
disapproval after Trump first spoke sympathetically about the Charlottesville
white supremacist rallies, and then pardoned Joe Arpaio—the Arizona sheriff
and unrepentant Birther who had been convicted of criminal contempt for
flouting court orders to stop racially profiling Latinos. The alt-right, Trump’s

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ethnic nationalist base, now increasingly saw itself as having a green light to
defy the rule of law.

With Democrats failing to mount effective resistance and Republicans

supinely enabling each new transgression, Trump kept pushing the envelope.
In January 2018, he told the Wall Street Journal that anti-Trump texts sent
by FBI agent Peter Strzok amounted to “treason”—and used similar language
to an Ohio crowd on February 5, when he denounced Democrats who didn’t
give him a standing ovation during his State of the Union address. “Can we
call that treason?” Trump asked in his familiar call-and-response style. “Why
not?”

The second year of Trump’s embattled presidency was buffeted by a

seemingly endless string of scandals and misadventures—from revelations of
his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels and hush money paid to her on the
eve of the 2016 election, to influence peddling by Trump’s longtime attorney
and fixer Michael Cohen, to the disastrous G7 summit in Canada, to Trump
heaping praise on Kim Jong Un at their ill-fated meeting in Singapore. The
White House was caught flat-footed by the bipartisan backlash against its
family-separation policy at the border, and the president faced sharp
condemnations from many in his own party after standing shoulder-to-
shoulder with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and publicly siding with the Russian
strongman over U.S. intelligence agencies. After the press conference, a CIA
source texted Glazer: “This guy would love nothing more than to purge us
Stalin-style.”

Michael had been sure that Helsinki would be the end. Surely, surely his core
supporters wouldn’t stand for that shameful display. Yet the more Trump did

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to alienate most Americans, the more confident he grew in the loyalty of his
base. When he tweeted “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself,” a
number of prominent conservative legal scholars opined publicly that he
actually did. After GOP congressional candidate Greg Gianforte body-
slammed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, he won his election and the favor of
the president, who later came to Montana and gushed “Any guy who can do a
body slam is my kind of guy.” That August, an Ipsos poll showed that 43
percent of Republicans believed “the president should have the authority to
close news outlets engaged in bad behavior,” and 23 percent felt “President
Trump should close down mainstream news outlets, like CNN, the
Washington Post, and the New York Times.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s accusations of treason and “Enemy of the People”

rhetoric had become so common and normalized that they no longer merited
even pro-forma statements of concern from GOP leaders. Glazer and his
colleagues were horrified when U.S.-residing Washington Post columnist
Jamal Khashoggi—who’d criticized both Trump and the Saudi regime—was
abducted and dismembered by agents of Crown Prince Mohammad bin
Salman with nary a word of protest by the White House. Weeks later, a
conspiracy-mad MAGA fan named Cesar Sayoc sent crude pipe bombs to
CNN and a long list of Trump’s opponents. “There’s a common thread here,”
Glazer told the Slack group on November 5. “Trump wants journalists to be
afraid.” With such a malign force still in the Oval Office, the Democrats’
midterm victory in the House provided little comfort.

Yet as 2018 drew to a close, special counsel Robert Mueller’s painstaking and
methodical investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the
Kremlin was tightening its grip—and with more indictments, guilty pleas, and

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raids making the news, there was a growing sense in Washington that the
former FBI director was closing in on his ultimate quarry. Staffers feuded,
officials leaked, and aides gossiped. According to fervid rumors, Mueller had
a network of informants wearing wires to work every day, and Trump
loyalists obsessed about discovering who had been flipped. The president
himself was said to be paranoid to the point of alienating even some allies. As
the commander-in-chief’s decision-making grew more erratic and
unmanageable, two of the last “adults in the room” packed their bags and left:
revered Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and long-suffering chief of staff
John Kelly.

When Mueller finally released his report in April 2019, Glazer had briefly
allowed himself to hope that its revelations of witness tampering, obstruction
of justice, and attempted collusion might at long last strike a mortal blow to
the Trump presidency. But seeing the way Trump and Attorney General
William Barr seized control of the media narrative, he soon confided to Julia
that that he’d again been horribly naïve. Far from slinking from office, Trump
went on the offensive—demanding that the New York Times “get down on
their knees & beg for forgiveness” and accusing several of his critics of
treason by name even after being reminded that it is a capital offense.
Emboldened, he was soon defying congressional subpoenas, declaring
willingness to accept foreign election interference, and sharing a chuckle with
Vladimir Putin in Osaka about their shared scorn for journalists: “Get rid of
them.” Right on cue, elected Republicans were falling in lockstep to defend
deplorable conditions for children in migrant detainment facilities, while
some joked publicly about supporting Trump for a third term. As Trump
confidently put it that July 23, “I have the right to do whatever I want as
president.”

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As such, it came as no surprise to anyone that fall that revelations of Trump’s
extortion of Ukraine failed to loosen his grip on the party. As Democratic
investigators uncovered damning evidence of the president withholding
military aid in an attempt to obtain a public investigation of the Bidens,
Republican loyalists paraded across cable news with a variety of conspiracy
theories about Clinton-Ukraine collusion, billion-dollar bribes, and Deep
State treason—less trying to fool Americans about the facts than curry favor
with the television-watcher-in-chief. Trump himself mused about arresting
impeachment orchestrator Rep. Adam Schiff for “treason,” and alluded to a
desire to execute the whistleblower as a spy. Demonization of the media
kicked into even higher gear, with a pro-Trump fundraiser showing donors an
action sequence from Kingsman: The Secret Service, edited to show the
president going on an ultraviolent rampage against figures labeled “CNN,”
“The Washington Post,” and numerous others. Even on the House floor, the
president’s partisans slavishly likened his impeachment investigation to
historical atrocities like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the
passion of Jesus Christ. With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
promising “total coordination” with the White House on impeachment
defense and GOP senator Lindsey Graham openly admitting he was “not
trying to pretend to be a fair juror,” the trial was over before it began.
Minutes after his acquittal, Trump tweeted a taunting video showing yard
signs that suggested he would run again in 2024, 2028, 2032, and into
perpetuity.

But as the president took his swaggering victory lap, COVID-19 was already
forming a stealthy beachhead on American shores. While Trump dithered
and ignored the problem throughout February 2020, the virus was spreading

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far beyond hope of containment. And as Democrats warned of the brewing
pandemic, Trump dismissed their alarm as mere political gamesmanship:
“This is their new hoax.” Yet despite his promises that cases were “going to be
down to close to zero,” he could not wish the historic calamity away. By late
March, the nation was in the grip of an unprecedented lockdown, thousands
of Americans were dead, and Trump had to find a new strategy. Soon, with
son-in-law Jared Kushner unofficially helming national coronavirus policy,
the president was alternating between blaming Democratic governors for the
crisis and trying to extort compliments out of them in exchange for federal
assistance—“they have to treat us well.” So instead of national coordination,
there was chaos and infighting both within the administration and between
the administration and the states. In daily press conferences, Trump
repeatedly spouted false medical claims and undercut his own public health
officials. On April 10, footage appeared of coffins being loaded into a trench
in New York for mass burial. But Trump was still insisting that the governors
had to take his marching orders: “When somebody’s President of the United
States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It's total. It’s
total.” By April 23, the U.S. death toll had crossed 50,000.

I
N THE MIDDLE of May, just as the first wave was easing, Michael Glazer

brought Chinese takeout home to Julia and Gabby, and noticed that he
couldn’t taste any spice in his kung pao shrimp. He said aloud that they
must have messed up the order. But Gabby, eyes wide with fear, pointed to
the chilies on his plate and had him bite into one. Nothing. By the end of the
meal, he was clammy and felt muscle aches spreading across his legs and
back. For the next two and a half weeks, he self-isolated in their guest
bedroom, running a fever as high as 103 degrees and hacking a dry cough so
violent that it was agony to even breathe lying down. Nights were the worst.

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He was kept awake by vivid hallucinations—huge snakes slithering around his
bed, Shiite fighters from Iraq peeking in his window, and a tiny horse that
would gallop around his room trailing fire—and by dawn would be shivering
and drenched in sweat. Julia left meals and clean clothes outside his door,
and they FaceTimed him from upstairs to keep his morale up.

When Michael returned to the land of the living, he tried to catch up on the
news, and found the country wracked by a convulsions of unrest. George
Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers had sparked coast-to-coast
protests, and in many places the tensions boiled over into rioting. It was
shocking to see videos of buildings ablaze, looters pouring into stores, and
D.C. monuments covered in graffiti. But Michael was more deeply disturbed
by the police response. Again and again, footage showed cops attacking
protesters without provocation—including journalists, the elderly, and
disabled people. And the violence was sanctioned from the top: Trump
tweeted a threat that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter,
finally starting to reckon with the president’s wanton abuse of its platform,
flagged the tweet with a “public interest notice” for “glorifying violence.” But
the threat stayed up, and there were no further consequences.

Watching from home, Michael saw the growing disorder across the river on
TV. Large crowds of mostly peaceful protesters were demonstrating in
Lafayette Square across from the White House, only to be driven back with
smoke and pepper balls by phalanxes of faceless cops in Robocop-style
armor. All so the president and his entourage could walk across the square to
St John’s Episcopal Church for Trump’s infamous upside-down-Bible photo-
op. He was flanked by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley in
Army fatigues, Attorney General Barr, and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper,

20
who told governors that they needed to “dominate the battlespace” in protest-
roiled cities.

The image was absolutely terrifying: a strongman leading a crackdown, with

the kingpins of the national security establishment marching loyally in his
wake. Glazer had fleetingly hoped that congressional Republicans would
recoil in horror, but instead they were urging even harsher measures.
Hawkish Arkansas senator Tom Cotton called for the active duty military to
be deployed to restore order, branding the violence “domestic terrorism” and
calling for “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of Trump’s most aggressive surrogates in the
House, was even more sanguine: “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists,
can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” That night, one
of Glazer’s Washington Post colleagues darkly warned their Slack group “if
they don’t start another impeachment tomorrow…” followed by a GIF of Nazi
stormtroopers marching with swastika banners.

Glazer didn’t respond to that message, but in the following days he played a
key role behind the scenes in encouraging several former senior military
officials to speak out about the incident—including general-turned-Secretary
of Defense James Mattis, and former Joint Chiefs chairmen Colin Powell,
Mike Mullen, and Martin Dempsey. Yet even these scorching condemnations
failed to shake the confidence of Trump’s supporters. By July, with masked,
camouflaged federal agents roaming the streets of Portland stuffing
protesters into unmarked vans, Michael confided to Julia that his efforts had
been a failure. AG Barr and Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf had
effectively created a secret police under the noses of the country, he said, and
he was powerless to stop it. After his August 2 article in the Post on former

21
intelligence officials alarmed about Trump’s call on Twitter to delay the
election, someone found Gabby’s Snapchat and sent her a picture of her
father photoshopped into a concentration camp uniform with a yellow Star of
David badge. The police did nothing.

Days later, Gabby told Michael over dinner that Trump had signed an
executive order attempting to ban TikTok—the wildly popular mobile app
where millions of teens mocked him with lip-synced dances. He only had a
vague idea what the app was: something she used while gyrating weirdly
around the house. But the idea that Trump was trying to suppress an entire
social media platform based on a thin national security pretext struck him as
intensely foreboding.

As a drumbeat of riots and killing continued throughout the summer, several

sources contacted Michael with claims that right-wing provocateurs had
instigated violence in Kenosha, Portland, and elsewhere. He did some
digging, but was unable to turn up any concrete evidence, and ultimately
concluded that the claims were probably baseless.

September brought steady escalation of the right’s catastrophic rhetoric, as

Trump as his surrogates sowed doubts about Democratic voter fraud and
hinted at a radical coup attempt brewing. On September 10, campaign dirty
trickster and felony-commutee Roger Stone went on InfoWars urging the
president to have ballots “seized by federal marshals,” and to declare martial
law and arrest enemies including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the
Clintons. Two days later, Trump told a Nevada crowd: “We’re going to win
four more years in the White House—and then after that, we’ll negotiate...
Based on the way we were treated, we’re probably entitled to another four

22
after that.” And the dire talk kept coming. Health and Human Services official
Michael Caputo predicted that “the shooting will begin” with a left-wing
insurrection after Trump’s victory, and warned followers: “If you carry guns,
buy ammunition … because it’s going to be hard to get.” Attorney General
Barr urged federal prosecutors to charge violent protesters with sedition—the
crime of conspiring to overthrow the government. At a Minnesota rally,
Trump mocked the injury of MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi, who was shot by
police with a rubber bullet during a peaceful protest. “It was the most
beautiful thing,” he crooned. “Wasn’t it a beautiful sight? It’s called law and
order.”

Yet as September turned to October, the mood in Michael’s slack brightened.

Joe Biden still had a commanding lead over Trump in the polls, and time for
a comeback was running out. Yet somehow the president didn’t seem
defeatist. He had grievously botched the response to America’s worst
humanitarian and economic crisis since World War II, but his hardcore
supporters did not waver. And with the price of defeat plausibly prison time,
he had every incentive to play dirtier than the pundits could imagine.

As the 2020 presidential election entered its final stretch, Trump tied his
pitch firmly to law and order. He regaled voters with graphic and exaggerated
details of the Andre Shorter riots in Indianapolis, and raged to a Jacksonville
crowd that Abdul Nasir, the Coney Island shooter, should have been
“burned … alive.” In Akron, Ohio, Trump told supporters at a rally: “If China
Joe wins, folks, we are going to become—and very rapidly—a communist
country.” In Cincinnati: “They want to outlaw our flag. It may be a hate crime
to show Old Glory.” In Cleveland: “If you are a Christian, if you are American,
they will come for you, they will come for your children… Antifa will loot your

23
beautiful homes.” In Allentown, Pennsylvania: “They want you dead. The fake
news media, the crooked doctors, and the so-called experts—they are the ones
who betrayed you and unleashed this virus upon the country.” Still, most of
the electorate didn’t seem to be buying it. Biden-Harris were up about 8
points in the polls, and FiveThirtyEight gave Democrats a 66 percent chance
of seizing back the Senate as well. Congressional Republicans were
bewildered. If Trump’s approval slid another few points before November 3,
the result could be apocalyptic. The Beltway crackled with anxiety on both
sides.

O
N THE MORNING of October 28, the Department of Justice hastily

called a press conference, and Bill Barr came out flanked by senior
Trump appointees to announce that the DOJ had formally opened
a criminal investigation into misconduct by Joe Biden in connection with
improper domestic surveillance requests in 2016. Looking straight-faced into
the cameras, Barr reminded Americans that Biden was “entitled to the
presumption of innocence,” and that the “timing of this investigation … is in
no way connected to the upcoming election.” But this lie was not even
intended to deceive. It was a lie intended to display naked political power and
remind opponents that they were helpless to resist. Barr’s statement did not
give Justice officials even a fig leaf for justifying the investigation as
nonpartisan. And by the following day, the next three officers in the DOJ’s
line of succession had resigned in protest: Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey
Rosen, Acting Associate Attorney General Claire McCusker Murray, and U.S.
Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia G. Zachary Terwilliger.
Commentators instantly compared the departures to Nixon’s 1973 Saturday
Night Massacre, but the president’s surrogates weren’t about to go on the
defensive. Instead, they platooned across the airwaves, assailing the careers

24
and characters of the resignees as “agents of the Biden-Obama Deep State
cartel,” “filthy swamp rats,” and “far-left America-haters” who possessed
“known ties … to the Chinese Communist Party.”

At the same time, a well-coordinated right-wing media blitz was springing into
action to capitalize on the news of the investigation. Starting the same night as
Barr’s announcement, Trump’s favored One America News Network aired a
slick three-night special on Biden’s alleged misdeeds. On Fox News, Mike
Huckabee described Biden’s role in Spygate as “essentially treasonous,” while
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany chided CNN’s Anderson
Cooper that the “liberal elite media … is behaving shamefully in trying to cover
up these crimes.” Politico later obtained a confidential list of talking points
from the White House urging even wilder suggestions that Biden had
“collaborated with Beijing to blame POTUS for the Wuhan China Virus [to
improve] his own chances of election.”

In Blue America, it was plain as day what was happening. This was,
commentators from Rachel Maddow to The Young Turks explained, a more
sinister redux of the Comey letter that likely swung the election to Trump in
late October 2016. As some congressional Democrats began organizing to
impeach Barr, activists flooded Instagram with calls to protest in the streets.
But with the third wave of COVID-19 ripping through many major cities, the
response was muted. Unlike the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer,
which had drawn enormous numbers of ordinary people horrified by images
they’d seen on their screens, the October actions skewed more radical. After
The Intercept published chats of DHS agents bragging about injuring
protesters, confrontations turned increasingly violent. Clashes with riot police
flared in a dozen cities, and cable news showed masked black bloc

25
demonstrators smashing storefronts and torching cop cars from Berkeley to
Buffalo.

While Trump’s too-harsh Lafayette Square crackdown had squandered any

political gains from the looting back in June, the optics for protesters were
now less favorable. The White House released a statement condemning the
demonstrators for spreading the virus and endangering American lives—with
Trump suggesting during a campaign event that coronavirus deaths that could
be traced to protest activity should be prosecuted as homicide. “I think it’s
murder,” he said. “Frankly, I think it’s murder.” By contrast, on October 30,
Joe Biden told reporters in North Carolina that “these protests … are
necessary in a democracy, and they are overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly
peaceful.” Two hours later, Daniel Quirk floored his pickup truck through a
riot police shield wall in Denver, killing three. Trump campaign ads were
laying Biden’s audio over the ramming footage by that night.

With Trump styling himself as the “LAW AND ORDER CANDIDATE,” a video
began circulating online of a Biden event in Atlanta—edited from fragments of
the candidate’s real statements to make it seem like he was telling a young
Black man that “police in this country … need to be wiped out … they’re pure
evil.” Because they were wearing masks, there was no need for high-tech
chicanery. The convincing-looking 40-second exchange could have been faked
by a competent 10-year-old in iMovie. Thousands of bots started promoting
the video across Twitter and Facebook, which reacted quickly to suppress the
obvious hoax. But the trolls were more sophisticated than they’d been in 2016.
Versions of the video appeared that had been manipulated by software to
defeat the tech giants’ detection algorithms. Numerous prominent
conservatives and six sitting members of Congress shared copies that lasted

26
hours or days before being taken down. According to the subsequent findings
of the Holder Report, at least 49 million Americans saw the video before
Election Day.

During the closing week of the campaign, Democratic operatives were focused
on countering procedural voter suppression. That is, efforts to stop people
from casting their ballots at the polls, or to prevent their votes from being
counted once cast. DNC lawyers crisscrossed the country chasing rumors of
right-wing schemes, supported by a small army of activists from the ACLU,
Southern Poverty Law Center, and other civil rights groups. And there were
indeed significant Republican efforts to thwart would-be voters directly—from
closing hundreds of polling places on public health pretexts to cutting voting
hours, restricting mail-in voting, and mobilizing battalions of poll watchers
and litigators to challenge voters and ballots. In 12 Republican-controlled
counties, election officials announced that voters would need to present
negative COVID-19 tests to gain entry to polling places—even though testing
delays were often too long to get results back in time. But when the White
House urged four GOP governors to announce emergency stay-at-home orders
in virus-wracked Democratic cities, they all refused to abuse their public
health powers for such transparently political purposes. And the Holder
Report concluded that the suppression measures that were carried out were
“limited in scope, largely ineffective, and ultimately not decisive.”

It is now clear that while Democratic strategists perceived exaggerated risk of

outright voter suppression, they were inexcusably sluggish in countering more
insidious means of reducing turnout. Right-wing YouTubers spread rumors
that Trump was planning to have ICE agents round up Hispanics at polling
places in search of undocumented immigrants. Mainstream media sources

27
repeated those claims in the course of debunking them, as did Spanish-
speaking outlets, giving them a paradoxical signal boost that only exposed
more people in that community to the idea. In the African-American
community, smoldering rumors caught fire claiming that a new strain of the
SARS-Cov-2 virus was spreading with vastly higher lethality for Black people.
As pro-Trump activists Diamond and Silk said: “stay inside, stay inside, stay
inside … we’re not leaving the house until Christmas.” Sham public health
organizations—later traced by the New York Times and ProPublica to pro-
Trump donors—bombarded social media users in urban areas with targeted
ads showing intubated patients and warning people avoid leaving home due to
“EXTREME Coronavirus risk during November.”

Perhaps most chilling were the warnings of violence. Left-wing media had
been bubbling with talk of threats against minority voters, and by Halloween
these rumors were breaking through into the mainstream press. Several
militia groups had taken seriously the president’s call on Twitter for armed
election monitors “to keep voters SAFE from Antifa terrorists,” and the Biden
campaign and DNC were feverishly working to ensure that voter intimidation
laws would be upheld and any militias kept at a safe distance from the polls by
police. Claims circulated online that some extremist groups were planning to
kill Black and Hispanic voters as they stood in line to vote. What began with
anonymous threats on forums like 8kun and divixx was soon being quoted by
journalists from Buzzfeed and Vox as evidence that Trump was inspiring voter
intimidation. Within days, these fears were being broadcast Americans’ living
rooms on Lester Holt’s nightly NBC newscast. Then on November 1, Trump
himself weighed in on Twitter: “I will not tolerate these threats of violence
against our Hispanic and African American (black) voters. Big turn out on
Election Day! Stay safe!”

28
At Biden-Harris headquarters in Philadelphia, it was like watching a slow-
motion bus crash. Staffers groaned in paralyzed dread as each new day’s
polling was released—and going into Election Day, the former vice president’s
national lead had crumbled to 4 points. In swing states, Trump was almost
even. Campaign leadership tried to put on an optimistic front, but the rank
and file numbly feared the worst.

In the predawn hours of November 3, field offices began reporting in that the
campaign’s get-out-the-vote app, known as Evergreen, was crashing
nationwide. Volunteers were unable to download their lists of who to call and
where to go, and their internal messaging system had frozen or gone down
altogether. The Biden war room immediately suspected foreign sabotage—
hacking by Russia or another pro-Trump regime. This impression was
reinforced as rumors exploded online that electronic voting machines in
Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida were behaving strangely and even registering
Biden votes as votes for Trump. So when swing states started lighting up red
on the electoral map that night, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon and
communications director Kate Bedingfield sat their candidate down in his
hotel room and advised him not to concede. The campaign was already
gearing up to fight the result in the courts, and planning a strategy to go to
the mat on vote-counting in contested states. On the theory that many mailed
ballots may have been delayed or mishandled, they were counting on picking
up as much as 4 percent in some states when everything was counted.

But Trump wasn’t waiting for his challenger to concede. As the red, white,
and blue balloons fell at Trump’s New York victory speech, maskless
supporters could be heard chanting “third term” and, about his opponents,

29
“off to Gitmo.” Because the president was no longer a millstone around the
necks of Republicans running for Congress, his party achieved significant
victories there too.

The following day, enormous protest crowds gathered in major cities across
America. But while rally organizers aimed to shatter attendance records,
Twitter boiled with rumors of attacks targeting protesters. Accounts later
linked by The Guardian to the pro-Trump Grenada Research Group spread
claims that the FBI had received credible truck bomb threats against rallies in
Boston, Miami, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Others warned of impending
jihadist terror aimed at crowds in Washington D.C., Denver, or Los Angeles.
Amid swirling fear and speculation, turnout—while still around nine million
nationwide—was disappointing compared to triumphant expectations. Calls
for a national general strike fizzled and went almost nowhere.

Over the following days, hopes of a Biden comeback faded. Although Twitter
pundits like Eric Garland and Malcolm Nance held out increasingly arcane
scenarios for how Trump’s reelection could be thwarted, it was becoming clear
that the votes just weren’t there. Major legal victories in several key states had
extended the deadlines for counting mail-in ballots held up by postal delays.
And the margins were tightening, but not nearly enough. The fabled “Blue
Shift” sputtered. Within 72 hours, enough mailed ballots had been counted in
the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina that the
president’s small but firm leads appeared insurmountable—not even close
enough for recounts. The best hope was Arizona, where Biden-Harris faced a
0.4 percent deficit that O’Malley Dillon believed might narrow to within the
0.1 percent recount threshold, but by November 10, the counting process
concluded with Trump-Pence still 0.3 percent ahead. And despite wild public

30
speculation, the lawyers investigating claims of rigged voting machines soon
realized they were chasing ghosts. Even the Evergreen crashes, it soon became
clear, were the result of bungled IT and not cyberattacks.

Over three million people were still demonstrating across the country, but
Biden saw no path to a change in the outcome. Seven days after Trump
declared victory, he telephoned the White House to concede. In his concession
speech to the American people that night, he called on his fellow citizens to
“persevere, keep faith in a moral future for our children, and never, never stop
fighting for the soul of this country.” Unshackled by even the possibility of
defeat at the polls, @realdonaldtrump shot back “Alzhiemer’s is a terrible
disease. We’re praying for you, Joe!”

Despite Biden’s 259-272 Electoral College loss (following the forlorn efforts of
seven faithless electors), his 3.9 percent win in the popular vote was almost
double Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016. And that margin mattered for a hill of
beans. Democratic leadership had feared that pro-Trump militias would
menace polling places—and poured their efforts into preventing that from
actually happening—but it was the mere threat of them that had been far more
effective. This was an especially bitter pill for the millions—disproportionately
minorities—who had ignored those threats, risked coronavirus infection,
driven or walked many miles, and braved lines several hours long to vote
anyway. In Blue America, the realization that all the activism and organizing
had come to nothing, and Trump would waltz unpunished into a second term,
was simply soul-crushing—and the victors lapped up liberal tears with
sickening relish. And the disaster wasn’t confined to the White House. When
the ballots were all counted and the legal challenges adjudicated, the Senate
stayed in Republican hands and the GOP picked up a net 14 House seats,

31
trimming Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s once-commanding majority to a precarious
six. Among Democrats, the bitter finger-pointing began immediately, with
Pelosi one of the first casualties.

Battered by the relentless dramas of a year that felt like a decade, Michael
Glazer and his colleagues looked ahead to 2021 with gallows humor. “The only
place to go from here is nuclear war for the world’s series finale,” a Wall Street
Journal reporter messaged the Slack group on New Year’s Eve. “Nah. Solar
flares, asteroids, Yellowstone supervolcano…” Glazer answered. “Get creative.”

A
th
S THE 117 Congress convened, Trump moved to consolidate his
reelection mandate by forcing out many of the establishment-
minded appointees that he perceived had undermined his first
term. Josh Dawsey’s book Totally Under Control had described a “St.
Anthony Society” of pro-science officials within the executive branch who’d
worked to coordinate a coherent coronavirus policy in defiance of Jared
Kushner—and the president was determined to exterminate the society, root
and branch. Along with senior advisor Stephen Miller, he formulated a list of
those to be abruptly terminated, above and beyond those who had already
agreed to step down for the upcoming term. They included Health and
Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, and
31 other deputy secretaries, under secretaries, and assistant secretaries across
the government. On January 8, 2021, Trump announced the unceremonious
firings via Twitter.

White House Chief of Staff Robert Lighthizer saw the news on his phone as he
was coming out of dental surgery in Washington—and caught the next flight to
Palm Beach, where the president had just arrived to spend the weekend at his

32
oceanside Mar-a-Lago estate. Lighthizer, who Trump aides recall still had
gauze packed into one side of a grotesquely swollen jaw, cornered his boss in a
hallway and demanded that the sacked officials be reinstated. But the
relationship between the two men had been growing more distant for several
weeks, and had already soured beyond the point where Trump cared what his
former U.S. Trade Representative thought. As described by Ben Smith in The
Endgame, Trump openly mocked Lighthizer for the saliva running down his
chin, imitating his Novocain-slurred protestations and taunting him to resign.
The next morning, he did. Hours later, Trump announced that newly-
pardoned Rudy Giuliani had agreed to serve as his sixth White House Chief of
Staff.

Trump then swiftly acted to ensure that his national security team was staffed
exclusively by America First loyalists. So National Security Advisor Matthew
Pottinger got the axe, along with his deputy Claire Spiroff and several key
National Security Council officials. In Pottinger’s place he appointed former
Heritage Foundation senior scholar Phillip Genovese, who had been an
outspoken critic of NATO and supporter of Bush-era torture. To fill the
Director of National Intelligence position following John Ratcliffe’s sudden
departure, he nominated Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of his staunchest
nationalist supporters in Congress. And with CIA Director Gina Haspel
reportedly crossing Trump in private over his handling of the Quoin Island
incident, she likewise had to go. To replace her, the president tapped Rep.
Devin Nunes, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, whose
blistering attacks on the FBI made him seem like a reliable surrogate. There
was a brief and spirited effort to thwart both nominations, based on their
histories of promoting conspiracy theories about the intelligence community,
but Senate Republicans fell into lockstep almost unanimously, and without the

33
filibuster available, Democrats folded. Nunes was confirmed 49-48, and Vice
President Pence stepped in to break the 50-50 deadlock in favor of Jordan.

More purges soon followed, as the new regime sought to force out anyone with
close ties to Lighthizer, Pottinger, Haspel, or their predecessors. Under the
leadership of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Trump diehards scoured the
relationships and social media profiles of almost the entire West Wing staff for
signs of disloyalty. In an intensification of tactics that started in the
administration’s first year, Miller subordinates terrorized employees with
surprise phone checks, email examinations, and inspections for concealed
recording devices. They demanded access to Facebook accounts, scrolled
through people’s sexts, and asked for banking passwords. Many recall that it
felt like being in a relationship with a jealous and abusive lover. One female
NSC aide was cornered in a bathroom by a woman colleague who demanded
that she take off her skirt and bra to prove she wasn’t wearing a wire—the aide
threatened to sue, and got a five-figure settlement to keep quiet.

At the same time, someone—there’s still fierce debate about who—wrote a big
check to have independent political operatives from an oppo shop linked to
Breitbart CEO Larry Solov investigate suspected turncoats using techniques
that couldn’t be legally ordered from within the White House. Their findings
found their way back to Miller, a close Solov ally, and over a dozen White
House staffers were branded as enemies of the administration and summarily
terminated. They were handed banker boxes, given a few minutes to gather up
their personal belongings, and escorted out of the West Wing by Secret
Service. Some shook and sobbed. Survivors humorously referred to the loyalty
checks and firings as the Red Vetting, in reference to the Red Wedding
massacre from Game of Thrones. In replacing all these departures, the

34
administration gave preference to those with unimpeachable Trumpist bona
fides, especially members of the “October 8th Coalition”—those who had firmly
supported Trump even when the infamous Access Hollywood tape nearly
torpedoed his campaign one month before the 2016 election.

The January 17 fire at Bedminster sent a shiver through Michael Glazer’s

Slack group—one Bloomberg reporter predicted “people are getting rounded
up over this,” to which a CNN correspondent answered “nah, someone’s
getting carpet bombed”—and they braced for an insane presidential
response. So it was an enormous relief when Trump accepted the official
explanation of a short-circuit during security renovations. Instead of
vengeance or conspiracy theories, he simply tweeted a promise to “REBUILD
BETTER THAN EVER” and vowed to keep Mar-a-Lago open through the
summer for members of both clubs—hurricane season be damned.

Even as repairs got underway in New Jersey, the president was scrambling to
pull the nation’s economy out of the deepening recession. Despite trillions in
stimulus spending since the coronavirus lockdowns began the previous March,
waves of small business closures had gutted the autumn recovery, with
consumer spending down almost 10 percent and unemployment back up to
9.5 percent. Americans’ savings were exhausted, and another storm of
foreclosures was looming on the horizon. So on January 21, with the DOW in
freefall back down through 22,000, the White House announced an enormous
relief plan billed as a way to get America spending again after the pandemic.
Each American citizen would receive a tax-free check for $5,500, with those
living in the 100 counties hit hardest by job cuts receiving $8,500. In all,
Trump proposed to pump over $1.9 trillion into the economy—the largest such

35
one-time injection in the nation’s history. Where the 2020 stimulus had been
rescue breathing, this would be the jolt of defibrillators.

Best of all, it would require no new taxes and wouldn’t increase the debt by a
single cent. Instead, the plan resurrected a radical idea floated by some
Democrats during the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis. It exploited an obscure loophole
in a Clinton-era law that allows the Secretary of the Treasury to “mint and
issue bullion and proof platinum coins in accordance with such …
denominations ... as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion may
prescribe.” Thus, acting secretary Tom Barrack Jr. would direct the U.S. Mint
to strike a platinum coin with a face value of $2 trillion, and deposit the coin
into the Treasury’s general account at the Federal Reserve. All members of
Congress had to do was vote to approve Trump cutting each of their
constituents a $5,500 check.

The plan was what economists call “helicopter money”—because the intended
effects are similar to what might happen if the government flew a helicopter
over a community and flung bales of cash down to residents below. People
would go out and spend the money, creating a burst of economic activity, but
also sharp inflation. Yet the inflation is intended as a feature, not a bug. As
money becomes less valuable, it is easier for ordinary people to pay back debts
at their nominal values. This was pure Bannonite economic nationalism—but
ironically found significant support within the populist Sanders-AOC wing of
the Democratic Party. According to the administration, the stimulus would
generate more than $8 trillion in economic growth, and an extra $2.5 trillion
in “free” government revenue by the end of FY2023. Analysts called the
estimates wildly overoptimistic, but by the end of trading that day, the DOW
had roared to a record +2,991-point close.

36
At a Rose Garden press conference introducing the plan that Friday, Trump—
after crowing endlessly about its rapturous reception on Wall Street, boasting
of its assured passage in Congress, and stolidly ignoring questions about the
unfolding rout in the bond market—teased another bombshell. After EFRAF
(Emergency Financial Relief for American Families) passed, he said, the first
agenda item of his second term would be a “major, major plan” to reduce
student debt “or maybe even wipe it out completely, we’ll see.” That night, a
Boston Globe reporter cautioned Glazer’s Slack group: “Stay frosty, kids.
Centrist Trump is the most dangerous Trump.”

Glazer’s next big story was a 4,400-word investigation of the breakdown of the
Special Relationship between American and British intelligence agencies over
the course of Trump’s first term. Ordinarily, MI6 freely shared intel with the
CIA and vice versa, but Trump’s chumminess with Putin and repeated careless
disclosures of classified information led the Brits to believe that continued
cooperation could get their sources burned. The article detailed several
substantive ways that losing this flow of information had already harmed U.S.
interests. The bombshell disclosure was that the British had known two weeks
in advance about Operation Golden Chariot, Israel’s December 2020 offensive
in Gaza. With the Trump-Netanyahu relationship fraying, the White House
got only a perfunctory 12-hour warning from the Israelis. Three Americans
had been killed in the strikes that followed. The night after the piece was
published, Sean Hannity referred to it on his Fox News show as a “vicious
anti-Semitic smear job” and “more fake news from Jeff Bezos’s blog.”

37
O
N JANUARY 25, morning news in the U.S. was dominated by

coverage of the first large-scale COVID-19 vaccine rollout across

the country. But by lunchtime, a new story sent shockwaves
throughout the media. A website called JournoLeaks had suddenly appeared,
hosting a searchable database of over 3,000 emails sent or received by
American journalists. On the homepage, a Drudge-style gallery of headlines
linked to especially compromising material. In one thread, a contributor to the
left-wing Waging Nonviolence blog arranges for sex with children as young as
five years old in Malaysia. In another, an Alternet writer asks a Palestinian
activist for help fabricating an anti-Trump source. An explosive series of
emails from a prominent cable news host showed him illegally sheltering
money in the Cayman Islands to evade U.S. taxes. Another chain featured
several prominent New York Times reporters openly describing Trump to a
Der Spiegel editor as “the enemy,” and a “psychotic madman” who “must be
defeated.” An exchange between a group of White House correspondents and
Guardian US editor John Mulholland exposed the names of several high-level
government sources who had leaked classified information to the press. Half a
dozen investigative reporters were caught telling colleagues in Zurich,
Amsterdam, and Tokyo about American state secrets in their possession. In
all, 266 journalists were affected.

JournoLeaks announced that it was the work of a hacker collective calling

itself “Nazgul” that was dedicated to exposing the corruption of the American
media. This cache was just the first out of six, Nazgul said, and hundreds more
journalists had even darker secrets yet to be revealed. To the journalists
themselves, Nazgul had a stark threat: next time you publish a piece that is
biased or anti-American, you will have your most compromising actions bared
to the world.

38
On the Trumpist right, the president’s supporters greeted JournoLeaks with
frenzied jubilation. Former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka tweeted a
link to the site: “FATAL blow to the FAKE NEWS media! #journoleaks.”
Donald Jr. did likewise, commenting “Lock ‘em up! Lying leftist journalists
turn out to be perverts, rapists, traitors. Not surprised.” Hannity devoted an
entire 2-hour special to breathless coverage of the leaks, and offered a
$10,000 reward for information that could confirm any of the felonious acts
described in the emails and put the journalist or source in question behind
bars. “The Espionage Act gives 10 years in prison for each violation,” Hannity
said. “So I have a message to all the Deep State saboteurs trying to destroy the
President of the United States of America, and to all these corrupt so-called
journalists on the alt-radical left: don’t drop the soap in there.” As soon as
Hannity’s show ended, Trump himself tweeted: “Proof of what I have been
saying many, many times. Media doesn’t just lie, but criminal. We will fix.”

Liberals bleated about the invasion of journalists’ privacy, but for much of the
leaks’ content, there was no way to defend them on the merits. Almost two
dozen resigned their jobs or were fired amidst revelations ranging from false
reporting to insider trading, and from extramarital affairs to statutory rape.
Many other JournoLeaks victims lawyered up or hired crisis PR firms to do
damage control. Some claimed not to have written the emails—others
admitted their authenticity, but argued that they were taken out of context.
Commentators not affected were quick to condemn colleagues’ misconduct in
order to keep their own hands clean.

Yet among journalists, something about the JournoLeaks story didn’t smell
right. Members of Michael Glazer’s reeling Slack group tried to make sense of

39
the situation, and noticed several peculiar facts. First, all the leaked emails
had foreign senders or recipients. Second, many of the victims had been using
secure Gmail accounts, had installed the latest anti-malware software, and had
guarded carefully against phishing attempts. Third, none of the foreign victims
had been using PGP or an equivalent email encryption protocol, nor were they
protecting themselves behind virtual private networks. Fourth, sources in
black-hat hacker circles had never heard of Nazgul, nor had cybersecurity
officials at American or allied intelligence services. Fifth, as discovered by the
gray-hat Sonic Screwdriver collective, JournoLeaks appeared to use a highly
unusual piece of back-end architecture that had only been observed on a
handful of sites known to have been built by Palantir—Peter Thiel’s secretive
data analytics firm. In a 178-part Twitter thread on February 1, anti-Trump
legal analyst Seth Abramson laid out evidence speculating that the
JournoLeaks emails had been gathered by the NSA and released by the CIA—a
Palantir client—at the president’s order.

Two days later, FBI agents arrested three senior State Department officials—
Jim Wilson, Mark Cook, and Pamela Shepard—on espionage charges related
to classified information disclosures to foreign journalists that had been
revealed by JournoLeaks. Trump took to Twitter within minutes: “TREASON
by very bad people in government. Fake News Media caused this ‘espionage’...
Killing the country. Penalty used to be death. We’re too soft.” That night, at a
rally in Tuscaloosa, Trump revived his recurring threat of broadcast license
revocations. “They are getting away with murder,” the president riffed. “And
we are going to make it stop. We’re making it stop, folks. Any network puts
classified information on TV, their broadcast license—bye-bye!” The crowd
roared thunderous approval.

40
That Friday, as CNN’s Jim Acosta was leaving his apartment building in
Washington D.C., he was accosted by a masked assailant and savagely beaten
with an aluminum baseball bat. Acosta suffered a broken jaw and four
fractured ribs—and witnesses said the perpetrator shouted about “treason”
before escaping. The next morning, Trump denounced the “horrible, horrible”
attack, and told reporters he would be praying for Acosta’s swift recovery. But
right-wing media was already aflame with conspiracy theories that the attack
had been staged by the president’s opponents. A viral armchair analysis by
Thaddeus Kuno—who billed himself on Twitter as “the world’s foremost
expert on 5G radiotoxicology” and admits he suffers from “paranoid
delusions” and “severe rejection-related PTSD”—claimed that the whole thing
was a hoax. Kuno analyzed cell phone footage showing Acosta being loaded
into an ambulance and highlighted seven features of his face, neck, and hands
that ostensibly proved that the bloodied man was merely a “crisis actor”
pretending to be the CNN journalist. Kuno’s post was retweeted by Donald
Trump Jr., Sean Hannity, and Seb Gorka. Meanwhile, users of the /pol/ board
on 4chan pointed to a mustachioed man in the background of a vlog shot in
Amsterdam to claim that the real Jim Acosta was living in disguise outside the
country.

In the wake of the attack, Michael Glazer’s Slack group discussed additional
security precautions journalists could take, and how to deal with worried loved
ones urging them to stay away from the Trump beat. Julia had warned
Michael to keep a lower profile, but she knew his instinct would be the
opposite. He tweeted 13 times about Acosta’s assault, and received half a
dozen death threats in return.

41
As violence menaced journalists in the streets, the administration assailed
them in the courts. At Attorney General Barr’s direction, the Justice
Department was unleashing a full-scale assault on press outlets that had been
critical of the president. Federal judges denied several attempts to block
publication of leaked material about Trump’s national security misdeeds—
most notably the explosive revelations that he had offered Bahrain assistance
repressing dissidents in exchange for giving him a foreign policy win with the
Abraham Accords. But government leakers were being prosecuted with
unprecedented ferocity in an effort dry up confidential sources, and leads were
already evaporating. Three reporters were already in jail for protecting their
sources, including Gordon Lubold of the Wall Street Journal, who had been
rotting in a Virginia cell since Christmas for refusing to reveal to a grand jury
who gave him the Pentagon memos detailing objections to the National Guard
deployment in Cleveland. And in an unprecedented escalation, the DOJ had
initiated prosecutions of two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters under the
Espionage Act—The Intercept’s James Risen for exposing a secret Homeland
Security database of protest attendees, and Mike McIntire of the New York
Times for disclosing Barr’s classified spending spree on military-grade anti-
riot equipment.

Meanwhile, the attorney general’s loyalists at Justice were bringing a wave of

antitrust actions against media ownership. Jeff Bezos and the Washington
Post successfully resisted efforts to force the Amazon centibillionaire to sell
the paper. But Barr’s investigators claimed extravagant abuses at The
Atlantic’s publisher Atlantic Media and its majority owner Emerson
Collective—and in late January the prospect of enormous fines forced Laurene
Powell Jobs and Emerson to divest the 164-year-old magazine. It was snapped
up by libertarian billionaire Forrest Hines, who promised editorial

42
independence, but would soon fire or alienate most of the staff. Yet the
venerable monthly’s voice was not silenced for long. Refugees from The
Atlantic, including former editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, would quickly
launch The Lodestar with a combination of crowdfunding and grants from the
Open Society Foundations and Hewlett Foundation.

All the while, JournoLeaks hung like a cloud over the whole industry. On
February 5, the FBI announced that it had arrested 29-year-old NSA employee
Ryan Lake—who investigators said was responsible for the JournoLeaks
breach. Standing 5’4” with thick glasses and an unruly dark beard, Lake
elicited comparisons to a Tolkien character from the moment his mugshot
appeared. He had a PhD in computer science from Caltech, and briefly worked
at Google until the Damore affair in 2017 spurred an exodus of right-leaning
talent. Lake was active in the “neurodiversity” movement promoting social
acceptance of autistic people, and under the username CapybaRRa styled
himself as part of Donald Trump’s “troll army.” The federal charges against
Lake alleged that he had stolen emails collected as part of the NSA’s foreign
surveillance programs, and created the Nazgul identity as cover for
distributing them.

But before Lake—denied bail as a flight risk—had spent 36 hours behind bars,
President Trump granted him a full and absolute pardon. Facing a storm of
questions from reporters the next morning, Trump defended the email thefts
as whistleblowing: “By revealing very serious crimes and corruption by the
media, Ryan did a great and even noble thing… Very brave.” When ABC’s Tara
Palmeri asked about the precedent the pardon would set for future privacy
breaches, Trump shot back—“You should be focusing on the crimes he
exposed.” Right on cue, the president’s surrogates flooded the airwaves to

43
remind viewers that President Obama had pardoned Chelsea Manning, who
was not only a leaker but a convicted traitor. “Unlike Manning, Ryan Lake has
not been convicted of anything,” Kayleigh McEnany enthused to a dumbstruck
Anderson Cooper.

B
UT THE OUTRAGE didn’t last long. The Super Bowl attack on February

7 swept everything else from the headlines. President Trump was

returning to Washington aboard Air Force One when the first
reports came in of a truck ramming postgame crowds in Tampa. By the time
he landed at Joint Base Andrews, local authorities were reporting almost a
hundred attendees killed, and had identified the big rig’s driver as Ahmed Ali
Osman—a Somali immigrant who had pledged allegiance to ISIS in a video
that afternoon. The president had been under the impression that ISIS had
been defeated, and feared that a new wave of attacks would destroy the
economic gains from his stimulus. Stomping into the Situation Room, Trump
was informed that Osman had been on Homeland Security’s radar since 2019,
but in the absence of overt jihadist activity, there was nothing that could be
done to stop him. Watching graphic images of the carnage on simultaneous
feeds of CNN and Fox News, he flew into a cyclonic rage—vowing never to let
such a lapse be repeated.

DNI Jordan arrived by car before sunrise, and together with Trump chaired an
Oval Office meeting attended by Stephen Miller, Attorney General Barr,
National Security Advisor Genovese, rehired advisor Sebastian Gorka, NSC
officials Dick Elkins and Todd Sexton, and DHS associate general counsel
Mike Russell. The details of the meeting remain unknown, but the principals
emerged with the broad strokes of a plan that would allow indefinite detention
of persons on U.S. soil believed to have been radicalized.

44
Staffers at Homeland Security and the office of the White House Counsel
spent the next few days frantically hammering out the specifics of the policy,
which as of a February 10 memo to the president was named the Preventive
Action Program. The main legal obstacle was that while the 2012 National
Defense Authorization Act allowed indefinite detention of U.S. citizens and
permanent residents “part of or substantially supported by” jihadist groups, or
who have “directly supported” hostilities against the United States, it did not
apply to people like Ahmed Ali Osman, who was independently radicalized
without joining any terrorist group. The solution was Executive Order 14004,
which directed DNI Jordan to come up with comprehensive definitions of
“part of” and “directly supported”—with the effect of reinterpreting the NDAA
language as applying to “lone wolf” radicalized jihadis. The new definitions,
promulgated concurrently with the order, would allow detention of those
giving “ideological allegiance” to jihadist groups, or who “participated in or
cooperated with” such groups’ efforts to promote violence.

Within hours of the order’s signing on February 10—with no notification to

governors—Homeland Security, FBI, and ICE agents conducted raids in 16
states, taking 112 suspected radicalized Muslims into custody. Most had
traveled to Syria from 2013-2018, and were considered by authorities to be the
highest priority terror threats. Yet administrative holding facilities on U.S. soil
soon became scenes of heated protest, as detainees’ families massed outside
the doors holding posters of loved ones’ faces and demanding answers. Civil
liberties groups bused thousands of demonstrators to sites like the Mira Loma
Detention Center in Lancaster, California, where a crowd became violent and
was dispersed with tear gas and water cannons. ACLU lawyers barraged the
courts with motions challenging the PAP’s legality, and left-wing social media

45
seethed with false reports that E.O. 14004 allowed mass internment of all
Muslims in America. As one viral post on Instagram put it: “The American
Holocaust has begun. Stop PAP by any means necessary.”

The political blowback surprised West Wing insiders, who had expected near-
universal public support following the Super Bowl attack. Administration
lawyers advised that federal judges would likely strike down key provisions of
the order, so the White House resolved to find less controversial detention
options, while pushing a bill through Congress to put the program on a firmer
legal footing.

On February 13, following frenetic legislative maneuvering and a midnight

passage on the House floor, President Trump signed the Agents of Foreign
Extremist Organizations Act. AFEO broadened authorization for preventive
detention to include persons merely “providing active support to … foreign
extremist organizations … that promote violence.”

The same day, the first batch of PAP/AFEO detainees were shipped overseas.
Although Seb Gorka and a minority of NSC legal advisors suggested sending
them to Guantanamo Bay, it was clear that that would only strengthen the
backlash. Rather, the president wanted an option that would keep detainees
out of sight and out of mind. The Navy had balked at the complications of
warehousing suspected jihadists on vessels underway, so the White House
decided to send the prisoners to one of America’s most remote territorial
possessions. Johnston Island, part of an uninhabited coral atoll, lies in a
desolate stretch of ocean between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands. The site of
a nuclear weapons accident in 1962 and biological weapons tests in 1965, it
was used later in the Cold War for storage of chemical weapons and Agent

46
Orange stockpiles. Now, after 14 years of abandonment, prefabricated
structures sprang up on the decrepit 9,000-foot runway, ringed by machine
gun towers and bales of concertina wire. As far as the ACLU was concerned,
the detainees might as well have been on the moon.

But there were civil rights violations closer to home, too. On February 14, a
week after the attack, federal authorities announced a manhunt for Ahmed Ali
Osman’s brother-in-law, Ahmed Abdiwali. Homeland Security believed he was
being sheltered in Minneapolis’s “Little Mogadishu.” In the Cedar-Riverside
neighborhood, to the east of downtown, teams of tactical officers with ballistic
armor and long guns walked alongside Humvees, BearCat armored personnel
carriers, and MRAPs—dark, hulking monstrosities that had protected U.S.
soldiers from IEDs in Iraq. The hundreds of personnel on foot put on an
impressive pageant of American law enforcement uniforms—Minneapolis
Police in light blue, MPD SWAT in dark blue, Minnesota State Patrol in tan,
FBI SWAT in olive drab, and DHS Special Response Team in mottled urban
camo.

They swept down heavily Muslim residential streets, treating every house as a
potential ambush. Squads moved tactically, maintaining 360-degree arcs of
awareness and keeping submachine guns trained on doors and second-floor
windows. Exchanging hand signals, they would “stack” in formation outside
homes to cover the officers going up to the front door. If no one was home,
teams would either pick their lock or beat the door open with a battering ram.
Usually, though, they’d be allowed in without incident, and fan out across
hallways and bedrooms, looking for any sign of Abdiwali. Sometimes, a squad
leader would call on the radio, and a pair of plainclothes MPD detectives or
FBI agents in navy Bureau windbreakers would appear and question the

47
residents inside. Occasionally, families would be herded onto their lawns and
flex-cuffed before being loaded into the police vans that trailed the armored
columns. Journalists and activists on the ground who tried to intervene were
tased and hauled off on felony charges. News helicopters circled overhead and
caught it all through telephoto lenses. The images reminded Michael Glazer of
the massive April 2013 manhunt in Cambridge, Massachusetts following the
Boston Marathon bombing.

Abdiwali wasn’t even in Little Mogadishu anyway—he was hiding out with a
classmate in South Minneapolis. And when armed federal agents showed up
at the house that night, he bolted out the back door. The declassified footage
from a police helicopter shows the whole scene in infrared. The runner’s body
heat lights him bright white against the cool background, clambering over a
chain link fence into the neighbor’s yard. Swarms of white incandescent
figures—SWAT officers—stream onto the front lawn, cued by spotters from
above. As the man runs, a glowing spatter appears on the ground—one of the
sharpshooters has hit him in the foot. He hobbles across the grass to the back
fence, but appears to decide he can’t get over it injured.

By now, SWAT officers are advancing up the driveway with guns raised. The
point man passes under a basketball hoop and sees him there at the side of
the garage. Headshot. The fugitive slams to the ground and lies motionless in
a growing pool of bright hot blood. Ten minutes later, a bomb squad robot
finds that he wasn’t wearing a suicide vest. Within an hour, the FBI would
confirm from fingerprints that the unarmed body belonged to 17-year-old
Ahmed Abdiwali. Authorities had never alleged he was connected to the
Super Bowl attack.

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The next morning, at a joint Rose Garden press conference with U.K. Prime
Minister Boris Johnson, President Trump took a question on the manhunt
from AP correspondent Zeke Miller. “The problem here,” Trump said, “is that
they harbored him. Here is this vicious, vicious animal—helps kill two
hundred Americans, which some people are saying it may turn out to be, and
the Muslims, I hate to say it, there in Minneapolis, they harbored him… That
is unbelievable disloyalty to our country, frankly, and we’re not going to sit
back and allow that anymore.” When Miller pointed out that investigators
were not claiming any connection between Osman’s brother-in-law and the
ramming, Trump repeated the falsehood that Ahmed Abdiwali was “armed to
the teeth—this guy had weapons you wouldn’t believe.” Again, Miller pushed
back, citing the FBI’s statement that he had been unarmed, and reports that
the Minneapolis cop grazed by bullet fragments had been hit by friendly fire.
“I think the FBI did say that,” Trump answered. “But also they’re saying he
shot and lightly injured one of the police officers, so nobody really knows.”

Hours later, Trump underscored his point with a tweet: “DISLOYALTY.

Where were the ‘Moderate Muslims’ on this? Harbored terrorist, tried to kill
Police.” The president’s KAG 2024 super PAC sent out emails linking to a
fringe blog pushing the theory that Muslims working security at the game had
conspired to allow the attack. Trump himself offhandedly gave credence to
the idea on the way to board Marine One: “maybe he had help at that
stadium.” Outlets less directly connected to the White House explicitly
blamed Democrats, Antifa, and Black supremacists for the February 7
slaughter. If only political correctness hadn’t stifled potential tipsters, or the
courts had allowed more invasive surveillance of mosques, such terror could
all have been prevented. “If it had been up to Trump,” one Facebook meme

49
said of the African-born attacker, “he never would gotten out of the Middle
East in the first place.”

T
HAT NIGHT, TRUMP broke into evening television broadcasts—prime

time on the East Coast—for a surprise address from the Oval Office.
The networks had been given just 45 minutes notice in a terse White
House statement, and knew only that the president would be addressing the
nation about national security. When the cameras went live, Trump, sitting at
the Resolute desk, solemnly announced that U.S. intelligence had had traced
the Super Bowl plot back to Abu Ubaydah al-Safiti, an ISIS-linked cleric
based in Yemen. In the telepromptered statement, he revealed that U.S.
warplanes operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea had already struck the
enemy, and bombing was expected to continue for almost a week. In support
of the operations, and in remembrance of the attack victims, Trump called on
all Americans to proudly wear NFL memorial pins for the next 30 days. “It is
time,” he said, “to unify as one country. We cannot be divided and distracted
by politics any longer.” The commander-in-chief ended with a promise: “I will
not waver, I will not stop, until these barbaric animals have been completely
and totally annihilated.”

The journalists in Glazer’s Slack group exploded with surprise and

incredulity. They frantically worked Pentagon and Langley sources, trying to
figure out what was going on. The truth soon became clear. There were
indeed strikes on valid jihadist targets in Yemen, but officials said privately
there was no evidence of an operational link to Ahmed Ali Osman. The
targets had been on the CIA’s radar for months, but airstrikes against them
had been deferred due to high potential for civilian casualties. The nugget of
intel used internally to justify the operation had been cherry-picked from a

50
sea of similar signals that had previously been dismissed as insignificant. But
the mandate from the White House was crystal clear: someone has to pay for
this. In other words, hitting these targets was far more political than
strategic. It was similarly calculating to schedule follow-up sorties for another
hundred hours, ensuring that the networks got lots of red-meat footage of
U.S. tax dollars raining holy vengeance on desert landscapes. On February 17,
Trump’s Twitter account posted video of a GBU-43/B, commonly known as
the Mother of All Bombs, flattening a mountainside compound in a burst of
orange fire and white smoke—captioned simply “#MOAB #MAGA.”

Soon, other images from Yemen trickled out to the world media. Piled
corpses amidst what looked like a shattered living room. Blood-soaked kids.
A badly burned girl clutching a teddy bear in a hospital. Human Rights Watch
estimated that over 350 civilians had been killed in Operation Resolute Eagle.
Over half of these were children and teenagers attending a jihadist-run
madrassa near the port city of Mukalla. In response, the Trump
administration touted 129 militants killed, and claimed that HRW’s numbers
were wildly exaggerated. Pro-Trump blogs posted amateur forensic analyses
purporting to prove that those killed in the strikes were all military-age men.
Others on the right conceded that minors had been killed, but essentially
branded them all future jihadists anyway. “Next time these liberal crybabies
tell you that our brave servicemen and women bombed a ‘school,’” Fox
News’s Tomi Lahren told viewers indignantly, “remember: it’s a madrassa. As
in, a training camp for Islamic terrorists. So what’s the problem? Are we
really supposed to believe that these RPG-toting, woman-stoning, death-to-
America-chanting young men were going to grow up to be the left’s fabled
‘moderate Muslims’? Didn’t think so.” Trump himself defended his actions

51
vigorously on Twitter: “SLANDER! against our heroes (U.S. soldiers, sailors,
airmen, marines)… Do not tolerate this from cowardly, lying media.”

What the American public did not then know was that the Mukalla strikes
were the result of Secretary of Defense J.J. Jack talking the president out of
much more drastic action. While the casualties were still being cleared away
on Super Bowl Sunday, Trump spoke with Pentagon advisors via secure video
link from the Situation Room. After hearing intelligence about recent
exhortations to attack American public events posted by al-Safiti, Trump
asked them to draw up options for an immediate retaliatory strike on Mukalla
with a tactical nuclear weapon. Only this, Trump said, would send Muslim
nations the powerful message required by the moment—and signal to the
world America’s resolve to stamp out Islamic terrorism for good. Phil
Genovese quoted a memo by National Security Council staffer Marcus
Ganswin—making the tendentious argument that under international law,
the entire population of Mukalla could be construed as participating in
“memetic warfare” against the United States, and were therefore enemy
combatants. In other words: every man, woman, and child who stayed in the
insurgent-plagued city bolstered al-Safiti’s propaganda claims on Twitter, so
it would be legal to nuke them.

Jack, multiple witnesses say, responded with stammering horror at what he

told the president would be “a moral atrocity.” He explained that such a
nuclear strike would violate the Principle of Distinction in the Law of Armed
Conflict, which forbids attacks that indiscriminately target both legitimate
military objectives and noncombatant civilians. “‘Memetic warfare,’” Jack
said, his Tennessee drawl supplying scare quotes, “means precisely nothing
under the LOAC.” As Jack warned, the U.S. is bound by the LOAC as a party

52
to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which have the full force of law under
Article VI of the Constitution. As such, Trump’s inaugural oath demanded its
faithful execution—and prosecution of any U.S. personnel who followed
unlawful orders. Beyond that, using any nuclear weapon in war for the first
time since 1945 would obliterate the precious international norm against
their use and undermine America’s ability to discourage similar actions by
other nations.

Trump protested that jihadists don’t follow the Principle of Distinction when
attacking an NFL stadium. How could America fight with one hand tied
behind its back? The 73-year-old former Army general cut right to the chase.
Under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, America’s nuclear arsenal is under
the control of the National Command Authorities—consisting jointly of the
president and the Secretary of Defense. Although the president could
technically go around the SecDef to order missiles out of their silos—perhaps
during the chaotic minutes before an incoming nuclear strike—the normal
chain of military command passes through the secretary. In front of everyone
else on the videoconference, Jack evenly informed Trump that he formally
refused to sign off on any use of nukes. This was a “brass balls move … pure
Mattis” as one witness puts it, noting that observers had considered Jack
unlikely to stand up to Trump in such a crisis.

Although the Secretary of Defense could thus legally forestall a strike order,
the president could also legally fire him at any moment, and ask his deputy—
as the new Acting Secretary—to approve the order. If the deputy refused, the
president had the power to keep firing people all the way down the chain of
command—in a sort of macabre parody of The Apprentice—until he found
someone willing to comply. And, theoretically, he could even just transmit the

53
order directly to the Pentagon, letting the lawyers sort it out later. But Trump
backed down. Affirming his respect for Jack’s advice, he agreed to a much
more limited strike package with conventional cruise missiles and carrier-
based aircraft, targeting al-Safiti and his fighters specifically. Even then, the
attacks would only proceed when American intelligence could draw a
plausible connection between the radical cleric and the driver in Tampa.

When the strikes went forward, they were devastating. On February 18, while
addressing the nation in front of an audience of first responders at Raymond
James Stadium, Trump announced with relish that an American cruise
missile strike a few hours earlier had killed al-Safiti and several dozen of his
followers outside Mukalla. “This horrible attack on America and our way of
life has been avenged,” Trump said, reading from a teleprompter to deafening
U-S-A chants. Overall, Resolute Eagle was a resounding success for the
administration. International media reports of civilian deaths did little to
sway public opinion in the U.S., and the action enjoyed high bipartisan
approval—from 93 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of Democrats
according to Reuters/Ipsos the following week. Pollsters found that viewers
had seen Trump’s handling of the crisis as “presidential,” “serious,” and
“strong.”

In the wake of the bombing campaign, nationwide opposition to the president

felt the wind going out of its sails. On Capitol Hill and in their districts,
legislators felt like everyone was wearing the memorial pin. One moderate
Republican with a history of opposing the president recalls holding a town
hall and finding that not a single supporter’s lapel was missing the ubiquitous
black ribbon over the red-white-and-blue NFL shield. With the winds of
public opinion blowing against partisan politics, elected officials in both

54
parties were hesitant to be seen as undermining national unity. And so,
Congress did not muster any meaningful oversight of how the administration
was using its detention powers under AFEO.

In heavily pro-Trump parts of the country, the NFL pins quickly became a
badge of loyalty to the president. In Hamilton, Alabama, parents circulated a
petition to fire high school civics teacher Brian McCoy, who pointedly refused
to wear the pin at a school assembly. In Kingfisher, Oklahoma, a restaurant
owner confronted a Black employee who came to work without a pin, handing
him an extra and demanding he put it on. When the employee—19-year-old
Jamel James—refused, he was fired. When New York Times columnist Bret
Stephens criticized the pin movement as “manipulative political theater,” he
faced a hurricane of Trumpist denunciation as anti-American and unpatriotic.
Tallahassee-based talk radio host David Yarbrough told listeners that
Stephens was a “Mexican Jew… [and] a genuinely treasonous Marxist,” and
urged them to write to President Trump demanding his deportation.

In some liberal enclaves, NFL pins had almost the opposite effect. Citizens
wearing the ribbon-and-shield out of genuine solidarity with the victims were
perceived as doing so in support of Trump. At Macalaster College in St. Paul,
Minnesota, visiting sociology professor Chris Flor ejected a pro-Trump
student who wore a pin to class, calling it a “symbol of totalitarianism and
oppression.” He then posted to YouTube a profanity-laced tirade against the
president that concluded with pouring a bag of NFL pins into a jar of his own
feces and flushing it all down a toilet. In addition to the predictable cries of
treason and online demands for Flor’s execution, the act also attracted
overwhelming criticism from mainstream media outlets—and tarred the wider
anti-Trump movement by association. The story gripped national news for

55
several days until Macalaster administrators caved and fired him. The red-hot
outrage bumped Trump’s average approval rating up over 47 percent by the
end of February.

Another display of bipartisan sentiment came on February 27, at the state

funeral of former president Jimmy Carter. Amidst unprecedented security,
representatives from 104 countries honored the former president at
Washington National Cathedral, including 14 current and former heads of
state or government. These included PM Boris Johnson of the U.K., President
Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, PM
Justin Trudeau of Canada, and former presidents Mary Robinson of Ireland
and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia. Other notable dignitaries included
Nelson Mandela’s widow Graça Machel, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon, and Prince Charles attending on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II. In a
front pew, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Donald
and Melania Trump all mourned shoulder to shoulder—together for the first
time since the funeral of George H.W. Bush.

Millions around the world tuned in as the flag-draped casket was carried in by
an honor guard representing each of the armed services, escorted by a
ceremonial detachment of sailors from the fast-attack submarine USS Jimmy
Carter. The former president’s children Amy, Jack, and Jeff gave scripture
readings—followed by a recorded message from Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Next came soaring hymns: “Amazing Grace” by the Georgia Children’s
Chorus, and “The Navy Hymn” by the United States Navy Band. Rev. Tony
Lowden, the Carters’ Baptist pastor back in Plains, gave a homily on the call
to service and humility in building a more just world. Then came the eulogies,
by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and finally his eldest son Jack Carter. After

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the service, cameras showed Trump tenderly consoling the late president’s
wife Rosalynn, despite her husband’s often fierce criticism of the current
president. That night, commentators marveled at how presidential Trump
had seemed. February 2021, a CNN panel predicted, would be the moment
history said Trump grew into the enormity of his office. Michael Glazer had
been in attendance with some of his old White House colleagues for a similar
spectacle at Bush 41’s funeral—and they now shared a sick feeling that this
grand ritual of civic religion was serving a political end that the late president
would have regretted.

On daily TV, Trump’s surrogates reminded voters that he had promised

vengeance and achieved it—and now needed sweeping new antiterror powers
to keep the country safe. “It took Bush and Obama ten years to get bin
Laden,” Sean Hannity gleamed. “Trump got al-Safiti in three days.” Laura
Ingraham displayed a graphic that showed Trump as a big game hunter, with
al-Safiti’s head mounted on the wall next to ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
and Iran’s Qasem Soleimani. At every turn, the cable news ideologues cloaked
their Trumpism in the red-white-and-blue mantle of national mourning. The
public grief was nowhere near as protracted and all-consuming as 9/11, and
the impact on the national psyche less wounding. But in some ways, the
Super Bowl attack proved even more insidious. It was the culmination of a
string of attacks targeting dense crowds—Paris, Nice, Berlin, Manchester,
London, Barcelona, Las Vegas, Stockholm, Wellington—that shattered
people’s sense of safety in communal spaces. Combined with the year-long
effects of the pandemic, it left citizens afraid to congregate, afraid to go out.
Psychologists across the country reported an unprecedented epidemic of
enochlophobia—the fear of being in crowded places. Any large gathering was

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a potential target, so people stayed home and retreated more and more to the
safety of their screens.

M
EANWHILE, LEGAL CHALLENGES to Trump’s detention program

were mounting. On March 3, federal judge Amy Berman Jackson

issued a temporary restraining order in the case of Hanoune v.
Trump, blocking further detentions under the AFEO Act nationwide, based on
the likelihood that the plaintiff—a Newark imam detained on Johnston Island
after urging young men in a chatroom to martyr themselves—would be able to
show that the act’s definitions of “active support” were unconstitutionally
vague and in violation of the First Amendment.

“OURTAGEOUS!” Trump roared in a tweet that was quickly deleted. Then, a

few minutes later: “This dangerous ‘ruling’ by one radical far left judge ties
both our hands behind our back, endangers everyone. We will fight it!” At a
joint press conference with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro the next day,
Trump boasted, without giving specifics, that PAP/AFEO detentions had
already thwarted nine terrorist plots. Asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl whether
his administration intended to comply with the court order, Trump answered,
“You can’t have it where one federal judge—out of thousands—can just decide
what she wants the law to be on her own. You can’t have her—hates Trump by
the way—you can’t have her bring our whole country’s law enforcement to a
virtual standstill.” Karl pressed on whether this meant he would defy court
orders. “We will abide by whatever the Supreme Court says,” Trump
answered. Karl pressed again: “But this court order, Mr. President. Will you
follow it?” Trump was getting impatient: “You can’t have one low-level judge,
who is a real radical, turn hundreds of known terrorists loose, Jon. So we’ll

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look at it.” Karl tried to follow up “This order never said—” but Trump cut him
off: “We will look at it. Next question.”

On Saturday Night Live’s spoof of the exchange aired two nights later, Beck
Bennett, playing Karl, asks “So Mr. President, do we or do we not have a
constitutional crisis?” Host Mike Myers, playing Trump as his orange-skinned
obese Fat Bastard character from Austin Powers, answers in a mischievous
Scottish brogue: “Mebbeh...”

At the same time, Trump’s surrogates were out in full force, simultaneously
denying that a constitutional crisis was unfolding, and insisting that Trump
was fully within his rights to ignore Jackson’s order. On Fox News, Hannity
thundered against “a judicial coup d’état that is presently underway in
Washington,” while Jeanine Pirro urged citizens to resist the “tyranny of one
radical leftist judge over our duly elected president and Congress.” On talk
radio, David Yarbrough promised “Mr. President, if you have [Judge Jackson]
arrested, we will support you. The people of this country are behind you to do
whatever is necessary.” While such incendiary rhetoric was limited to right-
wing outlets, a Reuters/Ipsos poll that week found that 57 percent of
Americans thought that a single federal judge should not be able to block
major national security laws.

Over the next two weeks, no one seemed to know whether this counted as a
constitutional crisis. There were no new PAP/AFEO detentions reported, but
civil liberties watchdogs reported that some Homeland Security officials were
conducting low-level defiance of judges’ orders—obstructing attorneys’ timely
communication with detainees, and exploiting debatable loopholes in Judge
Jackson’s wording to delay compliance. The White House publicly insisted

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that it was grudgingly complying with the substance of her order, but always
with the implication that this wasn’t a constitutional duty, but rather some
extraordinary beneficence from the president that could be reversed at any
time. Investors, shaken by the growing uncertainty, drove the DOW into a
sweeping five-day rout that wiped another 4.7 percent off the index before a
small rally.

Finally, on March 16, a three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court of
Appeals reversed Jackson’s order. After having previously denied the Justice
Department’s request for an emergency stay, citing procedural errors by the
DOJ, the court now decided by a 2-1 majority to grant a temporary stay—
allowing the administration to enforce AFEO while the panel considered the
government’s motion for a permanent stay.

As soon as the stay was announced, raids resumed across the country to detain
radicalized Muslims considered high-risk terror threats. In total, the first 139
PAP/AFEO detainees were all Sunnis of Arab or African ancestry. But when
the news reported on detainee #140, he looked to most Americans like the kid
next door.

Just after 4:00 a.m. on March 18, FBI SWAT officers stormed the Seattle-area
home of Thomas and Gloria Eisenmenger and their 22-year-old son Shawn.
Shawn Eisenmenger, who suffers from schizophrenia and is unable to work or
attend college, had converted to Islam in high school and taken the name
Ibrahim. As masked assaulters burst into his childhood bedroom, he threw a
lamp at them—only to be tased and taken away into the darkness with no
formal arrest. At a closed hearing before federal judge Sibley P. Allen,
investigators presented evidence that Shawn had been posting online under

60
the jihad-inflected pseudonym Abu Mujahid al-Amriki, and had written blog
entries supporting ISIS and glorifying the Super Bowl attacker. By lunchtime,
he was sent to Ault Field and put on a flight to Hawaii for helicopter transfer
to Johnston Island.

Shawn’s father Thomas, a commercial litigation partner at Perkins Coie, had

been two years ahead of Michael Glazer at Dartmouth, and they’d
corresponded occasionally over the years. After spending two days and nights
trying to contact his son or learn about the circumstances of his detention, he
called Glazer in the desperate hope that the investigative muscle of the
Washington Post could somehow shine a national spotlight on Shawn’s case
and force his release. Thomas insisted that any of Shawn’s postings had been
harmless fantasy—that he was mentally ill, not radicalized. He couldn’t even
make himself hot pockets for lunch, much less a pressure cooker bomb. Glazer
listened sympathetically, and began work on a story, but the Post spiked the
piece once a DHS source leaked excerpts of Shawn’s writings. In exceptionally
graphic terms, he longed for violence against “Christian Crusaders,” awaiting
the day when “faithful Muslims rise up to annihilate” the United States, and
“make glittering flags from [the] flayed skins” of American children. He
included suggestions for how to maximize casualties at schools and churches
before police could intervene. “This kid is toxic,” Glazer’s editor Doug Danzig
wrote to him in an email. “Tanehisi, shaun king, maddow already told people
he was an innocent lamb. Now this stuff comes out and they got burned.”

While the ongoing detention drama grabbed headlines, financial markets were
roiled by early indications that inflation was already spiraling upward due to
expectations of EFRAF stimulus jolting the economy over the summer. At
2:00 p.m. on March 17, the Fed had announced a sharp interest rate hike up to

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1.25 percent—jarring investors who’d expected a softer increase, and shearing
990 points off the DOW by the close of trading. “Fake news is destroying
TRILLIONS of dollars of your money,” Trump pouted that evening on Twitter.
“Very unfair!” Stocks spent the next week in violent seesaws as traders tried to
figure out how consumers would react.

And there were still more stories of questionable detentions coming to light—
like the case of Hossein Salmanzadeh, an Iranian-born American activist who
tweeted to ISIS-linked accounts a series of maps showing Trump Organization
properties, adding “Please consider hitting these attractive targets instead of
Seahawks fans, kthanks.” Yet Salmanzadeh himself was an avowed atheist
with no known sympathy for jihadist groups. Since the court hearing that
authorized his imprisonment was closed and its records secret, the public had
no way of knowing whether the government’s case rested solely on the tweets,
or whether there was evidence of a substantive link between Salmanzadeh and
a bona fide violent extremist group. On March 23, the Post published a 2,000-
word piece by Glazer and his colleague Ellen Nakashima headlined “Questions
mount over AFEO detentions authorized in secret court sessions.”

The same day, the D.C. Circuit granted the government a permanent stay of
the preliminary injunction Judge Jackson had issued to replace the original
restraining order. After hearing arguments from Justice Department lawyers,
Judge Gregory Katsas wrote for the 2-1 majority that “the Government has
shown that social media technologies can enable online advocacy of violence,
under certain circumstances, to constitute active support for, and
participation in, the activities of a violent extremist organization.” Judge
Justin Walker concurred that “advocacy of violence is … not merely theoretical
support for an idea when it is intended to incite terrorist acts … and is directed

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online at specific persons with the means to carry out such acts.” Writing in
dissent, Judge Cornelia Pillard objected that prohibiting certain speech
directed at radicalized individuals “places undue burden on citizens to assess
the ideology of their interlocutors online, and is likely to create … a chilling
effect that inhibits constitutionally protected speech.” It was a major victory
for the administration, but the fight would continue. Mourad Hanoune’s
lawyers promptly petitioned for a rehearing en banc—before all eleven judges
on the circuit—hoping that the court’s 7-4 preponderance of Democratic
versus Republican appointees would reverse the stay.

Meanwhile at the White House, the president was pressing the intelligence
community ever harder to find evidence of links between domestic dissident
groups and foreign provocateurs. He was convinced—due to reports from
fringe right-wing sites like The Gateway Pundit and PunchBack—that there
was an active conspiracy afoot between jihadist organizations, the Muslim
Brotherhood, liberal billionaire George Soros, and groups like Antifa and
Black Lives Matter. The CIA and FBI had stolidly refused to make assessments
supporting that theory, as had more than a dozen other agencies that had been
asked for evidence. Yet on March 23, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince
visited the West Wing, where he personally briefed President Trump, Bill Barr,
and Stephen Miller on a dossier collected at private expense by the Odin
Group. This off-the-books intel outfit, which last month The Intercept
reported received $1.4 billion in government funding to spy on America’s
adversaries in the Middle East and Central Asia, began operating the week
after the Super Bowl attack after previously failing to win administration
support. According to two senior Odin Group analysts with knowledge of the
report’s contents, the dossier did not support an ISIS-BLM nexus, but did

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provide evidence that German Antifa leaders had met with Hezbollah
members in Prague in July 2020.

It is not clear whether Prince misrepresented the intelligence in the dossier,

Trump sincerely misunderstood it, or the president deliberately twisted its
conclusions to support his political agenda. But 15 minutes after Prince left the
Oval Office study, Trump launched a tweetstorm claiming “I now have PROOF
of evil ‘alliance’ between ISIS, Antifa, BLM” and that “Antifa are taking
directions, $$$ from Muslim terrorists.” He concluded with a baleful warning
that “anyone who supports them is actively supporting a violent Foreign
Extremist Organization.” That evening, administration surrogates went on TV
to do damage control. “Of course the president is not saying that lawful
citizens who support the so-called Black Lives Matter group are subject to
Preventive Action detention,” Kayleigh McEnany huffed to Jake Tapper, “and
frankly to suggest otherwise is irresponsible and absurd.”

But at a rally the next day in Morgantown, West Virginia, Trump once again
backed the bus up over his mouthpieces. “And how ‘bout these unbelievably
dishonest reporters who deliberately lie … to support these terrorist
organizations who are trying to destroy this country we all love? Let me tell
you, folks, the rules have changed.” After 20 seconds of delirious cheering
from the audience of predominantly coalminers and pipefitters, he continued.
“If you deliberately lie to the American people on behalf of terrorists—bong!—
you’re going to…” and here Trump drew himself up to deliver the last two
words with affected movie-trailer-voice gravitas “…Johnston Island!”

In the West Wing, staffers watching the broadcast buried their faces in their
hands. In Michael Glazer’s Slack group, a New Yorker staff writer warned

64
colleagues: “Go bags. Passports. Have a plan for getting you and your family to
Canada or Europe on 24 hours notice. I’m fucking serious. If this goes south,
it’ll go south fast.” Others pooh-poohed such talk as alarmism. “OMG guys,”
said a different New Yorker writer, “everything with this douche is hot air.
Don’t let him intimidate you this easily.”

That night, Trump’s television surrogates had changed tack. “It’s obvious that
the president was joking, Jake,” McEnany scolded a bewildered Tapper on
CNN. “Obviously the ‘C’ in CNN doesn’t stand for ‘comedy.’” On Fox News,
Newt Gingrich marveled to Tucker Carlson that “the rabid anti-Trump anti-
America media is trying to incite a rebellion over what amounts to no more
than some good-natured ribbing… Late night comics say things ten times
worse every single night.” Kevin McCarthy, interviewed on 60 Minutes that
Sunday, said that the idea that Trump had made a real threat against
American journalists was “absolutely ridiculous.” Pressed again, McCarthy
stood his ground: “The president made a joke. Let’s move on.”

T
HE PRESIDENT, HOWEVER, was not ready to move on—he had a score

to settle. Since the 2020 election, Alyson Kopp had been one of
Trump’s most pungent online critics. Through a combination of
deadpan snark and searing indignation, she had earned over 150,000
followers and climbed into position as the top reply to many of Trump’s
tweets. The 31-year-old marketing executive had quit her job to become a full
time #Resistance organizer, living off savings and Patreon donations—and
after the Resolute Eagle protests became a founding member of the Sisterhood
Without Banners, which aimed to be the “direct action arm of the Women’s
March.” Or, as Bill Maher called it, “Antifa in pussy hats.” In late February
2021, Kopp flew to Croatia for meetings with antifascist activists, and there

65
was introduced to Iranian businessman Haydar Shahrokhi, who expressed
interest in supporting the Sisterhood’s anti-Trump actions in America.

Over at least seven subsequent Zoom conversations, Shahrokhi—sometimes

joined by persons described as fellow anti-imperialist campaigners from
Iran—gave Kopp operational guidance on countering riot police tactics,
storming secured venues, and launching nonlethal assaults on VIPs. They
discussed, but did not implement, plans to fund the Sisterhood with $170,000
in cryptocurrency. These communications were monitored by the NSA and
CIA, who had identified Shahrokhi as affiliated with Iran’s clandestine Quds
Force. When Trump was briefed on the Kopp-Shahrokhi connection just after
the Morgantown rally, he directed DNI Jordan to flag her case for PAP/AFEO
detention.

On March 25, as Kopp stepped off a Mexico City-Los Angeles flight at LAX,
she was apprehended by FBI agents waiting at the end of the jetway. Before
being handcuffed, she slipped her iPhone into her underwear and began
livestreaming the incident on Periscope. Viewers saw just a dark screen, but
heard chilling audio as Kopp surreptitiously narrated to her audience in the
form of questions to the agents: “I’m Alyson Kopp. Why are you arresting me
here at LAX? … Why aren’t you reading me my Miranda rights? … Why are
you walking me to an unmarked SUV?” The agents offer few answers, and by
the time Kopp is in the vehicle, her questions become increasingly frantic.
“Where are you taking me? Tell me, where are you taking me? Please! Where
are you taking me?”

By the end of the 32-minute clip, over 226,000 viewers heard Kopp—
convinced that she was about to be murdered—sobbing and repeating “I wish I

66
could tell my family and friends how much I love them. I wish I could tell
them to keep fighting.” Her battery went dead before the court hearing or
flights to Johnston Island, and left-wing Twitter erupted with speculation that
she had indeed been killed. Sisterhood Without Banners leadership put out an
urgent action message: “Take to the streets IMMEDIATELY. Sister Alyson
Kopp has been ‘disappeared’ by our government. Demand her release NOW!”
The message spread to other sympathetic movements including Antifa, Black
Lives Matter, and Voices Rising, and by evening, riots were unfolding in Los
Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C.

At LAX, over 9,000 mostly-nonviolent demonstrators blocked roadways into

and out of the airport. But unlike the peaceful protests over the January 2017
travel ban, a significant minority of masked black bloc activists poured into
the terminal, where they rushed the ticket counters, pulled fire alarms, and
streamed out emergency exits onto the tarmac—forcing all flights to be
grounded and arrivals diverted to Burbank, John Wayne, and Ontario. In
Manhattan, a crowd of around 7,000 picketed outside the FBI’s field office on
Foley Square, where clashes with the NYPD quickly escalated to smashed
windows and torched cars. In Washington, about 5,000 people gathered on
the Mall and marched toward the White House before being intercepted by
police—which was followed by tear gas and protracted street fighting.
Homeland Security drones hovered over the scene, compiling a list of
demonstrators using facial recognition technology developed by Clearview AI,
a startup backed by several prominent alt-right figures.

Watching the violence on television in the White House Residence, Trump

raged at aides about the ineffectiveness of law enforcement, insisting that the
chaos was only happening because use-of-force rules were too restrictive.

67
After Tucker Carlson highlighted the story of a mother who missed her son’s
funeral while on lockdown at LAX, Trump personally called LAPD chief
Horace Frank to deliver a vulgar and abusive rant about his department’s
weakness.

As the riots dragged into a second day, amidst round-the-clock cable coverage
and a dozen Trump tweets heaping blame on “Treasonous Fake News
reporters” for inciting the unrest, members of the media experienced sharp
increases in harassment and intimidation from the public. Journalists on their
way into work at the Washington Post were greeted by a small crowd of out-
of-towners chanting “Treason! Treason!” and “Fake News!”—Michael Glazer
was hit by a water balloon, and one of his colleagues was spat on by a young
man who looked to still be in high school. At the New York Times, several
employees were accosted on the sidewalk or hit with paintballs as they
emerged from Ubers. Hundreds of media figures who’d criticized Trump
received “We’re watching you” threats online from accounts identifying
themselves as the “Lion Guard.”

Around the same time, law enforcement agencies across the country received
evidence from anonymous sources linking at least 16 anti-Trump journalists to
crimes ranging from tax evasion to child pornography. The disclosures
revealed extremely intimate knowledge of the targets’ activities. The IRS
received exhaustive investigative records about the financial crimes, gathered
in greater detail than all but the most intensive government audits. Tips to
police about several male reporters referenced specific nude images on their
computers, along with documentation showing that they depicted slightly
underage models. The arrests sent a chill through Glazer’s Slack group, one of
whose members had his apartment raided and hard drives seized—and had to

68
pay huge legal bills to beat charges over a few jailbait photos. During this
period but unknown to Glazer, another award-winning journalist was sent
copies of his medical records and successfully blackmailed into dropping a
significant national security investigation in order to prevent disclosure that
he is HIV-positive.

On March 27, Glazer and five other core members of the Slack group met in
secret at the Brooklyn apartment of Buzzfeed reporter Jonathan Steinberg.
The purpose of the conclave was to develop better protocols for digital privacy
and personal security in the face of these unprecedented attacks on the press.
Although acknowledging that the evidence was still circumstantial, they
agreed to work under the assumption that each was being personally targeted
by high-level elements within the NSA. As such, they decided on an exotic
regimen of virtual private networks, file encryption, and anti-malware
programs. Although they remained uncertain of NSA capabilities to decrypt
traffic over the Tor anonymity network, they resolved to discontinue its use
because even if government supercomputers couldn’t crack Tor data, the very
act of using the software lit people up like Christmas trees amidst the flood of
global web traffic, exposing them to other forms of scrutiny. The group also
settled on rigid procedures to prevent human errors from compromising
sound technical precautions. If used correctly, their privacy tools were capable
of defeating even multibillion-dollar surveillance systems—but spy agencies
could usually rely on targets’ laziness and ineptitude to enable successful
attacks.

Those at the meeting also agreed to share story notes and sources even where
ordinary professional boundaries would forbid this. The purpose was
twofold—to help them see patterns and connections in the administration’s

69
behavior that might not be apparent from any single reporter’s perspective,
and to prevent the arrest or hacking of any one of them from suppressing a
valuable story.

Present for some of these discussions was Steinberg’s Buzzfeed colleague

Noah Feldstein, whose flight home to L.A. had been cancelled due to the riots.
His normal beat was media and technology, and unlike the others he had not
published any investigative pieces about Trump, so Steinberg had included
him as the eighth member of their circle—both for his tech savvy and his
ability to serve as a go-between for the others in cases where direct
communication might be monitored.

Feldstein had been introduced to Glazer that evening by Steinberg’s wife, who
had been Feldstein’s classmate at Columbia. He’d been immediately
impressed by the Washington Post reporter’s warmth and intellect, and
during the late-night drinks and conversation that followed the formal
meeting, Feldstein was deeply moved to hear Glazer lament how Trump had
turned against him so many of the soldiers he’d reported on overseas. NCOs
who’d confided in him like a brother now wouldn’t return his messages, and
since the PAP/AFEO piece, several had sent nasty texts accusing him of
betraying his country and siding with the terrorists. Feldstein could see how
personally Glazer took the loss of those relationships—and it hurt to see.

In the early hours of March 28, riot police finally massed overwhelming
numbers and regained full control of the tarmac and terminals at LAX.
Despite repeated calls from Washington urging the use of lethal force, Chief
Frank and the DHS officials on scene decided that that could only make a bad
situation far worse. The hundred or so demonstrators still resisting after 60

70
hours were well prepared to defeat normal riot control tactics. They had used
masks and goggles to endure frequent bombardment with tear gas, wore
padded clothing to lessen the impact of water cannons and rubber bullets, and
had hearing protection to deaden the earsplitting 149-decibel blasts from
LRAD sonic weapons.

Many had commandeered motor vehicles, and some were threatening to wreck
aircraft and blow up jet fuel trucks if officers killed any of them. Since there
were no hostages or imminent threats to life, SWAT commanders judged an
armed assault too risky. Instead, Humvees trundled down the runways, firing
beams of directed 95 GHz energy from satellite dish-looking weapons called
the ADS (Active Denial System). The waves penetrate clothing and heat the
very top layer of the skin by the same principle as a microwave cooking meat—
causing intense pain but (at least ostensibly) no permanent injury. As the ADS
flushed Antifa and Sisterhood members out of hiding, more than 2,000
officers with batons and riot shields swooped in and arrested them.

In New York and Washington, the NYPD and Metropolitan Police Department
had succeeded in breaking up the biggest masses of demonstrators, but the
angry crowds dispersed and hot spots of violence spread throughout
surrounding neighborhoods. Large areas of both cities had to be cordoned off,
and even with huge police mobilizations, it was difficult and time-consuming
to gradually isolate, surround, and subdue the remaining pockets of
resistance. Still, despite extensive property damage, there had been no
fatalities from any of the three riots.

th
By 9:30 a.m. on the 29 , calm had been all but restored in the nation’s capital
when a group of demonstrators suddenly coalesced again and linked arms

71
 th
across 12 Street, blocking the entrance to ICE headquarters. There were
about 200 of them—most wore facemasks and protective gear, but they were
not engaging in any violence. Instead, they stood in place, chanting “Free
Alyson Kopp! Free Alyson Kopp!” Although police units were on the scene
almost immediately, after twenty minutes there were still not enough
personnel in place to surround the protesters and bring them into custody.

Meanwhile, half a dozen counter-protesters—passersby—gathered on the

sidewalk nearby, alternately exchanging taunts with the crowd or chanting “U-
S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” at them. Todd Davis had come up from near Raleigh with
his wife Ashley to attend a restaurant franchisee conference, and when he saw
the black-clad resisters, retrieved a beach towel-size American flag from his
truck and held it up toward them defiantly. The two groups were about 25 feet
apart.

Suddenly, three figures from within the crowd rushed at the counter-
protesters with metal clubs and started swinging at them wildly. One of the
assailants tore the flag from Todd Davis’s grasp and shoved him backwards
onto the concrete. Crouching over Davis, he rained blows down onto his face,
chest, and neck—breaking his nose and shattering his front teeth. Seeing her
husband in danger and perhaps fearing for his life, Ashley Davis pulled a
concealed handgun from inside her coat and pointed it at the man beating
Todd. Cell phone footage taken from within the crowd appears to show her
switch off the safety and enter a shooting stance. One of the other assailants is
behind Ashley and sees her seemingly about to fire—he aims a vicious blow at
the base of her skull, and she crumples instantly.

72
The more famous footage by Al Jazeera captures only the last two seconds of
this sequence—a hooded man striking the back of a blonde woman’s head,
causing her to stiffen and collapse forward onto an American flag. A moment
later, a flashbang grenade thrown by police goes off in the midst of the fray,
and the cameraman is knocked over. The incident commander, MPD Cmdr.
Erica Stanley, had determined that there was imminent threat to life, and
ordered her outnumbered officers forward into the melee. The club-wielding
assailants took off running, and as the charging officers slammed into the
crowd with their riot shields, many of the demonstrators scattered down
nearby streets. The men who started the violence were not identified.

Paramedics performed CPR on Ashley Davis at the scene, but the 31-year-old
mother of two had suffered severe brain trauma and was pronounced dead at
MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. By evening, the Al Jazeera video
was all over the airwaves, and social media was blanketed with photos of the
American flag lying trampled at the scene, stained by a pool of Ashley’s blood.
Among the president’s supporters, the effect of the image was electric—while
those who had supported the demonstrations shrank into silence.

That night, in time to be played during the prime time newscasts, Trump
tweeted a short video of himself speaking from aboard Air Force One.
“America is under siege,” intoned the president. “This is a crisis unlike any in
the history of our great country.” Trump told viewers that “these violent and
murderous—murderous—so-called ‘protesters’ hate you, your family, your
children, and everything you love.” He concluded: “I promise you that I will do
whatever it takes to protect you and protect America from the people who are
trying to destroy it. Tomorrow, I will be announcing major new action to bring
a total stop to these threats to our country and our way of life.” Michael Glazer

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and the other attendees of the Brooklyn meeting already had left the Slack
group for security reasons, but a Politico reporter told those who remained:
“This is it. This is our Reichstag fire. There’s gonna be no stopping this.”

Morning brought a presidential speech in the East Room of the White House.
Flanked by cabinet members and senior Homeland Security officials, Trump
announced that, in consultation with Attorney General Barr and DNI Jordan,
he had directed the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement
agencies to pursue maximum penalties against anyone involved in
demonstrations that turn violent, regardless of whether they commit acts of
violence themselves. “We have no choice,” he said. “This violence must end.”
Such penalties could include felony charges for engaging in a riot—stiffened by
more felonies for inciting a riot or conspiracy to riot if investigators could find
that a defendant had coordinated with other demonstrators on social media.
To that end, Trump said that he would direct the NSA to provide technical
support to DHS and local police forces for the purpose of cracking encryption
rioters might use to thwart investigators. These measures were all legally
dubious and likely unconstitutional—but their intent, administration officials
recall, was not to win convictions but intimidate would-be protesters into
simply staying home.

That afternoon, news cameras followed President Trump as he visited Todd

Davis in the hospital. The blood-stained flag was draped over a chair next to
his bed, and featured prominently in the photo op—which was already
headlining RNC fundraising email blasts before Trump had exited the
building. The administration and its surrogates made aggressive use of the flag
on their own online platforms, and Sebastian Gorka—now Deputy National
Security Advisor—tweeted a photo of himself reverently touching the flag,

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captioned “We will NOT fail you, Ashley Davis! #DefeatAntifaTerrorism
#MAGA.” The next day, the Ashley Davis Flag was flown over the White
House, and press secretary Emerald Robinson told reporters that there were
plans to send the flag around the country for public viewings at rallies and
ceremonies honoring law enforcement.

At an April 2 panel at the Atlantic Council in D.C., Damon Wilson moderated a

discussion featuring Michael Glazer and David Ignatius of the Washington
Post along with Russian dissident and journalist Masha Gessen. The
conversation turned to Gessen’s piece that had just gone online at The New
Yorker that morning, titled “American Blutfahne.” Wilson asked her to explain
the title. “During Hitler’s failed rebellion in Munich in 1923,” Gessen said,
“one of the early Nazis was shot and killed by police, and his blood stained a
swastika flag. That flag—‘Blutfahne’ translates as ‘blood flag’—became central
to Nazi propaganda.” Gessen emphasized that while there was no moral
equivalency between the swastika banner and the Stars and Stripes, in both
cases, autocrats were “exploiting the primal imagery of a blood-soaked flag to
sanctify their cause.” Glazer countered that “Trump doesn’t own the American
flag. Even citizens who oppose him carry it at protests.” Gessen nodded. “And
that is why this is such a powerful tactic,” she said. “Trump is using this flag to
co-opt patriotism itself in this country—to tell people on the most visceral level
possible: ‘The forces that killed Ms. Davis are also a mortal threat to each and
every one of you.’”

Straight after the panel, Glazer took a car a block and a half back to the
Washington Post to appear via satellite on AC-360, where he recounted to
Anderson Cooper and his viewers how the PAP/AFEO program had already
proven a slippery slope—from radical Muslims who’d had direct contact with

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ISIS, to a mentally ill young man, to an atheist who goaded ISIS on Twitter, to
an activist who Zoomed with a businessman allegedly linked to Iranian
intelligence. “For all we know,” Glazer said, “they might all have genuine
connection to violent extremists, but when they are detained indefinitely
without public trial, American citizens cannot assess this for themselves.” He
added that “rumors—which I must stress are unfounded—are now spreading
among activists that people arrested in anti-administration demonstrations
may be sent to Johnston Island, and my Homeland Security sources are telling
me that senior administration officials welcome those rumors.”

Cooper next introduced leading Never Trumper David Frum of The Atlantic,
facing off against economist and sometime Trump advisor Stephen Moore.
Frum was even more strident in his criticism of the PAP/AFEO slippery slope,
but Moore dismissed Glazer’s reporting as wild rumor-mongering. “I know
this administration,” he said. “The intent here is only to keep Americans safe. I
am just baffled by this hysteria on the left that we’re going to have gulags and
secret police all of a sudden.” After shouting down an interruption from Frum,
Moore pressed on. “Let’s focus on the facts. No journalists have been detained
under this program. Zero. No peaceful protesters. For that matter, no rioters.
Zero. To suggest that the president has any control over the malicious rumors
leftists spread about him online … is just absurd.” When Moore emphasized
that the detainees “are the worst of the worst” and “committed to radical
Islam,” Frum mentioned Alyson Kopp. “Alyson Kopp!” Moore croaked. “She
was literally taking money from a terrorist group—from the mullahs of Iran. I
don’t know how you can defend any of this, David.” With that, the segment
was out of time.

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Over the next few days, the administration crackdown caused deepening legal
chaos, as activists were arrested based on social media information connecting
them to the riots. According to longstanding Supreme Court precedent from
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), speech encouraging violence is only unlawful if
intended to incite “imminent lawless action.” But now, arrestee-choked courts
were confused as to whether, for example, tweeting “#Resist by all means
necessary! Violence is a last resort!” from a mostly-peaceful area of the crowd
at LAX met that standard. Rank-and-file federal prosecutors were confused,
too.

To make things easier for law enforcement, Republican legislators and a few
Democratic aisle-crossers hurriedly passed the Unmasking Antifa Act of
2021—closely based on a bill first introduced in 2018 by Rep. Daniel Donovan.
The act provided up to 15 years in prison for anyone who “injures, oppresses,
threatens, or intimidates any person in any State” while “in disguise, including
while wearing a mask.” President Trump signed it into law that Wednesday
afternoon, gloating on Twitter that this was “CHECKMATE” for the “very un-
American people who are Rioting and Protesting.” At the same time, the White
House leaked plans to soon deliver facial recognition software to police
departments for the purpose of creating a public database of anyone who
attended violent demonstrations without a mask on—which pro-Trump
activists said would facilitate everything from prosecution to job loss and
business boycotts. According to subsequent reportage in Vanity Fair, Trump
also considered supporting a national mask law on public health pretexts to
criminalize maskless protesters—a sort of catch-22—but backed down when
Tucker Carlson told him it would alarm and confuse his COVID-skeptical base.

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On April 6, following an en banc rehearing, the D.C. Circuit decided 8-3 to
reverse the three-judge panel’s decision and lift the stay of Judge Jackson’s
order—once again blocking PAP/AFEO detentions. Trump vowed to take the
fight to the Supreme Court, and while new arrivals to Johnston Island ceased,
the administration still signaled that its compliance was not mandatory and
could be halted at the president’s discretion. White House surrogates attacked
the court’s credibility, and over 240,000 people signed a Change.org petition
demanding that the decision be overturned because “Judge Nina Pillard is
married to David Cole, the National Legal Director of the George Soros-funded
ACLU, constituting a massive conflict of interest, from which she was
obligated to recuse herself, but failed to do so.” So back America plunged into
its is-it-isn’t-it constitutional crisis.

The same night, a SWAT team executing a search warrant for Voices Rising
activist Matthew Ortega in Houston shot and killed his 17-year-old brother
Jonathan by mistake. Mostly-peaceful protests formed the next day in at least
13 major cities—with the largest, in Houston itself, attracting about 7,500
people. But organizers struggled to build momentum. Fearful rumors spread
among the demonstrators, claiming that riot police had been authorized to use
lethal force, or that the administration had ordered anyone who spent money
on protest supplies to be flagged for PAP/AFEO detention. Others claimed
that Trumpist militias were planning a mass shooting, or that right-wing
provocateurs had infiltrated protest crowds and would be used to incite
violence that could justify mass arrests on rioting charges. Marchers were
warned by family and friends to go home—and within 36 hours, the Jonathan
Ortega protests had died down to almost nothing.

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In response to the ongoing instability in America, on April 8 nine EU
countries—including France, Germany, and the Netherlands—issued travel
advisories warning their citizens to take extra precautions when visiting the
United States, citing human rights abuses and civil disorder. Likewise, more
than a dozen Muslim-majority countries were now urging postponement of
nonessential travel to the U.S.—and major corporations from Silicon Valley to
Wall Street complained that foreign business partners were afraid to send
their executives even for important meetings.

O
N APRIL 11, the Glazers were eating breakfast at their home in

Alexandria when they saw a report on television that FBI agents

with guns drawn had arrested senior DoD policy advisor Sean
Hughes outside a D.C. convenience store. He’d been charged with five counts
of unauthorized communication of national defense information, carrying a
maximum sentence of 50 years in prison. As they watched, Michael’s phone
made an unusual notification sound, and he read a message, ashen-faced.
“What is it?” Julia asked. Michael just flicked his eyes in Gabby’s direction, as
if to say not in front of her, and darted up to his home office.

The message was from Noah Feldstein via Signal, and it was bad news—
relayed from New York Times investigations correspondent Mark Mazzetti.
Hughes, who’d been a trusted Mattis aide, was acting as Mazzetti’s key source
for a major ongoing investigation into White House attempts to pressure the
Pentagon into unlawful military strikes. But it wasn’t a source getting burned
that had Mazzetti alarmed. He and Hughes had meticulously followed the
same anti-surveillance protocols as those who attended Steinberg’s meeting in
Brooklyn—and yet the leaker had still been exposed. Mazzetti suspected that
the protocols had been somehow compromised, and that the sources of

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everyone else using them were at risk until something more secure could be
devised.

Glazer took the next Acela Express up to New York for an emergency meeting
at Jonathan Steinberg’s apartment. All the members of the “March 27 Circle”
were there except Feldstein, who was still in Los Angeles. They were joined by
Mazzetti and one of his Times colleagues, along with a former U.S. intelligence
official who had been a trusted source for several of them since the Clinton
administration.

Mazzetti began by describing how this case differed from other major leak
prosecutions over the past year. Unlike Gail Gow at the FBI and Chris Wren at
the Justice Department, who were caught after their leaks were published in
the press, Hughes had been caught before the Times printed a word of his
disclosures. And unlike Wilson, Cook, and Shepard at the State Department—
who were sending low-privacy emails to journalists in the UK and Germany—
Hughes only communicated with a domestic reporter via Signal from his
personal phone.

As Mazzetti explained, they’d followed Mission Impossible levels of security.

Hughes had sent him passwords for documents stored anonymously in a
shared folder in the cloud and hidden steganographically—encoded in slight
alterations to pixels in ordinary images of household objects. Thanks to
Signal’s robust encryption, the passwords were almost certainly unreadable in
transit—even to the NSA—and they weren’t stored on any of Hughes’s devices.
This ruled out alternate explanations for how the government had learned
about the leaks. The only plausible answer was that the passwords had been
accessed directly from the secure files on Mazzetti’s computer.

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Given the formidable cybersecurity protections he used, this suggested an
enormously sophisticated attack targeted at Mazzetti personally. That would
be well beyond the reach of sweat-stained Trump trolls hacking from their
mothers’ basements, or even high-end private oppo groups. Only the NSA was
suspected to have those capabilities—though it was not clear whether the
action was taken on orders from the president, or taken independently by one
or more rogue pro-Trump agency employees emboldened by the Ryan Lake
pardon.

Whoever was responsible, their next move was even more chilling. At 9:44
a.m. on April 10, the documents that Hughes had hidden the cloud had been
sent unencrypted from his work computer to Mazzetti’s @nytimes.com email
address. DoD servers immediately flagged the message as a potential leak, and
the FBI promptly opened a criminal investigation. CCTV footage showed that
Hughes was in his Pentagon office at the time the email was sent, and card-
access records confirmed that he was logged into his computer. Hughes
fervently insisted that he had been hacked, but couldn’t produce a shred of
exculpatory evidence—from the government’s point of view, it was an open-
and-shut case.

The bottom line, Mazzetti told the journalists in Steinberg’s living room, was
that he had likely been singled out by the burning gaze of the NSA—and as
journalists who had been critical of the administration, there was reason to
believe they all had been, too. That meant that any of their sources could be
compromised and prosecuted. Unless they found a way to communicate
securely with leakers, their sources of sensitive information would dry up
rapidly. Mazzetti had consulted a range of trusted cybersurveillance experts,

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trying to learn what new encryption protocols would be needed, but they all
said the same thing: if the NSA wants to get into a computer, you have to
assume that they’ll get in. No matter how secure a message is in transit, if
snoopers can access your machine itself, it doesn’t matter. The only solution
was hiding in plain sight—communicating in ways that wouldn’t attract the
NSA’s attention in the first place.

The former intelligence official at the meeting spoke next, commanding rapt
attention. The planting of hacked documents in an email that law enforcement
could legitimately surveil showed that the president’s partisans were no longer
bound by the rule of law, the official said. This required a radical rethinking of
how reporters protected their sources. Instead of thinking in terms of what the
government could legally do, they had to start acting like journalists under
authoritarian regimes and guard against the most intrusive things that it was
possible for the government to do. Investigative journalists, the official said,
would have to fall back on tradecraft—the sorts of techniques used by spies in
hostile countries to thwart counterintelligence.

Although the NSA was an all-seeing eye for much of the world’s digital
communication, it had very little reach into the analog realm. So it was safer to
send hard copies of documents through the U.S. Postal Service than even with
the toughest online encryption. Parcels should be sent via trusted friends,
from public mail drops using bogus return addresses. This would make them
invisible to anything short of a massive Stasi-style letter-opening operation—
which, the official emphasized, would be much too labor-intensive for a small
number of rogue Trump sympathizers. For urgent messages, they would have
to pay cash for burner phones—“drug dealer-style,” one of the journalists
joked—or have in-person meetings. And because regular phones’ location data

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could be tracked, they couldn’t even be on a reporter’s person when talking
with sources face-to-face. For secure word processing, they would need to buy
used laptops at garage sales and physically disable their internet capabilities.

As the meeting came to an end, one of the attendees reminded those present
of the story of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and human rights
activist widely believed to have been assassinated on Vladimir Putin’s orders
in 2006. “Anna was my friend,” the speaker said. “I just want us all to be sure
we know what we’re getting into.” Everyone present solemnly affirmed that
they were.

On his way back to Washington, Michael picked up about a dozen pre-paid

burner phones, and instructed Julia on their use that night. If they had to talk
about his work, they would do it exclusively by burner. And they devised a
protocol—the Lois and Clark joke—for signaling that no one was coercing
them or listening in on the call. Then he walked over to her laptop and covered
the webcam with a strip of black electrical tape. Well after 11:00 p.m., he
called Julia and Gabby down into the kitchen and calmly explained that he
would be disabling their Amazon Echo system because it used hackable
passive listening devices around their home. There was something profoundly
unreal about it all. On one level, it felt to Julia like an elaborate game of
pretend. Like their own private spy fantasy. Yet Michael seemed to be taking it
so seriously. She silently wondered whether the stress of the job was driving
him to paranoia.

The next morning, following a Fox & Friends segment on the Sean Hughes
story, Trump turned his ire on Mark Mazzetti, tweeting: “@MarkMazzettiNYT,
known pervert, stole American secrets. Was planning to reveal to our enemies,

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but we stopped him cold. Espionage!” Hours later, at a rally in Jacksonville,
the president went off prompter with an offer that elicited audible gasps back
in the West Wing: “Donald Trump is offering—from my personal money—a
reward. A reward. One hundred thousand dollars to anyone, including
members of the dishonest media, who reports either a so-called leaker trying
to give away classified information, or a reporter who is helping them, if that
lets us put them away.” The crowd bellowed vigorously. “We’ll call it ‘Rewards
for Justice,’” Trump added, seemingly unaware of the 37-year-old State
Department program of the same name. “How’s that, folks? That’s a great
name, isn’t it?” Trump’s comments were swiftly denounced by his opponents,
but they played well in the heartland. A Monmouth University poll found that
91 percent of Republicans supported the bounties, seemingly because—as one
participant in a Frank Luntz focus group put it on CBS This Morning—“he’s
putting his money where his mouth is.” Indeed, between anxiety over the
recent riots and the promise of $5,500 EFRAF checks going out in July,
Trump’s approval rating as of that day’s RealClearPolitics polling average
stood at a handsome 45 percent—the highest since the aftermath of Resolute
Eagle.

On April 18, conservative anti-Trump commentator Morty Ball was assaulted

at a public event in Fresno by a man who was found to have been a Trump
delegate for California at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Viral
footage showed the sucker punch and Ball on the ground with a bloody lip, but
was pushed immediately out of the news by the release of the hotly-
anticipated first teaser for the Disney+ Obi-Wan series, which dropped that
same afternoon. “Trump is all we think of anymore,” Michael Glazer reminded
Julia that night, “but for 95 percent of Americans, life goes on.”

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Yet the outrage-numbed population was gradually rousing to anger. One week
later, while accepting an Oscar for her voter suppression documentary All In:
The Fight for Democracy, filmmaker Liz Garbus called on Americans to resist
the president’s efforts to intimidate activists into silence. Recounting a
graphically sexual threat made against her by an influential Trump supporter,
she defiantly concluded: “I. Am. Not. Afraid.” Video of Garbus, extending her
left arm overhead with two fingers raised in a Churchillian ‘V’ as she delivered
those last four words with devastating emphasis, became Twitter’s all-time
most shared video before the broadcast was over.

Trump, watching from a couch in the Executive Residence, tweeted his

comeback: “Maybe you should be afraid, Horseface. But won’t happen. This
dog thinks someone would do that to her. De-lusional!” The post was deleted
44 minutes later—after his daughter Ivanka raced to the White House and
desperately badgered her father into taking it town—but the fragile illusion of
Presidential Trump was shattered. Emerald Robinson got up in front of the
media the next morning and explained that the tweet had been posted in error
by an intern who had already been fired, and whom she refused to name. This
lie, unbelievably shabby even by Trump administration standards, did little to
defuse the public furor.

On HBO’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver riffed: “That the president of the
United States of America would advocate sexual violence against a member of
the media—who happens to also be Oscar-, Emmy-, and Peabody-winning
documentarian—is distressing. And yes, that is deeply distressing. But that’s
not the most distressing part of this whole Saffir-Simpson scale Category 5
shitstorm. The most distressing part is when you realize that this rectumclown
is so stupid he can’t even decide whether Garbus is a horse or a dog.” Within a

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week, Oliver’s florid and profane takedown of the president had amassed over
25 million views. Michael Glazer emailed the link to his sister Laura, calling it
“Some much-need comic relief.”

To read the Stories section of Instagram, it seemed that liberals had taken the
Garbus threat as a virtual call to revolution. But with Bill Barr’s forces given
free rein to violently suppress protests, and arrestees facing beatings, strip
searches, and felony charges, only the hardiest activists made themselves
heard on the streets. To House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the Garbus
threat was already a dead issue: “The President has assured the American
people that these disgusting and inappropriate comments were not posted by
him, and I take him at his word.”

With political resistance feeling hopeless, just about the only issue most
citizens had the energy to care about was their pocketbooks. And that’s where
opinion started to turn back against the president. At 8:30 a.m. on April 30,
the Fed released its advance estimate suggesting that real GDP had dropped
substantially during the first quarter of the year—cementing fears of a double-
dip recession. Consumer confidence was in the toilet, and a range of other
economic indicators were looking bleak.

Following the disruption of the Super Bowl attack, the markets had been
propped up by expectations that EFRAF would stimulate a huge boom in
consumption and put millions of Americans back to work. But the data
showed that the deepening civil unrest and political chaos had caused worried
families to cut their spending. Amidst this uncertainty, pandemic-battered
firms were hesitant to hire new workers, causing job growth numbers to fall

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badly short of projections. Yet prices had already jumped due to inflationary
expectations, so Middle America was getting hammered.

The Fed’s announcement sparked a furious daylong selloff in U.S. markets,

which soon rippled around the world and caused even deeper Wall Street
losses. With investors already on edge from the widening Deutsche Bank
scandal, the bears went on a rampage. The DOW ended in the red for 11 out of
the next 13 trading days, the slide aggravated when Trump—bewildered by the
dire financial news and beset by advisors with starkly conflicting
recommendations—tweeted “Might have to delay EFRAF. We are
considering!” Emerald Robinson tried mightily to walk it back, but the
resulting uncertainty about the White House’s intentions kept the market
from stabilizing until the flagship index dipped below 18,500—having
annihilated all the gains of Trump’s presidency for the second time in 13
months. By mid-May, RealClearPolitics had the president’s approval down to
40 percent.

Yet despite Trump’s post-attack popularity unraveling, his base was more
strident than ever, and the timbre of its rhetoric had never been more
menacing. Journalists covering the administration’s abuses began talking
more explicitly about their fear of reprisals, and some quietly shifted to other
beats after family members begged them to keep their heads down. Starting in
late April, several Washington Post reporters had been questioned by federal
investigators as part of leak investigations, and rumors began to spread in the
newsroom that there were turncoats on staff. Although Trump’s promise to
pay out $100,000 bounties was highly dubious, it was having a real effect.

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Mistrust and paranoia began to set in, and everyone heard secondhand
accounts insisting that some employees had found papers on their desks rifled
through. Suspicion fell on a colleague who had set up a GoFundMe to pay for
his daughter’s cancer treatments but recently taken the page down while still
well short of its goal and flown with her for therapy in Mexico. Another writer,
just a few years out of college, came under scrutiny when he was seen by his
editor’s wife in Manhattan’s Time Warner Center, coming out of Per Se—
Thomas Keller’s three-Michelin star restaurant where dinners often run $900
a head. Likewise, a young education reporter got dagger eyes when she came
to work in a new pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos.

But internal dissension wasn’t journalists’ only problem. Sources were already
clamming up, worried that even if the reporters they were dealing with were
trustworthy, their identities could be betrayed by third parties working in the
same office. Glazer himself was deeply skeptical about whether there were
actually informants at the Post, but he recognized the need to be able to
reassure wary sources that they would be safe in communicating with him. As
such, his editors gave him extraordinary permission to maintain falsified
copies of story notes on his work computer in case it was searched or seized as
part of an anti-leak operation. Several other members of the March 27 Circle
received similar accommodations.

The pall of fear grew darker on April 28, when the president tweeted “Media
lies about Trump to incite rioting is ‘Sedition’. Has gotten Americans killed &
must be punished!” He followed that up with an image showing 18 U.S. Code §
2384, which provides twenty years imprisonment for those who “conspire …
by force to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United
States.” At a Nashville rally the next evening, Trump made great show of

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magnanimity in explaining that while “every [journalist] in this room could be
taken away in handcuffs” for sedition, his firm belief in free speech had moved
him to leniency. After another day of surrogates insisting on cable news that it
was all a joke, Trump—delivering remarks on the Benton, Illinois tornado—
was asked by NPR’s Mara Liasson whether he endorsed something Donald Jr.
had retweeted that morning. The tweet, by alt-right blogger Desmond Thor,
said that journalists who opposed preventive detention of jihadists were
“enemy combatants.” Trump’s surly answer: “You tell me.” That evening, a
longtime Pentagon source messaged Glazer and Nakashima and told them,
simply, “I can’t do this anymore. Sorry.”

T
HAT SAME NIGHT, Air Force captain Cory Webb checked into a third-

floor room at the Knights Inn motel near Baltimore after a meeting
in which he had leaked information about Resolute Eagle
intelligence to New York Times reporter Scott Shane. Just after 2:45 a.m., a
sex worker walking along the balcony found Webb’s body slumped against the
railing, shot twice in the back of the head. The cold stub of a cigarette was still
stuck between his fingers. Motel guests told detectives they recalled hearing
two loud cracks about half an hour earlier, but there was no CCTV footage
available and the city didn’t have acoustic gunfire detectors working in that
area. There was no evidence linking the murder to the leaking, but when
Glazer and his compatriots found out a few days later, the coincidence was
chilling. The Knights Inn wasn’t in a particularly high-crime neighborhood,
and Webb didn’t appear to have been robbed. Still, they couldn’t rule out a
jealous lover, or a drug problem, or just a random thrill-killing—and the Times
brass, when Mark Mazzetti escalated the question to his bosses, decided that
the case was too thin to go public about Capt. Webb’s leak.

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Yet when Glazer spoke to a source in Army intelligence on May 3, the source
mentioned that people in the military were already whispering that Webb had
probably been a leaker. When Glazer pushed for more information, the source
spoke of dark rumors swirling in the Pentagon that leakers were being killed—
and said potential whistleblowers were staying quiet for fear of their lives. The
source showed him an email thread going around at DoD speculating that a
string of deaths over the past five months had gone unrecognized as murder:
Navy lieutenant commander Sam Little III, who fell out of a helicopter off the
Florida coast on November 2, 2020; Navy senior chief petty officer Reuben
Anderson, who died of a mysterious reaction after receiving a flu shot on
November 15; teetotaler Army lieutenant Matt Lirette, who died of a heroin
overdose at Fort Lesley J. McNair in D.C. on February 1; and Army major Ron
McQuirter, who threw himself off the roof of his Rosslyn, Virginia apartment
building on March 4. There was no affirmative evidence that any of them had
leaked to the press, but that hadn’t stopped amateur sleuths from amassing a
mountain of circumstantial inferences purporting to show that the dead
servicemen had all been passing reporters classified information. Glazer was
unconvinced.

The rumors set off a heated debate on the March 27 Circle’s

steganographically-hidden improvised message board, with two members
plunging headlong into wild speculation. “Guys,” Glazer warned, “this all feels
a little too Seth Rich to me”—referencing how the unsolved 2016 murder of a
DNC staffer spawned right-wing conspiracy theories that the Clintons had him
murdered for leaking emails to Wikileaks. Ultimately, although some Circle
members made discreet inquiries, they could find no journalists who’d had
contact with Little, Anderson, Lirette, or McQuirter. The case remained in the
realm of fevered conjecture.

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Yet while Glazer doubted the Trump White House was having leakers
murdered, that didn’t mean he thought it was a non-story. The fact remained
that such rumors played enormously to the administration’s advantage, and
served to deter legitimate whistleblowers. In early May, Glazer met in person
with one of the few Tier One special forces NCOs still willing to speak to him,
looking to gauge how widespread the rumors had become. The source, then
still an active-duty Navy SEAL, said he hadn’t heard anything like that—and
then showed Glazer a USA Today story on his burner phone. “Did you see that
crazy guy Ahlberg got arrested? Slugged an old man.” He pointed at a
mugshot.

A peaceful march on the National Mall protesting PAP/AFEO detentions had

suddenly turned violent, with several marchers assaulting a counter-
demonstration. Riot police attempted to kettle the crowd, but much of the
group scattered and melted back into the city. Still, several dozen had been
arrested, and video evidence led to six getting the book thrown at them. One,
39-year-old Lance Ahlberg, was charged with felonies for interference with
protected rights while in disguise, engaging in a riot, and aggravated assault
after he sucker-punched an elderly Vietnam veteran and stomped on the face
of an off-duty firefighter. Glazer squinted down at the photo. “The nutty right-
wing guy from Anbar?” The source nodded.

The blond beard in the mugshot had been shorter back in 2007, but Glazer
remembered being around him on his penultimate tour in Iraq. It’s hard to be
conspicuously right-wing by SEAL standards, but Ahlberg had somehow
managed it—with a mixture of virulent “South will rise again” racism,
sermonizing about how democracy was too weak to survive, and unseemly

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eagerness to kill Muslims. However another photo with the article, taken
during the brawl, showed a masked man identified as Ahlberg—wearing an
oversized Biden 2020 t-shirt over Antifa-style gear. It was almost ludicrous to
imagine Lance Ahlberg marching in support of Islamic detainees’ civil
liberties. Glazer asked whether he’d taken a leftward turn after Anbar. The
source said that Ahlberg had been dismissed from the teams in 2008 after
assaulting an officer and had pretty much dropped off everyone’s radar ever
since.

But something didn’t smell right—Julia remembers Michael saying as much

after showing her the article over dinner that night. The next day, he put in a
bunch of calls trying to reach SEALs from Ahlberg’s platoon and get a fix on
what happened to him since the Navy. Glazer finally found someone who had
stayed in touch with him for a few years after getting out. He said that Ahlberg
had gone to work for a private security company—he couldn’t remember
which one—and bounced around the world, working hard and playing hard.
Not only had he not turned toward left-wing politics, he’d fallen deeper into
right-wing extremism. The source emailed Glazer a photo of himself and three
other ex-SEALs with Ahlberg at Oktoberfest 2012 in Munich. It shows Ahlberg
in short sleeves, sporting several Norse runic tattoos, with a stylized black sun
on one forearm—a symbol often associated with Nazi occultism.

More digging only deepened Glazer’s puzzlement. He’d managed to put up a

$500,000 federal bail within ninety minutes, and was being represented by an
$800-an-hour attorney from an elite Beltway law firm. That raised the real
possibility that Ahlberg was a hired stooge for some wealthy patron—but who?
There was no trace of him on social media, but a fellow March 27 Circle
member managed to uncover a cached 2011 post from an online forum for

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private security contracting. A user with an email address matching the one
that Ahlberg’s platoon-mate had given for him encouraged another poster to
join him in working for a company called HFK. The user said he was “having
mad fun” protecting diplomats and journalists in Egypt. HFK private security
turned out to be defunct, but Glazer managed to track one of its executives
down to a new company and ask what happened to Ahlberg next. The
executive said that Ahlberg, who’d developed a reputation as a hotheaded
freelancer, had been caught smuggling drugs and fired in early 2013.

Another HFK alum was able to confirm that by 2015, Ahlberg was working for
Kukri Solutions, doing personal protection for political candidates in unstable
African countries. At the end of that year, Kukri became insolvent and was
purchased by a South Africa-registered firm called the Victoria Road Group.
But it was there that the trail went cold. The company wouldn’t confirm
whether it had ever hired Ahlberg, and of the few employees Glazer’s
colleagues managed to track down directly, none were willing to say anything
at all. The VRG website was totally opaque, and didn’t even identify what
industry it was in. A LinkedIn search revealed a former secretary, who
confirmed that VRG was not a private security company, but a political
consulting firm led by a shadowy figure named Simon Atlas.

In the second week of May, Glazer ran the name by some sources in the
intelligence community, and learned that Atlas had been fingered by the CIA
as supplying agents provocateurs to strongmen in countries including Kenya,
Egypt, Bahrain, Ukraine, and Belarus. In essence, leaders would hire VRG to
plant covert operatives in opposition groups, where they would incite
violence—discrediting anti-regime forces and justifying forceful crackdowns.
American spies also believed that the Cape Town-born Atlas, who had been

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active since the early 1980s, had some history of collaboration with Paul
Manafort—another third-world political sellsword, who for a time had chaired
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for president.

Although there was no evidence directly linking Atlas to Manafort’s activities

in America, in November 2020, Atlas had founded a U.S.-based company,
Victoria Road LLC, through his longtime U.S. associate and attorney Paul
Bosko. Corporate filings showed that Bosko had at the same time registered a
company called Oryx Strategy Associates, which received $2.8 million from
the pro-Trump American Resurgence Super PAC, which had also been
founded in November 2020. According to FEC disclosures, the vast majority
of American Resurgence’s funding came from right-wing billionaire Jessica
Draper, and its executive director was former Steve Bannon acolyte Brian
Crudo, who had told Breitbart that the organization would be “using new
media and citizen journalism to support populist-nationalist candidates.” But
the numbers didn’t lend themselves to an ordinary explanation. ARPAC only
had a $3.5 million total budget for the period in question—so why was it giving
80 percent of its money to a brand-new shell company with no discernible
activities in new media or citizen journalism? It was a compelling question,
but Glazer still had no concrete evidence that Ahlberg was an agent
provocateur, and no proof that he was ever employed by VRG.

If Glazer’s suspicions were correct, Ahlberg had likely instigated violence at

other incidents over the preceding half year. There were literally thousands of
hours of footage and hundreds of thousands of photos documenting those
incidents, but combing through all that was a herculean task. So at the
suggestion of another March 27 Circle reporter, Glazer turned to an unlikely
source for help. Posting anonymously to 4chan, he shared the three photos he

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had of Ahlberg, asking “Reports saying this guy might be a paid protester. Can
we get any face shots of him at other protests/riots since 2020?”

Within several hours, 4chan—a combination of ingenious hivemind and bilge

for the internet’s ugliest impulses—had scoured available recordings and
identified about 75 images that users claimed might be Ahlberg. Glazer and a
colleague spent the next morning poring over them, blowing up details on
their monitors and peering into blurry pixels trying to see if any of the passing
resemblances might actually be their man. None of them were. The noses were
wrong, the heights were off, or the builds were too schlubby. But one of the
images included no face. A video still shot from a phone camera, it shows a
black-clad man wearing a motorcycle helmet with a Voices Rising decal,
lighting an American flag on fire as other protesters nearby look on. He’s
holding his right hand at an awkward angle to avoid the flames, and his sleeve
has slipped partway down to reveal a tattooed forearm. The user labeled and
highlighted three similarities to the tattoos in the Oktoberfest image: what
they believed was an eiwaz rune, a tiwaz rune (or possibly just an arrow), and
what looked like the bottom half of a black sun. But the image was too grainy
to be certain.

Glazer followed up to ask where the video came from, and got a link to a 48-
second YouTube clip shot at the Jonathan Ortega protests in Houston. The
tattoos were visible for just 8 frames, but the difference in angles as the arm
twists during that brief moment allowed better image analysis. Glazer’s editors
sent the footage to a pair of industry-leading experts, and March 27 Circle
members passed it on to several other qualified specialists. In all, five out of
seven forensic video analysts concluded with high confidence that the tattoos

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of the man in Houston matched those of Lance Ahlberg, with the other two
sharing the same conclusion with moderate confidence.

That left little doubt that Ahlberg was traveling around the country trying to
provoke trouble, but to go public, Glazer still needed a firm link to Simon Atlas
and the Victoria Road Group. The trouble was, he was a virtual ghost. By the
latter part of May, half a dozen reporters were devoting significant time to the
story—mostly on a volunteer basis—but they could find no records or
witnesses who could confirm his employment. One journalist, contacting
Ahlberg’s parents in Tennessee under false pretenses, was abruptly hung up
on. A distant cousin said that last he’d heard, Ahlberg had been working in
Algeria.

But then, a breakthrough. A belated court records upload in North Carolina

showed that several months earlier, Ahlberg had been sued in Onslow County
small claims court by a woman who turned out to have been his landlady.
Glazer spoke with her on the phone, and his scanned handwritten notes record
increasing excitement. After she explained the circumstances of the property
damage judgment, she recounted Ahlberg moving into her rental property in
November 2020 (Glazer triple-underlined the month and year), explaining
that he was a retired Navy SEAL who had been living overseas for more than a
decade (Glazer enclosed the timeframe in a thick box), and that he expected to
be traveling a lot for work (Glazer emphasized this with four exclamation
points). He asked whether Ahlberg had given the name of his employer. The
woman said she didn’t remember it, but that he’d written it on the tenancy
application form. He had her fax it over right away. Half an hour later, the
machine spat out a still-warm message, and there it was, scrawled out in
ungainly block capitals: Victoria Road LLC.

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That all but sealed it, at least as far as Glazer’s own suspicions were concerned.
Yet the Post’s leadership wanted such an explosive story to be buttressed with
firsthand testimony on VRG’s modus operandi. They wanted a defector. So
Glazer went back to the well with his intelligence community sources, pressing
for any other nuggets that might turn up someone with inside knowledge of
how Simon Atlas did business. One contact was aware that in 2015, Atlas had
set up a London-based subsidiary called Incursus Strategy Ltd, seemingly
aimed at the European political consultancy market. But the startup seemed to
have never gotten off the ground. Seizing on this, Glazer found records
showing that in early 2017, Incursus had sued its former managing director
Clive Dowell for £1.2 million, claiming fraudulent misuse of company
resources. The falling out made him a good prospect to give up his old boss’s
secrets.

T
WO DAYS LATER, Glazer hopped on a plane to Heathrow to meet

Dowell in person. An ex-Royal Marine, Dowell had been an operative

for Atlas for nine years, participating in and later organizing
provocateur actions for VRG in half a dozen countries including Kenya, Sri
Lanka, and Equatorial Guinea. At their meeting in the Westbury Mayfair
Hotel, Dowell came across as truthful and forthright, but Glazer had to
carefully assess how the fraud suit might impact his credibility. In Dowell’s
telling, Incursus had tried shopping its services around to populist right-wing
candidates across the Continent, but found relatively little appetite for the
direct-action tactics that Atlas specialized in. Dowell felt they should pivot to
other kinds of services—such as crafted media stunts, promotion of viral
political videos, and helping populist groups network with each other—but
Atlas was never comfortable in the EU political landscape and wouldn’t adapt.

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Atlas blamed him for the company’s woes, ultimately firing him and, when
Dowell refused his extravagant demands for reimbursement, sued out of spite.
They ultimately settled on a small payment, but the legal fees had been
ruinous. So Dowell was more than willing to speak to Glazer off-the-record,
but warned that he couldn’t be quoted on anything.

Glazer took careful notes as Dowell walked him through VRG’s business
model—explaining the artful innuendo that allowed clients to request their
services while retaining a pretense of ignorance. Positioning brawlers in
peaceful crowds was “strategic action to discredit anti-government factions.”
Provoking demonstrator attacks against police was “exposing violent elements
within opposition groups.” Spreading rumors about impending violence
against demonstrators was “counter-messaging against elements causing civil
disorder.” Dowell detailed how operatives were recruited and screened, the
training they received on how to avoid arrest, and the influence Simon wielded
to get his guys out of the scrapes they inevitably sometimes got into. He paid
well—some at VRG would make over $270,000 for nine months of work—and
got silent loyalty in return.

In his notes, Glazer marveled at the ambivalence with which Dowell talked
about his own actions. Sometimes he took on an almost confessional tone,
seemingly well aware that the operations he was clinically describing involved
violence against innocent human beings. But when the conversation turned
more philosophical, Dowell expressed no remorse. Most of the opposition
factions he targeted were just as bloodthirsty as the governments they were
trying to depose, he reasoned, and propping up authoritarian strongmen
helped prevent the chaos and sectarian slaughter that so often attended their

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falls. “Iraq, Libya, Syria…” Dowell said. “More than a million dead. That’s the
real evil.”

After getting more information about Lance Ahlberg’s work for the company
and further background on the relationship between Atlas and Paul Bosko,
Glazer pressed Dowell for links to others who might be willing to speak with
him. But Dowell didn’t think there were any. Even the few former VRG
operatives who had become disaffected for one reason or another knew better
than to betray Simon’s trust to a reporter. So Glazer made his pitch, arguing
that Dowell was the only man alive in a position to stand up to him on the
record—and that this could be the ultimate revenge against the one who had
cost him so dearly. But Dowell said this was impossible, for three reasons.
First, he believed he would face serious reprisals for doing so. Second, many of
the operations he recounted entailed criminal acts whose statutes of
limitations had not run out. Finally, publicly attributing those comments to
him would palpably harm Dowell’s new risk management consultancy. After
an hour of wrangling, Glazer managed to cajole Dowell into at least being
quoted as an anonymous source.

Glazer landed back in America to a package at home that had been forwarded
from one of his close colleagues. That reporter had been developing a West
Wing source who’d grown disillusioned with the administration, and on
learning of the VRG story, sent the source a “wish list” of types of information
that might be helpful. A week later, the source had sent him a handwritten
copy of an email from Stephen Miller’s assistant referring to a meeting with
Paul Bosko over Thanksgiving weekend in 2020. That was a tremendous
coup—since it placed Trump’s deputy chief of staff directly in conversation
with Simon Atlas’s business partner—but without a means to confirm the

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email’s authenticity, Glazer needed some way to verify that the meeting had
occurred. It appeared that Miller had been at Mar-a-Lago on the date implied
in the email, so Glazer and a couple of March 27 Circle members searched
through all the Instagram photos tagged there that day, armed with a
headshot of Bosko for comparison. If they could catch him lurking in the
background of someone’s selfie, that would place him definitively on site for
the meeting. Alas, no such luck.

But then another March 27er called Glazer on his burner phone to report a
masterstroke. The leaked email implied that the meeting was early in the
morning, and Bosko lived in suburban Maryland, so he’d almost certainly
come down the day before and spent the night. So the reporter had drawn up a
list of every hotel within a half hour’s drive from Mar-a-Lago and began calling
them posing as Bosko. He had stayed there the previous November, he said,
but needed to know whether his check-in date was the 27rd or 28th. After a few
dead-ends, a helpful desk clerk at the Tideline Ocean Resort and Spa
confirmed that he’d checked in on the 28th. Cooking up a sad story about a tax
audit, the reporter asked if she could possibly dig up the receipt and send him
a copy at his work email (the newly-registered pbosko@boskopartners.com).
She’d happily obliged.

Glazer now had a case powerful enough for publication. He had confirmation
that one of Trump’s closest allies had funneled $2.8 million dollars to the
partner of one of the world’s shadiest political operatives, known to specialize
in violent provocations at opposition demonstrations. He knew that one of
that man’s employees, Lance Ahlberg, had committed unprovoked criminal
assault at one demonstration in Washington, and had committed a highly
provocative act at at least one other, in Houston. And now he could show

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strong evidence that the Victoria Road Group’s U.S. representative had indeed
been almost walking distance from Mar-a-Lago on the day a leaked email said
the Principal Deputy White House Chief of Staff had met with him. And all
this fit into the larger context of unsubstantiated claims by anti-Trump groups
that provocateurs were being planted at protests all the way back to the
George Floyd riots, and several notable incidents—including the murder of
Ashley Davis—at which violence seemed to have been incited by small groups
of unidentified individuals.

The story now escalated to the highest levels of decision-making at the Post.
Executive editor Marty Baron began looping in all the people who would need
to sign off on the piece before they could go to press. Baron had earned a
reputation for fearlessly taking on powerful interests when, as editor of the
Boston Globe, he led the paper in exposing massive clerical sex abuse within
the Catholic Church. Now, he knew better than anyone in the building that a
story like this had to be rock-solid. After going through hard copies of Glazer’s
notes, Baron summoned a senior editors meeting to try to poke holes in the
story. For more than five hours, Baron, investigations editor Jeff Leen, deputy
investigations editor Eric Rich, and managing editors Cameron Barr and Tracy
Grant battered Glazer with questions and what-ifs. He managed to answer
everything as satisfactorily as possible, and they were all impressed with the
thoroughness and depth of his research. Still, Baron and Leen were concerned
about Dowell’s credibility, and asked Glazer to try again to confirm his story
with other ex-VRG employees. Meanwhile, Baron would be bringing more
eyes onto the piece—both for fact-checking and to ensure that it would hold up
to fierce legal scrutiny. He placed Eric Rich in charge of internal security,
keeping the project on a need-to-know basis and ensuring that nothing that

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might identify Glazer’s sources was put on computers connected to the
internet.

The next morning, Glazer got back in touch with Dowell, pushing hard to get
names of Simon Atlas’s other castoffs. At last, Dowell relented, and over the
next few days, he worked those contacts, confirming key information about
VRG and trying to persuade them to speak on the record. None were willing,
but in the end he managed to get not-for-attribution quotes from two of them.
He brought these back to Baron and Leen, who pronounced themselves
satisfied with the piece on June 2.

When solicited for comment, all the relevant players—Ahlberg, Bosko, Atlas,
Draper, Crudo, Miller—had refused to offer statements. But soon, legal threat
letters began pouring in, bearing the signatures of $1,500-an-hour name
partners at superelite firms. Jessica Draper retained former White House
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to mitigate the fallout, and over the next 24
hours several other crisis communications firms began lobbying Washington
Post publisher and CEO Fred Ryan to kill the story. Trump lawyer Jay
Sekulow sent an ominous warning that publication would result in the Post’s
“annihilation” and the “personal civil and/or criminal prosecution” of every
reporter and editor who’d had anything to do with the piece. That Friday
night, Kayleigh McEnany called Marty Baron at home, vowing that if he went
ahead with the article, the White House would pull the paper’s press
credentials and shut down all access to its journalists. According to several
people familiar with the conversation, Baron minced no words in telling her
where she could shove it. If McEnany locked WaPo out, he said, fellow news
organizations would boycott in solidarity, and she’d find an empty press pool
on Monday morning. She backed down.

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On Saturday, June 5, Baron summoned senior staff for a final strategy
meeting. Glazer, who’d been huddling with Post security after receiving a
death threat on his home phone that morning, was 15 minutes late. There was
a last discussion about bylines—because several colleagues had made key
contributions to the research, Glazer generously offered to share full
authorship for the piece. But none of them wanted it. Partly this was out of
respect for Glazer’s indispensable role in uncovering the story. Yet fear also
played a role. They all understood perfectly well what kind of heat this would
bring down on whoever became known for authoring the article. In the end,
three—Scott Higham, Ana Lestak, and Cathy Wuerl—accepted “additional
reporting” credits, leaving Glazer with the sole byline. Legal ran him through
the warnings in no uncertain terms: he would likely face one or more
multimillion dollar lawsuits, and he could expect to have his home raided and
files seized by federal investigators. There was a good chance he would have to
decide between divulging his sources or spending time in jail. Glazer was
advised to get his calls screened and report all threats of violence promptly to
both the company and the police. Whatever happened, Fred Ryan said, the
paper stood behind him fully. Anything the Post could do to defend him, it
would—a guarantee that Ryan said came down from owner Jeff Bezos himself.

On Sunday, there was a brief emergency as lawyers raised new concerns about
some of the language in the already-laid out 5,500-word article—but the crisis
was averted with a few slight edits, and Marty Baron gave his final signoff just
after noon. He’d briefly considered delaying the piece by a week to allow
additional reportage on the points in question—but decided that would signal
to the administration that its intimidation was working and provoke even
more. If the story had been about any previous presidency, Baron would have

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wanted to hold back in hopes of achieving a more comprehensive exposé. Yet
in the current climate, with reporters being harassed by law enforcement and
potential sources in immense fear of reprisal, it was better to publish the facts
they had, hoping that the story or the administration’s reaction to it would
shake loose more information to allow even deeper investigation.

With the article put to bed—headlined “Documents link White House to firm
paid to incite violence at protests”—Baron and Eric Rich oversaw destruction
of materials that could be used to identify the leakers. Two encrypted digital
copies of Baron’s data were hidden in safe locations, but the full trove and
most sensitive information remained only in Glazer’s physical possession. He
put everything on a disguised thumb drive and gave it to Julia, who was flying
out to L.A. that night on business. Then he wiped everything from his own
secure laptop, disassembled the hard drive, clipped the data-bearing platters
into slivers with metal shears, and dropped it all into a restaurant dumpster
somewhere in Alexandria. He took Gabby out for pizza, then stayed up to call
Julia when she landed in California before turning in for the night.

W
HEN JULIA RACED back to D.C. the next day following Trump’s

tweet, she dozed on the plane and was disoriented when the
landing at Reagan jolted her awake. She struggled for a moment
to recall whether the president’s threat had been real or part of a dream. But
reality came thudding back when she slipped her phone off airplane mode and
the poor little device entered a paroxysm of chimes, dings, gongs, and buzzes.
The woman next to her gave her a knowing look. “Your kids don’t know where
to find things in the kitchen?” They unfastened their seatbelts. “No,” Julia said
crisply, relishing the shock of what she was about to say, “the president just
encouraged 60 million people to kill my husband.”

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In the Uber home, Julia started wading through her messages. She was
relieved to see that Twitter had deleted the original tweet, but it was only
modest comfort. The threat was already out there. Then a video in her
newsfeed stopped her cold. Trump, returning from a private New York
fundraiser earlier in the day, disembarks from Marine One on the South Lawn
and heads toward the Residence. Reporters barrage him with shouted
questions, including whether that morning’s tweet was a call for Michael
Glazer to be murdered. “I am not calling for his murder, no,” Trump says. “I’m
just saying that maybe America would be better off without him. Thank you.”
He turns, ignoring the sharp squall of follow-ups, and continues on his way.
Another torrent of notifications rattled Julia’s phone as friends and loved ones
watched Trump double down nearly in real time.

When she came in the front door, Michael and Gabby wrapped her in a
wordless group hug—as Michael conducted a conference call with his lawyer
and Post editors. A little while later, their good friend Tom Charen came over
with Ethiopian carry-outs. It helped to have someone else in the house. Gabby
was distraught, but holding up well. She and Julia curled up together on their
loveseat and took comfort reading encouraging messages from near and far.
Michael was pinned down on the phone late into the night, talking with
journalists and politicians, but he had been advised to hold off on interviews
until a press conference that had been scheduled for 10:00 a.m. the next
morning at the Washington Post’s offices. In between, he fielded calls of
support from dozens of prominent figures, including Weekly Standard
founder and leading Never Trumper Bill Kristol, former commanding general
in Iraq Ray Odierno, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, and
former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. For a time, Michael was told that

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police protection might be arranged for him that night, but ultimately it didn’t
work out. Charen, a retired Green Beret, had brought a gun, though, and
reassured the Glazers that he’d sleep over on their couch.

Once Gabby went to her room for the night and Michael collapsed into bed in
utter exhaustion, Julia—still keyed up and unable to sleep—slipped into their
soundproofed media room to watch coverage from the day on their big screen.
She saw accounts of comms staffers rushing into work early as everyone on the
Hill raced to be out front in either condemning the president’s tweet or
minimizing it. While a CNN countdown ticked off each second until the
Washington Post press conference, a Politico reporter told Jake Tapper that
Trump had received a frosty reception at his New York fundraiser—with big
donors arriving in a sour mood after already watching hours of TV coverage.
Among Trump’s opponents in the media, there was blistering outrage. On
MSNBC, the New York Times’s Bret Stephens told Chris Hayes, “This is
nothing less than a call for political violence… This is Henry II and ‘Will no
one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ all over again.” On Hayes’s prompting,
Stephens explained the reference to viewers—a medieval English king whose
intemperate remarks were interpreted by his knights as a command to murder
the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. “This is the president …
winkingly encouraging one of his unhinged followers to go out there and kill a
journalist he doesn’t like,” Stephens said. “Congress has a duty, an obligation
to impeach and remove him.”

Yet Julia couldn’t help appreciating a certain sickening brilliance to the

president’s remarks. On every news channel, in every timeslot, people were
talking and arguing about Trump’s tweet—with virtually no mention of violent
instigators, ARCAP’s $2.8 million payment to VRG, or Stephen Miller’s

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meeting with Paul Bosko. In 132 characters, Trump had sucked up all the air
in the room and taken the country’s focus off Glazer’s story before most people
could even read it. The piece had become yesterday’s news by the time it hit
newsstands. Indeed, as Julia pulled up the coverage on Fox, she saw the
president’s supporters celebrating this precise dynamic. “This wasn’t a threat,”
the white-maned Parler firebrand Bill Mitchell said on Hannity. “This was
brilliant media manipulation.”

The next morning over breakfast, Michael did press conference prep with his
lawyer while scanning through his Twitter mentions for choice death threats
to quote. But they ultimately decided, in consultation with Marty Baron, that
giving any more attention to the threats would be counterproductive. The Post
sent a car and a bodyguard for him at 8:00 a.m., and he arrived in the
newsroom to a swarm of colleagues offering hugs and handshakes. A mostly-
supportive crowd was gathering outside, and with impeachment chants
ringing in the background, the networks all carried live coverage of the press
conference. Adhering to a careful strategy, Glazer tried to shift the focus back
to the VRG story—taking advantage of the rolling cameras to highlight the key
issues and elaborate on the questions the investigation raised. He concluded
his prepared remarks with a “call on the president to address the substance” of
the article—“publicly, forthrightly, and immediately.”

A chorus of respected voices from across the political spectrum added forceful
condemnations throughout the day, even from conservatives. Senator Mitt
Romney issued a statement that the president had “defiled the platform of his
office,” and a spokesman for former president George W. Bush said that he
was “deeply dismayed” by the comments. Trump’s former White House
Counsel Don McGahn called the tweet and South Lawn remarks “wildly

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irresponsible” and “dangerous,” and called on his former boss to retract or
resign. Dozens of celebrities and entertainers called loudly for a second
impeachment.

Meanwhile, the president’s mouthpieces ramped up a frantic character

assassination campaign against Michael Glazer. A string of Fox guests called
Glazer a “totally discredited guy,” a “wacko Trump hater,” and “an Obama
bootlicker... Nobody in the military takes him seriously.” A Breitbart op-ed
implied that he had once given away the location of U.S. soldiers on-air in
Afghanistan, leading to a rocket attack and several American fatalities.

That night, Hannity featured a debate between conservative documentarian

Dinesh D’Souza and retired Navy lieutenant commander Evan Vrabec, one of
several enormously promising officers who had resigned their commissions
rather than participate in what they considered were illegally indiscriminate
airstrikes in Yemen. “The president’s comments targeted an American citizen
for violence,” Vrabec said, “and he must be held accountable.” D’Souza
dismissed the controversy as a “total non-story,” and said that viewers should
“focus on the Muslim terrorist in Tampa who killed three hundred Americans,
and received aid from the Democratic Party and a range of leftist groups.” But
Vrabec took the bait: “It was 97, Dinesh.” D’Souza’s jaw slackened in
scandalized horror. “You’re defending him!” he shouted. “What difference
does it make how many? Sean, the fact that this guy’s first instinct is to defend
the terrorist says everything we need to know.” Then the shouting began. By
the time the segment ended, Trump’s tweet about Michael Glazer was long
forgotten.

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Even when pro-Trump pundits did discuss Glazer’s investigation
substantively, they were already laying the groundwork for rationalizing his
actions if more proof came out. On Newsmax TV, conservative columnist Kurt
Schlichter insisted that the article “is a bunch of high-school gossip from
anonymous sources… The whole story is probably fake news.” But even if
Trump had hired VRG through his intermediaries, Schlichter said, “politics is
hardball. This is no different from what the left has been doing for decades.
Saul Alinsky, Luigi Galleani, SDS, the Weather Underground—look it up!”
David Yarbrough posted a Facebook Live video asking “what about Robert
Creamer and Scott Foval? Those were the democratic operatives caught doing
the exact same thing as VRG. If Trump is fighting fire with fire, I say that’s
exactly what we need.”

On Wednesday morning, House speaker Tim Ryan held a press conference on

Capitol Hill, flanked by senior Democratic representatives and a handful of
Republicans—calling on Trump to formally apologize and issue a statement
denouncing political violence. If he did not, they said, they would “explore all
constitutional options” to deter him from making such threats in the future.
Minority Leader McCarthy, whose office had cited a family commitment, was
pointedly absent.

Yet GOP leadership was not inactive. Under intense pressure to denounce
Trump’s comments but not wishing to break publicly with the president,
House and Senate powerbrokers spent the bulk of the afternoon politicking
and arm-twisting anyone they thought might have influence over the
commander-in-chief—hoping that he would take the initiative to apologize
and take them off the hook for making a hard decision. At the White House, a
small group including Senate President Pro Tem Chuck Grassley and

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Republican Whip John Thune sat down for a stormy meeting with Rudy
Giuliani and Kayleigh McEnany, trying to drive their message home. At one
point, the exchange became so heated that—according to two witnesses—
Giuliani refused to say another word until Kevin McCarthy’s comms director
Mark Ashman was ejected from the room. Neither Grassley nor Thune wanted
to die on that hill, so out Ashman went.

At last, though, Trump’s senior staff realized that a retraction was the only way
to stave off rebellion within the president’s own party. So they sat him down in
the Residence and began the exhausting task of coaxing, hounding, and
flattering him into walking back the Glazer comments. Although Stephen
Miller reportedly tried to convince Trump to stand firm, Giuliani, McEnany,
and Ivanka ultimately persuaded him that there was no other way. McEnany’s
office called the networks as speechwriter Teddy Potts made tweaks to a draft
Thune’s staff had imposed on them—and at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, President
Trump came on television for a short, scripted address. “I denounce violence
in all its forms,” he said, and expressed regret that comments he “intended to
be humorous” unintentionally “may have gone too far.” Here, he extemporized
that he was only expressing “anger at the false reporting of a biased reporter.”
Returning to the prepared remarks, Trump added: “I humbly apologize to the
reporter and his family and … I do not support violence against any reporter.”
He concluded with a pledge to “at the appropriate time, set up a fund, from my
own money, to protect reporters around the world from all forms of violence.”

Ad-libs aside, the speech mollified Republicans, leaving Ryan and Schumer
without the votes to impose any serious consequences. Thursday’s news was
dominated by the crash of Lufthansa flight 7252 on landing in Delhi, and
Glazer got back to work at the Post, following up on leads that had been stirred

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up by the original story. With police protection still not forthcoming due to an
absence of threats judged credible and specific, Jeff Bezos had personally
ordered armed Amazon security to place Glazer under round-the-clock guard.
On Friday, FiveThirtyEight showed that among polls conducted since Trump’s
tweet, his approval had plummeted to 35 percent. But he was out of
immediate political danger.

S
ATURDAY, JUNE 12 was Gabby Glazer’s graduation from Thomas

Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a highly selective

magnet school in Alexandria that U.S. News & World Report had
ranked America’s #1 high school that year. The ceremony was scheduled for
7:00 p.m., to be held at EagleBank Arena—the 10,000-seat athletic venue that
was normally home court for the George Mason University Patriots. Michael
Cava, Amazon’s chief of security, called Michael Glazer that morning urging
him not to go. “The threats we’re seeing here are off the charts,” Cava said
from the company’s Seattle headquarters. “Our guys can’t do their jobs as
effectively in an uncontrolled crowd like that.” But Glazer was adamant. Gabby
had won an impressive slew of honors in TJHSST’s notoriously competitive
academic rat-race, earning a coveted place in Stanford’s Class of 2025—and as
a dad, he wasn’t about to let Trump deny him the fatherly pride of watching
her victory lap. And besides, he’d be wearing the Kevlar vest the company had
given him. Cava sighed and relented.

That afternoon, Michael, Julia, and Gabby piled into an armored Suburban
with three Amazon executive protection officers, captained by a barrel-
chested, flat-topped ex-Army Ranger named Ron Benavidez. They were
meeting Julia’s sister and brother-in-law Katherine and David Barnes for an
early celebratory meal at The Warehouse, a buzzy steaks-and-seafood place

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with caricatures of local notables up on the wall. The driver made a wrong turn
after his Waze app crashed, and the Glazers arrived five minutes late for their
2:30 p.m. reservation. While Benavidez and his team loitered unobtrusively in
the private dining room, the family enjoyed gourmet dishes by Thailand-born
chef Sert Ruamthong—followed by a coconut cheesecake inscribed
“Congratulations, Gabby! Go Cardinal!” in raspberry frosting. The adults each
toasted her with misty eyes, then they all packed into the Suburban at around
4:30 p.m. for the ride to GMU.

They dropped Gabby off at the loading dock behind the arena where her
classmates were gathering, then stopped in the parking lot, waiting for the
doors to open at 6:00 p.m. Benavidez left one man—burley NYPD veteran
Anthony Santero—standing guard at the Suburban, and went up to the
security checkpoint at the building’s south entrance with former Bezos
bodyguard Stan Correll, a deceptively wiry supermarathoner with a deep tan
and sandy goatee hidden under his black facemask. Instead of the
stereotypical Secret Service-style dark suits and ties, they wore khakis, open
button-downs and navy blazers. With their matching tinted Ray-Bans, they
almost looked like some graduating senior’s yachtsman uncles.

At the entrance, they found GMU event staff still setting up in front of the
doors. Four metal detectors, and tables next to each one for inspecting purses
and bags. Crowd control ropes to divide the attendees into orderly lines.
Separation markers for social distancing. From inside the arena, they could
hear the faint sounds of a power drill and Mexican music on a stereo.

A facilities manager came out and confronted them, squinting warily from
under a GMU Patriots visor. He had seen them sizing up the checkpoint a little

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too closely, and felt something wasn’t right. Benavidez introduced himself and
asked for the venue security head. The facilities manager asked what it was
regarding. Benavidez said they were the personal protection team from
Amazon. He explained that his boss had left messages in advance about
concealed carry in the venue. They flashed their Amazon ID badges and
Virginia Concealed Handgun Permits. The facilities manager squawked a call
into his walkie-talkie.

A moment later, a figure in blue appeared behind the glass doors and came out
toward them. Police lieutenant Johnny Liu, an eighth-year cop who had come
to GMU from Arizona State just three weeks before, bore down on the Amazon
bodyguards, switching on his bodycam.

“Good evening, sir,” Benavidez says on the footage. “We’re the Amazon team.
If there’s any question, you can get Chief Bay on the horn and he can handle
this.” GMU’s chief of police Leonard Bay Jr. was a nationally renowned expert
on executive protection and active shooter preparedness. He had run global
security for Sun Microsystems during the dot-com boom, and Michael Cava
had trusted him enough to reach out personally to explain the situation.

But Bay hadn’t gotten Cava’s voicemails. He was without cell service in
London to give a talk, and was already fast asleep at the Marriott Grosvenor
Square. Apparently no one at the department switchboard had thought to
warn Cava about this, so Liu had received no heads-up, and was now faced
with two unexpected strangers asking to bring guns into EagleBank Arena.
Worse, the GMU police had just done a three-hour training on how to resist
social engineering—techniques criminals can use to talk their way past
security. One of the scenarios Liu had roleplayed was called “pretexting,”

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where an intruder claims authority from the officer’s supervisor. Alarm bells
went off in the lieutenant’s head.

On the recording, he informs them that according to University Policy 1120,

George Mason University is a weapons-free campus. Absolutely no firearms
would be allowed in the arena without approval from his chain of command.
Benavidez protests that they’d already gotten it cleared with Chief Bay, but Liu
repeats that he didn’t know anything about that. Benavidez starts to protest
again, and Liu barks a code into his radio calling for backup. He’s breathing
hard. “Sir, I can give you both two choices. You can either surrender your
firearms for the duration of the event and pick them up from Police and Safety
Headquarters afterward, or I can have you escorted off campus right now.”

At this point, Benavidez was thinking over his options. Since the Super Bowl
attack, security at all large venues had been paranoiac and turbocharged with
adrenaline. There had obviously been a major miscommunication, and
attempts to set the lieutenant straight would only risk arrest or worse. The
priority had to be de-escalation. “Alright,” Benavidez says. “We’ll surrender
our firearms. Direct us how to proceed.”

Two other GMU police officers arrive within moments. At gunpoint, Benavidez
follows their commands in slipping the Glock 43 from the holster at his hip
and placing it on the security table grip-first. Then Correll does the same. The
officers secure both pistols, then wand and frisk the bodyguards thoroughly.
Liu tells them that they’re free to go, and gives them a number to call to
arrange pickup of their firearms later.

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Back at the Suburban, all three members of the protection detail had a
powwow, filling Santero in on what happened, and then calling Seattle for
guidance. Cava was out of the office, but another security manager advised
them to proceed with a revised plan. Everyone who entered the arena would
pass through the metal detectors, and Benavidez and Correll would protect
Glazer from any physical assaults during the ceremony. Correll would go
through security first and save them all seats near an exit. The others would
wait in the SUV, then Benavidez would escort the Glazers and Barneses inside
a few minutes before commencement started to minimize exposure standing
in line. Santero would hide in the vehicle with his gun to avoid questions by
GMU police, and then pick everybody up right at the entrance when the event
was over. When they hung up with Seattle, it was 5:46 p.m.

At that same moment, surveillance footage shows a gray 2005 Dodge Durango
pulling onto the campus from Braddock Road, driven by a 50-year-old
locksmith named Dale Lee Baker. Baker had come half an hour from his home
in Manassas, where a note on the door instructed a neighbor to feed his cat for
the next three days.

Born in Athens, Georgia on March 11, 1971, he had lived a life similar in its
outlines to millions of working class white men of his generation. His father
Ray, a bottling plant foreman, had been killed by a drunk driver when he was
12. His mother June worked three secretarial jobs and had two short-lived
remarriages. Dale was an indifferent student, but excelled in shop class, and
was remembered by friends as an avid woodworker.

He joined the Army right out of high school, serving as a machinist from 1989
to 1991. He frequently told people later that he had been in Desert Storm, but

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in reality never shipped out overseas, and was separated from service later
that year due to an equipment handling accident that crushed a foot and left
him with a $435.69 monthly disability benefit.

Baker moved back in with his mother near Atlanta, and worked a succession of
odd jobs, punctuated by longer stints as a forklift driver, funeral home
custodian, movie theater usher, and video store clerk. After his mother died of
lung cancer in 2010, he moved to Appomattox, Virginia for a factory job that
lasted eight months before being outsourced. He found a cheap room in
Manassas on Craigslist, and at the suggestion of a friend, trained in nearby
Alexandria to become a locksmith, receiving his state license four months
later.

In 2013, Baker had received a small inheritance from his grandmother, and
combined with modest savings from his growing locksmithing business, this
provided the down payment for a 1-bedroom condo he purchased for $98,500.
Later that year, he paid $6,300 cash for the 2005 Durango—another find on
Craigslist.

It’s around this time that Baker became more politically active. He had once
been registered as a Democrat, and told coworkers he voted for John Edwards
in Georgia’s 2004 Democratic primary. There’s no record of changed party
registration, but by 2013, his few friends remember him ranting about Obama
and his supposedly forged birth certificate.

Baker is not known to have ever had a steady girlfriend, but he did create a
profile on adultfriendfinder.com, a personals site known for catering to casual
sex and swinging. Under the username “deaglefiddy71,” he described himself

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as a “decorated vet” and “USA patriot” looking for “White or Hispanic or
Asian” women for “Erotic Chat or Email” or “1-on-1 Sex.” Under “Male
Endowment,” he was listed as “Short/Average.”

Perhaps having had less success than he desired, Baker soon became
interested in the men’s rights activism (MRA) movement, purchasing half a
dozen books lamenting the rise of feminism and the claimed liberal fashion for
women to mate with non-whites and unassertive “beta males.” In 2015, he
registered on Reddit under the username “deagle1971,” and although he did
not write any posts himself, he upvoted several dozen postings and comments
in the /r/mensrights subreddit, one of the internet’s main MRA communities.
Several of these upvoted items attributed their grievances against women to
“Cultural Marxism”—a sort of ur-narrative within the nascent alt-right,
contending that a group of 20th-century German-Jewish philosophers known
as the Frankfurt School were responsible for just about everything wrong with
society. According to this idea, the Frankfurt School’s writings, today called
social critical theory, were designed to insidiously undermine traditional,
patriarchal Western civilization and replace it with a relativist, communist
worldwide government. All the other ills, alt-righters said—feminism,
multiculturalism, atheism, LGBT tolerance, and political correctness—were
but branches of the Cultural Marxist tree.

This view led Baker to the subreddit dedicated to the one man MRA activists
said could smash Cultural Marxism once and for all: Donald J. Trump. On
/r/The_Donald, he found a toxic stew of conspiracy theories, bigotry, and
hero-worship of the half-facetiously styled “God Emperor Trump.” Despite
commenting on several posts promoting voter turnout, it does not appear that
Baker voted in Virginia’s March 1, 2016 GOP primary.

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Baker’s Facebook profile wasn’t very active—his 78 friends were mainly
cousins and buddies from the American Legion post in Manassas—but that
September he posted a link to an article titled “The Flight 93 Election.” The
essay, which appeared in a highbrow conservative intellectual journal called
the Claremont Review of Books, was written under the pseudonym “Publius
Decius Mus” by Michael Anton, a hotshot finance executive who would later
become a senior staffer on Trump’s National Security Council.

In the essay, Anton drew an extended metaphor. Hillary Clinton, the anointed
candidate of the establishment, was like murderous 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah,
piloting the airliner of state on a suicide mission to destruction. In this
catastrophized view, a “bipartisan junta” of elites had promoted decades of
unrestricted third-world immigration, which had given Democrats an
inexorably growing demographic advantage—and in 2016 they were “on the
cusp of a permanent victory” that would snuff out American self-government
forever. The result? “Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial
Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see.” American civilization buried
under a tsunami of unwashed foreigners from “alien cultures.” Trump, Anton
argued, was the only candidate who “has stood up to say: I want to live… I
want my country to live. I want my people to live.” By analogy, Trump was the
battering ram necessary to take back control of the plane. The election offered
a stark choice for conservatives: “[C]harge the cockpit or you die.” Baker’s
comment on the shared piece: “Heard about this on Rush. Dead on.”

Baker did vote in the general election, and after Trump’s surprise victory, he
began to comment favorably on increasingly extreme posts on
/r/The_Donald. One, from 2017, is a collage of portraits of Jewish CNN

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employees, each labeled with a blue Star of David, under the title “something
strange about CNN…can’t quite put my finger on it…” Baker’s remark:
“Interesting….” Another, from just before the subreddit was banned in 2020,
is based on a ghoulish historical photo of Nazi soldiers hanging Russian
partisans. Photoshopped over the partisans’ faces are those of two journalists
who had vexed Trump the most—David Farenthold of the Washington Post
and Maggie Haberman from the New York Times. In place of the grinning
executioners are the faces of Donald Trump, white nationalist congressman
Steve King, and alt-right provocateurs Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec. To
Baker, it was “probably what they deserve.”

But Baker’s Reddit history wasn’t all hate. He upvoted images of cats and dogs
cuddling, woodworking tutorials, and a video of a fireworks show in Japan.
His last comment, from May 14, 2021, came in response to a man in Alabama
who said he was suicidal after a contentious divorce: “Stay strong, brother.”

The day after the Super Bowl attack, Baker had posted two incongruous
statuses to Facebook, half an hour apart. First: “We must UNITE. No politics.
Feeling sick for all the victims right now.” Then: “DEPORT. ALL. MUSLIMS.”
The next day, his profile picture changed to an AP photo of a little blonde girl
crying and soaked in blood, taken amidst the carnage in Tampa. Then four
months of quiet, broken only by a handful of birthday messages in March.

On June 7, Baker had changed his cover photo to weathered-looking white text
on a black background: “47A:948a:1:i”—a citation of the section of the 2006
Military Commissions Act defining unlawful enemy combatants. It had been
originally posted to Twitter by @lionguardloyalist on April 28, following
Trump’s “sedition” comments.

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N
OW, BAKER PULLED into the lot outside EagleBank Arena, parking

in the handicap space closest to the south entrance. Around the

rear Disabled Veteran plate was a cluster of bumper stickers so
caricaturish that even Rachel Maddow would have considered it all a bit too
on the nose. By level of wear, one could trace the evolution of the driver’s
political views. Most faded were stickers reading “Impeach Obama” and
“Remember Benghazi.” Then there were stickers for “Trump 2016,” “Trump
2020,” “#StopTheCoup,” “Fauci for Prison,” “Antifa Hunting License,” “St.
Kyle of Kenosha,” “Trump 2024,” and “InfoWars.com.” A “Molon Labe”
sticker, Greek for “come and take [them],” quoted the 300 Spartans at
Thermopylae refusing to surrender their weapons to the Persian king Xerxes
I—a phrase oft repeated among Second Amendment activists. Another had an
image of a medieval crusader with a red cross on his shield: “Proud Infidel.”
Below that was a stylized reproduction of the bloodstained Ashley Davis Flag.
The two most recent, still pristine, were “Treason is a Capital Crime” and “I
Stand Against Sedition.”

Baker got out and stepped into the security line. The CCTV footage shows him
wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, an unzipped blue windbreaker, and an Atlanta
Braves cap. He’s about 5’10” with a slim build, and has a trimmed dark
mustache. He passes through security without incident and enters the arena at
6:07 p.m., eleven places behind Stan Correll.

About 170 feet away in the parked Suburban, Michael and Julia Glazer were
trying to make small talk with Katherine and David Barnes. A mutual friend
who had a small role in the new Jurassic World movie, a good Chinese
restaurant near Dupont Circle that just closed, the June Gloom weather. But

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the conversation inevitably drifted back to politics. David asked in tones of
concern about the backlash to Monday’s article. Julia mentioned the
heartening comments of support that they’d gotten from celebrities—Oprah,
Ellen DeGeneres, J.K. Rowling. But Michael dived right in with gallows
humor. That was his way, ever since his days writing home from Kuwait, when
he puckishly recounted in a letter to his parents all the symptoms of anthrax
he didn’t have. Now, he pulled out his phone and read the Barneses highlights
of threats from his Twitter mentions.

Michael dramatically affected a virtuosic range of dopey voices: Southern

rednecks, halfwit dullards, and cackling maniacs from deep in the twisted
recesses of his own imagination. Between and during tweets, he editorialized
in his own best newscaster deadpan, mocking the authors’ defects in spelling
and grammar. From @lancetwp_ohio: “TRAITAR SCUM!!! you will pay when
you least expect it #Barrett50 #MAGA.” From @deplorablebaron:
“Sharpenening my machete to carve up that cuck face of yours, buddy boy.
Hey, couldn’t make things any worse.” From @saxonrevolt1488, whose avatar
was a photo of feared Nazi secret police leader Reinhard Heydrich: “You better
watch, out (((Glazer))). Just because you dont wear a yamaka we still know the
truth. Zyklon B or straight to oven? Up 2 you tbh.”At first, Michael’s listeners
were apprehensive. The subject matter was just too dark to be funny. But his
defiant ebullience was so infectious that by the end, they were all roaring in
spite of themselves. The way he could segue seamlessly between characters
reminded Julia of Robin Williams. Michael’s routine did not include any of the
tweets threatening his family.

Finally, Benavidez knocked on the window and told them it was time to go.
He’d been on with Amazon and GMU police HQ for the past hour, but they

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still hadn’t gotten authorization to bring their guns into the arena or even
bypass security to enter and exit via the loading dock. So Benavidez rapped his
knuckles against Michael’s ribs to reassure himself that he was wearing his
Kevlar, and the five of them went up and caught the tail end of the security
line. They linked up with Correll in the stands a few minutes before the
student orchestra struck up the Trio from Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance
March No. 1,” and the graduands processed into the arena in their royal blue
robes.

The ceremony was long and uneventful. Two student speakers hit all the
timeworn notes of looking forward and looking back, following your dreams,
and today being the first day of the rest of our lives. Technology executive
Anne Toth, a TJ alum, gave a politely-received commencement address
reflecting on the relationship between science and democracy. The one
touching moment was a graduating senior singing Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel”
in honor of her mother, a doctor who had died of the coronavirus near the
start of the school year. Then, the class cycled up on stage to receive their
diplomas, assembly line-style. During Gabby’s brief moment in the sun,
Michael stood up to film with his phone camera. With ‘Glazer’ fairly early in
the alphabet, there was a lot of boredom afterward, but Michael and Julia both
made a point of cheering loudly for kids whose names they recognized as
Gabby’s friends. At 9:19 p.m., TJHSST’s principal pronounced the Class of
2021 officially graduated, and a blizzard of mortarboards flew up into the air
and back down onto the newly minted alumni.

The crowd began to pour out of the arena. Photo flashes flickered down on the
court, as parents swarmed the student section to embrace the graduates.
Gabby came up and found them in the stands. There were hugs and smiles all

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around. Masks came off briefly and Katherine Barnes took a series of photos
on her high-end camera—Gabby by herself, Gabby and Michael, Gabby and
Julia, all three of them together. Michael got Benavidez’s attention. “Should
we get going?”

“Not yet.” He explained that they were still waiting for Santero to come around
with the Suburban, and that the crowd would have to thin out more first. Once
he pulled up, Benavidez and Correll would hustle everybody right into the
vehicle—and thence back to the Glazer home in Rosemont.

Gabby brought some of her friends over for introductions or reintroductions.

The Glazers met a few sets of friends’ parents. More pictures.

The arena was finally thinning out. Over his wireless earpiece, Benavidez got
the call that Santero was idling out front. “Alright folks, let’s go.” Benavidez
beckoned broadly to the group. His big Ranger sergeant voice boomed again
over the chatter of the crowd. “Car’s out front. Time to roll.” He signaled to
Correll: You take rear cover, I’ll take front.

With Benavidez in point position, the party came out through the south
entrance and headed for the waiting Suburban. There were still about a
hundred people scattered across the plaza.

“Wait!” called Julia. “Where’s Gabby?”

They all stopped and looked around. Benavidez turned back to Correll. Stan
gave him a look: I thought she was up there with you.

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“Gabby! Gabby!” Both couples started calling out, trying to find her.

Then Julia spotted one of Gabby’s good friends in the crowd. She shouted the
girl’s name to get her attention. “Have you seen Gabby?”

“Yeah, she got pulled back in for pictures” with another family, she said.

Julia started jogging back toward the entrance. Katherine, David, and Michael
all started after her. “Hey!” Benavidez sprinted up to Julia, and grabbed her by
the shoulder. “You guys come with me to the car. I’ll send Stan inside for her.”

Just then—9:54 p.m.—Michael’s phone buzzed. “Hold up. Just got a text from
Gabby.” His eyes scanned the screen for a few seconds. “She wants us to come
back in and meet her computer team coach.”

An instant later, Dale Lee Baker—standing about six feet behind Glazer—
pointed a Desert Eagle pistol at his back and fired four .50 caliber rounds into
him in just over one second. Glazer went to the ground hard. Baker took one
step forward and fired three more shots down at him. One bullet ripped
through the muscles at the base of his neck. Another glanced off the pavement.
The third ricocheted off the concrete, penetrated Glazer’s skull just above his
left ear and tore through the temporal lobe of his brain.

Baker flung the pistol to the ground and raised his hands in surrender.

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