Transition Integrity Project, Part One

Yesterday the Trump campaign dropped a 21-post thread recapping the threats the Democrat Party poses to American institutions and norms. (They used the adjective democratic when they meant republican – for ours is a republic, not a democracy.) This review included the information in the infamous Twitter Files, and briefly mentioned the case of Missouri v. Biden. It also mentioned President Biden’s infamous speech of September 2, 2022, if only as to its subject matter. But the thread also mentioned one other item to which it then paid scant attention. This is the Transition Integrity Project, which advertises itself as a blueprint to stop a dictator from seizing power. That putative dictator was none other than Donald J. Trump. In fact, the Transition Integrity Project laid down a rationale and partial method for stealing the Election of 2020. Others would supply the working method – later.

Who founded the Transition Integrity Project, and who runs it?

The Transition Integrity Project is the brainchild of Rosa Brooks. She holds the impressive title of Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center. Today she has her own author page on the Web, where she advertises her books. Her latest: Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City. She bases that on her experiences as a Police Academy student and later a voluntary reserve police officer on patrol in the low-income residential quarter of Washington, D.C. Reviewers (like Kirkus) seem reluctant to discuss her policy prescriptions, but all agree that she immersed herself in the experience of policing some of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in America today.

CNAV believes that might contribute to her general attitude toward society today. But being the daughter of Democratic Socialist Barbara Ehrenreich cannot fail to have shaped her outlook even earlier.

Two other personalities are important to understanding the Transition Integrity Project. One is Nils Gilman, Senior Vice-President for Policy Development at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. They are, quite simply, a globalist think-tank with elements of trans-humanism and, of course, socialism. The other is Zoe Hudson, the Executive Director, who came to the Project from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

These three, then, are the brain trust of the Transition Integrity Project. To understand them is to understand the Project. This is vital, because if the Project were an individual, that individual would rate a diagnosis of paranoia, paranoid schizophrenia, or shared paranoid disorder.

What concerns the Project most?

The Trump campaign found, at Document Cloud, a document titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition.”

This “Project document” carries a date of August 3, 2020. From it comes everything one can learn about the Transition Integrity Project. The Project does have a Web domain, which, according to its DNS manager (GoDaddy), has expired. Apparently Director Hudson took the site down after it, and the Project, had served their purpose.

This opening paragraph tells us how Brooks, Gilman and Hudson, or collectively the Project directors, feel and think:

The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) was launched in late 2019 out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process. TIP takes no position on how Americans should cast their votes, or on the likely winner of the upcoming election; either major party candidate could prevail at the polls in November without resorting to “dirty tricks.” However, the administration of President Donald Trump has steadily undermined core norms of democracy and the rule of law and embraced numerous corrupt and authoritarian practices. This presents a profound challenge for those – from either party – who are committed to ensuring free and fair elections, peaceful transitions of power, and stable administrative continuity in the United States.

From that, one can infer the following:

• Project directors really believed Trump to be another Adolf Hitler. (CNAV would say Josef Stalin, but Project directors appear sympathetic to Stalin.)
• Donald J. Trump had already gotten in their way, and Project directors resented that.
• The Uniparty is real, and Project directors fully sympathize with Uniparty ideals, or whatever ideals they believe the Uniparty holds.

In addition, Project directors said they didn’t care how Americans voted, or who won the election. That’s a lie. As further analysis of the Project document clearly shows, they wanted Donald J. Trump gone and Joe Biden in. The Trump campaign was absolutely correct to mark down the criticisms of Trump as projection. Projection, as your editor learned in medical school, means literally throwing off on another person, by accusing that person of one’s own sins, trespasses, follies, and/or foibles. Project directors threw off on Trump, and the Project document shows this.

More than that, Transition Integrity Project directors really believe the American people are with them and down with their cause. That cause is Democratic Socialism. Truly, Rosa Brooks is her mother’s daughter, and has surrounded herself with like-minded teammates. In short, she is in an echo chamber of her own making. So are her two cohorts.

What kind of society do the Project directors want?

In a footnote to an assurance that the Project believes in “democracy and the rule of law,” the directors say:

TIP recognizes and shares the view that the Electoral College is profoundly anti-democratic, and that numerous long-standing practices also function to create structural biases in our voting system. For present purposes, however, these constraints are treated as givens.

No person, who wants to abolish the Electoral College, can even pretend to a “commitment to the rule of law.” They can pretend to democracy, which is not a republic. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. A republic is a bulwark of law saying what might one lawfully have for dinner – and what one may not. (Or rather, whom one may not.) The Electoral College is a republican instrument, that ensures – to paraphrase the Trump campaign’s thread of yesterday – that the States of California and New York may not, between them, be the sole electors of the President and Vice-President. (Or rather, the cities of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.)

Exactly what “long-standing practices” Project directors believe “create structural biases in our voting system,” is as clear as mud. The only recommendation one can infer from any part of the Project document, regarding voting practices, is to enshrine permanently the practice of mail-in absentee balloting.

The Transition Integrity Project and its war games program

The Project document presents four war games – and none assumed that Donald J. Trump would win the popular vote. Everything depended solely on the direction and margin of victory in the Electoral College. More to the point, the Transition Integrity Project had no input from any patriotic Americans. In fact the Project document doesn’t say who they got to be their war game role players. They said only that, to play their games, they recruited

members of both major political parties, former high-ranking government officials (including, for example, two former governors), senior political campaigners, nationally prominent journalists and communications professionals, social movement leaders, and experts on politics, national security, democratic reform, election law, and media.

But one can best infer that “members of both major political parties” consisted of radical Democrats and establishment Republicans. (Or in blunt fact, RINOs – Republicans In Name Only.) In short, a perfect Uniparty sample. Everyone else in that rogues’ gallery were probably same-old, same-old people. CNAV will wager a hundred to eight that none of those players represented properly the Trump voters.

The most difficult part of any war game, when one team is simulating a common enemy, is predicting accurately how that enemy really feels and thinks. The Project document clearly shows that none of these people understood Trump or his voters. Likely neither of those former governors, and none of those campaigners, leaders, or experts, ever learned to balance a checkbook! CNAV will also infer that the Transition Integrity Project had no military officers or enlistees as game players. This will become readily apparent in an analysis of at least one of the games.

What does the Project see as the condition of the country?

The Project document lists the following bullet points either once or twice in two lists:

• Election night is obsolete now, given the tardiness of the delivery of mail-in ballots and the slowness in counting them.
• A “determined campaign” can contest an election all they way to the swearing-in deadline.
• Whether to contest the election would be a political, not merely a legal, calculation.
• During that time, the incumbent, if he loses, can disrupt the transition.
• Resolution of a contest of election results might come down to raw power, not a decision in a court.
• Trump operates outside “norms” and therefore has a definite power advantage.
• The outsider might have to rely on “a show of numbers in the streets, and action in the streets.”
• Trump would serve his personal interests in any transition.

From these one must infer that the Project directors wanted Trump gone. “Transitions” do not happen when an incumbent wins reelection.

What does the Transition Integrity Project recommend?

After the players finished playing their games, the Transition Integrity Project made five specific recommendations:

1. Plan for a contested election, including warning people they might not be able to call the election in one night. (That’s another lie, because the media fell over one another in their haste to call the election for Biden.)
2. Make sure State Divisions of Elections are ready to deliver a result as soon as possible. (And we all know how that worked out.) But readiness also included “mobilizing” people to take to the streets!
3. Recognize that Trump was not running a normal reelection campaign – whatever that might have looked like.
4. Say up-front that voter fraud “is extremely rare,” and try to stop violence before it starts. (More on that below.)
5. Anticipate a problematic, therefore “rocky,” transition. Again: why anticipate any transition if Trump was going to win without question?

If the Project directors received any advance briefing on plans to deliver tranches of fraudulent ballots in “roach coaches” (or in one case, in Officer of Election “suitcases”), disable security protocols in Ballot Marking Devices or scanner-tabulators, or do any of a number of things witnesses have already communicated to CNAV in comments on earlier articles and videos, they made sure their Project document did not reflect such a briefing.

Machiavelli would gasp – and laugh

As for “agents provocateurs,” we now know that the FBI salted Trump’s January 6 rally with such provocateurs. Did the FBI brief Project directors about that sort of plan? Probably not. The “insights” the Project directors inferred from their war games shows that they could never keep their mouths shut. Therefore only a moron or a maniac would dare trust them with such a briefing in advance. Far more likely, those who actually ran the Big Steal, did more than accept the recommendations in the Project Document. These war game referees and players were total “shut-eyes,” not eyes-open, cynical planners.

Niccolò Machiavelli, were he alive today, would read the Transition Integrity Project document, then look at how events actually unfolded. Then he would ask, in a mixture of awe and envy, “Why didn’t I think of such a plan?”

But he would regard the Project directors with a mixture of amusement and contempt. As CNAV said yesterday, the Project document bespeaks galloping paranoia about what Trump would do, and an appalling naivete about what Biden would and would not do – and whether the Biden Plan could work. Just the sort of mind-set, Machiavelli would say, that you want your loyal followers and mid-level propagandists to have.

To illustrate that naivete, consider their final recommendation:

that Congress take decisive action to limit executive power, as happened with in the wake of President Nixon’s abuses of power in the early 1970s.

The Democratic Congress had two years to take such action – and never took it.

No president should be able to use the executive branch to settle political scores, damage perceived adversaries, or pursue personal financial gain.

But Biden, not Trump, has done all three.

Wither the Project directors?

None of the three Project directors has spoken for attribution since this Project document came out. Rosa Brooks has promoted her book, but done nothing else except accept engagements through the Penguin Random House Speakers’ Bureau. Nils Gilman co-authored this op-ed at The Hill, which does not address his Transition Integrity Project in any way. And from Zoe Hudson? Absolute silence. That could indicate that all three are embarrassed, even mortified, at what they helped bring about. After all, today’s reality has Biden doing all the things they accused Trump of doing, planning, or thinking of doing. Or maybe the powers-that-be, having used these three, have discarded them. How can we know?

But we can know this: these three paranoiacs proved how dangerous mentally incompetent people can be, in positions of trust. All Americans are still paying for their folly. But Donald J. Trump will likely have his chance to make the last payment.

Here ends Part One. In Part Two, CNAV will at least start dissecting the Project’s war games for further insight into leftist thinking.