I want this question answered because it is insane how many people were involved in the coup.

[BumRushDaShow]

34. Consider that although initially, it was viceral and haphazard to start

much of the "organizing and planning" began to take shape when various coup plotters began to look at what they considered "legal" justifications for their actions - notably locking onto this as their "get out of jail free" card -

Article II

Section 1.

The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as follows:

Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.

The electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves. And they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them for President; and if no person have a majority, then from the five highest on the list the said House shall in like manner choose the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each state having one vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. In every case, after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal votes, the Senate shall choose from them by ballot the Vice President.

The Congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii

So they started rounding up loon state legislators in states they wanted to flip and the plan was set into motion to "disrupt" and try to reverse the outcome before or on each date associated with the deadlines required to complete the Electoral College process, which included the following (this is where a Ginni Thomas "pressure campaign" comes into play) -

1.) Individual state deadlines to complete vote counts and certify the election
2.) "Safe Harbor" date when all certifications need to be done
3.) Electoral College meeting date and final vote
4.) Joint Congressional session to formally receive, publicly disclose, and carry out the final tally of the Electoral College results (this date being January 6, the day of the insurrection)

Here is a good historical summary of the process -

Biden's Victory Cemented As States Reach Key Electoral College Deadline

December 8, 2020 5:00 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition

(snip)

Most Americans see Election Day as the end of the long political season aimed at choosing new federal leadership, but it's really only the beginning. On Nov. 3, voters actually voted for which Electoral College electors to represent them, not for the presidential candidates themselves. Those electors then meet and cast votes, which are counted and finalized by Congress. "The Electoral College is pretty complicated because it's a process," said Rob Alexander, a political science professor at Ohio Northern University and the author of a book on the Electoral College. "It's not one thing, it's not one event."

(snip)

Poorly written legislation

The Tuesday deadline was put in place by a piece of 130-year-old legislation widely criticized as "almost unintelligible." The Electoral Count Act of 1887 came as a reaction to the presidential election of 1876, which saw Democrat Samuel Tilden win the popular vote but ultimately lose the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes because of contested election results coming from three Southern states under the control of Reconstruction governments. Congress had no rules in place to deal with such a scenario, so it created an ad hoc commission to decide the presidency and then passed the 1887 law afterward to avoid similar situations in the future.


The legislation is "extraordinarily complex" and "far from the model of statutory drafting," according to an analysis by the National Task Force on Election Crises, but it does create a clearer timeline for when states need to have their election results finalized. Electoral College electors are scheduled to meet in states across the country on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December (Dec. 14 this year) to cast their votes. And if a state has finalized its results six days before then, according to the ECA, then those results qualify for "safe harbor" status — meaning Congress must treat them as the "conclusive" results, even if, for example, a state's legislature sends in a competing set of results.

(snip)

Key Election Dates

Dec. 8: States finish vote certification

Dec. 14: Electors vote

Jan. 6: Congress formalizes the outcome

Jan. 20: Inauguration Day

"If a state can conclude its process of appointing electors by that [safe harbor deadline] then Congress is bound by federal law to accept the slate of electors that is arrived upon by that date," said Rebecca Green, the co-director of the Election Law program at William and Mary. Both Green and Alexander, of Ohio Northern, said they expect a few "faithless electors" to vote on Dec. 14 for a different candidate than voters chose but nowhere near enough to affect the underlying result. A majority of states have some sort of law that either removes, penalizes, or cancels the votes of such errant electors, and the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such rules earlier this year. Trump allies in Congress may still look to stir drama during the electoral vote counting on Jan. 6, but a Biden presidency at this point is virtually certain.

(snip)

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/942288226/bidens-victory-cemented-as-states-reach-deadline-for-certifying-vote-tallies

The above December 8, 2020 NPR article was sadly prophetic with the last sentence in the above excerpt -

Trump allies in Congress may still look to stir drama during the electoral vote counting on Jan. 6, but a Biden presidency at this point is virtually certain.

And with the myriad of both state court-filed and federal court-filed lawsuits that ensued against multiple states including my own, without achieving the goal of "replacing Electors" before the final Electoral vote, then the plan was to go through the "objection" process (which was coordinated so that it would be guaranteed to proceed by having both of the statutorily-required House and Senate members signing on to each objection) and then the vote to accept or reject a state's electors (which they should have known would fail since they didn't control all of Congress). And while this was going on, the "go ahead" was given at the "Stop the Steal" rally analogous to Shakespeare's Mark Antony speaking about Caesar's spirit commanding "Cry havoc let slip the dogs of war".

And so that is what happened that afternoon of January 6 (where many on DU including myself, were watching it live on TV), with all hell breaking loose, until things were finally brought under control by about 5 pm ET with the purposely delayed but eventual arrival of the National Guard.