A former Army officer who advised then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the Trump administration wrote that his “blood ran cold” after reading the latest indictment against the former president.
Kevin Carroll, who served as Kelly’s senior counsel while he led the Department of Homeland Security, authored an op-ed in The Dispatch on Tuesday, saying he was deeply troubled by the plot to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Special counsel Jack Smith indicted the former president on four felony charges related to that effort earlier this month, pointing to a multi-pronged conspiracy to remain in power and install a slate of fake electors in swing states around the nation.
Part of that effort, Carroll wrote, appeared to include acknowledgements from two of Trump’s co-conspirators — Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman — that military force may have been needed to see the plot succeed.
“As a veteran, my blood ran cold reading two particular passages in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment,” Carroll wrote in the op-ed. “They suggest that part of the former president and his co-conspirators’ autocratic plan to remain in power, despite knowing that they lost the 2020 election, was to make the U.S. military choose between subservience to civilian control or refusing to undertake an anti-democratic domestic political role.”
Smith’s indictment includes conversations between co-conspirators who worried their effort to spread lies of rampant voter fraud would lead to “riots in every major city in the United States.” Clark — who is identified as co-conspirator No. 4 in the document — responded to that fear: “Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Carroll said the indictment appears to show the military would have been placed in an “unthinkable” position, with generals “forced to choose whether to abandon an unbroken tradition of American military obedience to civilian control, or turn their guns on civilians to facilitate a losing candidate remaining in the White House beyond Inauguration Day.”
If Trump is convicted, he added, the potential harm of that act “should be taken into account in the former president’s sentencing.”
“The foreseeable consequences of Clark, Eastman, and Trump’s criminal plot would have been profound for the military and the nation,” he concluded. “I suspect the generals would have reluctantly chosen the first of the two bad options they faced. In either case, the republic would still suffer grave damage.”