mentioned the scenario “that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Joe Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat, presumably reached after weeks of counting the votes in Pennsylvania. For their war game, they cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede, just as Mrs. Clinton had.”
“But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr. Biden, shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede. Alleging voter suppression, he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College,” the Times reported.
But it gets worse.
“In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office as planned. The House named Mr. Biden president; the Senate and White House stuck with Mr. Trump,” the Times reported. “At that point in the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do.”
The Boston Globe report suggests that the idea of secession came from Democrats in the “war game.”
“In the mock election, Trump sought to divide Democrats — at one point giving an interview to The Intercept, a left-leaning news outlet, saying Senator Bernie Sanders would have won if Democrats had nominated him. Meanwhile, Biden’s team sought to encourage large Western states to secede unless pro-Democracy reforms were made,” the newspaper reported.
In other words, John Podesta — Clinton’s campaign chairman in 2016 — thought it was not too far-fetched to suggest that Democrats would encourage secession and perhaps even a civil war if a Republican candidate won the presidency in November.
