John Zmirak, a senior editor of the religious-right outlet The Stream, declared on Eric Metaxas’s radio show this week that former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the late Sen. John McCain were all part of an attempted “coup” against Donald Trump that was orchestrated by President Barack Obama’s FBI and CIA before and after the 2016 election, along with Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Metaxas is a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist who emceed the December 2020 rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war if Trump did not do everything necessary to stay in power. Shortly after the 2024 election, Zmirak and a co-author called for Trump opponents to “pay a brutal price” for what they called the unjust persecution of Jan. 6, 2021 protesters and “those who reported the facts about the 2020 election.”
Zmirak’s appearance on the Metaxas show this week was part of a flood of breathless right-wing media coverage of a widely debunked claim made by Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that she had “irrefutable evidence” of an Obama-masterminded “treasonous conspiracy” and “coup” directed against Trump before and after the 2016 election.
As one of the many refutations of Gabbard’s claims noted, the documents she released are “thin gruel” compared to previous investigations of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, including a bipartisan report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020. As Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted, if Gabbard’s interpretation of the available evidence were true, “one of the co-conspirators would be the current secretary of state, Marco Rubio.”
Rubio didn’t make Zmirak’s list, but plenty of other people did.
“Clinton manufactured the Russia hoax to distract from her abuse of classified emails that should have gotten her in prison,” Zmirak asserted. He claimed that then-President Barack Obama and the FBI colluded to try to help Clinton win, and then after the election to “nullify” Trump’s victory and “prevent the peaceful transfer of power.”
They wanted to force Trump to resign so that Mike Pence, a pliable neocon puppet, would be the useless president of the United States and the Republicans would continue to be doormats for everything the Democrats want.
And I think Mike Pence was overtly part of it. I think he was actually directly in on it. I think he was part of the conspiracy.
Metaxas chimed in to say that Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-term convicted-then-pardoned National Security Adviser, believes the same thing. Zmirak portrayed Flynn as a victim of the same conspiracy:
They cooked up a conspiracy theory. They accused him of committing crimes…Mike Flynn has all the receipts. The deep state tried to nullify a presidential election. Both parties were implicated.
Zmirak went on to say that Graham and McCain were part of the conspiracy:
Lindsey Graham urged John McCain to bring the phony Russian dossier to the FBI as a U.S. senator and request an official investigation. So this isn’t just about Obama. This isn’t just about Hillary. This is about the RINOs and the swamp Republicans. They were part of the conspiracy, too.
It’s worse than Watergate. It’s up there with Benedict Arnold trying to sell West Point to the British.
Metaxas responded by saying the supposed coup conspiracy is “one hundred times worse than Watergate.”
“Honestly, I don’t think people are prepared for what lies ahead,” said Metaxas. “I mean, if Donald Trump pushes this, which he must, it’s going to be ugly. I mean, Hillary Clinton, for her to face the music on what she has done, that’s gonna be, in some ways wonderful and in some ways tough to watch.”
Zmirak responded by saying he hopes Clinton is disgraced, but that the people who should go to prison for “criminal stuff” are “deep state” people who worked for Obama in the FBI and CIA. “We’re going to have to see Obama staffers going to prison,” he said.
“After the election, they tried to prevent a peaceful transfer of power,” Zmirak claimed. “They tried to destroy Donald Trump before he even came into office. Those are the crimes that have to be prosecuted now.”
Gabbard’s claims are widely seen as a dutiful effort by a Trump team player to create a distraction from the ongoing scandal over Trump’s ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s refusal to abide by promises to release files on the convicted sex criminal. A recent analysis in The New Republic was titled “Tulsi Gabbard is Pushing Debunked Russian Propaganda to Help Trump.”
Trump has been peppering MAGA activists with text messages this week pushing the idea that a special prosecutor must be appointed to “expose” the “fraud” of the “Russia hoax.” Dutifully, Trump attorney and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has “directed a prosecutor to present evidence to a grand jury” based on Gabbard’s claims, AP reported this week.
