Two members of Donald Trump’s inner circle hatched a scheme they called the ‘The Green Bay Sweep’ to delay the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
The plot was the brainchild of political provocateur Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor. It involved getting members of the House and Senate to object to the certification, which would trigger Congressional hearings.
While the hearings would have no legislative impact, Bannon and Navarro hoped they would be covered live on television. The media attention, they reasoned, would increase public pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the official vote from six states that Trump lost.
Navarro first revealed ‘The Green Bay’ sweep in his memoir, In Trump Time.
“The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this: by law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress,” Navarro wrote.
“The Green Bay Sweep was very well thought out. It was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “But we thought that we could bypass the corporate media by getting this stuff televised.”
Navarro said his job was to provide congress members with raw materials they could present in the hearings. Navarro hoped to highlight evidence that most media outlets refused to cover because of its specious nature. Bannon, according to Navarro, would then somehow use that evidence to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The name ‘The Green Bay Sweep’ is a football reference. On the day of the Capitol riot, Bannon made several other football allusions on his podcast, according to The Daily Beast, saying “We are right on the cusp of victory. It’s quite simple. Play’s been called. Mike Pence, run the play. Take the football. Take the handoff from the quarterback. You’ve got guards in front of you. You’ve got big, strong people in front of you. Just do your duty.”
Navarro said the plot fell through because the Capitol riot – which included a group of people calling for Pence’s assassination – hardened the then-vice president against Trump.
“Stephen K. Bannon, myself, and President Donald John Trump” were “the last three people on God’s good Earth who want to see violence erupt on Capitol Hill,” wrote Navarro. He added that Pence is “the Brutus most responsible… for the final betrayal of President Trump.”
Navarro also noted that lawsuits filed by lawyer Sydney Powell that challenged the 2020 election amounted to “highly counterproductive antics.”
