A Quarter Inch from the White House
How I Exposed the Plot to Hijack Trump’s Nomination — and What It Reveals About July 13, 2024.
An investigative account of the multi-state conspiracy to suspend the rules at the 2024 Republican National Convention, the network behind it, and the chilling question the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt forces us to ask.
On June 4, 2024, I published what would become the most consequential story of my career: a report that “America First” GOP insurgents linked to Gen. Michael Flynn from at least eight states were conspiring to suspend the rules and place a new candidate into nomination at the upcoming Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. The plan appeared designed to create chaos and confusion on the convention floor — and, under the right circumstances, to install a new nominee.
I didn’t go looking for this story. It landed in my lap.
In early June, I got an urgent call with a tip from an Arizona GOP alternate delegate. The Arizona delegation to the RNC, led by delegation chair Shelby Busch, had just held what was billed as a routine delegate training session on June 3 at a Phoenix suburb office. What happened inside that room was anything but routine.
The June 3 Training Session
Joe Neglia, a Maricopa County parliamentarian that I had previously covered for his tendency to bend the rules to assist the contingent of power-hungry AZGOP delegates linked to Mike Flynn, led the meeting with the help of Shelby Busch. Neglia presented slides — including the one below that I later provided to Trump’s team — detailing the procedural mechanics of how to suspend the RNC’s convention rules from the floor. The slides laid out specific thresholds, including: Rule 32, requiring eight state delegations with majority support to suspend the rules and Rule 40.b.2 on placing a candidate into nomination requiring five delegations.
According to sources who were present, Busch told the room she was already coordinating with other states’ delegations. She said templates would be prepared with delegates’ signatures in advance — essentially blank checks that could be filled in with whatever rule objections the conspirators chose in the chaotic dynamics of a contested convention. The delegates signing the rule change templates wouldn’t necessarily even know what they were voting for.
“So they’re getting everybody’s signature on basically a blank check,” one of my sources recounted to me. “These people don’t even know what they’re voting for.”
The meeting ran two and a half hours — well beyond the scheduled one hour — and Neglia still wasn’t finished. A follow-up session was planned to continue to discuss “delegates’ rights” at the convention.
An email Busch sent the next morning, June 4, confirmed the scope of her effort. Sent at 1:36 p.m. from her United Liberty Coalition address, the email thanked attendees for the meeting, praised “Joe Neglia’s training” as “extremely valuable,” and stated plainly: “I am working on building some relationships with other states and hope to start scheduling some committee and delegate calls and Zooms. If you know people in the other delegations and are able to help make some introductions, please let me know.”
The email also discussed ordering matching delegate jackets — with the text “Trump Bound Every Round” on the back — suggesting Busch anticipated the convention would go to multiple rounds of voting for the first time in the modern television era. If the delegates were truly bound to Trump, as primary voters had decided, why would multiple rounds be necessary?
I published my findings that same day.
Trump’s Team Responds
The next day, Trump’s campaign team had me on the phone from Milwaukee, where advance preparations were already underway five weeks before the convention. I had withheld specific names and details in my initial report to protect my sources. Trump’s people already knew most of those specifics. I introduced them directly to my sources, and their internal investigation confirmed my reporting.
Within days, the campaign moved aggressively, and Harmeet Dhillon initiated the internal RNC process to remove Busch, Neglia and four others from the delegation. I was told by a member of the RNC that Trump stopped the process days later when Kari Lake appealed to him directly on Busch’s behalf.
To publicly discredit Busch quickly, Trump operatives fed the internal training slide materials to Laura Loomer, whose 1 million-plus followers provided a much larger platform than my then-small account. Loomer shared the slide showing the procedural thresholds Neglia had presented. She later deleted the post after Kari Lake connected her with Busch, who convinced Loomer it was all a misunderstanding.
But the story didn’t die.
The Washington Post Confirms
On June 22, 2024, the Washington Post published a bombshell by reporter Yvonne Wingett-Sanchez: “Trump campaign seeks to head off convention revolt from its right flank.” My sources had told me they were cooperating with the Post and asked me for evidence and details to share with the Post. I was eager to read the story and floored at how accurate it was. It was the first time I’d seen a major piece on Flynn in the mainstream media that showed Flynn working against Trump, rather than impugning Flynn’s antics upon Trump. I retweeted it immediately upon publication.
The Post’s reporting confirmed everything I had been publishing for weeks. The story described how Arizona delegates had gathered for what was supposed to be a get-to-know-you meeting but were instead presented with a plan to throw Trump’s nomination into chaos. It confirmed the plan came not from “Never Trumpers” but from self-described “America First” believers on the far right.
Critically, the Post reported that most of the dozen GOP officials and activists they interviewed speculated the aim may have been to substitute Flynn for Trump if the former president was sentenced to prison—which is exactly Roger Stone himself described, along the Flynn network’s X spaces and posts that I had been drawing attention to. The Trump campaign itself, in a memo obtained by the Post, described Busch and Neglia as being “engaged in a multi-state conspiracy to suspend the rules at the national convention.” One campaign staffer called it an “existential threat” to Trump’s nomination — and described the scenario discussed by the Arizona delegates as “the only process that would prevent Trump from being the nominee.”
Before the Post story went to print, my sources had called me asking for help connecting the financial dots between Busch and Flynn’s network. “Follow the money,” I told them, and provided links to receipts showing approximately $700,000 in direct payments to Busch’s We The People AZ Alliance PAC from Mike Lindell, Patrick Byrne, and The America Project — the Flynn-founded organization. The Post confirmed that Busch’s group had raised nearly $1 million and was funded largely by entities linked to Flynn and Byrne.
The Question No One Wanted to Ask
As I sat with the evidence, one question consumed me: If Trump was locked in as the nominee — as every RNC contact I had confirmed — why would anyone, even self-described MAGA loyalists, spend months orchestrating a procedural coup at the convention?
I had reported for months on their painstaking efforts to take over state parties across the country and engage in Saul Alinsky tactics to force their chosen radicals, all trained in Robert’s Rules of Order and party bylaws, into national delegate slots. They planned to use pre-signed blank rule change templates. They had trained parliamentarians in tactics to obstruct, delay, and manipulate conventions. They were coordinating across state lines. This was not a casual exercise in “protecting Trump,” as Busch claimed. This was an operational plan.
Why were they doing this?
The only logically consistent answer is that someone anticipated Trump would not make it to the convention as a viable candidate. And the evidence of who that someone might be — and what they expected to happen — was revealed in their own words and actions.
The Shadow Campaign
Months before the June 3 training session, the pieces were already in place.
In February 2024, one of my sources, who had worked directly with Flynn’s sister, Mary Flynn O’Neill, witnessed a remarkable statement. Mary had told a volunteer with absolute certainty: “My brother will be the next President. We’re working very hard to make it happen.” The source was struck by her tone. “She didn’t say ‘maybe he will be’ or ‘we think he will be,’” the source told me. “She knew. Which was so weird because he wasn’t even officially running.”
Around the same time, Roger Stone publicly confirmed on his blog and on social media that he and Flynn were running a contingency campaign — a “Plan B” — for Flynn for president “in case something happened to Trump.” In one post, Stone wrote that he had told Flynn directly that if Trump “decided not to run or was legally barred from running, that General Flynn himself would be preferable as a candidate to Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or anyone else.” Stone framed it as innocent contingency planning: “Nothing nefarious about it unless you’re a nut.”
Stone even admitted in his April, 2024 blog post promoting Flynn’s “campaign” movie that discussions of this contingency campaign began in 2022. This was confirmed to me by another source who directly witnessed ongoing discussions between Flynn and Stone that began in 2022. Both of those sources spoke to me on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from Flynn and Stone.
Stone’s framing became harder to accept after July 13.
A Three Year Asymmetrical Campaign - Launched by Steve Bannon
The campaign benefited from a takeover of local and state Republican parties that began on February 9, 2021, when Steve Bannon hosted Dan Schultz to present The Precinct Strategy to Bannon’s War Room audience.
The Precinct Strategy was a marketing campaign for precinct delegates promoted heavily by Bannon, Flynn, and Jack Posobiec from February 2021 until mid 2022. It was designed to target Bannon’s and Flynn’s loyalists who had no political experience or knowledge and been given by these influencers an outrage-based desire to takeover state parties.
“The party is there for the taking,” Schultz told Bannon’s audience. The objective was to take over the party and “kick out all the RINOs.” The leads from Bannon’s show were funneled through The Precinct Strategy website to organizations developed and run by trained operatives who gatekept the delegates and frequently employed cult-building tactics like paranoia, abuse of scripture, false prophesy and end times theories, antifa-style tactics, and even lawfare in their party takeover efforts.
I spent most of 2024 interviewing state party operatives across the country who described their experiences with these tactics in detail.
Even in Schultz’s very first appearance on Bannon’s War Room in Febrary 2021, he told would-be delegates that they could become national delegates at the next RNC convention, which would start on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee:
An actual campaign with calculated tour stops
The campaign reflected the years of planning that Stone admitted to. In April, without formal announcement, Flynn’s movie was released and bus tour announced.
The movie and bus were both well-funded and pre-planned ventures. The production value of the movie is indeed impressive. The bullseye on the right side of Flynn’s face in all of the promotional materials for the film is shocking with the hindsight of the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Instead of a typical theatrical, online or blended release for an independent documentary of this type, Flynn’s team opted for a startling alternative. The bus tour stops were marketed to a very narrow target market: GOP delegates in states where Flynn’s operatives had achieved a critical mass of Flynn-loyalists in delegate positions.
The events were actively marketed by GOP delegates and committeemen on internal Signal and Telegram chats across the country. Ivan Raiklin frequently told audiences: “Every delegate to the national convention needs to see the Flynn movie!”
The movie was marketed as an asymmetrical campaign tool to the delegates who would be on the floor of the national convention, positioned to take over the convention and fight to make Flynn the nominee.
“So Much Better for Us”: Raiklin and the Assassination Talk
The Flynn network at that time was abuzz with coded plotting and planning, but the most disturbing public statements came from Ivan Raiklin, Flynn’s top lieutenant and a director of America’s Future. On Alex Jones’ Infowars in January 2024, Raiklin laid out a scenario in which Trump’s assassination would actually benefit their movement.
“If they assassinate any political presidential candidate, whether it’s RFK, whether it’s Trump, guess what? America will do the following immediately,” Raiklin said. “They will respond in kind.”
He continued: “If they do that, option two behind Trump is going to be so much better for us and so much worse for them.”
Jones responded by saying that killing Trump would be “best case scenario from a sick level.”
Raiklin then added: “It’s going to be the best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
In the context of Raiklin’s long pattern of public statements, his close operational relationship with Flynn, and the convention infrastructure being built behind the scenes, the identity of “option two” was unmistakable. And his certainty that these things would happen was palpable.
Flynn: “How we assassinate people who are in their way now.”
On May/June 2024 X Space filled with his close lieutenants, Flynn himself discussed assassination in a way that suggests a certain foreknowledge of future events. He stated: “Assassination is not off the table. And how we assassinate people, how we assassinated people that were in their way in the past and how we assassinate people who are in their way now.”
Consider as you listen to the above statement by Flynn the context of the years’ long campaign to position national delegates, his well-funded and meticulously planned movie and bus tour, the alleged certainty of his sister and Ivan Raiklin, and the plot to take over the convention
May 30: The Panic
On May 30, 2024, Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in Manhattan. The plotters likely expected this to break him. Instead, Trump raised tens of millions of dollars in hours. His support surged.
That night, the panic was audible. Flynn himself jumped onto X Spaces, and what listeners heard was not a calculating general but something rawer — a man seething with anger at a movement that was succeeding without him.
“Right now, we have a pathetic Republican Party and pathetic Republican leaders,” Flynn fumed. “After today, we’re not going to see elections the way we’ve seen elections ever again.”
His fury didn’t match the mood of the broader MAGA movement, which was celebrating Trump’s resilience, as Trump’s campaign raised hundreds of millions of dollars within hours.
Raiklin joined multiple X Spaces that night pushing frantic plans: change the convention date, stack the delegate slates, seize control of the nomination process. Mike Flynn Jr. declared on a spaces: “The only choice for VP is my dad.”
One of the most disturbing talking points to emerge that night was this: “Flynn is the only VP choice who makes Trump assassination-proof.” The implication was clear — if Trump were killed, Flynn would ascend. And somehow, the argument went, this would be good for MAGA.
Raiklin and others even pushed to move the convention up to July 4 — nine days before the assassination attempt that would occur in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13.
Fake FEC Filings
As the convention approached, the psyops escalated. On June 25, a fabricated FEC filing appeared on the official FEC website: a newly created campaign committee titled “Donald J. Trump and Michael Flynn for President 2024, Inc.” It wasn’t discoverable through normal FEC searches, but it existed if you had the direct link. Someone sent it to me. I confirmed it was a forgery and chose not to publicize it — a fake like this, amplified by media, could have created exactly the kind of chaos the plotters needed.
On July 2, a second fake filing appeared — a Form 2 designating Flynn as Trump’s official VP pick. Flynn-aligned influencers circulated it aggressively, trying to create the perception that a Trump-Flynn ticket was a done deal. I again confirmed with RNC sources: it was fabricated. Coordinated. A deliberate ploy.
But why didn’t the FEC under Joe Biden take them down? As the above screenshot shows, they were housed on the fec.gov website. Were these intended to be used to try to persuade delegates at a convention without Trump that Trump intended to pick Flynn as his running mate?
Has law enforcement investigated the source of these documents?
Then, on July 3 — after 18 months of silence, after countless public hints that Trump would be “taken out” or “removed,” after the buildup of a secretive delegate operation spanning more than a dozen states — Flynn finally endorsed Trump.
The timing was damning.
July 13: A Quarter Inch
On July 13, 2024, two days before the convention was set to begin, a bullet came within a fraction of an inch of killing Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. That’s the part we all know.
What most Americans don’t know, until now, is what I knew the moment after it happened: had the bullet found its mark, the infrastructure was in place. At least eight state delegations were prepared with coordinated motions to suspend the rules, and had already discussed having pre-signed by delegates ready to act. At least another dozen state delegations had a near majority of Flynn-loyalists and would have shifted instantly in the emotional chaos of a grief-stricken convention. The largest and most influential states — including all the swing states — would have likely tilted toward Flynn.
A shell-shocked convention, a base in mourning, a media narrative already spinning. Into that void would have stepped a Flynn candidacy — possibly paired with Nikki Haley to create the illusion of a “unity ticket” healing the intraparty divide Flynn’s own network had spent years creating: “grassroots v. establishment.”
It didn’t happen. Trump survived. Thank God.
The Convention
Trump’s team took no chances. When they learned the full scope of the Arizona delegation’s plotting, they moved to replace delegates and ultimately struck an agreement: Neglia would step aside and Busch promised to play nice and there would be no revolt on the floor. As a measure of how seriously they took the threat, the Arizona delegation was seated in what amounted to a closet at the back of the convention floor — a fishbowl where they could be watched.
I attended the convention myself as a guest of Michigan’s delegation chair, and it was a truly euphoric experience. At that time, only I and my small audience knew exactly what we had been spared.
As I sat watching the proceedings, I was struck by how blissfully unaware nearly most of the delegates were of how close the convention floor had come to becoming a war zone on prime time television. When the balloons dropped on the final night and Pavarotti’s “Nessun Dorma” soared through the arena, I couldn’t stop the tears. Not because of spectacle (which was awesome), but because of what I knew — and what the country had narrowly avoided.
I can only say that God heard our prayers.
Great work, Scott!