A group founded by two of Barack Obama’s White House lawyers insists Donald Trump is coming for the midterm count.

Progressive lawmakers in statehouses across the country are already taking its advice.

And Glenn Beck just read the one line in their playbook he calls a confession.

The “Confidential” Playbook Sitting on a Public Website

Natalie Winters, the War Room co-host and White House correspondent, got her hands on a 14-page guide from Protect Democracy that carries a big “CONFIDENTIAL” stamp across the top.

Ian Bassin and Justin Florence co-founded the group after working as associate White House counsels for President Barack Obama.

The title tells readers exactly who the authors had in mind: “A State Legislator’s Guide to Election Threats.”

State Innovation Exchange, a network that feeds strategy to progressive state lawmakers, passed the guide along to its members. But the secrecy didn’t hold up for long. Anthony Gad, who runs the network’s Shared Tactics & Training program, linked the PDF in a public briefing dated October 22.

Not exactly the Pentagon Papers. Still, a stamp that loud usually tells a reader which pages the authors hoped outsiders would skip.

Glenn Beck didn’t skip any of them. On X, he accused the group of “hijacking the entire post-election process so nobody can audit the results.”

Seven Fights, and Every One Ends After the Polls Close

The guide opens by accusing the Trump administration of a three-step scheme it brands Deceive, Disrupt, and Deny. In the authors’ telling, Washington cooks up fraud stories, throws its weight around on Election Day, and then refuses to accept the outcome.

From there, it walks lawmakers through seven scenarios: intimidation at the polls, a federal takeover of election administration, seizures of ballots and machines, criminal investigations of election officials, interference with the count, mass ballot challenges, and refusals to certify.

Look closely at where the calendar ends. The guide’s risk chart runs straight through counting and certification, long after the last voter heads home for supper.

Then come the marching orders. Lawmakers should label certain investigations as intimidation meant to overturn an election, and they should do it immediately. If federal agents seize election materials, the guide wants that move made politically expensive. It tells legislators to have their messaging ready before Election Day, to pre-bunk any emergency declaration before anyone declares one, and to keep mass mobilizations in reserve.

And then there’s the sentence Beck couldn’t shake: “when we fight feelings with facts, we lose.”

He didn’t mince words on his show. “That is not a strategy for a fair election. That is a confession,” Beck said.

Protect Democracy would insist all of this guards against federal overreach. Winters noted that the guide warns against early victory claims and calls for accepting results no matter who wins. But the same pages that preach acceptance spend far more ink rehearsing the fight.

Coaching the Grand Jury Before Anybody Hears a Witness

The plank that ought to worry ordinary Americans most sits inside the fourth scenario.

There, the guide recommends teaching community members to turn down improper prosecutions when a court summons them for grand jury duty. A separate Protect Democracy explainer from January 28 fills in the curriculum. Jurors should test probable cause, weigh the credibility of evidence, demand original documents, question witnesses, and report misconduct to the supervising judge. According to Winters, the group also holds up refusals to indict in protest-related cases as a model of citizens checking government power.

Some of that list sounds like a high school civics class. Jurors should ask hard questions, and plenty of conservatives have cheered grand juries that told an overeager prosecutor to take a hike.

But the guide doesn’t stop at civics. It pairs the jury lessons with a verdict written in advance, namely that investigations of election officials amount to intimidation. So who decides which prosecutions count as improper before a single witness takes the stand? The folks who drafted the talking points, apparently.

Washington, DC already ran a trial version of this in August 2025. Sean Charles Dunn, a former Justice Department employee, hurled a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent during President Trump’s federal law enforcement surge in the city. Cameras caught the whole thing, and Dunn himself owned up to throwing it. A DC grand jury still refused to return a felony indictment, and prosecutors had to settle for a misdemeanor.

Jonathan Turley warned that refusing to indict even on a lesser charge would amount to “a form of jury nullification.”

And Dunn’s case wasn’t the only one that season. DC grand juries balked at a handful of cases tied to the surge. Protect Democracy now wants that same instinct primed in counties across the country and pointed at election probes it has already branded as illegitimate.

The grand jury exists to protect the accused from a reckless prosecutor. Nobody built it to vote as a political bloc against the government before the evidence even arrives.

Feelings First, Facts Whenever

Go back to that feelings line for a moment. A group that calls itself the guardian of democracy just told lawmakers that facts lose fights.

Most folks learned the opposite at the kitchen table. The kid who swears he didn’t break the lamp always wants to talk about how mad Dad looks, never about the glue on the lampshade.

Pre-bunking works on the same principle. Nobody can debunk a claim before anyone makes it. The only thing a pre-bunk can do is tell the public ahead of time how to feel.

Beck’s alternative sounds boring on purpose. He wants voter ID, free IDs delivered to anyone who lacks one, independent auditors combing the voter rolls with Social Security numbers blacked out, and open books. He compared it to a bookkeeper who hands over the ledger and the receipts and tells the auditor to check the math.

Millions of Americans still carry unanswered questions from 2020, when officials rewrote voting rules at the last minute under cover of COVID and private money flooded local election offices. The cure for that distrust was always more sunlight. This guide reaches for the dimmer switch.

Gad’s briefing adds one more detail worth chewing on. Every step on the list relies on powers and relationships lawmakers already hold, and “none of these require passing a bill.”

No vote. No hearing. No public debate. Just phone calls to clerks, sheriffs, and prosecutors, plus a spot on the nonprofit coalitions’ communications lists.

That’s a lot of muscle routed around the voters these legislators answer to.

Federal law already makes it a crime to station troops at a polling place. The courts sit open for anyone who believes an investigation crosses a line. Yet the guide treats those guardrails like a footnote and treats the street like Plan B.

Beck went even further on X, writing, “They aren’t waiting to see what the audits find.” Maybe he got a step ahead of the paperwork there. Nothing Winters published shows the guide ordering anyone to block an audit.

But a playbook that coaches future grand jurors, scripts the outrage in advance, and keeps protests on standby doesn’t leave an auditor much elbow room either.

Page Six and Page Thirteen

The certification section of the guide, on page 13, asks everyone to accept the results regardless of who wins.

The emergency section, back on page 6, already has the mass mobilizations penciled in.

Nobody reading it can tell yet which of those two pages progressive lawmakers will flip to if the count doesn’t go their way.

Sources: Natalie Winters, “EXC: Inside the Left’s ‘Confidential’ Playbook for the 2026 Midterm Fight” (Substack); State Innovation Exchange, “Protecting the 2026 Election: A Briefing for State Legislators”; Glenn Beck on X; RVM News, “Obama Lawyers’ Secret Midterm Playbook Exposed: Seven Scenarios to ‘Protect Democracy’”; Associated Press, NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News coverage of the Sean Charles Dunn grand jury decision (August 2025); Jonathan Turley, Fox News opinion on the Dunn grand jury; NatalieGWinters.com