Will the “Blitz Primary” Idea Have Legs?

By Liam Sturgess, Investigative Reporter, The Kennedy Beacon

The Democratic Party appears to be falling apart at the seams following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance late last month, with factions emerging to either oust or protect the beleaguered incumbent. As the deadline draws near for the Democrats to officially nominate their candidate (presumed until recently to be Biden) at August’s Democratic National Convention (August 19 - 22), political operatives on both sides are scrambling to come up with a plan to salvage their party’s thinning chances in the 2024 presidential election.

One such faction has emerged with an unprecedented idea: a “blitz primary” to select Biden’s replacement. Here’s the catch: it once again involves ignoring the will of Democrat voters, after the party blocked any and all challengers from competing against Biden in the primaries earlier this year – most notably, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

As explained in Semafor’s July 7 article, the plan involves Biden bowing out of the race of his own accord, with Kamala Harris not automatically becoming the nominee. Rather, she would throw her hat in the ring with several other leading contenders, which, though the article refrains from mentioning names, would likely include governors Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer. Biden and Harris would be tasked with announcing the “new system” as soon as mid-July, after which the party would hold weekly forums moderated by such “cultural icons” as Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and even Taylor Swift. Following this hasty and highly exclusive process, the party’s 3,939 delegates would select the new nominee by ranked-choice voting, with the winner to be announced on August 19 by Biden and his predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

As highlighted by Semafor, this rather “optimistic” idea “stands little chance of being implemented,” serving primarily to show the lengths to which Democrat advisors will go to escape their unprecedented political conundrum, especially given that party delegates are pushing back on the idea of replacing Biden, as CNN reported on July 8. This “blitz primary” conversation therefore provides an interesting opportunity to identify the dividing lines between the various party factions. Whoever controls the nomination process essentially controls the election. 

Semafor identifies the idea’s creators as Rosa Brooks and Ted Dintersmith, both major Democratic Party donors. Brooks, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, took to X to argue the merits of a blitz primary. “Let’s turn this crisis into an opportunity. We can DO this,” she wrote in a post sharing CNBC’s coverage of the plan.

Although Brooks downplays the notion that she’s a “power player” in the Democratic establishment, a review of her résumé strongly suggests otherwise. In addition to having served as a Biden campaign advisor, Brooks was named one of Washington DC’s Most Influential People by the Washingtonian in 2021, 2022, and 2023. The magazine cites her work in Obama’s Defense Department and in founding the Leadership Council for Women in National Security, funded by major defense firms Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, General Atomics, and Peraton, along with Microsoft and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Brooks previously worked at the Soros-led philanthropic behemoth as special counsel to the president of the Open Society Institute, according to her biography on the website of the Federalist Society, where she is a contributor. Indeed, her career has spanned high-level defense-industry-friendly positions in both the State Department and the Pentagon, also holding a teaching position at the military’s Modern War Institute. Finally, Brooks’s book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything received glowing praise from the Council on Foreign Relations – an organization any politically conscious individual would certainly classify as a “power player.”

Ted Dintersmith also hails from the State Department, where he served as the United States’ delegate to the United Nations, per his LinkedIn profile. But the thrust of his globalist career has been in venture capitalism and public-private partnerships. He served as a board member of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), a World Economic Forum-partnered nonprofit whose international activities include working with the State Department’s Palestinian Affairs Unit, according to the NFTE’s 2022 annual report. Meanwhile, he was a general partner at Charles River Ventures (CRV), a Palo Alto venture capital firm where he is now partner emeritus. In the year leading up to Dintersmith’s June 2015 retirement, CRV made two multimillion-dollar investments in Cybereason, a cybersecurity firm founded by “elite members of the Israeli intelligence agency,” per reporting by Venture Capital Journal and TechCrunch. 

On November 5, 2019, Cybereason led a counterterrorism exercise called Operation Blackout, simulating an attack on the 2020 US presidential election. Participants included the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and other “seasoned government officials,” as summarized in the after-action report. Among the fictional exercise’s striking conclusions were that “having clear channels of information or disinformation was very important for affecting public sentiment,” and “control of social media networks for journalists, influencers, and political figures” allowed bad actors to “easily spread misinformation through supposedly ‘legitimate’ channels.”

Brooks is also no stranger to compromised election scenarios. In December 2019, she convened the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) “out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process,” as noted in documents published by The Boston Globe. Much like Operation Blackout, the TIP ran various simulations to prepare to fortify Biden’s ascent to the presidency (despite the election having not yet taken place). 

Covering Operation Blackout for Mint Press News in early 2020, investigative journalist Whitney Webb warned that such exercises were effectively “prepping America” for a failed election, despite underlying claims of foreign interference largely lacking evidence.

Indeed, were it to occur, the long-shot “blitz primary” itself would pose the most significant threat to the 2024 election – one that comes not from overseas, but from within the ailing Democratic Party itself. 

Despite making the rounds on the mainstream media (including a surprising appearance on Fox News), it remains unclear whether Brooks and Dintersmith have swayed enough of their political and financial allies toward their plan. 

But actor and Democratic donor George Clooney is open to it, based on his July 10 New York Times op-ed. “Let’s hear from Wes Moore and Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear and J. B. Pritzker and others,” Clooney wrote. On the other hand, as Adam Garrie recently emphasized, the legal and political challenges to replacing Biden may prove insurmountable, and the party may just have to settle for the ailing candidate they forced upon the American public in the primary.

Liam Sturgess is an investigative reporter for The Kennedy Beacon. He is also a writer for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance and founder of White Rose Intelligence. He was the founding co-host and producer of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and publishes a Substack series called Microjourneys.