On the evening of Wednesday, April 15, 2026, thirty-nine people logged onto an encrypted Jitsi meeting. The people on this call expected the room to stay closed. It did not. The recording is now in my possession. This is the walk-through.
Let me tell you, plainly, what the April 15 recording is. I have spent a significant portion of my professional life around the international democracy-and-governance space. I know what civil-resistance training looks like. I have watched the "pillars of support" slide deck get presented in four countries in four languages. I have watched the careers of the people who deliver it climb the State Department contracting ladder, the USAID implementing-partner ladder, the USIP fellowship ladder, and the OSCE observer-mission ladder. I am not guessing at what this call was. I recognize it. The cadence is identical. The vocabulary is identical. The three-layer organizational chart is identical. Only the flag on the wall has changed.
The April 15 call was the American version. The coalition that ran USAID's color revolutions in Belgrade, Tbilisi, Kyiv, and every country the Office of Transition Initiatives ever touched has turned the apparatus inward. This time, the regime they are pressuring out of office is the constitutionally-elected executive branch of the United States.
The Room
The platform choice matters. Jitsi Meet — the self-hosted, end-to-end-encrypted variant of the open-source videoconferencing stack — is what operators choose when they want no record.
The moderator was Jeremy Alexander Zitomer, former Engineer and Equity Practitioner at the U.S. Digital Service — the technology component inside the White House Executive Office of the President. His 2023 reported federal salary was $152,771. Beverly Schreiber, MPA, FWAD's Deputy Director, teed up the first main event: a presentation from Kourtney A. Pompi of the Democracy Renewal Group, a 26-year veteran of State Department and USAID-funded democracy programming, 15-year OSCE election observer, 2021 Summit for Democracy Core Group member. A participant introduced as Sheila was named as FWAD's newly-hired Organizing Director. And a participant addressed on the record as Jay said something late in the call that, if a federal prosecutor ever takes an interest, could become one of the most legally consequential sentences spoken in 2026.
How Schreiber introduced Pompi
Before Pompi's main presentation began, Deputy Director Schreiber introduced her with a sentence that, for me, closes any remaining question about what Pompi has been doing inside FWAD:
Courtney has been a key part of our training team that has helped us with non-cooperation training and Courtney and the larger democracy renewal group plan have been just wonderful partners over the last several months.
Stop there. Read it again. "Non-cooperation training." That is not my label. That is FWAD's own label, spoken by FWAD's own Deputy Director, on a recording the organization believed was private. Non-cooperation is the specific technical term — used in Gene Sharp's From Dictatorship to Democracy, used in the Chenoweth-Stephan Why Civil Resistance Works, used in every USIP Special Report on nonviolent action — for the class of tactics designed to make a government unable to function through the coordinated withdrawal of labor, cooperation, and compliance by the people the government depends on.
When you train federal civil servants in non-cooperation, you are not teaching them citizenship. You are teaching them the specific professional refusal pattern that has historically been used to break authoritarian regimes overseas. The sitting United States government is not an authoritarian regime. It is the constitutionally-elected executive branch of a constitutional republic. And FWAD's Deputy Director has placed on the record that her organization employs Kourtney Pompi as a key trainer on how to apply that methodology to it.
What Pompi said about herself, unprompted
Pompi took the floor and, on a closed call where she had no reason to shade anything, validated in her own voice every identification Part Two of this series made about the Democracy Renewal Group:
I've worked in the international democracy state human rights space for the last 26 years until USA was dismantled.
We are a group of former, mostly USAID, OTI staff members, some State Department folks like myself, who have been in this space and both the federal space and the implementing partner space that are all democracy experts, primarily working overseas for our careers.
Read that second sentence carefully. OTI is the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives. OTI is the sub-office whose operational history includes ZunZuneo — the covert Twitter-for-Cubans that ran from 2009 to 2012 before Congress shut it down — and whose own internal strategic framework historically described its work as organizing "smart mobs that might renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society." Part Two of this series named Sonya Day as a 21-year OTI veteran inside the Democracy Renewal Group network. Pompi, unprompted, on a closed call, just confirmed that Day is not the exception. Day is the type. The Democracy Renewal Group is, by its senior trainer's own admission, a reunion of former USAID Office of Transition Initiatives staff. The apparatus that ran covert influence operations in Cuba has been reconstituted. Inside the United States. Training federal civil servants.
The three case studies
Pompi then walked the audience — thirty-nine participants representing eighteen federal agencies, by Zitomer's own later count — through three country case studies. She described each as an example of how career civil servants resisted the elected government they worked for. This was not comparative political science. This was a training module.
There was a bureaucratic resistance to this where career officials within the election administration body itself and the national election office... publicly warned folks that these changes would create very much a chaotic election environment... There was whistleblowing, again, primarily through expertise of bureaucrats that understood the process.
Local government officials and civil servants, career civil servants, refused to hand over sensitive voter data... The outcome of that was that... the drag on that administrative process made it logistically impossible to hold the election on a scheduled date, creating a postponement of the election.
Four tactics in one case study. Career officials publicly warning the public. Whistleblowing using technical expertise. Civil servants refusing to hand over voter data requested by their own government. Administrative drag to force postponement of a scheduled election. Every one of those tactics, if executed by a U.S. federal civil servant against a lawful order of the sitting administration, raises direct questions under 5 U.S.C. § 7311 (the federal employee loyalty oath), the Hatch Act, and — in the aggregate — 18 U.S.C. § 371, the conspiracy-to-defraud-the-United-States statute.
Resistance often happened via insider data sharing or through massive volunteer coordination that bypasses traditional bureaucracy... using insider information, using those connections kind of inside the building versus outside.
Resistance came, though, similarly through parallel data systems, what they were calling the citizen bureaucracy... this civil society initiative created a shadow count... and this bureaucratic whistle blowing effectively allowed sympathetic local election clerks who were unable to speak out publicly to provide information to party observers.
Turkey adds "insider data sharing" from civil servants unable to speak publicly. Parallel data systems. Shadow counts designed to produce competing vote totals. Election clerks feeding information to outside "party observers" through back channels. Pompi uses the pronoun "we've used overseas" — not describing other people's work, describing hers.
She then placed this sentence on the record:
You all, I'm sure, are familiar with the Hatch Act and how it applies to you and your agencies and have your ability to contact how and what it means for you to be able to do activities and what activities you can't do.
That sentence closes the good-faith question entirely. Pompi knows who is in the room. She knows their professional status. She knows which federal statutes bind them. She names the statute. She delivers the training anyway. And she closes with an offer of private follow-ups — "if anyone's interested in finding more specific tactics where federal workers or civil servants can engage in elections, we'd be happy to have a deeper dive chat." That is not policy education. That is the recruiting-and-retention language of an operational network.
Zitomer presents FWAD 2.0
After Pompi wrapped, Zitomer unveiled the organization's updated mission and structure. His own on-record count of the organization's reach:
In the last several weeks, FWAD convened our entire leadership team alongside 26 federal worker leaders across 18 agencies, a mix of current and former, including 11 partner organizations.
Twenty-six federal worker leaders. Eighteen federal agencies. A mix of currently-employed and recently-separated. Eleven partner organizations. From the FWAD operational leader's own mouth. If a congressional investigator, a federal prosecutor, or an Inspector General ever wants to understand the scope of coordination inside the federal workforce, that sentence is the baseline.
He then identified the centerpiece of the new architecture:
Agency resistance groups or ARGs as FWAD calls them... functionally fill the role of gathering together people from an agency to engage in symbolic or non-cooperative resistance. We call those ARGs. We've realized that ARGs, which historically have just been one part of our work, are actually the centerpiece of our entire strategy.
The federal-workforce-organizing apparatus now has a name. Agency Resistance Groups. The tactic is non-cooperation. The venue is the federal workplace. The strategy presenter is a former White House Executive Office of the President technologist. Inside the organization's Shared Services layer, Zitomer named a specific function:
Information gathering and analysis, which also includes a mix of adversarial analysis. This is kind of a know the enemy, understand what the administration is planning to do, and identifying points of leverage for people to engage in resistance.
The enemy. The administration. Points of leverage. This is the vocabulary of every civil-resistance textbook I have ever read — Sharp, Chenoweth, Stephan, Ackerman, Beer, Nagler. It is not generic advocacy language. "Points of leverage" is the technical phrase for operational identification of specific officials, processes, supply chains, and dependencies that hold a government together, for the purpose of targeting them for pressure or disruption. The operational leader of FWAD, on the record, has declared that his organization runs a function devoted to identifying those pressure points inside the sitting executive branch of the United States.
The "amen" moment
Late in the call, after Zitomer finished FWAD 2.0 and several participants — Toby, Tony, Jake, Barbara Blair — posed logistical questions about cross-agency coordination, a participant addressed on the record as Jay took the floor. He recalled events from April 7, 2026 ("when we woke up with Trump's tweet that a civilization was going to end tonight"), described what he saw as a failure of the movement to mobilize rapidly on that day, and then delivered the sentences that are now the primary-source editorial center of this entire investigation:
If something like that happens again, or the day after the election, when they seize the ballots and declare like none of that counted, we're going to need the ability to rally people on short notice to not, not just have a parade, right? Not have a festival and a demonstration, not a demonstration of our numbers, but maybe a demonstration of our power and actually withdraw cooperation and shut down the country until not just the election results are respected, but until Trump is removed from power. I think aligning around that strategical and building the capability to do that.
Shut down the country. Withdraw cooperation. Until Trump is removed from power. Not hypothetical. Not analogy. An operational objective — stated on the record, proposed for the movement to "align around" as a capability to be built.
Zitomer responded without hesitation, without qualification, without any distancing language whatsoever:
There's so much that I could say in response to that, but I think the shortest thing that I'll say is amen.
Thirty-nine participants were listening. Absorb what just happened on the recording. A former employee of the White House Executive Office of the President — now the operational leader of a 501(c)(3) running Agency Resistance Groups inside eighteen federal agencies — has publicly affirmed on a coalition strategy call that he endorses, as the movement's operational objective, the coordinated withdrawal of federal-worker cooperation to produce the removal of the sitting President of the United States from power. That is the sentence. That is what was said. That is what is on tape.
The exit ramp
What Zitomer did in the seconds immediately after "amen" is, to me, the most revealing single act on the recording. He did not move on. He did not invite further strategic elaboration. He offered participants a deliberately-worded opportunity to disconnect:
I think this is probably a good moment in case folks need, you know, a certain social permission to, to, uh, say good night and like, take care of your family and your kids and whatnot, or do the dishes as the case may be. You're welcome to use this moment to drop off.
This is consciousness of consequence on tape. Zitomer knew what had just been said. He knew it was significant enough that some participants might not want to be in the room for what came next. He offered them a socially-graceful exit — framed in domestic, innocuous, family-coded language — before the conversation continued. In international democracy-promotion work, this is the exact communications-hygiene discipline operators apply when they want to establish plausible deniability among participants whose full complicity has not yet been tested. I have seen this pattern. I recognize it. The FWAD operational leader, seconds after endorsing the removal of the sitting President of the United States, handed the federal workers on the call a polite off-ramp.
The statutory weight
I am not a lawyer. But I have been around enough of them in this space to know what the Department of Justice will look at first when a case file like this one is eventually assembled.
5 U.S.C. § 7311 — the federal employee loyalty statute — prohibits currently-employed federal workers from advocating the overthrow of the government. The Agency Resistance Groups Zitomer describes, whose function is "non-cooperative resistance" inside federal agencies, raise direct § 7311 questions for every currently-employed federal worker participating.
The Hatch Act (5 U.S.C. §§ 7321–7326) — prohibits currently-employed federal workers from engaging in partisan political activity in connection with their federal employment. Pompi named the statute on the record. She trained the room anyway.
18 U.S.C. § 371 — conspiracy to defraud the United States — construed by the Supreme Court in Hammerschmidt v. United States (1924) to reach any coordinated effort to "interfere with or obstruct" a lawful function of the United States government. The combination of the "amen" statement, the ARG architecture, and Zitomer's "adversarial analysis" function raises the question of whether the § 371 standard has been met. Investigators — not commentators — answer that question. The record provides the input.
18 U.S.C. § 2384 — seditious conspiracy — requires force. What is on the April 15 tape is not force. It is coordinated cooperation-withdrawal. So § 2384 is probably not the frame. I note it only because it is the statute most people reach for first, and I want to explain why it is not the right one here.
What the record is, and what it is not
The April 15 call was a strategy meeting of a 501(c)(3) and its coalition partners. Meetings are protected. Advocacy is protected. Speech is protected. This piece does not argue that the meeting was itself a criminal act. The First Amendment is strong, and I am not one of the people who pretends otherwise.
What this piece argues is that the April 15 recording is a primary-source operational record of a coalition whose stated objective — on tape, in the speakers' own voices — is the use of organized federal-worker cooperation-withdrawal to produce the removal of the sitting President of the United States. That is the coalition's own framing. This series simply preserves it.
What American institutions do with the record — Hatch Act enforcement, Inspector General review, § 371 analysis, IRS review of the coalition's charitable-purpose compliance, congressional oversight, or ordinary prosecutorial judgment — is a matter for those institutions. Not for me. What I can do is make sure the record is where the institutions can find it.
A closed call.
An encrypted platform.
A recording that was not supposed to exist.
The people on this call spoke freely because they believed the meeting would stay closed. It did not stay closed. The record is now public.
The April 15, 2026 Recording
(Video will be public when we can assure that the identity of the person is safe.)
Part Four will document the congressional pipeline — every sitting member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives in the Congressional Federal Workforce Caucus, the six members of Congress featured in the November 2025 "illegal orders" video, the Pentagon's ongoing UCMJ Article 94 review, and the FBI probe opened in February 2026. The names. All of them.
It's not the story they tell you that is important. It's what they omit.