Diving into the aftermath of the 2020 election, members of the Jan. 6 committee focused on Tuesday on a meeting between former President Donald J. Trump and outside advisers that culminated in what they described as a chaotic showdown over a desperate bid to win the election. to undo .
Based on testimony from former Attorney General William P. Barr and others, the commission detailed a hastily staged meeting in which advisers proposed an executive order to allow the military to seize voting machines in crucial states that Trump had lost.
“On Friday, Dec. 18, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit to the White House that would soon become a legend,” said Maryland Democrat Representative Jamie Raskin. “The meeting has gone wild, not normal, and has been called the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”
According to the panel, several of Trump’s advisers, including Mr. Barr and former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, had publicly and privately dismissed the possibility of large-scale voter fraud in the weeks before the December meeting and urged Mr. Trump to admit. Mr Barr made a public announcement on Dec. 1 to confirm that he had found no significant evidence of fraud.
Just four days before the meeting, on December 14, the Electoral College met to certify the election results, which Mr Barr told the committee in a taped interview “should have been the end of the matter”.
But on the evening of Dec. 18, several of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers, including Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, came to Mr. Trump to urge him to consider the plan to confiscate voting machines.
As the meeting intensified, Mr. Cipollone told the committee that other plans were being discussed, including granting Ms. Powell security clearance and appointing her special counsel, putting her in charge of Mr. contesting election results.
The meeting lasted hours and moved from the Oval Office to other areas of the West Wing before ending in the presidential residence, the committee said. And fights broke out throughout the evening, including “challenges to fight physically,” said Mr. raskin.
In a taped interview presented Tuesday, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary, said, “Sometimes there were people yelling at each other, throwing insults at each other — it wasn’t just people sitting on a couch chatting.”
The panel showed evidence that the meeting ended around midnight, with no agreement among participants on how to proceed.
But committee members used Tuesday’s hearing to suggest that while Mr. Trump was apparently frustrated with the lack of options to contest the election results at the December rally, at the time he was turning to his supporters and encouraging them to come. . to Washington on January 6.
Just over an hour after the meeting was said to have ended, Trump tweeted at 1:42 a.m. on December 19 that it was “statistically impossible” for him to lose the election. In the tweet, he also urged supporters to gather in Washington to demonstrate, receiving dozens of responses from people sharing plans to occupy the Capitol and photos of weapons they intended to take.
“Be there, will be wild,” the tweet said:†