At around 5 p.m. on Christmas Day in 2020, as many Americans were celebrating with family, President Donald J. Trump was on the phone at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, with a little-known conservative attorney who his efforts to reverse the election, according to a memo the lawyer later wrote to document the appeal.
The attorney, William J. Olson, promoted several extreme ideas to the president that Mr. Olson later admitted could be considered declaring “martial law” and even lead to comparisons with Watergate. They include tampering with the Justice Department and firing the acting attorney general, according to the Memo of 28 December by Mr. Olson entitled “Preserving Constitutional Order”, describe their discussions.
“Our small group of attorneys is working on a memorandum explaining exactly what you can do,” Mr. Olson wrote in his memo, obtained by The New York Times, which he labeled “privileged and confidential” and sent to the president. “The media will call this martial law,” he wrote, adding that “that’s ‘fake news’.”
The document highlights Mr. Olson’s previously unreported role in advising Mr. Trump as the president increasingly turned to extreme, far-right figures outside the White House to pursue options many of his official advisers had told him. that they were impossible or illegal, in an effort to stay in power.
The involvement of a person like Mr. Olson, who now represents conspiracy theorist and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, underscores how the system that would normally isolate a president from rogue actors operating outside official channels within weeks of the election of 2020 had collapsed.
As a result, Mr. Trump came into direct contact with people promoting conspiracy theories or questionable legal ideas, telling him not only what he wanted to hear, but also that they—not the officials who advised him—were the only ones he could trust.
“During our lengthy conversation earlier this week, I overheard the White House Counsel’s Office attorney’s shameful and dismissive attitude toward you personally—but more importantly, toward the Office of the President of the United States itself,” wrote Mr. Olson to Mr Trump. “This is unacceptable.”
The memo was written 10 days later one of the most dramatic rallies ever held at the Trump White House, in which three of the president’s White House advisers competed — almost physically at one point — with outside actors to influence Mr. Trump. At that meeting, attorney Sidney Powell and Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, insisted that Mr. Trump confiscate the voting machines and appoint Ms. Powell as special counsel to investigate wild and unfounded claims of voter fraud, even if it White House attorneys fought back.
But the memo suggests that even after his aides won that skirmish in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump continued to seek extreme legal advice that ran counter to the recommendations of the Department of Justice and the attorney’s office.
Key Revelations from the January 6 Hearings
And, the memo suggests, Mr Trump was acting on outside advice. At one point, the memo refers to the president urging Mr. Olson to contact the acting attorney general directly about the Justice Department’s lending credibility to Mr. invalidate election results.
A person familiar with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack said the committee was aware that Mr. Olson was in contact with Mr. Investigating was in putting forward plans to overthrow the 2020. election.
Mr. Olson, who is a lawyer in Washington, DC and Virginia, did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment about the former president’s relationship with Mr. Olson.
According to his memo, Mr. Olson discussed with Mr. Trump the idea that the Justice Department would mediate directly with the Supreme Court to reverse his electoral defeat.
The court had declined to hear a case that allies of Mr. Trump in Texas had contested the election results in Pennsylvania, because the plaintiffs had no standing.
Mr. Olson told Mr. Trump that he believed the Justice Department “will do nothing except continue to run out of clocks.”
“While the time to act was short when we spoke on Christmas Day, it is about to run out,” he wrote.
It was unclear which White House attorney Mr. Olson was referring to in his memo. At the time, White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone; Patrick Philbin, his deputy; and another lawyer who didn’t work for the law firm, Eric Herschmann, teamed up to push back some of the more outlandish ideas that were recommended. Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Herschmann had played a leading role in countering Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn at the White House meeting on Dec. 18.
“The feeling I had was that not only was he not offering you options, but he was there to make sure you didn’t consider any,” wrote Mr. Olson, referring to the unnamed attorney for the United Nations. White House. “But you do have options.”
Among those Mr. Olson said he spoke to Mr. Trump about the Justice Department’s involvement was Mark Martin, the former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. White House officials at the time believed that Mr. Martin had been brought in through Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.
Mr. Olson urged Mr. Trump to hire another attorney, Kurt Olsen, who had worked on the Texas case.
“When I emailed Molly Saturday morning,” Mr. Olson, referring to Mr. Trump,” we began following up on your inquiry about our team that revised the Texas complaint to what could be the first draft of a complaint filed by the United States. The attorneys I’ve worked with have that job and we now have a draft that can be submitted to you to review, and by you to Mr. Rosen to edit, improve and archive.”
That was a reference to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the Acting Attorney General. In his memo, Mr. Olson told Mr. Trump during their discussions that he had followed the president’s suggestion to call Mr. Rosen a few hours earlier and ask the acting attorney general to file a lawsuit. to try to block Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College win.
A spokesman for Mr Rosen said he could not recall speaking to Mr Olson, but the acting attorney general was against filing lawsuits to interfere in the election.
Based on Mr. Olson’s memo, Mr. Trump was aware that Mr. Rosen was slowly executing his request. The suit was never filed; Mr Rosen testified before the January 6 committee last month that this was outside the bounds of the law.
At the time of the memo, Mr. Trump had left for Mar-a-Lago, but Mr. Olson encouraged him to return to Washington to fight the election results from his White House spot. Mr. Trump did so shortly afterwards, working over the holiday season to contest the election results.
“I don’t believe you can do what needs to be done from Florida,” Mr. Olson wrote to the president. “And it would send a message about your commitment to the task, to leave Mar-a-Lago to take charge of the White House. I urge you to come back as soon as possible.”
Mr. Olson also encouraged Mr. Trump to fire or reassign Mr. Rosen if he did not agree to plans to use the Justice Department to challenge the election in court, although Mr. Olson acknowledged that such an action would receive negative coverage.
“This move is likely to generate a thousand stories analogous to ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ in 1973 when President Nixon ordered AG Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox as special counsel investigating Watergate,” he wrote.
Mr Olson said the new attorney general must take steps to ensure a “fair count of the election”, which he admitted would be seen by many as “martial law”.
It was not immediately clear how Mr. Olson in the orbit of Mr. Trump landed. Mr. Olson previously worked with Republican super PACs and promoted a conspiracy theory that Vice President Kamala Harris is ineligible to become Vice President, falsely claiming that she is not a natural American citizen. He and his firm have long represented Gun Owners of America, an advocacy group.
After Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Olson joined Mr. Lindell’s legal team, which has promoted a range of conspiracy theories about the election and is sued for defamation by a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems. Mr. Lindell, who? crashed the Oval Office in the last days of the presidency hoping that Mr Trump would still take action regarding the election, was adamant that: mr. Trump would be reinstated as president in 2021, something that is not possible.
He filed suit against the commission on January 6 for block the panel’s subpoena to Verizon for Mr. Lindell’s call logs. The lawsuit, which Mr. Olson filed with other attorneys, argued that Mr. Lindell’s statements about his objections to the 2020 election were protected speech, in part because they were related to his religious beliefs.
“Mr. Lindell has widely disclosed that his 2020 election integrity activities are motivated in part by his strong religious beliefs,” the lawyers wrote in Mr. Lindell’s lawsuit.