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The meeting lasted more than six hours, past midnight, and erupted into shouts that could be heard outside the hall. The participants hurled insults and almost came to a fight. Some people left in tears.
Even by the standards of the Trump White House, where people were yelling at each other and President Donald J. Trump yelled at them, the December 18, 2020 meeting became known as a “non-aligned” event — and an inflection point in Mr. Trump’s desperate bid to stay in power after losing the election.
Details of the meeting have been reported before, including by The New York Times and Axios, but at a committee public hearing on Tuesday, Jan. 6, participants in the chaos offered a series of shocking new details about the meeting between Mr. Trump and rival factions of advisers .
“It got to the point where the screaming was totally, totally there,” Eric Hershman, a White House lawyer, told the committee in videotaped testimony. “I mean, you have people coming in — it was late at night, it was a long day. And what they were proposing, I thought was crazy.”
The proposal that the president order the secretary of defense to seize voting machines to check them for fraud and also appoint a special counsel to possibly charge people with crimes was hatched by three outside advisers: Sidney Powell, a former attorney for Mr. -n , the Trump campaign, which propagated conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan conspiracy to manipulate voting machines; Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser whom Mr. Trump fired in his first weeks in office; and Patrick Byrne, former CEO of Overstock.com.
On the other side were Pat A. Cipollone, White House counsel; Mr. Hershman; and Derek Lyons, White House Secretary.
The row began soon after Ms. Powell and her two companions were dropped into the White House by a junior aide and wandered into the Oval Office without an appointment.
They were there alone with Mr. Trump for about 15 minutes before other officials were notified of their presence. Mr. Cipollone said he received an urgent call from a staff member to get to the Oval Office.
“I opened the door and entered. I saw General Flynn,” he said in a videotaped interview the committee released at Tuesday’s hearing. “I saw Sidney Powell sitting there. I was not happy to see the people who were in the Oval Office.
Asked to explain why, Mr. Cipollone said: “First, the Overstock person, I never met, I never knew who that person was.” The first thing he did, Mr. Cipollone said, was tell Mr. n Byrne: “Who are you?” “And he told me,” said Mr. Cipollone. “I don’t think any of these people gave the president good advice.”
Mr. Lyons and Mr. Hershman joined the group. “This was not a chance meeting,” Mr Lyons told the committee in videotaped testimony. “Sometimes there were people shouting at each other, insulting each other. It wasn’t just people sitting on the couch chatting.”
Ms. Powell, in her videotaped interview, described Mr. Trump as “very interested in hearing” what she and her two cohorts had to say, things that “apparently no one else has bothered to inform him about “.
Mr. Hershman said he was overwhelmed by what he heard.
“And I was asking, like, are you saying that the Democrats worked with Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelans, whoever? And at one point, General Flynn pulled out a chart that supposedly showed IP addresses around the world and who was communicating with whom through the machines. And some comments about Nest thermostats being connected to the internet.
When White House officials pointed out to Ms. Powell that she had lost dozens of court cases challenging the results of the 2020 election, she replied: “Well, the judges are corrupt.”
“Am I like everybody else?” Mr. Hershman testified. “Every single case you’ve brought in the country that you’ve lost? Every single one of them is corrupt? Even the ones we appointed?”
Ms. Powell testified that Mr. Trump’s White House advisers “have shown nothing but contempt and disdain for the president.”
The plan, White House advisers have learned, is for Ms. Powell to become a special adviser. That didn’t go well.
“I don’t think Sidney Powell would say I think it’s a good idea to appoint her special counsel,” Mr. Cipollone testified. “I didn’t think she should be assigned to anything.”
Mr. Cipollone also testified that he was troubled by Ms. Powell and others insisting that there was election fraud when there was no evidence. “When other people keep suggesting there is, the answer is what is it? At some point you have to put up or shut up. That was my vision.”
Mr. Hershman described a particularly intense moment. “Flynn was yelling at me for giving up and everything, he kept getting up and standing around and yelling at me. At one point I had it with him, so I yelled at him, “Either come to us or put your ass back on.”
Cassidy Hutchinson, chief aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, could hear the shouts from outside the Oval Office. She sent a message to the Deputy Chief of Staff, Anthony M. Ornato, that the West Wing was “IMPOSSIBLE.”
After the meeting began, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, was called by White House advisers to confront Ms. Powell. The meeting eventually moved to the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room, where Mr. Giuliani found himself alone at one point, something he told the committee he found “kind of cool.”
Finally, the group ends up at the White House residence.
Ms. Powell believed she had been appointed a special counsel, something Mr. Trump has said he wants, including that she should have a security clearance, which other aides opposed. She testified that others said that even if that happened, they would ignore her. She said she would “fire” them on the spot for such insubordination.
Mr. Trump, she said, told her something like, “You see what I’m dealing with? I deal with it all the time.”
In the end, Mr. Trump relented and rejected the outside advisers’ offer. But early the next morning, Dec. 19, he posted on Twitter urging his supporters to arrive at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the day a joint session of Congress was scheduled to take place to certify the Electoral College results.
“Be there, it’s going to be wild!” he wrote.
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