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Axios
On Track: Trump Highlights Election Conspiracies As Oval Office Sinks In Madness
Starting on election night 2020 and during his last days in power, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his supporters sacked the U.S. Capitol two weeks before the end of his term. This Axios series takes you into the collapse of a president. Episode 3: The Conspiracy Goes Too Far. Trump’s outside lawyers are plotting to seize voting machines and theories about communists, spies and computer software.President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office one day in late November when a call came in lawyer Sidney Powell. “Ugh, Sidney,” he told the staff in the room before taking over. “She’s getting a little crazy, isn’t she? She really has to tone it down. Nobody believes this stuff. It’s just too much.” Be smart: sign up for America’s most influential newsletter for FREE. speaker for the benefit of its audience. Powell was overjoyed at a national security crisis involving the Iranians who reversed votes in battlefield states. Trump kept quiet and laughed mockingly, “So what are we going to do about this, Sidney?” Trump was saying every few seconds, throwing Powell more and more into a frenzy. He was having fun with it. “She’s really crazy, isn’t she?” He said, again with his finger on the mute button, it was clear Trump recognized how disturbed his outside legal advisers were. But he increasingly despaired of losing to Joe Biden, and Powell and his crew were willing to continue feeding the big lie that the election could be overturned. They were selling Trump an alluring but delusional vision: a clear and achievable path to victory. The only catch: He would have to stop listening to his government and campaign members, cross the Rubicon and see them as liars, relinquishers and traitors. Trump’s new band of advisers shared some common traits. They were sycophants longing for an audience with the president. They were pure conspiracy theorists. The other striking common point within this team was that all of them had, at some point in their lives, done an impressive job, professional and mainstream. Rudy Giuliani was once the “mayor of America,” hailed for his handling of 9/11. Powell was a successful lawyer who defended Enron. Michael Flynn was a decorated three-star general who Obama fired, then brought back as a national security adviser, before firing him and eventually forgiving him. Lin Wood was a nationally recognized defamation lawyer. Patrick Byrne made a small fortune starting Internet retailer Overstock.com, with the exception of Jenna Ellis. She had a slim legal resume and during the 2016 campaign season had used adjectives like “silly,” “boorish,” “arrogant,” “bully” and “disgusting” to characterize Trump and his behavior. But during Trump’s presidency, she worked her way into his inner circle, fueled by levels of television obsequiousness noticeable even for Trumpworld. Powell and Wood have been distinguished by their extremism. Even Giuliani began to distance himself, telling anyone listening that Powell was not representing the president. But Trump promoted Powell to his team, and even though he privately admitted to assistants that he thought she was “crazy,” he still wanted to hear what she had to say. “Sometimes you need a little crazy,” Trump said. As Trump’s campaign team – senior lawyers such as Justin Clark and Matt Morgan – considered issues such as signature verification and access to room surveillance for the vote count, Powell appealed to Trump’s personal mantra of “Think Big!” president with a vast multinational conspiracy of foreign interference on a scale never seen before in American history. The fact that she didn’t have any evidence that could stand in court was a minor detail; Powell and Flynn told Trump he couldn’t trust his team. It appealed to a paranoid mentality that still lurked beneath its surface: the FBI was corrupt. His CIA was working against him, and so was his intelligence community. Why weren’t they showing him proof that China, Venezuela, Iran and various other communists had stolen his electoral victory? To help him get around these hurdles, they would need Trump to give them high-level security clearances so they can get to the bottom of the “stolen” election. Trump liked this idea. Why not make Powell a special advisor on electoral fraud? Why not give him and Flynn the permissions? Trump’s professional staff had learned over time that they had to choose their times to fight. On Powell’s question, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House attorney Pat Cipollone were of the same opinion: no way to get top secret clearance. . To White House staff, that was gibberish – the ranting of a QAnon devotee. But these documents – perhaps the most inconvenient documents to reach a modern American president – found their way to the West Wing. According to documents obtained by Axios, Powell and his crew informed Trump that a foreign conspiracy to steal the election involved a coordinated cyberwar attack. from China, Russia, Iran, Iraq and North Korea.During arguments before Trump in the Oval Office, White House officials responded aggressively. What Powell claimed to have discovered would have been the largest foreign attack in American history. Yet the U.S. intelligence community had seen no evidence of it, but Powell also had an answer to this: The reason Trump hadn’t heard of this from his intelligence officials was that they were actively subverting him and hid crucial information from him. Whistle to QAnon’s conspiracy theorists – a curiosity aroused once he learned they “love Trump” – dated back at least to the summer. On July 1, 2020, Trump met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senator Todd Young of Indiana, and senior Oval Office political aides for an update on Senate races. Trump was holding a printed slide showing the latest key data points, like polls and available money, for the closely watched Colorado Senate race between Republican Cory Gardner and Democrat John Hickenlooper. Trump looked at the game and immediately said: primary last night? QAnon enthusiast Lauren Boebert won the Republican primary in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. The consensus in the room was that Boebert’s victory was a stunner. The president then addressed McConnell. “You know that ‘she believes in that QAnon, “he said.” Do you know that, Mitch? “McConnell was sitting there, his face rock. He hasn’t moved a muscle.” You know, people say they like it. all kinds of bad things and say all kinds of terrible things about them, “Trump added.” But, you know, my understanding is that they’re basically people who want good government. “The room fell silent. No one did. knew how to react. Then all of a sudden Meadows burst out laughing. “I heard them described in many ways, but never quite like that,” he said. The meeting participants burst out laugh. “In terror, quite frankly,” said a source in the room. Powell filled out the diagra. even Trumpian Venn between conspiracy theorists and sycophants. She offered the heartwarming deceptions that Trump longed for in his desperate post-election days and that members of his team who had actual experience with electoral law refused to serve him.In the false and baseless theory that she developed , America’s enemies had used two CIA programs – a foreign surveillance program called “Hammer” and a cyberwar weapon called “Scorecard” – to steal the US election. His testimony was based on the claims of a California computer programmer with a long history of peddling from technology to its fantastic. Powell and Flynn claimed that the CIA had used these programs in nefarious ways since 2009. Documents his team shared with Trump advisers falsely claimed that senior Obama administration intelligence officials John Brennan and Jim Clapper – both enemies of Trump – had illegally requisitioned Hammer to advance the supposed Obama. ambition to make America a communist client state. They further claimed that Brennan and Clapper took the source code for the program with them when they left office. China had now mysteriously acquired Hammer, argued Powell. They described it as an act of war during an appearance in the Oval Office on December 18. No response should be seen as too bold, they said. Trump had to use all the strength of the US government to grab the Dominion’s voting machines and catch the “traitors.” The fact that a US president even entertained all of this raised questions about his state of mind and his ability to perform his duties. The day before that meeting, Giuliani had phoned his old friend, Ken Cuccinelli, deputy in command at the Department of Homeland Security, asking if DHS could seize the voting machines. “No,” Cuccinelli said to Giuliani, politely but firmly. His ministry lacked that legal authority, and at this point Trump was promoting conspiracies. Many of his older advisers had all but given up on trying to reason with him; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, once touted by Newsweek as the most influential presidential relative since Bobby Kennedy, withdrew from the talks when it came to to counter the madmen. Once Giuliani took over, Kushner stepped out of sight, trying to make last-minute deals in the Middle East and polish his foreign policy legacy. This frustrated some of his colleagues. Serious intervention was needed on the home front. Whether Trump himself is still in charge, or has ceded decision-making to lower feeders, was at least an open question. Listen to Jonathan Swan on Axios’ new investigative podcast series, How It Happened: Trump’s Last Stand. About This Series: Our reporting is based on interviews with current and former White House, campaign, government and congressional officials as well as eyewitnesses and people close to the president. The sources were granted anonymity to share sensitive observations or details they would not be allowed to disclose. President Trump and other officials to whom quotes and actions have been attributed by others were given an opportunity to confirm, deny or respond to the report material ahead of publication. “Off the rails” is reported by White House reporter Jonathan Swan, with reporting and research assistance from Zach Basu. It was edited by Margaret Talev and Mike Allen. Illustrations by Sarah Grillo, Aïda Amer and Eniola Odetunde. Support safe, intelligent and sensible journalism. Subscribe to Axios newsletters here.
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