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Starting on election night 2020 and during his last days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his supporters sacked the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left of his tenure. This Axios series takes you into the collapse of a president.
Episode 3: The plot goes too far. Trump’s outside lawyers are plotting to take over voting machines and theories about Communists, spies and computer software.
President Trump sat in the Oval Office one day in late November when a call came in from attorney 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 thing. It’s just too much.”
He put the call on loudspeaker for the benefit of his audience. Powell was overjoyed at a national security crisis involving the Iranians who reversed votes in battlefield states. Trump maintained silence and laughed mockingly.
“So what are we going to do about it, 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 that 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 should stop listening to his government and campaign staff, cross the Rubicon and see them as liars, relinquishers, and traitors.
Trump’s new gang of advisers shared a few common traits. They were sycophants longing for an audience with the president. They were pure conspiracy theorists. The other striking thing in common with this team was that they had all, at some point in their lives, done impressive, professional and mainstream work.
Rudy Giuliani was once “America’s mayor,” 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.
An exception was 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 made her way into his inner circle, fueled by levels of television obsequiousness noticeable even to Trumpworld.
Powell and Wood stood out for 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 told an official.
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 the Trump’s personal mantra: “Think big!
She presented the president with a vast multinational conspiracy of foreign interference on a scale never seen before in American history. The fact that she had no evidence that could withstand the 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 obstacles, they would need Trump to give them high-level security clearances to 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 to choose your moments to defend yourself. On Powell’s question, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House attorney Pat Cipollone agreed: no way to get top secret clearance.
Powell and Flynn sent documents to Trump’s advisers that they believed contained evidence of this massive conspiracy. To White House staff, that was gibberish – the ranting of a QAnon devotee. But these documents – perhaps the most inconvenient materials to reach a modern American president – have 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 the United States. North Korea.
In the arguments in front of Trump in the Oval Office, White House officials have responded aggressively.
What Powell claimed to have discovered would have been the largest foreign attack in American history. Yet the US intelligence community had seen no evidence of this.
But Powell also had an answer to this: The reason Trump hadn’t heard about this from his intelligence officials was because they were actively subverting him and withholding crucial information from him.
His dog whistles at QAnon Conspiracy theorists – a curiosity aroused once he learned they “love Trump” – go 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 bridge and immediately said, “How about that primary last night?”
Lauren Boebert, passionate about QAnon had won the Republican primary for the 3rd Congressional District of Colorado. The consensus in the room was that Boebert’s victory was a stunner. The President then addressed McConnell. “You know she believes in this QAnon,” he said. “Do you know that, Mitch?” McConnell sat there, his face stone. He didn’t move a muscle.
“You know people say they like all kinds of bad things and say all kinds of terrible things about them,” Trump added. “But, you know, my understanding is that these are basically people who want good government.”
The room fell silent. No one knew how to react.
Then suddenly Meadows burst out laughing. “I’ve heard them described in many ways, but never quite like that,” he said. The meeting participants burst out laughing. “In terror, quite frankly,” said a source in the room.
Powell filled out Venn’s Trumpian diagram between conspiracy theorists and sycophants. She offered the heartwarming deceptions Trump needed in his desperate post-election days and that members of his team who had real experience in electoral law refused to serve him.
In the false and baseless theory She conceived, America’s enemies had used two CIA programs – a foreign surveillance program called the “Hammer” and a cyberwar weapon called the “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 have claimed that the CIA has used these programs in nefarious ways since 2009.
Documents his team shared with Trump’s advisers falsely claimed that senior Obama administration intelligence officials John Brennan and Jim Clapper – both enemies of Trump – had illegally requisitioned Hammer to further the supposed ambition Obama to turn America into 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 in an appearance at the Oval Office on Dec. 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.”
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 did not have this legal authority.
At this point, Trump was dominating the plots. Many of his older advisers had all but given up on reasoning with him.
His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, once touted by Newsweek as the most influential presidential relative since Bobby Kennedy, has stepped back from discussions when it comes to countering 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 was still in charge or had ceded decision-making to lower eaters was at least an open question.
🎧 Listen to Jonathan Swan on Axios’ new investigative podcast series, titled “How It Happened: Trump’s Last Stand.”
About this series: Our reporting is based on interviews with current and former White House officials, 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.
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