This just hit from the Washington Post this morning:
They called it the “command center,” a set of rooms and suites in the posh Willard hotel a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lieutenants were working day and night with one goal in mind: overturning the results of the 2020 election.
The Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and the ensuing attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob would draw the world’s attention to the quest to physically block Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s victory. But the activities at the Willard that week add to an emerging picture of a less visible effort, mapped out in memos by a conservative pro-Trump legal scholar and pursued by a team of presidential advisers and lawyers seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate Trump for a second term.
They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
The gang was all there.
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance responds in a tweet, “The Willard isn’t cheap & this story reports the campaign paid $55K in bills for the Trump war room. This is campaign activity, not covered by executive privilege unlike the work of the presidency. The Jan 6 Comm is entitled to info about who knew/who paid”
The effort underscores the extent to which Trump and a handful of true believers were working until the last possible moment to subvert the will of the voters, seeking to pressure Pence to delay or even block certification of the election, leveraging any possible constitutional loophole to test the boundaries of American democracy.
House investigators cited the presence of the “war room” in the contempt resolution passed this week after Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena to testimony in the Jan. 6 investigation.
In May, Eastman indicated that he was at the hotel with Giuliani on the morning of Jan. 6. “We had a war room at the at the Willard . . . kind of coordinating all of the communications,” he told talk show host Peter Boyles, comments first reported in the newsletter Proof.
Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, did not respond to requests for comment.
Giuliani was likely otherwise occupied.
Seth Abramson posted a thread on Thursday reprising his own PROOF reporting (many for subscribers only) from months ago about this second Trump war room (the first was at the Trump International Hotel in D.C.) In it, he identifies additional players present, claiming that in fact there were three war rooms at the Willard.
“Most folks don’t realize that the highest-traffic, most ‘celebrity’-laden war room at the Willard Hotel on January 5 wasn’t Giuliani’s—it was Alex Jones’s. Roger Stone was there. Michael Flynn was there,” Abramson tweets, citing interviews given by the talkative Stone and Jones.
All this means that the House Select Committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol had better make haste. They’ve got a lot of people’s stories to cross-check.