“There are very few things you can count on in this world, but one thing you can, with the consistency of a Swiss watch, is that at any given moment Donald Trump and his inner circle will be doing something both deeply corrupt and extremely stupid,” writes Bess Levin at Vanity Fair.
To wit, a 38-page PowerPoint document entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” was among the documents the Jan. 6 investigation received from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. The presentation included a string of Trump’s options for delaying certification of the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. Including declaring a national security emergency to stay in power.
It is, however, unclear that Trump aides prepared the document. A similar document circulated online on Thursday. The New York Times confirmed it was simlar to the document turned over to the House Jan. 6 committee. Business Insider found other versions had circulated online before, “including by Fox News’s Lara Logan on January 5 and other proponents of challenges to the 2020 election.”
The New York Times dug into the document’s origins:
Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and an influential voice in the movement to challenge the election, said on Friday from a bar he owns outside Austin, Texas, that he had circulated the document — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — among Mr. Trump’s allies and on Capitol Hill before the attack. Mr. Waldron said that he did not personally send the document to Mr. Meadows, but that it was possible someone on his team had passed it along to the former chief of staff.
It is unclear who prepared the PowerPoint, but it is similar to a 36-page document available online, and it appears to be based on the theories of Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a Texas entrepreneur and self-described inventor who has appeared with Mr. Waldron on podcasts discussing election fraud.
Waldron and his associates briefed a group of sentors on Jan. 4. The next day, he himself briefed several House members, including on the (debunked) theory that foreign powers had gained control over the vote tallies.
The document also outlined means by which Vice President Mike Pence might delay or overturn the results, the Guardian adds:
Pence could pursue one of three options, the PowerPoint said: seat Trump slates of electors over the objections of Democrats in key states, reject the Biden slates of electors, or delay the certification to allow for a “vetting” and counting of only “legal paper ballots”.
The final option for Pence is similar to an option that was simultaneously being advanced on 4 and 5 January by Trump lieutenants – led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, as well as Trump strategist Steve Bannon – working from the Willard hotel in Washington DC.
The Willard Hotel war rooms were bound to turn up here. Meadows’ posession of the document makes it a stretch for him to claim he was unaware such plans were under consideration.
Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, has cited the 38-page PowerPoint as among the reasons he wants to question Mr. Meadows under oath.
Before coming to loggerheads with the panel, Mr. Meadows had provided some useful information to the committee, including a November email that discussed appointing an alternate slate of electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and a Jan. 5 message about putting the National Guard on standby. Mr. Meadows also turned over his text messages with a member of Congress in which the lawmaker acknowledged that a plan to object to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory would be “highly controversial,” to which Mr. Meadows responded, “I love it.”
Like the smell of napalm in the morning, eh?