Let’s revisit that tale of the PowerPoint presentation for overturning the 2020 election that was in documents former Donald Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows turned over to House Jan. 6 investigators. The Washington Post has more this morning:
Phil Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN,” Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.
Waldron told the Washington Post he had visited with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed “several members of Congress” on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot.
Members of Congress? Which members of Congress? Waldron declined to identify them.
“The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here’s the proof,” Waldron said. “These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.”
The PowerPoint circulated by Waldron included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” or replace them with Republican electors. It included a third proposal in which the certification of Joe Biden’s victory was to be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops were to help “secure” and count paper ballots in key states.
A lawyer for Meadows claims Meadows did nothing with the PowerPoint after receiving it. But the “wild theories and proposals” circulating among Trump loyalists, plus Meadows asking Department of Justice heads to investigate baseless conspiracy theories, suggests Meadows “was more directly in contact with proponents of such theories than was previously known.”
Waldron, a cybersecurity consultant who specialized in psychological operations during his military career, said that a meeting he and others had with Meadows in the days around Christmas turned to questions about how to determine whether the election had been hacked. He said Meadows asked, “What do you need? What would help?” Waldron said his team developed a list for Meadows with information on IP addresses, servers and other data that he believed needed to be investigated “using the powers of the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus.”
Waldron “and others” on his “team”? Which others?
An unnamed source tells the Post that Meadows had “little or nothing to do” with Waldron or any of his documents, but simply passed along information to appropriate parties.
Eight to 10 times?
No one owns up to authoring the PowerPoint. Nor do they know who sent it to Meadows even though Waldron seems to know who provided input:
Waldron has said that the team behind the PowerPoint included former intelligence officers and military veterans and was supported by hundreds of “digital warriors” who provided research. Jovan H. Pulitzer, a Texas-based entrepreneur who is a vocal election denier, told The Post that he contributed material for it.
“It was a pretty wide variety of folks from around this country that jumped in to say how can we help,” Waldron told The Post.
“Violence is absolutely the last thing that anybody on our team espoused,” Waldron told the Post. Perhaps they should have told the losing candidate, The Three Percenters, The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and others.
Waldron also claims to have briefed Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in Meadows’s office with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani present and is known to have worked with Trump’s legal team and Giuliani at their Willard hotel war room.
No comments on this Post reporting from :
- Ben Williamson, a Meadows spokesman
- Rudy Giuliani
- Lindsey Graham
- A Trump spokesman
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (R) on Friday “did not directly address whether Waldron had briefed him and his staff.”
The Post has much more background on Waldron’s background and post-service involvement in cybersecurity. He had post-election involvement with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and advised Arizona Senate President Karen Fann on the hiring of Cyber Ninjas for the bamboo ballots recount in Maricopa County, Arizona.
We once had a major client who operated like these clowns. You knew it was him calling when you heard an office page for the process engineering team leader, then, after a pause, for someone else on the process team, then, after another pause, a page for someone on the piping team, and so on. He would not take responsibility for making his own decisions. He would call around our office looking for someone to tell him what he wanted to hear so he had someone to blame when the stupid thing he wanted to do went to hell. Team Trump, Giuliani, pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and others kept doing the same with 2020 election results.
How many court decisions and official recounts would it take to prove to Trump and his cadre of seditionists that there was no significant fraud in the election?