Two Texas businessmen, with ties to former Gov. Rick Perry, met with former President Donald Trump a week after the 2020 election and presented him with a fringe theory that state legislatures could overturn election results, according to the congressional report on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that was released Thursday.
The theory fueled one of the main strategies Trump's closest allies pushed to overturn the 2020 election results, even though legal experts, including those within Trump's White House, dismissed the idea as unlawful and said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
The two Austin-area businessmen, Morgan Warstler and John S. Robison, met with Trump in an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 10, 2020, according to the report. The exact nature of what they discussed was not detailed, but Warstler tweeted in June that he had told the “whole Trump team in Oval” that “State legislatures can choose the electors-no matter what current state law OR state courts say” — in essence empowering Republican-controlled state lawmakers to overturn President Joe Biden’s win.
