In a bizarre, angry and “unhinged” White House meeting on 18 December 2020, outside advisers to Donald Trump screamed insults at presidential aides who were resisting their plan to seize voting machines and name a special counsel in pursuit of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.
The meeting – which the House January 6 committee in its public hearing on Tuesday described as a “heated and profane clash” – was held between those who believed the president should admit he lost the election to Joe Biden, and a group of outsiders referred to by some Trump advisers as “Team Crazy”.
They included Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani; the retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser; and a lawyer for his campaign team, Sidney Powell.
The committee confirmed a previous Guardian exclusive that Trump verbally agreed to grant Powell a security clearance and make her special counsel with oversight for seizing voting machines.
In testimony to the House January 6 committee played at the hearing, Giuliani said that at the meeting he had called the White House lawyers and aides who disagreed with that plan “a bunch of pussies”.
Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, said that Flynn “screamed at me that I was a quitter and kept standing up and turning around and screaming at me. I’d sort of had it with him so I yelled back, ‘Either come over or sit your effing ass back down.’”
Herschmann also said: “I think that it got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there. When you got – people walk in, it was late at night, it’s been a long day, and what they were proposing I thought was nuts.”
Powell, who wanted to be named special counsel, told the committee how the group had gained access to the White House via a junior official and spent “probably no more than 10 or 15 minutes” with Trump before top Trump aides “set a new land speed record” in order to join the meeting.
Testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s second White House counsel and a participant in the meeting with Herschmann and Derek Lyons, then White House staff secretary, was played for the first time at the hearing.
He said: “I opened the door and walked in. I saw General Flynn. I saw Sidney Powell sitting there. I was not happy those two people were in the Oval Office … first of all, I saw the Overstock person.”
That was Patrick Byrne, a Trump ally and former chief executive of Overstock.com.
Cipollone said: “The first thing I did, I walked in, I looked at him, I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he told me.
“I don’t think any of these people were providing the president with good advice. So I didn’t understand how they had gotten in.”
Cipollone said the plan to seize voting machines and appoint a Powell was a “terrible idea for the country”.
Referring to William Barr’s prior rejection of claims of electoral fraud in Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, Cipollone said: “There was a real question in my mind, and a real concern, particularly after the attorney general has reached the conclusion that there wasn’t sufficient election fraud to change the outcome of the election, when other people were suggesting that there was, the answer was at some point you have to put up or shut up. That was my view.”
Cipollone said he and others had told Flynn, Giuliani, Powell and Byrne to produce evidence for their claims or stop advancing them, and were told they had no evidence to hand.
Cipollone added: “To have the federal government seize voting machines, it’s a terrible idea. That’s not how we do things in the United States.
“There is a way to contest elections. That happens all the time. But the idea that the federal government come in and seize election machines and all that.”
The committee also displayed a text message in which Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows whose previous testimony lit up Washington and led to Cipollone being served with a subpoena, described the 18 December meeting as “unhinged”.
The committee also showed a picture Hutchinson took of Meadows escorting Giuliani off White House grounds after the meeting, to “make sure he didn’t wander back to the mansion”.
As described by witnesses answering the Maryland Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, the White House meeting ended without the Trump allies’ wild plans being approved or implemented.
But in the early hours of 19 December, Trump sent a tweet encouraging supporters to come to Washington on 6 January 2021, the day Joe Biden’s victory would be certified in Congress.
“Be there, will be wild,” Trump wrote.
The committee played testimony and archive footage from far-right Trump supporters who planned to answer the call.
