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Jan. 6 Committee Examines PowerPoint Document Sent to Meadows

Mark Meadows’s lawyer said the former White House chief of staff did not act on the document, which recommended that President Donald J. Trump declare a national emergency to keep himself in power.

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By Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer

WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is scrutinizing a 38-page PowerPoint document filled with extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election that Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff to President Donald J. Trump, has turned over to the panel.

The document recommended that Mr. Trump declare a national emergency to delay the certification of the election results and included a claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states.

A lawyer for Mr. Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that Mr. Meadows provided the document to the committee because he merely received it by email in his inbox and did nothing with it.

“We produced the document because it wasn’t privileged,” Mr. Terwilliger said.

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.

Mr. Waldron said he was not surprised that Mr. Meadows had received a version of the document, which exists in varied forms on internet sites.

“He would have gotten a copy for situational awareness for what was being briefed on the Hill at the time,” Mr. Waldron said.

On Jan. 4, members of Mr. Waldron’s team — he did not identify them — spoke to a group of senators and briefed them on the allegations of supposed election fraud contained in the PowerPoint, Mr. Waldron said. The following day, he said, he personally briefed a small group of House members; that discussion focused on baseless claims of foreign interference in the election. He said he made the document available to the lawmakers.

Mr. Meadows is not known to have worked directly with Mr. Waldron, who has described his military background as involving “information warfare.” However, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer as he fought to stay in power, has cited Mr. Waldron as a source of information for his legal campaign.

Mr. Meadows remains in a legal battle with the Jan. 6 committee, which is moving forward with holding him in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a scheduled deposition or to turn over documents he believes could violate Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive privilege. Mr. Trump has filed suit claiming he still has the power to keep White House documents secret, an assertion several courts have rejected, though the case appears headed for the Supreme Court.

Mr. Meadows has responded by filing suit in an attempt to persuade a federal judge to block the committee’s subpoenas. His lawsuit accuses the committee of issuing “two overly broad and unduly burdensome subpoenas” against him, including one sent to Verizon for his phone and text-message data.

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.”

But Mr. Meadows also informed the committee that he had turned in the cellphone he used on Jan. 6 to his service provider, and that he was withholding some 1,000 text messages connected with the device.

In December, after Mr. Pulitzer testified before the Georgia State Senate and claimed to have “hacked” the state’s voting system, Georgia’s secretary of state issued a news release calling him a “failed treasure hunter” who had “provided no evidence.”

Mr. Pulitzer did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Waldron was featured in a film by Mike Lindell, the embattled chief executive of MyPillow who helped finance Mr. Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results. In the film, Mr. Waldron pushed the unfounded claim that the Chinese government had access to files and data through voting machines. He also claimed that overseas servers in Germany, Spain and Britain somehow played a role in manipulating results .

Even though Mr. Meadows did not appear to act on the PowerPoint, he did take action to pursue other baseless claims of voter fraud.

In five emails sent in late December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen , then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of wild conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual winner of the election, according to emails provided to Congress.

The emails included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Mr. Biden.

Mr. Rosen did not agree to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows. He also refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.

Luke Broadwater covers Congress. He was the lead reporter on a series of investigative articles at the Baltimore Sun that won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award in 2020. More about Luke Broadwater

Alan Feuer covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The Times in 1999. More about Alan Feuer

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Explosive PowerPoint presentation detailing plan to overturn election for Trump discovered by Jan 6 committee

The actions recommended in the 36-page powerpoint presentation are similar to what trump allies were demanding of a top defence department official in the days leading up to the 6 january insurrection, subscribe to independent premium to bookmark this article.

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A PowerPoint presentation that bears the exact title as one that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has turned over to the House of Representatives select committee investigating the 6 January insurrection alleged that China had effective control of American voting machines and urged the declaration of a “national security emergency” as a pretext for throwing out election results in several US states.

According to a letter to Mr Meadows’s attorney from select committee chair Bennie Thompson, Mr Meadows delivered a copy of a presentation, “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN”, to the committee before ending his cooperation with its investigation into the worst attack on the Capitol since British troops set it ablaze in 1814.

Many of the actions recommended in the presentation – which Mr Meadows reportedly intended to deliver to members of Congress – also match up with ideas floated by other key allies of former president Donald Trump in hopes of keeping him in the White House for a second term against the wishes of American voters.  

In a tweet posted late on Thursday, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar called the document “a plan for a coup”.

“We need [to] get serious about what the consequences for that should be,” she said.

A spokesperson for the select committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether a version of the presentation reviewed by  The Independent was the same as what the committee recieved from Mr Meadows, but committee vice chair Liz Cheney wrote in a Twitter thread on Thursday that the committee had “received exceptionally interesting and important documents from a number of witnesses”, the former White House chief of staff included.

The 36-page document, which was intended to be presented to members of Congress before they met in a joint session to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral college victory, opens with an allegation that the Chinese government “systematically gained control” over the US election system through “compromised” electronic voting machines which could not be trusted to provide an accurate vote count.

It further singles out eight states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico — as having had their results corrupted through “domestic voter fraud”.

The specific charges of how vote totals were “fixed” in favour of Mr Biden are largely in line with a grab bag of outlandish and false claims promulgated by people in former president Donald Trump’s inner circle during the period between 7 November — when most news organisations called the 2020 race for Mr Biden — and 6 January, when a mob of Mr Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in hopes of stopping Congress from carrying out its statutory duty to count each state’s electoral votes. 

The presentation lays out a theory identical to that which was offered up by Trump campaign attorneys Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell at a now-infamous press conference held at Republican National Committee headquarters on 19 November 2020.

At the time, Ms Powell alleged that she had uncovered the “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, in the interference with our elections here in the United States”, and further claimed – without offering evidence – that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems used software from a different voting system builder, Smartmatic, with both having been developed “at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election”.

None of what Ms Powell alleged about either Dominion or Smartmatic had any basis in reality, and both companies have subsequently filed billion-dollar defamation lawsuits against her.

The presentation also makes recommendations that match up with drastic demands made to a Defence Department official by another erstwhile ally of Mr Trump, ex-White House national security adviser Michael Flynn .

Several slides lay out a scenario under which ballots in all 50 states would have been seized by the US Marshals Service and held for a 50-state hand recount conducted by “select federalized National Guard units” under supervision of a “trusted lead counter” to be appointed by Mr Trump.

Mr Flynn, a retired three-star army general who lasted just three weeks as Mr Trump’s first national security adviser, reportedly pushed a top Defence Department official he had once worked with to help use national guard units to reverse the results of the election his former boss had lost.

In  Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,  author Jonathan Karl reported that Mr Flynn placed a call to then-acting undersecretary of defence for intelligence Ezra Cohen in late 2020, just days after having received a presidential pardon from Mr Trump.

The ex-general reportedly told his former aide to immediately return to Washington from an official trip he was on.

“We need you,” Mr Flynn reportedly said before telling Mr Cohen that he would need to obtain signed orders to seize ballots and take “extraordinary measures…to stop Democrats from stealing the election”.

When the Defence Department official replied that the election was “over” and it was “time to move on”, Mr Flynn berated him for being a “quitter” and maintained that the election was “not over”.

Another slide in the presentation alleges that a computer server in Frankfurt, Germany, operated by a company called Scytl was used by “malicious actors” to falsify election results.

The alleged German server – which does not exist – also figured in a call Ms Powell made to Mr Cohen’s private phone number – a number known only within the Pentagon and White House – shortly after he had spoken with Mr Flynn.

After Mr Cohen answered the unsolicited phone call, Ms Powell demanded that he “launch a special operations mission” to retrieve then-Central Intelligence Agency director Gina Haspel from Germany, where Ms Powell claimed she was being held after sustaining an injury during a secret mission (which never actually happened) to retrieve the server (which did not exist) as part of a cover-up.

It is unclear to what extent Mr Meadows or other Trump allies were able to get anyone from the Defence Department to take any affirmative steps towards implementing the plans laid out in the presentation, but another document Mr Meadows has reportedly given to the committee – an email about “having the national guard on standby” – may provide further information on the matter.

According to the letter from Mr Thompson, that email – which was sent from Mr Meadows’s personal email account – bore the date of 5 January, one day before the Capitol attack.

Additionally, one of the three “options for 6 January” laid out in the presentation matches a proposal for delaying certification of the electoral college results which was offered by Texas senator Ted Cruz.

The option, under which then-vice president Mike Pence would have unilaterally delayed certification of the 2020 election “to allow for a vetting and subsequent counting of all the legal paper ballots”, matches the plan laid out by Mr Cruz in a statement on 2 January.

Mr Cruz, along with senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and then-senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Mississippi, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, proposed that rather than count the electoral vote on 6 January, Congress could “immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states”.

Mr Lankford, who was speaking on the senate floor in support of the delay plan when the pro-Trump mob forced senators and Mr Pence from the chamber into hiding, later dropped his support for a delay, as did Mr Johnson, Ms Blackburn and Mr Daines.

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A PowerPoint presentation circulating online — outlining a plan to overturn the 2020 election — is similar to the one Mark Meadows gave to the Jan. 6 panel, report says

• A 36-page PowerPoint presentation on how to overturn the 2020 election was being shared on Twitter Thursday.
• The New York Times confirmed Friday it's similar to the one Mark Meadows gave the January 6 committee.
• A lawyer for Meadows said he was emailed the document on January 5 and did nothing with it.

A PowerPoint circulating online this week — that detailed extreme plans to overturn the 2020 election — is similar to the one former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows handed over to the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack, The New York Times confirmed Friday.

Meadows, who served in former President Donald Trump's White House, previously sent documents to the committee before announcing earlier this week that he was no longer cooperating with the investigation, putting himself at risk of being held in contempt of Congress .

Parts of a 36-page version of the document, titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN," were shared on Twitter Thursday . The PowerPoint included many of the false claims about voter fraud and election irregularities that were being shared by former President Donald Trump and his allies after Joe Biden's victory.

The presentation also featured recommendations on how to change the election outcome, including declaring a national security emergency, throwing out all electronic voting, and having Vice President Mike Pence personally select Republican electors.

The New York Times confirmed on Friday the presentation being shared online was similar to the presentation Meadows gave to the January 6 committee. However, the version Meadows provided was 38 pages, and it's unclear how exactly the two differed.

Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was said to be the one circulating the presentation, did not respond when Insider reached out on Thursday.

On Friday, he told The Times that he sent the presentation to Trump allies before the January 6 insurrection and that one of his associates may have sent it to Meadows. It was not clear who created the document.

A lawyer for Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. He told The Times that the former chief of staff was emailed the presentation on January 5 and did not do anything with it, adding that they gave it to the January 6 committee simply because it wasn't privileged.

Despite making the rounds on Twitter this week, the document (or apparent versions of the presentation) have been shared publicly online before, including by Fox News's Lara Logan on January 5 and other proponents of challenges to the 2020 election.

Have a news tip? Contact this reporter at  [email protected] .

• Main content

Trump’s White House Emailed About a PowerPoint on How to End American Democracy

By Ryan Bort

The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol has obtained a trove of electronic messages from former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows , including an email referring to a PowerPoint suggesting Trump could declare a national security emergency in order to delay the certification of the results of the 2020 election.

The revelation is the latest indication that Trump and his inner circle, including his allies in Congress, were very actively and very aggressively trying to overturn the results of the election, which Trump lost handily.

The PowerPoint presentation, which spanned 38 pages and was titled “Election fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN,” was part of an email sent on Jan. 5, the day before the attack on the Capitol. The email pertained to a briefing that was to be provided “on the hill.” Hugo Lowell of The Guardian tweeted slides from the presentation on Thursday detailing a conspiracy theory-laden plan for Vice President Pence to install Republican electors in states “where fraud occurred,” and for Trump to declare a national emergency and for all electronic voting to be rendered invalid, citing foreign “control” of electronic voting systems.

In the 13 months since the election, no evidence has emerged that foreign entities influenced the election, or that any significant fraud occurred.

Latest: Trump White House chief Mark Meadows turned over to Jan. 6 committee an email that referred to a PowerPoint calling for Trump to declare a NatSec emergency and have VP Pence delay Biden’s certification pic.twitter.com/D2wgLS6AoD — Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) December 9, 2021

George Terwilliger, an attorney for Meadows, said on Friday that Meadows provided the committee with PowerPoint because he simply received it in an email. “We produced the document because it wasn’t privileged,” he said, according to The New York Times .

The committee noted in a letter on Wednesday that Meadows had provided text messages in which he discussed a “highly controversial” plan to overturn the election results by appointing alternate electors in certain states. “I love it,” Meadows replied to the idea, which was sent to him by a lawmaker. Meadows discussed the same plan, which was described as a “direct and collateral attack,” in a separate email. The letter referenced the PowerPoint presentation, as well, but did not provide details of its contents.

The letter sent on Wednesday, which was addressed to Meadows’ attorney, explained that the committee had “no choice” but to move to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with his subpoena. How, if Meadows is refusing to comply, did the committee get ahold of all of these damning documents from the former chief of staff? Meadows last week reached an agreement to cooperate, turned over the material, and then earlier this week changed his mind and is now stonewalling the committee. He’s now suing the committee in an attempt to block his subpoena.

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It’s unclear what exactly inspired the reversal. Meadows says the committee was not respecting his claims of executive privilege, to which Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said the committee “tried repeatedly to identify with specificity the areas of inquiry” were subject to privilege, but Meadows wouldn’t cooperate. It’s also possible that Meadows decided to buck the committee after reports began to circulate that Trump was pissed at him for revealing a bunch of damning information about how the White House covered up details of Trump’s bout with Covid last year. It’s also possible that Meadows just isn’t very bright.

Regardless, the committee is now in possession of a trove of his documents indicating the extent of Trumpworld’s very real efforts to overturn the election results, efforts that culminated in a throng of supporters storming the Capitol in a violent attack that resulted in five deaths and dozens of injured police officers.

The material turned over by Meadows may be the tip of the iceberg. Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said last week that the committee is preparing to hold “several weeks” worth of public hearings that will tell the story of the riot at the Capitol in “vivid color.” She added on Thursday that the committee has met with nearly 300 witnesses, that it is conducting multiple depositions and interviews every week, and that it expects a ruling imminently on whether it can obtain Trump’s White House documents. “The investigation is firing on all cylinders,” she wrote.

Hours after Cheney teased an upcoming ruling on Trump’s executive privilege claim, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down .

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