Trump was in contact with the war room command centers at the Willard Hotel
Washington Post reveals Trump was in contact by phone to the ‘war room’ that contained the ex-President’s most senior coup conspirators.
As more details begin to emerge about the deadly January 6 insurrection, more is being revealed about the extreme lengths that former President Trump and his team were willing to go through to have him reinstated illegally.
According to the Washington Post, this included setting up “war rooms” in a downtown DC hotel. At DC’s Willard hotel, they hatched their elaborate plans, mere days before the January 6 insurrection. It has been made clear by the publication that their focus was on how to overturn the legal 2020 election.
Another publication, the Washington Examiner, stated in their report that in just one day, January 2 Trump, Giuliani and Eastman called as many as 300 state legislators in a conference call that supposedly gave them the evidence to present. All the efforts were aimed at decertifying the election results.
Trump is quoted as saying: “You are the real power. You’re the ones that are going to make the decision.”
The war room included a command centre that was broken up into multiple rooms and suites at the above-mentioned hotel. From these rooms, they brainstormed on how they could reinstate Trump for a second term. This, even though the results had already been verified and certified. The report further stated that the effort was intense with some of the team working around the clock.
Some of the names mentioned in the report are well known Trump loyalists. For example, his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was there along with his former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon who acted as an adviser and made occasional visits to the hotel.
Also among the names listed, was former NYPD police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was a part of the team as an investigator. His firm was allegedly paid $55,000 for rooms for the legal team by the Trump campaign. He would later state that he was infuriated by the RNC because they refused to pay for his team’s services, even after it collected tens of millions of dollars in support of Trump’s legal battle.
Kerik’s main focus, even while the riot was going on, was to try and prove allegations of election fraud. Part of his team included Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations. Kerik has since revealed that he was working since November 5, 2020, just two days after the election, all the way up until Jan. 19, 2021.
A reporter attached to One America News, Christina Bobb, who is also a lawyer, was mentioned in the report as a person who volunteered for the campaign at the time.
John Eastman was also present. It is now known that he tried to coerce former Vice President Mike Pence during an Oval Office meeting on January 4, to use his powers to illegally delay or even block the certification of the election. All of this information is now before the special House committee investigating the January 6th MAGA riot at the Capitol.
Steve Bannon, has already been held in criminal contempt after his refusal to appear before the committee because of the influence of Trump’s legal team. He along with organizers of the Stop the Steal rally, including former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and former communications director Dan Scavino and Pentagon chief of staff Kashyap Patel.
Republican Michigan state Sen. Ed McBroom, spoke with the Post about the mass conference call that he was a part of. He said that he remembered listening to Trump, Giuliani, Eastman and others go on about the power that state legislators have when it came to the certification of electors. He said that he was already well aware of what could be done but was not convinced since the callers did not provide additional information. Therefore he did not support the delay of certification of the election.
The House committee in conducting its investigations has officially requested the communications related to the legal advice and analysis given by Eastman. This includes the team’s master six-point plan that mapped out a way for Pence to overturn the certified and legal election to Trump.
As their efforts to incite their loyal Trump supporters ramped up, on Jan. 2, Eastman, Giuliani and Epshteyn appeared on Bannon’s podcast. Bannon is quoted as calling the day “all-hands meeting with state . . . legislators that the Trump campaign and also others are putting on.”
In another part of that podcast, Eastman said: “It’s the duty of these legislatures to fix this, this egregious conduct, and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected. ‘
Eastman continued to create strategies to try and get the defeated Trump back into office. When all of them failed he told a crowd gathered at the rally on the Ellipse that all they wanted from former Vice President Pence was that “he let the legislatures of the states look into this so that we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not!” This call for action came after Trump allegedly said the VP was being arrogant because he would not go along with their plans.
According to the article, the plan included the publicising of the unfounded evidence of fraud and pressuring state legislatures to challenge Biden’s victory. It also included the inciting of Trump supporters to get Republican lawmakers to agree with the plans, especially in key states. Trump’s team used their war room to put pressure on lawmakers in swing states.
This included key states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. Part of the plan included getting these lawmakers to host special sessions to investigate fraud and to reassign electoral college votes. Their massive conference call persuaded some lawmakers from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They would go on to write Pence, asking that he delay certification of Biden’s victory for at least 10 days.
Part of that letter stated that they needed time to allow their “respective bodies to meet, investigate, and as a body vote on certification or decertification of the election.” Eastman previously admitted to some of the details of the war room. During an interview, he said, “We had a war room at the at the Willard …kind of coordinating all of the communications.”
Even though the select committee, has not reached out to him for more details, he has already hinted that he may refuse to appear because of client-attorney confidentiality. The Post also spoke with former White House special assistant Boris Epshteyn who stated that even now as he firmly believed then, the vice president had the constitutional power to send the issue back to the states for 10 days, to investigate their claims of widespread fraud. He said if that path was taken they would have returned their findings well before Inauguration Day, on January 20th.
Trump has carried on with his tirade even though most of his claims have been found to be untrue. Just last week, October 18, he sued the House select committee for issuing a number of subpoenas to his top former advisors. He’s also sought to stop having certain documents released from the National Archives. He is trying to stop the presenting of information about the inner workings of the White House leading up to the Jan. 6th riot.
The defendants in the suit include Rep. Bennie Thompson and archivist David Ferriero. Part of it states that the committee “has decided to harass President Trump and senior members of his administration (among others) by sending an illegal, unfounded, and over-broad records request to the Archivist of the United States.”
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