President Donald Trump on Tuesday touted yet another false allegation about the election as he reportedly rocked close White House advisers by talking to conspiracy-minded allies who fueled his fantasies to undo Joe Biden’s victory.
They have put forward suggestions including having Trump declare martial law and repeating elections in states where he narrowly lost; trying to get congressional republicans to invalidate Biden’s victory in a session next month; and seizure of voting machines.
The charges are led by attorney Sidney Powell, who fired Trump as an election attorney last month, and Powell’s client Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who recently pardoned Trump for lying to FBI agents.
“People talk about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done before,” Flynn told conservative news outlet Newsmax last week.
“Martial law has been instituted 64 times,” said Flynn, a retired army lieutenant general.
Powell, who was fired from the campaign reelection team last month because her theories about voting machines used to hurl the election to Biden were apparently too extreme even for other Trump lawyers, has visited the White House three times since Friday.
Trump has reportedly considered the idea of appointing her as special counsel to investigate alleged electoral fraud. Powell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Another person who has urged Trump to ignore the more moderate suggestions of Pat Cipollone and other White House advisers is Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com.
Byrne’s well-known affair with Russian asset Maria Butina, while giving the FBI information about her, plays a key role in his conspiracy-minded worldview.
Byrne has said he was at a long, sometimes contentious meeting with Trump, Powell, Flynn and Trump advisers on Friday as they discussed electoral challenge strategy.
NBC News has reported that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Cipollone ended the meeting because it went in an alarming direction.
“My concern is that I was in the room when it happened,” Byrne wrote in a tweet.
Among the lofty voices were my own. I can promise you: President Trump is terribly served by his advisers. They want him to lose and they lie to him. He is surrounded by lying mediocrities. ‘
Byrne later wrote, referring to Powell and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, “For the first time in my life, I feel sorry for Donald Trump. He is in snakes up to his waist. Trust only Rudy and Sidney.”
The president’s discussions with Powell and the others were quickly leaked to The New York Times and other media outlets, underscoring their reports that the White House’s own advisers are concerned about the merits of those talks.
The Times reported Saturday that Trump had asked at the meeting about Flynn’s proposal to impose martial law.
Trump called that report “Fake News” in a tweet on Monday.
One of the other Trump campaign lawyers, Jenna Ellis, tweeted early Tuesday, “To anyone not using the resurrection law (which does not apply in this context), remember that President Trump himself tweeted that it is fake news, he is even considering it. “
“He is also a constitutionalist. We are not undermining the rule of law,” Ellis wrote in her tweet, referring to suggestions by some Trump supporters that the president would invoke martial law.
But Ellis’ tweet, and a similar one by her around the same time, was met by criticism from Trump backers who called for more extreme measures to reverse Biden’s victory beyond lawsuits and ensure that state lawmakers effectively pass the election to Trump. hand over, what they have refused to do.
“That’s our problem. While we worry about following the ‘rules,’ Dems break them all, invent new ones, and get away with them!”, One person wrote in response to Ellis.
Trump echoed that frustration, lashing out at Senate Leader Mitch McConnell after the Kentucky Republican admitted Biden had defeated Trump. McConnell also tried to dissuade other lawmakers from making an almost certainly doomed attempt to get Congress to overturn the election.
Trump’s personal assistant emailed Republicans in Congress a slide Monday night attributing McConnell’s own election victory to a Trump tweet and robocall recording by the president.
Unfortunately Mitch forgot. He was the first to get off the ship! ‘ said the slide.
All the while, the president has been tracking a steady pace of Twitter posts underscoring his refusal to accept that Biden won and his baseless claim that he lost the election due to widespread voting fraud.
“THE DEMOCRATS HAVE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BALLOTS IN THE SWING STATES IN THE EVENING,” Trump tweeted Tuesday.
“IT WAS AN EXTENSIVE ELECTION !!!”
Twitter promptly tagged Trump’s tweet with the message, “This allegation of electoral fraud is disputed.” The social media site has repeatedly slapped that label on Trump’s tweets in recent weeks.
Trump’s rant on Twitter about the election – and the lack of reports of the rising coronavirus death toll – has led a number of observers to compare the president to King Lear, the Shakespearean character furious about his alleged betrayal.
Trump and his allies have lost or withdrawn all dozens of lawsuits that attempted to undo or undermine Biden’s victory, as the Electoral College confirmed last week that Biden won, and as a number of Republican members of Congress have accepted that Trump lost .
Particularly painful for the president, Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press that the Justice Department, which Barr supervises, had seen no evidence of widespread voting fraud that would result in Biden’s victory being reversed.
While Trump has no control over how judges govern, he is even the judges he appoints, he is Barr’s boss, and the Justice Department is part of the executive arm of the government.
Barr’s targeted refusal to endorse Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election was soon followed by the resignation of the Attorney General, which takes effect Wednesday.
The losses in court and of Barr as an ally willing to carry out the president’s orders have left Trump with little more than Hail Mary scenarios of the kind promoted by Powell, Flynn and Byrne.
CNBC asked White House spokesman Judd Deere about the advice Trump was getting from that trio, whether the president was considering declaring martial law, as Flynn has proposed, and what Trump believes Congress should be on Jan. 6 to do. That’s the date Congress is scheduled to confirm the results of the electoral college.
Deere declined to comment.
But on Monday at the White House, Trump met with Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., And about a dozen other House GOP members who Brooks said were willing to challenge the Electoral College results.
“President Trump is a strong supporter of our efforts,” Brooks told The Associated Press.