Beginning on the night of the 2020 election and continuing until his last days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers plundered the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left of his term. This Axios series takes you into the collapse of a president.
Episode 3: The conspiracy goes too far. Trump’s outside lawyers plan to confiscate electronic ballot boxes and develop theories about communists, spies and computer software.
President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office one day in late November when he received a call from attorney Sidney Powell. “Ugh, Sidney,” he said to the staff in the room before answering. “She’s going a little crazy, isn’t she? She really has to tone it down. No one believes these things. It’s too much.”
He put the call on speaker for the benefit of his audience. Powell was raving about a national security crisis involving the Iranians exchanging votes in battlefield states. Trump pressed dumb and laughed mockingly.
“So what are we going to do about it, Sidney?” Trump said every few seconds, driving Powell more and more into frenzy. He was having fun with this. “She really is crazy, huh?” he said, again with his finger on the mute button.
It was clear that Trump recognized how troubled his outside legal advisors were. But he was becoming increasingly desperate to lose to Joe Biden, and Powell and his team were willing to continue feeding the big lie that the election could be overturned.
They were selling Trump a seductive but delusional vision: a clear and attainable path to victory. The only problem: he would have to stop listening to his government and campaign teams, to cross the Rubicon and see them as liars, dropouts and traitors.
Trump’s new gang of advisers shared some common traits. They were sycophants who longed for an audience with the president. They were hardcore conspiracy theorists. The other notable similarity within this team was that they had all, at one point in their lives, done impressive, professional and conventional work.
Rudy Giuliani was once “the mayor of America”, acclaimed for his way of dealing with 9/11. Powell was a successful lawyer who defended Enron. Michael Flynn was a decorated three-star general that Obama fired and Trump brought back as his national security adviser, before firing him and finally forgiving him. Lin Wood was a nationally known defamation lawyer. Patrick Byrne made a small fortune by launching Internet retailer Overstock.com.
An exception it was Jenna Ellis. She had a weak legal background and, in the 2016 campaign season, used adjectives like “idiot”, “rude”, “arrogant”, “bully” and “disgusting” to characterize Trump and his behavior. But during Trump’s presidency, she made her way into her inner circle, driven by remarkable televised levels of subservience even for Trumpworld.
Powell and Wood stood out for their extremism. Even Giuliani began to distance himself, telling anyone who wanted to hear that Powell did not represent the president. But Trump promoted Powell as part of his team, and although he privately admitted to advisers that he thought she was “crazy”, he still wanted to hear what she had to say.
“Sometimes you need a little bit crazy,” Trump told an official.
While Trump’s campaign team – seasoned lawyers like Justin Clark and Matt Morgan – examined issues such as signature verification and access to room monitoring for vote counting, Powell appealed to Trump’s personal mantra of “Think big!”
She presented the president with a comprehensive multinational conspiracy of foreign interference on a scale never before seen in American history. The fact that she had no evidence that could be sustained in court was a minor detail.
Powell and Flynn told Trump that he could not trust his team. This appealed to a paranoid mentality that has always hidden under its surface: The FBI was corrupt. His CIA was working against him, and so was his intelligence community. Why else would they not show him the evidence that China, Venezuela, Iran and several other Communists stole his electoral victory?
To help you get around these obstacles, they would need Trump to give them top-level security clearances so they could get to the bottom of the “stolen” election. Trump liked the idea. Why not make Powell a special lawyer in charge of electoral fraud? Why not give her and Flynn the permits?
Trump’s professional team learned over time that it needed to choose moments to fight back. On the Powell issue, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House lawyer Pat Cipollone shared the same opinion: There was no way she would be able to get top secret authorization.
Powell and Flynn sent documents to Trump’s advisers that they said contained the evidence of this far-reaching conspiracy. For the White House team, it was gibberish – the speeches of a devotee from QAnon. But those documents – perhaps the most disturbed material for reaching a modern president of the United States – reached the west wing.
According to documents obtained by Axios, Powell and his team warned Trump that a foreign conspiracy to steal the election involved a coordinated cyber attack from China, Russia, Iran, Iraq and North Korea.
In discussions in front of Trump in the Oval Office, White House officials reacted aggressively.
What Powell claimed to have discovered would be the greatest foreign attack in American history. However, the United States intelligence community saw no evidence of this.
But Powell also had an answer to that: the reason Trump hadn’t heard about it from his intelligence officers was because they were actively subverting and hiding crucial information from him.
Your dog beeps at QAnon Conspiracy theorists – a curiosity that arose when he heard they “loved Trump” – dated back to at least summer.
On July 1, 2020, Trump met with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Senator Todd Young of Indiana and key political advisers in the Oval Office for an update on Senate disputes. Trump was holding a printed slide show showing the latest key data points, such as voting and cash, for the Colorado Senate race closely observed between Republican Cory Gardner and Democrat John Hickenlooper.
Trump looked at the deck and immediately said, “How about that last night primary?”
Lauren Boebert, not enthusiastic had won the Republican primary for Colorado’s 3rd congressional district. The consensus in the room was that Boebert’s victory was surprising. The president then addressed McConnell. “You know she believes that QAnon,” he said. “Are you familiar with that, Mitch?” McConnell sat with an impassive face. He didn’t move a muscle.
“You know, people say they like all kinds of bad things and say all kinds of terrible things about them,” added Trump. “But, you know, my understanding is that they are basically just people who want good government.”
The room was silent. Nobody knew how to respond.
Then, suddenly, Meadows started laughing. “I’ve heard them described in many ways, but never like that,” he said. The meeting participants started to laugh. “In terror, quite frankly,” said a source in the room.
Powell filled in the Trumpian Venn diagram between conspiracy theorists and sycophants. She offered the comforting disappointments that Trump longed for in his desperate post-election days and that people on his team with real experience in electoral law refused to serve him.
In false and baseless theory she elaborated, America’s enemies used two CIA programs – a foreign surveillance program called “Hammer” and a cyber war weapon called “Scorecard” – to steal US elections.
Their evidence was based on claims by a California computer programmer with a long history of advertising fantastic sound technology. Powell and Flynn claimed that the CIA had been using these programs nefariously since 2009.
Documents that his team shared with Trump advisers falsely claimed that the Obama administration’s top intelligence officials, John Brennan and Jim Clapper – both Trump’s enemies – had illegally commanded Hammer to further Obama’s alleged ambition to make America a state communist customer. They even claimed that Brennan and Clapper took the program’s source code with them when they left office. China had mysteriously acquired Hammer, Powell argued.
They described it as an act of war during in an appearance in the Oval Office on December 18. No answer should be considered too bold, they said. Trump needed to use all the strength of the United States government to seize Dominion’s ballot boxes and capture the “traitors”.
The fact that an American president was considering any of these things raised questions about his state of mind and his ability to do his duties.
The night before that meeting, Giuliani called his old friend, Ken Cuccinelli, second in command at the Department of Homeland Security, asking if DHS could seize electronic voting machines. “No,” said Cuccinelli to Giuliani, politely, but firmly. His department did not have this legal authority.
At this point, Trump was major conspiracies. Many of his older advisers had given up trying to reason with him.
Her son-in-law, Jared Kushner, once announced by Newsweek as the most influential presidential relative since Bobby Kennedy, backed down from discussions when it came to fighting the crazy. As soon as Giuliani took office, Kushner disappeared from sight, trying to close last-minute deals in the Middle East and polish his legacy of foreign policy. This frustrated some of his colleagues. Serious intervention on the home front was necessary.
Whether Trump himself was still in charge, or whether he had given up decision-making to the fund’s feeders, was at least an open question.
🎧 Listen to Jonathan Swan in Axios’ new investigative podcast series, called “How it Happened: Trump’s last stand.”
About this series: Our reports are based on interviews with current and past White House officials, government and Congress officials, as well as eyewitnesses and people close to the president. The sources obtained anonymity to share sensitive observations or details that they would not be allowed to disclose. President Trump and other officials to whom quotes and actions have been attributed by others have had the opportunity to confirm, deny or respond to elements of the report prior to publication.
“Off the rails” is reported by White House reporter Jonathan Swan, with assistance for reporting and research by Zach Basu. It was edited by Margaret Talev and Mike Allen. Illustrations by Sarah Grillo, Aïda Amer and Eniola Odetunde.