I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  In his Newsmax TV interview with Greg Kelly at about 4:00 that afternoon, Flynn said there was precedent for deploying military troops for this purpose when in fact there was none.

  “Number one, President Trump won on the third of November,” he said. “First of all, he needs to appoint a special counsel immediately. He needs to seize all of these Dominion and these other voting machines that we have across the country. . . . Clearly there is a foreign influence that is tied to this system and it goes back to China, likely goes to Russia, likely goes to Iran. . . . There’s been problems all over the country with them.

  “The president has to plan for every eventuality because we cannot allow this election and the integrity of our election to go the way it is,” Flynn added. “He could also order, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states. It’s not unprecedented. . . . These people out there talking about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted sixty-four times.”

  Late the next day, December 18, Flynn showed up at the White House with Sidney Powell to outline for the president this very plan. They were joined that Friday evening by Emily Newman, a former Trump administration official, and Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of online retailer Overstock.com. A promoter of conspiracy theories, Byrne had left his executive position and had dated a woman who was a Russian agent.

  Herschmann spotted Powell walking into the West Wing and became suspicious. He trailed the foursome into the Oval Office, filing in behind them and sitting in the back of the room while they took seats in front of Trump at the Resolute Desk.

  Powell proceeded to tell Trump that she believed he had been the victim of manipulated voting machines and a foreign influence campaign. She said he should issue an executive order to seize voting machines in key states, and name her a special counsel to investigate. From a clutch of papers, she waved the affidavit she had boasted about at the Republican National Committee news conference, a sworn statement from a person she said was a direct witness to the manipulation of Dominion machines in a Venezuela election to ensure Hugo Chavez’s victory. She did not give a clear explanation of how this person witnessed anything incriminating or corrupt about the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

  Herschmann objected, saying he didn’t follow Powell’s claims. They were about foreign interference, and very different from the legal challenges that Rudy Giuliani and other Trump campaign lawyers had been making in dozens of courts. The campaign argued in those cases that Democrats had changed or flouted voting rules, leading some counties and states to overcount Biden votes.

  Powell told Herschmann that Giuliani had failed to grasp the source of the fraud—“until now.”

  With that, Herschmann called out to an aide outside the Oval for someone to get Cipollone to join them immediately. The White House counsel arrived and was surprised to find people in the Oval he did not recognize. He asked Byrne: “Who are you?”

  Cipollone listened as Powell claimed a massive and vague conspiracy to flip votes for Biden in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Flynn echoed her. Herschmann debated the Georgia county Powell mentioned; it was one Trump actually had won. That didn’t make sense. Powell said the innards of the machines would show how the counts were corrupted. Cipollone warned this foursome the president had no legal grounds to seize machines. Flynn disagreed, saying Cipollone didn’t understand the president’s broad authority.

  The meeting, first described in detail by Jonathan Swan of Axios, turned ugly fast. The attendees cursed and hurled insults at one another. The tenor of the conversation did not befit the serious work normally conducted in the Oval Office, not even in Trump’s unorthodox one. But that’s how deep the West Wing had sunk, and how desperate Trump had become for a rescue plan, four days after the states certified their vote results for the electoral college. By this point, the president had almost entirely ceased doing the business of running the country. Instead, he was taking meetings with people who had wild theories.

  The Powell-Flynn-Byrne team told Trump that his other advisers were not loyal enough and not fighting hard enough for him. Flynn shouted that the people denying this extensive fraud by Dominion machines—at that moment, he was directing his anger at Cipollone and Herschmann—were “quitters.”

  Herschmann was equally disgusted. “Why the fuck do you keep standing up and screaming at me?” he said to Flynn. “If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down.”

  Flynn backed off for a bit. But eventually he started yelling again, this time at Cipollone. He called him a “capitulator” and a “weakling.” Cipollone snorted. Powell insisted she had evidence the election was dirty, and she was willing to fight for the president and prove his case. She and Flynn argued that the Department of Justice couldn’t be trusted to handle this.

  The meeting eventually dragged on for hours and drew in more people. Trump dialed campaign lawyer Matt Morgan and Robert O’Brien to bring them into the discussion at various times. The scene was chaotic. The din grew louder as people spoke over each other. O’Brien, who was speaking from his home after about 8:00 p.m., was asked by one of the White House lawyers whether he had any national security information regarding Powell’s claim of foreign governments hijacking voting machines. O’Brien, who could hardly believe this was a serious question, responded that he saw no evidence or intelligence of such foreign manipulation. When someone soon after tried to add Giuliani to the conference call, O’Brien was inadvertently dropped from the line. Nobody called him back, and O’Brien, content to be liberated from the discussion, did not attempt to rejoin it.

  Trump took a break and left the Oval to go to his dining room for a while, but then resumed the discussion from the residence. By this time, Giuliani had made his way to the White House in person. Herschmann told Powell she should tell Giuliani to his face what she told them in the Oval: that Giuliani hadn’t known what he was doing and only just recently figured out the source of the fraud.

  Trump never took the steps Flynn and Powell had urged. And the Giuliani-Powell relationship appeared to have suffered a break. Giuliani had figured out that Powell lacked any supporting evidence for some of her claims. And he complained to his associates that “Sidney doesn’t play well in the sandbox.”

  When The New York Times reported on December 19 that a tempestuous meeting in the Oval had included a discussion of naming Powell as a special counsel on election fraud, Giuliani quickly distanced himself and Trump from Powell. He asserted she had not been part of Trump’s legal team for the past five weeks and did not speak for the president.

  “She’s a fine woman, a fine lawyer,” Giuliani told Newsmax host Sean Spicer, who had been Trump’s first White House press secretary. “But whatever she’s talking about, it’s her own opinions. I’m not responsible for them, the president isn’t, nor is anybody else on our legal team.”

  Twenty

  Hitting a Dead End

  President Trump’s time in office was running out when, on December 22, he granted a pre-Christmas wave of pardons. The president continued to undo the Mueller investigation’s most important prosecutions by pardoning two people who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators: George Papadopoulos, a former national security adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, and Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer who had married into one of Russia’s wealthiest families and had worked with former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Trump also granted mercy to four Blackwater guards convicted in connection with opening fire on Iraqi civilians, as well as three former Republican members of Congress who had pleaded guilty or been convicted on corruption charges. These acts of clemency fit a pattern; by this point in his presidency, according to one legal tally, 88 percent of pardons went to people who had personal ties to the president or who furthered his political aims.
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br />   Trump had been using most of his remaining time trying to overturn the election, calling state election officials and state legislators to pressure them to block certification of Joe Biden’s wins. Much of his attention was focused on Georgia. Throughout December, Trump had been ratcheting up pressure on Georgia’s leaders to somehow toss out enough Biden votes to overturn the Democrat’s razor-thin victory. He had accused Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp of disloyalty for not requiring signature verification, which Trump said would “expose the massive voter fraud in Georgia” and result in Republican victories.

  On December 23, Trump made a call to Frances Watson, the chief investigator in Raffensperger’s office, who was probing allegations of ballot fraud in Cobb County, in the Atlanta suburbs. Watson had met a day earlier with Mark Meadows, who flew to Georgia to observe firsthand the ballot-signature audit. On the call, Trump told Watson that Meadows had asked him to call her. The president claimed that “something bad happened” and urged Watson to identify “dishonesty” in the state’s vote tally, stressing to her that she would earn praise if she did so.

  “The people of Georgia are so angry at what happened to me,” Trump told Watson. “They know I won, won by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”

  Trump added, “Hopefully when the right answer comes out you’ll be praised. . . . People will say, ‘Great.’ ”

  Watson sounded flattered to get a call from the president—“Quite frankly, I’m shocked that you would take time to do that,” she told him—and thanked him profusely for his interest in her and her team’s work. But she also was cautious. She did not offer or reveal any details of her open investigation. Trump offered her some investigative tips, though. He recommended she try to match ballot signatures with older signatures on file, a strategy that Trump allies believed would increase the number that had to be rejected.

  “I hope you’re going back two years as opposed to just checking, you know, one against the other because that would just be sort of a signature check that didn’t mean anything,” Trump said.

  The president also urged her to look at votes in Fulton County, which encompasses most of the city of Atlanta and is Georgia’s most populous county. Nearly 45 percent of Fulton’s one million residents are Black, and the county is one of Georgia’s most solidly Democratic.

  “If you can get to Fulton, you’re going to find things that are going to be unbelievable, the dishonesty that we’ve heard from, just good sources, really good sources,” Trump told Watson. He added, “Fulton is the mother lode, you know, as the expression goes.”

  Watson did not engage Trump on the details of his requests. “Well, Mr. President, I appreciate your comment,” she said. “And I can assure you that our team, and the [Georgia Bureau of Investigations], that we’re only interested in the truth.”

  Trump’s call to Watson was especially brazen. Experts in criminal law said his attempt to pressure the investigator was inappropriate and may have constituted obstruction of a state investigation. And Trump’s continued assault on the integrity of Georgia’s elections was taking a demonstrable toll on the state’s Republican senators in their runoff campaigns. David Perdue’s and Kelly Loeffler’s seats—and with them, the GOP’s Senate majority—were in jeopardy. The party’s internal polling showed the way to win was with a “checks and balances” message, meaning Perdue and Loeffler would need to campaign as Republican counters to the incoming Democratic administration’s power. To do so credibly, however, the senators had to acknowledge Biden’s victory. Unfortunately for the Republican senators, the leader of their party was saying the opposite and wanted them to do the same. With Trump claiming widespread fraud and refusing to concede, many of his voters would not believe Biden was the next president. Worse still for Perdue and Loeffler—and for Mitch McConnell, who was desperate to remain majority leader—many Georgia Republicans were skeptical about the value of voting in the January 5 runoff because they believed the president when he said the system was rigged.

  Trump wasn’t alone in propagating these doubts. Lin Wood, a prominent Atlanta attorney and Trump ally, had been urging Georgia Republicans not to vote in elections with Dominion machines. At a “Stop the Steal” rally on December 2 in Alpharetta, Wood had appeared with Sidney Powell and told the crowd, “Don’t be fooled twice. This is Georgia. We ain’t dumb. We’re not going to vote on January 5 on another machine made by China. You’re not going to fool Georgians again.” Michael Flynn had made the same claim in his December 17 interview on Newsmax TV, calling the Georgia runoffs “fake elections.” “You can’t have another election on the same system,” Flynn said. “It’s a broken system, and we cannot allow a system that’s tied to foreign powers to be used to vote for the president or any election, any elected office in our country.”

  After McConnell’s easy reelection win in November, he dispatched some of his field staffers to Georgia to assist in the runoff campaigns. One of McConnell’s most talented young operatives settled in northwest Georgia, a bastion of hard-core conservatism where voters had just elected Marjorie Taylor Greene. This was Trump Country. McConnell kept in close contact with the operative as he and his team canvassed door-to-door in the area. On one such phone call, the operative said, “Leader, they’re very confused.”

  “What are you hearing?” McConnell asked.

  “They don’t think their votes are going to count,” the operative said. “They don’t trust the system.”

  * * *

  —

  Mark Milley’s task to protect against Trump and his people manipulating the military had become considerably more difficult with Mark Esper and Bill Barr gone and new loyalists installed at the Pentagon. Milley told confidants he would never openly defy the president; that would be illegal and violate his own sense of duty. But he was determined to plant flags. As Milley had once told Meadows, during one of their many discussions about Trump’s wishes to show off the military’s might, “I’m not moving, just so you know. You’re dealing with a thick-headed Irish guy from Boston. I’m stubborn as shit, and I’m not going to move. It’s just the way I am.”

  Milley, who had considered resigning in the summer, had consulted with lifelong friends and peers he trusted, both in the military and in academia, throughout the rest of the year. Former defense secretary Bob Gates, a mentor, warned Milley the days ahead might be hard, but implored him not to back down. “Stick to it,” Gates said. “Don’t quit. Steel your back. It’s not going to be easy, but you’re the right guy in the right place and at the right time. Thank God you’re there.” Gates had told Esper the same thing at his low point, counseling both men that resigning would give Trump an easy way out and advising them to stay unless or until the president fired them.

  As the president amped up his rhetoric, Milley fine-tuned his antennae for trouble. He monitored the horizon for some stealthy move by Chris Miller, Kash Patel, or Ezra Cohen-Watnick, or for an outbreak of violence in the streets. On New Year’s Eve, military chiefs received an update on how local law enforcement was preparing for a spate of pro-Trump rallies planned in Washington on January 6. The Pentagon was tracking as many as ten planned events centered around Black Lives Matter Plaza, the White House, and the Capitol. The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department requested the Defense Department provide about 340 D.C. National Guard troops for extra support beginning that next week, hoping to assign about 300 to traffic control on the streets and crowd control in the Metro subway, and to place about 40 on standby at Joint Base Andrews as part of a quick-reaction force in case of emergency.

  Meantime, Republicans on Capitol Hill were divided over whether to try to contest the election results on January 6. More than 140 Republicans in the House, roughly two thirds of the GOP members, were planning to do so, even though a bedrock conservative, Barr, had announced the Justice Department found no voter fraud that could change the outcome. Their fealty to Trump was so
strong that they rejected the facts in front of them.

  In the Senate, Josh Hawley of Missouri became the first to announce that he planned to vote to oppose certifying the electoral college vote and force an ugly floor debate over the integrity of the election. The freshman senator, jockeying for position to run for president in 2024, garnered national headlines that he surely hoped would endear him to Trump’s supporters—and that infuriated McConnell. On December 31, McConnell said on a conference call with Senate Republicans that he would vote to certify and that he considered it “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his thirty-six years in the Senate.

  Milley was not alone in his anxiety about the coming days. Other senior leaders in the administration and in Congress were concerned about whether Trump might try to use the powers of the FBI, the CIA, and especially the military to try to stay in office. Starting on December 31, some of them called Milley seeking comfort.

  “Everybody’s worried about coups, attempted coups, overseas stuff in Iran,” one congressman told Milley. “There’s high tension.”

  “The military’s going to stay out of politics,” Milley responded. “We don’t determine the outcome of the election. We don’t pick the people in power. Everything’s going to be okay. We’re going to have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to land this plane safely. This is America. It’s strong. The institutions are bending, but it won’t break.”

  Milley would repeat a version of the same pledge to various government officials many times during this period.