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The PowerPoint reached Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 5, who was held in contempt Monday night by the special committee probing the Capitol attack. The document, which echoes other false claims of voter fraud and calls for what experts have diagnosed as unconstitutional remedies, came to light after the former congressman shared it with the House committee.
Meadows also gave the panel the explosive texts — many from prominent Fox New personalities who have since played down the effort to overthrow the election — that show close Trump allies imploring the chief of staff to convince his boss to intervene to halt the violence.
Together, the records provide further insight into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, a campaign that included dishonestly undermining faith in vote-by-mail, making false claims of fraud, and heaping private pressure on election officials, at least one of whom the former president directed, to no avail, to “find” the number of votes he would have needed to win.
They also cast new light on the Republican Party’s efforts to install Trump loyalists in control of state elections, pass laws curtailing electoral practices they blame for President Biden’s victory and whitewash the Jan. 6 riot.
‘Multiple occasions’
Early caution about the PowerPoint was justified: As my colleague Philip Bump documented, there were questions about its authenticity and how seriously the West Wing took the document’s outlandish claims.
But subsequent reporting from my colleagues Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger, published on Saturday, showed the scheme apparently reached deep inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“A retired U.S. Army colonel who circulated a proposal to challenge the 2020 election, including by declaring a national security emergency and seizing paper ballots, said that he visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election, spoke with President Donald Trump’s chief of staff ‘maybe eight to 10 times’ and briefed several members of Congress on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot,” they reported.
“Phil Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing ‘Options for 6 JAN,’ Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House.”
Still, my colleagues reported: “Although Trump at the time was pressuring [Vice President Mike] Pence to delay certifying Biden’s victory, it is not clear how widely the PowerPoint was circulated or how seriously the ideas in it were considered. A lawyer for Meadows, George J. Terwilliger III, said on Friday that there was no indication that Meadows did anything with the document after receiving it by email.”
Text trouble
The texts, also part of a trove of records Meadows provided to the Jan. 6 committee before he abruptly ceased cooperating, show some of Trump’s biggest Fox boosters and even one of his sons pressing for him to call off the rioters ransacking the Capitol, my colleague Jeremy Barr reported.
“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Fox News prime time star Laura Ingraham texted Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
Brian Kilmeade, who co-hosts the Trump favorite “Fox & Friends” morning show, told Meadows “please get him on TV” and warned the violence was “destroying everything you have accomplished,” Jeremy reported.
Sean Hannity asked Meadows if Trump could “make a statement” and “ask people to leave the Capitol.”
At the Bulwark, Amanda Carpenter documented messages from Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, including one telling Meadows “He’s got to condemn this [shit] ASAP.”
Meadows responded: “I’m pushing it hard. I agree.”
“Still, President Trump did not immediately act. Donald Trump, Jr. texted again and again, urging action by the president: ‘We need an Oval address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand,’” Amanda reported.
It’s not clear how hard Meadows pushed his boss, if at all. Trump eventually made a public statement hours after the rioters had breached the Capitol and sent Pence fleeing for his safety.
The committee voted Monday night to hold Meadows in contempt for defying its subpoena to testify. My colleagues Jacqueline Alemany and Mariana Alfaro noted the panel identified one possible avenue of inquiry in a report it released on Sunday.
“[T]he committee said it wanted to question Meadows about text messages he exchanged with an unnamed senator about … Pence’s power to reject electors. In the messages, Meadows recounted a “direct communication with President Trump who, according to Mr. Meadows in his text messages, quote, ‘thinks the legislators have the power, but the VP has power too,’” to reject electors.”
One of the committee’s missions is to figure out the relationship between Trump’s West Wing and rioters who have reset America’s “Consecutive Peaceful Transitions of Power” calendar to 0. The PowerPoint and the texts took that one step further into the White House.
It's unclear whether the texters reached out directly to Trump.
What's happening now
U.N.: Taliban rule marked by killings, denial of women’s rights
“More than 100 former Afghan national security forces and others have been killed since the Taliban takeover in August, most at the hands of the hardline Islamist group which is recruiting boy soldiers and quashing women's rights, the U.N. said on Tuesday,” Reuters’s Stephanie Nebehay and Emma Farge report.
House, Senate near agreement on Uyghur bill aimed at China
“The House-passed version would require the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to create a list of entities that collaborate with the Chinese government in the repression of the Uyghurs, a predominately Muslim ethnic minority as well as other groups. It also contains a ‘rebuttable presumption’ that assumes all goods were made with forced labor unless the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection gives an exception,” Bloomberg’s Daniel Flatley reports.
Fed meets for first time since Powell signaled policy shift
“Federal Reserve officials meet Tuesday and Wednesday for the first time since Chairman Jerome Powell said last month that the central bank needed to shift its focus toward preventing higher inflation from becoming entrenched and away from fostering a rapid rebound in hiring from the pandemic,” the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos reports.
“The pivot raises the prospect that the Fed’s postmeeting statement—a document parsed by markets as a signal of likely future policy—could be overhauled at the conclusion of their meeting Wednesday.”
The federal agency that measures racial diversity is led mostly by White people
“Starting next month — more than two centuries since the country's first national count in 1790 — the [U.S. Census Bureau] is expected to be led by the first Latino and second-ever person of color to head the U.S. census: Robert Santos, one of the country's leading statisticians who is Mexican American and a Biden administration appointee confirmed by the Senate for a five-year term,” NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports.
“But under the bureau’s director, the permanent full-time staff (which does not include the temporary workers hired specifically for the decennial count) at the federal agency in charge of measuring the demographics of the U.S. still doesn't reflect the country's racial and ethnic diversity. And that's especially true among its highest-ranking civil servants in the Senior Executive Service who run its day-to-day work.”
Some hospitals cancel worker vaccine requirements with Biden rule tied up in courts
“The hospitals all said they had instituted vaccine requirements to comply with the Biden administration’s directive that hospitals and medical centers that receive Medicaid or Medicare funding institute vaccine mandates. But now that the rule is being held up in court, they said they were dropping the requirements,” Eli Rosenberg and Aaron Gregg report.
Lunchtime reads from The Post
Documents link Huawei to China’s surveillance programs
“The Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has long brushed off questions about its role in China’s state surveillance, saying it just sells general-purpose networking gear. A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked ‘confidential,’ suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged,” Eva Dou reports.
- What could Huawei track? “These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.”
- A familiar story: “Huawei has long been dogged by criticism that it is opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims. A number of Western governments have blocked Huawei gear from their new 5G telecom networks out of concern that the company may assist Beijing with intelligence-gathering, which Huawei denies.”
… and beyond
Who gets abortions in America?
“The typical patient, in addition to having children, is poor; is unmarried and in her late 20s; has some college education; and is very early in pregnancy. But in the reproductive lives of women (and transgender and nonbinary people who can become pregnant) across America, abortion is not uncommon. The latest estimate, from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights, found that 25 percent of women will have an abortion by the end of their childbearing years,” Margot Sanger-Katz, Claire Cain Miller and Quoctrung Bui report for the New York Times.
The NYT found that the typical patient:
- Is already a mother
- Is in her late 20s
- Attended some college
- Has a low income
- Is unmarried
- Is in her first 6 weeks of pregnancy
- Is having her first abortion
- Lives in a blue state
The rise of omicron
Biden official warns: COVID explosion imminent
“Everything points to a large wave. A large wave is coming,” a senior Biden administration official told Axios’s Caitlin Owens. “It will be fast. It won't be as severe, but regrettably, there will be plenty of hospitalizations,” the official added.
Pfizer’s anti-covid pill prevents severe illness and should work against omicron variant, company says
“As the omicron variant threatens to wipe out a mainstay of coronavirus treatment, Pfizer announced Tuesday that in a final analysis, its experimental antiviral pill sharply reduced hospitalizations and deaths among people at high risk of severe illness because of age or underlying medical conditions,” Carolyn Y. Johnson reports.
The Biden agenda
Biden administration was not legally bound to auction gulf drilling rights
“The Biden administration admitted that a court decision did not compel it to lease vast tracts of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling, shortly before claiming it was legally obliged to do so when announcing the sell-off,” the Guardian’s Oliver Milman reports.
“The president’s administration insisted it was obliged to hold the lease sale due to a court ruling in favor of a dozen states that sued to lift a blanket pause placed on new drilling permits by Biden. But a memo filed by the US Department of Justice before the lease sale acknowledges that this judgement does not force the government to auction off drilling rights to the gulf.”
Biden’s ambitious broadband funding has a key impediment: an outdated map of who needs it
“The problems with the FCC’s maps have been well documented for years. Telecommunications experts, lawmakers and even the agency’s commissioners acknowledge that the maps overestimate the number of Americans who have reliable Internet connections. Because the maps are based on census data, if even one household in a census block — a statistical area that conveys population data — has broadband available, then the agency considers the entire group served. In rural areas, one block could cover dozens of square miles, creating an inaccurate picture,” Cat Zakrzewski and Chris Alcantara report.
Car prices inflation, visualized
“Throughout the pandemic, new and used cars have been a kind of litmus test for the country’s supply chain issues and related price hikes. Used cars and trucks have been a driving force behind the surge in inflation this year.” Here’s another four charts explaining why inflation is at a near 40-year high.
Hot on the left
Democratic governors worry about threat to democracy but don’t see it as a winning message for 2022
“Attempts to meddle with the certification of the Electoral College count and the partisan takeovers of the voting infrastructure don't seem to be front of mind for an electorate drained by nearly two years of pandemic living and a creeping sense of economic panic, and that worries a range of Democratic governors gearing up for campaigns who gathered in New Orleans this weekend for grim meetings about their 2022 electoral prospects,” CNN's Edward-Isaac Dovere reports.
“The dozen Democratic governors who assembled for an annual policy workshop and donor conference definitely don't want to be the next Terry McAuliffe, whose campaign for Virginia governor went down last month amid a fevered effort to make his GOP opponent out as the horseman of a Trump apocalypse."
Hot on the right
Opinion: It’s time to entertain the possibility that the Build Back Better bill won’t pass
“Most pundits seem to be operating under the assumption that President Biden’s Build Back Better program will eventually become law. After all, it would be very unusual for a Congress controlled by the president’s party to reject his first major domestic proposal,” columnist Henry Olsen writes.
“But given developments in the past week, it might be time to start seriously considering the chance that BBB is DOA.”
Today in Washington
At 6:15 p.m., the Bidens, Vice President Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will attend a Democratic National Committee holiday celebration. Biden and Harris will deliver remarks.
In closing
Late night’s hosts weighed in on the PowerPoint. Their key takeaway: PowerPoint? Really?
Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.
