Tuesday’s January 6th hearings revealed yet another boatload of dirt on what went down behind the scenes in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the insurrection on the Capitol. One of the most interesting tidbits was about a meeting-turned-shouting match that took place on December 18, 2001 until the wee hours at the White House, where Donald Trump had assembled all the usual suspects—plus a who’s who of totally random individuals, including Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne—to figure out his next step in how to cling to power in the wake of a lost presidential election.
As The Washington Post reported, this “motley crew of unofficial Trump advisers [who] had talked their way into the Oval Office and an audience with the president” spent hours offering up all sorts of increasingly bizarre ideas on how the election might have been stolen (spoiler: it wasn’t) and some mostly illegal strategies on how Trump might be able to deny the results and remain in power. When one lawyer tried to explain to the president how “nuts” these ideas were, all hell broke loose, and former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann admitted that he and disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn nearly came to blows. At one point, Rudy Giuliani—classy as ever—called people like Herschmann, who weren’t willing to blow up democracy as we known it, “a bunch of p*ssies.”
Perhaps the most entertaining detail reported about this meeting, which former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described as “unhinged” in a text message sent that night, is that Byrne, presumably one of the nutters who thought Trump could somehow just ignore America’s vote and carry on as president, made more than a meal out of some Swedish meatballs Trump served up as the hours wore on. As The Washington Post wrote:
At some point, the meeting migrated to the Yellow Oval Room in the White House residence, where Trump served the group Swedish meatballs. (Byrne was “nonstop housing meatballs — he ate so many meatballs,” one person familiar with the gathering told The Post.) There the fighting continued.
https://t.co/KlHgrURMM8 pic.twitter.com/MlyPWTFQzB
— Jim Newell (@jim_newell) July 13, 2022
If loving tiny meatballs and discounted home goods is wrong, Byrne clearly doesn’t want to be right.
(Via The Washington Post)