On the night of December 18-19, 2020, the White House was “out of control.” At that time, two camps were arguing about the outcome of the US election and in the end Donald Trump made a decisive tweet – a reconstruction.
Sometime at the end of 2020, the centrifugal forces of the previous presidential election pulled so hard on the White House that the Trump confidants gathered there divided into two camps: “Team Normal” and “Team Crazy”. Until the middle of the month, the incumbent but defeated US President Donald Trump tried everything he could to stay in office. With lamentations, recounts and self-pity on display. Between December 18 and 19, the whole madness culminated in “the craziest day of the entire Trump presidency,” as MP Jamie Raskin said.
“Team Normal” vs. “Team Crazy”
What happened that day, when the decision was made to change the history of the United States, was heard at the seventh hearing of the Capitol Storming Committee of Inquiry. Various witnesses were invited, including, from “Team Normal”, the White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone, whose testimony was recorded a few days earlier.
The meetings, which lasted a total of six hours, began on the evening of December 18, 2020. Four days earlier, the electoral college had met and, in accordance with the election results, had declared the Democrat Joe Biden US President. On the 18th, a Friday, an unnamed Trump employee gave a rather dubious trio access to the White House. This part of the “Team Crazy” consisted of the conspiracy theorist and former prosecutor Sidney Powell, the equally eccentric ideas inclined CEO of the furniture retailer Overstock, Patrick Byrne, and Trump’s disgraced first security adviser Michael Flynn. Rudy Giuliani, the US President’s ominous whisperer, was already there.
According to his own statement, the lawyer Pat Cipollone was called that evening and asked if he could please come to the Oval Office immediately. When he entered the President’s office, he was “not happy” about the visitor he met there. “I walked in and said, ‘Who are you?’ I didn’t think these people would be good advisors to the President, so I didn’t know how they got here in the first place,” Cipollone said in his statement. The trio had apparently been talking to Donald Trump for almost a quarter of an hour.
Did thermostats falsify the US election?
This meeting, which other close White House aides seemed unaware of, quickly escalated. One of them, Derek Lyons, testified that the two camps started “yelling and insulting each other. It wasn’t the kind of people who sit on the sofa chatting away.”
Eric Herschmann, also a White House lawyer and from “Team Normal,” reports that the illustrious guests claimed, among other things, that thermostats from the Chinese company Nest had manipulated the votes cast over the Internet to the detriment of the Republicans. Cipollone said he contradicted the group and demanded that they provide evidence to support their claims.
But in his view, it didn’t seem particularly important to the three of them to provide evidence for their allegations. Instead, they accused the legal advisors of being too “soft” to take decisive action against the election result. Donald Trump’s private attorney at the time, Rudy Giuliani, recalled the dialogue in his statement: “I have to say in no uncertain terms: you’re not tough enough, you’re a bunch of pussies.” According to the witnesses, he appeared to have been very drunk that evening. There is a photo showing the former New York Mayor being escorted out of the Oval Office. Under the watchful eye of Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, “so Giuliani doesn’t stray back there,” as Meadow’s assistant at the time said recently.
The “Team Normal” is said to have tried to counteract the “Team Crazy”. “What they said was crazy,” says Eric Herschmann. Among other things, the discussion was about the trustworthiness of the judges, who had all dismissed around 60 lawsuits from the Trump camp. But Sydney Powell replied that they were “all corrupt”. Counsel Herschmann: “All of them? Every single case in this country that you’ve lost? They’re all corrupt? Even the ones we nominated for office?”
Trump should recognize the election
During the evening, Pat Cipollone is said to have tried to persuade the US President to give up. As did then-Labour Secretary Eugene Scalia: “I told him (Trump, ed.) that I think it’s time for him to acknowledge that President (Joe) Biden won the election.”
The wild meeting was also about allegedly manipulated voting machines and the question of whether the government could confiscate them for the purpose of testing. Apparently, the idea of making conspiracy theorist Sydney Powell a special representative for checking machines and general allegations of voter fraud circulated briefly. Cipollone said: “I was very opposed to it. I didn’t think she should be called up for anything.” He also found the proposal to confiscate voting machines to be a “terrible idea.”
The meeting lasted until after midnight, and the US President was always there. At one point, Trump turned to Sydney Powell and said, “See who I’m dealing with here? That’s what I have to deal with all the time.”
The chairman of the investigative committee, Democrat Bennie Thompson, said of the evening’s events: “If you’re on the losing side, that doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it. What Donald Trump should have done at that moment, what by any American leader was to say, ‘We did our best, but we didn’t make it.’ He went the opposite way.”
“It’s getting wild,” Trump wrote at 1:42 a.m
On the night, Donald Trump chose a side and joined the “Team Crazy”. At 1:42 a.m. he tweeted, “Statistically impossible that we lost the 2020 election. Big protest in DC on January 6th. Come on, it’s going to be wild!” It was this tweet that, in particular, encouraged Trump’s far-right supporters to go to Washington that day and storm the Congress building. At least that’s what the leading figures, for example from the “Oath Keepers”, said before the committee.
Sources: DPA, AFP, NPR“Independent“, NBC News