The photo was part of Ms. Hutchinson’s and others’ accounts of an explosive meeting in the Oval Office and around the White House on Dec. 18, 2021, in which Mr. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, along with General Mike Flynn, tried to persuade Trump to grab the vote. machines and take his plans to subvert the election even further. But the team clashed with White House counsel and other White House lawyers who dismissed their ideas as silly and not based in reality, while repeatedly pressing them for evidence of fraud they did not have. And according to Ms. Hutchinson’s text message from that day, it ended with the former mayor being escorted from the presidential residence under the watchful eye of Mr. Meadows to ensure he didn’t “wander” back to the Oval Office. The meeting was full of insults and accusations of infidelity, according to several attendees and witnesses who testified Tuesday. Ms. Powell and her colleagues apparently pressured the president to name her a special counsel with authority to investigate voter fraud and take other, drastic actions, including confiscating voting machines from states across the country. Those ideas were rejected by Mr. Cipollone and Eric Herschmann, a fellow White House lawyer, who said they repeatedly pressed Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani for evidence of their claims. The group responded with a “general indifference” to the importance of backing up one’s claims with facts, Messrs. Cipollone and Herschmann testified. Rumors that Mr. Trump had considered appointing Ms. Powell to the role of special counsel have been reported in the past. What was not publicly known was the extent to which White House legal experts were cracking down on fringe members of Donald Trump’s inner circle who were pushing a wide and almost unimaginably wide range of voter fraud conspiracies. And it paints a picture of a White House in total disarray in recent weeks, as Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell apparently made it all the way to meeting Donald Trump in the Oval Office without a single senior official knowing. before it happens.
