They referred to it as the “command center”, a collection of rooms and suites in the luxurious Willard Hotel just a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump’s closest aides worked around the clock with one goal in mind: to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Planning the Legal Efforts to Restore Trump
The activities that took place at the Willard Hotel during that week spotlight an emerging narrative of a less visible effort, outlined in memos by a conservative legal scholar aligned with Trump and executed by a team of White House advisers and lawyers seeking to implement a legal strategy to restore Trump to a second term.
Led by Trump’s Personal Attorney Rudolph Giuliani
Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, was the leader of this team. Former senior White House political adviser Steve Bannon was sometimes present as a senior political consultant for the efforts. Bernard Kerik, former New York City Police Commissioner, was present as an investigator. John Eastman, the legal scholar, was also present and provided scenarios for denying Joe Biden’s victory in a meeting in the Oval Office on January 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Efforts to Pressure Pence
The team sought to convince Pence and increase pressure on him to take action on January 6 that Eastman suggested was within his powers, according to three people familiar with the process. Their activities included finding and disseminating alleged evidence of fraud, urging state legislators to challenge Biden’s victory, and rallying Trump supporters to pressure Republican officials in key battleground states.
Last-Ditch Efforts to Reverse the Will of the Voters
These efforts underscore the determination of Trump and a few of his true believers who worked up to the last moment to manipulate the will of the voters, seeking to pressure Pence to delay or even prevent the certification of the election, and exploiting any possible constitutional loophole to test the limits of American democracy.
Responses to the Legal Efforts
In an attempt to compel Bannon to testify, the congressional committee investigating the events of January 6 this week cited his alleged presence in the “war room” organized at the Willard Hotel. The House voted Thursday to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a subpoena from the committee.
The committee also requested documents and communications related to the legal advice and analysis provided by Eastman.
Eastman told The Post on Wednesday that he had not yet been contacted by the congressional committee investigating the insurrection. When asked about his role in the Trump team’s operations at the Willard Hotel, Eastman said, “As far as I was there, these were attorney discussions. You’re not getting any comment from me on that.”
Ongoing Efforts to Influence Pence
In May, Eastman indicated that he was at the hotel with Giuliani on the morning of January 6. “We had a war room at the Willard… coordinating all communications,” he told the program host Peter Boyles, with the comments first reported in the Proof newsletter.
Giuliani’s attorney, Robert Costello, did not respond to requests for comment.
There was also Christina Bobb, a correspondent at One America News, a trained attorney who was working as a volunteer for the campaign at the time, according to people familiar with the process. Bobb declined to comment.
Continued Efforts to Gather Evidence of Fraud
Kerik stated that his company lost the Trump campaign over $55,000 for the legal team’s hotel rooms. The costs were later reimbursed, records show.
Three people familiar with the process described the intense activity in the days and hours leading up to and extending past 1 p.m. on January 6, when Congress convened to count the electoral votes.
In those early days of January, Trump supporters were contacting from the command center state legislators highlighted by Eastman in his memos, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, encouraging them to hold special sessions to investigate fraud and reroute electoral college votes from Biden to Trump, according to two people familiar with the process.
The Attempts
Convincing State Legislatures
On January 2, Trump, Giuliani, and Eastman spoke to 300 members of state legislatures via a phone call aimed at providing them with alleged evidence of fraud and motivating them to take action to “overturn the certification” of their election results. “You are the real power,” Trump told state legislators, according to a report in the Washington Examiner. “You are the ones who will make the decision.”
Republican Senator from Michigan Ed McBroom said he listened to Trump, Giuliani, Eastman, and others describe the power that state legislators have in certifying voters. “I didn’t need any persuasion about our overarching authority,” McBroom told The Post. “I was listening to see if they had any evidence to substantiate claims” of widespread electoral fraud that could change the results in Michigan. The speakers offered no additional information, and he said he did not endorse postponing the counting of election votes.
Ongoing Efforts to Convince Pence
But it appeared that others were convinced. Three days after the call, several members of Congress from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin wrote to Pence. They asked him to postpone certifying Biden’s win for 10 days to allow “our concerned bodies to gather and investigate and vote as a body on certifying or decertifying the election.”
Also on January 2, Eastman, Giuliani, and Epstein appeared on Bannon’s podcast to persuade Trump-supporting listeners. They discussed what Bannon described as a “hand-holding meeting with state legislatures… organized by the Trump campaign and others as well.” The comments were first highlighted in the newsletter Proof.
They argued that state legislators should reexamine their election results based on the law. “It is the duty of these legislatures to address this outrageous behavior and ensure we are not putting someone who did not win in the White House,” Eastman said. He considered that Congress could itself on January 6 choose Trump electors in contested states, but “it would certainly be helpful if state legislatures looked into what happened in their states and weighed in.”
Eastman’s Strategy
Eastman was not the first or only person on Trump’s team to argue that Pence was empowered to block or postpone the certification of Biden’s win. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, and Trump himself suggested this on December 23 when he retweeted about the possibility of invoking the “Pence card.”
However, after other attempts failed, and as January 6 approached, Eastman’s strategy began to crystallize. Eastman, who is a member of the Federalist Society, a law professor, and a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, said the initial memo he wrote, which was two pages long, outlined a six-point plan through which Pence could effectively take control of the electoral vote counting process and enable Trump to win. The memo was first revealed last month in the book “Peril” by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
Eastman stated that it was a “preliminary draft” of a more complete and complex memo outlining several potential outcomes after the joint session of Congress on January 6. The ideas in the memos were essentially the basis for discussions of the options available to Pence with Eastman and Trump in the Oval Office on January 4, and he said he wrote the memos at the request of “someone on the legal team” whose name he did not remember.
In the Sacramento Bee, Eastman wrote on October 7 that he advised Pence to postpone the electoral vote count to give states time to address concerns over voter irregularities.
Strategy at the Command Center
This is the strategy that advisors gathered around at the command center at the Willard Hotel, according to two people familiar with the discussions that took place there in early January. For these scenarios to reflect a Biden victory, the legislatures of those states would investigate the alleged fraud and invalidate their results if they chose to do so.
Failure
Pence’s Conviction on the Plan
But by January 5, Pence was not convinced about the plan, according to the book “Peril”. That evening, Trump called Giuliani and then Bannon, who were at the Willard at the time, according to the book that mentioned some details of the events at Willard that day. Trump told Bannon that Pence was “very arrogant” when he discussed the matter earlier in the day, according to the book. The next day, Eastman spoke at the rally at the Ellipse.
Pence withstood the pressure. Around 1 PM, as he prepared for the joint session, he announced via a message posted on Twitter that he would count the electoral votes as they were voted on weeks earlier.
When violence erupted shortly thereafter, forcing Congress to halt, some of Trump’s staunchest supporters saw an opportunity.
“Congress is adjourned. Send the electors back to state legislatures,” wrote Kelly Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican Party, in a tweet at 3:30 PM, more than half an hour after rioters in tactical gear stormed the Senate chamber.
Ward did not respond to a request for comment.
Epstein told The Post: “It was made clear immediately by Trump’s legal team that any violence was unacceptable.” At 2:30 PM on January 6, shortly after the Capitol was breached, Epstein tweeted: “To all protesters, please remain peaceful and respect the law.”
After the violence began, Trump used his Twitter account to ask his supporters to “remain peaceful,” but he did not urge them to go home until 4:17 PM, when he posted a video tweet of himself addressing the Capitol rioters. He said: “I know your pain. I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” and added, “We need to have peace. So go home. We love you, you are very special.”
Efforts to Investigate Fraud Claims
While lawyers at the Willard Hotel were focused on bolstering the legal strategy set by Eastman, Kirsch helped oversee efforts to gather and investigate fraud claims. Phil Waldron, a retired U.S. Army colonel specializing in psychological operations, led a team of individuals who provided Kirsch with analyses of state data, allegedly showing voter fraud, according to two people familiar with the activities at the Willard Hotel.
Waldron was working closely with Russell Ramsland, a Texas Republican who had been spreading conspiracy theories about election fraud for several months before the election and provided sworn testimony in several lawsuits after the election, The Post previously reported. Ramsland was present in one of the Willard Hotel rooms on the evening of January 6, according to widely circulated Instagram photos after the committee mentioned the “war room”.
Waldron and Ramsland did not respond to requests for comment.
Kirsch said he had been working alongside Giuliani since November 5, two days after the election, and continued until January 19. “I believed up until inauguration day that something could be done – that’s why the fight was ongoing,” Kirsch told The Post. “There were a lot of people who thought it was over on January 6, but I didn’t think so because the evidence seemed overwhelming to me.”
Kirsch and Giuliani set up an office in Washington in early November at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, according to Kirsch, and in the third week of December, they moved to the Willard Hotel, closer to the White House. The Willard Hotel attracted many pro-Trump figures at the time, including the controversial “Stop the Steal” Roger Stone. Stone was not part of Giuliani’s team at the Willard and did not participate in the team’s efforts, according to three people who know the details.
In
On January 8, Kirik charged Trump’s campaign $66,371.54 for travel expenses, including $55,295 for rooms for legal team members at the Willard Hotel from December 18 to January 8, according to Kirik and documents reviewed by The Post. The legal team members mentioned in the documents include Kirik, Giuliani, and Eastman.
The documents also show that Kirik paid for the rooms of William Leggion, a Georgia state senator who chaired two sessions in Atlanta where Giuliani made false claims of election fraud, and Preston Halliburton, an Atlanta attorney who represented a Republican leader in Coffee County and claimed he had evidence regarding Dominion’s voting machines.
Leggion and Halliburton did not respond to requests for comment.
Kirik initially sought reimbursement from the Republican National Committee, but said he was told the party would not pay the bills. The bills were eventually submitted to Trump’s campaign, which agreed to pay them.
Kirik told The Post he was “furious” with the Republican National Committee because it raised tens of millions of dollars to support Trump’s legal fight, “but it didn’t spend a single cent on Giuliani’s legal team or their expenses.”
The Republican National Committee previously stated it did not pay the legal bills because both Giuliani and Kirik were not appointed or represented by the organization.
Eastman stayed at the Willard Hotel from January 3 until after breakfast on January 8, according to records showing that the hotel missed $1,407 for his accommodations and meals during that period.
Eastman arrived at the Willard on the same day Trump held a meeting in the Oval Office to discuss replacing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey B. Clark, a Justice Department official friendly with Eastman who suggested the department encourage investigations into Trump’s claims of election fraud in Georgia and other states. The three-hour meeting ended with threats from Rosen and other department officials and White House counsel Pat Cipollone to resign if Clark was appointed.
Clark was subpoenaed by the committee investigating January 6 and is required to appear for questioning this weekend. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite Clark’s proposal being rejected, staff at the command center at Willard continued to…
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