A retired Army colonel who circulated a PowerPoint document detailing a proposal to overturn the 2020 election results claimed to have visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election and met with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to the Washington Post.
Phil Waldron, a retired U.S. Army colonel, told the Post that he met with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed several members of Congress the day before the deadly Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. Waldron reportedly claimed that he was working with former President Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a group that briefed lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN.”
According to the Post, Waldron said that he contributed claims of foreign interference in the vote to the presentation, and brought up those same claims during his discussions with the White House.
A version of the PowerPoint reportedly made its way to Meadows on Jan. 5 — which is information that surfaced publicly last week when Jan. 6 committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) sent a letter to Meadows’ lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, saying that Meadows had turned over an email regarding a 38-page PowerPoint presentation “that was to be provided ‘on the hill’,” titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.”
“The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here’s the proof,” Waldron told the Post. “These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.”
Additionally, the PowerPoint reportedly included proposals for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred” or replace them with Republican electors. It also included a third proposal seeking a delay in the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory, with the deployment of U.S. marshals and National Guard troops to help “secure” and count paper ballots in key states.
The Post noted that it is unclear how widely the PowerPoint was circulated or the extent to which the proposals in it were considered.
On Friday, Terwilliger denied to the Post that the former Trump White House official did anything with the document after receiving it by email.
“We produced it [to the committee] because it was not privileged,” Terwilliger told the Post.
According to the Post, Waldron denied that he was the person who sent the PowerPoint to Meadows. Waldron reportedly claimed that a meeting he and others had with Meadows in the days around Christmas last year involved questions about how to determine whether the election had been hacked. Waldron told the Post that Meadows asked, “What do you need? What would help?” Waldron said his team produced a list for Meadows that contained information on IP addresses, servers and other data that he believed needed to be investigated “using the powers of the world’s greatest national security intelligence apparatus.”
Waldron recalled Meadows indicating that he would pass the list on to then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, but was unsure whether Meadows followed through on delivering it, according to the Post. A spokesman for Ratcliff denied receiving the document to the Post.
According to the Post, Waldron said that he and Meadows “weren’t pen pals” and that their communication was often through Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who would sometimes ask Walldron to “explain this to Mark” over the phone.
Waldron also reportedly attended attended a Nov. 25 meeting with Trump and several Pennsylvania legislators in the Oval Office and claimed to have briefed Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) at the White House in Meadows’ office with Giuliani in attendance.
The Post’s report on the PowerPoint presentation that Waldron circulated comes days after Thompson detailed the materials that Meadows has offered up thus far to the Jan. 6 committee during his short-lived stint of engaging with the panel in a letter to Terwilliger. According to Thompson, Meadows produced communications documenting an early White House effort to push for the appointment of “alternate slates of electors” on the day networks called Biden’s presidential victory. Thompson also said that Meadows provided the committee with an email from Jan. 5 regarding a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” that was to be provided “on the hill” and another email on Jan. 5 about having the National Guard on standby during the joint session of Congress certifying Biden’s electoral victory.
In his letter to Terwilliger last week, Thompson also informed him that the committee has been “left with no choice” but to advance contempt proceedings against his client, after the panel warned that the former Trump official would be referred for contempt if he failed to show up for his deposition. Meadows swiftly moved to sue the Jan. 6 committee, its members, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as part of his latest attempt to block the enforcement of a committee subpoena for his insurrection-related records and testimony.
CNN also reported last week that Meadows produced text messages and emails that show he was “exchanging with a wide range of individuals while the attack was underway” to the committee prior to going back to stonewalling the panel. Meadows reportedly handed over messages on his personal cell phone and email account voluntarily to the committee, without any claim of executive privilege.
