According to House investigators, President Trump held a heated, hour-long meeting at the White House with opposing factions before sending the tweet that would inspire various militia groups and extremists to storm the Capitol on January 6. At this meeting, it was discussed whether Trump should accept his election loss or continue to promote unfounded conspiracy theories.

An evidence document is shown on a screen during the House select committee hearing on Tuesday. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

According to information gathered by the House select committee looking into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Giuliani associate Sidney Powell were all secretly ushered into the White House on the evening of Dec. 18, 2020, “by a junior staffer.”

Nearly 15 minutes after meeting with Trump alone, the delegation was promptly stopped by Trump’s White House attorneys, including former counsel Pat Cipollone and deputy counsel Eric Herschmann. And over the course of the following six hours, the two sides bitterly disagreed over whether Trump should accept defeat or keep trying to void the election.

Staff members at the White House claimed they could hear the yelling coming from the Oval Office as the two sides battled.

Cipollone, Herschmann, and other witnesses said in court about their dissatisfaction with a group that promoted conspiracy ideas with few to no supporting documentation.

“Where is the evidence?” Cipollone said he asked, repeatedly. The response from Powell and others, Cipollone said, was a dismissal of his concerns and a “general disregard for the importance of actually backing up what you say with facts.”

Powell stated that she would have dismissed everyone that evening and had them removed out of the building if she were the president.

Powell’s response to Herschmann’s question on the numerous court battles they kept losing was, “Well, judges are crooked.” Herschmann claims that he responded, “Everyone? Every case you’ve handled throughout the nation and lost—every single one of them—is corrupt, right? even the people we chose?”

Before his attorneys barged in, Giuliani, Powell, Flynn, and Byrne had nearly fifteen minutes by with with Trump. Powell testified that at the time, Trump was interested in learning more about what he might do in response to unfounded claims of foreign influence in the election.

“He was very interested in hearing particularly about the CISA findings, and the terms of [Executive Order] 13848, that apparently nobody else had bothered to inform of,” Powell said in her taped deposition, just before taking a drink of Diet Dr Pepper.

The executive order Trump enacted in 2018 to prevent foreign meddling in American elections was the one Powell was alluding to. False statements were made by Powell, Flynn, and others claiming Venezuela, Italy, and other countries had tampered with the 2020 election.

During the discussion, Trump made an attempt to appoint Powell as his special counsel to look into claims of voter fraud. He also mentioned possible voting machine seizures.

It was all part of a darker turn Trump took, lawmakers on the House Jan. 6 committee said, after the Dec. 14 counting of electoral votes that formally deemed Joe Biden the president-elect and convinced most of Trump’s own staff and allies that he had indeed lost the 2020 election.

At 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19, 2020, Trump sent a tweet that House lawmakers say spurred extremist militia groups with deep ties to his closest advisers, including former strategist Steve Bannon and longtime consigliere Roger Stone, to begin planning for a violent march on the Capitol.

“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Trump wrote less than two hours after the raucous showdown at the White House.

That tweet, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the House Jan. 6 committee, was designed to “mobilize a crowd”.

“Trump turned away from both his outside advisers’ most outlandish and unworkable schemes and his White House counsel’s advice to swallow hard and accept the reality of his loss,” Raskin said. “Instead, Donald Trump issued a tweet that would galvanize his followers, unleash a political firestorm and change the course of our history as a country.”

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