A top aide to Mark Meadows has shared with the January 6 committee a photo of her then-boss escorting Rudy Giuliani out of the White House after a contentious meeting with Donald Trump and West Wing officials.
The photo was part of accounts from Ms Hutchinson and others about an explosive meeting in the Oval Office and around the White House on 18 December, 2021, during which Mr Giuliani and Sidney Powell attempted along with Gen Mike Flynn to convince Mr Trump to seize voting machines and take his plans to overturn the election even further.
But the group clashed with the White House counsel and other attorneys for the White House who rejected their ideas as idiotic and not based in reality, while repeatedly pressing them for evidence of fraud that 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 Mr Meadows’s watchful eye to ensure he didn’t “wander” back to the Oval Office.
The meeting was rife with insults and accusations of disloyalty, according to multiple attendees and witnesses who testified on Tuesday. Ms Powell and her colleagues apparently pushed the president to name her a special counsel with the power to investigate election fraud, and to take other, drastic actions including seizing voting machines from states around the country.
Mark Meadows escorts Rudy Giuliani out of the White House
(Screenshot/PBS NewsHour)
Those ideas were rejected by Mr Cipollone and Eric Herschmann, a fellow White House attorney, who said they repeatedly pressed Ms Powell and Mr Giuliani for evidence of their claims.
The group responded with a “general disregard” for the importance of backing up one’s claims with facts, Mr Cipollone and Mr Herschmann testified.
The rumours that Mr Trump had considered assigning Ms Powell to the role of special counsel were previously reported; what was not known publicly was the extent to which White House legal experts fought back against the fringe members of Donald Trump’s inner circle who were pushing a wide and almost inconcievably-broad spectrum of election fraud conspiracies.
And it paints a picture of a White House in total disarray in its final weeks as Mr Giuliani, Mr Flynn and Ms Powell apparently made it all the way to a meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office without a single high-level staffer finding out before it happened.