Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who had a Dec. 18, 2020, meeting at the White House with then-President Donald Trump, Trump’s personal lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, testified to the House Jan. 6 committee behind closed doors Friday for nearly eight hours. Byrne had already acknowledged that at that meeting, he, Flynn, Powell and Trump discussed official actions Trump could take to reverse the 2020 presidential election. Apparently in the absence of White House staff, they discussed Trump ordering the military to seize voting machines, Trump replacing the acting attorney general if he refused to cooperate with Trump’s plan and Trump making Powell, and not Rudy Giuliani, his top lawyer tasked with overturning the election.
As professor Claire Finkelstein and I observed in December 2020, the actions contemplated at that meeting very likely constitute criminal sedition and would have been sedition if carried out. And the meeting itself is an extreme example of a problem I pointed out shortly after leaving former President George W. Bush’s White House in 2007: the inappropriate blurring of lines between partisan politics and official capacity work of White House staff.
In the case of the Dec. 18, 2020, meeting, apparently, nobody from the White House staff was in the room as Trump and these three individuals began discussing a plan for official action that would have ended democracy as we know it. According to Byrne’s own blog post...
BEIJING – The China Coast Guard (CCG) on Thursday warned the Philippine side to immediately stop its infringements, provocations and false claims after a Philippine Coast Guard vessel transported ...