With a career-ending affair with a Russian agent, attacks on a professional nemesis he named “the Sith Lord” and constant references to a “deep state,” Patrick Byrne often pushed conspiracy theories and found himself ensnared in controversy — long before the former chief executive of online retailer Overstock promoted Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a rigged election.
Byrne, one of corporate America’s most vocal proponents of the former president’s falsehoods about the 2020 election, will be the latest figure from Trump’s orbit to meet with House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The longtime cryptocurrency advocate is scheduled to meet privately with the committee on Friday.
Byrne’s involvement in efforts to overturn the election were revealed Tuesday during the committee’s hearing. The former furniture industry executive joined lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, as well as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, days after the electoral college certified that Joe Biden had won the presidential election. While many of Trump’s legal advisers had accepted that he had lost the election, Byrne and others were pushing an idea that the president could use the National Guard to seize voting machines.
Byrne’s Oval Office access appeared to agitate those staffers hoping to redirect Trump’s attention away from conspiracy theories.
“First of all, the Overstock person — I didn’t even know who...
"Anura brother (elder sibling), making a system change," reads a Sinhala-language Facebook post shared on April 27, 2026, referring to Dissanayake. The post includes an image that appears to show ...