The day the Oval Office turned into a mafia social club

Vincent “The Chin” Gigante’s Triangle Civic Improvement Association, 208 Sullivan St, NYC

The northeast was under a blanket of snow on December 18, 2020.  The FDA authorized emergency use of the COVID vaccine manufactured by Moderna.  Vice President Pence, wearing a gray, starched short-sleeve shirt and a black mask, received his COVID shot on national television and declared, “I didn’t feel a thing.”  More than 880,000 Americans filed new unemployment claims for the week.

And that night in the Oval Office of the White House, a meeting took place like those that used to happen in places like the Ravenite Social Club and the Triangle Civic Improvement Association in New York’s Little Italy, where mobsters like Carlo Gambino and Vincent “The Chin” Gigante gathered to conspire to commit truck hi-jackings, drug deals and murder.  How was it that the Oval Office turned into a mob hang-out, you might ask?  According to the hearing held today by the Jan. 6 Committee, Donald Trump called the meeting and ordered that at least four co-conspirators be smuggled into the Oval Office without their names appearing on official White House records. 

“I did not understand how they had gotten in,” former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told the committee in a deposition taken last Friday.  He was referring to a murderer’s row of election fraud conspiracy nuts that included attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani, who were fresh from losing multiple election fraud cases filed on behalf of Donald Trump in battleground states around the country; retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s one-time national security adviser, who had been convicted of lying to the FBI, was awaiting sentencing, and whom he would soon pardon; and Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, who had been traveling the country giving speeches about non-existent voter fraud and marketing such COVID “cures” as hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.

Cipollone, who rushed to the White House when he heard the meeting was taking place, did not recognize the former Overstock CEO and asked him, “Who are you?” when he first entered the Oval Office.  “I did not know who he was,” Cipollone said.  “I was not happy.”

What were these co-conspirators doing in the Oval Office of the White House late at night on a Friday in December?  They were presenting the president with a plan to declare martial law and invoke the Insurrection Act that included a draft executive order commanding the Department of Defense to seize voting machines around the country so the election of 2020 could be “rerun” under supervision of the military. 

Trump was desperate.  The meeting took place four days after electors from the Electoral College had met separately in the states and certified that Joe Biden had won the election by 306 electoral votes to 232 for Donald Trump.  Three days previously, on December 15, the Republican Majority Leader had taken to the floor of the Senate to declare that the Electoral College had certified the winner of the 2020 election.  Mitch McConnell congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the president-elect and vice president-elect of the United States.  

The election was over everywhere in the country with the exception of one room in the White House: the Oval Office.  Donald Trump apparently personally cleared Powell, Giuliani, et. al. through White House security and into the Oval Office because no one interviewed by the 1/6 Committee knew how they got in there.  The 1/6 Committee presented testimony from Trump’s own campaign chairman, Attorney General William Barr, and multiple White House officials that Trump had been told repeatedly that he had lost the election and that there was no evidence of election fraud anywhere in the country sufficient to overturn the election. 

He knew he had lost.  He knew there was no evidence that the election had been “stolen” from him.  He was casting about for anything that would enable him to hold onto power, so he called four of the biggest nutcases in the entire country into the Oval Office to listen to their outlandish and clearly illegal plans. 

When Cipollone and other White House officials learned the meeting was taking place and who was there, they hurried to the Oval Office to stop it.  Mark Meadows, a Trump loyalist if there ever was one, was there to counter the insane advice Trump was being given.  Eric Herschman, the deputy White House counsel, entered the room and joined his boss.  The White House staff secretary, a man by the name of Derek Lyons, somehow got into the meeting.  Interviewed on video tape by the committee, Lyons testified that it “was not a casual meeting. At times there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other. It wasn't just sort of people sitting around on the couch like, chit-chatting. The four outsiders in the room claiming to have ample evidence to support the findings and others including myself disputing that and then there was a discussion of, well, we don't have it now, but we will have it or whatever."

Lyons was referring to evidence of election fraud.  None of the “outsiders” could produce any evidence of fraud of any kind even though they were asked for it again and again, according to participants who were in the room.

The meeting went on for several hours and devolved into “screaming and insults,” according to deputy counsel Herschman.  "It was really unprecedented ... I thought it was nuts.  I told them (Powell, Giuliani, etc.) to shut the f-up,” he testified.

When the meeting in the Oval Office ended, several of the “outsiders,” as Powell and the others were referred to, went upstairs to the president’s private quarters to continue.  They were followed by Cipollone and other White House officials.  At some point, Trump asked if he could appoint Sidney Powell as an official White House counsel and authorize her to have a top-secret security clearance.  When he was told by Cipollone that he could, Trump made the appointment verbally.  Cipollone testified that Powell never assumed the position because the “paperwork” was not completed. 

Giuliani, looking disheveled in the video of his deposition, said that he had gone upstairs with the others but remained in a conference room in the residence called the “Yellow Oval.”  Seeming to brag about his presence in the private quarters of the White House, Giuliani said he sat in the Yellow Oval “by myself.”  Cipollone told the committee that before he went home, he personally escorted Giuliani off the White House grounds to make sure he was gone. 

At 1:42 a.m., shortly after the meetings had broken up, his plans to have the United States military seize voting machines and “rerun” the election thwarted, Trump sent his infamous tweet, "Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

The committee presented evidence from Twitter and right-wing websites that within hours, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and white supremacist groups were making plans to travel to Washington for Trump’s “big protest” on January 6.  Some of the online rhetoric, according to 1/6 Committee member Jamie Raskin, was “openly homicidal.”

Five people died on January 6 at the Capitol.  More than 140 Capitol police officers were injured.  At least one of them, introduced at the hearing today, was injured seriously enough that doctors barred him last week from continuing to serve in the Capitol police.

The committee presented evidence today that Trump had planned to urge the crowd to march on the Capitol days before January 6.  He insisted that language to that effect be written into his speech.  The committee also presented White House phone logs showing that Trump spoke with his former adviser Steve Bannon that morning, and moments later, Bannon went on his podcast and announced that “all hell is going to break loose today” at the Capitol. 

If the 1/6 Committee were to shut down its investigation tomorrow, enough evidence was presented today that Donald Trump engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow the election of 2020 to justify his indictment under federal laws against seditiously interfering with the government of the United States.  

Trump is fond of saying that he learned everything he knows about power from former mob attorney Roy Cohn.  On December 18, 2020, he summoned the ghost of Cohn into the White House and turned the Oval Office into a mob social club.  He is a gangster, and he belongs behind bars.