Around 5 within the afternoon on Christmas Day in 2020, as many Americans have been celebrating with household, President Donald J. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago house in Palm Beach, Fla., on the telephone with a little-known conservative lawyer who was encouraging his makes an attempt to overturn the election, in keeping with a memo the lawyer later wrote documenting the decision.
The lawyer, William J. Olson, was selling a number of excessive concepts to the president. Mr. Olson later conceded a few of them might be considered tantamount to declaring “martial law” and will even invite comparisons with Watergate. The plan included tampering with the Justice Department and firing the appearing legal professional basic, in keeping with the Dec. 28 memo by Mr. Olson, titled “Preserving Constitutional Order,” describing their discussions.
“Our little band of lawyers is working on a memorandum that explains exactly what you can do,” Mr. Olson wrote in his memo, obtained by The New York Times, which he marked “privileged and confidential” and despatched to the president. “The media will call this martial law,” he wrote, including that “that is ‘fake news.’”
The doc highlights the beforehand unreported function of Mr. Olson in advising Mr. Trump because the president was more and more turning to excessive, far-right figures outdoors the White House to pursue choices that lots of his official advisers had instructed him have been unimaginable or illegal, in an effort to cling to energy.
The involvement of a particular person like Mr. Olson, who now represents the conspiracy theorist and MyPillow chief government Mike Lindell, underscores how the system that might usually insulate a president from rogue actors working outdoors of official channels had damaged down inside weeks after the 2020 election.
That left Mr. Trump in direct contact with individuals who promoted conspiracy theories or questionable authorized concepts, telling him not solely what he needed to listen to, but in addition that they — not the general public servants advising him — have been the one ones he may belief.
“In our long conversation earlier this week, I could hear the shameful and dismissive attitude of the lawyer from White House Counsel’s Office toward you personally — but more importantly toward the Office of the President of the United States itself,” Mr. Olson wrote to Mr. Trump. “This is unacceptable.”
It was not instantly clear how Mr. Olson, who practices regulation in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, arrived in Mr. Trump’s orbit. Mr. Olson beforehand labored with Republican tremendous PACs and promoted a conspiracy theory that Vice President Kamala Harris shouldn’t be eligible to be vp, falsely claiming she shouldn’t be a natural-born U.S. citizen. He and his agency have lengthy represented Gun Owners of America, an advocacy group.
According to his website, which shows a {photograph} of him shaking arms with President Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Olson was a White House intern in 1971.
Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 Hearings
His 2020 memo was written 10 days after one of the most dramatic meetings ever held in the Trump White House, throughout which three of the president’s White House advisers vied — at one level nearly bodily — with outdoors actors to affect Mr. Trump. In that assembly, the lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael T. Flynn, the previous nationwide safety adviser, pushed for Mr. Trump to grab voting machines and appoint Ms. Powell particular counsel to analyze wild and groundless claims of voter fraud, whilst White House legal professionals fought again.
But the doc means that, even after his aides had gained that skirmish within the Oval Office, Mr. Trump continued to hunt excessive authorized recommendation that ran counter to the suggestions of the Justice Department and the counsel’s workplace.
And, the memo signifies that Mr. Trump was appearing on the surface recommendation. At one level, it refers back to the president urging Mr. Olson to contact the appearing legal professional basic immediately about having the Justice Department lend its credibility to Mr. Trump’s authorized efforts to invalidate the election outcomes.
An individual acquainted with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol stated the committee was conscious that Mr. Olson was in touch with Mr. Trump and that it was exploring Mr. Olson’s function in pushing ahead plans to overturn the 2020 election.
Mr. Olson didn’t reply to requests for remark.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t reply to a request for remark in regards to the former president’s relationship with Mr. Olson.
According to his memo, Mr. Olson was discussing with Mr. Trump the notion that the Justice Department would intercede immediately with the Supreme Court to reverse his electoral defeat.
The courtroom had declined to listen to a case that allies of Mr. Trump in Texas had introduced difficult the election ends in Pennsylvania, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing.
Mr. Olson instructed Mr. Trump that he believed the Justice Department “will do nothing except continue to run out the clock.”
“While time to act was short when we spoke on Christmas Day, time is about to run out,” he wrote.
It was unclear which White House lawyer Mr. Olson referred to in his memo. At the time, the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone; Patrick Philbin, his deputy; and one other lawyer who didn’t work for the counsel’s workplace, Eric Herschmann, have been working in tandem to push again on a few of the extra outlandish concepts being really useful. Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Herschmann had taken lead roles through the Dec. 18 White House assembly in countering Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn.
“The feeling I had was that not just was he not offering you any options, but that he was there to make certain you did not consider any,” Mr. Olson wrote, referring to the unnamed White House lawyer. “But you do have options.”
Among these whom Mr. Olson talked about as chatting with Mr. Trump in regards to the Justice Department getting concerned was Mark Martin, the previous chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. White House officers believed on the time that Mr. Martin was introduced in via Mark Meadows, the White House chief of workers.
Mr. Olson urged Mr. Trump to rent one other lawyer, Kurt Olsen, who had labored on the Texas case.
“As I emailed Molly Saturday morning,” Mr. Olson wrote, referring to Mr. Trump’s assistant, “we began acting on your question about our team revising the complaint filed by Texas into what could be the first draft of a complaint filed by the United States. The lawyers with whom I have been working took on that task, and we now have a draft that could be presented to you to review, and by you to Mr. Rosen to edit, improve and file.”
That was a reference to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general. In his memo, Mr. Olson recounted that in their discussions, he had instructed Mr. Trump that he had adopted the president’s suggestion to name Mr. Rosen a few hours earlier requesting that the appearing legal professional basic file a lawsuit to attempt to block Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory.
Mr. Trump, based mostly on Mr. Olson’s memo, was conscious that Mr. Rosen was slow-walking his request. The swimsuit was by no means filed; Mr. Rosen testified last month before the Jan. 6 committee that doing so was out of the bounds of the regulation.
A spokesman for Mr. Rosen stated that he didn’t recall talking with Mr. Olson, however that it was correct that the appearing legal professional basic was in opposition to submitting any lawsuits to intervene with the election outcomes.
At the time of the memo, Mr. Trump had decamped to Mar-a-Lago, however Mr. Olson inspired him to return to Washington to combat the election outcomes from his perch within the White House. Mr. Trump did so shortly thereafter, working via the vacations on difficult the election outcomes.
“I do not believe you can do what is required to be done from Florida,” Mr. Olson wrote to the president. “And, it would send a message about your commitment to the task, to leave Mar-a-Lago to take charge at the White House. I urge you to return as soon as it can be arranged.”
Mr. Olson additionally inspired Mr. Trump to fireplace or reassign Mr. Rosen ought to he not associate with the plans to make use of the Justice Department to problem the election in courtroom, although Mr. Olson acknowledged such motion would draw destructive information protection.
“This step will likely bring on a thousand stories making an analogy to ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ in 1973 when President Nixon ordered AG Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox as a special counsel investigating Watergate,” he wrote.
Mr. Olson stated a new White House counsel ought to take steps to make sure a “fair election count,” although he conceded that might be seen by many as “martial law.”
After Mr. Trump left workplace, Mr. Olson joined the authorized group of Mr. Lindell, who has promoted a sequence of conspiracy theories in regards to the election and has been sued for defamation by a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems. Mr. Lindell, who crashed the Oval Office in the final days of the presidency hoping that Mr. Trump would nonetheless take motion associated to the election, was adamant that Mr. Trump would be reinstated as president in 2021, one thing that isn’t doable.
He filed swimsuit in opposition to the Jan. 6 committee in search of to block the panel’s subpoena to Verizon for Mr. Lindell’s name logs. The swimsuit, which Mr. Olson filed together with different legal professionals, argued that Mr. Lindell’s communications about his objections to the 2020 election have been protected speech, partly as a result of they have been tied to his non secular beliefs.
“Mr. Lindell has widely publicized that his 2020 election integrity activities are motivated, in part, by his strongly held religious beliefs,” the legal professionals wrote in Mr. Lindell’s swimsuit.
