[link:https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/03/trump-nsa-election/|
"Cramer said Del Rosso sent the memo to his office after a Jan. 4 meeting that both men attended at the Trump International Hotel, which was organized by MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a prominent backer of Trump’s bogus election fraud claims.
Cramer and Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) joined some two dozen others crammed into a ground-floor hotel conference room to discuss election fraud allegations, according to Cramer and an aide to Lummis. Participants recalled that Johnson also attended, via videoconference. The details of the meeting, which took place two days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, have not been previously reported. The meeting was similar to a briefing held in a congressional office building the next day for members of the House.
Michael Flynn, who resigned in 2017 as Trump’s national security adviser and had advocated using the military to “rerun” the election in battleground states, also extended an invitation to at least one senator and his staff, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Flynn did not respond to requests for comment.
That person and others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations and sensitive documents.
What the senators heard from a handful of presenters were some of the most fantastical claims among those alleging that the election had been stolen — including, according to Cramer, that the 2020 vote had been influenced by foreign powers and that proper investigation required gaining access to voting machines around the country.
“They wanted to get the machines,” Cramer, who later voted to confirm Biden’s victory, told The Post in an interview. He said the presenters accused various countries meddling including China and Venezuela, and a “lot of theories but not a lot of evidence.”
Lindell said he didn’t recall discussion of getting access to machines. He said the goal of the Trump hotel meeting with senators was to line up congressional allies to delay the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s election victory, making time to examine votes in key states.
“We were hoping that the senators would give it 10 more days to give it back to the states,” Lindell said in an interview. “We were in an anomaly in history. We still are.”
The Jan. 4 meeting was part of a sustained, weeks-long effort by Trump allies to persuade the president and other high-level U.S. officials to take extraordinary actions, including employing the government’s military and intelligence powers, because they claimed the Nov. 3 election had been manipulated by foreign actors. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the election or any indication that foreign interference helped Biden win.
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