President Donald Trump told advisers he is considering appointing far-right lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell as special counsel to investigate allegations of fraud in the 2020 election, multiple outlets reported.
The president raised the idea at a controversial White House rally on Friday, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news. Multiple advisers, including some sympathetic to the president’s baseless claims about the election, vehemently rejected the idea, the paper said.
Trump also reportedly asked about the idea of imposing martial law at the meeting. He later denied this in a message on Twitter.
Powell, who reportedly attended the meeting, is the attorney of former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who was charged with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation until he was pardoned from the president last month.
A conservative legal entity, Powell has concocted elaborate and false theories of how Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden, including the suggestion that voting software was developed on the orders of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader who died in 2013.
Flynn would also attend the meeting. The retired Army Lieutenant General has taken to conservative media in recent days to urge Trump to introduce martial law as part of an effort to reverse the results of the November contest.
On Thursday, Flynn appeared on the right-wing news channel Newsmax and said Trump could “grab” voting machines and use the military to “basically repeat an election in any of those states.”
“These people talk about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done before,” Flynn said. Martial law has been instituted 64 times. Flynn added that he “wasn’t calling for that.”
Later on Sunday, Trump wrote in a post on Twitter, “Martial law = Fake News. Just more deliberately bad reporting!”
Senior military leaders rejected Flynn’s calls in a statement on Friday.
“There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of a US election,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Chief of Staff General James McConville said in a statement.
In the Oval Office, Powell and Flynn both urged Trump to do more to support their efforts to reverse the election results, Politico reported, citing a person familiar with the rally.
The New York Times reported that Trump advisers had pushed vigorously back on the idea of appointing Powell as special counsel, as well as other ideas that emerged at the meeting.
Among those who rejected the ideas were Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Cipollone told Trump that, according to The New York Times, there was no constitutional authority for the ideas under discussion. According to Politico, the meeting became tense and it was about screaming.
The White House and Powell have not responded to requests for comment on the meeting.
Trump has not yet admitted the November 3 election, despite Biden’s clear victory in both the popular vote and the legally important electoral college.
The electoral college formally voted for Biden on Monday by a margin of 306 to 232. Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who publicly congratulated Biden on his victory for weeks, did so on Tuesday.
While Trump has continued to dispute the results of the election, his campaign distanced itself last month from the allegations that Powell made. In a statement, Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, another Trump attorney, said Powell was “single-handedly practicing the law.”
However, Trump has kept in touch with Powell, according to The New York Times. The newspaper said Trump asked about the attorney who received security clearances to continue her possible investigation.
Previously, Trump had unsuccessfully pushed for Attorney General William Barr to appoint special counsel to look into the election. Barr has denied this, saying the government has found no evidence of widespread fraud. On Monday, Trump announced that Barr was stepping down effective December 23.
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