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Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. It was early evening on Friday, Dec. 18 — more than a month after the election had been declared for Joe Biden, and four days after the Electoral College met in every state to make it official.
"How the hell did Sidney get in the building?" White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann grumbled from the outer Oval Office as Sidney Powell and her entourage strutted by to visit the president.
President Trump's private schedule hadn't included appointments for Powell or the others: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little-known former Trump administration official, Emily Newman. But they'd come to convince Trump that he had the power to take extreme measures to keep fighting.
As Powell and the others entered the Oval Office that evening, Herschmann — a wealthy business executive and former partner at Kasowitz Benson & Torres who'd been pulled out of quasi-retirement to advise Trump — quietly slipped in behind them.
The hours to come would pit the insurgent conspiracists against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.
Herschmann took a seat in a yellow chair close to the doorway. Powell, Flynn, Newman and Byrne sat in a row before the Resolute Desk, facing the president.
For weeks now, ever since Rudy Giuliani had commandeered Trump’s floundering campaign to overturn the election, outsiders had been coming out of the woodwork to feed the president wild allegations of voter fraud based on highly dubious sources.
Trump was no longer focused on any semblance of a governing agenda, instead spending his days taking phone calls and meetings from anyone armed with conspiracy theories about the election. For the White House staff, it was an unending sea of garbage churned up by the bottom feeders.
Powell began this meeting with the same baseless claim that now has her facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit: She told the president that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged their machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden and that it was part of an international communist plot to steal the election for the Democrats.
[Note: In response to a request for comment, Powell said in an emailed statement to Axios: “I will not publicly discuss my private meetings with the President of the United States. I believe those meetings are privileged and confidential under executive privilege and under rules of the legal profession. I would caution the readers to view mainstream media reports of any such conversations with a high degree of discernment and a healthy dose of skepticism.”]
Powell waved an affidavit from the pile of papers in her lap, claiming it contained testimony from someone involved in the development of rigged voting machines in Venezuela.
She proposed declaring a national security emergency, granting her and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion’s voting machines.
"Hold on a minute, Sidney," Herschmann interrupted from the back of the Oval. "You're part of the Rudy team, right? Is your theory that the Democrats got together and changed the rules, or is it that there was foreign interference in our election?"
Giuliani's legal efforts, while replete with debunked claims about voter fraud, had largely focused on allegations of misconduct by corrupt Democrats and election officials.
"It's foreign interference," Powell insisted, then added: "Rudy hasn't understood what this case is about until just now."
In disbelief, Herschmann yelled out to an aide in the outer Oval Office. "Get Pat down here immediately!" Several minutes later, White House counsel Pat Cipollone walked into the Oval. He looked at Byrne and said, "Who are you?"
The meeting was already getting heated.
White House staff had spent weeks poring over the evidence underlying hundreds of affidavits and other claims of fraud promoted by Trump allies like Powell. The team had done the due diligence and knew the specific details of what was being alleged better than anybody. Time and time again, they found, Powell's allegations fell apart under basic scrutiny.
But Powell, fixing on Trump, continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others. She named a county in Georgia where she claimed she could prove that Dominion had illegally flipped the vote.
Herschmann interrupted to point out that Trump had actually won the Georgia county in question: "So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?"
As for Powell's larger claims, he demanded she provide evidence for what — if true — would amount to the greatest national security breach in American history. They needed to dial in one of the campaign's lawyers, Herschmann said, and Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan was patched in via speakerphone.
By now, people were yelling and cursing.
The room was starting to fill up. Trump's personal assistant summoned White House staff secretary Derek Lyons to join the meeting and asked him to bring a copy of a 2018 executive order that the Powell group kept citing as the key to victory. Lyons agreed with Cipollone and the other officials that Powell's theories were nonsensical.
It was now four against four.
Flynn went berserk. The former three-star general, whom Trump had fired as his first national security adviser after he was caught lying to the FBI (and later pardoned), stood up and turned from the Resolute Desk to face Herschmann.
"You're quitting! You're a quitter! You're not fighting!” he exploded at the senior adviser. Flynn then turned to the president, and implored: "Sir, we need fighters."
Herschmann ignored Flynn at first and continued to probe Powell's pitch with questions about the underlying evidence. "All you do is promise, but never deliver," he said to her sharply.
Flynn was ranting, seemingly infuriated about anyone challenging Powell, who had represented him in his recent legal battles.
Finally Herschmann had enough. "Why the fuck do you keep standing up and screaming at me?" he shot back at Flynn. "If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down." Flynn sat back down.
The meeting had come entirely off the rails.
Byrne, backing up Flynn, told Trump the White House lawyers didn't care about him and were being obstructive. "Sir, we're both entrepreneurs, and we both built businesses," the former Overstock CEO told Trump. "We know that there are times you have to be creative and take different steps."
This was a remarkable level of personal familiarity, given it was the first time Byrne had met the president. All the stanchions and buffers between the White House and the outside world had crumbled.
Byrne kept attacking the senior White House staff in front of Trump. "They've already abandoned you," he told the president aggressively. Periodically during the meeting Flynn or Byrne challenged Trump's top staff — portraying them as disloyal: So do you think the president won or not?
At one point, with Flynn shouting, Byrne raised his hand to talk. He stood up and turned around to face Herschmann. "You're a quitter," he said. "You've been interfering with everything. You've been cutting us off."
"Do you even know who the fuck I am, you idiot?" Herschmann snapped back.
"Yeah, you're Patrick Cipollone," Byrne said.
"Wrong! Wrong, you idiot!"
The staff were now on their feet, standing behind one of the couches and facing the Powell crew at the Resolute Desk. Cipollone stood to Herschmann's left. Lyons, on his last day on the job, stood to Herschmann's right.
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Everett Stern to release new allegations regarding the former top FBI official Charles McGonigal
HSBC Whistleblower, Fmr. U.S. Senate Candidate, CEO, Intel Director, Author. Have the Honor of being Sued by Trump Ally - General Flynn for 10 million.
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Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul
Robert Maxwell—ruthless, volatile, defiant; a man of gargantuan appetites, for food, wine, women, power, money—unabashedly bared his ambition to the world, as he strove to build a publishing empire. But, throughout his career, Robert Maxwell also nurtured another, more driving, and—until now—altogether hidden ambition, and that was to spy for Israel’s Mossad. In the end, as Gordon Thomas, an author who has long been trolling the murky waters of international intelligence, shows in this gripping narrative, the conflict between the tycoon’s public interests and spy’s secret pursuits led to his mystifying death, officially by drowning, in November 1991, offshore of the Canary Islands. According to Thomas’s well-placed sources in Israel, Washington, and London, Maxwell first came into Mossad’s orbit in the 1970s, when the crack Israeli spy organization stole from the United States its most sophisticated piece of intelligence-gathering software, Enhanced Promis. Of it Mossad made an electronic Trojan horse, secretly amassing strictly classified information from inside the very organizations worldwide to which they were selling it. Mossad’s representative for these extremely sensitive transactions costing tens of millions of dollars in China, Russia, India, and twenty other countries was Robert Maxwell. Only Maxwell was also helping himself to some of Mossad’s profits—as well as $750 million from his employees’ pension fund—in desperate attempts to maintain his empire and to meet the demands of increasingly intolerant creditors. Aboard his yacht that November night in 1991 Maxwell no doubt still clung to the hope of a bailout by Mossad. But Mossad’s spy masters could not afford to smile on blackmail. This book reveals all the shocking reasons why. Eight pages of black-and-white photographs add to this astonishing tale of international intrigue, espionage, the Mossad, and murder.
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Vicki Morgan, mistress to department store heir and Ronald Reagan confidante, Alfred Bloomingdale, lived beyond her years and died before her time—the victim of a brutal murder. Seething with power, intrigue, sex and obsession, it's a ringside seat into the darker habits of the world's rich and powerful.
The Guys Who Spied for China
“The Guys Who Spied for China” is a roman a clef, exposing Chinese Espionage Networks during the eighties and nineties.
It is the quirky story of how two disparate men uncovered an elaborate spy operation that had functioned on American soil for nearly four decades. Through fate and serendipity, Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll, meets Johnny G Man, a vaunted scientist and the ultimate Cold Warrior.
What they helped unmask was a network of home grown spies in California and throughout the United States. As a result, newspapers ran relentless headlines depicting Chinese Espionage practices in the United States. The year 1985 was pronounced by the news media as “The Year of the Spy.”
“This is a new twist on the spy drama. While providing details of events that were often swept under the rug, this very personal and often darkly humorous tale captures what it feels like to be suddenly thrust into the shadowy world of espionage. You get to feel what it’s like to be there.
The Guys Who Spied for China is set largely in California, in the Santa Monica Mountain Range, just above Beverly Hills.
What’s remarkable is that most of this story is true.
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Ottis Toole was either one of the worst serial killers in history or a dimwitted arsonist who never meant to kill anyone. Or someone somewhere between. It’s hard to tell if Ottis Toole himself knew which Ottis was Ottis.
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A missing young woman. A Los Angeles hotel with a haunting history. A perplexing real-life mystery. With stunning new insights and impeccable research, investigative journalist Jake Anderson explores the case that captivated a nation and inspired the Netflix series Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel! Exclusive interviews and photos included.
Twenty-one-year-old student Elisa Lam was last heard from on January 31, 2013, after she checked into downtown L.A.’s Cecil Hotel—a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. More than a week later, guests’ complaints of poor water quality led to a grim discovery: Elisa’s nude body floating in a rooftop water tank. The only clue was a disturbing elevator video of Elisa, uploaded to YouTube in a plea for public assistance.
As the video went viral, journalist Jake Anderson set out to uncover the facts. In Gone at Midnight he chronicles eye-opening discoveries about who Elisa Lam really was and what—or whom—she was running from, offering stunning new insights into one of the most chilling and obsessively followed true crime cases of the century.
“Outstanding . . . What really happened to Lam may never be known, but true crime buffs won’t want to miss this gripping search for the truth.”
–Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW
“Extremely detailed and featuring new evidence. . . . Anderson’s thorough research and passionate writing make a fascinating read.”
--Booklist
“Gone at Midnight is the type of true crime book that you stay up all night reading.”
--New York Journal of Books
A Fortune magazine“Most Anticipated Books of the Year” Selection
A Goodreads Featured Release
An Oxygen Best True Crime Book of the Year
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"To an ever-increasing extent, the business of America is the business of war. But although Americans live in the shadow of a war economy, few understand the full extent of its power and influence. Thanks to Christian Sorenson's deeply researched book into the military-industrial complex that envelops our society, such ignorance can no longer be an excuse." - ANDREW COCKBURN, author of 'Kill Chain, The Rise of the High Tech Assassins.'
“A devastating account of American militarism, brilliantly depicted, and exhaustively researched in an authoritative manner. Sorensen’s book is urgent, fascinating reading..." RICHARD FALK
"“I’m adding Christian Sorensen’s new book, Understanding the War Industry , to the list of books I think will convince you to help abolish war and militaries.." DAVID SWANSON World Without War
“This meticulously researched book lays out in painstaking detail exactly how our nation has been captured by a war industry that profits from endless conflict and pursues profit at all costs. It will shock you, infuriate you, and hopefully inspire you."MEDEA BENJAMIN, co-director, CODE PINK
The War Industry infests the American economy like a cancer, sapping its strength and distorting its creativity while devouring its treasure.
Stunning in the depth of its research, Understanding the War Industry documents how the war industry commands the other two sides of the military-industrial-congressional triangle. It lays bare the multiple levers enabling the vast and proliferating war industry to wield undue influence, exploiting financial and legal structures, while co-opting Congress, academia and the media. Spiked with insights into how corporate boardrooms view the troops, overseas bases, and warzones, it assiduously delineates how corporations reap enormous profits by providing a myriad of goods and services devoted to making war, which must be rationalized and used if the game is to go on: advanced weaponry, drones and nukes; invasive information technology; space-based weapons; and special operations—with contracts stuffed with ongoing and proliferating developmental, tertiary and maintenance products for all of it.
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“You want to read this book. It is chilling and compelling at the same time.” – Dr. Phil McGraw.
“I can think of no more important book at this moment in our history than Profiling Evil: An Investigative Memoir of the Zion Society Cult. Mike King has made a superb and vitally important contribution by exposing the abuse of women and children in that heinous cult. And this still happens far too often in the multitude of harmful groups around the world. If you want to understand coercive influence and control, then read this book.” -Janja Lalich, Ph.D., Professor
“This book has it all – intellectually scintillating deep dives into the investigation for the true crime buffs, relatable character portrayals of people who joined the cult looking for love and community, and heartwarming stories of hope and redemption after trauma. Mike is an expert author, having penned several books in his illustrious career, and this latest volume is one you won’t be able to put down. It is a book you’ll want to tell your friends about; a book that will leave a lasting impression with you long after you’ve finished it.” Dr. Judy Ho, Clinical and Forensic Neuropsychologist, Associate Professor at Pepperdine University, Author of Stop Self-Sabotage.
I've known Mike King for many years, at least long enough to become a close friend. He is an example of what law enforcement is truly about. He was involved in the solution of a great problem that took place in Ogden, Utah many years ago. I won't try to tell you about the book as the story goes far beyond any description. I will say that the book contains intimate details of the solution to one of the most bizarre cases I've ever heard of. As a result of his research and absolute dedication to his profession, Mike has very effectively told this story. As I began to read it, I became aware that my friend is a great storyteller. As you read this book, the scripture to keep in mind is Mark 9:42 which says: “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.”-Wilford Brimley, actor (1934-1920)
“Deceived” is a memoir of Detective Mike King’s investigation and ultimate take-down of a deviant polygamous cult called the Zion Society. For over a decade, gossip swirled around the secretive group of religious zealots who were buying up homes to take over a developing neighborhood in northern Utah. This true crime story examines the cult’s leader, a well-known landscaper in the city who had proclaimed himself to be a prophet of God. But he was no man of God. Leaning on hoaxes & deceptions, these extremists were stockpiling weapons as part of their doomsday beliefs. His polygamist doctrine attracted over a hundred followers who soon accepted his ideologies that led to some of the most repugnant crimes against women and children ever seen in the state. The hidden atrocities of the cult may never have been discovered if not for the courage of one of its members. Thirty years later, victims reconnected with each other and with the lead investigator to address the shortcomings of the criminal justice system regarding child victims. With global experts, the author explores why people join cults, how cult leaders keep them engaged and what it takes to investigate crimes against children.
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