Waldron told the Post that he spoke with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” after the election. He also said that he briefed several members of Congress the day before a Trump-incited mob violently stormed the U.S. Capitol. During the briefing, Waldron presented a PowerPoint presentation titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN,” which detailed extreme plans to discredit and overturn the election, including a recommendation for Trump to declare a national emergency to stall the certification of the results.

Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel, floated discredited claims about voting machines to top Trump White House officials and Trump allies. Bernie Kerik, an ally of Rudy Giuliani, previously testified to the select panel that Waldron had been first to propose the idea of Trump issuing an executive order to seize voting machines in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
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Investigators also subpoenaed Waldron’s phone records, prompting him to sue in an effort to block the select panel from obtaining them.

While the lawyers at the Willard were focused on promoting the legal strategy Eastman outlined, Kerik helped head up efforts to sift through allegations of election fraud. Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations, led a team of people who provided Kerik with analyses of state data, which purported to show fraudulent voting, according to two of the people familiar with activities at the Willard.

The military-intelligence veterans who helped lead Trump’s campaign of disinformation

During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the careers of two military officers often intersected. Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in both countries, Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service. Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs – targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field manual describes, “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
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“But when those conspiracies contend that the current government of the United States is illegitimate, those primal fears of a standing army ready to turn its guns inward and topple our government are justifiably awakened. In short, these people are doing great harm to the legitimacy and efficacy of our military.”
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[Early November]First he met with Sidney Powell, the lawyer for his old commander, Flynn. Waldron said he met Powell in a hotel conference room that functioned as her headquarters, briefing her in the early morning hours. A lawyer who worked with Powell, Howard Kleinhendler, confirms Waldron was part of the group. Powell declined to comment.

Then Waldron huddled with Giuliani. “We were supposed to have a 10 minute briefing but it went 45 minutes,” Waldron said. When Giuliani said he wanted to discuss voter fraud, Waldron said he pressed upon the former mayor that the fraud was on a larger, and global, scale. “We kept going over it and going over it. He finally came aboard,” he said.

Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump

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None of 1AP’s top operatives have been arrested in connection with the Capitol riot, and it remains unclear how much influence they exerted or how seriously criminal investigators are focused on them. Still, the group had men on the ground outside the building on Jan. 6 and others at the Willard Hotel, near some of Mr. Trump’s chief allies. And in the days leading up to the assault, 1AP’s Twitter account posted messages suggesting that the group knew violence was imminent.

“There may be some young National Guard captains facing some very, very tough choices in the next 48 hours,” read one message posted by the group on Jan. 4.
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In the interview, Mr. Rhodes described how the two groups worked together at the rally. He then urged Mr. Trump to “wage war” against “traitors” at home by imposing martial law. That was the same message that Ms. Powell, Mr. Flynn and others in their orbit were advising at the time.

Mr. Lewis says he played his own small part in the effort to persuade Mr. Trump to declare martial law. On Dec. 18, he said on a podcast last year, he drove Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn to the White House to meet with Mr. Trump. It is not clear whether Mr. Lewis attended the meeting, where Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn urged the president to declare a national emergency and demand a recount of key swing states on live TV, according to the business executive Patrick M. Byrne, who was also there.