JAN. 6 PANEL SUBPOENAS RETIRED COLONEL
He reportedly shared plan to overturn election
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol issued a subpoena Thursday for Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in information warfare who had circulated a detailed plan to overturn the 2020 election.
The committee has been scrutinizing Waldron’s role in spreading false information about the election since a 38page PowerPoint presentation he circulated on Capitol Hill was turned over to the panel by Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s last chief of staff, who denied having anything to do with it.
“The document he reportedly provided to administration officials and members of Congress is an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chair of the committee, said.
The PowerPoint — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — recommended that Trump declare a national emergency to cling to power and included the false claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states.
“The select committee’s investigation and public reports have revealed credible
evidence that you have information concerning attempts to disrupt or delay the certification of the 2020 election results,” Thompson wrote in the subpoena.
On Jan. 4, associates of Waldron spoke to a group of senators and informed them about the allegations of election fraud in the PowerPoint, Waldron told The New York Times recently. On Jan. 5, he said, he personally briefed a small group of House members whom he did not identify; that discussion also focused on baseless claims of foreign interference in the election. He said he had made the document available to the lawmakers.
Waldron told The Washington Post that he had contributed to the creation of the document and had visited the White House several times after last year’s election and spoken with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times.”
Waldron, who specialized in psychological influence operations and once was deployed to Iraq, retired from the military in 2016 after 30 years of service. He appears to lead a quieter life these days, describing himself on his LinkedIn page as the founder, forklift driver and floor sweeper at One Shot Distillery and Brewery in Dripping Springs, Texas.
But almost as soon as the 2020 polls closed, he joined a wide-ranging effort to persuade the public and key Republican politicians that the vote count had been marred by rampant fraud.
By mid-November, Waldron was in contact with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who at the time was overseeing challenges to the election. Waldron fed Giuliani information about alleged attempts by foreign powers to hack U.S. voting machines and about suspected left-wing operatives who were working for the vote tabulation company Dominion Voting Systems. Some of these baseless claims ultimately made their way into federal lawsuits attacking Dominion’s role in the election that were filed by the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.
“Colonel in the military, great war record,” Giuliani later said of Waldron in a deposition he gave in a defamation lawsuit brought by a Dominion employee. “I’ve had substantial dealings with him and he’s very, very thorough and very experienced in this kind of work.”
Giuliani said that Waldron’s legal team put up a “big whiteboard” that laid out its strategies while he and fellow lawyers, including Powell and Jenna Ellis, ran operations as “really active supervisors.”
Giuliani said another lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, was focusing on fraud allegations in Nevada and Arizona, while Waldron was investigating conspiracies related to Dominion voting machines.
“If I were to think of Dominion, I would think of Sidney carrying the ball on that, with everybody else helping, and Phil was the investigator,” Giuliani said.
Waldron also participated in meetings at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in early January to plan ways to challenge the election results, according to the committee.