Conspiracy to Obstruct: A Tale of Two Hotels

Image from the Willard Intercontinental Hotel Facebook page

With a new federal indictment on three charges due to land any day, there is renewed focus on exactly where all the criming by Trump and his co-conspirators was plotted and planned.

According to reporting by Rolling Stone, which improbably has been at the forefront of great breaking stories around January 6th, Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team have zeroed in on at least one of these locales—the Willard Hotel—where Trump’s top advisers huddled and schemed in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol. 

On top of that, citizen journalists, such as Seth Abramson in his Proof newsletter, long ago also pointed to a “war council” of 23 or so people convened on January 5, 2021 at another D.C. location—Trump’s private residence at the Trump International Hotel—which may have been linked up by phone or video with the plotters at the Willard. 

These two locations may soon take on added significance. Juries and the public need a story to picture in their heads. That’s why prosecutors often walk through how a conspiracy came to be in order to make that picture clearer. In this case, they’ll want to show where the plot to overturn the election got hatched, agreed to and executed upon. To do this, they’ll place key people at the scene of the crime—people who saw, heard or even participated in the conspiracy. Those same people, by the way, make for excellent potential witnesses to flip.

That’s why the meetings and “war rooms” in two hotels in Washington D.C. may start to matter a lot once the indictment emerges. So let’s take a closer look at what we know about the Willard and the Trump International Hotel “war room” and “war council” and how these facts may prove crucial in bringing down the ex-president and his allies.

Before we do that, though, a quick refresher on precisely what the plan was.

The “what” of the conspiracy 

To prove a conspiracy, prosecutors need to show two things: that there was a plan to commit some illegal act, and that a defendant took at least one concrete step in furtherance of that plan. 

Fortunately for prosecutors and our Republic, the co-conspirators here made the first part easier to prove. That’s because they wrote the plan down. No joke. It was documented not only in John Eastman’s handy coup memos, but also in something called the “Green Bay Sweep” plan, which top Trump aide Peter Navarro documented and even proudly wrote about. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Navarro wrote in his memoir, “In Trump Time: My Journal of America’s Plague Year,” that he had more than 100 congressmen committed to the idea, which included waging a series of challenges over a 24-hour period that would delay certification of election results. That maneuver was intended to increase public pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to send electoral votes back to six contested states (including Wisconsin), where Republican-led legislatures could try to overturn the results.

Now, Trump and his allies will no doubt argue that there was nothing illegal about trying to challenge the election results, especially through objections by Congressmembers under the Electoral Count Act’s procedures. And from 30,000 feet, that statement might feel true.

Where the scheme turned very illegal, however, was in how Mike Pence would somehow magically obtain the power to “send the votes back to the states” and thus delay the electoral count. In order to do this, he would have to have in hand “alternate” slates of electors from the swing states that raised some kind of cloud over which candidate those states had voted for. To obtain those alternate certifications, the Trump White House, at the ex-president’s direction, coordinated GOP operatives to sign nearly identical false documents, in some instances under the cloak of secrecy, fraudulently declaring themselves the duly elected slates of electors for their states. 

They rushed these false documents to D.C. and tried to get them in the hands of Mike Pence. The plot only failed because Pence refused to go along with it. But a failed conspiracy is still illegal, and sixteen people are now under arrest in Michigan for having participated in this. More arrests in other states may follow.

Another way this plot went to the crimey dark side is this: The Trump White House pushed the narrative of a stolen election and urged state legislators (in one famous case, during a 300-person zoom call led by Trump and his top aides) to prepare to decertify their results based on claims that they knew to be false and baseless. 

For starters, there is no such thing as state legislatures “decertifying” presidential election results after a certified count has been submitted to Congress. In any event, and importantly, Trump had already admitted privately to his aides that he had lost the election, but he kept pressing these false claims anyway. And his team kept pressuring state legislators with election conspiracies that had been debunked, even by Trump’s own campaign and its hired consultants.

If you read my piece yesterday, this whole thing starts to sound a lot like a grand Conspiracy Against Rights, where the right at issue is the fundamental one of having your vote counted. Knowingly pushing fraudulent election claims as true, in order to diminish or invalidate votes, is illegal. And conspiring to do so can land you with a Section 242 charge, among other things.

One more important fact on the “what” before we move on to the “where” of the conspiracy. The plan, even according to John Eastman, was to raise enough doubt with the fake alternate slates to get Pence to agree to a 10 day delay, buying Trump and his team time to start to foment chaos at the state legislature level. This is an important thing to keep in mind as the events of January 6 itself unfurled. 

That’s because Trump, as widely reported, was actually delighted and excited by what he was seeing at the Capitol during the insurrection. Congress had to adjourn as a result of the attack out of safety concerns. That meant the mob was accomplishing what Trump and the plotters had hoped the MAGA allies in Congress would do—delay the vote past January 6 so that the transfer of power would be left up in the air. Then his teams could fan out at the state level and get to work on decertifying the election.

That’s why, as Liz Cheney of the January 6 Committee argued, Trump didn’t lift a finger to help, didn’t call in the guard, didn’t call off his supporters. Instead, he lit a fire under them by tweeting that Mike Pence had failed the country, enraging the mob even further while they stormed the building, calling for Pence to be hung.

And that sounds a lot like corrupt obstruction of Congress.

The “where” of the conspiracy

The Willard Hotel has long been the focus of inquiry by investigators due to the cast of characters assembled there before the insurrection. This included Trump’s most important advisors: Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Boris Epshteyn. The latter two were in charge of organizing those fake electors in the battleground states. For good measure, also in the building was Trump’s ally and dirty political trickster Roger Stone, who had direct ties to and communications with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, many of whom have now been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Over at the Trump private residence at the Trump International Hotel, Trump’s family members and political allies gathered and schemed. These reportedly included both Don Jr. and Eric Trump, Peter Navarro, Michael Flynn, Kimberly Guilfoyle, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, as well as possibly Sidney Powell. 

These advisers, family members, and political allies were likely in on the details of how the Trump campaign intended to disrupt the congressional count. Reporting by the Washington Post in 2021 noted that the activities of the co-conspirators holed up in the Willard Hotel “command center,” in the weeks and days leading up to the insurrection, “included finding and publicizing alleged evidence of fraud, urging members of state legislatures to challenge Biden’s victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states.” 

While that might initially sound like legitimate activity, what wasn’t known at the time was the deeply criminal nature of the conspiracy. As discussed above, the plotters knowingly deployed false claims of election fraud to justify raising objections to the electoral count, as well as to gather Trump’s most extreme supporters to his side (while bilking them out of their money). The criminal plot also included the knowing use of fraudulent alternate elector certifications to justify Mike Pence’s proposed delay of the count. 

We also know that Donald Trump was in close communication with people like Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon about where Mike Pence stood on the Eastman coup plan as of January 5. Per the Washington Post, summarizing facts first disclosed by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book “Peril”:

But by Jan. 5, Pence was not sold on the plan, according to “Peril.” That evening, Trump called over to Giuliani and then to Bannon, who were both at the Willard at the time, according to the book, which reported some details of the events at the Willard that day. Trump told Bannon that Pence had been “very arrogant” when the two discussed the matter earlier in the day, the book reported.

It is presumed that Giuliani and Bannon then conveyed Pence’s reluctance in real-time to the other co-conspirators at the Willard “command center.”

This alone is probably enough for charges of conspiracy to land. But there may be more. If the plotters also knew about any plans to physically disrupt the count, such as by illegal trespass by rioters, and importantly if they did anything to aid or abet that plan or to incorporate its possibility into their own plotting, then the case for a criminal conspiracy to obstruct Congress grows even stronger. A big question, then, is how much the guy at the top knew also.

At this time, we simply don’t know what the evidence shows. While the January 6 Committee tried very hard to break past the wall of silence around what took place at the Willard, witnesses such as Steve Bannon refused to show up to testify, some pled the Fifth if they did show, and some like Eastman claimed attorney-client privilege. So the Committee came away thwarted and frustrated.

Enter Jack Smith. As Special Counsel, he had far more tools at his disposal and apparently had far more success gaining information around the inner workings and plotting inside the war room. In recent weeks, a few key witnesses have struck deals to cooperate with prosecutors. These include InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, who was at the Willard Hotel, as well as Rudy Giuliani, who spoke to prosecutors under a proffer letter agreement. 

At the end of the day, what went down at the Willard and Trump International hotels could prove especially illuminating for the jury and the public and could complete a much needed part of the missing narrative. Per Rolling Stone, one unnamed former senior official, who stayed on through and past the insurrection, simply referred to the Willard as “the crime headquarters.”

And that’s coming from one of their own.