City native fed – and fed off of – election fraud allegations | Opinion | Journal Gazette – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

Axios, an online news publication, reported this week on what surely must be one of the most bizarre Oval Office meetings of Donald Trump’s – or any – presidency. It included a Fort Wayne native.

The six-hour meeting was on a Friday night, one week before Christmas, and the detailed account reported by Axios came from a White House insider present at the meeting. An entourage of election conspiracy theorists that included attorney Sidney Powell, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump administration official Emily Newman and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne marched into the Oval Office to make their case.

Byrne was born in Fort Wayne in 1962. His father was assistant manager at Lincoln National Life, according to city directory listings, and later ran GEICO Insurance. Byrne was chairman of Indianapolis-based EdChoice, the muscle behind Indiana’s school voucher program, until a year ago. He also was a generous Indiana campaign contributor, having donated nearly $500,000 to Mitch Daniels, Tony Bennett and Republican political action groups since 2007.

Byrne played a particularly odd role in the Dec. 18 meeting, according to Axios. He did not appear to have previously met Trump or any of the top White House aides present. The group pressed the president to pursue claims of election fraud, at times screaming and accusing Trump’s aides of being “quitters.”

Powell and Flynn accused the FBI and Department of Justice of corruption and told the president he should install leaders he could trust.

“Byrne, wearing jeans, a hoodie and a neck gaiter, piped up with his own conspiracy,” Axios reported. “ ‘I know how this works. I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation.’ ”

Eventually, the group followed the president up to the White House’s private quarters, where Byrne sat on a couch with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, and “wolfed down pigs in a blanket and little meatballs on toothpicks that staff had set on the coffee table.”

The meeting reportedly ended after midnight, after Powell and the others urged Trump to install her as special counsel, invoke emergency national security powers and seize voting machines.

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