Eric Herschmann had known Trump and the Trump family from his work with Trump’s law firm in New York. Then, as a no-salary retainer, he had signed on to help with the first impeachment trial. In this, he was on the Kushner side, part of the self-appointed adults in the room. That is, he shared the belief that beyond the outward fire and fury, Trump was in fact quite a cipher. Hence, you wanted to be there to guide him away from the people who might otherwise encourage his fire and fury.

On the eighteenth, a collection of the irregulars showed up in the Oval after hours, including Sidney Powell, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. It was quite a group: Powell, a lawyer so mired in fantastic conspiracy theories that almost everyone in the White House, including the president, questioned her mental competence; Flynn, a QAnon favorite, himself spiraling ever deeper into conspiracy (he would argue that COVID was a liberal plot), who had pled guilty to lying about his contact with the Russians and had then, subsequently, been pardoned by the president; and Byrne, an anti–deep state conspiracist who had been romantically involved with Maria Butina, whom federal prosecutors had accused of being a Russian spy trying to seduce powerful men.

The regulars, who would leak copious details of the scene to Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, one of the leading Trumpworld leak transcribers, would portray this as a showdown:

The crazies would be beaten back by responsible White House lawyers. According to the Axios report, Powell “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.”

Herschmann, according to Axios, faced her down: