Jan. 6 hearings cast spotlight on fears fringe voices influence Trump

The influence of fringe voices on former President Trump, highlighted by the Jan. 6 House select committee, is raising new questions about who would surround him in a second term.

The hearings have landed some tough blows on Trump, including showing how even conservatives close to the president were unnerved by the credence he gave to 2020 conspiracy theories coming from political characters well outside the mainstream. 

The revelations are giving some second thoughts about putting Trump back in the White House, given the company he might keep.

“I would be surprised if he can pull many people from the A-team of Republican operatives and Republican staffers, from the chief of staff-type people all the way down to lower-level employees,” said John Sides, an author and professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.

“That was a challenge for him in his presidency the first time, and I think his actions around Jan. 6 and what has happened since then that the hearings have brought to light — I can’t imagine it makes working there any more appealing,” Sides added.

Should Trump enter the race, Sides noted, he would receive the backing of numerous Republican lawmakers and elected officials, some of whom — or their staffs — would be willing to make the jump to the White House.

The question of whose voices are most in Trump’s ear was thrust into the spotlight during a hearing this week for the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

One major focus of the hearing was on an explosive, hours-long Dec. 18, 2020, White House meeting in which prominent election deniers such as Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, gained access to the Oval Office and were pushing baseless theories about fraud.

The committee detailed how easily Powell and her cohort, several of whom are facing litigation over their election claims, were able to meet with Trump alone before someone alerted then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone.

Powell and others were arguing to Trump that votes had been switched from him to President Biden because of fraudulent election machines, part of a conspiracy theory involving Venezuela and the hacking of smart thermostats, witnesses told the committee.

“I was asking, like, are you claiming the Democrats were working with Hugo Chavez, Venezuelans and whomever else?” said Eric Herschmann, a former White House lawyer who, along with Cipollone, got into a heated back-and-forth with the outside advisers to Trump.

“And at one point, Gen. Flynn took out a diagram that supposedly showed IP addresses all over the world and who was communicating with whom via the machines. And some comment about, like, Nest thermostats being hooked up to the internet,” Herschmann added.

A photo displayed by the committee showed then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows walking with Giuliani after the meeting had broken up in order to ensure Giuliani did not meander back to the White House residence to talk to Trump more.

The meeting, which former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described in a…