The confab lasted until after midnight, ultimately ending in the president’s living quarters, known as the “Yellow Oval,” where Byrne says Swedish meatballs were served and he was “scarfing them down like popcorn.” Aides said the meeting became “unhinged” with shouting and insults being hurled between the conspiracy theorists and the White House legal team. In December, Byrne says the trio decided to “crash” the White House to try and get their message to Trump.
and remained in communication with Powell, who introduced him to Flynn. (The White House distanced itself from her after that.)Īll the while, Byrne says he continued to spend time in D.C. When Powell stepped to the microphone, she blamed communists in Cuba and Venezuela, left-wing billionaire George Soros and the Clinton Foundation for a plot to ensure that Trump did not win the presidency. He then relayed that information to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani at her direction, he says.ĭays later, Giuliani spoke at a press conference during which rivulets of hair dye ran down his face as he made allegations of widespread voter fraud. He says he approached Sidney Powell in mid-November with information on election fraud. He says he spent the next several months speaking with cybersecurity experts and hackers, learning about the ways in which electronic voting machines could be vulnerable to foul play and foreign interference.īy the time election night came, Byrne was on the lookout for signs of fraud. He told him he should get involved with a group that was looking into suspicious activity in the 2018 Dallas election and believed there was potential for election fraud on a much wider scale, according to Byrne’s book.īyrne threw himself into the subject. In the summer of 2020, Byrne was recovering from spinal surgery when he says a friend paid him a visit at his home in Utah and piqued his interest in election fraud. He then sold his entire stake in Overstock, worth about $90 million before taxes, citing a fear of retaliation from the government, which he referred to as the “Deep State.” Byrne says he was a federal informant in her investigation and had been feeding information to the “Men In Black” since 2015. In 2019, he resigned from Overstock after his romantic relationship with accused Russian spy Maria Butina came to light. He embarked on a yearslong crusade, ranting in one call with investors that hedge funds, journalists and regulators were conspiring to push down the company’s stock price under the direction of some faceless menace he called the “Sith Lord.”īyrne later became enamored with blockchain technology, spending hundreds of millions of Overstock’s money to start or invest in more than a dozen blockchain companies. When the stock tanked, Byrne blamed it on an illegal practice called naked short-selling.
Three years later, the company’s revenue hit $92 million and he took it public. In 1999, he bought a discount retailer, renamed it Overstock and began scooping up inventory from bankrupt dot-coms and selling it at discounts online. He and his brother then began doing deals financed by their dad, buying up bankrupt hotels, strip malls, apartment buildings and distressed consumer debt. The son of an insurance tycoon who turned around Geico in the 1970s and attracted an investment from Warren Buffett, he earned a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford while battling three bouts of testicular cancer and wrote his dissertation exploring the virtues of limited government.
Byrne, 59, has a long history of hawking conspiracy theories and becoming embroiled in controversy.
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