Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com who was present at a meeting that became a focal point of Tuesday’s hearing, is expected to speak this week with the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, a person familiar with the investigation told The New York Times.
Mr. Byrne was at a meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, in which Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, the pro-Trump lawyer, pressed to seize voting machines and name Ms. Powell as a special counsel to work to overturn the election.
Mr. Byrne stood out as a vocal purveyor of conspiracy theories even before he was among those who surrounded Trump in his final days as president. He lost his job at Overstock in 2019 after releasing a statement with references to the “Deep State” and “Men in Black” in which he said he had been romantically involved with Maria Butina, a woman accused of being a Russian spy. Ms. Butina, who tried to befriend politically powerful people before the 2016 election, spent more than a year in prison for conspiring to act as a foreign agent.
Then he showed up at the White House in December 2020 — at whose invitation is unclear. According to a long and digressive blog post he published after the meeting, he wrote that he had urged Mr. Trump to “‘find’ that there was adequate evidence of foreign interference with the election” so that the president could use his powers to direct federal law enforcement to get involved with vote-counting.
He wrote that Mr. Trump responded, “Knowing I was cheated, that they rigged this election? How can I just walk away from that?”
More about Mr. Byrne’s role in the final days of the Trump presidency could come to light this week, when he speaks to investigators, according to the person who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak on the record.
