A draft executive order to seize voting machines, while never signed, was ready to go and only needed previous guy’s signature. With the departure of Bill Barr in December, it remained a tactical option in coup planning on the approach to 6 January 2021. There seemed to be at least one of many possible pretexts to seize voting machines, this one involved national security rather than the more difficult to rationalize reasons of homeland security. A parallel operation involved forged elector slate documents that could then be substituted for legitimately certified state election documents.
The executive order — which also would have appointed a special counsel to probe the 2020 election — was never issued. The remarks are a draft of a speech Trump gave the next day. Together, the two documents point to the wildly divergent perspectives of White House advisers and allies during Trump’s frenetic final weeks in office.
It’s not clear who wrote either document. But the draft executive order is dated Dec. 16, 2020, and is consistent with proposals that lawyer Sidney Powell made to the then-president. On Dec. 18, 2020, Powell, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump administration lawyer Emily Newman, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump in the Oval Office.
In that meeting, Powell urged Trump to seize voting machines and to appoint her as a special counsel to investigate the election, according to Axios.
A spokesperson for the House’s Jan. 6 select committee confirmed earlier Friday that the panel had received the last of the documents that Trump’s lawyers tried to keep under wraps and later declined to comment for this story on these two documents.
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(2020) “To this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Barr said.
The comments are likely to further erode what is already a significantly damaged relationship between Barr and Trump, though they also could help insulate Barr’s successor, Deputy Attorney General Jeff A. Rosen, from any White House pressure. Reacting to a news story about the comments, Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, who has been involved in the effort to challenge election results, wrote on Twitter, “Maybe you should sit down now, Bill. You certainly did enough sitting down on the job.”
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Since then, Trump has intensified his effort to overturn the results of the election. On Sunday, he said in a radio interview that he had spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) about challenging the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene on Jan. 6 to formally affirm Biden’s victory.
And at a frenetic Oval Office meeting days earlier, he seemed to entertain other steps that some advisers warned are baseless and exceed the bounds of his power.
He suggested, for example, naming lawyer Sidney Powell — who has promoted the wild, false claim that Venezuelan communists programmed U.S. voting machines to flip votes for Biden — as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud, though the idea appeared to be a non-starter, people familiar with the meeting have said.
Barr had previously seemed to throw cold water on Powell’s allegation of a grand conspiracy, telling the Associated Press, “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”
Trump also suggested that homeland security officials should seize state voting machines and investigate alleged fraud, though acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and other homeland security officials have previously told the White House they have no authority to do so unless states ask for inspections or investigations.
Powell was present at the meeting, as was Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser who has said publicly Trump could use the military to “basically rerun an election.” Flynn came to the Oval Office to discuss that idea, people familiar with the matter said, though Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone pushed back “strenuously.” Trump later tweeted, “Martial law = Fake News.
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