One of the pieces of evidence that Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to keep out the hands of a congressional committee investigating the January 6, 20,21 insurrection at U.S. Capitol, shows that Trump considered ordering soldiers to seize voting machine across the country following his 2020 loss. publishedFriday by Politico revealed.
The document — a draft executive order that Trump ultimately did not sign — “credulously cites conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan, as well as debunked notions about Dominion voting machines,” explains Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan.
Woodruff Swan reports that it is not clear who created the draft order. However, its contents are consistent with proposals made by Sidney Powell, a former Trump attorney and purveyor of the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.
“This draft order represents not only an abuse of emergency powers, but a total misunderstanding of them,” Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Politico. “The order doesn’t even make the basic finding of an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ that would be necessary to trigger any action… It’s the legal equivalent of a kid scrawling on the wall with crayons.”
🚨🚨Wow! After the election, Trump or his enablers created an executive order directing the Secretary for Defense to seize voting machines.https://t.co/LgBHmuzbBQ pic.twitter.com/RNhDAs6j9T
— Bill Pascrell, Jr. (@BillPascrell) January 21, 2022
Woodruff Swan writes:
The order empowers the defense secretary to “seize, collect, retain, and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under” a U.S. law that relates to the preservation of election records. It also cites a 2017 lawsuit against Brad Raffensperger (Georgia Secretary of State).
The draft order would have allowed the defense secretary 60 days for a review of the 2020 election. This suggests that it could have been a ploy to keep Trump in power at least until mid-February 2021.
The government accountability watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) notes that the draft order “was part of the records that Trump was fighting to keep from the January 6th committee,” a reference to the bipartisan House select panel investigating the attack.
A draft executive order was prepared that would have directed the defense secretary to seize voting devices in advance of the insurrection.
This was part the records Trump fought to keep from the January 6, 2017 committee. https://t.co/DEqft5RxZH
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) January 21, 2022
Trump wanted to stop the January 6, committee from obtaining more 700 documents. The documents were held at the National Archives. On Thursday, however, the U.S. Supreme Court defeated Trump’s attempt to prevent the January 6th committee from obtaining more 700 documents that were held by National Archives. sided with the committee, which wants to know what was happening in the Trump White House during the deadly assault on the Capitol by supporters of the defeated president as Congress was meeting to certify President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., responded to Friday’s revelations tweeted that “every single Trump seditionist must be prosecuted.”
In a Washington Post analysis of the draft order, national correspondent Philip Bump writes that “the main predicate President Donald Trump cited as his rationale for having federal officials seize every voting machine in the nation as part of his doomed effort to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him was that Sheryl Guy had forgotten to update something on her computer.”
Staffers alerted Guy (the Antrim County clerk) to an error in which she had added a candidate to her county ballot at the very last moment of Election Day. Guy failed to update the counting machines properly with new parameters as she added the candidate for village trustee on the ballot. Slightly over 2,000 Trump votes were subsequently—and erroneously—shifted to Biden. Employees double-counted more votes in an effort to rectify the error.
Trump won Antrim County with nearly 3,800 votes. Michigan was won by Biden by more than 300,000.
Analysis: Donald Trump’s rationale for seizing voting machines was worse than you might have assumed https://t.co/zXSCcTbb4Q
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 21, 2022
Bump however writes:
A right-wing media ecosystem primed by Trump to look for evidence of ‘fraud’ decided that fraud was precisely what had happened in Antrim County. Despite the fact that the results didn’t effect the state outcome. Despite the fact the error was explained. Despite the fact it was a Republican County that Trump had won. Antrim County became a shorthand for ‘fraud committed via electronic voting machines.’
In June 2021, a Republican-run state legislature committee published a report on Michigan’s 2020 elections process. It found no evidence of wrongdoing. Addressing Antrim County in particular, the committee declared that “all compelling theories that sprang forth from the rumors surrounding Antrim County are diminished so significantly as for it to be a complete waste of time to consider them further.”
