Shortly before Christmas 2020, Donald Trump was so desperate to cling to power, despite his defeat, that he assembled a radical team of fringe figures with radical ideas to advise him. The New York Times described one “raucous” discussion from the time in which the outgoing president broached the subject of an executive order that would seize control of voting machines.
As we recently discussed, this went beyond idle chatter. As NBC News reported two weeks ago, there was an actual draft executive order prepared for Trump in which the Republican would’ve authorized the secretary of defense to send National Guard troops to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” voting machines around the country.
We know, of course, that this order was never issued. But the fact that such a document was written is itself extraordinary, and a reminder of the dangerous tactics Team Trump was willing to consider.
But it wasn’t just his team. The New York Times reported overnight on the then-president’s direct role in these radical tactics.
The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes.
Among the striking elements of the story, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, is the scale of the reported efforts. The Times described plots in which the then-president directed Rudy Giuliani to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states. Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary at DHS, apparently told Trump’s lawyer this wasn’t a credible option.
But this wasn’t the only such conversation. The Times’ report also noted the then-president’s conversation with then-Attorney General Bill Barr about the Justice Department seizing the voting machines — Barr “shot down” the idea — which came around the same time as a related effort to have the Pentagon “take control of the machines.” The article concluded:
Even Mr. Giuliani, who had spent weeks peddling some of the most outrageous claims about election fraud, felt that the idea of bringing in the military was beyond the pale. After [Michael] Flynn and [Sidney] Powell left the Oval Office, according to a person familiar with the matter, Mr. Giuliani predicted that the plans they were proposing were going to get Mr. Trump impeached. Soon after, Trump helped incite the riot at the Capitol, at which point Trump was impeached anyway. Part of what makes this report striking is the degree to which the then-president apparently bought into his own delusion. There has long been a school of thought that Trump, at a personal level, realized that he lost fair and square, but he concocted ridiculous conspiracy theories as a face-saving tactic that might help him politically after leaving the White House. If, on the other hand, Trump was personally searching in vain for a federal agency that would seize voting machines on his behalf, it would suggest that he actually believed the conspiratorial nonsense. What’s far less clear is what, exactly, the Department of Homeland Security — or the Justice Department, or the Defense Department — was supposed to do with the voting machines after they were seized.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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