Read the never-issued Trump order that would have seized voting machines

…from Politico

[ Editor’s Note: This is some major coup plotting going on here. It will add to the growing mountain of evidence that once Trump lost the election, his team basically stopped governing and focused all of its efforts on throwing the election over.

I had one wondered about the press reports of the Jan 6 committee’s interests in drafts of potential plans, thinking that distracted efforts away from what they finally did, and how and why.

But I see here in this story that at the top of the list was taking a path to cut the courts and judges out of the picture, going full military under the presidential chain of command, not only to look into issues, but to take actions where a judge could not step in to stop with a restraining order.

The Secretary of Defense would have been Trump’s blocking force. Obviously Milley would not have gone along with the request, if it was actually made. But this gives us more material to show the ‘state of mind’ of the Trump Insurrection team, and why it is so important to get even plans that were not used into the Jan6 report record to show the depth of the plotting.
–
This will help justify the final report and recommendation for legislation to put firewalls in place where no disgruntled defeated president and cabal can inflict another insurrection upon us.

I am hoping that one of the conclusions would be that it’s a bad idea to throw the jurisdiction of litigation of such an event into the backlogged cauldron of the American justice system, when time is off the essence.

The good news is that the Archives got some of the requested Trump records to the Committee the day after the Supreme Court ruling. Hurrah for them! … Jim W. Dean ]

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First published … January 21, 2022

Among the records that Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to shield from Jan. 6 investigators are a draft executive order that would have directed the defense secretary to seize voting machines and a document titled “Remarks on National Healing.”

POLITICO has reviewed both documents. The text of the draft executive order is published here for the first time.

…The draft executive order shows that the weeks between Election Day and the Capitol attack could have been even more chaotic than they were. It credulously cites conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan, as well as debunked notions about Dominion voting machines.

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 preservation of election records. It also cites a lawsuit filed in 2017 against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Additionally, the draft order would have given the defense secretary 60 days to write an assessment of the 2020 election. That suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021.

…The draft order also greenlit “the appointment of a Special Counsel to oversee this operation and institute all criminal and civil proceedings as appropriate based on the evidence collected and provided all resources necessary to carry out her duties consistent with federal laws and the Constitution.”

Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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