Washington:
A draft decision, written by Donald Trump’s White House in the weeks following his defeat in the 2020 election, ordered the country’s top military leader to confiscate voting machines, a report said on Friday.
The explosive document, released by the National Archives and obtained by Politico, highlights the extreme measures Trump may have been willing to take to remain in power against the will of the voters who chose Joe Biden as their next president.
The December 16, 2020 order was intended to appoint special counsel to bring charges against any allegations of fraud arising from the seizures. But it was never signed.
It is one of more than 750 records handed over to the House of Representatives selection committee investigating the 2021 Capitol attack after the Supreme Court dismissed Trump’s appeal to block their release.
“Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense will seize, collect, preserve and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information and material data necessary for safekeeping,” the three-page draft says.
The document echoes many of the debunked conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines pushed by figures in Trump’s orbit who are now targeted by congressional investigators, including right-wing attorney Sidney Powell.
She falsely told reporters that the election was the target of “Communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and probably China.”
Powell and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani led failed efforts in the weeks following Trump’s defeat to make courts throw out election results in key swing states.
The ex-president and his allies have spent months making false claims about widespread fraud, despite experts in his own administration confirming it was the safest vote in US history.
The claims were also dismissed by Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr, and Trump was eventually impeached for inciting the attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.
The draft order bears similarities to a plot outlined in a Powerpoint presentation to keep Trump in office, which former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows handed over to the select committee last year.
That document foresaw that US marshals would confiscate ballots for a manual recount of 50 states.
The draft decision, released Friday, specifically targets touchscreen ballot marking devices made by Dominion, which were used in Georgia, where a manual recount and a machine recount confirmed Biden’s win.
It repeats false allegations that Dominion is “owned or heavily controlled and influenced by foreign agents, countries and interests” and claims its machines are deliberately designed to create “systemic fraud”.
Powell and Giuliani fight multibillion-dollar libel lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic, another voting machine company.
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)