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 1. Home
 2. World
 3. Trump had role in weighing proposals to seize voting machines


TRUMP HAD ROLE IN WEIGHING PROPOSALS TO SEIZE VOTING MACHINES


THE NEW ACCOUNTS SHOW THAT TRUMP WAS MORE DIRECTLY INVOLVED THAN PREVIOUSLY
KNOWN IN EXPLORING PROPOSALS TO USE HIS NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCIES TO SEIZE
VOTING MACHINES.

 * 
 * 
 * 

By: New York Times |
Updated: February 1, 2022 11:42:57 am

Former US president Donald Trump. (File photo via AP)

Written by Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman, Michael S. Schmidt and Luke Broadwater

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, US President
Donald Trump directed his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to make a remarkable call.
Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally
take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with
the matter said.

Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he
lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.


https://images.indianexpress.com/2020/08/1x1.png

Trump pressed Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by
his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the
outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Trump, in an
Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William Barr, raised the possibility
of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously
undisclosed suggestion that Barr immediately shot down.

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The new accounts show that 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.

The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist
Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals
involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were
codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.

But the new accounts provide fresh insight into how the former president
considered and to some degree pushed the plans, which would have taken the
United States into uncharted territory by using federal authority to seize
control of the voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread
voting fraud.

The people familiar with the matter were briefed on the events by participants
or had firsthand knowledge of them.

The accounts about the voting machines emerged after a weekend when Trump
declared at a rally in Texas that he might pardon people charged in connection
with the storming of the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, if he were reelected. In a
statement issued after the rally, Trump also suggested that his vice president,
Mike Pence, could have personally “overturned the election” by refusing to count
delegates to the Electoral College who had vowed to cast their votes for Joe
Biden.

The new information helps to flesh out how the draft executive orders to seize
voting machines came into existence and points in particular to the key role
played by a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron.

According to people familiar with the accounts, Waldron, shortly after the
election, began telling associates that he had found irregularities in vote
results that he felt were suggestive of fraud. He then came up with the idea of
having a federal agency like the military or the Department of Homeland Security
confiscate the machines to preserve evidence.

Waldron first proposed the notion of the Pentagon’s involvement to Trump’s
former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, whom he says he served with in
the Defense Intelligence Agency.


Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn speaks during the daily news
briefing at the White House, in Washington. (AP/File)

The plans were among an array of options that were placed before Trump in the
tumultuous days and weeks that followed the election, developed by an ad hoc
group of lawyers like Sidney Powell and other allies including Flynn and
Waldron. That group often found itself at odds with Giuliani and his longtime
associate Bernard Kerik, as well as with Trump’s White House counsel, Pat
Cipollone, and his team.

Around the same time that Trump brought up the possibility of having the Justice
Department seize the voting machines, for example, he also tried to persuade
state lawmakers in contested states like Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local
law enforcement agencies to take control of them, people familiar with the
matter said. The state lawmakers refused to go along with the plan.

The meeting with Barr took place in mid to late November when Trump raised the
idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize machines,
according to two people familiar with the matter. Trump told Barr that his
lawyers had told him that the department had the power to seize machines as
evidence of fraud.

Trump mentioned a specific state that had used machines built by Dominion Voting
Systems, where his lawyers believed there had been fraud, although it is unclear
which state Trump was referring to. Barr, who had been briefed extensively at
that point by federal law enforcement officials about how the theories being
pushed by Trump’s legal team about the Dominion machines were unfounded, told
Trump that the Justice Department had no basis for seizing the machines because
there was no probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.

It was only after several early options were exhausted that Waldron pitched the
idea of using other parts of the federal government to seize the machines to
both Giuliani and members of the Trump legal team, and to Flynn and his own
associates, including Powell and Patrick Byrne, a wealthy business executive who
funded many of the efforts to challenge the election.

Waldron, who owns a bar and distillery outside Austin, Texas, was previously
best known for having circulated a 38-page PowerPoint presentation to lawmakers
and White House aides that was filled with extreme plans to overturn the
election.

Giuliani was vehemently opposed to the idea of the military taking part in the
seizure of machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. The
conflict between him and his legal team, and Flynn, Powell and Byrne came to a
dramatic head-on Dec 18, 2020, during a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office.

At the meeting, Flynn and Powell presented Trump with a copy of the draft
executive order authorising the military to oversee the seizure of machines.
After reading it, Trump summoned Giuliani to the Oval Office, according to one
person familiar with the matter. When Giuliani read the draft order, he told
Trump that the military could be used only if there was clear-cut evidence of
foreign interference in the election.

Powell, who had spent the past month filing lawsuits claiming that China and
other countries had hacked into voting machines, said she had such evidence, the
person said. But Giuliani was adamant that the military should not be mobilised,
the person said, and Trump ultimately heeded his advice.

Shortly after the Oval Office meeting, Waldron amended the draft executive
order, suggesting that if the Defense Department could not oversee the seizure
of machines then the Department of Homeland Security could, the person said.

Around that time, Trump asked Giuliani to call Kenneth  Cuccinelli II, the
acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, to ask about the
viability of the proposal, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Cuccinelli said that homeland security officials could not take part in the
plan.

All of this was playing out amid open acrimony among White House aides and
outside advisers about how best — and how far — to proceed with efforts to
pursue Trump’s claims of fraud in the election. That same month, during a
meeting on another matter, Trump asked Cuccinelli what he thought of appointing
a special counsel to investigate election fraud. Cuccinelli, according to two
people briefed on the conversation, said it was not a good idea for a variety of
reasons.

When Flynn, Powell and Byrne arrived at the White House to discuss their plan to
use the military to seize voting machines, they were not let into the Oval
Office by a typical gatekeeper, like Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff.
Rather, they were escorted in by Garrett Ziegler, a young aide to another Trump
adviser, Peter Navarro, according to Ziegler’s account.



“I waved in Gen. Flynn and Sidney Powell on the Friday night of the 18th — for
which Mark Meadows’ office revoked my guest privileges,” Ziegler said on a
podcast, adding that he had done so because he was “frustrated with the current
counsel” Trump was getting.

Even 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 Flynn and Powell left the Oval Office, according to a person familiar with
the matter, Giuliani predicted that the plans they were proposing were going to
get Trump impeached.



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