It is an explosive document – which may explain why Donald Trump has done everything to keep it secret. According to a draft executive order that he ultimately did not sign, a month after his election defeat, Donald Trump considered asking the National Guard to seize voting machines across the country, on behalf of an imaginary fraud. A decision that would have shaken American democracy and allowed the tenant of the White House to stay in place for two more months, beyond the transfer of power scheduled for January 20.
Revealed by the Politico websiteThe draft executive order, from the National Archives, is among 750 documents forwarded to the House committee investigating the Capitol attack after the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead on Wednesday.
special prosecutor
“Effective today, the Secretary of Defense must seize, collect, preserve and analyze all machinery, equipment, electronically stored information” regarding the election, if necessary with the assistance of the guard national, a reserve force of the American army, stipulates the text.
The draft executive order, drafted on December 16, 2020, provided for the appointment of a special prosecutor to file complaints for any allegations of fraud arising from the seizures. And he gave the secretary of defense 60 days to compile a report, which would have suspended the handover of power with Joe Biden and allowed Donald Trump to stay in place until mid-February.
Proposals from Mike Flynn and Sidney Powell
The draft executive order relied on a discredited report from Michigan to claim there had been “systemic fraud” and “foreign interference” that exploited alleged flaws in Dominion Voting Systems’ voting machines. This conspiracy theory had however been swept away three weeks earlier by the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. The Attorney General himself, Bill Barr, had said there was no evidence of massive fraud days earlier.
At this stage, it is not known who is the author of this document. Because it references classified memos, the author was, in all likelihood, a senior Trump administration official. On December 18, the American president had received at the White House the lawyer Sidney Powell, his former national security adviser Mike Flynn and the founder of the e-commerce site Overstock.com Patrick Byrn. According to leaks published by the New York Times at the time, they suggested several extreme solutions to Donald Trump, including seizing voting machines and bringing in martial law.