Former President Donald Trump drafted an order for the Pentagon to seize voting machines after the defeat in the 2020 election, writes Politico.
The draft was written a few weeks after the election defeat and was released by the US National Archives in connection with the investigation into the storming of the congress building a year ago.
The document highlights the extreme measures Trump considered to retain power against the will of the majority of voters, writes Politico. The policy website has been given access to a document and a draft of an order called “Remarks on National Healing”.
It is dated 16 December 2020 and advocates the establishment of a council that would prosecute all fraud allegations that arose due to the seizures. But the order was never signed.
One of many documents
The document is among the more than 750 documents submitted to the committee investigating the storming of Congress on January 6, 2021. It happened after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to prevent the release of these documents.
“With immediate effect, the Minister of Defense shall seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information and documents required for storage,” the three-page draft states.
The document reproduces many of the refuted conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines that Trump and his allies came up with, among them lawyer Sidney Powell.
She mistakenly told reporters that the election was influenced by “communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and probably China”.
Powell and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani led an unsuccessful attempt to get the right to reject the election result in several tipping states in the weeks following the election defeat.
Repeated allegations of cheating
The president and his allies made allegations of widespread electoral fraud for several months, despite experts in his own government confirming that it was the safest election in US history.
The draft order, which appeared on Friday, is specifically aimed at touch screens for election machines made by Dominion. These were used in the state of Georgia, where a hand count and machine count confirmed Joe Biden’s victory.
It reiterates false claims that Dominion is “owned or heavily controlled and influenced by foreign agents, countries and interests” and claims that the machines are deliberately designed to create “systematic cheating”.
Powell and Giuliani are currently battling multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic, another company that makes vending machines.
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