New Details on Donald Trump’s Grand Conspiracy To Steal The 2020 Election

The New York Times reports on how Donald Trump tried to enlist every government agency in his Big Lie propaganda and self-coup. Is Attorney General Merrick Garland taking notes? Memos Show Roots of Trump’s Focus on Jan. 6 and Alternate Electors:

Fifteen days after Election Day in 2020, James R. Troupis, a lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, received a memo setting out what became the rationale for an audacious strategy: to put in place alternate slates of electors in states where President Donald J. Trump was trying to overturn his loss.

So many corrupt Republican lawyers, so little time to prosecute and disbar them all.

The memo, from another lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro, may not have been the first time that lawyers and allies of Mr. Trump had weighed the possibility of naming their own electors in the hopes that they might eventually succeed in flipping the outcome in battleground states through recounts and lawsuits baselessly asserting widespread fraud.

But the Nov. 18 memo and three weeks later in a Dec. 9 memo later are among the earliest known efforts to put on paper proposals for preparing alternate electors. They helped to shape a crucial strategy that Mr. Trump would embrace with profound consequences for himself and the nation.

The memos show how just over two weeks after Election Day, Mr. Trump’s campaign was seeking to buy itself more time to undo the results. At the heart of the strategy was the idea that their real deadline was not Dec. 14, when official electors would be chosen to reflect the outcome in each state, but Jan. 6, when Congress would meet to certify the results.

And in that focus on Jan. 6 lay the seeds of what became a pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to accept the validity of a challenge to the outcome and to block Congress from finalizing Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory — a campaign that would also lead to a violent assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters and an extraordinary rupture in American politics.

“It may seem odd that the electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on Dec. 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count, and no certificate of election has been issued in favor of Trump and Pence,” the Nov. 18 memo said. “However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action.”

Both federal prosecutors and the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 have recently confirmed that they are examining the effort to submit alternate slates of electors to the Electoral College. On Friday, congressional investigators issued subpoenas to 14 people who claimed to be official Trump electors in states that were actually won by Mr. Biden.

The two memos, obtained by The New York Times, were used by Mr. Trump’s top lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and others like John Eastman as they developed a strategy intended to exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The memos were initially meant to address Mr. Trump’s challenge to the outcome in Wisconsin, but they ultimately became part of a broader conversation by members of Mr. Trump’s legal team as the president looked toward Jan. 6 and began to exert pressure on Mr. Pence to hold up certification of the Electoral College count.

Neither Mr. Troupis nor Mr. Chesebro responded to requests for comment about the memos. Even before they were written, legislative leaders in Arizona and Wisconsin sought advice from their own lawyers about whether they had the power to alter slates of electors after the election took place and were effectively told they did not, according to new documents obtained by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.

Mr. Trump has long embraced the scheme. Just this past weekend, he issued a statement reiterating that he was justified in using the process in Congress on Jan. 6 to challenge the outcome and asserting that Mr. Pence “could have overturned the election.” [An admission to a seditious conspiracy.]

The plan to employ alternate electors was one of Mr. Trump’s most expansive efforts to stave off defeat, beginning even before some states had finished counting ballots and culminating in the pressure placed on Mr. Pence when he presided over the joint congressional session on Jan. 6. At various times, the scheme involved state lawmakers, White House aides and lawyers like Mr. Chesebro and Mr. Troupis.

In the weeks after the election, Mr. Troupis oversaw the Trump campaign’s recount effort in Wisconsin, which ultimately showed that Mr. Biden had won by more than 20,000 votes. In early December 2020, Mr. Troupis filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Trump campaign that sought to invalidate the use of absentee ballots in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, which both have large numbers of Black voters.

At a hearing in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, one justice, Rebecca Dallet, noted that Mr. Troupis had not sought to invalidate votes in Wisconsin’s 70 other counties but had focused only on the “most nonwhite, urban” parts of the state. Another justice, Jill Karofsky, echoed that sentiment, telling Mr. Troupis that his lawsuit “smacks of racism.”

In late December, Mr. Chesebro joined Mr. Troupis in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the question of whether competing slates of electors in Wisconsin and six other contested states could be considered on Jan. 6. The high court denied their request.

The language and suggestions in the memos from Mr. Chesebro to Mr. Troupis closely echo tactics and talking points that were eventually adopted by Mr. Trump’s top lawyers.

The November memo, for example, called Jan. 6 the “hard deadline” for settling the results of the election and advised that the Trump campaign had nearly two months for “judicial proceedings” to challenge the outcome. It also suggested that Trump-friendly electors in Wisconsin needed to meet in Madison, the state capital, on Dec. 14, 2020, the day the Electoral College would be voting.

The December memo expanded on the plan. It set forth an analysis of how to legally authorize alternate electors in six key swing states, including Wisconsin. It noted that the scheme was “unproblematic” in Arizona and Wisconsin, “slightly problematic” in Michigan, “somewhat dicey” in Georgia and Pennsylvania, and “very problematic” in Nevada.

Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California and a member of the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, said the panel is examining the origins of the plans to put forward alternate electors. The panel already has in its possession memos that were written by Mr. Eastman and another Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, in late December 2020 and early January 2021; those memos laid out steps for Congress to take to cast aside Mr. Biden’s electors in key swing states.

“We know this was a coordinated effort on behalf of the former president and those around him to overturn a free and fair election,” Mr. Aguilar said. “We continue to learn new and more details. It’s incredibly troubling to know the lengths they went to support these efforts in multiple states.”

Mr. Aguilar said that he and others on the panel believed the plan to use the electors was connected to other aspects of Mr. Trump’s effort to remain in power, such as proposals to seize voting machines and to put intense pressure on Mr. Pence to throw out legitimate electoral votes.

“We need to know the depth of that plan, and we need to know the different ways in which they sought to operationalize their theory,” he said.

Earlier The Times reported, Jan. 6 Panel Examining Trump’s Role in Proposals to Seize Voting Machines:

The House Jan. 6 committee is scrutinizing former President Donald J. Trump’s involvement in proposals to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, including efforts to create a legal basis for directing national security agencies to take such an extreme action, according to three people with knowledge of the committee’s activities.

It is not clear what evidence the committee is examining as it looks at any role Mr. Trump might have played in encouraging or facilitating the drafting of a so-called national security finding, a type of document more typically used as the basis for a presidential order to an intelligence agency to take covert action. But the committee recently received documents from the Trump White House including what court filings described as a “document containing presidential findings concerning the security of the 2020 election after it occurred and ordering various actions,” along with related notes.

A document fitting that description circulated among Mr. Trump’s formal and informal advisers in the weeks following the election. It reflected baseless assertions about foreign interference in American voting systems that had been promoted most prominently by one of his outside lawyers, Sidney Powell.

That document, dated Dec. 16, 2020, and titled “Presidential Findings to Preserve Collect and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election,” was published last month by Politico. It used the groundless assertions about foreign interference in the vote tally to conclude that Mr. Trump had “probable cause” to direct the military to begin seizing voting machines.

“We certainly intend to run to ground any evidence bearing on an effort to seize voting machines and to use the apparatus of the federal government to confiscate these machines in the service of the president’s aim to overturn the election,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. “We want to fully flesh out the facts: How close did this come to being operationalized? What kind of pushback did they receive? Who was a part of this particular scheme? We want to answer all those questions.”

The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals championed by outside advisers to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.

Those attempts included directing his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states — Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting deputy secretary, said no — and raising with Attorney General William P. Barr the question of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a query that Mr. Barr rejected, according to people familiar with the episodes.

Mr. Cuccinelli, who had told Mr. Giuliani that the Homeland Security Department did not have the authority to audit or impound the machines, later encountered Mr. Trump at a meeting on another topic. Mr. Trump again raised with him, in passing, the idea of the department seizing the machines, and Mr. Cuccinelli reiterated that there was no legal authority for doing so, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

The outside advisers [Michael Flynn and Sidney Powel] had earlier pushed a plan under which Mr. Trump would direct the Pentagon to seize the voting machines, an idea that was killed by White House officials and Mr. Giuliani.

“It is alarming that the former president apparently seriously contemplated extraordinary and legally not permitted courses of action to seize voting equipment from states and localities,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee.

The panel for weeks has been studying the actions of Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who investigators say was involved in discussions about seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency and invoking certain national security emergency powers, including during a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18. [It all comes back to Russian asset Michael Flynn.]

Mr. Flynn also gave an interview to the right-wing media site Newsmax a day earlier in which he talked about the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.

At the Dec. 18 meeting, Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election, said he, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell decided they would get into the White House without an appointment “by hook or by crook” to present their plans to Mr. Trump. He said a junior staffer let them in the building, and eventually they got close enough to the Oval Office that Mr. Trump saw them and called them in.

Once inside, the group pitched Mr. Trump on their plans for him to sign an executive order for the National Guard to take control of voting machines and for Ms. Powell to be appointed a special counsel overseeing election integrity.

“We pointed out that, it being Dec. 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting the Problematic 6 counties) finished before Christmas,” Mr. Byrne wrote of the episode in a book, referring to portions of contested swing states that Mr. Trump had lost.

Mr. Byrne wrote that Mr. Flynn had drafted a “beautiful operational plan” that just needed “one signature from the president.” He described various versions of the plan, including an option for the U.S. Marshals to intervene and another for Mr. Trump to “have the National Guard rerun the elections in those six states.”

He described White House lawyers and officials as fighting the plans in the meeting, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who thundered, “He does not have the authority to do this!”

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said the panel is trying to understand the “whole picture” of the plan to seize voting machines and how it relates to other efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, such as the former president’s pressure campaign on Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors from states won by President Biden.

“His overriding objective was to overturn the election. He said that as recently as this weekend,” Mr. Raskin said of Mr. Trump. “He set into motion a range of tactical ploys to accomplish his goal.”

Mr. Raskin added: “It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous federal assault on voting rights than a presidential seizure of voting machines without any action by Congress at all and no basis in law. That is the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”

The extraordinary plan to mobilize the country’s national security agencies to take control of voting machines required an equally extraordinary first step. Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was an ally of Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell, revealed in a podcast interview last year that the gambit initially hinged on a report about foreign interference in the election that John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence at the time, was bound by congressional mandate to present to lawmakers by Dec. 18, 2020.

If Mr. Ratcliffe had pointed a finger at China, accusing Communist Party officials of manipulating votes in the United States, Mr. Waldron said in the interview, Mr. Trump would have been within his rights to invoke rare and extraordinary powers reserved for a president in times of national emergency. By Mr. Waldron’s account, those powers would have permitted Mr. Trump to seize voting machines and conduct an audit of them or a recount of the votes — the same basic plan that appeared in the draft executive orders that were sent to Mr. Trump.

But Mr. Ratcliffe and his senior aides were unaware until recently that Mr. Waldron and Mr. Flynn had plans involving the report, which was not submitted until well after the Dec. 18 deadline in part because of disputes within the intelligence community over how to characterize China’s role in seeking to influence American public opinion ahead of the election.

The report concluded that there had been no foreign interference in the casting, tabulation or counting of the votes. It said that several countries had engaged in operations to shape public opinion over the course of the campaign.

Mr. Waldron, an information warfare expert who has claimed he served with Mr. Flynn in the Defense Intelligence Agency, had a longstanding interest in China’s purported involvement in election interference.

In August 2020, months before a single presidential vote was cast, he developed a relationship with a Texas cybersecurity firm, Allied Security Operations, which was co-founded by two men: a technology expert named Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and a former soldier named Adam T. Kraft, whose online biography shows he also served at the Defense Intelligence Agency at the same time as Mr. Flynn.

In the podcast interview, Mr. Waldron maintained that Mr. Ramsland’s team at Allied Security had made a startling discovery in the summer of 2020: that the Chinese Communist Party, through software companies it controlled, had developed a way to flip votes on American tabulation machines, particularly those built by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion has adamantly denied that its machines have security flaws and has filed defamation suits against many of those who have repeated the claims, including Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.

Before they were used as the basis for the draft orders sent to Mr. Trump, these allegations about Dominion were the centerpiece for four conspiracy-laced federal lawsuits that Ms. Powell filed in late November and early December 2020, seeking to overturn results of the election.

The suits — accompanied by affidavits from Mr. Ramsland, among others — made the baseless claim that Chinese officials, international shell companies and the financier George Soros had conspired to hack into Dominion’s machines in what Mr. Waldron once described as a “globalist/socialist” plot to steal the election.