Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize
Voting Machines
New accounts show that the former president was more
directly involved than previously known in plans developed by outside advisers
to use national security agencies to seek evidence of fraud.
By Alan
Feuer, Maggie Haberman, Michael S. Schmidt and Luke Broadwater
Jan. 31,
2022
Six weeks
after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump
directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. 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.
Mr.
Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he
lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.
Mr. Trump
pressed Mr. 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 Mr. Trump,
in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the
possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a
previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down.
The new
accounts show that Mr. 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 Mr.
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 Mr. Trump
declared at a rally in Texas that he might pardon people charged in connection
with the storming of the Capitol last Jan. 6 if he were re-elected. In a
statement issued after the rally, Mr. 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 Joseph R. Biden Jr.
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, Mr. 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.
Mr. Waldron
first proposed the notion of the Pentagon’s involvement to Mr. Trump’s former
national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, whom he says he served with in the
Defense Intelligence Agency.
The plans
were among an array of options that were placed before Mr. 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 Mr. Flynn and
Mr. Waldron. That group often found itself at odds with Mr. Giuliani and his
longtime associate Bernard Kerik, as well as with Mr. Trump’s White House
counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his team.
Around the
same time that Mr. 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 Mr. Barr took place in mid- to late November when Mr. Trump raised the
idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize machines,
according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump told Mr. Barr that
his lawyers had told him that the department had the power to seize machines as
evidence of fraud.
Mr. 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 Mr. Trump was referring to. Mr. Barr, who had been briefed
extensively at that point by federal law enforcement officials about how the
theories being pushed by Mr. Trump’s legal team about the Dominion machines
were unfounded, told Mr. 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 Mr. Waldron pitched the idea of
using other parts of the federal government to seize the machines to both Mr.
Giuliani and members of the Trump legal team, and to Mr. Flynn and his own
associates, including Ms. Powell and Patrick Byrne, a wealthy business
executive who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election.
Mr.
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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell and Mr. Byrne came to
a dramatic head on Dec. 18, 2020, during a meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval
Office.
At the
meeting, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell presented Mr. Trump with a copy of the draft
executive order authorizing the military to oversee the seizure of machines.
After reading it, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Giuliani to the Oval Office, according
to one person familiar with the matter. When Mr. Giuliani read the draft order,
he told Mr. Trump that the military could be used only if there was clear-cut
evidence of foreign interference in the election.
Ms. 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 Mr. Giuliani was adamant that the military should not be
mobilized, the person said, and Mr. Trump ultimately heeded his advice.
Shortly
after the Oval Office meeting, Mr. 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, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Giuliani to call Kenneth T. 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s
claims of fraud in the election. That same month, during a meeting on another
matter, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Cuccinelli what he thought of appointing a special
counsel to investigate election fraud. Mr. Cuccinelli, according to two people
briefed on the conversation, said it was not a good idea for a variety of
reasons.
When Mr.
Flynn, Ms. Powell and Mr. 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, Mr. Trump’s chief of
staff. Rather, they were escorted in by Garrett Ziegler, a young aide to
another Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, according to Mr. Ziegler’s account.
“I waved in
General Flynn and Sidney Powell on the Friday night of the 18th — for which
Mark Meadows’s office revoked my guest privileges,” Mr. Ziegler said on a
podcast, adding that he had done so because he was “frustrated with the current
counsel” Mr. Trump was getting.
Even Mr.
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 Mr.
Flynn and Ms. Powell left the Oval Office, according to a person familiar with
the matter, Mr. Giuliani predicted that the plans they were proposing were
going to get Mr. Trump impeached.
Alan Feuer
covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about
mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption
and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The Times
in 1999. @alanfeuer
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.
@maggieNYT
Michael S.
Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal
investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one
for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of
President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
Luke
Broadwater covers Congress. He was the lead reporter on a series of
investigative articles at The Baltimore Sun that won a Pulitzer Prize and a
George Polk Award in 2020. @lukebroadwater
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