Trump discussed ‘bringing military in to overturn
election result’ and calls for ‘wild’ protest on 6 January
President continues to falsely insist the election was
“rigged”
Matt
Mathers
@MattEm90
Monday 21
December 2020 09:24
Donald
Trump on Friday considered bringing in the military to overturn his key swing
state defeats to president-elect, Joe Biden, it has been reported.
White House
insiders allegedly said Mr Trump discussed imposing martial law in a move aimed
at overturning the result of the 2020 election.
It
reportedly came after Michael Flynn, the president's first national security
adviser, floated the idea in an interview with the right-wing news outlet, Newsmax
last week.
Flynn,
recently pardoned by Mr Trump after his Russia investigation conviction, told
Newsmax martial law was not "unprecedented" as he laid out his case
for military involvement in the democratic process.
During
Friday's White House meeting, at which Flynn was present, Mr Trump asked aides
how martial law works, sources told the New York Times.
According
to the NYT report, Mr Trump also suggested naming Sidney Powell, a lawyer and
ally who has pushed his false election claims, as a special counsel overseeing
alleged voter fraud at the election.
The White
House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows -
and other top advisers - opposed the ideas being put forward at the meeting,
saying there was no constitutional authority for them, the NYT reported.
In response
to Flynn’s calls to invoke martial law, army secretary Ryan McCarthy and chief
of staff general James McConville issued a joint statement saying there
"is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American
election".
It was not
immediately clear if the president plans to press ahead with appointing Ms
Powell as a special counsel.
Mr Trump
responded to the martial law claim early on Sunday morning, describing it on
Twitter as "Fake News". "Just more knowingly bad
reporting!" he added.
Despite the
electoral college (EC) meeting last week to certify Mr Biden's election
victory, the defeated incumbent continues to falsely insist that the won and
that the 3 November poll was "stolen" from him.
The
president and his legal team continue to allege, without evidence, that mass
voter fraud took place in key swing states across the country.
Thousands
of Mr Trump's supporters took to the streets last week in a show of support of
those baseless claims, with violent clashes breaking out in state capitals
across the US.
And there
is another protest planned to take place on 6 January, the day Congress meets
to officially recognise Joe Biden as president following the 14 December EC
vote.
As the coronavirus
continues to ravage vast swathes of the country, the outgoing president called
on his legion of loyal fans to descend on the capital and join the
demonstration.
"Big
protest in D.C. on January 6th," he tweeted on Saturday. "Be there,
will be wild!"
Mr Trump's
campaign and his allies have now filed roughly 50 lawsuits alleging widespread
voting fraud and almost all have been dismissed or dropped.
Team Trump
has lost before judges of both political parties, including some he appointed,
and some of the strongest rebukes have come from conservative Republicans.
The Supreme
Court has also refused to take up two cases — decisions that the president has
scorned.
With no
further tenable legal recourse, Mr Trump has been fuming and peppering allies
for options as he refuses to accept his loss.
That
includes his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who during the Friday meeting
pushed the president to seize voting machines in his hunt for evidence of
fraud.
The
Department of Homeland Security made clear, however, that it had no authority
to do so. It is also unclear what that would accomplish.
Sacked
attorney general William Barr earlier this month said that the Departments of
Justice and Homeland Security have looked into claims that voting machines
"were programmed essentially to skew the election results ... and so far,
we haven't seen anything to substantiate that."
Paper
ballots are also retained under federal law and have been used to verify
results, including in Georgia, which performed two audits of the vote tally
using paper-ballot backups.
Ms Powell
was initially part of the president's campaign legal team but was booted out
after a bizarre news conference with Giuliani in which she made a series of
outlandish claims of election fraud, including an assertion that election
software was created in Venezuela "at the direction of Hugo Chavez" —
the Venezuelan president who died in 2013.
In
interviews and appearances, Ms Powell continued to make misleading statements
about the voting process, unfurled unsupported and complex conspiracy theories
involving communist regimes and vowed to "blow up" Georgia with a
"biblical" court filing.
Trump's
team soon announced it had cut ties with Ms Powell. "She is not a member
of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his
personal capacity," Giuliani and another Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, said
in a statement.
Dominion
Voting Systems, a particular target of Ms Powell's, has also demanded she
retract the "wild" and "knowingly baseless" claims she has
made about the voting machine company and threatened a defamation lawsuit.
Since
parting ways with the campaign, Powell has continued to file litigation on
Trump's behalf, teaming up with conservative attorney L. Lin Wood in Georgia.
Ms Powell
and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário