Recent news reports on the last days of former President Donald Trump's White House are increasingly disturbing and provide a frightening window into just why it is so necessary to get the full, documented details of the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection.
We may have come closer to a coup than anyone has been willing to acknowledge so far. A New York Times story details what appears to be a somewhat elaborate and frantic plan to seize voting machines by whatever means necessary.
According to The Times, Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with his U.S. Attorney General William Barr, queried whether the Justice Department could seize voting machines in key states. Barr, who had often been blindly loyal to Trump, apparently quickly rejected the suggestion. Trump also tried to get state lawmakers in Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local law enforcement to impound voting machines, according to NYT sources. Those state lawmakers, thankfully, refused to do so.
At one point, unidentified outside advisers to Trump floated the idea of having the Pentagon take the machines, thus involving the U.S. military in civilian voting. That went too far even for Trump, who apparently rejected the notion.
Six full weeks after Election Day, still unwilling to acknowledge his loss and desperate to remain in power, Trump had his attorney Rudy Giuliani call the Department of Homeland Security to see if it could seize voting machines. An acting deputy secretary in that department, stating what should have been obvious from the outset, said they lacked that authority. The proposals involving both the Defense Department and Homeland Security apparently went so far as to be drafted into executive order form by advisers.
These are the actions of a despot, not a democratically elected president in a republic that prides itself on the peaceful transfer of power.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee despite acknowledging having spoken with Trump that fateful day, should be subpoenaed. With every revelation it becomes more critical to learn all of the full facts surrounding the attempt to overturn a presidential election — an attempt driven by a president unwilling to relinquish power.
Imagine if Homeland Security had acceded to Trump's demands, or if state lawmakers allowed themselves to be bullied into using local police to take voting machines.
Americans came dangerously close to having the federal government use its vast powers to seize voting machines — in an election that is supposed to be run by states — without ever providing a scintilla of evidence that substantial voter fraud existed.
One of the draft orders, according to CNN, has been turned over to the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. A key figure, Bernard Kerik, who worked closely with Giuliani, recently testified to the committee on those matters. Kerik, it should be noted, is another one of the rogue's gallery of disgraced figures who populated Trump's circle.
Once commissioner of the New York Police Department under Giuliani, who was mayor at the time, Kerik is a convicted felon, found guilty of tax fraud, ethics violations and making false criminal statements. He was sentenced to four years in federal prison but pardoned by Trump. Giuliani made so many egregiously false allegations in his attempts to overturn the election that his law license was suspended.
Trump has an authoritarian's penchant for seeking out those already compromised and drawing them in as loyalists. Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn was among them. A national security adviser to the Trump campaign, Flynn was also in 2016 a paid foreign agent working for Turkey. He was later forced to resign as national security adviser after he was found to have lied to Vice President Mike Pence about conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those conversations. But before the case even came to trial, Trump stepped in with a pre-emptive pardon. Flynn was a big proponent of seizing election equipment, and maintained in a Newsmax interview late in 2021 that Trump "could immediately on his order seize every single one of those machines around the country. … He could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states."
Now more than a year out of office, Trump seeks to tighten his grip on his party and relentlessly punish any sign of disloyalty. In a rally last weekend, he all but promised pardons for insurrectionists, in what can only be seen as an attempt to buy their silence.
A prominent Trump ally and Republican National Committee memeber, David Bossie, is seeking to get the only two Republicans courageous enough to serve on the Jan. 6 committee, Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, expelled from the party.
All these actions and more point to the need to dig deeper for facts, bring wrongdoers to justice and clarify laws such as the Electoral Count Reform Act before another attempt is made to twist it as a means of installing a would-be dictator.
