New details about Trump’s threat toward voting machines show danger ahead

New details about Trump’s threat toward voting machines show danger ahead

Greg Sargent — Read time: 4 minutes

Columnist

The beating heart of Donald Trump’s 2020 coup attempt was his effort to use the machinery of government to manufacture pretexts for delaying the electoral count in Congress. To this end, as we know, Trump extensively pressured the Justice Department to issue statements and investigations, to create the phony impression of widespread election fraud.

This provides a big opening to flesh out key unknowns about Trump’s scheme. While some will focus on what seizing machines itself might have accomplished, potentially more interesting is what this says about how far Trump and his co-conspirators went to create smokescreens to justify the procedural coup that unfolded over weeks leading up to Jan. 6.

The crux of the New York Times’ new report is that Trump went farther than previously known in entertaining the use of law enforcement and national security agencies to seize voting machines to cast Joe Biden’s victory as illegitimate.

Trump’s pressure on Barr unfolded as follows:

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.

It appears Trump was listening to more conspiratorial-minded allies — lawyer Sidney Powell, former national security adviser Michael Flynn — about how to thwart the transfer of power, and tried to enlist the Justice Department in the scheme.

Barr told Trump that the department had no basis for seizing the machines, per the Times. But these efforts continued.

Indeed, soon after that, the Times reports, Powell and Flynn tried to prevail on Trump to use the military to seize the machines, but this was resisted by Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, a longtime Trump ringleader who for some reason suddenly decided to defend the rule of law.

At around that time, reports the Times, Trump instructed Giuliani to call a top Homeland Security official to see about executing the scheme. That, too, was rebuffed.

On the Barr revelations, note that a Senate report already documented that Trump and his allies tried to co-opt the department to help validate fake fraud claims, apparently to create the pretext for his vice president to delay the congressional count of electors. This would kick the election back to states who might then send fraudulent electors.

Remember, a Trump ally tried to get the department to send letters advising swing states to hold special sessions to consider sending new electors. In this context, Trump’s apparent flirtation with seizing voting machines is probably best understood as another effort to corrupt law enforcement to create a pretext for thwarting the transfer of power in Congress.

The Jan. 6 select committee will almost certainly have to hear from Barr on this. CBS News recently reported that Barr told the committee he doesn’t have much to say about Trump’s scheme to overturn the election. This new report suggests otherwise.

In an interview, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the select committee, declined to say how the committee will approach this with Barr, a decision it will make collectively. But Raskin confirmed it would continue pursuing all avenues of inquiry.

“We’re interested in every plan that Donald Trump set into motion,” Raskin told me. “It’s also significant if there were plans that he couldn’t pursue because people recognized how outrageous they were, and refused to go along.”

“We want to know about the whole operation,” Raskin continued. “Certainly a former attorney general of the United States has an obligation to give us all of the information that he knows about criminal plans and potential criminal plans to overthrow the election.”

The even larger context here is this: In recent days, Trump has left no doubt whatsoever that he fully intended to do everything within his means to stop a legitimately elected government from taking control, to remain in power illegitimately.

Trump issued a remarkable statement admitting that he wanted his vice president to help “overturn the election.” He suggested he may pardon Jan. 6 rioters, who acted after Trump incited them to try to subvert the electoral count through mob violence.

The news that Trump also may have sought to seize voting machines to help realize that scheme underscores that intent. “What it establishes is a general purpose to overthrow the election,” Raskin told me.

Noting that Trump stated explicitly that he wanted his vice president to “overturn the election,” Raskin added: “The seizure of voting machines was one more tactical avenue of making that happen.”

The ultimate danger here lies in this: Trump is moving to run again while installing even more pliant allies in positions of control over election machinery. And even though we’ve now learned of this apparent pursuit of seizure of voting machines, most Republicans will continue to signal that they’ll support Trump as their party’s standard-bearer.

That Republicans don’t see all of this as disqualifying, and indeed continue to try to capture the base voter energy it is unleashing, is deeply unsettling indeed.