Unsigned executive order from Trump asked the Pentagon to seize voting equipment
Friday's report said a draft executive order drawn up by the administration of former US President Donald Trump in the weeks following his loss in the 2020 presidential election asked the country's top military official to seize voting equipment.
The document, published by the National Archives and obtained by news website Politico, sheds light on measures Trump might have been willing to take to stay in power despite his opponent Joe Biden's victory.
According to the document dated December 16, 2020, the executive order sought to appoint a special counsel to bring charges in the event of any fraud arising from the confiscation of the devices.
But it did not happen.
The document is one of more than 750 documents submitted to the House committee investigating the Capitol events in 2021, after the Supreme Court rejected Trump's objection to its publication.
The three-page draft states: "With immediate effect, the Minister of Defense shall confiscate, collect, retain and analyze all electronically stored machinery, equipment, information, and physical records required to be preserved."
The document repeats many conspiracy theories about the hacking of polling machines, promoted by figures in Trump's vicinity and currently under investigation in Congress, including right-wing lawyer Sydney Powell.
She had told reporters that the election was targeted with "communist money via Venezuela, Cuba and possibly China".
Powell and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani led a fruitless effort to persuade courts to nullify election results in swing states in the weeks since Trump lost.
For months, the former president and his allies tried to push back accusations of massive fraud, despite the assertion of experts from his government that the elections were the healthiest in US history.
Attorney General Bill Barr, who was appointed by Trump, also dismissed the charges.
The document also bears similarities to a presentation of a scheme to keep Trump in office that his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, handed over to the special committee last year.
The scheme envisions US security officials (Marshalls) confiscating ballot boxes to recount the votes of 50 states.
The document, published Friday, focuses in particular on the Dominion touch-screen voting machines used in Georgia, where a manual and automated recount of votes confirmed Biden's victory.
The document repeats accusations that Dominion is "owned, controlled, or highly influenced by foreign agents, states, and interests" and that its machines were deliberately designed to promote "systematic fraud."
Giuliani and Powell face billion-dollar defamation lawsuits brought by Dominion and Smartmatic, another company that produces polling equipment.
Time races,
and the Special Representative Committee is charged with examining whether Trump or those around him were involved in the attack that was launched on the headquarters of Congress on January 6, 2021, by a crowd of supporters of the Republican billionaire.
The committee summoned prominent personalities who refused to appear before it voluntarily, and referred to the Department of Justice accusations of contempt of the committee against two people who still refuse to cooperate, the former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, and his chief of staff, Meadows.
The special committee is racing against time because it wants to publish the summary of its investigations before the midterm elections scheduled for November 2022, when Democrats risk losing their majority in the House of Representatives.
If the Democrats lose this majority, it is likely that the new Republican majority will dissolve this committee.
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