The Daily - The Trump Plan to Seize Voting Machines

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Since the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a clearer picture has emerged of the steps that President Donald J. Trump and his allies took to try to keep him in power and overturn the 2020 election.One of the biggest questions, however, has been how far was Mr. Trump willing to go in using the apparatus of the federal government to stay in power?The Times has uncovered that in the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, Mr. Trump considered using the levers of the federal government to seize voting machines in swing states.What exactly did Mr. Trump do, and will this revelation tip the scales of the congressional effort to hold him legally accountable?Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal investigations for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: New accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in plans developed by outside advisers to use national security agencies to seek evidence of fraud.The House Jan. 6 committee will look into efforts by Mr. Trump’s outside advisers to create a legal basis for national security agencies to help reverse his defeat in 2020, and it will investigate his involvement in those proposals. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, The Times has uncovered Donald Trump's most brazen attempt yet to overturn the results of the 2020 election. I spoke with my colleague, Mike Schmidt, about exactly what Trump tried to do and whether it may tip the scales of a congressional effort to hold him legally accountable. It's Wednesday, February 2nd. So, Mike, good to be with you again. It's good to be back. So just tentacles, what were the attempts that Donald Trump and his allies undertook to try and keep him in office, keep him in power, and overturn the election. A portrait of a lot of this different stuff has emerged since then.

of this different stuff has emerged since then. The Trump team brought forth dozens and dozens of lawsuits, not just in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. This time in Wisconsin. Today in New Mexico. The baseless claims made in lawsuits about voter fraud. A Trump Justice Department official drafted a letter to Republican leaders in Georgia, telling them to look into replacing the state's Biden electors with a new slate of Trump electors. A bigger ploy to create a separate set of electors for the electoral college?

All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people. The pressure that Trump himself put on Vice President Mike Pence to essentially, as the person overseeing the certification of the election, pick his own president. And Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you're not, I'm going to be very disappointed in you, I will tell you right now. But as we have learned all of these different things, one of the biggest questions has been, what was Trump's role in this stuff behind closed doors?

And how far was Trump willing to go to use the vast apparatus of the federal government and its authorities to help himself stay in power? Right, not just the powers of his personal persuasion, but the actual levers of government. but the actual levers of government. Right. And what my colleagues and I were able to figure out over the past few days was that Trump was far more willing

to use that apparatus than we had previously known. So Mike, at a very high level, explain what you have found. We learned that in the weeks after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Trump considered using three of the most powerful institutions in the federal government, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security, to go out into swing states and seize boating machines. Wow.

That Trump claimed would show there was widespread fraud in the election and that he was the true victor. So, Mike, take us inside this story that you have all now uncovered. How did we get to a place where the president of the United States is contemplating going to these three federal agencies and having them seize voting machines? After Trump lost the election, whatever the guardrails that were still there came off even more. And this allowed a true motley crew of individuals to begin advising and surrounding the president as he sought to come up with any type of way to stay in office. We know a lot of those figures. Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, the attorney who

filed lawsuit after lawsuit in swing states on behalf of Trump, and Mike Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor. But there was another figure, someone far less known, and his name is Phil Waldron. And who is Phil Waldron? Phil Waldron is a retired Army colonel who had a background in psychological operations. And in that chaotic post-election period, found his way to Sidney Powell, who was filing these conspiracy-laden lawsuits that were challenging the election. And Waldron claimed that he had identified irregularities in public data that showed that the voting results were fraudulent. Okay. Waldron thought that he had evidence that China or Chinese controlled software companies

had hacked into voting machines. And the only way to truly prove his claims was to get his hands on the machines themselves. makes it to Trump's legal team, and somehow in the mess and swirl of all of this is communicated to Trump. And we begin to see examples of Trump raising the idea directly with the people running those powerful national institutions. And in mid to late November, we see one of the first examples of Trump weighing the idea. In an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump says, my lawyers say that the Justice Department could go out and seize these machines. Could the Justice Department do that? And Barr, who had become an increasingly strong force against the president,

pushing back on the president's false claims of election fraud says absolutely not. There's no evidence of criminality. There's no probable cause. There's no way the Justice Department, which should have no role in elections, could do something extraordinary like this. So Barr says no. Right. But at the same time, Waldron is continuing his efforts. He knows Mike Flynn because both of them worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. And Waldron goes to Flynn. And what he pitches Flynn on is a pretty big escalation of the voting machine idea. And what is his pitch?

He suggests using the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, to seize the machines. And on December 17th. And the president does have some options, at least on paper. And the president does have some options, at least on paper. Can you tell us what those options are and your opinion, if he might take any of them? Well, you know, I don't know if he's going to. Flynn goes on Newsmax, the far right media channel. I mean, he could immediately on his order seize every single one of these machines around the country on his order. He could also order, he could order the, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could

take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states. I mean, it's not unprecedented. I mean, these people — — to say that the military has the authority to take such an action. Hmm. So presumably, Flynn thinks Trump will either watch his appearance on Newsmax or that what he says will somehow reach inside the White House.

That is a very common way people reach Trump throughout his presidency. And what we know is that the very next day, December 18th, Flynn shows up to the White House with Sidney Powell. They're escorted into the Oval Office where they meet with Trump and his advisors and lawyers. And it's here that they pitch Trump directly on the idea of deploying the U.S. military to seize the voting machines. And to Mike Flynn, and this idea that the Pentagon should seize voting machines based on that PowerPoint presentation, that has reached the Oval Office and the ear of the president. Correct. We'll be right back.

So Mike, finish the story of what happens during this Oval Office meeting. So Flynn and Powell have essentially gotten this idea of deploying the U.S. military to seize voting machines on the desk of the president. Flynn and Powell present the idea to Trump and have a draft executive order for him to sign to put all of this into motion. White House staffers are deeply unnerved by this because they know that this is way outside the bounds of what a president should be doing in the midst of an election. be doing in the midst of an election. Rudy Giuliani, who's in Washington, is summoned to the Oval Office. And Giuliani, who throughout the Trump presidency was usually the first person in the door with the idea that everyone else thought was a bad one, says he vehemently opposes this idea. Giuliani tells Trump that legally the military should not get involved in the electoral process. The only possible exception for that would be if there was foreign interference.

But Powell says she does have evidence of foreign influence, something we should say has never been proven or corroborated. In the end, Giuliani prevails and he persuades Trump against the idea of using the military. And Trump decides not to do it. So at this point, President Trump has very seriously entertained the possibility of asking two federal agencies to intervene in the election by seizing voting machines, which leaves a third and final agency, the Department of Homeland Security. So what happens with that agency? So Waldron, that former army colonel who originally came up with this idea, alters the draft executive order and replaces the Pentagon with the Department of Homeland Security.

Mm-hmm. So the idea being that DHS would go out and seize the machines. Got it. Giuliani, apparently swayed by the fact that it's just a different department, pitches Trump on that idea. Interesting. Trump, still searching for something, asked Giuliani to vet the legality of it by reaching out to the number two guy at the Department of Homeland Security, a longtime conservative firebrand named Ken Cuccinelli.

Cuccinelli tells Giuliani, we're not doing that. Hmm. Why not? Cuccinelli says that DHS lacks the power and authority to impound machines and audit them. Got it. And with that, this plan that Waldron started working on in the middle of the 2020 election that made its way all the way to the president of the United States dies.

And just to be clear, Mike, at each turn, key leaders of these agencies, Cuccinelli, Barr, basically say, no, we refuse to be drawn into this plot to seize the voting machines because there's no evidence or we're not sure it's legal. which feels very reminiscent of the local officials like the Secretary of State in Georgia who turned down Trump's request to play a role in overturning the election. But in this case, the willingness of these people to say no stands out a bit more because they answered to the president. At any moment, Donald Trump could have fired them. Correct.

And they might have said yes. These political appointees who could have been fired at any point by Trump could have said yes and done what he wanted and sent the country into uncharted waters where the federal government was going into states to seize voting machines. states to seize voting machines. Mike, stepping back for just a moment, everything you're describing here is very startling, and it's very much outside the norms of what we would ever expect from a president. But it fits a pattern that we have observed for a long time with this president. And so far, Trump has not been held legally accountable for any of it. When it comes to January 6th and everything he did around the 2020 election, he was impeached, but that's a political process, not a legal one. So how might this particularly startling new set of events that you have just described,

how might that change the prospect of holding Trump legally accountable for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election? Does it change those prospects? So this special committee on Capitol Hill, the January 6th committee, is looking at everything that happened around the election and attack on the Capitol. But it's not just a fact-finding mission. At the end of this investigation, the committee will make a decision about whether to ask the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation and prosecute those who the committee believes committed crimes. And the committee sees that as its best attempt to try and contain Trump. What do you mean?

To hold Trump accountable and potentially stop him from becoming president in 2024. So they may ask for a criminal investigation into Trump. Correct. At the end of the investigation, they will look at the evidence and say, is there enough here to say to the Justice Department that it should investigate and prosecute the president? about voting machines does is draw Trump directly into the attempts to overturn the election in a much bigger way than we knew before. So when the committee sits down, when it's done, it will be able to make an argument, perhaps now a stronger argument, perhaps now a stronger argument, about Trump's direct involvement in all of this activity.

And for the committee, the more damning evidence that it has about Trump, the more pressure it thinks it can put on Attorney General Merrick Garland to do something and to not look the other way. So in theory, Mike, these new revelations that you all have uncovered might strengthen the January 6th committee's argument for asking the Department of Justice to prosecute Donald Trump over his behavior after the election. But is anything Trump did here actually illegal? It's not against the law for the president to explore a bad idea and not do it.

Mm-hmm. And here, he didn't do it. Right. But if the committee is trying to make a larger argument about a wide-ranging conspiracy that Trump undertook or participated in to overthrow the election, bringing him directly into it is a powerful piece of evidence and is a powerful fact. The Democrats on the committee and the top Republican Liz Cheney, they know that Trump is out there. They know that Trump thinks that January 6th was a good thing and that Trump recently said that he would pardon the rioters if he's re-elected president in 2024. And what the committee is trying to do is come up with the most compelling, damning narrative about Trump that leaves the attorney general with no choice but to investigate him.

Understood. But ultimately, Mike, the committee may not make a successful legal argument for prosecuting President Trump. In fact, the bar seems pretty high for that and the chances of a successful prosecution relatively low, right? And if that's the case, what becomes of a revelation like the one that you've laid out here? And ultimately, what's the value of having uncovered it? We talk these days a lot about threats to democracy. How real are they? Are they overstated? In this case, we can see that the threat to democracy was quite real. It was inside the Oval Office in front of Donald Trump. was the president being just a few yeses away from underlings getting American soldiers or DHS agents to seize voting machines from key swing states. That would have created a national uproar. It would have brought people into the streets, brought the

outcome of the election into question. And then where would we have been? And so no matter what criminal referral is or isn't made at the end of this congressional investigation, you want to know these details. You need to know these details so that we can understand just how vulnerable the democracy really was and still is. Mike, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. to Nordei. During an appearance on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the U.S. of trying to pull it into an armed conflict over Ukraine that Russia does not want. Despite the fact that Putin has amassed 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine's borders, Putin claimed that it was the Biden administration that wanted a war, so it would have an excuse to impose tough sanctions against Russia. When the fox is screaming from the top of the henhouse that he's scared of the chickens, which is essentially what they're doing, that fear isn't reported as a statement of fact.

At the White House, Press Secretary Jen Psaki reacted to Putin's claims with derision. We know who the fox is in this case. We have seen the buildup of troops at the border. And Pfizer has asked the Food and Drug Administration to authorize its COVID vaccine for children younger than five, the only Americans not yet eligible for vaccination. Pfizer is asking the FDA to approve a two-dose vaccination, even though a clinical trial of two doses conducted by the company failed to produce the immune response Pfizer had hoped for in many young children. Pfizer has said it believes that three doses of its vaccine will ultimately be required to fully vaccinate most children under five.

Today's episode was produced by Muj Zaydi, Rochelle Banja, and Austin Mitchell. It was edited by Mark George and Paige Cowett and contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Mitchell. It was edited by Mark George and Paige Cowett and contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell and engineered by Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.