A month after Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential defeat, a draft White House executive order ordered the nation’s top military official to seize election machinery across the United States, according to documents revealed Friday by the Politico media.
• Read also: Capitol assault: Biden to denounce Trump’s “responsibility” in this “chaos”
• Read also: Man arrested for threatening to kill US election officials
• Read also: New York prosecutor claims to have discovered “evidence of fraud” within the Trump Organization
The explosive document, released by the National Archives, highlights the extreme measures the former Republican president was willing to take to cling to power.
‘Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense shall seize, collect, preserve and analyze all machinery, equipment, and electronically stored information’ relating to the election, the three-page, never-signed draft reads. .
Dated December 16, 2020, the decree also provided for the appointment of a special advocate to file complaints for any allegations of fraud arising from the seizures.
To justify this project, the document lists a series of conspiracy theories – repeatedly denied – on the fact that electoral machines would have been hacked. It is not known by whom it was written.
It is among more than 750 documents handed over to the House of Representatives committee investigating the Capitol storming, after the Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s appeal to block their disclosure.
This commission, composed mainly of elected Democrats, seeks to establish the responsibility of Donald Trump and his entourage in the assault on the seat of Congress on January 6, 2021.
A year after officially leaving power, Donald Trump maintains that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. According to opinion polls, more than half of Republican voters agree with him.