In new reporting released Monday, (1/31/22), former President Donald Trump was shown to be more directly involved than previously known in plans to seize voting machines across several swing states following his 2020 election defeat.
First reported by The New York Times, Trump attempted to lean on at least 3 federal agencies to confiscate the machines—The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Defense Department. That these plans had been discussed at the upper echelons of the Trump Administration has been well documented, but, according to the Times, “the new accounts provide fresh insight into how the former president considered and to some degree pushed the plans, which would have taken the United States into uncharted territory by using federal authority to seize control of the voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread voting fraud.”
Times reporter Maggie Haberman Tweeted on the subject late Monday evening as well, providing the following context: “Among many reasons why these facts about the Cuccinelli call and Barr ask matter: Trump allies have repeatedly painted him as essentially giving a hearing to but not really heeding some of the suggestions he was getting about how to use the govt post-election.”
It triggered a flurry of further reporting as well, from outlets like Huffington Post, The Hill, Today, and Politico among many others.
This follows a weekend in which Trump indicated at a rally held in Conroe Texas that he would pardon January 6th rioters if re-elected President, floated the idea of a conservative boycott of AT&T and DirecTV over their plans to drop the Trump-friendly network OAN, and suggested his followers engage in further mass-protests if he is ultimately indicted for any election-related wrongdoing. “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt,” Trump told supporters Saturday night in Conroe.