Trump’s Election Dead-Enders Won’t Tell Who Wrote the Coup Plan

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Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

In late 2020, a collective of the worst killed in Donald Trump’s election, led by MAGA attorney Sidney Powell and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, was loudly telling anyone who would listen — the media, judges, local Republican politicians, and (Trump himself — about their ridiculous plan to deploy troops, hijack U.S. voting machines, and keep former President Trump in power.

If there was a wild, baseless conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential election that gave Trump life at the time and fueled his crusade, these diehard MAGAs were ready, willing to publicly take credit for advancing the ideas and written proposals to the maximum. government levels, and get it on Trump’s ear. And they are ready to slag anyone in the Trump administration who gets in their way.

But a year later, as investigations and lawsuits intensify, as subpoenas fly and legal charges rise, the Trumpist gang is taking a bizarre approach to a newly published draft of the Trump executive-order outlining their rude authoritarian blueprint.

They don’t want to do anything here anymore.

In fact, they claim, even if they don’t recognize the document, even if it reflects (almost in a T) the plans they previously openly championed.

“I do not recognize this and neither does the General [Michael] Flynn, ”former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who worked as part of a small group of Trump trustees and colleagues advising the then president on seizing the machines, told The Daily Beast.

“It’s not what we brought [to Trump] on December 18, [2020], ”Added Byrne.

A source close to Flynn confirmed that the former Trump national security adviser was privately telling people he did not recognize the order, a document that now clearly analyzes the U.S. House investigation into the deadly unrest in January 6 and the lead-up. here. Flynn’s brother, Joseph, who acts as a de facto spokesman for Trump’s former top lieutenant, also said he “agrees[s] with Mike and Pat, ”and said he did not recognize the text of the order.

The story continues

The ongoing hot potato game in the draft EO, with would-be coup participants all using the Shaggy defense, underscores an intriguing mystery that investigators in the congressional committee are trying to solve on Jan. 6 and lawmaker on Capitol Hill: Who, exactly, wrote the mandate for Trump, and what other related schemes did the then president, along with his aides and cronies, make to come true?

“I’m not surprised that the author of this memo doesn’t come out. After all, that person will buy him expensive legal fees, potential embarrassment, and a lot of unwanted attention from government authority, ”said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor. “If you’re engaging in questionable activities, it’s more important to stay under the radar. The more weird things you say, the more you’ll focus on things that the authorities would never know otherwise.”

The identity of the true author of the memo remained an unsolved mystery even at the upper levels of Trumpland, and also among the influential people around it.

In December 2020, Lin Wood, another MAGA lawyer who worked closely with Powell and sometimes said goodbye to then -President Trump, also urged Trump to “use his executive power to direct U.S. Marshals to i impound the voting machines used in [the] 11/3 elections. “

When asked last week if he had any hand in writing the draft order, or if he knew who made it, Wood abruptly replied: “I have no involvement,” adding that he can only “imagine” who – but refused to do so.

On Monday, Politico reported that Bernie Kerik, who was on Trump’s legal team that attempted to steal Joe Biden’s election, claimed to the committee on Jan. 6 that “former Army colonel Phil Waldron first had the idea that Trump will issue an executive order to seize the voting machines, ”but the author was not identified.

Four sources directly involved with Trump’s group during the turbulent presidential transition told The Daily Beast that they were not free to confirm who wrote it.

“Often I don’t know who wrote what, or where every crazy document came from,” said a former senior Trump aide. “The Sidney and Rudy things [Giuliani] and other people were driving then, you can’t determine if they wrote it or if they took it to a weird website somewhere. I told [then-]president that many of these documents appear to have been written by a ten year old. As far as I know, they can. ”

However, each of the four sources said they assumed it was from Powell at the time, because he was the main driver behind ideas like commanding the machines and getting Trump to assign him. his new “special adviser” to the White House on election fraud. conspiracy theories.

“The president knows this election was stolen but he is not getting the support he deserves, the Constitution, and the republic,” Powell told the Washington Examiner in December 2020 — while also claiming credit for the baseless theory that China and Iran hacked the election in Biden’s Favor. “His own people are deceiving and weakening him while protecting their own careers and agendas.”

MAGA Diehards Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell Have Fallen Out

Powell also asserted, “White House attorneys and others have blocked me from meeting or talking to the president since I raised the formal findings in public” during the now-infamous gathering. at the White House on Dec. 18. At that meeting, Flynn, Powell, Byrne, and former Trump administration attorney Emily Newman specifically huddled with Trump to discuss their ideas fueled by conspiracy theory for “ investigation ”into the results of the 2020 election, rotation of voting machines by force, and illegitimate retention of the 45th U.S. president in office.

Today, Powell — like his colleagues — is moving away from his plan and “formally discovered.” The hardliner MAGA attorney, as well as his own attorney, did not respond to repeated questions by The Daily Beast about whether or not he wrote the draft executive-order. Currently, Powell is still dealing with legal fallout from his efforts, including potentially destructive lawsuits and the heat of a federal investigation.

If released, the order, first reported by Politico last week, would order his defense secretary to seize the voting machines in an effort to stay in power after certain defeat in the 2020 presidential contest to Biden. The document, which would also have appointed a White House “special adviser” to investigate baseless election claims, is among the files that former President Trump and his lawyers have unsuccessfully tried to prevent the National Archives to be given to the committee Jan. 6 in Washington DC.

Assuming that Powell wrote the explicit anti-democratic missive for Trump — or at least he had a part in its distribution within the last administration — may be wrong. But as independent researchers pointed out, the document reported by Politico shares some similarities to one published on Powell’s PDF-hosting account on Scribd in December, which has since been deleted.

The memo hosted on Powell’s Scribd account was labeled as a summary that “established‘ foreign interference ”in the 2020 United States elections as defined in [Executive Order] 13848 ”and dated December 22 — one week after the date of the draft executive order obtained by Politico.

The same memo cited the same excerpts of a Georgia judge’s decision in a lawsuit over ballot marking software on Dominion Voting Systems machines, a “forensic report” from Antrim County, Michigan compiled by the firm and Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), and wrong. claimed that Dominion Voting Systems intentionally used their voting machines to miscalculate vote counts.

Elsewhere, the two documents share the same exact language while trying to paint Dominion Voting Systems as a stalking horse for foreign opponents. In a paragraph appearing verbatim in both the draft executive order and Scribd memo, the authors forcefully used Dominion’s sale of intellectual property to HSBC, a British bank with a branch in China — in an attempt establish a non -existent relationship between the voting technology firm and the Chinese government.

Whoever on the Powell-Flynn crew authored the draft order, the document clearly bears traces of their coup d’état plans. But because individual members of this group may refuse participation or be openly silent on the subject, they do so not as siblings, but as a fractured and quarrelsome group.

In the period since December 2020, Wood, Byrne, Flynn, and Powell — formerly loyal comrades in some of the most extreme extremes and efforts of the conservative MAGA movement — have resulted in a blitz of high-school-style melodrama— full of backstabbing, vicious accusations, and broken intimacy.

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