A plan for a military coup surfaces in White House documents obtained by 1/6 Committee

The big news out of Washington D.C. today is the exposure of the first document obtained by the 1/6 Select Committee from the National Archives after earlier in the week winning the Supreme Court decision slapping down 8 to 1 Trump’s claim of executive privilege.

No wonder Trump wanted to keep his trove of White House documents secret!  Betsy Woodruff Swan of Politico got hold of a bombshell executive order dated December 16, 2020 for Trump’s signature that would have ordered the Secretary of Defense to seize every electronic voting machine, “material records and electronically stored information” in the entire country and use soldiers to do it.  In effect, it’s an executive order to carry out a military coup. 

Let that sink in for a moment.  The Department of Defense, which the order said could federalize the National Guard for the purposes of collecting the nation’s voting infrastructure, would have been charged with “analyzing and assessing” the election results for all 50 states and territories voting in the federal election of 2020.  The  assessment of the election results would have been delivered to the Director of National Intelligence, who would then have turned them over to the President (Donald Trump, who had lost the election both in the popular vote and the Electoral College, which had met and counted its votes on December 14), and to the Secretaries of Defense, State, Homeland Security, Treasury, and the Attorney General.

The order also authorizes the appointment of a “Special Counsel to oversee this operation and institute all criminal and civil proceedings as appropriate based on the evidence collected.”  In other word, Trump was planning on using the military to steal the election and then throw people who opposed him in jail.

The order allows 7 days for an “initial assessment,” and commands that “the final assessment must be provided to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence no later than 60 days from commencement of operations.”

So let’s do the math:  the order is dated December 16.  By December 23, all electronic voting machines and records of votes and other “electronically stored information” in all 50 states and American territories had to be collected and undergo an “initial assessment,” and this was to be done by active duty soldiers and federalized National Guard soldiers with the assistance of the Department of Homeland Security.  By February 16th, 27 days after the inauguration of Joe Biden by the official calendar, the Director of National Intelligence was commanded to have done his “final assessment” and reported the results to the President and the heads of the various cabinet offices listed in the order.

The executive order specifically gives the Secretary of Defense “the discretion to determine the interdiction of national critical infrastructure supporting federal elections. Designated locations will be identified in the operation order.”  This is military speak the way it was taught to me at West Point, and they’re talking about our elections.

The order does not say who would be the President of the United States on February 16, but clearly it contemplates that Donald Trump would have overturned the results of the election and remained in office.

Quite apart from the assumptions inherent in the order indicating Trump’s plan to still be president on February 16, the executive order is breathtaking for its unprecedented and clearly unconstitutional take-over of the federal election infrastructure and election results by the military of the United States.  It was effectively not just a plan for a military coup, but an order to carry it out using soldiers and Department of Defense personnel and military equipment such as trucks, military aircraft, computers, offices, military bases and any other manpower and materiel necessary to “analyze and assess” not only the election results including paper ballots and electronic records, but all of the thousands of voting machines used by voters to cast their ballots in all 50 states.

It was obviously an impossible task to carry out in 60 days.  If you have any doubts, you need look only as far as the farcical “audit” done by a single state, Arizona, which began around April 1st of this year.  The “audit” took nearly six months to present results which you will recall ended up not only confirming Biden’s victory, but awarding him even more votes than the official count and two recounts had given him.

The order appears to put into writing the madcap recommendation of the disgraced and convicted former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn that Trump “declare martial law,” as well as the recommendation of Insane Clown Legal Eagle Sidney Powell that Trump use the military to seize all voting machines and declare the election null and void.  The two had been all over Newsmax and Fox for days pushing their idea that the use of the “red Chinese-controlled Dominion Voting Systems” machines gave Trump enough reason to declare a “national security emergency.”

A page and a half of the order is taken up by a lengthy stream of “evidence” that Dominion Voting Systems is controlled by a “foreign entity” based in Hong Kong and Shanghai. “In fact, there is probable cause to find a massive cyber-attack by foreign interests on our crucial national infrastructure surrounding our election––not the least of which was the hacking of the voter registration system by Iran,” the order screeches before launching into several more paragraphs of “evidence” pushed by Sidney Powell.

So let’s just toss a little electoral I Ching and have a look at a possible result for the phantasmagorical leap into the Great Trumpian Unknown contemplated by this executive order.  There is no plan for how Trump remains in office while all of the military’s seizure of the nation’s electoral infrastructure and its “analysis and assessment” is taking place.  There is no plan whatsoever for the reaction of elected officials and citizens in the various states and electoral districts when military trucks and soldiers show up to seize hundreds, even thousands of voting machines and state and local records.  And of course there is no plan for how Trump would bring to an end in the month of February (if not later) his coup-extended-presidency if and when the “analysis and assessment” produced a result similar to that of the “audit” in Arizona – that all of the voting machines and records were accurate and Trump lost the election.

So now we know what kind of military coup was being contemplated as the clock ticked down on the Trump presidency.  All we have to do is make sure this ship of fools never gets near the White House again.