The 1/6 Committee has the evidence. We know he did it. All of it.

The crack strike force ready to file lawsuits.

As I wrote a few days ago, Politico reported last week that somebody – no one knew who – ordered that an executive order be drawn up for the signature of the President commanding the Department of Defense to use active duty, reserve, and National Guard troops to seize voting machines and conduct an “analysis” and “assessment” of voting fraud within 60 days.  

Now we know who did it.  The New York Times reported last night that Trump himself went into a manic roundelay trying to find someone who would tell him that having an arm of the federal government seize state-controlled voting machines was a legal thing to do.  First, he told his New York pal and lawyer Rudy Giuliani to call the Department of Homeland Security and see if there was any way the department could seize the voting machines for him.

Giuliani called the acting deputy secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, and asked if DHS could do it.  Let’s stop and consider this call more closely for a moment.  You may recall Cuccinelli as the anti-immigration Attorney General of Virginia who ran for governor and lost.  As a consolation prize and apparently at the direction of Stephen Miller, in 2019 he was appointed Deputy Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but when Republican senators informed the White House there was no way he could be confirmed for the post, he was appointed as Acting Director under something called the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.  When it was pointed out that he did not even meet the criteria for such an appointment under that law, Trump named him “Principal Acting Director,” a position that did not exist under the law.  In 2020, a federal district judge ruled that he was not lawfully appointed to that position, and so various anti-immigrant directives he had signed did not have the force of law.

Suffice to say, Cuccinelli was as rabid a Trumpazoid as was serving in the administration, and so when he told Giuliani the DHS couldn’t put Trump’s order to seize voting machines into effect, that should have told Trump something, i.e., that he was flirting with taking an illegal action in his attempts to overturn the election of 2020.

But did that stop him?  Of course not.  He turned to his puppet Attorney General, William Barr, and asked if the DOJ could seize the voting machines “as evidence of fraud,” according to the Times.  Barr had already consulted federal law enforcement officials who were familiar with the spate of failed lawsuits the Trump campaign had filed in battleground states alleging that voting machines, especially those manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, had been used to commit voting fraud.  Barr knew the charges of fraud were bogus and told Trump the DOJ could not seize the machines because there was no “probable cause” that a crime had been committed.

You see where this is going, don’t you?  Trump had been listening to the likes of Sidney Powell, the losing lawyer in multiple lawsuits filed by his crack “legal strike team,” and to Michael Flynn, his former national security advisor who had been convicted of perjury and was awaiting sentencing…with crackerjack lawyer Powell representing him.  Trump was flailing about looking for any tiny crack in the law through which he could slip an order to obfuscate, delay, or otherwise make impossible the inevitable certification of electoral college ballots that was coming on December 14.  Having some arm of the federal government seize the voting machines in furtherance of an investigation of voting fraud was, to Trump anyway, his best chance for success.

When his first two attempts failed, Trump turned to the Department of Defense.  Flynn contacted “sources” of his within DOD and asked if the military could do it and was told yes, so long as the order came from the Commander in Chief.  After all, that’s what the military does:  it follows orders.

But now the first deadline had passed, the day the Electoral College met in the various states and cast their ballots for either of the two candidates. 

Four days later, on December 18, Trump held a meeting in the Oval Office with Flynn and Powell and Patrick Byrne, whom the Times describes as “a wealthy business executive who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election,” just the kind of guy Trump understands and likes:  he’s rich, he’s a businessman, and he has spent money to help Trump.  Flynn and Powell presented Trump with an executive order which had been prepared by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was close to Flynn and who had prepared the now-infamous 38-page PowerPoint presentation recommending various bogus ways to overturn the election.  Waldron’s executive order is the one Politico received from sources in the 1/6 Committee commanding the military to seize the voting machines.

Trump called Giuliani into the Oval Office and showed him the proposed executive order involving the military, according to the Times.  Giuliani told Trump he couldn’t use the military unless there was “clear cut evidence of foreign interference in the election.”  Powell had spent the last month filing lawsuits alleging just such foreign interference by the Chinese Communist Party and Venezuela, but she had lost all of them.  Giuliani himself had participated in some of the lawsuits and had gone around the country holding fake hearings with Republican state legislators and had presented some of the “evidence” Powell was referring to.

Amazingly, despite the late hour of the Oval Office meeting, the former New York Mayor, serial adulterer, well know braggart and heavy drinker was in possession of his faculties and “was adamant the military should not be mobilized,” one source told the Times.  After Powell and Flynn had left the Oval Office, Giuliani “predicted that the plans they were proposing were going to get Mr. Trump impeached,” according to another of the Times’ sources. 

There would be other Oval Office meetings after the one on the night of December 18.  At one of these meetings, the upper leadership of the Department of Justice threatened to resign en masse if Trump fired the acting attorney general and replaced him with a man who had promised to use the DOJ to convince state legislatures to become involved in Trump’s plans to overturn the election. 

Trump was exhausting what he had thought were his options to involve various departments of the federal government in seizing voting machines.  But it wasn’t Flynn or his pal Waldron or the zillionaire Byrne or whacky-wawyer Powell who was pushing the buttons and pulling the strings.  It was Trump himself who called them into the Oval Office, Trump himself who convinced Giuliani to make his calls, Trump himself who suggested contacting Cuccinelli, Trump himself who wanted to pressure the military.  These people didn’t walk into the White House, into the Oval Office, on their own.  They came because the President summoned them, because the President wanted them to do something for him, because they were trying to help him overturn the election.

And now one more deadline loomed, the day the Congress would meet and count and certify the electoral ballots and declare the winner of the election. 

Trump was finished with his lawyers, he was finished with his acting deputy departmental secretaries, he was finished with the generals who wouldn’t follow his orders, with the chickenshit DOJ lawyers who threatened to resign.  They had shown themselves not as True Believers, but as pissy little rule-followers, people who just wanted their jobs, people who weren’t willing to put it all on the line for the man who was calling on their loyalty but not finding it. 

The last allies Trump had in his effort to overturn the election were coming to Washington for a rally on January 6:  the MAGA faithful, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the people who wore the red hats, who proudly put on their camo and swore allegiance to the Man at the Top, the people who had followed his every tweet on Twitter and had believed every lie he had told going back to the days of his birther lies about Barack Obama, the people he wouldn’t lose if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. 

The others would bicker among themselves and fight for little scraps of power and wouldn’t do what he told them to do because they didn’t believe. 

But he knew who did.