Draft Order Would Have Given Armed Trump Supporters Power to Seize Voting Data – By Dan Friedman (Mother Jones) / June 4, 2022
An associate of Mike Lindell circulated the proposal, which would have granted extraordinary powers to allies of Michael Flynn.
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As MAGA-world scrambled in November 2020 to concoct claims that the presidential election had been stolen, a business associate of Mike Lindell—the My Pillow executive promoting outlandish conspiracy theories—circulated an especially extreme proposal: a draft executive order that would have empowered armed Trump supporters to seize voting data and conduct investigations of supposed “election tampering.”
The proposal identified three individuals who would be granted this power. Two were associates of former national security adviser Michael Flynn: retired Army Colonel Philip Waldron and Texas businessman Russell Ramsland. Waldron and Ramsland, at the time, were working closely with Flynn and lawyer Sidney Powell to promote the unsubstantiated and loony allegation that the Chinese Communist Party, in cahoots with billionaire George Soros and an array of other actors around the globe, had rigged US voting machines to throw the presidency to Joe Biden.
It is unclear how far this proposal got; Trump never implemented it. But it’s an indicator of just how bizarre the effort to overturn the election was. The draft order was shared among a group of Trump backers organized by Powell, who was concocting conspiracy theories and developing implausible legal strategies to keep Trump in power. In a now infamous December 16, 2020, Oval Office meeting, Powell and Flynn reportedly pressed Trump to issue an executive order allowing either the military or a civilian agency to seize voting machines. Public reporting indicates that Ramsland and Waldron helped to formulate this proposal. But the idea may have may have taken at least some inspiration from the separate draft executive order distributed by Andrew Whitney, the Lindell associate.
