A review of the draft Executive Order presented to Donald Trump that would have authorized the Department of Defense to seize an untold number of voting machines shows sloppy work, false assertion, and out-and-out lies justifying a military takeover of civil elections.

I’ll set aside the important, but minor, errors–like Trump claiming Dominion is solely based in Toronto when its US headquarters is in Denver–and concentrate on larger themes.  The claims about Dominion in the document are all based on speculation and conspiracy, not facts, similar to the claims being made at the time by Sidney “The Kraken” Powell and Lin Wood (who seems to have dropped off the face of the Earth in recent months), which leads me to believe the author of the document is Powell or someone from her team, like Jenna Ellis.  Whoever wrote the E.O. had little experience in government and minor functioning knowledge of the laws surrounding the management of elections.

Bad data:  The most egregious error happens in the first sentence of the second paragraph:  “…that the forensic report of the Antrim County, Michigan voting machines,…”  The referenced report, done by failed 2016 Texas Congressional candidate Russ Ramsland, declared that voting from Antrim County, Michigan was out of whack with the number of voters in the county. 

There’s one major problem:  Ramsland reviewed data from Antrim Township, Minnesota, not Antrim County, Michigan.  It’s unclear if the report Trump refers to is the one based off that faulty data.  But that did not stop him from declaring unequivocally, “We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”

Ramsland goes on to claim that corrupt election officials in one of the Antrims intentionally and improperly “adjudicated” votes and changed them in the Dominion voting system. This is completely untrue.  Dominion itself weighed in on the subject and said that officials in either Antrim (the township or the county) could not have changed votes in the system because they did not have that capability.

Curiously, Trump didn’t have such a complaint in 2016, when Dominion was used in 1,600 of the nation’s 5,000+ jurisdictions to manage the ballots of 70 million voters.  But then, Trump allegedly won the election, even if he didn’t win the popular vote.

No legal justification:  An important aspect of this E.O. is that, despite a slew of legal references in the opening paragraph–Executive Orders 123444, 143545, National Security Presidential Memoranda 14 and 21, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA) and all applicable Executive Orders derived therefrom, the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C.16011 et seq.) (NBA), and section 401 of title 4, United States Code–none of them have anything to do with a federal management of elections:

• EO 12333 is an outline of the roles of national intelligence agencies in the federal government;
• EO 13848, signed by Trump in 2018, provides options to retaliate against a foreign government for interfering in US elections;
• National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 13 is a description of the approval process for offensive US cybersecurity operations;
• NSPM 21 doesn’t have a public record, as far as I can tell.

The two most curious references, though, are the ones for International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) and the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), which outline Presidential powers in the event of an attack on the United States by a foreign government.

What Trump was attempting to frame is a story that the United States was attacked by a foreign nation which manipulated the election results to install Joe Biden as President.  Trump doesn’t name the country that he alleges attacked the election, although the E.O. is rife with allusions to whom it might have been:  China, the UK, even possibly Canada.

That argument falls apart when one realizes that a week after the election and again two weeks before this E.O. was supposedly written, the Trump-appointed Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Christopher Krebs, said the election was “the most secure in American history.”  Krebs was fired by Trump on November 17th.

Limitations of power:  Trump is using the false pretense of a non-existent foreign attack to justify activating the military to collect voting machines.  Sadly for Trump, the Constitution bars the President from deploying the military on US soil to enforce laws unless a national emergency is declared.  This document is obviously a precursor to such a declaration, which would have set off alarms of a coup attempt even among Trump’s allies in Congress.

That may be why this document was never signed:  saner heads in Trump’s inner circle recognized the dangers such a declaration would release.

Additionally, the E.O. would have had Trump appoint a “Special Counsel” to oversee the coup.  Unfortunately, the President cannot appoint a Special Counsel in the traditional role; that ability falls to the Attorney General at the time, Bill Barr.  Barr would resign from the position a week after this memo was dated.

We don’t know why the document was never signed; perhaps that’s something that will be revealed by the J6 Committee.  However, a rational arbiter of the document would have quickly seen the copious holes in the argument, and the implementation of the E.O. would have likely sparked numerous lawsuits and protests.