President Trump has admitted that he wishes he hadn’t dismissed a radical proposal to seize voting machines by executive order in 2020.
In a recent wide-ranging interview with the New York Times, Trump said that he regrets not seizing state voting machines to seek evidence of vote-rigging after the election.
He famously refused to concede the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, insisting the vote had been “rigged” by a variety of methods, with a bitter debate ensuing over the integrity of the election.
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LifeSiteNews reports: In 2022, Politico published the text of a draft executive order Trump considered but never issued, which would have authorized the U.S. Secretary of Defense to “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under United States Code Title 42, Sections 1974-197,” a law concerning the preservation of election records; and appointed a Special Counsel to “oversee this operation and institute all criminal and civil proceedings as appropriate based on the evidence collected.”
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One year later, ABC News obtained video clips of former Trump personnel interviews with investigators from Fulton County, Georgia, who had been investigating the president’s efforts to contest the election outcome. Among them was election lawyer Sidney Powell, who recounted Trump’s aborted intentions to appoint her special counsel, which would have given her much broader investigative powers.
“I guess he assumed, and I would have thought, that I would have looked at putting into effect a provision of 13848 that would have allowed the machines to be secured in four or five states or cities,” Powell testified at the time (her testimony describes the aforementioned draft order, but erroneously calls it by the number of a different order).
The debate over those revelations came, went, and was largely forgotten until January 11, when the Times published one of several articles focusing on different highlights from their extensive interview with Trump in the Oval Office.
At one point, the conversation moved to Trump’s eventual decision not to act on the proposal, prompting the president to declare, “Well, I should have,” with his only lingering doubt being the technical ability of the National Guard to carry out such a legally and politically explosive order.
“I don’t know that they are sophisticated enough,” Trump said. “You know, they’re good warriors. I’m not sure that they’re sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats, and the way they cheat, to figure that out.”
Trump would go on to win the second term he had been denied in 2024 when he defeated Biden’s Democrat replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris. But his resentment of the 2020 outcome remains a recurring staple of his public remarks, such as a tangent during a recent Fox News interview on the future of Venezuela. Closely related was his frustration with so many White House officials in his first term likely to talk him out of such actions, a factor he took great pains to change last year by prioritizing “loyalty” in his second-term nominees.
Without clear authorization for such a move in federal law, seizing voting machines would likely have been a massive controversy for an outgoing administration already under fire for its handling of election challenges, which would culminate in a second (albeit unsuccessful) impeachment attempt over the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
That impeachment ended 10 votes short of the total necessary to convict Trump and bar him from future office, but the voting-machine order may well have inspired more Republicans to break ranks and vote against the president.
