The unsigned order is one of the documents turned over to the Jan. 6th committee by the National Archives.
Betsy Woodruff Swan got the scoop for Politico. It’s not clear who wrote the Dec. 16, 2020 document, she notes, but it is “consistent with proposals that lawyer Sidney Powell made to the then-president.” She also notes that two days later, Powell and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, as well as others, met with Trump in the Oval Office.
“In that meeting, Powell urged Trump to seize voting machines and to appoint her as a special counsel to investigate the election, according to Axios,” Swan writes. The order indicates the special counsel is a woman.
The unsigned order also directs the defense secretary to provide an assessment of the election to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “That suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021,” Swan points out.
The order tracks closely with the bat***t crazy Jan. 2021 PowerPoint presentation Mark Meadows turned over to the Jan. 6 committee. In that case, though, there was an astronaut overseeing a recount and the special counsel seems to have been tossed.
Appearing on MSNBC Friday, Swan called the document “a heck of a read.” She stressed that we don’t know who wrote it, how widely it circulated within the White House. Nor do we know how closely Trump came to signing it.
But whoever wrote the draft order probably had access to information about sensitive government secrets, Swan wrote. She explained on MSNBC:
SWAN: [The order] cites two documents that are not whatsoever well-known to the public: There's National Security Presidential Memorandum 13 and National Security Presidential Memorandum 21. The existence of National Security Presidential Memorandum 21 had not been publicly reported anywhere until we got this executive order. Both of those national security presidential memorandums are classified. They are not publicly available documents. I am told they both relate to the way that offensive U.S. cyber attacks get authorized. And the fact that the author of this executive order knew that there was a National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 21 indicates that the person who wrote this memo appears to likely have had access to sensitive information about how the United States government handles national security matters.
Michael Flynn, anybody?
