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An election denier called for the president to fire the Election Assistance Commission. Soon after, Trump did.

Election denier David Clements: “For all intents and purposes, if the EAC were to decertify the machines, it's game over"

Written by Sophie Lawton

Published 07/10/26 5:36 PM EDT

Updated 07/13/26 1:22 PM EDT

Update (7/13/26): This article has been updated with an additional example.

Discussing the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on a conservative podcast, prominent election denier David Clements claimed on July 8 that “in theory, right now,” President Donald Trump “can fire the entire board as it's comprised, and it's completely constitutional."

On the evening of July 9, Trump announced that he had done just that. Democrats have criticized the move, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called it a “brazen attempt to seize control of our elections” by Trump ahead of the midterms.

In a conversation on The David Rutherford Show, Clements claimed the commission “can, right now, say the elections are vulnerable. The machines are crap. We're decertifying them,” adding, “For all intents and purposes, if the EAC were to decertify the machines, it's game over.”

Clements excitedly explained that the Supreme Court’s recent Trump v. Slaughter ruling — which gives the president “sweeping new authority over approximately two dozen multi-member agencies that Congress intended to be independent” — is “an amazing opportunity for Trump to start firing people right out the gate” at the EAC and replace them with commissioners who would “decertify the machines.” He then called for Trump to force recess appointments so “all of a sudden, you could have like a Shawn Smith on the EAC.” As the Brennan Center notes, Smith is an election denier.

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From the July 8, 2026, edition of iHeart Radio's The David Rutherford Show

Clements also briefly mentioned acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, claiming he “has been given a mandate to downsize and fire everyone, declassify everything, which will play in nicely into the election discussion. In fact, Tulsi [Gabbard] was promising to have a major bombshell drop on the election machines.” Pulte’s new role as DNI has been celebrated in right-wing media as part of a larger plan by election deniers to subvert the midterm elections.

Other election denial spaces in right-wing media have also promoted claims connecting the Election Assistance Commission and voting machines.

MMA

Election denier podcaster David Clements calls for “a military-like commission” where those who used the “government apparatus to rig and steal elections are prosecuted, tried, put out to pasture”

07/08/26

6 26 mma

At election denial summit, media figures endorse ICE at the polls and suggest executing a “prominent traitor” from the deep state “to improve our elections”

Podcaster David Clements: “The one thing that we need to see is a prominent traitor brought before you ... and after that due process, they get to suffer the legally prescribed penalty, which may or may not include a firing squad”

Written by Alex Kaplan

Published 06/25/26

Last week, multiple promoters of election denial conspiracy theories spoke at a summit co-led by a QAnon influencer, calling on attendees to monitor voting precincts and to use “a tribunal” and a “legally prescribed penalty” like “a firing squad” as a possible solution to “improve our elections.” Some speakers touted connections to the Trump administration.

The Fraud-Fighter Summit, which took place between June 15-17 in Las Vegas, aimed to “confront fraud in elections” and featured “powerful presentations and discussions on topics such as tabulator vulnerabilities and advanced methods for detecting manipulation in election processes.” The event seems to have been coordinated by two figures in the election denial movement, Wayne Willott and Matt Meck. Willott, known online as Juan O. Savin, helped organize a coalition of election denial candidates for the 2022 midterm elections and claimed to have been involved with a proposed “national emergency” executive order for President Donald Trump to control elections. Meck is a board member of Fight Voter Fraud — an organization which “has been criticized in the past for repeatedly advancing unfounded claims based on its misinterpretation of voter registration information and other data,” — and also apparently Savin’s “chief of staff.”

Speakers and presenters included Tina Peters, Steve Bannon, Jim Marchant, David Clements, Peter Ticktin, Martin Rodil, and Douglas Frank.

Notable moments from the summit include:

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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 16, 2026, streamed on Rumble

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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 17, 2026, streamed on Rumble

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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 17, 2026, streamed by UnAuthorized

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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 17, 2026, streamed on the “Bannons War Room” Rumble channel

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From a video of the Fraud-Fighter Summit uploaded to Telegram on June 16, 2026

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From the Fraud-Fighter Summit on June 16, 2026, streamed on Rumble

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  1. ### Right-wing figures and Trump allies are calling for Trump to declare a “national emergency” to prevent supposed election fraud

:{10/28/25

  1. ### QAnon influencer says he impacted decisions of secretary of state candidates in Colorado

:{03/11/22

  1. ### Election denier reportedly involved with Trump administration’s 2020 election probes suggests Maricopa County, Arizona, is the administration’s next target

02/11/26

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/16/trump-white-house-aide-secret-author-dominion-report

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Trump White House aide was secret author of report used to push ‘big lie’

This article is more than 4 months old

Report on Dominion voting machines produced after 2020 election was not the work of volunteer in Trump’s post-election legal team

Donald Trump used a number of unsubstantiated allegations in the Dominion report in support of his lie that he defeated Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Hugo Lowell in Washington

Thu 17Mar 2022

Weeks after the 2020 election, at least one Trump White House aide was named as secretly producing a report that alleged Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden because of Dominion Voting Systems – research that formed the basis of the former president’s wider efforts to overturn the election.

The Dominion report, subtitled “OVERVIEW 12/2/20 – History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties”, was initially prepared so that it could be sent to legislatures in states where the Trump White House was trying to have Biden’s win reversed.

Trump and Mike Pence in November, just before the election.

Trump lawyer knew plan to delay Biden certification was unlawful, emails show

Read more

But top Trump officials would also use the research that stemmed from the White House aide-produced report to weigh other options to return Trump to the presidency, including having the former president sign off on executive orders to authorize sweeping emergency powers.

The previously unreported involvement of the Trump White House aide in the preparation of the Dominion report raises the extraordinary situation of at least one administration official being among the original sources of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The publicly available version of the Dominion report, which first surfaced in early December 2020 on the conservative outlet the Gateway Pundit, names on the cover and in metadata as its author Katherine Friess, a volunteer on the Trump post-election legal team.

But the Dominion report was in fact produced by the senior Trump White House policy aide Joanna Miller, according to the original version of the document reviewed by the Guardian and a source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The original version of the Dominion report named Miller - who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro – as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly, the source said.

The involvement of a number of other Trump White House aides who worked in Navarro’s office was also scrubbed around that time, the source said. Friess has told the Daily Beast that she had nothing to do with the report and did not know how her name came to be on the document.

It was not clear why Miller’s name was removed from the report, which was sent to Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani on 29 November 2020, or why the White House aide’s involvement was obfuscated in the final 2 December version.

Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

images of two documents saying “Dominion voting systems” and below that, “overview: history, executives, vote manipulation ability and design, foreign ties”. Each document has a different date - left one is 29 November 2020, right one is 2 December 2020. left one says it’s by Joanna Miller, right one by Katherine Friess]

Different versions of the report. Photograph: Dominion Voting Systems report

The Dominion report made a number of unsubstantiated allegations that claimed Dominion Voting Systems corruptly ensured there could be “technology glitches which resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Biden’s total ballot count”.

Citing unnamed Venezuelan officials, the report also pushed the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems used software from the election company Smartmatic and had ties to “state-run Venezuelan software and telecommunications companies”.

After the Dominion report became public, Navarro incorporated the claims into his own three-part report, produced with assistance from his aides at the White House, including Miller and another policy aide, Garrett Ziegler, the source said.

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Ziegler has also said on a rightwing podcast that he and others in Navarro’s office – seemingly referring to Trump White House aides Christopher Abbott and Hannah Robertson – started working on Navarro’s report about two weeks before the 2020 election took place.

“Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those,” Ziegler said of the three-part Navarro report in an appearance last July on The Professor’s Record with David K Clements.

The research in the Dominion report also formed the backbone of foreign election interference claims by the former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who argued Trump could, as a result, assume emergency presidential powers and suspend normal law.

That included Trump’s executive order 13848, which authorized sweeping powers in the event of foreign election interference, as well as a draft executive order that would have authorized the seizure of voting machines, the Guardian has previously reported.

The claims about Venezuela in the Dominion report appear to have spurred Powell to ask Trump at a 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House – coincidentally facilitated by Ziegler – that she be appointed special counsel to investigate election fraud.

Miller’s authorship of the Dominion report was not the last time the Trump White House, or individuals in the administration, prepared materials to advance the former president’s claims about a stolen election and efforts to return himself to office.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack revealed last year it had found evidence the White House Communications Agency produced a letter for the Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark to use to pressure states to decertify Biden’s election win.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/1107868327/trump-election-fraud-jan-6

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npr

Election deniers have taken their fraud theories on tour — to nearly every state

June 30, 2022

Heard on All Things Considered

Miles Parks headshot

MILES PARKS

Twitter

Allison Mollenkamp headshot

ALLISON MOLLENKAMP

Twitter

Nick McMillan headshot

NICK MCMILLAN

Seth Keshel speaks at a New Hampshire election security seminar presented by the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group in Manchester, N.H., on Nov. 19, 2021. Seth Keshel, a retired U.S. Army captain, has worked to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Editor's Note: Since this story's publication, NPR has updated the data accompanying this story to more accurately reflect the number of election-related events at which each influencer appeared.

On a quiet Tuesday night in Howard County, Md., dozens of people gather in a community center and listen to Seth Keshel's 10-point plan.

"Captain K," as he's known in election fraud circles, is a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, and he is walking through his go-to presentation: comparisons of vote totals from the past few election cycles, which he falsely claims prove President Biden's win in 2020 was illegitimate. His 10-point plan to "true election integrity" includes banning all early voting and requiring all American voters to re-register.

The next night, more than a thousand miles away in Minneapolis, in a small building across from a popular garden shop, roughly 60 people wait for David Clements to take the stage.

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Clements, professorial in a tan blazer with a graying beard and unruly curly hair, begins his presentation with a prayer. Then he goes to the slideshow.

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The audience, which appears to be all white and mostly middle-aged, occasionally gasps as he shows charts and graphs, which he claims contain evidence of widespread election fraud.

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Clements ends his talk with a request to the people in the audience: Go to the offices of your local officials.

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"They respond to fear," he says. "You need to hold these institutions with the contempt they deserve."

An NPR investigation found that since Jan. 6, 2021, the election denial movement has moved from Donald Trump's tweets to hundreds of community events like these — in restaurants, car dealerships and churches — led by a core group of election conspiracy influencers like Keshel and Clements.

These local gatherings may reach fewer people than viral internet posts, but they seem to effectively spur action by regular people, who are motivated by their almost evangelical intimacy.

"It's this constellation of election conspiracy theorists," said Chris Krebs, a former Department of Homeland Security official who oversaw the federal government's election security efforts in 2020. "You can see the complexion of local politics shifting as a result. They have decentralized post-January 6th and are really trying to effect change at the lowest-possible level."

NPR monitored the election-denial influencers through events advertised on their public social media accounts, the websites and social media accounts of local organizations, events NPR attended, video footage and news reports over the past 18 months. Four prominent purveyors of voting misinformation stood out, crisscrossing the country to appear at at least 308 events in 45 states and the District of Columbia.

NPR tracked Keshel and Clements, as well as Douglas Frank, who misleadingly claims to have discovered a secret algorithm that swings vote totals across the U.S. (his methodology has been widely debunked by voting experts), and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

The scale of their movements paints a portrait of an election denial movement that has evolved into a nationwide force, beyond just swing states — and despite the Jan. 6 Committee's investigation and efforts by voting officials at every level to combat disinformation. NPR's investigation is the first such effort to document the scope of these influencers.

"It's an existential threat to American democracy," said Franita Tolson, an elections expert at the University of Southern California. "If the numbers get big enough, it's unclear whether we will survive it."

The chain reaction

Carly Koppes, who runs elections in Weld County, Colo., says she noticed a tone shift in her county after Douglas Frank came to town.

She's reading over an email that just came in from one of her voters.

"Traitors will be exposed. These guys are going down and you have no chance..." She trails off as she scans. "You deserve everything coming your direction."

The Republican county clerk takes a long sigh.

Last summer, a group of suspicious citizens here knocked on thousands of doors looking to uncover evidence of election fraud.

"It started because of Dr. Frank and his really bad data analysis," Koppes said. "Him and his people, unfortunately, just don't know how to read election records correctly."

[Douglas Frank, a former high school math and science teacher from Ohio, gives a presentation to about 100 people in the Missouri Capitol rotunda on his theories about election fraud, on Jan. 6, in Jefferson City, Mo. Frank, whose ideas have been debunked, claims to have discovered secret algorithms that were used to rig the 2020 election in favor of President Biden.

David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP]

In his former life, Frank was a high school math and science teacher in Ohio. He's moved now into touring the country spreading election fraud conspiracies full time.

He, and the other three men whose movements NPR documented, either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment for this story.

In the visit Koppes mentioned, on April 24, 2021, Frank held court in a DoubleTree hotel conference room near Denver. Dozens of people cheered as Frank pointed at graphs that he claimed showed how the 2020 election was marred by fraud (something that's been debunked many times by hand counts, audits and investigative reports across the country).

"Go knock on some doors!" Frank implored.

And many people in this Colorado community listened.

A group popped up there, dedicated to this sort of fraud-motivated canvassing, and they devoted their organizing playbook to Frank.

Jim Gilchrist, a doctor of holistic medicine in Colorado, saw an online posting of Frank's talk and volunteered to canvass with the group. He estimates he spent more than 20 hours last summer knocking on doors.

"I just kind of wished there was some mechanism for there to be a more transparent kind of way of making sure the vote was counted correctly," Gilchrist said in an interview with NPR. "Douglas Frank kind of offered a solution that we could do as citizens."

Influencing policymakers

The election denialists also frequently bump elbows with people in power.

NPR found that over the past year and a half, the men met or appeared with at least 78 elected officials at the federal, state and local levels — many of whom will have a role in how future elections are run and certified.

At least two secretaries of state, two U.S. senators, 10 U.S. representatives, two state attorneys general and two lieutenant governors met or appeared with the figures NPR tracked. More than three dozen members of state legislatures, many of whom have introduced legislation in their states that would affect how Americans cast ballots, have also appeared at events with them.

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"Our voices have gotten bigger and bigger every single day since last year and you cannot stop that," said Mike Lindell, at a rally in January of 2022 attended by three members of Arizona's congressional delegation, Debbie Lesko, Andy Biggs, and Paul Gosar, all of whom voted not to certify Arizona's election results at the U.S. Capitol a year earlier. "We will get our country back."

Mike Lindell, political activist and CEO of MyPillow, speaks during a rally hosted by former President Donald Trump at the Delaware County Fairgrounds on April 23 in Delaware, Ohio.]

In some cases, the election denial influencers worked to persuade skeptical officials to embrace their claims.

In May 2021, Frank met with staff from the Ohio secretary of state's office for more than two hours.

NPR acquired audio of the meeting, which was first reported by The Washington Post, through a public records request.

The staffers in the meeting pushed back on Frank's many fraud accusations, and at one point he responded by threatening to send unauthorized people, or "plants" as he put it, into local voting offices.

"We have plants everywhere that go into buildings when your machines are on and capture your IP addresses. We have those, not necessarily in Ohio but we can arrange for that," Frank said, his voice rising. "So all I'm trying to point out to you is that this is coming. Be ready. And I'm not trying to fight you — do you see that I'm trying to help you?"

The staffers in that meeting didn't budge. But shortly after that meeting, someone did attempt to breach an elections network in Lake County, Ohio, though a state official told NPR that no sensitive data was ultimately accessed.

The four election denialists also appeared with well over 100 candidates for local, state and federal office in the 2022 primaries. Some, including U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois and state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who is running to be governor of Pennsylvania, have already won their party's nomination for the general election.

A fraud evolution

The highest profile of the group that NPR tracked is MyPillow CEO Lindell, a prominent and longtime Trump supporter.

Lindell says he has spent millions of dollars on his crusade, which started almost as soon as ballots were cast on Nov. 3, 2020. Sometime around March of 2021, he brought Frank into the fold and Frank's popularity skyrocketed.

"I went from being completely mum to suddenly 10 million people knowing me in about a week," he told a group in Utah last July.

David Clements talks to audience members after speaking to the Surry County board of commissioners during a presentation by several individuals that aimed to cast doubt on election integrity, urging the commission to replace existing voting machines with purely paper ballots in Dobson, N.C., on May 16.]

Frank often speaks at events with Keshel and Clements. Clements is a lawyer and former professor at the New Mexico State University business school who was fired for not complying with the school's COVID-19 policies. Keshel is a retired Army captain and veteran of Afghanistan.

While those in the group often repeat talking points and appear together, they don't necessarily coordinate appearances or strategy. And other than Lindell, they were mostly unknown before 2020. Now they're influencers in the movement with online followings of hundreds of thousands of people. They even promote merchandise like T-shirts, books and body lotions, along with their election misinformation.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, says they're using election fraud as a vehicle to advance themselves.

"There's no shortage of ability to access the truth about our election system, yet there seems to be a proliferation of people willing to lie about it," Benson said. "I think it's logical to conclude that they know better. And that they're knowingly spreading misinformation ... to win elections, to raise money, to gain attention and celebrity."

Benson says her office has seen a direct correlation between election denier events in Michigan and a rise in harassment toward voting officials.

"Whenever there is an appearance in which the former president or Lindell or others come out attacking our system we know to expect an uptick in threats and add additional security as a result," she said.

But she, and the thousands of other Americans in charge of elections nationwide, have yet to figure out a truly effective way to fight back and break through to the two-thirds of Republican voters who believe voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.

That's because election denialism has grown from a political movement into something almost religious, said Koppes, the Republican county clerk in Colorado.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump cheer as he speaks at a Save America Rally in Florence, Ariz., on Jan. 15. Mike Lindell and three Arizona lawmakers — Debbie Lesko, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar — also attended the event.

"There's just so much that is incorrect that they just keep repeating and repeating and repeating," Koppes said. "And then as soon as I have absolutely blocked off that path with actual correct information, then they just move that goal post. And they keep just moving the goal posts. And moving the goal posts."

Between conversations with voters and research on all the separate false claims that have popped up over the past two years, she estimates she's spent thousands of hours dealing with the fallout of Donald Trump's misinformation campaign.

At this point, she says she's had to stop engaging with voters who are unwilling to listen to her.

"Some of these people really, truly believe they're doing the Lord's work," Koppes said. "But I think at the end of the day, they so desperately want to believe what they're being fed, that they're using all means to justify what they're doing."

Monika Evstatieva, Barbara Van Woerkom, Barrie Hardymon and Meg Anderson of NPR's Investigations team contributed reporting to this story. NPR's Nick Underwood contributed to the data visualizations.

https://rumble.com/c/theprofessorsrecord?duration=long

The Professor's Record with David K. Clements

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296 David Clements on the 2020 election, Critical Race Theory, and Free Speech

4,894 viewsApr 28, 2021

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On this week's podcast interview Paul sits down with David Clements. A libertarian-leaning law professor at New Mexico State University, David once ran for US Senate as a Republican, but he (like Paul) was not necessarily a fan of President Trump in his run for the White House in 2016.

Clements not only had a change of heart during Trump's time in office, but he has actively engaged in tracking down many problems and issues with the 2020 election. David has also spoken out publicly against "critical race theory" and efforts to stifle free speech in the halls of academia. Don't miss this timely and informative interview! You can find out more about David and his numerous interviews and discussions at: https://www.theprofessorsrecord.com.

https://www.rawstory.com/sidney-powell-special-counsel/

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February 04, 2022

Trump came perilously close to carrying out Sidney Powell's bizarre plot to steal the election: report

Donald Trump personally reviewed a draft executive order that would have authorized the National Guard to seize voting machines and verbally agreed to appoint campaign lawyer Sidney Powell as special counsel to investigate his baseless fraud claims, according to a new report.

The twice-impeached one-term president did not follow through on the order, but four sources with knowledge of a Dec. 18, 2020, meeting at the White House told The Guardian that he came perilously close to doing so.

"Trump was handed the document when he sat down with four informal advisers – Powell, Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, former Trump aide Emily Newman and former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne – who had arrived at the White House unannounced," the newspaper reported. "The group had not scheduled an audience with Trump, but after Byrne messaged an acquaintance, they were cleared to enter the White House by Garrett Ziegler, a policy aide to former Trump advisor Peter Navarro, andPatrick Weaver, an aide with the National Security Council."

The draft that Trump reviewed was one of the final versions that Powell had prepared, and was retained automatically by the White House and recently turned over to the House select committee by the National Archives.

READ: Republicans in Congress were in on Trump's coup plot

White House attorney Patrick Cipollone and White House staff secretary Derek Lyons told Trump he lacked the constitutional authority to take those actions, but the former president said he might just make Powell special counsel anyway and unilaterally grant her security clearance.

He reportedly told Powell to coordinate with his attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had removed her from the campaign legal team a few weeks earlier and found her evidence of foreign election interference to be unpersuasive.

Powell told her associate that Trump had authorized her as some type of special counsel, and she called White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to ask for office space and security clearance, but Giuliani told him that she had been banned from the White House.

Meadows refused to grant Powell a "hard pass" to the White House, but she returned two days in a row on a temporary "appointment" pass granted by another aide to share documents accusing Iran of election threats, but she was not permitted to meet with Trump himself.

https:/yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/04/trump-draft-order-voting-machines-white-house-meeting

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weeks after the 2020 election, Donald Trump reviewed a draft executive order that authorized the national guard to seize voting machines and verbally agreed to appoint Sidney Powell, a campaign lawyer and conspiracy theorist, as special counsel to investigate election fraud.

More than 700 people have been charged over their involvement in the Capitol attack.

Trump considered blanket pardon for Capitol insurrectionists – report

Read more

The two previously unreported actions of the former president – which is certain to interest the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack and Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat – came during a contentious White House meeting on 18 December 2020.

Trump never followed through with issuing a formal executive order authorizing the seizure of voting machines or appointing a special counsel. But four sources with detailed knowledge of what transpired during the18 December meeting described to the Guardian how close he came to doing so.

The draft executive order Trump reviewed was one of the final versions Powell had prepared. An early version of the document was published by Politico. Another version, obtained by CNN, empowered the Department of Homeland Security instead of the Department of Defense.

But all versions included language that would have allowed Trump to appoint a special counsel to investigate claims of foreign interference in the 2020 election, which the Department of Justice had already determined were without foundation.

The draft executive order seen by Trump was retained automatically by the White House as a presidential record. It was recently turned over to the select committee by the National Archives after the supreme court rejected Trump’s appeal to block its release.

Trump was handed the document when he sat down with four informal advisers – Powell, Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn, former Trump aide Emily Newman and former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne – who had arrived at the White House unannounced.

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The group had not scheduled an audience with Trump, but after Byrne messaged an acquaintance, they were cleared to enter the White House by Garrett Ziegler, a policy aide to former Trump advisor Peter Navarro, and Patrick Weaver, an aide with the National Security Council.

It is understood that the four were not registered in the West Wing guest access system as meeting with the former president, which may have violated national security protocols.

In a statement, Byrne said Trump had called the group into the Oval Office after he saw Flynn, his former national security adviser, with the rest of the group about 25ft from the room. Eric Herschmann, a White House senior adviser, slipped in behind them.

Trump first reviewed the draft executive order and documents brought by Powell, including a physical copy of Trump’s executive order 13848 that authorized sweeping powers in the event of foreign election interference, as she ran through the supposed legality of suspending normal law.

Powell and Newman told Trump that he could rely on that order and classified National Security Presidential Memoranda 13 and 21 – cyber-security memos referenced in Powell’s draft executive order – to have the national guard seize voting machines.

That prompted pushback from the former White House counsel Patrick Cipollone, who had joined the meeting with former White House staff secretary, Derek Lyons, who supported Cipollone’s claim that Trump lacked the constitutional authority to take such measures.

Byrne made another attempt to convince Trump to appoint Powell as special counsel and have Flynn act as “field marshal” to coordinate her efforts. The draft executive order said Flynn would be “direct liaison” to coordinate the “applicable US departments and agencies”.

Byrne claimed Trump had a range of options. He could decide whether to investigate election fraud in six, 12 or 31 states; whether to “image” hard drives in voting machines or seize them; and whether to have that done by the national guard, DHS or the FBI.

Trump appeared open to such advice. Late that Friday night, two of the sources said, he told Cipollone he would just make Powell special counsel. When Cipollone said Powell would need a security clearance, which he said was probably impossible, Trump said he would grant it.

But after nearly all of Trump’s formal advisers shot down Powell’s suggestions, Trump did not sign the draft executive order. Instead, he instructed Powell to coordinate with his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, about seizing voting machines or appointing a special counsel.

That posed a problem for Powell, who had been ejected from the Trump campaign’s legal team a few weeks beforehand at Giulaini’s behest.

The group then tried again to cajole Trump into issuing some sort of executive order, since Trump still appeared intrigued. But when Trump summoned Giuliani, the former president’s attorney said the gambit would work only in the event of clear foreign interference.

Powell, who had spent the previous weeks filing lawsuits alleging that Iran and China hacked into voting machines, sprang up and announced both to everyone in the room and a coterie of aides who had been dialled in on a conference call, that she had a file full of such evidence.

Giuliani looked at the documents but told Trump that Powell’s evidence was worthless, accusing her of producing one witness who was willing to testify about foreign election interference and around 10 who had simply signed affidavits saying they agreed.

Top advisers including Cipollone and Lyons have told associates they did not think the exchange about making Powell special counsel was serious. But Trump continued for days to mull the special counsel and voting machine ideas.

A spokesperson for Trump and a spokesperson for Cipollone did not respond to requests for comment. Powell, Giuliani and Lyons did not respond either. A spokesman for the select committee declined to comment on how the meeting might feature in its investigation.

Powell told associates she believed Trump made a decision to authorize her to be a special counsel of some nature. The following day, she called the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, saying she needed office space and a security clearance as the new special counsel.

Meadows did not refute Powell’s claim but told her he was working on logistics, and then called Giuliani to tell him Powell was trying to secure another audience with Trump. Giuliani told Meadows that Trump had barred Powell from the White House.

But while Meadows and other advisers had refused to grant Powell a “hard pass” that would have allowed her unfettered access to the complex, she returned to the White House on Sunday and Monday with documents on alleged Iranian threats to US election websites.

Meadows had revoked Ziegler’s access to the system for permitting White House access but Powell was cleared on a temporary “appointment” pass by another aide. She was, however, blocked from meeting the former president.

seth a substack

Conclusion

As the House January 6 Committee reaches the critical days and perhaps even hours of its decision-making process with respect to sending a subpoena to Ginni Thomas, and as the U.S. House of Representatives quickly reaches the last drop-dead date for initiating an impeachment investigation of Justice Clarence Thomas—who continues to refuse to recuse himself from January 6 cases, but is closer to the progenitors of a Trumpist coup plot than any Supreme Court Justice in history has ever been to any federal crime of such magnitude—the evidence above, and the further information and investigation it implicitly and explicitly points toward, becomes as important as any revelation that’ll come from the Committee in a month of harrowing revelations.

The simple fact is that all of the coup plot progenitors mentioned above were echoing one another in unmistakable ways in Fall 2020 and early 2021. Of the federal divisions over which Congress has the constitutional duty of oversight, the Trump conspirators’ plot encompassed—at a minimum—the Supreme Court, the White House, DOJ, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Nor does it appear that the plot has run its course. The same individuals referenced above as being involved in a coup plot in 2020 and 2021 appear to still be involved in similar efforts in 2022.

Consider that former Department of Homeland Security employee Christina Bobb, whose role in Trump’s coup plot appears to have been in part to lobby her former employer to illegally interfere in national vote-counting processes, is now a member of Trump’s legal team. In the video below, she tells us what she’s working on now:

Twitter avatar for @RonFilipkowski

Ron Filipkowski

@RonFilipkowski

Trump’s attorney Christina Bobb tonight says things are in the works to overturn the 2020 election and possibly reinstate Trump. She says the plan is for 3 states to decertify their results and send resolutions to the next Congress after the midterms to overturn the results.

July 9th 2022

1,897 Retweets5,392 Likes

This shocking video isn’t from 2020 or 2021. It’s from this month—July—in 2022.

The plan Bobb details is identical to the one Ginni Thomas and others were working on before Trump left office, suggesting that Thomas requires House questioning not just about 2020 and 2021 but whether she has continued her covert lobbying of state GOP legislators and GOP members of Congress in 2022. After all, Bobb makes clear that, as a member of Trump’s legal team, her efforts to aid Trump’s candidly deranged plot to be “reinstated” as President of the United States following the 2022 elections requires action from the same individuals who Thomas was lobbying in 2020 and 2021—starting with the very same state legislators Thomas targeted. While Bobb admits that the current Congress wouldn’t attempt to further any such coup, she ends her summary of Trump’s current illegal scheme by saying, “After 2022, if we replace them [the current Democratic majority in the House of Representatives], who knows?”

Given that any such 2023 coup would eventually come before Clarence Thomas, the urgency of questioning Ginni Thomas now—before a possible Republican takeover of Congress in January 2023 ends the Committee’s brief lifespan—is urgent at a level that can’t be overstated. Any who doubt this should listen to what Trump himself has been saying lately, all of which dovetails with the statements coming from his lawyers and (again) were last heard from all his foremost 2020 and 2021 coup co-conspirators:

Twitter avatar for @RonFilipkowski

Ron Filipkowski

@RonFilipkowski

Trump’s attorney said yesterday that if they could get 3 states legislatures to pass these resolutions, then a 2023 GOP Congress could take this up, overturn the 2020 election, and reinstate Trump. Now this from her client.

Image

July 9th 2022

1,607 Retweets4,888 Likes

Meanwhile, following the recent Proof coverage of a little-noticed July 2021 Rumble interview between insurrectionists David K. Clements and Garrett Ziegler, there is now new attention being paid to the links between Team Kraken—which Ziegler let into the White House on December 18, 2020, without the proper authority to do so—and Trump’s administration, particularly top Trump adviser Peter Navarro’s office.

Twitter avatar for @RonFilipkowski

Ron Filipkowski

@RonFilipkowski

Peter Navarro’s aide Garrett Ziegler says he let Powell & Flynn into the WH without permission: “That was not scheduled. So when Meadows & Cipollone got called into that meeting and realized that Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn were there .. they had no idea how they got in.”

July 15th 2022

1,704 Retweets4,123 Likes

As evidence mounts that the December 18, 2020 meeting in question constituted an actionable Conspiracy to Commit Treason, the accusation that Trump and his many co-conspirators didn’t “merely” commit Conspiracy to Obstruct a Congressional Proceeding but a crime punishable by life imprisonment or even death are starting to appear in mainstream media—underscoring that what is at stake in the House January 6 Committee executing a thorough investigation of Trump’s plot before its time is up.

ABOVE: Garrett Ziegler.

Here’s MSNBC legal analyst (and former federal prosecutor) Glenn Kirschner on the appropriateness of treating the January 6 investigation as an investigation of Treason:

Twitter avatar for @ifindkarma

Adam Rifkin  @ifindkarma

“Donald Trump launched the attack on the Capitol and refused to call it off… He told those around him Mike Pence should be hanged. Donald Trump waged war — levied war — against the United States on and around #January6th.”

@glennkirschner2 #JusticeMatters

Adam Rifkin @ifindkarma

@glennkirschner2 “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them… is guilty of treason… and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

18 U.S. Code § 2381 — https://t.co/X1T73pDXc5

https://t.co/uvjuBCFDj2 https://t.co/uI7Qujveda https://t.co/wu4SYrqD2j

July 12th 2022

Indeed, evidence of the size, scope, depth, and duration of Trump’s coup plot—this last too little a topic of public discussion thus far—is only increasing as the summer of 2022 wears on, emphasizing that the House January 6 Committee will likely need to hold more hearings in August or even September of this year. For instance, and as Proof will now report for the first time, there is new evidence in the Clements-Ziegler interview above that, contrary to his claims of having no awareness of or support for Trump authorizing the illegal interference of the U.S. armed forces in a U.S. election,Peter Navarro may have been present at the December 18, 2020 Trump-Team Kraken meeting conference—and therefore been well aware that precisely such a plot was being pushed by Team Kraken and advanced by Trump.

In the July 2021 Clements-Ziegler interview, Ziegler says that during his time in the White House as Navarro’s top aide (notably, he says that he and not Navarro primarily authored, with one or two other aides, the Navarro “reports” that helped animate the January 6 insurrectionists) he was only in Trump’s presence at a private meeting five or six times. He makes clear that his most substantive involvement with Trump came on December 18, 2020, when he led Team Kraken, by fits and starts, to the Oval Office.

Now consider this section of his interview with Clements (which begins at 41:50 in the linked video), after Ziegler has just referenced “December 18” several times and the topic of the conversation is, unambiguously, December 18, 2020 (emphasis added):

ZIEGLER: The memory that sticks out to me the most [of being in a private meeting with then-President Trump and others] is the 18th. That’s the most that I had spoken to him one-on-one and he had directly listened to me. And Peter [Navarro] was actually ill at the time, so he was on the phone—they conferenced him in. You know, Cipollone was there, [Jared] Kushner was there, Meadows was there, and I was basically saying—

CLEMENTS (looking concerned): The 18th of what?

ZIEGLER: January.

CLEMENTS (looking relieved): January, okay.

ZIEGLER: So this was after the Federal Bureau of Insurrection [sic] did their thing [on January 6]. {NB: Ziegler here adopts the conspiracy theory that the FBI planned and executed the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021].

Is it possible that, of the five or six times Ziegler had meaningful encounters with the President of the United States, two of them occurred on the 18th of a month and both involved Pat Cipollone, the White House Counsel? It’s possible. Or, this may’ve been a slip of the tongue that helps explain why—after the Trump-Team Kraken meeting ended in the wee hours of December 19—Trump tweeted about just two things: (1) the “wild protest” that was coming on January 6, and (2) the “Navarro reports” Ziegler had written and Navarro had put his name on.

In short, what has come into focus in the last two months is a ring of co-conspirators whose names are known and who nearly all have connections to either John Eastman, Ginni Thomas, or both. Eastman has now pleaded the Fifth Amendment a hundred times. It’s time for Ginni Thomas to answer questions to help protect our democracy or confirm herself—finally—as one of those who has secretly been trying to destroy it.

By Seth Abramson  ·  Tens of thousands of paid subscribers

David

Jul 16

More & more of these enablers & plotters will be revealed as the investigations continue. As one thing leads to another Americans are going to have a difficult time grasping the enormity of this conspiracy & the implications to our nation. We need to see some of these miscreants arrested or held in detention pending trial. Otherwise, they are going to remain emboldened & continue their plotting, further disrupting society & causing political chaos. At what point is the evidence readily available sufficient to start pressing charges?

Cheryl Wolf

Jul 16

Holy Crap Cakes, Seth! Brilliant investigative work. But it makes me think, what if any one (or more) of those co-conspirators has subscribed to PROOF and knows that you’re hot on their trail? Stay safe, please. The world needs you.

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