Trump will send military into cities to take voting machines if he wins: Ex-Homeland Security official
Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor sounded the alarm Monday on MSNBC that former President Donald Trump would likely seize voting machines if he is re-elected.
Trump actually explored the possibility of doing this in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election — something that even Rudy Giuliani warned him was illegal and could blow apart democracy.
"The idea that anyone would stop him from seizing voting machines and doing all manner of things to them, and the idea that the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security going into a small locality and taking them is anything that any locality could stop, whether it was run by a Democratic election official or Republican election official, is ludicrous," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "But it is illustrative. Not as something that was investigated in 2020 but as something that is probably very much on the whiteboard for 2024 or any future opportunities he has. I wonder if you could elaborate."
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Taylor, who famously wrote an op-ed proclaiming himself a "resistance" inside the Trump White House, agreed.
"Let me take you back in time on that, Nicolle, because Trump's claim that he could go seize voting machines was based off of something that I helped write several years earlier, which was before the midterm elections in 2018 we were very worried that the Russians were going to try to meddle again in U.S. elections," Taylor recalled. "So we convinced the White House and a very reluctant Donald Trump to sign an executive order that would have given additional authority to federal agencies to respond decisively, to punish the Russians if they interceded. And you know why Donald Trump was reluctant. He didn't want to punish the Russians if that happened. But he signed the executive order anyway."
"Fast-forward to ... 2020 and then into early 2021," Taylor continued. "Donald Trump's lawyers misconstrued that executive order, which would have been used to defend America against foreign adversaries, to try to make the perverse legal case that it somehow gave him these powers to seize U.S. voting machines."
This idea, Taylor said, is a "completely wrong reading of the executive order" and "an illustrative example of how they would play a game of legal twister to try to give the President of the United States extraordinary, almost dictatorial powers."
He explained that it isn't a hypothetical question because those who know Trump or were around him, are aware he'll do whatever it takes to get what he wants, even if that means bringing down the United States.
"And in the second term, I have Trump's own people saying to me that in a second term, he would go send U.S. forces, he would send domestic Homeland Security forces into U.S. cities to go to polling places, to intimidate voters, to examine the machines," said Taylor. "I don't think this is a hypothetical. This will happen if Donald Trump's back in power."
Watch the video below or at the link here.
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