In December 2020, as President Donald Trump grasped for ways to nullify his electoral defeat, a draft executive order circulated in his White House that would have empowered the U.S. military and intelligence community to intervene in the vote certification process. The idea for the order appears to have originated with retired Army colonel Phil Waldron while working with Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell. Waldron had already sought to invalidate voting results in Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, and remained in close coordination with Trump’s personal legal team. The order instructed Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller to “seize, collect, retain, and analyze” voting records and infrastructure across the country. Miller would have carte blanche authority to federalize National Guard units to assist in the operation. Within sixty days, the Pentagon’s elections analysis would be forwarded to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe to add “appropriate supporting information” and deliver the results to the president and key members of the cabinet. Trump himself was reportedly aware of the proposal and did nothing to discourage it.
The order represented an unprecedented militarization of the U.S. elections administration. Its objective was likely the delegitimization of the 2020 election and the creation of emergency conditions in which Trump might have extended his term.
Although contemporary far-right media was filled with false claims of domestic voter...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...