The House Jan. 6 committee has obtained a bombshell December 2020 draft executive order that, if Donald Trump had signed it, would have allowed him to order the federal government to seize voting machines and appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2020 election. It’s unclear who wrote the document and whether it was presented to Trump. However, the draft order, obtained and published by Politico, was among the documents Trump’s lawyers had tried to withhold from the committee. It also mimics the language that Trump advisers Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne presented to Trump in a previously reported Oval Office meeting in December 2020 in which they discussed overturning the election result by any means necessary. Another document detailed a speech Trump never gave on the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which he would have forcefully condemned the rioters and ordered the Justice Department to prosecute them. Instead, Trump expressed his sympathy for them.
