ARGUMENT: FOREIGN INTERFERENCEDraft Trump Executive Order Shows How False Foreign Interference Claims May Be Used to Undermine U.S. Elections

In December 2020, as President Donald Trump grasped for ways to overturn his electoral defeat, a draft executive order circulated in his White House which would have empowered the U.S. military and intelligence community to intervene in the vote certification process. Emerson T. Brooking writes in Just Security that 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.

Brooking writes:

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 fraud and stolen ballots, these incidents were not the focus of the order. Instead, it centered on the specter of foreign interference. By alleging hostile foreign activities, the order advanced arguments that could not be readily checked or challenged. Crucially, by invoking the threat of foreign actors, the order also justified the mobilization of military resources. As a historical document, the order illustrates how foreign interference concerns can be harnessed to delegitimize election outcomes. One should expect future attacks on U.S. election integrity to follow a similar model.

The draft executive order made far-reaching assertions, each one of them false. It claimed:

·  That Dominion Voting Systems, the second-largest U.S. supplier of electronic voting machines, was “heavily controlled by foreign agents, countries, and interests.”

·  That this showed “probable cause” of “international and foreign interference.”

·  That supposed vulnerabilities in the vote tabulation systems also indicated probable cause of “fraud and numerous malicious actions.” But it wasn’t just Dominion.

·  That there was probable cause that all voting machine vendors “[had] the same flaws and were subject to foreign interference” and that “votes were in fact altered and manipulated contrary to the will of the voters.”

·  Citing an October 2020 incident in which Iranian agents targeted and harassed Florida voters, the order declared further probable cause of “a massive cyber-attack by foreign interests on our crucial national infrastructure surrounding the election.”

Brooking notes that instead of a factual document, the order is better understood as the culmination of a long-running disinformation campaign. For months, Trump had primed his followers to expect foreign attacks on the election, attacks which would deny Trump a victory in November.

Far-right conspiracy theorists had taken Trump’s narrative further: citing Russian revisionist history which blamed the U.S. intelligence community for fomenting the pro-democracy “color revolutions” which had swept Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Bloc in the early 2000s, these conspiracy theorists claimed that U.S. Deep State operatives were now deploying the same color revolution handbook in the United States, aided by unspecified foreign agents. 

Brooking writes:

The draft order elevated and legitimized these falsehoods, seeking to use the power of the White House to write them into the federal record. Even if the order had stopped there—simply alleging foreign interference without authorizing a government response—its issuance would have significantly increased the strength and durability of the Stop the Steal movement, whose adherents were ultimately responsible for the violence of January 6.

But the order aspired to much more. It prescribed a military takeover of U.S. voting infrastructure, to be overseen by appointees who owed their positions and authority to a president who had just lost re-election. At worst, such an event would have shattered the expectation of free and fair elections in the United States. At best—if military officers resisted and the courts interceded—it would have sparked a constitutional crisis.

He concludes:

This order reveals the extent to which Trump’s allies weighed authoritarian action in the final days of his presidency, seeking to use disinformation and raw executive power to nullify a democratic mandate. Despite the opprobrium of January 6 and Trump’s ultimate concession, these ideas have not been widely discredited among Trump’s supporters. If the unsettled conditions of the 2020 election repeat themselves and similar individuals find themselves adjacent to power, they may try this strategy again.