Trump’s Plan to Nationalize Elections Using Fabricated Claims of Foreign Interference

A recent history of Donald's attempts to conjure up foreign election interference in an effort to seize voting machines and control elections in the name of national security.

Back in 2020 after losing to Joe Biden, Donald Trump conspired with multiple individuals to overturn the results. There were multiple conspiracies that all failed, leading to his final act of desperation: sending a violent and angry mob to the Capitol to block the certification of the votes.

Jack Smith detailed the multiple conspiracies in his indictment of Donald Trump, his 165-page immunity brief, and his final report Volume I. The conspiracies included Trump’s pressure campaign against state election officials, the fraudulent elector scheme, the weaponization of the Justice Department, and the pressure campaign against Mike Pence. Trump also sued over 60 times and lost.

But there was another conspiracy afoot that Jack Smith outlined as part of the fraudulent elector scheme: fabricated foreign election interference.

Going back to November and December of 2020, Trump tried furiously to seize voting machines in multiple states. He asked the Department of Justice to seize voting machines, but Bill Barr said he didn’t have the authority, nor was there any evidence of election fraud that would justify it.

Trump then asked the Department of Homeland Security to seize the voting machines, but they also rebuffed his demands. Finally, in a contentious meeting in the Oval Office on December 18th, 2020, Trump floated the idea of the military seizing voting machines. During that meeting, Rudy Giuliani told Trump that they couldn’t involve the Pentagon unless there was proof of foreign election interference.

Around that time, a draft executive order cooked up by Sidney Powell, Phil Waldron, and Mike Flynn began to circulate. It ordered the Secretary of Defense to seize all voting machines citing a bogus report on Antrim County, Michigan, and testimony in a Dominion voting machines case in Georgia. The executive order also called for the appointment of a Special Counsel (Sidney Powell was angling for the job), and an assessment to be provided to the Director of National Intelligence within 7 days.

The Executive Order was never issued, but that didn’t stop Trump from continuing to try and fabricate foreign election interference so he could purport to have a role in federal election oversight. On January 2, 2021, just days before the insurrection, Trump ordered his DNI John Ratcliffe to brief Jeffrey Clark on foreign election interference. Jeffrey Clark was the environmental lawyer Trump tried to install as Attorney General the next day, but the rest of the DOJ said they would resign if he did. Clark is also the lawyer who wrote the letter to Georgia telling them (falsely) they were under investigation for election fraud and needed to certify the alternate slate of electors for Trump.)

During that briefing, DNI Ratcliffe told Jeffrey Clark that there was no outcome-determanitive foreign election interference. How do we know? Because Merrick Garland had seized the phones of both Jeffrey Clark and congressional republican Scott Perry. Scott Perry is the person who initially introduced Jeffrey Clark to Donald Trump as someone in the Justice Department who might be willing to do his dirty work. And in Scott Perry’s phone were Signal messages from Jeffrey Clark who admitted to him that Ratcliffe said there was no outcome-determinative foreign election interference.

During the Jack Smith prosecution, Trump demanded the “real” documents about that briefing, claiming Ratcliffe told Clark about foreign election interference, and that’s what caused Clark to write those letters to the swing states about election fraud investigations.

Trump again brought up foreign election interference during the pendency of the criminal case against him for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. In a motion to compel discovery, Trump alleged that Jack Smith cherry picked government communications, and that proof of foreign election interference existed - he was just not handing it over:

“In support of his Motion to Compel, the defendant suggests that the Government relied only on a selection of politically biased officials, but he does not and cannot substantiate this theatrical claim. To the contrary, as the defendant is aware from the discovery that has been provided, the Government asked every pertinent witness—including the former DNI, former Acting Secretary of DHS, former Acting Deputy Secretary of DHS, former CISA Director, former Acting CISA Director, former CISA Senior Cyber Counsel, former National Security Advisor (“NSA”), former Deputy NSA, former Chief of Staff to the National Security Council, former Chairman of the Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”), Presidential Intelligence Briefer, former Secretary of Defense, and former senior DOJ leadership—if they were aware of any evidence that a domestic or foreign actor flipped a single vote in a voting machine during the presidential election. The answer from every single official was no.”

You may recall that the CISA Director Chris Krebs put out the following statement on the final day of voting in 2020: “Over the last four years, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been a part of a whole-of-nation effort to ensure American voters decide American elections. Importantly, after millions of Americans voted, we have no evidence any foreign adversary was capable of preventing Americans from voting or changing vote tallies.”

Krebs was fired after issuing that statement.

And believe it or not, Trump even tried to rely on Russian interference by citing the “Solar Winds” attack:

“The defendant invokes a completely unrelated event—the SolarWinds attack to support his speculative and conspiratorial theory that there was foreign interference in the election, contrary to the universal consensus of the officials he appointed. Even if the defendant is correct that Russia breached federal networks as part of the SolarWinds incident, he omits two critical details: (1) states, not the federal government, operated the machines that were used for voting and tabulation, and (2) the SolarWinds attack had nothing to do with the 2020 election”

Additionally, Trump alleged that the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference - prepared by folks he associates with the “deep state” including former CIA Director John Brennan - included underlying source materials proving outcome-determinative foreign election interference:

“The defendant has moved to compel production of the classified version of the ICA on Russian meddling in the 2016 election, along with “all source materials,” which would include classified assets, methods, and operational details. None of these materials are in the possession of the prosecution team, nor are they relevant to the charges in the indictment.”

All of these quotes are from Jack Smith’s December, 2023 response to Trump’s motion to compel discovery.

A few weeks later, Jack Smith filed a motion in limine - that’s a motion asking a judge to prohibit certain evidence from being allowed in court. Jack Smith wrote:

“The defendant has indicated that he intends to introduce evidence of foreign influence in the 2020 presidential election to show that (1) he was personally tricked by foreign disinformation, and/or (2) the January 6 riot resulted from “efforts by foreign actors to influence public opinion.” Such evidence should be excluded as an irrelevant and confusing sideshow. As to any claim that the defendant was fooled by foreign influence, absent a concrete showing that the defendant (1) relied in good faith on (2) specific foreign disinformation when (3) making a particular false claim, such evidence will be irrelevant to the defendant’s mens rea and will only distract the jury from the issues properly before it. Next, any argument that foreign actors—rather than the defendant, and his ceaseless, knowingly false claims of election fraud—were responsible for inflaming his followers and causing the Capitol riot is nothing more than an infirm third-party guilt defense. The defendant has not pointed to a single piece of evidence indicating that foreign influence—rather than his own lies—motivated rioters on January 6. And in any event, whether others—be they civilians or foreign actors—said untrue things on the internet does not exonerate the defendant for the lies he told to his followers or the criminal steps he took to illegally retain power.”

All of this to say that Trump was and is hell-bent on fabricating foreign election interference. Why?

First, he was trying to establish his unlawful acts as “official acts” in order to claim presidential immunity. The problem he faces is that the executive has no role in election oversight. But Trump believed that if he could prove foreign election interference, then he could claim it’s his Article II job to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.

That’s an uphill climb. In Mark Meadows’ bid to move his Fulton County charges out of state court and into federal court, the very conservative Chief Judge of the 11th Circuit William Pryor drove home the point that neither the president nor his chief of staff have any role to play in election oversight.

Second, on April 10, 2025, in its order requiring the government facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia from CECOT prison in El Salvador, the Supreme Court said “The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” And ever since then, anything Trump has wanted to justify, he quotes that ruling and references National Security. Doesn’t want to turn over the CECOT agreement with Bukele? Due regard for deference in foreign affairs. Blows up boats in the Caribbean? Due regard for defence in foreign affairs. Want to deport migrants to third countries without due process? Due regard for deference in foreign affairs.

Want to control elections despite the executive having no constitutional role in election oversight? Due regard for deference in foreign affairs.

Trump has also been doing everything he can to discredit anyone who said there was no outcome determinative foreign election interference. Last year he issued an Executive Order directing the Department of Justice to investigate Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. He’s also investigating ex-CIA chief John Brennan. There is also a criminal investigation into everyone who participated in the ICA of 2016 foreign election interference, to mention the DOJ probe into Jack Smith.

That brings us to why Tulsi Gabbard was present at an FBI raid of Fulton County, Georgia election offices last week. It seems pretty obvious to me that he’s using her to fabricate foreign election interference in an attempt to usurp control of elections from the states, hoping the Supreme Court will show him “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

Reuters reported yesterday “A team working for President Donald Trump’s spy chief, Tulsi Gabbard, last spring led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines, said Gabbard’s office and three sources familiar with the previously unreported events. The sources said the goal was to work with the FBI to investigate claims that Venezuela had hacked voting machines in Puerto Rico, but added the probe did not produce any clear evidence of Venezuelan interference in the U.S. territory’s elections.”

Venezuela, you say?

“Her team took an unspecified number of Puerto Rico’s voting machines and additional copies of data from the machines as part of its investigation. Noting similar voting infrastructure elsewhere in the United States, it added: “ODNI found extremely concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections.”

Challenging the denials of Gabbard’s office about Venezuela’s role, the three sources told Reuters that the FBI team involved in the Puerto Rico operation was probing the theory that Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro’s government had hacked U.S. voting, an allegation that has strong support among some Trump supporters but for which no evidence has surfaced publicly.

We now know that Trump and Bondi had ordered Gabbard to be there. And recently, Trump stated that Republicans should nationalize elections. He’s also called to ban voting machines and end vote by mail. Steve Bannon this week urged Trump to send ICE and the military to polling places. The plan seems pretty obvious here.

It’s also very interesting that we now have Maduro in custody. Will Trump use Maduro to fabricate false claims of foreign election interference so he can try to seize voting machines, end vote-by-mail, and nationalize elections? I think so. And it will all come down to whether the Supreme Court believes he has the authority.

This may or may not have anything to do with a highly classified whistleblower report that was just submitted to Congress 8 months after it was filed last spring. According to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal on the condition of anonymity, the report accuses DNI Gabbard of over-classifying a document in order to limit the number of people who could see it. She then sat on this report for 8 months, and when she finally transmitted it to the gang of 8, it was heavily redacted for “executive privilege”- which means the White House was involved.

This smacks of the Trump National Security lawyer named Eisenberg who stashed the Zelensky phone call transcript in a code-word classified system to limit the number of people who could see it. That whistleblower report led to the first impeachment of Trump, and Eisenberg is now in charge of the lawyers at DOJ responsible for redacting the Epstein files.

I’ll be interviewing the whistleblower’s lawyer Andrew Bakaj this weekend for The Breakdown on the Meidas Touch network this Sunday at Noon PT, and for the Daily Beans podcast Monday morning. You can support Whistleblower Aid with a tax-deductible contribution here, and though none of my content will ever be behind a paywall, you can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber.

~AG

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images