- Trump pushed for plans to use federal agencies to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, the NYT reported Monday.
- On Tuesday, the January 6 House select committee said it was investigating Trump’s role in those plans.
- The New York Times reported that it’s not clear what evidence they’re currently looking through.
The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot is looking into whether former President Donald Trump had a role in plans to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
It’s not immediately clear what evidence the committee is looking at to evaluate the former president’s role in these plans, according to The Times.
“We certainly intend to run to ground any evidence bearing on an effort to seize voting machines and to use the apparatus of the federal government to confiscate these machines in the service of the president’s aim to overturn the election,” Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the committee, told The Times.
Schiff added: “We want to fully flesh out the facts: How close did this come to being operationalized? What kind of pushback did they receive? Who was a part of this particular scheme? We want to answer all those questions.”
On Monday, in a separate report, The Times reported that Trump was more active in considering and pushing for some plans to seize the machines, including some proposals that involved finding legal grounds to utilize federal agencies.
While Insider and other news outlets have previously reported on the plans to use federal agencies to seize machines, The Times cited new details from three anonymous sources familiar with the effort who revealed which plans Trump had seriously considered and pushed for.
People familiar with the plans told The Times that Trump instructed his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to call the Department of Homeland Security to see whether it could legally take control of voting machines in key states six weeks following the 2020 presidential election.
At the end of January, the House committee obtained a draft executive order written by people close to Trump in December 2020 that stated a plan to use the Pentagon to seize machines.
The Times added that the committee recently got documents from the Trump administration, including what was described as a “document containing presidential findings concerning the security of the 2020 election after it occurred and ordering various actions.”
Representatives for the office of Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the committee, the law firm representing Giuliani, and a spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
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