collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information and material records relating to the 2020 election. you are a west point grad. you are close friends with the former trump defense secretary mike esper. what s your reaction to hearing that? yeah, so, dana, look, i have not seen the document, i have not seen i have not even seen the article, i heard it this morning. so i don t really know the details of it. obviously, look, as you described, that that s troubling, but i don t know why they were you know, what the underlying issue was in terms of taking the voting machines out of the control of the states. perhaps it was the fact that they were the administration felt that they were not going to be correctly held in the chain of custody such that they would be preserved for future examination. i don t know. but, as you said, it was a draft, it was never executed, it was never sent around.
can get big things done in this country. last year, you help laid the groundwork. this year we have to build it. the biggest weapon in our arsenal is the build back better act. nothing is going to do more to ease pressure on families. we ll see if he can get it done in year two. so much to discuss tonight with cnn s chief legal analyst jef jeffrey toobin. good evening. appreciate you joining us. let s talk about this politico reporting. when i read it, i said this has to be an article from the onion. this is not real but it turns out it is real. politico never releases drafts of a trump executive order that would have directed his defense secretary to seize voting machines part of it i want to read. effective immediately, the sec d secretary of defense should seize equipment, electronically stored information and records required for retention. what would have happened, jeffrey, if trump actually
that s incredibly damning. do you think it s possible? i think it s possible but i don t want to speculate. the other thing i would say that s important, i think you re going to see the anatomy of the big lie begin to unfold. when you see more text messages with come out of people around trump who knew the election fraud was a total myth, they were simply humoring him and privately saying, yeah, we can t keep spreading this craziness, i think that chips away at trump s credibility and i also think it really gets to him. david, politico obtained a draft, trump executive order, it was a draft, it s now in possession of the january 6th committee which would have ordered the acting secretary of defense to, quote, seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information and material records relating to the 2020 election. you are a west point grad. you are close friends with the former trump defense secretary mike esper. what s your reaction to he
mehdi, enjoy the rest of your friday night. thank you. tonight the full scope of the republican effort to overturn the 2020 election is coming into sharper focus. the january 6th select committee is now in possession of hundreds of pages of documents that donald trump attempted to block the national archives from handing over. and it s now clear why he fought so hard to hide these documents. politico obtained one of them, an unsigned draft of an executive order that directs the department of defense to seize voting machines. the order, which was never signed, is dated december 16, 2020. and it would allow the defense secretary to, quote, seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information and material records required for retention under a u.s. law that relates to the preservation of election records. the order also cites two classified documents, suggesting
reveal a plot by theex-president s aides to use the military to overturn election results. the order empowers the defense secretary to seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information and materiel records required for retention under a u.s. law that relates to preservation of election record, military. the draft order would have given the defense secretary 60 days to write an assessment of the 2020 election. that suggests that it could have been a gambit to keep trump in power until mid-february of 2021. this executive order was signed on the 16th and you don t have 60 days to overturn the election. it appears to be part of the more than 700 pages of documents that the ex-president tried very, very hard to block. the house january 6th committee from getting from the national