Unsigned Trump order told Pentagon to seize voting machines

Personally, I'd have to publish a retraction if I made these types of assertions here at PF.

You obviously didn't follow the link offered in #2.

The statement in the EO is a run-on sentence a paragraph in length that attempts to wrap the EO in legal protection and valid authority:

By the authority vested in me as President of the United States pursuant to the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, including Article 2 section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, Executive Orders 12333, 13848, National Security Presidential Memoranda 13 and 21, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA) and all applicable Executive Orders derived therefrom, the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C.1601 et seq.) (NBA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code:

The first sentence following this is:

I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, find that the forensic report of the Antrim County, Michigan voting machines, released December 13, 2020, and other evidence submitted to me in support of this order, provide probable cause sufficient to require action under the authorities cited above because of evidence of international and foreign interference in the November 3, 2020, election.

So, at best in your defense you did qualify your argument with what the "first sentence" states. Apparently you didn't make it to the second sentence in your haste to post your argument, which only get's worse as @Arkanis already pointed out. So, it's the second sentence that makes the statement you assert isn't made by the first sentence. Not even close you wrote - no, you're correct, it's not: it's verbatim, it's exactly what you claim is not written in the order.

And, since it does state exactly what you claimed it doesn't, you hedged your assertion by further asserting that if it does make such a statement then the PF member's claim is only supported by "a circular logic fallacy." I assume you are now referring to @Arkanis's assertion that this document is proof that Trump wasn't just shooting from the hip when he fired Esper 6 days after the election and installed someone he hoped would be more amenable to his agenda. I suppose if you honestly consider such an opinion to be a circular logic fallacy then there is simply no value in debating the point with you.

I find the more interesting point-of-view is that given the US involvement with assisting right wing factions to attain power in the so called banana republics then what we may have here is a simple example of the chickens coming home to roost. And you and other apologists and supporters of Trump here are helping to make sure these chickens have a nice easy path to travel. Good For You.

You then proceed to make an argument that as of December 2020, the Executive Branch still had a significant presence of members in opposition to Trump and you do not discount that the National Archives document was planted by them. Or perhaps your assertion is that federal employees working the national archives made it up themselves.

Mixed in with this second post is your appeal to your own authority arising from your vast experience and knowledge of "the way things work in any high level Government job". Contingency planning is not unique to government jobs or even high level jobs. What is common to contingency planning is that all options have to have some merit. This specific example, a draft executive order to have the military illegally engage in domestic seizures of voting machines is what we get with someone like Donald Trump at the helm.

Finally you ask what conclusions can be drawn from the fact that the order wasn't actually issued, if it was real. The likely connection of the dots for others that don't question whether or not the document is in fact real is Bill Barr. That connection seems to me to explain both why the order wasn't issued and why Bill Barr resigned on December 23rd, quietly, having advised Trump that he could finally face the music if he chose to issue this one.

 

Unless Biden decides to seize them lol

 

Here is your problem. You do not understand the difference between a claim and evidence. Now are you going to keep ducking, dodging, and deflecting or will you answer the following questions:

Who reported this meeting? Did this person participate in the meeting? Are they credible?

 

Yet another CNN new piece on two people familiar with the matter said and the left goes wild.
The most gullible bunch on the planet.

 

The comment about the circular logic was to point out if the draft document said as Ark claimed that I Donald Trump wrote this document, which it did not, that statement would not be proof the Donald Trump did in fact write the document. The reason of course being a circular logic fallacy.

With respect to an appeal to authority, it does not take much of an authority to understand the President does not write legal documents. That should be common sense. Understanding the difference between "writing" and "signing" should be pretty clear to anyone.

I make no assertions about how a draft unsigned document was sent to or retrieved from the national archives. I assume that like all Federal agencies the White House has a chief records officer and until that person is questioned or makes a statement, I make no assumptions unlike my left wing friends posting here.

I agree with you on the chickens coming home to roost. The fake news stories and techniques used against the Trump administration have all been used against the governments of other countries as described in this book. Fake news stories, fake documents, and the like apparently work as well here as they do in other countries. Not believing every claim of political opposition or fake news does not make one, use your words, an apologist for Trump. The Dems are like the proverbial boy who cried wolf.

 

its a claim that Fox News and the NY Times has confirmed.

are you saying Fox News and NYT are lying about the same thing???

wow, talk about historical revisionism.

 

Another illegal act by Trump.

 

Ah hem, executive orders !!!!!

 

Do you understand the difference between "writing" and "signing"?

 

so Trump is soooo dumb, he signs **** that he never reads?

 

I have asked the same questions 3 times now. And you have ducked, dodged and deflected three times.

Answer these questions or our conversation is at an end.

Who reported this meeting? Provide a name of the person, not Fox, NYT, etc.
Did this person participate in the meeting?
Are they credible?

 

Total strawman. But you answered my question. You do not understand the difference between writing and signing. BTW, the document in question was not signed by Trump, was it?

 

Hey Now, that's not the real Donald Trump AKA Mangolini, that's the Deep Deep State PLANT who is now currently faking it at Mar-a-lago (Melania's idea BTW). Please try to keep up or the RW cultists will leave you in the dust!

 

Thank you, I do try

The first thing you have to do as a Republican is realize that you have become the villain of every story you've ever heard

 

so you're saying you dont trust the NY Times or Fox News.

gotcha

 

Are you effing serious !!!!!!

Trump signed the orders, he is responsible.

 

Here is some more evidence.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/22/politics/boris-epshteyn-trump-campaign-fake-electors/index.html
Boris Epshteyn, an adviser for former President Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign, acknowledged Friday that he was part of the effort to prop up so-called "alternate electors" to support Trump in key states.

 

Good ol' Boris, hoping to spin his case in the court of public opinion.

 

You need to take a deep breath, go back to the beginning, and do your homework. The subject of this thread is an executive order that was never signed or issued.

 

the mere fact that such a fascist treasonous crime could even appear in a draft EO, is terrible enough.

would you be ok if Biden had a draft EO on his desk calling for the detention and mass-imprisonment of all white conservatives?

 

Evidence? Go back, read the link you posted, and tell me what sentence or sentences, support the claim of this threat that Trump wrote or even saw the unsigned executive order this thread is about. Did I miss something cause I did not even see the words "executive order" in the link/article you posted.

Don't conflate every claim about Trump you can find and present it as a cogent argument.

 

Your exact words were "Trump signed the order." Which since the subject order was not signed, is obviously a false claim. Stop moving the goal posts.

 

i never stated Trump signed anything.

 

Thanks for the clarification. I missed that you were quibbling over whether Trump actually wrote the document himself when you made mention of circular reasoning. I had given you more credit than being in the business of bogging down the topic with who's fingers were on the keyboard. And yet you continue to do so.

You did make assertions about the legitimacy of the record - and now you seem to want to divert your previous statements to being about the mechanics of how the document made its way into the archive. Maybe AOC gained access to it and ran it over to the archives, eh? Dem operatives had the same access as Devin did, huh?

This is simply a wicked sad attempt to deflect from the fact that the document was archived and the basis for archiving such a document is easily found with a simple search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act.

This isn't just some random document - it's a draft executive order and falls under rules. Rules that Trump likely lividly foams at the mouth about. Likely rants to himself with spittle flying from his lips, "How f'g stupid are these people!", he exclaimed to Francis Underwood. "They sent the f'g draft to the f'g National Archives!?".

You made the assertion that its mere existence in the archive was questionable. I suppose you might want to investigate the office of the archivist too.

There are explicit facts that are not in dispute regarding Trump's exceptional actions following the 2020 election. For the first time since the office was established in 1947, the Secretary of Defense was removed from office by a President having lost his election. Not to mention that Trump's failure to concede the election was among a very small set of occurrences with irregularities in transitioning this office. A simple fact.

You seem to not have understood my point about the chickens coming home to roost. The US government favored right wing factions at the expense of left wing factions. The US did not help Chavez or Castro attain power, these leftist, socialist and explicitly communist regimes attained power against the will of the US. Your assertion that my analogy is one you agree with is empty bs rhetoric and another example of the sad attempt by so many on the right that have succeeded in blurring the line between well established concepts of political science in support of whatever it is that they hold as their ideals.

Interesting that you seem to take exception to being labeled a Trump supporter or apologist. Am I reading your statement correctly?

 

The aoc comment, investigate the archivist, are strawman comments.

Do you suppose/assume there is some chain of custody that can be verified for the transmittal of records to NARA??

The Wikipedia link you provide provides zero clarification about an unsigned unissued order being a "record." Was the draft in question draft number one, or draft number 100. Who wrote it? Did Trump see it? Is every White House draft of anything an official record?

I understood perfectly your "chickens" point. The reference I provided documents the use of fake news stories and fake documents as information operations against other governments. I never said anything about these target governments being right or left wing. What makes you think the same sort of dirty tricks being used in other countries are not being used here? Because of course they have been, e.g., mkultra

As far as being a Trump supporter I do not buy into the false dichotomy of American politics. I am registered as an Independent and vote based on issues. I am not a huge Trump fan, but he certainly was a better choice than Clinton or Biden. What I do care about is obviously staged hysteria executed as an information operation to push a so called voting rights bill intended to rig future elections.