Everything You Need To Know About the Night Giuliani Kept Trump From Seizing the Voting Machines

Happy Groundhog Day. We’re going to see six more weeks of winter, and things are looking gloomy for Donald Trump and famille as well, tsk tsk. Let George Conway set the tone for the story of how things in Trump world got so unbridled and out of control in the last days.

Imagine being in a room, let alone a venerated oval one, in which the voice of reason and rationality belongs to Rudy Giuliani. https://t.co/87BLd3yMpT

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) February 1, 2022

When that is your starting point, yes indeed, the night has already gone mad. It’s yet another Twilight Zone episode. Charlie Sykes explains it brilliantly in his newsletter today.

The conflict between the former New York mayor and Trump’s bizarre legal team reached a crisis at a meeting in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020.

At the meeting, Mr. [Michael] Flynn and Ms. [Sidney] Powell presented Mr. Trump with a copy of the draft executive order authorizing the military to oversee the seizure of machines. After reading it, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Giuliani to the Oval Office, according to one person familiar with the matter. When Mr. Giuliani read the draft order, he told Mr. Trump that the military could be used only if there was clear-cut evidence of foreign interference in the election.

Ms. Powell, who had spent the past month filing lawsuits claiming that China and other countries had hacked into voting machines, said she had such evidence, the person said. But Mr. Giuliani was adamant that the military should not be mobilized, the person said, and Mr. Trump ultimately heeded his advice.

Afterward, Giuliani would contact the Department of Homeland Security with a similar request to seize the machines, but that also went nowhere. That outreach came after Attorney General Bill Barr had also rejected suggestions that the Department of Justice join in the attempt to overturn the election.

The NYT reports:

The meeting with Mr. Barr took place in mid- to late November when Mr. Trump raised the idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump told Mr. Barr that his lawyers had told him that the department had the power to seize machines as evidence of fraud.

Barr, who had been Trump’s loyal Roy Cohn-like attack dog and defender, turned him down flat.

Mr. Barr, who had been briefed extensively at that point by federal law enforcement officials about how the theories being pushed by Mr. Trump’s legal team about the Dominion machines were unfounded, told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no basis for seizing the machines because there was no probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.

By then, as he later told author Jonathan Karl, he’d had enough of Trump’s lies.

“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told me. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

As the coup gathered momentum, Barr resigned, effective December 23, 2020. He managed, however, not to publicly break with the president, or to warn the country at the time.

A few weeks later, Vice President Mike Pence would refuse to play his part in the attempt to overturn the election.

So, this is worth thinking about: Pence, Barr, and Giuliani were not merely Trump loyalists: over the last four years, they had repeatedly shown a willingness to rationalize, lie, cover-up, bully, bluster, and bend the law for Trump’s benefit.

But it turned out there were lines they would not cross. There was a Barr-Pence Line — and apparently even a Giuliani Line — beyond which there be dragons.

There were signs that there may even have been a Mitch McConnell Line, in the days after the attack on the Capitol, but those political lines proved to be porous, malleable, and ultimately disposable. (See Nikki Haley, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Gallagher, etc.)

But within the administration itself — in Trump’s own inner circles — some of the insanity was held at bay in the weeks before the inauguration. In today’s Bulwark, Mona Charen makes the point:

A little-noticed feature of the stories about Trump’s thus-far unsuccessful efforts to stage a coup is that even among the MAGA crowd, some things were considered beyond the pale. Barr was willing to swallow a lot, but he couldn’t go along with lying about imaginary vote fraud. The high-ranking lawyers at the Justice Department were Trump appointees, but they would resign en masse rather than see Clark subvert the department for plainly unlawful ends. Brad Raffensperger voted for Trump but refused to lie for him. Cuccinelli was Trump’s loyal immigration hawk, but he couldn’t see his way to using his Homeland Security post to confiscate voting machines and commit fraud. And though Mike Pence, pressed hard by Trump for the last full measure of devotion, wavered (he phoned Dan Quayle for advice), in the end, he did what he knew was right.

Why did they draw those lines? Why did they come so far only to say, at a crucial moment, no further? Charen notes that a healthy body politic “needs certain automatic defenses,” and even after four years of Trump, some members of his administration retained what she calls “the vestigial antibodies of a healthy democracy.”

“The people who made those crucial decisions were acting out of a sense that anything less would be dishonorable and would be perceived as such by the whole society.”

For all their many faults, Pence, Barr, and even Giuliani came from a different era of American politics, with lingering (and rapidly fading) memories of the rule of law and a (more or less) decent respect for the opinions of mankind.

But in a second Trump term, they won’t be there. It will be all Kayleighs, Bannons, Epshteyns, McEntees, Bonginos, D’Souzas, and Stephen Millers.

So consider this: In Trump 2.0, we may look back on Bill Barr, Mike Pence, and — God forgive me — Rudy Giuliani with a certain sense of nostalgia, because where are those lines now?

The message here again is that the guardrails of democracy held with the flimsiest of tolerance.

Think about what has just been said here. Trump’s bonkers request to seize voting machines was a bridge too far for Rudy Giuliani and this is the man who has been quoted as saying he doesn’t care about his legacy, because “I’ll be dead.” Yet something ingrained in him kept him from breaking this particular law — after blithely breaking lobbying laws and pressuring Ukraine to find dirt on the Bidens, while his buddies Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman broke campaign finance laws.

This is the same Giuliani who cobbled together Strike Force Rudy and assembled the likes of Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Jenna Ellis to go forth in the land and preach the Big Lie.

This is the same Giuliani who told Trump to go in front of the crowd on election night and announce that he had won the election.

And finally, this is the same Giuliani who humiliated himself in the parking lot of the Four Seasons Landscaping Company, tucked between a crematorium and a sex shop and raged at the heavens, “All the networks!” when he was informed that all the networks had indeed declared Joe Biden the winner.

Certainly something to ponder. Trump has no guardrails, that much has always been blatantly apparent, and he’s never needed any. He’s never been held accountable in his life. His brand of out of control buffoonery would have been tempered by having to function in the real world, should that ever had been the case. His massive wealth insulated him from such necessities and allowed his immaturity to rage on throughout his life, even into his twilight years.

Go inside any high school. There are legions of young Trumps, rebels without a clue, but their big mouths and their destructive ways get tempered when they have to go out and in the world and earn a living. Trump never had that experience. He just proceeded to squander fortunes and wreak havoc with the lives of all that he encountered.

Then he ended up in the highest office in the most powerful nation on earth. It is a story that never could have been written as fiction. Maybe life really is nothing more than a computer simulation created by some Higher Mind and one day an engineer decided to introduce a really batshit variation in the program and that’s where we are. Maybe some celestial intelligences are sitting on the edges of their seats as well, wondering how all of this is going to turn out, even as we do. I wonder if they’re even taking bets?

Support the site with a subscription today and see no more ads!

Go Ad-free Now!