This president, however, may well believe that “national emergency” is a set of magic words that does allow him to do exactly that
—rob Congress of its powers and imbue him with them instead.

Certainly, he has taken that view in other contexts,
from the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants
to the deployment of troops to U.S. cities
to his signature tariffs,
on which he was recently rebuffed by the Supreme Court.

Trump also said in January that he regrets not seizing voting machines after his 2020 loss.

That gambit would also have relied on an invocation of a national emergency
—at least according to the copy Politico obtained of the draft executive order some of his more advisers were urging him to sign in December of that year.

But how exactly would Trump attempt to pull this off?

That’s where the draft order on which the Washington Post reported may prove revealing:

The document ends with a series of directives, including to the director of national intelligence,
to revise the threat assessment in a separate, existing EO from 2018
—intending, presumably, to apply the legal analysis and stated authorities therein to new ends.

This order, entitled “Imposing Certain Sanctions in the Event of Foreign Interference in a United States Election,” does what it sounds like:

declares a national emergency to deal with the threat of foreign interference in elections,

then creates a process for imposing sanctions on individuals and governments found to have interfered.

President Joe Biden extended the order,
and his administration eventually did apply its penalties to Iran and Russia.

This administration
—whether or not it has an emergency declaration in mind
—appears to be hunting for a foreign interference emergency of its own.

The Washington Post’s story on the draft order mentions Chinese meddling,
but, as Lawfare’s Renée DiResta has written,
the administration and its allies have been busy chasing conspiracy theories about malign activities by other states too:
from Venezuela rigging the vote using Dominion voting machines;
to a Spanish election software company hosting “real” vote tallies;
to operatives in Italy remotely switching votes using military satellites;
to South Korea shipping fraudulent ballots with bamboo fibers in their paper into the United States;
to, finally, China hacking machines.

Ticktin’s theory involves a plot among China, Venezuela
—which he said “was not just exporting cocaine and fentanyl, but [also] exporting election results to 72 different countries”
—and Serbia.

The very woman who would be responsible for a formal threat assessment,
Director of National Intelligence #Tulsi #Gabbard,
last spring led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines on the off-chance they’d been hacked by Venezuela.

#Kurt #Olsen, one of the Trump officials in attendance at the election deniers summit—with whom Ticktin told us he had been in touch—reportedly pushed the narrative.

And the beauty of flat leaf chive flowers. The bees love them too, but not as much as the tulsi. I didn't manage to capture them. It is late in the day.

#FromTheGarden #GardeningAU #Tulsi #GardeningAdelaide #Gardening