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.

The origin story of the proposed executive order is murky, but it appears to trace back to a network of pro-Trump activists who have spent years pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

One of them is
#Peter #Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who has known Trump since the two attended the New York Military Academy as teenagers.

Ticktin represented his former classmate in a 2022 civil suit accusing Hillary Clinton and others of conspiring to smear Trump with claims that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

A federal judge later dismissed the suit and sanctioned Trump’s attorneys
—including Ticktin
—finding that the suit amounted to the “deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”

Ticktin currently represents #Tina #Peters, the former Colorado elections clerk who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a 2021 breach of her office’s voting machines.

In an interview, Ticktin told us he wrote what he described as a “precursor” to the 17-page draft executive order that has been circulating since April of last year.

“I'm not sure exactly who prepared this one,” he said of the version dated April 12,
which he provided to Democracy Docket last month.

But Ticktin said he believed the April 12 version of the draft order was “really well done”
—well done enough that he emailed it to the president.

Ticktin said his outreach to government officials about the draft executive order also extended to #Kurt #Olsen, the White House director of “election security and integrity.”

Olsen, an attorney, represented Texas in its unsuccessful post-2020 suit to overturn Trump’s loss.

He was later sanctioned by a federal judge for advancing “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in Kari Lake’s failed bid to challenge her 2022 gubernatorial loss in Arizona.

Now, as a White House official, Olsen has reportedly been tasked with leading a probe to reexamine the 2020 race.

Last month, an unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit revealed that a criminal inquiry into election irregularities in Fulton County began with a referral from Olsen.

According to Ticktin, others involved with the effort surrounding the draft order include #Michael #Flynn, the former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI before receiving a sweeping pardon from Trump in December 2020;

#Patrick #Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and prominent election skeptic;

and #Stefanie #Lambert, an attorney who is awaiting trial in Michigan over allegations that she illegally accessed voting tabulators in an attempt to prove that the 2020 election was stolen.

Both Flynn and Byrne have repeatedly and publicly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency ahead of the upcoming election.

Authorship of the April 12 draft is difficult to pin down,
but several figures connected to the election-denial movement say they had a hand in shaping it.

A key figure is "#Juan O. #Savin",
the nom de plume of #Wayne #Willott, a private investigator turned QAnon influencer who has cultivated a significant following in far-right conspiracy circles.

Savin is perhaps best known among QAnon followers as the subject of a theory that he is actually John F. Kennedy Jr.
—who died in a plane crash in 1999
—living under an assumed identity.

Beyond his QAnon celebrity, however, Savin has formed notable political connections:

In 2021, he co-founded the "America First Secretary of State Coalition", which worked to place election-denying candidates in charge of state elections in key swing states.

The coalition received significant funding from "The America Project",
the organization co-founded by Flynn and Byrne.

In a recent appearance on the right-wing program "Nino’s Corner", Savin said he reviewed an early version of the executive order during Trump’s re-election campaign in the summer of 2024.

Finding that version “inadequate,” he assembled a coalition of “legal minds” and “election experts”
to formulate a new version of the proposed order.

According to Savin, the group met for several days in Washington, D.C. shortly after the inauguration.

Over the following months, he said, the coalition produced approximately 13 drafts before arriving at the 17-page version circulated that spring.

The page count may not be coincidental:
Within QAnon lore, the number 17 carries symbolic meaning,
because “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet,
and believers often treat the number as a coded signal.