The Supreme Court May Have Handed Trump A ‘Road Map’ For Stealing An Election

When the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled earlier this month that presidents are immune from criminal charges for laws they allegedly break while performing official duties, Adav Noti, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, thought back to the final weeks of Donald Trump’s time in the White House.

Faced with an embarrassing defeat to Joe Biden, Trump and his campaign had orchestrated a nationwide effort to challenge the loss in court, lying and citing conspiracy theories about fraud. Eventually, they summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., that attacked Congress in an unsuccessful effort to overturn the election results.

But a couple weeks before the Capitol attack, Trump made a crucial decision. In furtherance of his efforts to cast doubt about the election results and provide the grounds to overturn them, outside advisers had urged Trump to issue an order to seize voting machines nationwide, in order to gin up evidence about the machines being compromised. There was even a draft executive order drawn up announcing the seizure. But Trump did not issue it.

The Capitol attack the following month was a crisis, to be sure, but a president issuing a lawless order to seize voting machines would have represented something closer to a directive to overthrow the American democratic process, in which elections are largely run by states and localities.

Now Noti, a former attorney at the Federal Election Commission, wonders if Trump would have acted differently if the new Supreme Court ruling had been in place.

“People in the White House counsel’s office and DOJ said, ‘It’s illegal, you can’t do that,’ and they won that argument,” Noti said. “That’s the conversation that I think potentially comes out differently