The proposal to seize and analyze ‘NSA unprocessed raw signals data’ raises legal and ethical concerns that set it apart from other attempts that have come to light
The memo used the banal language of government bureaucracy, but the proposal it advocated was extreme: President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win.
Proof of foreign interference would “support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies,” argued the Dec. 18, 2020, memo, which was circulated among Trump allies.
The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, laid out a plan for the president to appoint three men to lead this effort. One was a lawyer attached to a military intelligence unit; another was a veteran of the military who had been let go from his National Security Council job after claiming that Trump was under attack by deep-state forces including “globalists” and “Islamists.”
Read the memo advocating use of NSA data to attempt to prove stolen election
The third was a failed Republican congressional candidate, Michael Del Rosso, who sent a copy of the memo to Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who confirmed to The Post he received the document from Del Rosso. An aide to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) also said his office received the document but declined to say who sent it. Del Rosso did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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The previously unreported proposal, whose provenance remains murky, in some ways mirrors other radical ideas that extremists who denied Biden’s victory were working to sell to Trump in the weeks between the November 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol. Many of those proposals centered on using government powers to seize voting machines.
Jan. 6 insurrection: The Washington Post’s investigation of the causes, cost and aftermath
But the proposal to seize and analyze “NSA unprocessed raw signals data” on behalf of Trump’s electoral ambitions raises particular legal and ethical concerns and distinguishes the new memo from other attempts that have come to light. The NSA collects a broad range of electronic data, including text messages, phone calls, emails, social media posts and satellite communications. By law, the NSA cannot target a U.S. person’s communications without a court order.
The effort also involved players whose names have not yet publicly surfaced in connection to efforts to overturn the election.
Trump’s continued false claims of 2020 nationwide voter fraud
At a rally on Oct. 9 in Des Moines, former president Donald Trump continued to unleash a litany of false and unproven claims of voter fraud in 2020. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
The memo outlined a plan in which Trump would ask Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller to tap Del Rosso, former NSC member Richard Higgins and an Army lawyer named Frank Colon to carry out the effort.
Miller told The Post he was not aware of the proposal and was not asked to enact it. Colon disavowed any knowledge of the memo, while Higgins did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The Dec. 18 memo was just one in a swirl of last-ditch efforts to prevent Biden’s legitimate victory from being recognized as Trump and his backers grew more desperate after the courts rejected their claims of fraud. Some of his allies mounted a series of efforts to get the memo into Trump’s hands in his final days in office, according to people familiar with the attempts, although no evidence has emerged to suggest they succeeded.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) speaks to reporters as he arrives on Capitol Hill for the fifth day of former president Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, on Feb. 13, 2021. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
“That period in time was amateur hour with people who did not know Trump or had never met with Trump before in their lives attempting to get into the Oval Office to get authorized to do investigations that the rest of the government had examined and had said there was no evidence for,” said Michael Pillsbury, an informal adviser to Trump at the time.
Cramer said Del Rosso sent the memo to his office after a Jan. 4 meeting that both men attended at the Trump International Hotel, which was organized by MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a prominent backer of Trump’s bogus election fraud claims.
Cramer and Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) joined some two dozen others crammed into a ground-floor hotel conference room to discuss election fraud allegations, according to Cramer and an aide to Lummis. Participants recalled that Johnson also attended, via videoconference. The details of the meeting, which took place two days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, have not been previously reported. The meeting was similar to a briefing held in a congressional office building the next day for members of the House.
Michael Flynn, who resigned in 2017 as Trump’s national security adviser and had advocated using the military to “rerun” the election in battleground states, also extended an invitation to at least one senator and his staff, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Flynn did not respond to requests for comment.
That person and others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations and sensitive documents.
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What the senators heard from a handful of presenters were some of the most fantastical claims among those alleging that the election had been stolen — including, according to Cramer, that the 2020 vote had been influenced by foreign powers and that proper investigation required gaining access to voting machines around the country.
“They wanted to get the machines,” Cramer, who later voted to confirm Biden’s victory, told The Post in an interview. He said the presenters accused various countries meddling including China and Venezuela, and a “lot of theories but not a lot of evidence.”
Lindell said he didn’t recall discussion of getting access to machines. He said the goal of the Trump hotel meeting with senators was to line up congressional allies to delay the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s election victory, making time to examine votes in key states.
“We were hoping that the senators would give it 10 more days to give it back to the states,” Lindell said in an interview. “We were in an anomaly in history. We still are.”
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell walks out ahead of President Donald Trump for a White House briefing in March 2020. Lindell organized a Jan. 4, 2021, meeting at the Trump International Hotel about allegations of election fraud. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
‘I was not impressed by these people’
The Jan. 4 meeting was part of a sustained, weeks-long effort by Trump allies to persuade the president and other high-level U.S. officials to take extraordinary actions, including employing the government’s military and intelligence powers, because they claimed the Nov. 3 election had been manipulated by foreign actors. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the election or any indication that foreign interference helped Biden win.While Trump did not ultimately order the national security establishment to intervene on his behalf, such proposals have become a particular focus of attention for the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks because of the extreme danger they would have posed to core tenets of American democracy.
As Jan. 6 approached, a loose network of self-styled technical consultants and intelligence experts redoubled their efforts to press for extreme measures. Some of the figures involved are only now coming into public view.
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