In the aftermath of the 2020 election, allies of former President Donald Trump circulated a memo that called for using the National Security Agency to prove foreign powers interfered in the contest.
The origins of the memo, dated Dec. 18, 2020, remain murky, but it talked about how Trump should put together a three-man team to use NSA resources to search through raw data the agency collected, the Washington Post reported.
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“Expert DOD legal opinion of this work product is that it provides sufficient predicate to form search inquiries against NSA unprocessed raw signals data under the existing authorities of NSPM-13. Those targeted inquiries will likely identify hard evidence of foreign involvement in DOD data which will support all other efforts to reverse the fraud,” the memo said. “If evidence of foreign interference is found the team would generate a classified DOD legal finding to support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies.”
The proposed team to oversee the investigation included Republican congressional candidate Michael Del Rosso, former National Security Council member Richard Higgins, and lawyer Frank Colon. The team would go oversee the data processing and put together a public presentation of their findings. The document suggested that Trump could declassify data as necessary.
Colon said he did not know about the document, while Higgins and Del Rosso did not comment on it, according to the Washington Post.
The memo said the job would be completed “confidentially” and within a couple of days. The investigation would focus on foreign-based vote count manipulation in the 2020 election but did not specify which countries may have been behind the alleged manipulation. The memo did not list a sender or a recipient.
The memo was circulated among several Republicans, including the offices of Sen. Ron Johnson and Sen. Kevin Cramer, the Washington Post reported. Cramer told the news outlet that he received the memo from Del Rosso after they attended a meeting at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to discuss alleged voter fraud.
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The NSA collects a broad range of digital data. While it uses its tools to sift through metadata, it is not legally allowed to target U.S. citizens’ personal communications without a court order.
Trump and some of his allies have repeatedly argued that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and irregularities despite those claims being roundly rejected by courts and election officials.
