manipulated the vote count.[221] Giuliani's chief investigator, Bernie Kerik, acknowledged that his team was not able to find any proof that a Dominion voting machine improperly switched, deleted, or injected votes during the 2020 election.[222]
President Trump was not swayed by these basic facts. The President continued to promote the ASOG report, hounding DOJ to investigate the matter further. He returned to ASOG's claims during a December 27th call with Acting Attorney General Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Donoghue, citing the report's claimed error rate of 68 percent in Antrim County. Donoghue pointed out to the President that the difference between the computer and hand count was only one vote and that he "cannot and should not be relying on" ASOG's fraudulent claim, because it was simply "not true."[223]
President Trump's fixation on Dominion's voting machines and the baseless theory that the machines had manipulated votes led to a concerted effort to gain access to voting machines in States where President Trump was claiming election fraud. On the evening of December 18th, Powell, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.) and Patrick Byrne met with the President at the White House. Over several hours, they argued that President Trump had the authority, under a 2018 executive order, to seize voting machines. Several administration officials joined the meeting and forcefully rejected this extreme proposal.[224] Multiple lawyers in the White House, including Eric Herschmann, Derek Lyons, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone "pushed back strongly" against the idea of seizing voting machines. Cipollone told the Select Committee it was a "horrible idea," which had "no legal basis,"[225] and he emphasized that he had "seen no evidence of massive fraud in the election."[226] White House advisor Eric Herschmann similarly told the Select Committee that he "never saw any evidence whatsoever" to sustain the allegations against Dominion.[227] National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien phoned into the December 18th meeting and was asked if he had seen "any evidence of election fraud in the voting machines or foreign interference in our voting machines." O'Brien responded that his team had "looked into that, and there's no evidence of it."[228]
Around the same time, President Trump, Mark Meadows, and Rudy Giuliani were repeatedly asking the leadership of DHS whether the agency had authority to seize voting machines, and they were repeatedly told that DHS has no such unilateral authority.[229] Giuliani and Powell were also engaged in efforts to access voting machines in multiple States with the assistance of sympathetic local election officials.[230] Those efforts turned up no evidence of any vote manipulation by any Dominion machine, but President Trump continued to press this bogus claim.
