Most of the details that have emerged concerning Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election have focused on the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 and the various steps Trump’s team put in place to destroy the process on that day. But that doesn’t mean there were not efforts being made to destroy democracy through a more direct route.

Yet another new memo, this one surfaced by The Washington Post, included a proposal to bypass all legal restrictions and tap directly into the raw data collected by the NSA, giving Trump’s team access to phone records, text messages, social media, emails, and other online activities of everyone in the nation. This unprecedented violation of privacy would then be used so a panel appointed by Trump could skim though the global sea of data looking for anything that could be held up as evidence of foreign interference in the election.

Once found, this evidence would be used to support what may be one of the most chilling examples of bureaucratic doublespeak ever committed to paper, described as “next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies.”

Whether that translates into “roll out the tanks,” or “round up the disloyal,” or both is unclear.

The new document, issued on Dec. 18, 2020, creates a plan for a three-man panel that would have access to all NSA data. All three of those appointed were to be Trump loyalists, with one being former White House aide and Michael Flynn loyalist Rich Higgins. He was kicked off the National Security Council in 2017, after which he issued a memo describing how:

That memo also claimed that the American Civil Liberties Union and Black Lives matter were working against Trump in partnership with the United Nations and the Muslim Brotherhood. Clearly, this was the exactly the right man to be put in charge of reading every American’s text for signs of foreign connections.

All of the data collected by the NSA is supposedly sealed without a court order describing specific information under request. Under the scheme described in the memo, Trump would have avoided all those court defeats by simply bypassing the court and producing whatever “evidence” was required to support his claims directly from his three-man panel.

The plot to hand over all NSA “raw signals data” to Trump’s team and use it to support “[defending] the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies” is described in the article as one of a number of last-ditch efforts by the Trump team as time ticked down on other efforts at overturning the election. With Jan. 6 approaching, a series of court defeats raining down on them, and a lack of apparent commitment from then-Vice President Mike Pence, the Post describes Trump’s team as “desperate” to come up with alternatives. 

But what’s most amazing about this secret memo to bypass the courts, destroy the privacy of every single American, and generate an excuse for ending democracy through a selective reading of Tinder swipes and Subway orders, may be that it wasn’t secret at all.

Just as it took until last month to discover that a 38-page PowerPoint presentation was given to Republican members of Congress to instruct them in how best to assist Trump on Jan. 6, the proposal to read raw NSA data was apparently circulated widely in Republican circles. That includes usual suspect Sen. Ron Johnson, whose office admits they had a copy. So did Sen. Kevin Cramer, who got a copy of the memo courtesy of failed Republican congressional candidate Michael Del Rosso—one of the three would-be members of the All-seeing Panel of Three.

But it was far from only two senators who got a peek at this idea. Just as with the how-to-overthrow-democracy-in-six-easy-steps PowerPoint, this scheme also became the subject of a large meeting involving Cramer, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, and “some two dozen others crammed into a ground-floor hotel conference room.” Johnson was also there via teleconference.

That Jan. 4 meeting, during which the scheme to bypass the courts was presented along with a series of wild claims about Venezuela or China having control of voting machines, is also new information. It apparently had some of the same allegations as the PowerPoint and was intended to move senators to join Josh Hawley in supporting overturning the election for Trump.

Also among the recipients of the proposal to tap every phone call, email, and text message in the nation was My Pillow guy Mike Lindell. Considering that Lindell recently had a multiday telethon devoted to looking at screens of randomly generated static, it’s impossible to say what he might have found if allowed to skim worldwide satellite communications. 

However, there is something that Lindell said when asked about this that keeps coming up. The purpose of the Jan. 4 meeting, according to Lindell, was to sway senators to “delay the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s election victory, making time to examine votes in key states.”

Except there had already been over two full months in which to examine those votes. There had already been machine recounts, and hand recounts, and forensic audits. There had already been more than 80 court cases filed and dismissed for lack of evidence or simple lies. Ten hours, or 10 days, or 10 weeks weren’t going to change that. 

The purpose of getting senators to go along with halting the Jan. 6 count wasn’t to allow more time for investigation, it was to allow Trump to be crowned on that day.