The Atlantic‘s Barton Gellman Sounds Alarm With Report on Trump’s Contingency Plans to Deny Electoral Defeat: ‘I Scared Myself With This Story’

Reporter Barton Gellman sounded the alarm on Wednesday about the extensive strategic discussions the Trump campaign has undertaken about how it could delay or deny an electoral defeat this November.

Gellman’s in-depth look at the Trump camp’s contingency plans was published in The Atlantic, and ominously titled “The Election That Could Break America.” Coincidentally, Gellman appeared on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon to discuss his reporting on Wednesday night, just hours after the president all but confirmed his reporting, when Trump bluntly refused to agree to a “peaceful transfer of power” when pressed by a White House reporter. Instead, the president hedged, saying “we’re going to have to see what happens” and then outright called for the invalidation of possibly millions of mail-in ballots in order to accept the election results.

“I read your long article in The Atlantic today,” Lemon said. “You think that this is all part of the bigger strategy. What does it look like?”

“I did this piece by starting with the proposition that President Trump is never going to concede defeat,” Gellman explained. “He could win a electoral majority. If he doesn’t, he will not concede. The system is surprisingly poorly designed to handle a president who won’t concede. Concession is how we end elections. Trump’s plan is to halt the vote count with the day-of votes, to litigate the rest into oblivion.”

“What I learned from this article and describe in great detail is that he and his people are talking about contingency plans to bypass the vote of each state,” Gellman added. In one of the most alarming details from his reporting, Gellman learned of conversations with some GOP sources to simply ignore the popular vote in states with high mail-in ballot numbers and have Republican-majority state legislatures appoint pro-Trump supporters to the Electoral College instead.

Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

“State legislators have the power to appoint electors directly. And legislators in six battleground states are controlled by Republicans,” Gellman reminded Lemon. “We think of electoral votes as representing the results of the popular vote state by state. The Constitution doesn’t guarantee that.”

“This is a reason that elections, especially presidential elections, are so important,” Lemon replied. “Of what you’re saying. How frightening is that prospect for you?”

“I scared myself with this story,” Gellman acknowledged. “I have never broken the fourth wall in a news article and stopped reporting in the third person and gone straight to talking to the reader. I do that in this piece because I think it’s so disturbing, what I have discovered, and so dangerous to the continuity of our democracy. You have a president who is unwilling to accept defeat, who insists out loud, as he did today, that there won’t be a transfer of power, it will be continuity of power.”

“Everyone has to prepare for an election that is not normal,” Gellman added. “Everybody has to understand and understand this better than anyone, the there is no umpire. In an election. There’s no singular official who can say to the loser you’ve lost and the game is over. The system isn’t built that way.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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