GOP Senator Blasts Trump Allies Who Tried to Recruit Him in Plot to Use NSA Data to Overturn 2020 Election: ‘I Was Not Impressed’
Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany was on MSNBC Thursday to explain her recent bombshell report that Trump allies drafted a memo advocating the use of National Security Agency data to help overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Alemany explained the plot and the different approaches figures like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and disgraced attorney Sidney Powell took in trying to get the Trump White House to go along with them – including recruiting U.S. Senators to join their efforts.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) spoke to the Post and confirmed much of the reporting, saying that he “was not impressed” with the pitch or the evidence presented in trying to enlist his support.
“We’ve seen a number of memos and fringy ideas surfaced in recent days and weeks, but this one is a little different in that the players involved in it, whose names were on this memo, have not been yet surfaced before,” said Alemany as she began explaining the rather complex story.
Alemany continued:
One of them actually is still currently a military lawyer, this guy named Frank Colon, who I’m sure you might recognize his name. It was famously photographed on Mike Lindell’s papers as he walked into the Oval Office in the lead-up to Jan. 6 by our all-star photographer Jabin Botsford, but Colon is still a lawyer in the U.S. military.
His name, again, was on the memo along with someone named Michael Del Rosso, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in Virginia along with, again, some pretty fringy conspiracy theorists, a former NSC staffer who left the White House under Trump because he was too extreme, anti-Muslim, thought the U.S. was controlled by the ‘deep state.’
“But this memo is a little bit different in that it did not necessarily layout a plan to seize voting machines,” she argued, “but rather wanted to analyze and secured unprocessed raw data to prove that there was foreign interference in the 2020 election.”
Alemany continued. “That could then sort of lay a foundation for then taking further steps, to maybe seize voting machines or do something more extreme.”
“But we do know a bunch of senators, Kevin Cramer, Cynthia Lummis, Ron Johnson, via Zoom, were briefed explicitly on this memo. They attended a meeting Jan. 4 at the Trump Hotel, two days before the insurrection,” she added mentioning Cramer and the other Senators involved.
Alemany then explained Cramer’s role in helping understand the story:
Now Cramer went on the record for this story and told my colleague Josh Dawsey that he didn’t buy the presentation given by Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, Dell Rosso and a few other of these players in a conference room in the hotel but they were asked by these people to raise the memo to the president. It is unclear how far the memo made it into the mainstream channels of the administration, though.
“Honestly, I was not impressed by these people,” Cramer is quoted as saying in the Washington Post, which reported “he attended as a favor to his friend Lindell and that he brought along his wife.”
“The whole point was getting a message to the president and the vice president on what they should be doing to stop the certification,” Cramer added.
The Post also quotes Cramer, who voted to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, saying, “They wanted to get the machines” and that Trump’s allies had “a lot of theories but not a lot of evidence.”
Watch the full clip above via MSNBC
