Election conspiracy theorists sent GOP senators a memo demanding 'the seizure of NSA data to overturn the 2020 election'

A memo proposing the seizure and assessment of "National Security Agency (NSA) unprocessed raw signals data" was reportedly circulated among pro-Trump Republican senators, per a new report.

According to The Washington Post, the memo recommended extreme measures be taken in an effort to overturn the presidential election. The message it conveyed was clear: "President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win."

The memo, dated December 18, 2020, argued that evidence of foreign intrusion would “support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies."

It also included detailed plans for the former president to appoint three individuals to spearhead the effort.

Per The Post:

"One was a lawyer attached to a military intelligence unit; another was a veteran of the military who had been let go from his National Security Council job after claiming that Trump was under attack by deep-state forces including 'globalists' and 'Islamists.' The third was a failed Republican congressional candidate, Michael Del Rosso, who sent a copy of the memo to Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who confirmed to The Post he received the document from Del Rosso."

"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.

The document added that the "inquiry would be done confidentially and could be completed in several days," saying, "to treat this solely as a legal issue is to ensure that the USG's response is under-scoped and inadequate."

The memo has raised legal and ethical concerns. Speaking to The Post, Michael Daniel, the chief executive of the Cyber Threat Alliance and former cybersecurity coordinator for President Barack Obama's administration, weighed in with his concerns about the strategy describing it as “a crazy tangle of things” that appears to depict a misconception of the powers of White House policy memos. He also noted that the proposal, as laid out, would also lead to substantial implications.

"To use an overused term, all of this would have been completely unprecedented. I can't imagine anything like that ever having happened before," Daniel told the Post. "It would have been a radical departure from normal procedure."