Over the last couple of days, an alleged tweet posted by President Donald Trump is being circulated on Twitter, in which he supposedly announced that he had "declared Martial Law."
"Under the Insurrection Act I have declared Martial Law," the alleged post read. "This was an attempted coup. Arrests are being carried out all over the nation. Biden has surrendered his passport. More to come!"
The tweet appears to have been spurred by calls by some Trump supporters for Trump to invoke martial law and get the military to intervene in the 2020 presidential election over a conspiracy theory that the vote count was skewed by widespread election fraud and that Trump, not President-elect Joe Biden, won the election.
Trump's White House Meeting Over 'Martial Law' Imposition
The tweet surfaced amid a New York Times report that Trump convened a meeting in the Oval Office on Friday with lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The report claimed Trump had discussed invoking martial law in the heated White House meeting, which was pushed back by participants of the meeting, including WH chief of staff Mark Meadows and counsel Pat Cipollone.
Did Trump Post the Tweet?
Fact-checking website Snopes confirmed that Trump did not write the tweet. Not only did the tweet fail to appear on his Twitter timeline on Dec. 18, 2020 as time-stamped in the tweet, but it also could not be found in a searchable database that archives all of his tweets as well a database of his deleted posts.
Trump also responded to the New York Times report on Twitter, calling it "fake news."
With less than 30 days until Biden's inauguration, Axios reported that White House officials are growing increasingly concerned that the president will abuse his power to overturn the results of the election, which Trump claims was "rigged" despite losing by more than 7 million votes and 74 Electoral College points.
However, his own administration's Department of Homeland Security has debunked Trump's "election fraud" disinformation campaign with a statement holding that the November 2020 election was the "most secure in American history."
