| As President Donald Trump tried to hang on to power after his election loss, he surrounded himself with advisers, lawyers and seemingly random people who were willing to give him ideas. We keep learning just how drastic some of them were. Here are some of the most extreme ideas that circulated around Trump about how to overturn the election and what we know about how he acted on them. They're in rough order of how seriously they were taken. Not seriously considered: Use the NSA to try to prove election fraud  (Patrick Semansky/AP) | My colleagues reported today that a December 2020 memo suggested Trump use the National Security Agency, the vast spy agency, to look through foreign emails and phone records and other logs to try to show that foreign powers had intervened in the election — thus providing a supposed basis for throwing out the result. The notion that foreign players hacked into voting machines is baseless. Even in 2016, after multiple investigations of Russian interference in the election, there was no evidence that Russians managed to change any votes after they were cast. The Washington Post reports that the memo made its way to the offices of two Republican senators, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. But it's not clear this ever got to the White House, and it's not an idea we heard Trump or his allies talk about prominently, if at all, in 2020. Considered at the highest levels of the White House: Declare a national emergency and try to seize ballots A retired Army colonel says he was one of several people who briefed members of Congress on a wacky, out-there PowerPoint about how to overturn the election that sounded a lot like instituting martial law. The PowerPoint slides suggested delaying the Jan. 6 congressional certification of Joe Biden's win, declaring a national emergency and seizing paper ballots to prove baseless fraud claims. That colonel's name is Phil Waldron. If you haven't heard of him, you're not alone; neither have most people who follow politics. He rocketed to fame in the Trump world by forcefully denying the election results. That appears to be his only qualification, yet his ideas ended up reaching some of the highest levels of the White House, such as Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Considered by Trump himself: Seize voting machines This bold proposition appeared to derive from a draft executive order Trump appeared to have considered issuing. This idea was brought to Trump, directly, in a White House meeting in December, about a month after he lost. And it appears he even pushed for it: The New York Times reports that Trump told his attorney Rudy Giuliani to call the Department of Homeland Security and ask whether it was legal to take these machines. (It isn't.) Why Biden wants to appear tough-ish on crime  President Biden speaks at police headquarters in New York City on Thursday. (Alex Brandon/AP) | Rising violent crime in U.S. cities is not something you hear Democratic leaders talk about a ton. But on Thursday, President Biden went to New York City to talk about crime prevention with police and the city's newly elected, tougher-on-crime-talking mayor, Eric Adams (D). We talked in yesterday's newsletter about how inflation is a real political problem for Biden and his party ahead of November's midterm elections. Public safety could be up there, too. Republicans I talked to who worked on the GOP's successful governor's race in Virginia last fall say that their campaign was pretty straightforward: education, public safety, inflation. It's a trio that hits a wide array of political persuasions, one strategist told me They know that attacking Democrats in particular as weak on crime works. In 2020, Republicans running for Congress spent a lot of money on ads accusing Democrats of being tied to or tacitly supportive of "defund the police," even though it's a movement relegated to the fringe of the Democratic Party. And Republicans surprised even themselves in those elections with how well they did. One place Biden definitely won't be this week: The Beijing Winter Olympics  Activists protest the Beijing Olympics Games in D.C. on Thursday. (Shawn Thew/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) | The Olympics are officially starting in China, but the president and his administration are boycotting it because of the host country's human rights record. "Standing up for human rights is in the DNA of Americans," White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said. "We have a fundamental commitment to promoting human rights." (Canada, Australia, Britain and India are also joining the diplomatic boycott — their athletes and those from the United States are still participating.) She's referring specifically to China's treatment of ethnic Uyghur Muslims. "It's hard to understand why anyone feels it's even possible to celebrate international friendship and 'Olympic values' in Beijing this year," the head of the Uyghur Human Rights Project told Post sports columnist Barry Svrluga. This is actually a topic with rare, pretty bipartisan agreement among U.S. politicians. Recently, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) led the charge alongside one of the Senate's most liberal members, Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), to pass legislation prohibiting imports of products made by forced laborers in Xinjiang, home to many ethnic Uyghurs. Biden signed it into law last month. | 
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