Trump edition
In case you aren’t fully aware of the details of the fake elector scheme, the NY Times has published a good explainer. It starts off with a discussion of what took place in Hawaii in 1960 when there was a 100 vote difference in the presidential election and the recount was not expected to be made before the deadline on December 14th. The Kennedy campaign drafted a slate of electors to reflect its win in case it went their way, which it eventually did. The results would not have affected the outcome of the election either way.
The Trump forces used this as their template for the scheme to overturn legal elections in various states on the basis of alleged voter irregularities (not a close election as in 1960):
The Trump plan began with an effort to persuade Republican officials in the targeted states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to help draft, or to put their names on, documents that declared Mr. Trump to be the victor.
That effort was largely led by lawyers close to Mr. Trump, like Rudolph W. Giuliani and John Eastman, who sometimes communicated directly with local points of contact in the state, or by lawyers who worked in the states themselves and dealt with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman or with Mr. Trump’s campaign aides.
Their stated rationale was that Mr. Biden’s victories in those states would be overturned once they could establish their claims of widespread voting fraud and other irregularities, and that it was only prudent to have the “alternate” slates of electors in place for that eventuality.
But, as Mr. Trump had been told by his campaign aides and eventually even his attorney general, there were no legitimate claims of fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the race, and the seven states all certified Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Dec. 14, 2020. Mr. Trump and his allies barreled ahead with the electors plan nonetheless, with an increasing focus on using the ceremonial congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to derail the transfer of power.
Ultimately, several dozen of Mr. Trump’s allies in the states signed false slates of electors, and most were unequivocal in their contention that Mr. Trump had won. But in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, local officials who drafted the documents included a caveat, saying that they should only be considered if Mr. Trump prevailed in the many lawsuits he and his allies had filed challenging the election, and was legally the winner.
Once the false pro-Trump slates had been created, Mr. Trump and his allies turned to the second part of the plan: strong-arming Mr. Pence into considering them during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. The point was to persuade Mr. Pence to say that the election was somehow flawed or in doubt.
“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a pro-Trump lawyer based in Arizona, wrote in an email to his colleagues.
Any number of outcomes could have worked in Mr. Trump’s favor.
Most simply, Mr. Trump and his allies sought to convince Mr. Pence to count the pro-Trump slates, reject those saying Mr. Biden had won and thus unilaterally keep the former president in office.
Alternatively, the Trump team hoped that Mr. Pence might declare the election to be irreparably defective and, under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, let state delegations in the House of Representatives decide the election themselves, a process that would also have given Mr. Trump his victory.
In yet a third option, Mr. Trump and his allies thought Mr. Pence could choose to delay the certification of the electors count, providing the former president with more time to prove his claims of fraud or mount a last-ditch challenge in a Supreme Court case.
At Least 3 Investigations Involve the Fake Electors
In Georgia, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, has notified 16 people who identified themselves as the state’s pro-Trump electors that they are targets in an ongoing criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia.
In Washington, the Justice Department’s inspector general obtained a warrant to search the home of a former department official, Jeffrey Clark, as part of its 18-month long investigation into attempts by Justice Department employees to undo the election.
Mr. Clark pressured the nation’s top prosecutors to send a letter to Georgia state officials falsely stating, among other things, that the legislature should create an alternative slate of electors that supported Mr. Trump.
The warrant indicated that Mr. Clark is being investigated for conspiracy to obstruct the certification of the presidential election, according to a person familiar with the matter. In a related action, the inspector general and the F.B.I. seized the phone of Mr. Eastman.
A federal grand jury this spring issued subpoenas to some pro-Trump electors and Republican officials requesting information about several lawyers closely allied with Mr. Trump and the electors scheme, including Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman, Jenna Ellis, who worked with Mr. Giuliani, and Mr. Chesebro. The subpoenas also sought information about any employees of Mr. Trump or his campaign who knew about the plan.
Some pro-Trump elector slates were filed with the National Archives. It is a federal crime to knowingly submit false statements or documentation to a federal agency for an undue end.
Trump’s Ties Come Into View
While no prosecutor has criminally charged anyone for their participation in the scheme to submit false slates of electors to Congress, possible ties between Mr. Trump and the plan have come into view over the past few months.
In a lawsuit that Mr. Eastman filed hoping to keep scores of documents from reaching the House committee investigating Jan. 6, court filings established that he and Mr. Trump had worked together on several efforts to undo the election results, including the fake electors plan.
In a ruling against Mr. Eastman, Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California said that Mr. Trump had facilitated two meetings “explicitly tied” to persuading Mr. Pence to either reject electors or delay the count. Judge Carter said that “the illegality of the plan was obvious.”
The Jan. 6 committee has also pinned the effort to assemble slates of electors in key battleground states squarely on the Trump campaign, saying that Mr. Trump’s allies “created phony certificates associated with these fake electors and then transmitted these certificates to Washington.”
Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told the committee that he refused Mr. Trump’s directive to create a false slate of pro-Trump electors. “You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath,” he testified saying to Mr. Trump.
Last week, Mr. Pence’s two top White House aides testified before the federal grand jury investigating the electors scheme. The two aides — Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, and Greg Jacob, his counsel — were present in the Oval Office on Jan. 4, 2021, when Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman tried unsuccessfully to convince Mr. Pence that he could invoke the competing elector slates to derail the congressional certification two days later.
As part of its criminal investigation, the Justice Department has begun asking witnesses in the case about Mr. Trump’s involvement.
Trump was certainly involved. He would not have pressured Pence to do what he did if he wasn’t. The whole plot depended upon it.