The alternate electors plot revealed
The Washington Post does a deep dive into some of the issues we’ll be hearing about in the hearing tomorrow:
The convening of the electoral college on Dec. 14, 2020, was supposed to mark the end of the wild, extended presidential election that year.
But when the dayarrived, a strange thing happened. In seven swing states won by JoeBiden, when the Democrat’s electors assembled to formally elect him president, Trump supporters showed up, too, ready to declare that their man had actually won.
“The electors are already here — they’ve been checked in,” a state police officer told the group in Michigan, according to a video of the encounter, as he barred the Republicans from the Capitol in a state Biden won by more than 154,000 votes.
In Nevada,a state Biden had won by about 33,600 votes,a photo distributed by the state Republican Party showed Trump supporters squeezing around an undersize picnic table dressed up with a bit of bunting, preparing to sign formal certificates declaring that they were “the duly elected and qualified” electors of their state.
At the time, the gatherings seemed a slapdash, desperate attempt to mimic President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede.
But internal campaign emails and memos revealthat the convening of the fake electors appeared to be a much more concerted strategy, intended to give Vice President Mike Pence a reason to declare the outcome of the election was somehow in doubt on Jan. 6, 2021, when he was to preside over the congressional counting of the electoral college votes.
Oh…
The documents show Trump’s team pushed ahead and urged the electors to meet — then pressured Pence to cite the alternate Trump slates — even as various Trump lawyers acknowledged privately they did not have legal validity and the gatherings had not been in compliance with state laws.
In a public hearing Thursday, the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 explored the end of the story — the pressure campaign placed on Pence to accept the Trump electors as somehow legitimate.
Committee members have said that Tuesday’s hearing will focus on what came before that, how the elector scheme was organized and the ways Trump pressured officials in swing states to go along with his false claims that Biden had lost.
“We’ll show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” committee member Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We’ll also, again, show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme. And we’ll show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislatures back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden.”
Here comes the coup in search of a legal theory:
The testimony and evidence presented by the committee will build on an argument it made in a federal court in California, where it successfully obtained a judge’s order forcing Trump lawyer John Eastman to turn over records to the committee. In ordering Eastman to produce the documents, Federal District Court Judge David O. Carter wrote that Eastman and Trump’s endeavor amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
The shifting internal explanations over whether the elector strategy could be considered legitimate was typified in two emails sent in late December by Eastman, a constitutional law professor who was a leading proponent of the idea. In an email sent on Dec. 19 to a California activist with whom Eastman exchanged periodic notes about the election, Eastman wrote that the electors would be “dead on arrival in Congress.” His reasoning — no state legislature had acted to certify them as valid.
Just four days later, however, Eastman wrote to other Trump advisers that he believed Pence could indeed recognize the Trump electors on Jan. 6, apparently despite their lack of state legislative certification. “The fact that we have multiple slates of electors demonstrate the uncertainty of either. That should be enough,” he wrote.
They planned it from the very beginning, obviously fully aware that they had legitimately lost the election:
The emails show some Trump advisers began strategizing just days after the election about how to construct a legal argument for advancing their own electors, even though laws in every state hold that electors are determined by the certified vote of the people.
In particular, they started mulling whether state legislatures, which in a number of key states were controlled by the GOP, could appoint Trump electors even if the certified results showed Biden won.
“John — what would you think of producing a legal memo outlining the constitutional role of state legislators in designating electors?” conservative activist Cleta Mitchell, another lawyer advising Trump’s team, wrote to Eastman two days after the November vote. “A movement is stirring. But needs constitutional support.”
The notion that state legislatures could choose electors in defiance of voters would be a radical one in modern American history. But the documents show Trump strategists quickly began to pursue the theory, especially as lawyers for the campaign and allied groups racked up losses in court cases that they had urged judges to hear expeditiously, before the electors could meet.
Their idea was that state legislatures could step in if the election had been marred by massive fraud or illegality. The Trump campaign pushed the fraud narrative even though the president and other top officials were told over and over, even by allies, that there was no evidence to support it,committee evidence and testimony has shown.
“That’s the most important point to keep in mind here: The whole predicate was nonsense,” said Edward Foley, an Ohio State University law professor who has studied disputed elections.
By Nov. 28, Eastman had penned a seven-page memo entitled “The Constitutional Authority of State Legislatures to Choose Electors.” Internal emails show a copy was sent to White House staffers, with a cover note that read, “For POTUS.” Another copy was circulated to members of the Arizona House of Representatives by a member who added that it would take only “courage to act.”
Already, Trump advisers were considering how they might attempt to use the alternate elector slates to derail Biden’s win at the joint session of Congress in January. Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump legal adviser, argued in an internal memo that Jan. 6 — not Dec. 14 — was the “hard deadline” for winning the election, particularly if Trump’s electors met and declared him the victor in December.
“It may seem odd that the electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count, and no certificate of election has been issued in favor of Trump and Pence. However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action,” he wrote.
They did everything they could to get around state laws preventing them from carrying out this fraud. The evidence that they knew it was illegal is overwhelming. […]
Four days later, after Congress confirmed Biden’s win and Trump prepared to leave office, Eastman received an email demanding to know what had happened.
“Tell us in layman’s language, what the heck happened with the dual electors? Please?” read the email, which was from a person whose name is redacted in a version released publicly.
In his response, Eastman admitted the facts: The electors never had legal standing.
“No legislature certified them [because governors refused to call them into session], so they had no authority,” he wrote.
“Alas,” he concluded.
Always keep in mind that they knew from the start that they had lost. They were trying to overturn a legitimate election and they knew it.
This is the case we know the DOJ is looking into. If you want a perfect example of voter fraud, this is it.
