Jan 6 panel ties Trump to fake state electors scheme
Plot sought to replace elected representatives in battleground states
Former US President Donald Trump was directly involved in a scheme to put forward slates of false pro-trump electors in states won by Joe Biden, the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol revealed yesterday during a hearing into his pressure campaign on state officials to subvert the 2020 election result.
The committee played deposition video from Ronna Mcdaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, who testified that Trump personally called her about furthering the scheme. Trump put conservative lawyer John Eastman on the phone with Mcdaniel “to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors”, she testified.
The revelation came during the fourth of the panel’s hearings this month, in which it called Republican state officials from Arizona and Georgia who testified about how Trump clung to claims of election fraud he knew were false, relentlessly pressured them to embrace the lies and overturn the election results, and knowingly put them at risk when they refused to go along.
“A handful of election officials in several key states stood between Donald Trump and the upending of American democracy,” Chairman Bennie Thompson said yesterday, praising them as heroes and the “backbone of our democracy”.
Arizona Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers said he was subjected to a public smear campaign, including relentless bull-horn protests at his home and a pistolwielding man taunting his family and neighbours. Officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states told similar stories of having their cellphone numbers and home addresses spread publicly after they refused Trump’s demands.
The select committee worked to untangle the elaborate “fake electors” scheme that sought to have representatives in as many as seven battlegrounds — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico — sign certificates stating that Trump, not Biden, had won their states.
Bowers walked through what started with a Trump phone call in which the defeated president laid out his proposal to have the state replace its electors.
“I said, ‘Look, you’re asking me to do something that is counter to my oath,” Bowers testified.
Bowers insisted on seeing Trump’s evidence of voter fraud, which he said Trump’s team never produced beyond vague allegations. He said
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told him: “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”
The committee also showed a message sent from an aide to Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson to an aide for Vice-president Mike Pence early on January 6 saying Johnson wanted to give Pence an “alternate slate of electors for MI and WI”.
“Do not give that to him,” Pence aide Chris Hodgson replied. Johnson didn’t, a spokeswoman said.
Conservative law professor John Eastman, a lawyer for Trump, pushed the fake electors scheme in the weeks after the election. Trump and Eastman convened hundreds of electors on a call on January 2, 2021, encouraging them to send alternative slates from their states where
Trump’s team was claiming fraud.
The fake electors idea was designed to set up a challenge on January 6, 2021, when Vice-president Pence presided over a joint session of Congress in what is typically a ceremonial role to accept the states’ vote tallies. But the effort collapsed when Pence refused Trump’s demands that he halt the certification of Biden’s win — a power he believed he did not possess.
That’s the certification the Capitol mob tried to stop.
At least 20 people in connection with the fake electors scheme were subpoenaed by the House panel. The committee says it will show that it has gathered enough evidence to connect the varying efforts to overturn the election directly to Trump. —AP