Don’s coup push
Former President Donald Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani pushed GOP election officials and lawmakers in key states to help keep the 45th president in power by any means necessary — despite his 2020 election loss, the select committee investigating last year’s Capitol riot heard Tuesday.
At one point, Republican Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers recalled taking a call from Trump and Giuliani, during which Bowers was asked to sign off on a plan to remove the state’s pro-Biden electors and replace them with a slate loyal to Trump.
“I said, ‘Look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath that I swore to the Constitution,’ ” said Bowers, who did not reveal who specifically pitched the idea to him.
“I said, ‘I’ve got some good attorneys, and I’m going to give you their names, but you’re asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath.’ ”
During the same call, Giuliani claimed to have evidence that hundreds of thousands of votes by illegal immigrants had swung Arizona to Biden. But when the former Big Apple mayor was asked to produce proof at a later meeting with GOP legislators, he backed down.
According to Bowers, Giuliani admitted: “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”
“Afterwards, we were kind of laughing about it,” Bowers recalled. Turning to Georgia, the House panel played a series of audio clips from Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to state Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — in which the president told Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” one more than his margin of defeat in the Peach State.
“The real truth is I won by 400,000 votes at least,” Trump said at one point. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
The committee also heard from former Georgia election worker Wandrea Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, who were both accused by Trump and Giuliani of “rigging” the election and said they received racist abuse for months afterward as a result.
At one point, the mother and daughter were alleged by Giuliani to have passed a USB thumb drive to each other while working in an Atlanta ballot-counting area. Moss revealed to the committee that the “drive” was actually a “ginger mint.”
“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States targeting you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one,” Freeman said in a prerecorded deposition. “But he targeted me, Lady Ruby! A small-business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.”