DOCUMENTS OFFER INSIGHT INTO FAKE-ELECTOR EFFORT
Trump aides wanted to give Pence option of citing alternates
When the Electoral College convened on Dec. 14, 2020, a strange thing happened. In seven swing states won by Joe Biden, when the Democrat’s electors assembled to formally elect him president, Donald 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 Trump’s refusal to concede.
But internal campaign emails and memos reveal that 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 that the outcome of the election was somehow in doubt on Jan. 6, 2021, when he was to preside over the counting of the electoral votes.
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 Trump lawyers acknowledged privately that 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 today’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.
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 Carter wrote that Eastman and Trump’s endeavor amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
The Justice Department and an Atlanta-area prosecutor are also investigating the elector scheme, issuing subpoenas and conducting interviews in recent weeks to determine whether it amounted to a crime.