Rudy Giuliani rarely gets good press these days, but it’s been especially bad as of late.
Giuliani and the Trump campaign team coordinated a failed scheme to submit illegitimate Republican electors in several states the former president lost in 2020, according to a new report from CNN Thursday, published just days after the former New York mayor-turned-Trump lawyer was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
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Former President Donald Trump’s team participated in multiple planning calls with state and local Republicans in seven states, according to CNN. They even reportedly helped coordinate meeting places for the Trump-supporting illegitimate electors to meet and circulate fake certificates that later wound up sent to the National Archives.
If proven, the accusations would represent some of the clearest evidence so far that people working under Trump were directly and intimately involved in the effort to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate win in the presidential race.
Michigan Republican Party co-chair Meshawn Maddock, who was one of the fake Trump electors put forward in Michigan—where Biden won by more than 150,000 votes, more than 10 times Trump’s margin of victory there in 2016—implicated the Trump team during a recent event, according to leaked audio obtained by CNN. “We fought to seat the electors,” Maddock said. “The Trump campaign asked us to do that.”
In Nevada, the state GOP sent the National Archive falsified documentation showing Trump had won the state’s six electoral votes, Las Vegas station KLAS reported earlier this month. Biden won that state by more than 30,000 votes, or three and a half percentage points.
The purpose of the scheme, according to CNN, was to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to aid in the effort to deny certification and overturn the election results, and keep Trump in the White House.
Pence didn’t do that, and despite nearly 150 Republican members of Congress voting to deny certification of Arizona and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, the effort failed and Biden’s win was certified—but not before hundreds of Trump supporters breached the Capitol building, delaying the process for several hours.
A former Trump campaign staffer told CNN that after “Rudy and these misfit characters” took charge of the campaign, the campaign “was throwing enough shit at the wall to see what would stick.”
Giuliani and three others—Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, lawyer Sidney Powell, and former Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn—were issued subpoenas by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot earlier this week. The letter to Giuliani accused the former New York mayor of seeking “to convince state legislators to take steps to overturn the election results.”
Jan. 6 committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson told reporters Thursday that the committee is investigating potential White House involvement in the fake elector plot, according to CNN.
Giuliani lawyer Robert Costello indicated in an interview with CNN Tuesday that Giuliani will attempt to claim attorney-client privilege and executive privilege rather than cooperate with the investigation.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said earlier this week that while she believes federal authorities should handle any criminal prosecutions, she has enough evidence to charge the illegitimate electors with a crime.
“Seemingly there’s a conspiracy that occurred between multiple states,” Nessel told the Detroit Free Press.
“So if what your ultimate goal is, is not just to prosecute these 16 individuals but to find out who put them up to this, is this part of a bigger conspiracy at play in order to undermine the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, not just in Michigan but nationally?” Nessel said. “It creates jurisdictional issues.”
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