New reporting has revealed that the scheme to use fake electors to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021, was coordinated by members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign team, including Rudy Giuliani, who was his personal lawyer at the time.
Giuliani and other campaign associates coordinated the plan on a state-by-state level, sources told CNN. The Trump campaign was directly involved in finding Trump loyalists to participate in the plan in seven states, and ensured that fake electors could have rooms in statehouses to conduct their unofficial business.
The fake electors’ documents – which were forged but purported to be official – were sent to the National Archives.
The second part of the plan required involvement from former Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the certification of the Electoral College. In order for the plan to come to fruition, Pence had to either accept the fraudulent electors’ votes as real, or say that he couldn’t count any of the votes out of supposed confusion over which were actually legitimate. But despite a campaign to get Pence to participate in the plan, the former vice president refused to do so.
While the fake electors scheme was materializing, Giuliani forwarded letters to Pence from Republican state legislators across the U.S., urging him to accept the false documents as legitimate. The former vice president’s legal team reportedly reviewed the requests but were unswayed, noting that there wasn’t a legal basis for accepting the illegitimate votes.
The scheme to present fake electors and their forged documents as legitimate may become a new focus of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol building. Some members of the commission have expressed an interest in discerning whether or not Trump was involved in the scheme along with his campaign team.
Although Trump vocally supported overturning the 2020 election in the weeks after President Joe Biden was announced the winner, the extent to which the former president was involved in the fake electors scheme is unclear.
The committee expects to receive hundreds of documents from the National Archives in coming days, as the Supreme Court recently dismissed a last-ditch appeal by Trump to keep his presidential records hidden from the January 6 commission. It’s possible that these documents will reveal more information about the extent of Trump’s involvement in his campaign team’s plan.
“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates,” committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said. “And then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election.”
