By Vihaan Majumdar
The Trump campaign, led by Rudy Guliani, reportedly led the attempt to put pro-Trump electors forward in December 2020, according to CNN and the Washington Post. This is the latest revelation of actions taken by the Trump campaign to overturn President Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
The plot was first reported by American Oversight, a government watchdog group based in Washington D.C., who obtained phony elector certificates in six battleground states: Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, as well as the state of New Mexico – in a failed attempt to suggest that Trump had won those states. American Oversight says the fake electors were assembled to replace the legitimate electors who had been chosen by voters.
Had the plot worked, the phony electors, who would have been dubbed “faithless electors”, would have had enough electoral votes to declare Trump the winner, as only three out of the seven states – Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan – have laws banning the counting of votes from faithless electors.
“It was Rudy and these misfit characters who started calling the shots,” a former Trump campaign member told CNN. “The campaign was throwing enough s*** at the wall to see what would stick.”
Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, was one of the 16 fake electors from Michigan who signed the phony certificates. CNN obtained a recording of him saying, “We fought to seat the electors,” and “the Trump campaign asked us to do it,” at a public event two weeks ago.
The news came as the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection issued a subpoena to Giuliani, along with Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn, and Sidney Powell, all former attorneys for the Trump campaign.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS 2nd District), chairman of the committee, said in a statement that the four lawyers, “advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results, or were in direct contact with the former President about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes.”
