The January 6 committee sent Giuliani a subpoena letter earlier this month specifically referring to his efforts instigating the ploy.Īnother area of intense interest is the draft letter prepared in December 2020 by Jeffrey Clark, a relatively lowly justice department official, who tried to persuade Georgia and six other states won by Biden to call back their electors from Congress and consider replacing them with Trump electors. The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection has also recently begun to focus on the fake Trump electors, and particularly those who organized the plot.Ī figure of special interest is Rudy Giuliani, who acted as a lawyer for the Trump campaign and who has been reported to have spearheaded the fake elector strategy. The fact that Republicans left a paper trail by sending their phony certificates to both Congress and the National Archives suggest that they may now face legal peril. Their referrals appear to have triggered the DoJ’s investigation. The move was in direct contravention to the actual vote in Georgia, confirmed in multiple counts, which Biden won by 11,779 votes.ĭemocratic attorneys general in at least two of the seven states – New Mexico and Michigan – have now asked federal prosecutors to examine whether drawing up the bogus certificates amounted to a crime. The fake statement then carries the names and signatures of 16 fake electors who claimed falsely to have cast their electoral college votes for Trump when in fact they had no legal standing to do so. The certificate from Georgia, one of the most hotly contested states in 2020, reads: “We, the undersigned, being the duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice president of the United States of America from the state of Georgia …” Official certificates naming the electors for the winning candidate in each state are then sent to Washington to be certified, in this case on 6 January, when hundreds of violent Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to disrupt the process.Įarlier this month the pro-democracy group American Oversight obtained under freedom of information laws the bogus certificates from all seven states in which Republicans attempted to overturn the election result. Under America’s arcane presidential election system, US presidents are not chosen directly by voters but indirectly through electoral college votes meted out state by state. The other five states sent signed statements to Washington giving the appearance that Trump had won despite clear and verified counts placing Biden on top. Of those, two – New Mexico and Pennsylvania – added the caveat that the Trump electors should only be counted in the event of a disputed election. Monaco added: “We are going to follow the facts and the law wherever they lead to address conduct of any kind and at any level that is part of an assault on our democracy.”įake slates of Trump electors were sent to Congress from seven states in fact won by Biden – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. She said the department had received referrals on the matter and “our prosecutors are looking at those”. In an interview on CNN, the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, revealed that the justice department has begun an investigation into what she called the “fraudulent elector certifications”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |