Jan. 6 Committee Focuses On Trump Scheme To Solicit Slates Of Fake Electors

WASHINGTON – The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol sharpened its focus Tuesday on former President Donald Trump ’s scheme to send slates of “false” electors to Congress in an attempt to overturn his election loss.

New subpoenas went out to six new witnesses, including two Trump campaign aides, state legislators and Republican Party officials from three of the states involved in the plan.

“The select committee is seeking information about efforts to send false slates of electors to Washington and change the outcome of the 2020 election,” committee chair Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said in a statement. “The select committee has heard from more than 550 witnesses, and we expect these six individuals to cooperate as well.”

Among the six are two new celebrities among Trump followers: Mark Finchem, an Arizona state lawmaker who is running to be the top elections official there, and Doug Mastriano, a Pennsylvania legislator who led the efforts to overturn Democrat Joe Biden ’s victory in that state. Both reportedly also attended the Jan. 6 rally that turned into a deadly riot in the attempt to keep Trump in power.

Also subpoenaed: Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party who was among the 11 fake Trump electors there; Laura Cox, the former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, who reportedly witnessed Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani pressure legislators to overturn Biden’s win in that state; and Michael Roman and Gary Michael Brown, two Trump campaign officials involved in promoting the fake elector plan.

All six have been ordered to turn over relevant documents and then sit for depositions next month.

The Jan. 6 committee had previously subpoenaed two of the fake electors from each of the seven states where the Trump White House and Trump campaign had pushed the scheme.

A total of 84 Republicans signed paperwork claiming to be Trump electors (as opposed to the Biden electors chosen by the voters in their states), although 25 of them — 20 from Pennsylvania and five from New Mexico — made clear in their attestations that they would only be “duly elected and qualified” electors if the election results in their states were reversed by a court order or other legal proceeding.

The verbiage included in Pennsylvania’s document was enough for the state attorney general to conclude that they had not done anything illegal, even if it was “misleading.”

The remaining 59 GOP officials from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, however, included no such qualifiers in their paperwork, and instead claimed to be their states’ legal electors.

Among those 59 are six Republican National Committee members, including Ward in Arizona — a fact that led the RNC to approve a resolution condemning Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), the two Republicans on the Jan. 6 committee, and accusing the committee of going after Trump supporters for participating in “legitimate political discourse.”

Trump himself has been unrepentant about his actions to effectively overthrow the republic and retain power despite losing his election by 7 million votes nationally and 306-232 in the Electoral College.

In a speech last month  in Texas, Trump advocated for unrest across the country if prosecutors went after him. “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt,” he said.

A few minutes later, he said that the over 700 of his supporters who have so far been arrested for storming the Capitol — a number of whom assaulted police officers in the process — have not been treated fairly, and offered pardons to them should he regain the White House.

The following day, Trump claimed in a statement that former Vice President Mike Pence “could have overturned the election” for him and let him remain in office.

Trump and his aides had assigned Pence the key role in the scheme to nullify the results of the presidential election after the Electoral College formally voted on Dec. 14, 2020, sealing Biden’s victory. Trump’s White House and campaign aides pressured Republicans in several states Biden won to send up slates of Trump “electors” anyway.

According to Trump, Pence could have cited these “competing” slates of electors to ignore the electoral votes from those states entirely — and then, with Trump holding a lead in the remaining states, ruled him the winner.

But Pence made sure to sabotage that plan by crafting language that allowed him to ignore Trump’s fake slates of electors from the outset.

Trump became the first president in more than two centuries of elections to refuse to hand over power peacefully. Five people died in connection to the Capitol riot, four police officers died by suicide in the weeks and months following the assault, and another 140 officers were injured.

Despite this, Trump remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party and is openly speaking about running for the presidency again in 2024.