Jan. 6 Panel and State Officials Seek Answers on Fake Trump Electors

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Jan. 6 Panel and State Officials Seek Answers on Fake Trump Electors

Mr. Thompson’s committee this week received more than 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House related to various attempts to challenge the e

Mr. Thompson’s committee this week received more than 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House related to various attempts to challenge the election, according to a National Archives log, including a draft of an executive order calling for extreme measures.

The draft executive order, which was obtained by Politico and called for the military to seize voting machines and deploy the National Guard, was the subject of heated debate inside the White House in December, as the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn promoted wild conspiracies about voting machines. Others in the room, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed.

The flurry of interest around the actions of the fake electors comes after reports in The Washington Post, CNN and Politico revealed new details about the Trump campaign’s efforts to organize the slates. Ultimately, the efforts were rejected by Vice President Mike Pence.

Though he did not directly acknowledge the existence of alternate electors as he presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, Mr. Pence did amended the traditional script read by a vice president during such proceedings, adding language making clear that alternate slates of electors offered up by states were not considered legitimate.

As he ticked through the states, Mr. Pence said repeatedly that the result certified by the Electoral College, “the parliamentarian has advised me, is the only certificate of vote from that state that purports to be a return from the state, and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the state purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.”

It is not clear who first proposed that Republican-led state legislatures in key states that Mr. Biden won could replace the electors chosen by the voters with a different slate. But John Eastman, a lawyer who would later present Mr. Trump with an elaborate plan for overturning the election, was one of the first to bring the idea up publicly when he addressed Georgia lawmakers by video on Dec. 3, 2020, and advised them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”

At the time, the notion was roundly ridiculed by legal scholars who dismissed it as a futile attempt to subvert the will of the voters.

www.nytimes.com