The Big Lie isn’t big enough. We knew in Dec. 2021 that Republicans had forged papers for bogus Trump electors in WI. Two days ago we found out about forgeries in AZ and MI. Now we are up to five states, and looking for more. We are also starting to find out about Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clarke coordinating this conspiracy against our free and fair elections, nay against our entire Constitution. Oh, and who else, you might like to know? Whom did Meadows bring in at the White House, and Clarke at DoJ? (He’s pleading the Fifth.) Watch this space.
Rachel Maddow has been following this rapidly developing story on her evening show, with full credit to reporters and others who are bringing these documents and shenanigans to light, a year after they occurred.
Nicholas Wu, Politico
Jan. 6 panel ramps up investigation into Trump's state-level pressure
POLITICO has identified the information the committee has received from key swing states, as lawmakers prepare to take their findings public.
That’s thousands of documents, among them these forged “certificates of ascertainment of the electors”.
Since the 1/6 Select Committee doesn’t release documents, Wu had the bright idea of asking the states that submitted document, plus the National Archives, which also received copies. It turned out that the fraudulent papers are nearly identical, with only the names of the guilty and their states changed. This gives us the idea that they all derive from the same ancestral word processing file.
Now it is at least five states, and in addition Arizona has two different sets of forged papers from two different groups of Republicans claiming to be Arizona’s electors.
That’s bad news for John McCain. Barry Goldwater, too.
The story as of two days ago, when we knew about only three states, was described yesterday in this DK post by Rebekah Sager of the Daily Kos Staff. When I went looking for background, this post was the second hit on Google.
Records show Republicans in three states forged election docs falsely claiming Trump won in 2020
The non-profit American Oversight has given us the next round, with forged documents from two more states, Georgia and Nevada.
Actually, American Oversight says that they had seven sets of fake documents last March.
March 2, 2021
American Oversight Obtains Seven Phony Certificates of Pro-Trump Electors
The fake electoral certificates were assembled by groups of Trump supporters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who sought to replace the valid presidential electors from their state — who had been chosen by voters in free and fair elections — with bogus slates of pro-Trump electors.
I don’t know how that squares with the results reported above. Maybe we will learn more.
The Pennsylvania Republican Party reports that they got a request from the Trump campaign to send in such bogus papers. They declined, and instead sent in papers identifying who their electors would be if a court declared that Trump had won Pennsylvania. The courts, we all know, did no such thing, so this declaration is a dead letter, but not a crime.
I know nothing about the situation in New Mexico.
Rachel commented on states following up on this story. Michigan has a probe ongoing, and will not say anything more about it.
GOP official dodges questions after she is accused of sending forged certificate claiming Trump won
The forgeries are being investigated by the Capitol riot select committee
Republican activists in Michigan and Arizona tried sending the National Archives fake documents purporting to award each state’s 2020 electoral votes to Donald Trump and Mike Pence. The erroneous documents are now in the hands of the House select committee investigating the 6 January insurrection.
We may expect the Committee to have questions for all of the bogus signatories and any state or party officials they had contact with about all of this. They will want to know, and they will want to tell us, who cooked up this plot, and who paid for it.
Those who like to dig up these kinds of things are all out digging up these kinds of things as you read this, except those who were doing it late into the night and are currently in bed. We may expect Rachel and others to have much more to tell us. I have left out a lot of detail already. This is going to be a book, or more likely several.
Are you having fun yet? I know Rachel is.