Rudy Giuliani’s sleight of hand scheme wasn’t just forgery but in some cases the actual phony electors tried to enter state buildings claiming they were the legitimate electors and were stopped by state police. Print to fit, maybe the forged documents would still be approved by Pence or Grassley, and then there’d be “no take-backsy” and previous guy would remain in power. Easy-peasy, riot-sleazy… Presto!
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating the fake slates of electors that falsely declared Donald J. Trump the victor of the 2020 election in seven swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had in fact won, a top agency official said on Tuesday.
“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in an interview with CNN.
[...]
“The phony electors were part of the plan to create chaos on Jan. 6, as a pretext for a contingent election,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.
“The fake electoral slates were an effort to create the illusion of contested state results,” Mr. Raskin said. That, he added, would have given Mike Pence, who as vice president presided over Congress’s count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, “a pretext for unilateral rejection of electors.”
“The people who pretended to be official electors in states that were won by Biden were undoubtedly guilty of fraud on the Constitution and on the democracy,” Mr. Raskin said. “It’s a trickier question whether they are guilty of either common-law fraud, state statutory fraud, federal mail fraud or some other offense.”
www.nytimes.com/...
(CNN) Federal prosecutors are reviewing fake Electoral College certifications that declared former President Donald Trump the winner of states that he lost, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told CNN on Tuesday.
"We've received those referrals. Our prosecutors are looking at those and I can't say anything more on ongoing investigations," Monaco said in an exclusive interview.
The fake certificates falsely declaring Trump's victory
were sent to the National Archives by Trump's allies in mid-December 2020. They have attracted public scrutiny amid the House's January 6 investigation into
the pressure campaign that sought to reverse Trump's electoral defeat.
Monaco did not go into detail about what else prosecutors are looking at from the partisan attempt to subvert the 2020 vote count. She said that, more broadly, the Justice Department was "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."
This is the first time that the Justice Department has commented on requests from lawmakers and state officials that it investigate the fake certifications.
The certificates contain the signatures of Trump supporters who falsely claimed to be the rightful electors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico -- all states that President Joe Biden had won.
The efforts, which in many cases seem to have been coordinated by high-ranking members of Trump's campaign team, weren't successful. Congress did not accept any of the illegitimate results on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the actions by those groups across the U.S. still may have been illegal.
Attorneys general in at least two of the seven states where the Republicans met, Michigan and New Mexico, say they have referred investigations regarding the separate slates of electors up the ladder to federal prosecutors.