According to new reporting, Loyalists under former President Donald Trump tried to certify that the Electoral College was in favor of the defeated candidate by using forged documents. MSNBC Rachel Maddow is the host.
Trump loyalists forge documents in at most five states where Joe Biden defeated Trump and submit them for certification. according to Maddow.
The forgeries are not the same as the state-issued paperwork. Maddow noted, but they used very specific language purporting that those who signed it were the “duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America” — even though they were not.
“It’s not like they created these documents to like, hold close to their chest and fantasize that this had been the real outcome,” Maddow said. “It’s not like they created these documents just to keep [for]They were kept as keepsakes. They sent them into the government, as if they were real documents.”
Maddow also said that the effort to flip the election in Trump’s favor appeared to be coordinated. The faked documents “all match, exactly,” Maddow observed. “Same formatting, same font, same spacing, almost the exact same wording. All of them.”
The final part of the program will include the MSNBC host connected these documents to a draft letter, written by a Department of Justice (DOJ) official loyal to Trump named Jeffrey Clark, which “explicitly describes these forged slates of electors from multiple states” as part of a plan to keep the former president in office. Maddow said it was unusual that Clark was aware of these types moves before he suggested the idea for Trump and his associates.
“How did [Clark] know that, two weeks earlier, Republicans in at least five states had in fact created these forged electoral documents?” Maddow asked. “Did the Trump Justice Department know about it because they helped Republicans in those states do it? We don’t know, but somebody helped them do it, because they all filed the exact same document.”
Other documents that were discovered over the past year detail similar strategies devised by Trump allies to win the election. In one such document, Trump’s former lawyer John Eastman devised a six-point plan that relied upon “multiple slates of electors” being usedto cause confusion in the Electoral College certification procedure. Eastman stated that Mike Pence, the former Vice President, could use that confusion to force a vote on the House of Representatives. Trump would then be elected president.
Weeks after the election was called for Biden, Trump aide Stephen Miller also said in December that the campaign’s next step to challenging the election’s outcome was to submit false certificates for ascertainment stating that Trump won in states where he hadn’t.
“An alternate slate of electors in contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress,” Miller said at the time. “This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means if we win these cases in the courts, that we can direct that the alternate slate of electors be certified.”
