Trump had a direct role in plan to install fake electors
Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, former Elections Department employee in Fulton County, Georgia, testifies, as her mother, Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman looks on, during the fourth public hearing of the U.S. House Select Committee to investigate the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, U.S. June 21, 2022.
Pool | Reuters
The House select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot focused its fourth public hearing on how former President Donald Trump and his allies pressured officials in the critical swing states of Georgia and Arizona to challenge President Joe Biden’s victories in the 2020 election.
Tuesday’s hearing revealed new information on how Trump, his team and a handful of Republican lawmakers worked behind the scenes to try to remove electors and replace them with a slate of pro-Trump ones picked by his team and the Republican National Committee. The panel also heard emotional testimony from state election officials who recalled in chilling detail the violent threats and intimidation many of them endured in the wake of the 2020 election.
Here are the main takeaways:
Trump had a ‘direct and personal role’
Witnesses testified under oath to Trump’s direct involvement in efforts to reverse elections in key states by either decertifying Biden’s win or sending an alternate slate of fake pro-Trump electors to cast ballots in the electoral college.
“Trump had a direct and personal role in this effort,” said committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.
Arizona Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers said he refused to cede to Trump and Rudy Giuliani when they asked him to hold an official committee hearing at the Arizona capitol to prop up their claims of election fraud. Bowers said they wanted the hearing to justify arguments to remove and replace the electors.
“I did not feel that the evidence, granted in its absence, merited a hearing, and I didn’t want to be used as a pawn,” Bowers said.
He recalled telling them: “You’re asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath.”
Bowers also said Trump lawyer John Eastman asked him in a separate call to hold a vote to decertify Arizona’s electors.
“Just do it and let the courts sort it out,” Bowers recalled Eastman as saying.
Bowers said he replied: “You’re asking me to do something that’s never been done in history — the history of the United States — and I’m going to put my state through that without sufficient proof? And that’s going to be good enough with me?”
RNC involvement
The committee also said that the RNC was involved in helping the Trump campaign organize fake slates of electors at Trump’s “direct request.”
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel told congressional investigators that Trump, during a phone conversation, “turned the call over to Mr. Eastman, who then proceeded to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors, in case any of the legal challenges that were ongoing changed the result of any of the…
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