A year and a half after Donald Trump and his allies hatched the fake electors scheme, we’re still learning details that aren’t just amazing — they’re also likely to be of interest to officials investigating the scandal.
The Jan. 6 committee, for example, has helped document the fact that the former president was directly involved in the plot. We also learned that Team Trump knew the scheme was illegal because the White House counsel’s office told them so. It also came as a surprise when Ronna McDaniel acknowledged that the Republican National Committee helped put the slates of fake electors together. We even learned that some Trump campaign lawyers distanced themselves from the scheme because it was so obviously dubious.
It reached the point last month that some local Republicans said they felt as if they’d been duped. “We were kind of useful idiots or rubes,” one former Trump campaign staffer in Michigan said. Asked if he would’ve volunteered to be a fake elector, knowing what he knows now, the staffer added, “I absolutely would not have.”
It’s a safe bet that feeling was even more intense yesterday after The New York Times published this report.
Previously undisclosed emails provide an inside look at the increasingly desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack, including acknowledgments that a key element of their plan was of dubious legality and lived up to its billing as “fake.”
According to the communications, which have not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, those involved in the scheme were quite candid — in messages they did not expect the public to see — freely using the word “fake” and leaving little doubt that their plot was unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny.
The Times highlighted one email, for example, from Jack Wilenchik, a lawyer who helped organize the bogus electors in Arizona. “We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Wilenchik wrote on Dec. 8, 2020, in an email to Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign.
The lawyer soon added that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes.” The email added a smiley face emoji.
George Conway, a prominent Republican lawyer, wrote on Twitter yesterday, “If you had asked me to hypothesize, for illustrative purposes, a set of emails that prosecutors would find helpful in proving a fake-elector fraud conspiracy, I would not have come up with anything nearly as incriminating as the emails that the Times just reported on today.” David Laufman, who served as the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence official, added on CNN this morning that the Team Trump members behind the scheme were “malevolent nincompoops.” The revelations didn’t do any favors for those who intended to help execute the plot. The Times flagged another Wilenchik email from Dec. 8, 2020, in which he wrote that Kelli Ward, one of the Republicans participating in the fake electors plan in Arizona, recommended trying “to keep it under wraps until Congress counts the vote Jan. 6th (so we can try to ‘surprise’ the Dems and media with it) — I tend to agree with her.” As a Washington Post analysis added, “The idea was apparently that the slate of fake electors would somehow be kept secret before Jan. 6 and then be sprung on an unsuspecting political world when Congress counted the electoral votes. Precisely why isn’t clear, but it’s certainly a remarkable plot to overturn democracy. It’s also very difficult to square with the fake-elector plot being characterized as merely a contingency.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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