On Dec. 14, 2020, the day of the electoral college vote, Republican electors convened in the capitals of five states that Joe Biden had won. They declared themselves “duly elected and qualified” and sent signed certificates to Washington purporting to affirm Donald Trump as the actual victor.
At the time, the gatherings in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — all states that had officially approved Biden electors — were widely derided as political stunts intended to bolster Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud.
Understanding the origins of the rival slates has now become a focus of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to people familiar with the panel’s activities. Two Democratic attorneys general have asked federal prosecutors in recent days to investigate whether crimes were committed in assembling or submitting the Trump slates.
The Trump electors gathered in plain sight, assisted by campaign officials and Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said publicly that the rival slates were necessary and appropriate. Internally, Giuliani oversaw the effort, according to former campaign officials and party leaders who, like some others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. One of the people familiar with the plan said Giuliani was assisted at times by an anchor from the right-wing network One America News.
What comes next for the Jan. 6 committee
The House select committee investigating the attempted insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 faces an uphill battle with former Trump administration officials. (Blair Guild/The Washington Post)
The extent and particulars of the behind-the-scenes coordination — and the refusal by some Trump electors to go along with the plan — have not been previously reported. The campaign scrambled to help electors gain access to Capitol buildings, as is required in some states, and to distribute draft language for the certificates that would later be submitted to Congress, according to the former campaign officials and party leaders.
The campaign also worked to find replacements for the electors who were unable to participate, or unwilling. Among the unwilling were a state GOP chairman, a lawmaker who was one of the first in Congress to endorse Trump and a son of legendary Republican senator Johnny Isakson, The Washington Post found.
When the electoral college votes were cast, Trump’s allies claimed that sending rival slates to Washington echoed a move by Democrats in a close race in Hawaii six decades earlier. They said they were merely locking in electors to ensure they would be available if courts determined that Trump had won any of those states. Republican electors in two additional states, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, sent certificates, but those documents explicitly stated that they were to be considered only if the election results were upended.
In ways that were not publicly known until months later, however, the rival slates were leveraged as evidence in last-ditch efforts to give Vice President Mike Pence the ability to reject Biden’s victory when he presided over the electoral vote count in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Before Election Day, presidential candidates or their parties nominate a slate of potential electors in each state where they appear on the ballot. After the popular vote is certified, the governor in each state is required under federal law to certify the winning candidate’s electors. The electors then meet in mid-December and send signed certificates recording their votes to, among other places, the national archivist and the president of the U.S. Senate. The votes are tallied on Jan. 6.
In a subpoena Tuesday to lawyer Jenna Ellis, who worked closely with Giuliani, the House committee wrote that she “prepared and circulated two memos purporting to analyze the constitutional authority for the Vice President to reject or delay counting electoral votes from states that had submitted alternate slates of electors.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), who referred the matter to federal prosecutors, last week said that submitting the electoral certificates to historical archives and government officials turned what might have been a political event into a “an open-and-shut case of forgery of a public record.”
“This is not political theater. It‘s not protected speech,” Nessel said in an interview. “It’s an attack on the very fabric of our system of government. And so it deserves to have federal prosecutorial and investigative scrutiny.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) outside the Capitol in Lansing as state electors prepare to cast their presidential votes for Joe Biden. (Nick Hagen for The Washington Post)
A spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, Gustavo Portela, accused Nessel of “playing political games.”
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said this week that he, too, had referred the matter to federal prosecutors, while his counterpart in Wisconsin — fellow Democrat Josh Kaul — said he believed the federal government should investigate any unlawful act that furthered “seditious conspiracy.”
Giuliani did not respond to messages from The Post seeking comment. A spokesman for Trump also did not respond.
Ellis declined to comment on her role in the Trump elector plan. She did not respond to a request for comment about the subpoena.
Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn told The Post he took part in conference calls with the campaign’s legal team, including Giuliani, to discuss elector participation.
“This was in total congruence with the overall effort to send it back to the states,” Epshteyn said last week. “With the rampant fraud across the country, the interplay of the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act made it important to have alternate slates of electors be available when a challenge to states’ slate of electors would be successful.”
Multiple courts, recounts and audits have found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Epshteyn was subpoenaed Tuesday by the House committee, as was Giuliani.
Talk of rival electors dated to the days immediately after the election, according to communications released last month by the House committee. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, received text messages proposing a strategy in which Republican legislatures would appoint alternate slates of Trump electors. One text called the plan “highly controversial.”
“I love it,” Meadows responded, according to the committee, which did not release the names of the people who sent the messages. The committee said Meadows responded to a subsequent message about potentially appointing alternate electors by saying, “We have a team on it.”
In late December, Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official sympathetic to Trump, drafted a letter urging Georgia officials to call a special session of the legislature to reconsider Biden’s win. Though Gov. Brian Kemp (R) had certified Biden’s electors, Clark falsely implied that the Justice Department believed the Trump electors were valid rivals to those put forward by Georgia and other states for Biden. Clark’s bosses rejected the proposal to send such a letter, which surfaced publicly after Trump left office. Clark has said his communications were lawful.
Around the same time, Trump attorney John Eastman claimed in memos laying out options for Pence that the rival electoral slates allowed him to declare on Jan. 6 that no winner could be determined in those seven states.
Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, told The Post that Giuliani and his associates forwarded letters from individual state legislators objecting to Biden’s electors and arguing the Trump electors should be recognized instead. Short and Pence’s legal team reviewed the unsolicited letters but were not persuaded there was any legal basis to accept Trump electors who had not been certified by their states, Short said.
Robert F. Spindell Jr., a member of the Wisconsin Election Commission, said he and fellow Trump electors did what was right to preserve the president’s legal avenues should courts rule in his favor. Spindell said he viewed signing the certificate as a “ministerial act” and not as a stealth tactic.
“It was pretty straightforward. Show up, sign the stuff,” he said. “There was no attempt to be secretive about it.”
Giuliani, with lawyer Sidney Powell at right, at the November 2020 news conference at RNC headquarters in D.C. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
At the time, the gatherings in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — all states that had officially approved Biden electors — were widely derided as political stunts intended to bolster Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud.
Understanding the origins of the rival slates has now become a focus of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to people familiar with the panel’s activities. Two Democratic attorneys general have asked federal prosecutors in recent days to investigate whether crimes were committed in assembling or submitting the Trump slates.
The Trump electors gathered in plain sight, assisted by campaign officials and Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said publicly that the rival slates were necessary and appropriate. Internally, Giuliani oversaw the effort, according to former campaign officials and party leaders who, like some others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. One of the people familiar with the plan said Giuliani was assisted at times by an anchor from the right-wing network One America News.
What comes next for the Jan. 6 committee
The House select committee investigating the attempted insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 faces an uphill battle with former Trump administration officials. (Blair Guild/The Washington Post)
The extent and particulars of the behind-the-scenes coordination — and the refusal by some Trump electors to go along with the plan — have not been previously reported. The campaign scrambled to help electors gain access to Capitol buildings, as is required in some states, and to distribute draft language for the certificates that would later be submitted to Congress, according to the former campaign officials and party leaders.
The campaign also worked to find replacements for the electors who were unable to participate, or unwilling. Among the unwilling were a state GOP chairman, a lawmaker who was one of the first in Congress to endorse Trump and a son of legendary Republican senator Johnny Isakson, The Washington Post found.
When the electoral college votes were cast, Trump’s allies claimed that sending rival slates to Washington echoed a move by Democrats in a close race in Hawaii six decades earlier. They said they were merely locking in electors to ensure they would be available if courts determined that Trump had won any of those states. Republican electors in two additional states, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, sent certificates, but those documents explicitly stated that they were to be considered only if the election results were upended.
In ways that were not publicly known until months later, however, the rival slates were leveraged as evidence in last-ditch efforts to give Vice President Mike Pence the ability to reject Biden’s victory when he presided over the electoral vote count in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Before Election Day, presidential candidates or their parties nominate a slate of potential electors in each state where they appear on the ballot. After the popular vote is certified, the governor in each state is required under federal law to certify the winning candidate’s electors. The electors then meet in mid-December and send signed certificates recording their votes to, among other places, the national archivist and the president of the U.S. Senate. The votes are tallied on Jan. 6.
In a subpoena Tuesday to lawyer Jenna Ellis, who worked closely with Giuliani, the House committee wrote that she “prepared and circulated two memos purporting to analyze the constitutional authority for the Vice President to reject or delay counting electoral votes from states that had submitted alternate slates of electors.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), who referred the matter to federal prosecutors, last week said that submitting the electoral certificates to historical archives and government officials turned what might have been a political event into a “an open-and-shut case of forgery of a public record.”
“This is not political theater. It‘s not protected speech,” Nessel said in an interview. “It’s an attack on the very fabric of our system of government. And so it deserves to have federal prosecutorial and investigative scrutiny.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) outside the Capitol in Lansing as state electors prepare to cast their presidential votes for Joe Biden. (Nick Hagen for The Washington Post)
A spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, Gustavo Portela, accused Nessel of “playing political games.”
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said this week that he, too, had referred the matter to federal prosecutors, while his counterpart in Wisconsin — fellow Democrat Josh Kaul — said he believed the federal government should investigate any unlawful act that furthered “seditious conspiracy.”
Giuliani did not respond to messages from The Post seeking comment. A spokesman for Trump also did not respond.
Ellis declined to comment on her role in the Trump elector plan. She did not respond to a request for comment about the subpoena.
Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn told The Post he took part in conference calls with the campaign’s legal team, including Giuliani, to discuss elector participation.
“This was in total congruence with the overall effort to send it back to the states,” Epshteyn said last week. “With the rampant fraud across the country, the interplay of the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act made it important to have alternate slates of electors be available when a challenge to states’ slate of electors would be successful.”
Multiple courts, recounts and audits have found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Epshteyn was subpoenaed Tuesday by the House committee, as was Giuliani.
Talk of rival electors dated to the days immediately after the election, according to communications released last month by the House committee. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, received text messages proposing a strategy in which Republican legislatures would appoint alternate slates of Trump electors. One text called the plan “highly controversial.”
“I love it,” Meadows responded, according to the committee, which did not release the names of the people who sent the messages. The committee said Meadows responded to a subsequent message about potentially appointing alternate electors by saying, “We have a team on it.”
In late December, Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official sympathetic to Trump, drafted a letter urging Georgia officials to call a special session of the legislature to reconsider Biden’s win. Though Gov. Brian Kemp (R) had certified Biden’s electors, Clark falsely implied that the Justice Department believed the Trump electors were valid rivals to those put forward by Georgia and other states for Biden. Clark’s bosses rejected the proposal to send such a letter, which surfaced publicly after Trump left office. Clark has said his communications were lawful.
Around the same time, Trump attorney John Eastman claimed in memos laying out options for Pence that the rival electoral slates allowed him to declare on Jan. 6 that no winner could be determined in those seven states.
Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, told The Post that Giuliani and his associates forwarded letters from individual state legislators objecting to Biden’s electors and arguing the Trump electors should be recognized instead. Short and Pence’s legal team reviewed the unsolicited letters but were not persuaded there was any legal basis to accept Trump electors who had not been certified by their states, Short said.
Robert F. Spindell Jr., a member of the Wisconsin Election Commission, said he and fellow Trump electors did what was right to preserve the president’s legal avenues should courts rule in his favor. Spindell said he viewed signing the certificate as a “ministerial act” and not as a stealth tactic.
“It was pretty straightforward. Show up, sign the stuff,” he said. “There was no attempt to be secretive about it.”
Giuliani, with lawyer Sidney Powell at right, at the November 2020 news conference at RNC headquarters in D.C. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
