In the weeks after the 2020 election, Rudolph W. Giuliani and other legal advisers to President Donald Trump asked a Republican prosecutor in northern Michigan to get his county’s voting machines and pass them to Trump’s team, the prosecutor told The Washington Post.
Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter said in an interview that Giuliani and several colleagues made the request during a telephone call after the county initially misreported its election results. The inaccurate tallies meant that Joe Biden appeared to have beaten Trump by 3,000 votes in a Republican stronghold, an error that soon placed Antrim at the center of false claims by Trump that the election had been stolen.
Rossiter said he declined. “I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause.” Even if he had had sufficient grounds to take the machines as evidence, Rossiter said, he could not have released them to outsiders or a party with an interest in the matter.
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Legal scholars said it was unusual and inappropriate for a president’s representatives to make such a request of a local prosecutor. “I never expected in my life I’d get a call like this,” Rossiter said.
Giuliani declined to comment in response to questions from The Post, his attorney said.
Giuliani’s team called Rossiter around Nov. 20, 2020, Rossiter said, as it worked to overturn Trump’s defeat to Biden. The direct appeal to a local law enforcement official was part of a broader effort by Trump’s allies to access voting machines in an attempt to prove that the election had been stolen. That effort extended to a recently disclosed draft executive order for Trump’s signature to have National Guard troops seize machines across the nation.
A Post examination found that the call to Rossiter was also part of a behind-the-scenes intervention by Trump’s legal team in Antrim that seized on the county’s election night blunder and helped twist the mistake into supposed proof of a vast conspiracy to rig the election.
Antrim is dominated by elected Republicans, and the small rural county last backed a Democrat for president in 1964. A review commissioned by state officials later found that the election-night error was largely the result of officials’ failure to properly update machines that scan and count paper ballots following a last-minute change to ballots in several precincts. This led to inaccurate vote tallies in the county’s initial results.
After addressing the mistakes in the days that followed, officials announced that Trump had in fact beaten Biden by more than 3,000 votes, a result that was confirmed by a hand recount of the paper ballots marked by voters. The county clerk, Sheryl Guy, later said in a report that the error was an honest mistake that she “owned, acknowledged and accepted.”
But as Trump’s advisers searched for evidence to support his false claims that the election had been stolen, they focused on Antrim. Having unsuccessfully pressed Rossiter and another county official for access to the voting machines, they supported an election lawsuit brought by local Realtor William Bailey, who won a court order granting him access to the machines from a judge who had recently donated to Trump’s campaign.
A purported “forensic report” produced for Bailey’s lawsuit, created by a team that his attorney later described in a podcast interview as “forensic scientists and data collection scientists,” claimed that data gathered from Antrim’s machines provided evidence of sweeping fraud. The machines — made by Dominion Voting Systems, which had become a focus of election conspiracy theories — were “intentionally and purposefully designed” to manipulate votes, the report said. Experts have called that conclusion false and the report critically flawed.
The 23-page report was produced by a team that included Phil Waldron, the pro-Trump retired army colonel now best known for circulating a PowerPoint presentation before Jan. 6 that said troops could seize ballots. The report was signed by Russell J. Ramsland Jr., a conservative activist who has claimed since 2018 that elections were compromised and leads the Texas-based company Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG).
Neither Ramsland nor Waldron responded to requests for comment.
The analysts who examined Antrim’s machines for ASOG were accompanied by Katherine Friess, a former Republican Senate counsel who was working with Giuliani on Trump’s legal effort, the Traverse City Record-Eagle first reported. They made two visits to municipal offices in Antrim to inspect voting machine data, arriving on private planes provided by Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock chief executive, Byrne told The Post. Byrne, who was deeply involved in efforts to prove the election was stolen, described himself as part of an independent team that gave assistance to Giuliani and others.
The ASOG report was released to the public via a Dec. 14 court order, as electoral college members met to cast their presidential votes in state capitols. Alongside the report, Bailey’s attorney submitted an affidavit to court from a former engineering professor who raised additional concerns about voting machines. The metadata of a version of the affidavit posted to the attorney’s website lists Friess as the creator of the document the previous month. Friess did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
When the ASOG report was made public, Giuliani issued a news release calling it “nothing short of mind-blowing.” The evidence of fraud it presented, he claimed, was “undisputable” and reason for state lawmakers to “halt any further approval of presidential electors until all of these machines have been seized for auditing and analysis.” The news release was authored by Friess, according to the metadata of a copy posted online that day by a TV news station in Michigan.
Election challengers demand to observe the counting of absentee ballots on Nov. 4, 2020, in Detroit. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The president’s legal team cited alleged findings from Antrim to pressure battleground state lawmakers to reject Biden’s victory. The claims about Antrim were eventually presented as a key justification for the draft executive order for troops to seize machines. Trump cited the case of Antrim in his speech on Jan. 6 shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol.
Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham University Law School and former chair of the American Bar Association’s criminal justice standards committee, said Giuliani and his team were wrong to ask Rossiter to seize the county’s voting machines.
“One might understand someone who’s not a lawyer asking, not knowing it wouldn’t be lawful. It’s another thing for a lawyer who used to be a U.S. attorney,” Green said. “If anyone knew the prosecutor couldn’t comply, it should be Rudy Giuliani.”
Rossiter, a Marine Corps veteran, became Antrim’s prosecuting attorney — Michigan’s equivalent of a district attorney — in 2013 after more than a decade as a prosecutor in the county office. While he was reelected as a GOP candidate in 2020, Rossiter said, he stressed to Giuliani’s team that “politics play no part” in his official duties.
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/02/09/giuliani-antrim-prosecutor-voting-machines/
Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter said in an interview that Giuliani and several colleagues made the request during a telephone call after the county initially misreported its election results. The inaccurate tallies meant that Joe Biden appeared to have beaten Trump by 3,000 votes in a Republican stronghold, an error that soon placed Antrim at the center of false claims by Trump that the election had been stolen.
Rossiter said he declined. “I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause.” Even if he had had sufficient grounds to take the machines as evidence, Rossiter said, he could not have released them to outsiders or a party with an interest in the matter.
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Legal scholars said it was unusual and inappropriate for a president’s representatives to make such a request of a local prosecutor. “I never expected in my life I’d get a call like this,” Rossiter said.
Giuliani declined to comment in response to questions from The Post, his attorney said.
Giuliani’s team called Rossiter around Nov. 20, 2020, Rossiter said, as it worked to overturn Trump’s defeat to Biden. The direct appeal to a local law enforcement official was part of a broader effort by Trump’s allies to access voting machines in an attempt to prove that the election had been stolen. That effort extended to a recently disclosed draft executive order for Trump’s signature to have National Guard troops seize machines across the nation.
A Post examination found that the call to Rossiter was also part of a behind-the-scenes intervention by Trump’s legal team in Antrim that seized on the county’s election night blunder and helped twist the mistake into supposed proof of a vast conspiracy to rig the election.
Antrim is dominated by elected Republicans, and the small rural county last backed a Democrat for president in 1964. A review commissioned by state officials later found that the election-night error was largely the result of officials’ failure to properly update machines that scan and count paper ballots following a last-minute change to ballots in several precincts. This led to inaccurate vote tallies in the county’s initial results.
After addressing the mistakes in the days that followed, officials announced that Trump had in fact beaten Biden by more than 3,000 votes, a result that was confirmed by a hand recount of the paper ballots marked by voters. The county clerk, Sheryl Guy, later said in a report that the error was an honest mistake that she “owned, acknowledged and accepted.”
But as Trump’s advisers searched for evidence to support his false claims that the election had been stolen, they focused on Antrim. Having unsuccessfully pressed Rossiter and another county official for access to the voting machines, they supported an election lawsuit brought by local Realtor William Bailey, who won a court order granting him access to the machines from a judge who had recently donated to Trump’s campaign.
A purported “forensic report” produced for Bailey’s lawsuit, created by a team that his attorney later described in a podcast interview as “forensic scientists and data collection scientists,” claimed that data gathered from Antrim’s machines provided evidence of sweeping fraud. The machines — made by Dominion Voting Systems, which had become a focus of election conspiracy theories — were “intentionally and purposefully designed” to manipulate votes, the report said. Experts have called that conclusion false and the report critically flawed.
The 23-page report was produced by a team that included Phil Waldron, the pro-Trump retired army colonel now best known for circulating a PowerPoint presentation before Jan. 6 that said troops could seize ballots. The report was signed by Russell J. Ramsland Jr., a conservative activist who has claimed since 2018 that elections were compromised and leads the Texas-based company Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG).
Neither Ramsland nor Waldron responded to requests for comment.
The analysts who examined Antrim’s machines for ASOG were accompanied by Katherine Friess, a former Republican Senate counsel who was working with Giuliani on Trump’s legal effort, the Traverse City Record-Eagle first reported. They made two visits to municipal offices in Antrim to inspect voting machine data, arriving on private planes provided by Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock chief executive, Byrne told The Post. Byrne, who was deeply involved in efforts to prove the election was stolen, described himself as part of an independent team that gave assistance to Giuliani and others.
The ASOG report was released to the public via a Dec. 14 court order, as electoral college members met to cast their presidential votes in state capitols. Alongside the report, Bailey’s attorney submitted an affidavit to court from a former engineering professor who raised additional concerns about voting machines. The metadata of a version of the affidavit posted to the attorney’s website lists Friess as the creator of the document the previous month. Friess did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
When the ASOG report was made public, Giuliani issued a news release calling it “nothing short of mind-blowing.” The evidence of fraud it presented, he claimed, was “undisputable” and reason for state lawmakers to “halt any further approval of presidential electors until all of these machines have been seized for auditing and analysis.” The news release was authored by Friess, according to the metadata of a copy posted online that day by a TV news station in Michigan.
Election challengers demand to observe the counting of absentee ballots on Nov. 4, 2020, in Detroit. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The president’s legal team cited alleged findings from Antrim to pressure battleground state lawmakers to reject Biden’s victory. The claims about Antrim were eventually presented as a key justification for the draft executive order for troops to seize machines. Trump cited the case of Antrim in his speech on Jan. 6 shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol.
Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham University Law School and former chair of the American Bar Association’s criminal justice standards committee, said Giuliani and his team were wrong to ask Rossiter to seize the county’s voting machines.
“One might understand someone who’s not a lawyer asking, not knowing it wouldn’t be lawful. It’s another thing for a lawyer who used to be a U.S. attorney,” Green said. “If anyone knew the prosecutor couldn’t comply, it should be Rudy Giuliani.”
Rossiter, a Marine Corps veteran, became Antrim’s prosecuting attorney — Michigan’s equivalent of a district attorney — in 2013 after more than a decade as a prosecutor in the county office. While he was reelected as a GOP candidate in 2020, Rossiter said, he stressed to Giuliani’s team that “politics play no part” in his official duties.
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/02/09/giuliani-antrim-prosecutor-voting-machines/
