The House select committee investigating the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is expected to show at its fourth hearing today that former president Donald Trump and top advisors coordinated the scheme to send fake slates of electors as part of an effort to return Trump to the White House.
The panel is expected to also examine today Trump’s campaign to pressure top officials in seven crucial battleground states in order to corruptly reverse his presidential defeat to Joe Biden after the 2020 election.
The select committee is expected to focus heavily on the fake electors’ scheme, which has played a large part in its investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election at the state level.
The fake electors’ scheme was the underlying basis for Trump’s unlawful strategy to have his vice president Mike Pence refuse to certify Biden’s win in certain states.
In the 2020 election, after the authorized Democratic electors met at statehouses to formally name Biden as president, illegitimate Republican electors also arrived in seven battleground states. They said they had come to name Trump as president.
These electors were turned away. But they still proceeded to sign fake election certificates that declared they were “duly elected and qualified” electors that certified Trump to be the winner in their states’ elections.
These “dueling” electors were created so that Pence could use them to pretend the election was in doubt, and then refuse to certify Biden’s win. The fake election certificates were partly manufactured by the Trump White House, the select committee will show today.
It is important because it could be a crime. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the Republicans who signed as electors could be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud, or conspiracy in order to defraud the U.S. If Trump himself was involved in the scheme, and the justice department pursues the case against him, then a former president may have also committed a crime.
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