By Aaron Miller-
The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack have evidence to demonstrate at its fourth hearing on Tuesday that Donald Trump and top advisers coordinated a scheme to send fake slates of electors as part of an effort to return him to the White House.
Its hearings are comprising of appearances from live witnesses with video montages of the attack and snippets of taped testimony from some of the more than 1,000 people interviewed.
The panel will examine Trump’s campaign to pressure top officials in seven crucial battleground states to dishonourably reverse his defeat to Joe Biden in the weeks and months after the 2020 election. The committee will delve into the schemes used by the president and his allies to reverse or withhold the election certification in contested states like Michigan by leaning on Republican-led legislatures and state officials, and how the Trump campaign “organized and drove” the false electors scheme that was ultimately meant to disrupt the transfer of power scheduled to take place on Jan. 6, the aides said.
At the afternoon hearing, the select committee will demonstrate the fake electors scheme, which has played a large part in its nearly year-long investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election at the state level.
The panel will show how the fake electors scheme was at the heart of Trump’s unlawful strategy to have his vice-president, Mike Pence, refuse to certify Biden’s win in certain states and grant him a second term.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer at the Georgia secretary of state’s office, are among those slated to testify on Tuesday.
Raffensperger and Sterling, both Republicans, defended the state’s handling of the 2020 election under both public and private pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn President Biden’s victory in Georgia. Trump was recorded on a phone call with Raffensperger telling him to “find” enough votes to flip the state, and Trump endorsed Georgia GOP Rep. Jody Hice in an unsuccessful primary bid against Raffensperger last month.
Tuesday’s hearing of the U.S. House select committee is expected to detail how Trump and his allies drove a pressure campaign based on lies about the 2020 presidential election, which perpetuated a belief that the election was stolen and contributed to the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to select committee aides.
The committee will dig into how the president and his allies came up with schemes to reverse or withhold the election certification in contested states like Michigan by leaning on Republican-led legislatures and state officials, and how the Trump campaign “organized and drove” the false electors scheme that was ultimately meant to disrupt the transfer of power scheduled to take place on Jan. 6, the aides said.
The panel plans to present some non-live video testimony from Michigan and Pennsylvania witnesses who provided information to the committee during its investigation, as well as from former White House officials and Trump campaign officials, the aides said.
After the authorized Democratic electors met at statehouses to formally name Biden as president, in seven battleground states, illegitimate Republican electors arrived too, saying they had come to instead name Trump as president. The Trump electors were turned away.
However, they nonetheless proceeded to sign fake election certificates that declared they were the “duly elected and qualified” electors certifying Trump as the winner of the presidential election in their state.
The fake electors scheme was conceived in an effort to create “dueling” slates of electors that Pence could use to pretend the election was in doubt and refuse to formalize Biden’s win at the congressional certification on 6 January. And, the select committee will show, the fake election certificates were in part manufactured by the Trump White House, and that the entire fake electors scheme was coordinated by Trump and his top advisers, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Members of Trump’s legal team deny the allegation, claiming that the so-called alternate slates were put together and signed in case that states did re-certify their election results for Trump and they needed to be sent right away to Congress.
The justice department is investigating whether the Republicans who signed as electors for Trump could be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or conspiracy to defraud the United States.
If Trump was involved in the scheme, and the justice department pursues a case, then the former US president may also have criminal exposure. At least one federal grand jury in Washington is investigating the scheme and the involvement of top Trump election lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani.
The select committee is also set to closely focus on Trump’s pressure campaign on leading Republican state officials in the weeks and months after the election, according to a committee aide who previewed the hearing on a briefing call with reporters.
Other issues that the panel intends to examine include Trump’s now-infamous 2 January 2021 call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger – who will testify live at the hearing – when Trump asked him to “find” votes to make him win the election.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said during the conversation, a tape of which was obtained by the Washington Post and House investigators working for the select committee.
The select committee will describe Trump pressuring other state officials to investigate election fraud claims his own White House and campaign lawyers knew were false, relying on testimony from Arizona House speaker Rusty Bowers.
And the panel will additionally hear testimony from Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker in Fulton County, who was falsely accused by Giuliani and others of sneaking in “suitcases” of ballots for Biden – a conspiracy debunked by election officials.
The 6 January select committee has subpoenaed previously unseen footage from a documentary filmmaker who had access to Donald Trump and his inner circle around the time of the 2020 election.
In its subpoena to Alex Holder, which was first released by Politico, the committee asks for any raw footage shot from 6 January 2021, that features discussion of election fraud or election integrity, or featuring interviews with Mr Trump, his children, or Mike Pence.