Pour one out for the staff at Mar-a-Lago. After the last 24 hours of revelations from the Times and the Post about Justice Department investigations into the January 6 plot, there’s going to be a whole lot of ketchup on the wall this week.
The New York Timesgot the ball rolling in the afternoon with a cache of internal Trumpland emails from a bunch of lawyers who are about to get bar complaints in the very near future. While the paper isn’t publishing the emails themselves, the quotes make two things abundantly clear: First, that Trump’s lawyers played a central role in marshaling the fraudulent swing state electors. And second, that they knew bloody well that what they were proposing was totally illegal.
“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,” Jack Wilenchik, the lawyer corralling the Arizona cosplay electors, emailed Trump lackey Boris Epshteyn, who is also a lawyer!
Later Wilenchik conceded as how “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding that Kelli Ward, the chair of the state GOP and a putative Trump elector, suggested that they all keep quiet about the scheme “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.”
He was even courteous enough to memorialize in writing for the entire group that the scheme to send the fake electors to Congress, put forth by attorney Kenneth Chesebro, was totally illegal and merely a pretext to let Republicans in Congress overturn Biden’s win.
“His idea is basically that all of us (GA, WI, AZ, PA, etc.) have our electors send in their votes (even though the votes aren’t legal under federal law — because they’re not signed by the Governor); so that members of Congress can fight about whether they should be counted on January 6th,” Wilenchik wrote on December 8, 2020, adding in a parenthetical that congressional Republicans might argue that they were not themselves bound by the Electoral Count Act “because they’re Congress and they make the law.”
Siri, show me consciousness of guilt.
“Kind of wild/creative — I’m happy to discuss,” he rambled on. “My comment to him was that I guess there’s no harm in it, (legally at least) — i.e. 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.”
The scuttlebutt in Trumpland of late is that former chief of staff Mark Meadows has won the coveted “Most Likely to Take the Fall for the Boss” award. And indeed he does seem to have been looped in on some of the shenanigans here, emailing a campaign advisor that “We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.” But the Times reports that the campaign lawyers took the leading role here.
If Coups 4 Dummies lawyer John Eastman was the “brains” behind the plot to substitute fake electors for the real Biden ones on January 6, and Rudy Giuliani was the hype man, Epshteyn appears to have been the central planner — which stands to reason after Rudy’s disastrous performances in the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot and at the RNC, where he leaked hair dye all over the podium. Mike Roman, aTrump campaign operative who cut his teeth as a Koch brothers-funded oppo researcher and worked in the White House as a loyalty enforcer, ran point for Epshteyn, updating a team of lawyers which included Jenna Ellis, the campaign’s Pennsylvania counsel Bruce Marks, the campaign’s Wisconsin counsel James Troupis, Roman’s deputy Gary Michael Brown, and Christina Bobb, who was simultaneously “reporting” for One American News.
Bobb, who later went on to fundraise for the Arizona fraudit while “covering” it for OAN and now works for a Trump PAC, had to round up Rudy Giuliani to talk to Pennsylvania “elector” Doug Mastriano, who is now the Republican gubernatorial nominee. (It’s the circle of cri-i-i-ime.)
“Mastriano needs a call from the mayor. This needs to be done. Talk to him about legalities of what they are doing … Electors want to be reassured that the process is * legal * essential for greater strategy,” she wrote, acknowledging that people on the ground were raising questions already answered by the campaign’s “Don’t worry, it’s totally kosher to sign a piece of paper claiming to be an elector for the guy who lost the election” T-shirts.
And John Eastman, never one to leave the crazy shit unsaid, wrote Epshteyn on Christmas Eve to suggest that it was probably time to mobilize Trump’s “74 million strong” voters to scare the shit out of anyone standing in the way of his coup.
“Let’s figure out a targeted way to deploy them. Rolling thunder? One legislature at a time? The others can see it coming,” he wrote.
Merry Christmas, haters!
Lest we forget, that was after Trump’s “Be there. Will be wild!” tweet on December 18, summoning the mob to DC where they heard Eastman, Giuliani, and of course the sitting president hype lies about election fraud and preposterous legal theories about the vice president’s unilateral right to reject electors. Before descending on the seat of government in a murderous rage, which is not a coincidence!
We’ll have to get to the Washington Post’sscoop about the Justice Department investigating Trump in another post. But let’s take a wildass guess that if Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater have these hilariously incriminating campaign emails, so does Attorney General Garland.
Tick tock, assholes. And if we might quote Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, “Get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.”
[NYT]
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