The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol has issued subpoenas to 14 of the so-called “alternate electors” who’d falsely claimed that then-President Donald Trump had won the election in their states, seeking to find out who was behind “the scheme.”
The panel subpoenaed the people listed as chairperson and secretary for the bogus slates of electors from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to find out more information about the plan to overturn the election results.
“The Select Committee is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives. We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement.
In a letter to one of the “alternate electors,” Thompson noted, the existence of these purported alternate-elector votes was used as a justification to delay or block the certification of the election during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
The phony electors met on the same day the real electors cast their Electoral College votes.
While Electoral College votes are typically ceremonial events that formalize the results of a presidential election, the Dec. 14, 2020 vote came as Trump refused to accept the results of the election and urged legislatures in battleground states that Biden won to disqualify Biden’s electors.
The National Archives, which is responsible by law for receiving all of the certified results from states and then passing them on to Congress to be counted on Jan. 6, received alternative slates from Republicans in several states. But since the federal Electoral Count Act prohibits the archives from forwarding anything other than the slates certified by the states, the agency did not transmit them.
The committee has previously alleged that Trump’s re-election campaign urged state and GOP officials to press state election officials to “delay or deny certification of electoral votes” citing the existence of the alternate electors.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller touted the plan in an appearance on Fox News on the day the Electoral College voted.
“We’re going to send those results up to Congress. This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means that if we win these cases in the courts that we can direct that the alternate slate of electors be certified,” Miller said.
The committee apparently already has some information on the origins of the plan. Thompson said last month said among the records handed over by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows was “a text message exchange with a member of Congress apparently about appointing alternate electors in certain states as part of a plan that the member acknowledged would be ‘highly controversial’ and to which Mr. Meadows apparently said, ‘I love it.’”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
