TIL the trump campaign directed collaborators to forge and mail in false 2020 electoral documents to try to trick the national archives into certifying trump as the victor in states he lost to Biden.
According to <em>Politico</em>, the false certificates of ascertainment were sent from Arizona and Michigan groups but they were instead turned over to the Jan. 6 congressional committee
I came across a post in a Michigan community that mentioned this, and i asked if it really happened because it seems so crazy that Republican collaborators would directly mail in fake documents saying Trump won states he lost and I hadn't even really heard about it.
But this is exactly what happened, as I found out today after looking for more corroborating sources:
Trump republicans in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Mexico forged false elector certificates and actually mailed in those forged electoral certificates to the national archives, that were examined and found to be forgeries, with trump, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman as the ring leaders calling hundreds of Republicans to ask them to directly commit election fraud and forgery.
Some of them said yes. A bunch of them said yes, actually.
Yea, stop the steal was real, but being perpetrated by Republicans and conservatives, and Americans and its political institutions actually did stop the steal trump and his campaign officials attempted.
Like straight up. Straight up forgery and electoral fraud, even more direct than that Georgia call.
Keep in mind that their goal was and continues to be discrediting the democratic process. They are willing to give up short term gains for long term power.
They have, imo, successfully convinced enough people that elections cannot be trusted. It's why we need more and more people to be election officials but the threat of violence against them is making it challenging.
It's always projection with them. Which is why I wanted to see investigations into some of the states where they won instead of it all being focused where they lost and claimed fraud was happening. Also battleground states they lost but didn't call fraud on.
I feel like I just learned that Arizona didn’t prosecute anyone either. So it feels like the bad people are learning more about the process and how to cheat better. Pretty fucked.
I was pretty heartened to find out the national archives inspected and then rejected all of the false certificates sent in, so I'm going with the glass half full thing here.
I would have liked some convictions as well, but it looks like Michigan is looking to prosecute people, if I understand correctly. I don't know. It seems like the whole prosecution of the false elector plot is still going on.
He should be facing far more serious legal consequences, suffice to say. Rather than this piecemeal, "ooo, maybe we can get him on a technicality" bullshit. If a democracy is incapable of even protecting itself from such a hamfisted coup, how could it hope to protect itself from one orchestrated by a person who isn't pants on head stupid.
I just wanted to ask, did you happen to get the phrase 'pants on head stupid' from zero punctuation back in the day? It's the only place I've ever heard that term before and I still use it all the time
The problem is that Attorney General Garland, for reasons known only to himself, wanted to wait until after the Jan 6th committee issued its report before turning the full power of the DOJ on prosecuting Trump.
I think he did it for political cover; to avoid the appearance of a political motive; but I think it's obvious now that it was a mistake both because Trump was always going to claim political persecution regardless, and because they are now in real danger of running out of time.
The current right wing talking point is its not fraud because it wasn't successful lol. Even if it was successful, it still wasn't fraud because trump believed the election was stolen from him. Oh and state legislator can pick any electors they want at anytime.
"That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't fraud.
And if it was, it didn't work.
And if it had, it would be justified.
And if it wasn't, legislators could elect anyone.
And if they did, we would be right."
The only crimes that aren't punishable are suicide and coup d'etat... If successful. I guess people forgot that last bit. Too bad there wasn't more attempted suicide amongst these guys.
I remember reading about this; in particular, some fake electors showing up to vote for Trump and being turned away. I was super confused, as a european, because it seemed obvious that this meant that they were impersonating officials.
I asked americans why they hadn't been arrested. I don't quite recall the answers, but it was something about them just making a gesture, or just larping. It's still just weird to me.
All those us shenanigans are quite strange. They seem to be allowed to do pretty much anything with no consequences whatsoever. Apparently the us has no laws governing what republican politicians are allowed to do.
They have been arrested and charged and released on their own recognizance which is much cheaper and less onerous than detaining someone who is not a flight risk in jail until they plead or go to trial.
As of now, if memory serves, pretty much all of the fake electors in Michigan have pleaded out for reduced sentences and cooperation agreements. There are some in Georgia who are still holding out to go to trial, but that's a completely different case brought by the state as opposed to by the federal government.
You really need to be careful about believing everything you read on Lemmy, especially when it comes to legal information.
Let's just say that if there were a Lemmy Bar Association, you wouldn't even have to be particularly literate in order to pass the exam and become a member. Lemmy's idea of US law is basically whatever some rando thinks makes sense. It's pretty comical sometimes.
You really need to be careful about believing everything you read on Lemmynearly anywhere on the internet.
Too many people decide to not vote on entirely skewed cherry-picked drip-drip-drip, downright false often without any fact-checking except a tummy sense of truthiness. That's how we get these passive hordes staying at home fondling their purity on Election Day, "bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRitE".
Like nobody would notice the difference or double-check the numbers. "Oh, I guess he did win after all. I could've sworn he didn't, but this document here says he did, so that's that."
I think that's why if I heard rumblings about this before, I didn't clock it as so monumental because what happened is so absurd.
Trump is guilty of insurrection and rape, and those are a couple flagpole reasons in my head that he shouldn't be any sort of political candidate, but he also directly committed electoral fraud in that Georgia phone call and apparently directed Republicans to mail in forged election certificates.
It's just so crazy that I didn't think he and his campaign committed straight up, direct electoral forgery and electoral fraud in multiple states, which they apparently did.
It was a multi-prong attack. The goal was to generate uncertainty in the validity of results certified by the states, and create a justification for Mike Pence to delay certification.
Run a search on mike pence delay certification fake electors and take your pick.
Yes. Although "multi-prong attack" makes it sound like they were somewhat competent when in fact the whole thing was a gross charade of competence performed by the most idiotic dipshits god ever mistakenly crapped out on the earth. And even then it's still all this.
Remember the projection: if they thought this would work, it would absolutely work on the old stinky orange.
Has anyone tried just handing him some papers requesting to be removed from all ballots and seeing if he'll sign them? I think if you gave him a really cool pen with a BIG space to sign he would go for it. If you called him 'sir' in the process he'd probably brag about it later.
Ah yes... "We're going to trick NARA into thinking that we actually won the election. It's not like it's an entire agency made up of the most pedantic motherfuckers on the planet or anything."
Narrator: "NARA is in fact an entire agency made up of the most pedantic motherfuckers on the planet."
I don't think I'd say that, I think the fact that all of the false certificates were immediately flagged and rejected is a good sign.
I think it's a lot more odd that the matter isn't being treated more seriously by the authorities, but I wouldn't say that some recent development indicating a collapse, the aw, shucks recognition of "oh they were just trying" seems oddly within the American tradition.
Maybe falling apart was a bit much but there's some glaring cracks that can no longer be ignored. Hopefully they can be addressed before it comes to that.
This fraud has been known about and even covered fairly well by some news outlets. For example, check out the CNN special report, Trumping Democracy An American Coup, for a lot of details surrounding it and other aspects of Trump's attempts to retain power. It's been a while since I saw it, but if I recall correctly, a really cool thing about this report is that all/most of the politicians interviewed are Republicans. i.e. It's not just a Democrat-spun narrative.
What surprises me is the fact of how little this was actually broadcasted. There was thousands of reports on MSNBC and CNN about how there was claims to be election fraud, but generally it was covering the other side saying it was done to them not actual evidence showing that they did the fraud.
I blame entertainment news as the reasoning for it, they had been much more apt to cover the international conflicts then what's happening domestically because it's attracting more viewers
I don't think it is, I just read a couple articles and then found the Wikipedia page.
I think other people knew about it, but for some reason aren't making this as known as it should be. Or perhaps the American political process is not understood well or broadly enough that direct forgery and fraud isn't making the impact it should when the story is reported on?
I am confused as to why this is not a bigger story or a headline that the Democrats are running with, maybe because there haven't been any convictions related to this yet?
But thanks for bringing that up, I want to look into that and which media I should contact.
My $.02: media companies are interested in perpetuating the political horse race, because it is good for ad sales, so they softball a lot of the really heinous shit, so he looks at least something a normal-ish politician to large swaths of the American electorate who blindly consume their TV news.
If the Trumpist go down this road Putin might be right with his prophesy that the US will collapse within five years.
But don't despair, the 13 founding states will always be welcome in the European Union. Right next to Ukraine :-)