MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported this week that Donald Trump’s allies sent fake second sets of Electoral College documents to the government in 2020, falsely declaring that the then president was the recipient of state electors.
“They didn’t do it in one state, not in three states — it was in at least five states where we have now received fake Republican-created documents,” the MSNBC anchor said.
“And it’s not that they, again, created these documents to, like, hold them close to their chest and fantasize that this was a real result. It’s not that they create these documents just for themselves, as a keepsake.”
“They sent them to the government as if they were real documents,” she added.
The documents were signed by Trump supporters who claimed to be legitimate voters in the states that Democrat Joe Biden won, although they did not have the support or approval of any election officials. The papers were intended to challenge the official state electoral rolls that represented the Electoral College votes in favor of Biden with alternative lists of people who would have supported Trump.
Fake documents from Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Michigan were first released in March by government watchdog group American Oversight, but they have come under renewed scrutiny this week as investigation into the January 6, 2021 US Capitol riots intensifies. Politico It was reported Monday that the Jan. 6 committee received fake certificates sent to Arizona and Michigan through the state secretaries of both swing states.
Maddow then cited a December 28, 2020 letter written by Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who supported Trump’s efforts to cancel the presidential election. In it, he claimed that voter rolls supporting both Trump and Biden had been sent to Washington, D.C., two weeks earlier.
This draft letter was dated 28 December. How did this guy, this Trump guy from the Department of Justice, know that two weeks earlier, Republicans in at least five states had actually created these fake voter papers?” Maddow asked.
“Did the Trump Justice Department know about this because it helped Republicans in these states do it? We do not know. But someone helped them do it, because they all submitted the same document in the same font, with the same spacing, in the same language. So someone helped them do it.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel stated this to Maddow. live Thursday that the creation of forged documents violated several state laws and is “absolutely” the subject of a criminal investigation. She said her office had turned the case over to federal prosecutors.
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