Voter fraud conspiracies ‘beameddown from the mothership’

The 45-page charge sheet shows the desperation of Trump acolytes to convince state officials their election results were fraudulent.

Rudy Giuliani warms up the crowd on January 6, 2021. Picture: AFP

As Donald Trump and his team of legal advisers, including Rudy ­Giuliani and Sidney Powell, tried to pressure, persuade and cajole Republican election officials around the country into believing in widespread voter fraud, one of his top White House staff remained singularly unconvinced.

“I’ll obviously hustle to help out on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mother ship,” the unnamed staffer wrote on December 8, 2020, exasperated by the White House’s attempt to portray a video of election workers acting fraudulently during the count at State Farm Arena, Atlanta.

The 45-page indictment against the former president, along with his six unnamed co-conspirators, highlights the desperation of Trump acolytes, and Mr Trump himself, to convince state election officials in six states, including Georgia, to proclaim their states’ election results were fraudulent.

In Arizona, even some of Mr Trump’s lawyers appeared to concede their hopeless predicament: “We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories” one told the Republican Arizona house Speaker, according to the indictment, but to no avail.

“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election. I voted for Donald Trump and worked hard to re-elect him, but I cannot and will not entertain violating the law,” the Speaker later responded in a public statement. The Arizona ­attorney-general described Mr Trump’s arguments as “kind of wild/creative” on December 8.

On December 14, the states’ electors around the nation cast their votes for the presidency, reflecting the outcomes in their individual states and falling 232 to 306 in Joe Biden’s favour. Before, during and after that, the then president and his team were agitating to flip some of the electors.

 

Mr Trump claimed without evidence that more than 140,000 votes had arrived suspiciously in Detroit, costing him Michigan. “Detroit is corrupt. I have a lot of friends in Detroit. They know it,” he fumed to one official.

Yes, in some states, dead people had voted, Mr Trump’s officials told him, but only two in Georgia, not the 10,000 plus the former president suspected without evidence, according to that state’s Republican secretary of state.

After multiple allegations of voter fraud had come to nothing, the deputy White House legal counsel in December told Mr Trump that “there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House on January 20”.

Mr Trump’s and his lawyers’ desperation grew. In January, that same counsel warned of “riots in every major city in the US” if the president didn’t leave the White House and concede the election. “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” replied one of the president’s lawyers, a reference to a law that allows the president to dispatch the military within the US in certain extenuating circumstances, a worrying sign of where the US could have headed days later.

Mike Pence, the former vice-president, emerged by far the best from the indictment. “You’re too honest,” Mr Trump sneered at Mr Pence on January 3, after the latter had repeatedly refused to buy into an obscure legal argument that he could alter the election result.