“A gift to prosecutors”: Emails expose Trump aides admitting plot to send “fake” electors

Newly released emails are shedding light on the frantic effort by aides to then-President Donald Trump trying to reverse the results of the 2020 election in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

The emails show people connected to Trump working to assemble lists of people who could falsely claim to be Electoral College electors on his behalf in battleground states that he lost.

“Previously undisclosed emails provide an inside look at the increasingly desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack, including acknowledgments that a key element of their plan was of dubious legality and lived up to its billing as ‘fake,” the newspaper reported.

“In emails reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who had worked with the Trump campaign at the time, one lawyer involved in the detailed discussions repeatedly used the word ‘fake’ to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide Vice President Mike Pence and Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome,” The Times reported. “And lawyers working on the proposal made clear they knew that the pro-Trump electors they were putting forward might not hold up to legal scrutiny.”

The emails show how the Trump campaign conspired with others “to organize the elector plan and pursue a range of other options, often with little thought to their practicality,” according to The Times.

According to Just Security’s Ryan Goodman, the emails are a “gift to prosecutors.”

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti tweeted that this is “the sort of proof DOJ is looking for in its investigation of the fake electors scheme.”