Georgia Fake Electors Say Plot To Overturn Vote Was Legal. Or Rudy Giuliani’s Fault. Or The Prosecutor Is Mean. Or … SQUIRREL!

// Ballot Box with Beer Election day drinkingIt’s not clear whether Attorney General Merrick Garland has the stomach to prosecute Donald Trump’s for a blatant attempt to mount an electoral coup by dint of substituting fake electors for the real ones in swing states won by President Biden. But Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis suffers from no such infirmity, and her effort to hold the former president’s cronies accountable keeps chugging along.

Willis recently issued subpoenas to multiple lawyers associated with the Trump campaign, including Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Cleta Mitchell, as well as Senator Lindsey Graham, who called up Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, allegedly asking if there was some way to toss out enough absentee ballots to put Trump over the line in the state. It’s not as egregious as Trump asking Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” and painting a target on the back of an innocent election worker, whom he called “a professional vote scammer and hustler,” but it’s not great.

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As first reported by Yahoo News, DA Willis has now issued target letters to the fake electors who huddled up in the state capital and secretly swore themselves in on December 14, 2020, signing their names to a bogus electoral certificate, which was then submitted to the National Archives. The fake electors, many of whom have political aspirations in the state, are not happy about getting hauled in front of a grand jury to plead the Fifth in person, and filed a furious motion obtained by Politico seeking to quash the subpoenas and disqualify Willis.

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“The abrupt, unsupportable and public elevation of all eleven nominee electors’ status wrongfully converted them from witnesses who were cooperating voluntarily and prepared to testify in the Grand Jury to persecuted targets of it,” they huff, accusing Willis of engaging in a “publicity stunt” and violating state ethics laws by confirming to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the putative electors were now targets of the grand jury probe.

They conveniently memory hole the Yahoo article which broke the news, without apparent help from the DA. Similarly they claim to have been open about the whole process, despite the Trump campaign’s man on the ground in Georgia demanding “complete discretion,” and emailing that “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.” Indeed, the Georgia GOP did publicize the scheme, but only after two reporters found out about the meeting and were denied entry.

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The fake electors defend their actions as not just legal but required by the US Constitution and Georgia law. In their telling, they were obliged to swear themselves in because one of the many Trump LOLsuits seeking to overturn the election was pending, and they needed to dummy up a fake electoral certificate and submit it to the National Archives just in case they succeeded in getting the actual votes tossed out. (Note that they are not arguing there was any legitimate reason to believe the official vote count was wrong.)

They also appear to have gotten the memo that Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman are the dedicated fall guys du jour, and are pedaling as fast as they can to put distance between themselves and the plot to substitute fake electoral slates for the real ones on January 6, 2021. The complainants “did not and could not have had any involvement in or knowledge of any such plan as it was not even conceived until several weeks after the GOP electors had completed their contingent electoral slates on December 14, 2020, and in any event it was never disclosed to or discussed with the nominee electors at any time,” they insist.

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They’re also advocating a maximalist version of the independent state legislature theory — because it wasn’t radical enough already? — in which Willis lacks jurisdiction to investigate because “the States have no jurisdiction to determine which elector slates are ‘fake’ or valid.” By this logic, the losing party should swear in and submit a competing slate of electors every time, since the courts are powerless to stop them, and either the legislature will bless it, or the Vice President can choose among competing slates. Wheeee!

Meanwhile, Georgia Rep. Jody Hice, who championed the Big Lie and just lost a race against Raffensperger to be the Republican Secretary of State nominee in November, has successfully gotten his challenge to Willis’s grand jury subpoena transferred to federal court. In his telling, the Speech or Debate clause protects his right to ratf*ck the vote in Georgia. And Senator Graham has agreed to drop his challenge to the subpoena in a federal court in South Carolina after Willis pointed out that it was premature since he’d never actually accepted service anyway.

As usual, Rudy Giuliani’s response was the most spectacular, in the sense that he failed to respond at all. As Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Stephen Fowler reports, the former head of the SDNY USAO failed to show up for a show cause hearing on July 13 before Justice Farber of the Supreme Court of the State of New York where he could have contested the Georgia grand jury’s Certificate of Material Witness. So now he’s due to testify in Atlanta on August 9.

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Well played, all.

False Georgia electors are deemed targets of DA criminal probe [Politico]
Exclusive: Fulton County DA sends ‘target’ letters to Trump allies in Georgia investigation [Yahoo News]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

Crime, Election Law, Fani Willis, Government, Rudy Giuliani


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Originally posted on: https://abovethelaw.com/2022/07/georgia-fake-electors-say-plot-to-overturn-vote-was-legal-or-rudy-giulianis-fault-or-the-prosecutor-is-mean-or-squirrel/