The Department of Justice is investigating the fake GQP electors scheme that was one element of the Trump Coup Plot. Fake Arizona Republican Electors Potentially Face Federal Charges And Prison Time.
Our partisan hack Attorney General Mark Brnovich aka “Nunchucks” (or is it numbnuts?) supposedly looked into the two groups of fake GQP electors in Arizona, but he has taken no legal action because he is engaged in a coverup of their crime to protect the participants, which include the chair of the Arizona Republican Party and party officers, and current GQP candidates for office, Jake Hoffman, Anthony Kern, and James Lamon.
A new lawsuit filed in the state of Wisconsin may provide a roadmap to suing these two groups of fake GQP electors in civil court.
Press Release: Wisconsin Voters File Suit Against Fraudulent Wisconsin Electors:
Law Forward and Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) today filed suit in Wisconsin State Court against twelve individuals associated with a fraudulent slate of presidential electors who falsely sought to have their votes counted on January 6.
Despite certified election results showing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had carried the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, the fraudulent electors met in the state capitol on the day statutorily designated for the meeting of the Electoral College, cast their votes for Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and sent the false certification of their votes to the President of the U.S. Senate.
The actions of the fraudulent electors in Wisconsin and similar actions in other swing states were a necessary predicate to efforts to persuade Vice President Pence, as President of the Senate, to reject the electoral votes of the real electors in those states on January 6 and count the fraudulent electoral votes instead. Had the scheme succeeded, it would have overturned the legitimate results of the 2020 election. This marks the first suit in the nation filed against fraudulent electors.
“The individuals named in this case schemed to hijack Wisconsin’s role in selecting the president of the United States and to override the will of the voters. We must hold them accountable for their illegal, unprecedented, and profoundly anti-democratic actions,” said Jeff Mandell, President and Lead Counsel at Law Forward. “Supporters of a presidential candidate can and should campaign vigorously. But when the votes are counted, we come together as Americans and celebrate a peaceful, orderly transition of power. These fraudulent electors crossed a line. Their disregard for the law helped lay the groundwork for the insurrection of January 6th. We can’t allow this to ever happen again.”
The lawsuit is filed on behalf of two lawfully elected Wisconsin presidential electors and an additional Wisconsin voter. The defendants named in the suit are the ten fraudulent electors, along with two attorneys who helped orchestrate the illegal scheme. The filing alleges that by fraudulently assuming the office of elector despite certified election results indicating that they were not permitted to do so, the defendants illegally usurped the role of Wisconsin’s rightful electors and undermined the legal authority of voters to choose which candidate will receive the state’s electoral votes.
The suit seeks a judicial declaration that the defendants acted unlawfully when they falsely assumed the office of presidential electors for the State of Wisconsin, as well as an injunction both correcting the historical record and preventing them from engaging in similar violations in the future. The plaintiffs also ask the court to impose statutory fines and monetary damages.
“The actions of these fraudulent electors had real consequences,” said Mary B. McCord, Executive Director of ICAP and a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. “Their fraudulently submitted electoral votes fed into the false narrative that was relied on by those who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, halting the counting of the legitimate Electoral College votes. As important as it is that we hold accountable those responsible for that attack, it’s just as vital that we demand accountability for those whose fraudulent activity undermined the electoral process and weakened our democracy.”
“We must have accountability for these fraudulent electors,” said Mel Barnes, staff attorney at Law Forward. “In America, the voters decide. If the public loses faith in this fundamental principle because officials who disagree with their choices are not held responsible for disregarding the will of the voters, that is toxic to our democracy.”
Today’s filing describes in detail how the defendants deliberately attempted to override Wisconsin’s recounted and certified election results, ignoring state and federal law as well as judicial rulings upholding the election results.
The full complaint can be found here.
The Washington Post reports, Wis. Democrats file first-of-its-kind suit vs. fake Trump electors:
Three Democratic voters in Wisconsin, including two who served as electors for President Biden in 2020, filed suit Tuesday against 10 supporters of Donald Trump in the state, arguing the group engaged in a civil conspiracy to violate state and federal law when they declared themselves presidential electors in 2020 even though Biden won the state’s popular vote.
The group also sued two lawyers who worked with Trump’s campaign and advised Trump’s electors to meet in states Biden had won and declare themselves properly elected.
Lookin’ at you, Rob Natelson. Meet The Right-Wing Lawyer Who Advised Arizona Republican Legislators On Submitting Fake Electors.
Wisconsin was one of five states won by Biden where Republican electors gathered Dec. 14, 2020, and declared themselves “duly elected and qualified” — then sent signed certificates to Washington purporting to affirm Trump as the actual victor of their states.
Though Biden’s win had been formally certified in their states — in some cases confirmed via recounts and upheld by courts — Trump supporters cited the actions of the electors to argue Biden’s win in the states was in doubt. They argued that when Congress met to count the electoral college votes, Vice President Mike Pence could choose to recognize Trump’s electors over Biden’s. Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol after Pence announced he believed that the Constitution required him to recognize only official electors.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has been exploring the origin of the plan to appoint rival slates of Trump electors. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco confirmed in January that the Justice Department is also investigating whether what she termed “fraudulent elector certifications” violated federal law. And in Georgia, a local district attorney has opened an investigation into whether the appointment of fake Trump electors broke state law, said two people familiar with the investigation.
The lawsuit filed in Wisconsin’s Dane County represents a new approach to seeking to hold fake Trump electors accountable. It asks that a judge formally declare that the Trump supporters’ actions were unlawful — that they took actions that constituted a “public nuisance” under Wisconsin law, engaging in a conspiracy that violated the rights of Biden electors and voters.
It also asks that the judge require the Trump supporters to take the unusual step of correcting the historical record by sending a judicial order declaring their actions unlawful to the same government entities to which they sent certificates in 2020, including the president of the U.S. Senate and the National Archives. It also asks a judge to prohibit the defendants from ever serving as presidential electors again and require that they pay monetary damages.
“We have to have accountability for people who try to subvert our election process,” said Jeffrey Mandell, an election lawyer and founder of Law Forward, a nonprofit liberal law firm that focuses on election issues. The firm is representing the plaintiffs, as is Georgetown Law School’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
“These electors decided that they knew best‚ and they disregarded the votes of almost 3.3 million people in Wisconsin in an attempt to hijack the state of Wisconsin’s role in choosing the next president,” he said.
Among the Trump electors named in the suit are Andrew Hitt, who served in December 2020 as chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, as well as Robert Spindell Jr., who serves on the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The suit also names James Troupis, a retired Wisconsin judge who served as a lawyer for the Trump campaign.
[At] the time Trump electors gathered in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin — all states that had officially approved Biden electors — the moves were widely derided as political stunts intended to bolster Trump’s false allegations of fraud. Only after the Jan. 6 attack and subsequent release of internal Trump legal memos did it become clear how the campaign leveraged the rival elector slates to try to argue that congressional Republicans and Pence could overturn the election.
The Washington Post has reported that Trump’s campaign and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani helped coordinate the elector plan, and that some of those who had planned to be Trump electors before the November election refused to go along after Trump did not win the popular vote in their states.
Republican electors in two additional states, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, sent certificates, but those documents explicitly stated that they were to be considered only if the election results were upended.
Biden defeated Trump in Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes, a margin that was confirmed after Trump requested a recount in the state’s two largest Democratic counties. State and federal judges also rejected challenges to Biden’s win.
Although the Wisconsin Capitol was closed to the public because of pandemic restrictions, Trump electors arranged to be admitted to the building Dec. 14, 2020 — the same day Biden electors met publicly elsewhere in the building. There, the Trump electors signed certificates declaring themselves duly elected and mailed them to the National Archives in Washington as if they were legitimate.
CNN reported:
I would encourage the Arizona Democratic Party to contact your counterparts in the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and to follow their lead in suing the two groups of fake GQP electors in Arizona. They need to be held accountable at law.
