The Day Trump’s Plot to Overturn the Election Got Stuck in the Mail
It turns out that pulling off a scheme to use fake electors to overturn a presidential election isn’t as easy as you might think. What if, for example, the fake elector documents you ginned up to further the plot somehow gets stuck in the mail? Well, then you have to go to elaborate lengths to make sure that your counterfeit credentials make it to Washington in time to stop the actual electoral votes from being counted—an “all hands on deck” moment for President Donald Trump’s crackerjack gang of coup plotters.
That’s one of the primary takeaways from a new report from CNN, adding fresh details to the way Trump’s inner circle plotted to get Vice President Mike Pence to throw a spanner in the works in the days before Trump’s desperate effort to hold onto power in the days before the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. The news comes at a time when secretaries of state around the country are mulling whether Trump’s efforts to topple the electoral process should get him booted from the presidential ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Late Thursday afternoon, CNN reported that it had obtained “emails and recordings” that shine a light on “the chaotic last-minute effort to keep Donald Trump in office”—specifically that the plotters’ “fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail.” Per CNN:
So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress, to try to get the documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence while he presided over the Electoral College certification.
The operatives even considered chartering a jet to ensure the files reached Washington, DC, in time for the January 6, 2021, proceeding, according to emails and recordings obtained by CNN.
This fresh material comes courtesy of improbably named Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro—an indicted co-conspirator in the Georgia election fraud case who has since been cooperating with prosecutors. According to the CNN report, the two Republican lawmakers who were part of this comedic courier chain of fake documents were Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and “a Pennsylvania GOP lawmaker that he believed was Rep. Scott Perry.” (CNN goes on to note that the January 6 committee’s report says “a staffer for a different Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Mike Kelly, helped shuttle the documents that day.”)
In 2017, The New Republic’s Jeet Heer wrote that the oft-maligned Coen brothers movie Burn After Reading—about a group of “imbeciles who have only the most limited understanding of the world around them” who get involved in cynical, seriocomic plot that effectively “captures the amorality that leads people to become entangled in mercenary treason”—was “singularly prophetic of the Trump era.” I think we can all agree that Heer’s take has aged very well.
