Sunday, April 24, 2022

Naming names

Republican members of Congress were heavily involved in calls and meetings with former President Donald Trump and his top aides as they devised a strategy to overturn the election in December 2020, according to new evidence filed in federal court late Friday.

[...]

Lawmakers who attended meetings, in person or by phone, included Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and numerous members of the House Freedom Caucus, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows who provided key testimony about the conversations and meetings Meadows had in December 2020.

The new evidence underscores the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had ultimately enlisted themselves in Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power. Members traded theories about ways to push then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Biden’s election, they parried with the White House Counsel’s Office on the boundaries of the law regarding presidential electors and they met directly with Pence’s staff to encourage him to take direct action on Jan. 6, when Congress convened to count electoral votes.

[...]

Some of the GOP lawmakers were present in December meetings, Hutchinson recalled, when members of the White House Counsel’s Office raised significant legal doubts about a plan for pro-Trump activists to submit “alternate” electors in states won by Joe Biden.

Others attended a Dec. 21 meeting where Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, and some associates advocated a plan for Pence to unilaterally refuse to count Biden’s electors and instead send the election back to various GOP-controlled state legislatures to replace Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

The panel also released text messages between Perry and Meadows about replacing Justice Department leadership before Jan. 6 with officials thought to be more sympathetic to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

[...]

The panel concluded: “It is also now clear that Mr. Trump never telephoned his Secretary of Defense that day to order deployment of National Guard, and never contacted any federal law enforcement agency to order security assistance to the Capitol Police.”

  Politico
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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