Donald Trump implicated in ‘fake voters conspiracy’, committee says

Pressure, intimidation, threats… Republican officials and anonymous people recounted, on Tuesday, the methods of Donald Trump and his lawyers to try to convince him to overturn the result of the American presidential election in November 2020. And one of the members of the parliamentary committee who investigation into the assault on the Capitol ensured that the former American president had directly participated in the “conspiracy of false voters”, which aimed to send Congress a list of alternative voters for the disputed states.

Republican Party boss Ronna McDaniel said in a previous hearing before the committee that it was Donald Trump himself who called her and put her through lawyer John Eastman, to convince her to support these alternative voters having however no legal value – because not having been certified by the legislatures of the States in question. According to her, Donald Trump has “coordinated” with the Republican Party.

This possible involvement of the White House tenant is important because it could be invoked by the committee, if it decides to recommend criminal charges against Donald Trump. However, it is up to Joe Biden’s Department of Justice to decide on a possible indictment.

“Theories but no proof”

The Republican billionaire justified his requests by his conviction that the election had been “stolen” from him by repeating accusations of fraud, which he never provided proof of and which were swept away by the courts. Trump’s claims about his victory in Arizona were “false”, assured Rusty Bowers, president of the House of Representatives of this state, before the commission of inquiry into this attack in Washington.

“Anyone who would say, anywhere and anytime, that I said the election was rigged, it would not be true,” added the elected official. He also called “false” the allegations of the lawyer for the ex-president, Rudy Giuliani, evoking “hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and thousands of dead who had voted” for Joe Biden.

Despite multiple requests, Bower said he “never” saw evidence of the allegations, citing a conversation with the former New York City mayor. “He said, ‘We have a lot of theories, we don’t have any evidence.’ And I don’t know if it was a blunder.

Rusty Bowers refused to convene the local assembly to invalidate the ballot, then to replace the electors elected, responsible for certifying the result of the vote, by supporters of Donald Trump. He was then inundated with “more than 20,000 emails and tens of thousands of phone calls and text messages” as demonstrators, sometimes threatening, gathered outside his home to insult him, he said. , with tears in his eyes, referring to his sick daughter, who died a few weeks later.

Phone call to the Secretary of State of Georgia

Trump’s legal team, however, went ahead with their plan. Supporters of the billionaire, chosen as parallel voters in the key states won by Joe Biden, had overturned the result of the ballot by means of false certificates. But Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the vote, resisted pressure from the White House to declare Donald Trump the winner. “I just thought it was a tragic parody,” commented Rusty Bowers, who voted for the billionaire in 2016 and supported him in 2020.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, had received a phone call from Donald Trump in which the president had asked him to “find” nearly 12,000 ballots in his name, enough to beat Joe Biden in this Southern state controlled by the Republicans.

He had again mentioned electoral fraud and ballot box stuffing, charges dismissed by the courts. But Brad Raffensperger did not give in. “Numbers are numbers and we couldn’t recount (votes) because we made sure we checked every allegation,” he told the committee on Tuesday.

“There were no ballots to be found, the account was accurate and it was certified,” he pointed out. He has also been the target of harassment and threats, like Shaye Moss, a simple election agent from Atlanta who had participated in the counting of the ballots on election night with his mother.

Donald Trump had accused them by name of being “professional scammers”. “It turned my life upside down,” she said Tuesday, recounting receiving racist messages and death threats.

The committee’s fifth hearing will take place on Thursday, and will look into the president’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to stay in power. Donald Trump, who has never conceded his defeat in the presidential election, denounced Tuesday on social networks “political thugs who have criminalized justice on a level never seen before in our country”.