Former President Trump‘s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a plot to create fake electors during the 2020 presidential election in an attempt to keep Trump in charge, three people with knowledge of the plan told CNN.
The former president’s lawyer led the charge in seven key states that Trump lost by working with allies at the state-level so fake certificates could be sent to the National Archives, according to CNN’s sources.
In a recording obtained by CNN, Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, who was also a fake elector, said at an event that the Trump campaign asked Michigan to seat electors.
“We fought to seat the electors. The Trump campaign asked us to do that,” she said.
Other states that were involved in the scheme include Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico.
Sam DeMarco, one of the Trump electors in Pennsylvania, told the outlet that electors in the state urged Trump officials to add a caveat to the fake certificates saying they were only electors if Trump won the election after his court challenges. New Mexico added a similar caveat.
All the other states did not add that legal caveat as many were convinced of the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election.
Another source told CNN the Trump campaign got rooms in statehouses and recruited pro-Trump electors to meet about sending the certificates in December.
“It was Rudy and these misfit characters who started calling the shots,” a former Trump campaign staffer told the outlet. “The campaign was throwing enough sh-t at the wall to see what would stick.”
On the day the electoral votes were certified, a source familiar with the issue said former Vice President Mike Pence’s team carefully worded his speech to exclude the fake electors as Pence was concerned about the issue.
The CNN report comes days after the Jan. 6 House committee issued a subpoena against Giuliani for his alleged involvement in the fake elector scheme.
“You actively promoted claims of election fraud on behalf of former President Trump and sought to convince state legislators to take steps to overturn the election results,” the committee said in the subpoena.