A Michigan prosecutor says that Rudy Giuliani, the former personal lawyer to former President Trump, asked him to obtain voting machines from Antrim County following the 2020 presidential election and to send them over to a team of allies to the former president.
In an initial tabulation of the county’s votes in the 2020 presidential election, the voting machines showed then-candidate Joe Biden had beaten Trump by 3,000 votes, The Washington Post reported. But a hand count was later conducted, demonstrating that Trump had actually won the county by more than 3,000 votes, with officials acknowledging that errors had been made in the first tabulation.
A review later blamed the tabulation errors on the fact that the machines where ballots are scanned and counted had not been properly updated by officials, according to the newspaper.
Trump allies seized on this in their effort to spread claims of a rigged election.
Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter told the Post in an interview published on Wednesday that following the 2020 election, he was on a phone call with Giuliani and several other associates in which he was allegedly asked to take county voting machines and pass them along to the former president’s team. However, he said he declined the request.
“I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause,” Rossiter told the newspaper, adding that interested parties and outsiders could not be given access to the voting machines even if there was probable cause.
The Post reported that Giuliani and others allegedly tried to use the initial tabulation error in the Michigan county to falsely illustrate how the entire 2020 election was rigged.
A judge, who had financially contributed to Trump’s campaign, granted a court order by a realtor to get access to the county machines. Giuliani later said that a report regarding the voting machines provided “undisputable” evidence of voter fraud, the newspaper reported.
A lawyer for Giuliani said his client declined to comment on the Post’s questions.
The newspaper’s reporting comes as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol subpoenaed Giuliani and several others last month regarding their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election results.
The Hill has reached out to Rossiter and Giuliani for comment.