Texts show Trump advisers' plot to use false electors to 'flip states' [View all]

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2024/04/26/in-texts-trump-advisers-touted-using-false-electors-to-flip-states/73454731007/

Lansing — In text messages, officials within then-President Donald Trump's campaign and lawyers laid out detailed plans for how Republicans posing as battleground states' electors could spur lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence to alter the outcome of the 2020 election, tossing aside millions of votes for Democrat Joe Biden.

Some Trump allies have argued, for three years, that the false electoral certificates simply provided a legal lifeline in case a court reversed Trump's loss, so then, and only then, the GOP slates could be recognized. But Trump aides' own text messages — more than 400 pages of them were obtained by the Michigan Attorney General's office and reviewed by The Detroit News — painted a different picture.

On Dec. 31, 2020, lawyer John Eastman, who was assisting the Trump campaign, told Boris Epshteyn, one of Trump's top advisers, that if Pence rejected electoral votes from the seven states that Biden won but where Republicans submitted alternate electors, "Trump wins 232 to 222."

"OK got it," Epshteyn replied.

Lawyer John Eastman lays out a path he sees in a Dec. 31, 2020, text message with other Donald Trump campaign advisers as a way of holding Democrat Joe Biden below the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win the presidency.

Then, lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who was leading the Trump campaign's planning around the false electors, added, "The math sounds tough, but that's why it's so key that all the electors voted on Dec. 14 — it allows us to flip states, not just tie them up to deny them to Biden."

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