'High-level decision': Trump lawyer details plot to fly fake elector papers to DC in new recordings
A new batch of leaked recordings show the lengths that former Donald Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro went to make sure so-called "fake elector" documents made it to Washington, DC in time to challenge Congress' certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote count.
CNN obtained and published the recordings from Chesebro's testimony to investigators in Michigan probing the fake electors plot. In the recordings, Chesebro told prosecutors that the Trump campaign went into panic mode when learning that the fake elector ballots from the Mitten State were still stuck in the mail and unlikely to make it to Washington, DC by January 6th. According to Chesebro, this prompted one campaign lawyer to fly the documents overnight and hand-deliver them to lawmakers friendly to their cause of attempting to overturn the election results.
"The general counsel of the campaign was alarmed, and was chartering, well, they didn't charter a jet, they did commercial ... this is a high-level decision to get the Michigan and Wisconsin votes there," Chesebro said.
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Chesebro's testimony and emails he turned over to investigators show a deeply involved plot involving the documents changing hands several times in between Michigan, Wisconsin and Washington. The fake elector papers from Wisconsin were flown from Milwaukee to the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, where a Trump campaign official and a Wisconsin Republican Party official landed with the papers in hand at approximately 10 AM on January 5.
Those two men then handed off the documents to Chesebro after meeting him at the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington, DC for safe keeping. After that handoff, Chesebro and a separate Trump aide met with House Republican staffers to personally deliver the fake elector documents.
“I had the Wisconsin stuff. [Trump campaign aide] Mike Brown had the Michigan stuff. We walked to the Longworth Office Building, and the guy with [Pennsylvania Rep. Scott] Perry, or whatever his name is, and some other fellow, that were like staff members of the House, took them and said, 'We’re going to walk them over to the Senate and give it to a Senate staffer,'” Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors. “I don’t know why logistically we didn’t take it directly to [Wisconsin Sen. Ron] Johnson. But that’s how we did it,” he added.In Wisconsin, state party officials were reportedly annoyed at the Trump campaign's insistence on providing a courier service to ensure the delivery of the fake elector papers."
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The Trump campaign's insistence on using a courier service to ensure the safe passage of fake elector ballots out of Wisconsin reportedly annoyed GOP officials in the Badger State.
"Freaking [T]rump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the [S]enate President," one Wisconsin GOP official wrote to then-party chairman Andrew Hitt on January 4.
Listen to the recordings by scrolling up or clicking this link. And watch CNN's report on the new recordings by playing the video below or by clicking this link.
