The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will present evidence in a public hearing this week about then-President Donald Trump’s involvement in a failed scheme to push slates of bogus electors to overturn the 2020 election results, Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the panel, said Sunday.
“We’ll show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Schiff, D-Calif., said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We’ll also again show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme. And we’ll show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislators back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden.”
The system held, he said, because numerous state and local election officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, “upheld their oath to the Constitution.”
After the election, certificates purporting to be from Trump electors were sent to the National Archives in Washington, DC, by Republicans in seven battleground states that Joe Biden won — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The efforts, which were ultimately unsuccessful, created two sets of electors: an official group selected by the states and the fake ones.
Asked whether the committee has evidence that Trump “directed” the scheme, Schiff said, “We don’t want to get ahead of our hearing.”
“We’ll show during the hearing what the president’s role was in trying to get states to name alternate slates of electors, how that scheme depended, initially, on hopes that the legislatures would reconvene and bless it,” Schiff said. “They didn’t, and they pressed forward with it anyway.”
The Justice Department said this year that federal prosecutors were looking into the legal ramifications for those involved in the scheme to push slates of fake Electoral College members declaring Trump the winner of states that Biden won.
