'We Need Ammo': CNN Sheds Light on GOP Lawmakers' Flip-Flopping on Trump's 2020 Election Challenge
© AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin
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On 15 April, CNN released messages obtained by the Dem-led House Select committee on the 6 January attack. The exchange between Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and then-White House chief of staff Meadows showed how the congressmen had grown disenchanted with Team Trump's effort to challenge the 2020 election outcome.
"We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend," Roy wrote to Mark Meadows on 7 November 2020, as then-President Donald Trump was raising concerns over potential election irregularities after his rival Joe Biden was projected by the US media as the president-elect.
For his part, Lee offered his "unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections" in his message to Meadows.
Judging from the exchange, it was Lee who lobbied Meadows to get attorney and former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell access to Trump. Powell was well-known among conservatives for providing legal defence to Trump's former national security adviser General Michael Flynn.
FILE PHOTO: Sidney Powell, an attorney later disavowed by the Trump campaign, participates in a news conference with U.S. President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani (not pictured) at the Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. November 19, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
However, after the 19 November 2020 news conference, where members of Trump's legal team – including Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis – made a series of statements with regard to the alleged election fraud in key battleground states, the congressmen took on a more critical tone.
"Hey brother - we need substance or people are going to break," Roy texted to Meadows on November 19, while Lee expressed concerns about "the Powell press conference".
"The potential defamation liability for the president is significant here," Lee wrote. "For the campaign and for the president personally. Unless Powell can back up everything she said, which I kind of doubt she can."
At that time, Powell suggested that Trump had won the 2020 election "in a landslide," adding that Dominion, a voting machines manufacturer, had manipulated votes. She also alleged that Dominion received payment from foreign states, including Cuba, Venezuela and China. The voting machines producer denied the accusations; last year, Dominion filed a defamation lawsuit against Powell, seeking $1.3 billion in damages.
According to CNN, by late November 2020, Lee had shifted away from Powell and started promoting conservative lawyer John Eastman. Roy also supported Eastman's candidacy while subjecting Rudy Giuliani to heavy criticism.
In December 2020, both GOP congressmen expressed growing concerns to Meadows about the plan to challenge the certification of the election on 6 January 2020.
"If you want senators to object, we need to hear from you on that ideally getting some guidance on what arguments to raise," wrote Lee on 16 December 2020. "I think we're now passed the point where we can expect anyone will do it without some direction and a strong evidentiary argument."
On 31 December, Roy appeared pretty scared: "The president should call everyone off," he wrote to Meadows. "It's the only path. If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by congress every 4 years... we have destroyed the electoral college... Respectfully."
At that time, Team Trump was discussing both choosing new electors in the battleground states and trying to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to challenge the outcome of the Electoral College vote. On 5 January 2020, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, forwarded to Meadows a legal opinion by Washington attorney and former Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz. Schmitz provided detailed reasoning for suggesting that Pence had the constitutional authority to object to the certification of electoral votes submitted by a handful of states.
Lee and Roy both voted to certify the electoral results in favour of Biden, even though over 100 of their GOP colleagues in both the House and Senate did not. On 6 January neither Lee nor Roy joined their dissenting Republican peers.
Following the infamous DC incident when a crowd breached into the congressional building, Roy said on the House floor: "The President should never have spun up certain Americans to believe something that simply cannot be." He then wrote to Meadows: "This is a sh*tshow. Fix this now."
In this May 6, 2021, file photo, Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors working for Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. Arizona’s largest county has approved nearly $3 million for new vote-counting machines to replace those given to legislative Republicans for a partisan review of the 2020 election. The GOP-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors said Wednesday, July 14, 2021 that the machines were compromised because they were in the control of firms not accredited to handle election equipment. (AP Photo/Matt York, Pool, File)
© AP Photo / Matt York
Post-Election Independent Audits in Battleground States
The US mainstream press dubbed Team Trump's assumption that the 2020 election was rigged a "Big Lie." Nevertheless, months later, several Republican-led states kicked off initiatives aimed at independently auditing the results of the elections. Thus, in September 2021, independent auditors tapped by the Arizona GOP to examine the 2020 election results in Maricopa claimed that glaring anomalies and irregularities took place in the county during the vote. President Joe Biden won Arizona by a razor-thin margin of 10,000 votes, or 0.3 percentage points.
In November 2021, VoterGA, a not-for-profit election monitoring organisation, complained that 74 counties in Georgia had failed to produce original images of more than 17,000 ballots from the November 2020 election. Of 74 counties surveyed by the VoterGA team, 56 counties admitted that most or all of the images created automatically by the Dominion voting system to tabulate results have been destroyed. Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes or 0.23 percent.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during a primary election night event, Tuesday, March 1, 2022, in Corpus Christi, Texas.
© AP Photo / Eric Gay
A Phase One Progress report released by Texas Secretary of State John B Scott on 31 December 2021 found roughly 12,000 potential non-citizens suspected of illegally registering to vote in the counties of Collin, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant. Trump won Texas in November 2020 by 5.5 percentage points. However, Tarrant, Dallas and Harris counties were won by Democrat candidate Joe Biden.
In February 2022, data analyst Peter Bernegger suggested during the hearings held by the GOP-led panel Wisconsin that over 50,000 "fraudulent votes" cast in November 2020 from phantom voters were identified in the state, i.e. twice Biden's victory margin. US mainstream media have largely ignored the findings, while some publications focused on the fact that data analyst Bernegger was convicted of bank fraud and mail fraud in 2009.
The findings prompted the GOP lawmakers to double down on introducing strict ID laws in their respective states. For its part, the House Select Committee on the 6 Attack has been racing about the clock to investigate Donald Trump's alleged conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election and promote what they call the "Big Lie."
