Rudy Giuliani, a former personal lawyer to Trump, and other legal advisers to the then-US president, attempted to obtain Antrim County's voting machines after Trump's loss in the 2020 presidential election, according to a Republican prosecutor in Michigan.
James Rossiter, the prosecuting attorney for Antrim County in northern Michigan, told the Washington Post in a recent interview that Giuliani, along with several other collaborators, asked for the machines to be turned over after the county misreported that then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden appeared to have beaten Trump by 3,000 votes, despite the county being historically Republican.
Rossiter reportedly declined their request, which was initially made during a November 20, 2020, phone call.
"I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors," he told The Post. "You need probable cause."
Even if he did have grounds to secure the voting machines as evidence, the items could not be released to outsiders, or those lacking legal authority.
Election officials claimed that the inaccurate result—which showed Biden ahead of Trump by 3,000 votes, with 98% of ballots counted—was due to a human error. Dominion Voting Systems, which has been cited in several election conspiracy theories, also said the "issue with election results reporting in Antrim County was due to user-error." Trump ultimately won the county, but lost the state.
"I never expected in my life I’d get a call like this," Rossiter declared.
A day before Giuliani's reported phone call, Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican working with the office for more than four decades, asserted to state legislators that "human error did not in any way, shape or form affect the official election results of Antrim County."
She went on to claim that the error would have ultimately been caught by the tabulator machines, which provide receipts of the votes.
Details about the unusual request come alongside the US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol probe into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol building. Giuliani, who has not represented Trump in legal matters for about a year, was one of several subpoenaed by the group last month over their respective roles in attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results.