Thread by @weareoversight

Each day this week, we’re breaking down an element of the Big Lie. Yesterday, we discussed the years of anti-voting activism that laid the foundation. Today, we’re talking about attempts to stop the certification of the 2020 election.
americanoversight.org/from-voter-fra…

When polls closed on Nov. 3, 2020, the result of the presidential election was unclear, in part because of the additional challenges of counting absentee ballots. Four days after Election Day, all the major networks and news agencies called the race for Biden.

Trump and his supporters turned up their efforts to undermine confidence in the results, with a particular focus on the states where the vote had been the closest: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

While votes were still being counted in those states, Trump gave a press conference during which he claimed that he had “easily” won the election if you counted only “legal votes.”

Trump was following a playbook laid out by his attorney Rudy Giuliani on election night, when Giuliani reportedly urged Trump to “just say we won” the states where the count was outstanding.

Trump then launched an effort to pressure state and local officials, and his own Justice Department, to repeat this Big Lie.

I: Pressure on the Justice Department. DOJ officials stated clearly in post-election private and public communications that the widespread fraud Trump had alleged had not taken place.

But Trump repeatedly pressured Justice Department officials not only to repeat his lies but to take steps to stop the certification of the election results.

Congressional investigations have revealed new details about this effort.

Soon after Attorney General William Barr resigned in late December, Trump told Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me,” according to notes of the call released to congressional investigators.
washingtonpost.com/national-secur…

According to the notes, Trump threatened to “replace DOJ leadership” and elevate Jeffrey Clark, a little-known political appointee and Trump loyalist, to head the department.

A former U.S. attorney in Georgia, Byung J. Pak, also told Senate Judiciary Committee investigators that he had resigned in January after hearing that Trump was planning to fire him for failing to corroborate lies about widespread fraud.
nytimes.com/2021/08/11/us/…

American Oversight is currently suing for documents that could shed light on this period at the Justice Department, including communications between the White House and agency officials.
americanoversight.org/american-overs…

II: Trump Pressure on State Officials. While Trump was pressuring DOJ to help him overturn his election loss, he was also personally coercing state and local elected officials who he thought might be able to help him.

Among the officials who received personal pleas from Trump in the weeks after the election were the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

A recording of Trump’s Jan. 2 call with Raffensperger, in which he urged Georgia election authorities to “find” enough votes to hand him a win in the state, gave an indication of the types of conversations Trump initiated with state and local officials.
npr.org/2021/01/03/953…

Joining Trump on the call was his attorney Rudy Giuliani and Cleta Mitchell, a well-known conservative attorney who had long been involved in the effort to restrict voting rights. The previous week, Trump had also placed a call to the chief investigator in Raffensperger’s office.

A recording of that call, which was later released to us in response to a public records request and separately obtained and reported on by the Wall Street Journal, revealed that Trump had told the investigator that she would “be praised” when “the right answer comes out.”

Despite Trump’s pressure campaign, officials certified the election results in each swing state. However, groups of Trump allies in seven states submitted fake certificates to the Senate claiming that Trump had won the electoral votes of their states.
americanoversight.org/american-overs…

III: Legal Efforts. As Trump was pressuring state and federal officials to reject the results of the election, his lawyers — with the help of a set of activist state attorneys general — were launching an all-out legal challenge to election certification.

In the weeks following the election, Trump and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits alleging voter fraud and arguing that various measures that facilitated voting during the pandemic had been improperly enacted.

In the end, the lawsuit that garnered the most hope among Trump supporters was the one filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. That lawsuit asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the presidential election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

The New York Times later reported that Paxton’s lawsuit had been designed by a team including Kris Kobach, former North Carolina Chief Justice Mark Martin, and pro-Trump attorney Lawrence Joseph.
nytimes.com/2021/01/31/us/…

Kobach had originally tried to recruit Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry to file a lawsuit; a draft of the lawsuit that we obtained from Landry’s office showed that it originally challenged the election results in Minnesota and Nevada as well.
talkingpointsmemo.com/news/louisiana…

Our investigations have also uncovered the involvement of Michael Farris, president of the social conservative behemoth Alliance Defending Freedom, who counseled South Carolina’s attorney general on efforts to challenge the election results.
talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sc-ag-str…

Shortly before the Electoral College met to cast its votes, the Supreme Court rejected Texas’s lawsuit. The legal battle to overturn the election results had concluded, but the propaganda campaign was far from over.

Check our Twitter again tomorrow for Part 3 of our deep dive into the Big Lie. We’ll break down the Jan. 6 insurrection. In the meantime, read our investigation here:
americanoversight.org/from-voter-fra…