Rudy Giuliani and a team of Donald Trump supporters determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election pressured a Michigan prosecutor to seize voting machines and hand them over to the Trump campaign, according to an investigation by The Washington Post.
Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter, a Republican, resisted the scheme, telling the outlet “I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause.”
The Trump team sought Antrim County’s voting machines because a legitimate error initially inflated the number of votes Joe Biden received there, making it briefly appear that he pulled off a stunning upset in the conservative stronghold. The Post explains:
Antrim is dominated by elected Republicans, and the small rural county last backed a Democrat for president in 1964. A review commissioned by state officials later found that the election-night error was largely the result of officials’ failure to properly update machines that scan and count paper ballots following a last-minute change to ballots in several precincts. This led to inaccurate vote tallies in the county’s initial results.
After addressing the mistakes in the days that followed, officials announced that Trump had in fact beaten Biden by more than 3,000 votes, a result that was confirmed by a hand recount of the paper ballots marked by voters. The county clerk, Sheryl Guy, later said in a report that the error was an honest mistake that she “owned, acknowledged and accepted.”
Even though the election night error was quickly rectified, it became the seed for a larger conspiracy theory pushed by then-President Trump and his cronies, who wanted to obtain the machine to present it as evidence of malfeasance.
But the local prosecutor resisted their overtures, which took place via conference calls. The Post adds:
Even if he had had sufficient grounds to take the machines as evidence, Rossiter said, he could not have released them to outsiders or a party with an interest in the matter.
Legal scholars said it was unusual and inappropriate for a president’s representatives to make such a request of a local prosecutor. “I never expected in my life I’d get a call like this,” Rossiter said.
Eventually, a local realtor named William Bailey, with the support of Trump’s legal team, sued for access to the voting machines in question. A judge, who also happened to be a Trump donor, authorized the access.
Bailey quickly produced a report that claimed the machines were intentionally designed to manipulate votes. “Experts have called that conclusion false and the report critically flawed,” notes The Washington Post.
We strong encourage you to read the Post’s full investigation, and consider how much effort was put into reversing the outcome of a free and fair election.
