January 28, 2022

The January 6 Committee’s Next Target? Bogus Trump Electors.

A real electoral ballot preparing to be certified on January 6, 2021Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

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Shortly after former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani came up with a harebrained scheme: hijack the Electoral College by having fake electors sign fake election certificates, and then convince former Vice President Mike Pence to throw out authentic Biden-voting electors and replace them with Trump-voting alternates.

The plan was patently absurd, and Pence refused to go along with it. But that’s not the end of the story. Now, the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is subpoenaing 14 of those illegitimate “electors,” including the chairmen of the Nevada and Georgia GOP and several Republican National Committee members, in hopes that they’ll give more information about exactly how the plan went down.

“We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a statement. “We encourage them to cooperate with the Select Committee’s investigation to get answers about January 6th for the American people and help ensure nothing like that day ever happens again.”

Let’s see what happens next.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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