Trump issues pardons for Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell and others involved in 2020 fake elector scheme
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The White House announced late Sunday evening that Donald Trump had issued pardons for members of his 2020 campaign legal team, including Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and Sydney Powell, for their involvement in a scheme to alter the slates of electors chosen by states that voted against the Republican nominee in that year’s presidential election.
A statement announcing a list of 77 people who were pardoned was tweeted out late Sunday evening, at 10:54 p.m. local time, by Trump’s “clemency czar” Ed Martin.
It included a number of Americans who participated directly as members of the slates of false electors whose purpose was to supplant duly elected state electors bound to cast their states votes in the Electoral College for Joe Biden after the Democrat won states including Georgia, Arizona and Michigan in the general election.
That plot, supported at the highest levels by Trump and his allies, eventually led to the attempt by the president’s supporters to halt the certification of the 2020 election on January 6, 2021 – a political demonstration that devolved into a rioting mob attacking the U.S. Capitol and besieging it for several hours.
Sunday’s announcement noted that the pardons were also extended to members of Trump’s administration and campaign uncovered in the January 6 investigations as having facilitated those conversations directly between MAGAworld and a combination of conservative activists and sympathetic conservative state lawmakers who supported the president’s efforts, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
A line near the end of the statement also pointedly indicated that one individual was not pardoned over the scheme: Donald J. Trump.
Donald Trump declined to pardon himself as he issued clemency for Rudy Giuliani and other involved in his ill-fated 2020 legal efforts to challenge the election results (REUTERS)
The timing of the announcement seemed as if it was meant to bury itself in a news cycle around the government shutdown. Just minutes earlier, the last vote was cast in the Senate to break a filibuster on a resolution to end a 40-day government shutdown by Sen. John Cornyn, who arrived late.
The resolution now heads to the House of Representatives, and potentially to the president’s desk for a signature that would end the longest funding lapse in history.
Aside from directing the “fake elector” scheme, members of the 2020 Trump legal team named in the document participated in another, more orthodox method of challenging the 2020 election results. In multiple lawsuits led by Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and others on the campaign legal team, Trumpworld argued that widespread voter fraud took place in multiple states, changing the results of the election in Biden’s favor.
The campaign was never once able to provide definitive proof to any judge that took the cases, instead relying on signed affidavits from the president’s supporters alleging they had witnessed nefarious activity. Trump campaign sources never proved that vote totals in any of the states they targeted were manipulated, nor were they able to come up with measurable numbers of names of voters who participated in the election unlawfully through fraudulent means.
Campaign sources were separately unable to prove another claim: that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two companies that supplied digital elections infrastructure to states during the 2020 election, used systems that were manipulated or corrupted in any way. Those companies ended up launching massive legal bids against conservative news networks that uncritically spread the Trump campaign’s claims, like Fox News. In Fox’s case, Dominion Voting Systems was awarded a staggering $787m settlement.
The subsequent investigation by the January 6 committee and the discovery portion of Dominion’s lawsuit revealed that prominent Fox hosts privately dismissed the Trump campaign’s fraud claims as bogus while treating them as factual or, at the minimum, believable on their respective programs.
Giuliani, who was the public face of the Trump campaign’s legal team in 2020, fell into personal and professional disgrace over his actions. Appearing sloppy, confused and downright inept at times as he presented the president’s case, the former New York City mayor, known as “America’s Mayor” after he stewarded the city through the 9/11 terror attacks, found himself disbarred in Washington D.C. and New York after it was all said and done.
