Mary McCord spent nearly 20 years of federal prosecutors,
the US Attorney's office in DC She litigated a case
against the Wisconsin fake elector.
She currently Co hosts the Webby Award MSNBC podcast prosecuting
Donald Trump.
Tom Jocelyn was a senior staffer on the January 6th
committee and a principal drafter of their final report and
they both join me now.
Mary, I I I think you guys have gotten a
little time to look over this indictment.
Your thoughts on what you've read,
well, it's a very familiar conspiracy to me having like
you mentioned been part of a team of lawyers that
litigated against the Wisconsin fraudulent electors and to Trump attorneys.
And so one of the things I was looking for
in there,
our case resolved with a settlement which included permanent injunctive
relief.
The electors are never to do this again.
The attorneys are never to help them do it again.
But it also it also resulted in the release of
some 15-16 hundred emails and text messages that show the
of the scheme.
And what I saw in this Arizona indictment is a
lot of the things I saw in those text messages.
So this scheme was concocted in Wisconsin by Trump campaign
attorney Jim Trupus and his friend Ken Chesbro.
Yes, Kenneth Chesbro, who has been pleaded guilty in Georgia,
who is unindicted Co conspirators turn #4 in this
Arizona indictment. He is the one who came up with
the idea.
He had the beginnings of the idea just five days
after the election,
his first e-mail to to Mr.
Troopas saying, you know, what about if an alternate slate
of electors shows up on January 6,
throwing things into chaos unless the state legislatures then decide
who the slate should be.
Or we could throw such things into such chaos that
that the vote would go to the House.
And what that means is the vote
by the House under the 12th Amendment when there's no
winner,
means every state gets one vote.
It's not all 450 legislative and one.
At that time it was a 26
state majority and that would have meant the election went
to Trump.
So what I saw then in this indictment is the
communications after Mr.
Troopas sent these memos that he asked Mr.
Chester to write up to the White House.
That's reflected in this indictment.
Boris Epstein then said, hey,
can you replicate this in the other states?
And that's what set Mr.
Chesbro off it again. Unindicted Co conspirator #4 in this
indictment.
I'm certain based on the allegations in the indictment to
working so closely with people like Kelly Ward and and
also attorneys in Arizona like Jack Willencheck to make this
happen in Arizona. Tom, when you worked on the generation
committee and and and helped draft that that that final
report,
did you think when you're working on the committee that
there would be downstream effects of state criminal investigations happening
after your committee's work?
Well, you know, I, I think there should have been
these downstream effects.
I mean the bottom line is this is conspiracy that
cut across seven states right?
Trump and his Co conspirators tried to steal or nullify
the electoral votes from 7 states because they lost the
popular vote in the Trump lost the popular vote in
those states. This is now the third state.
Arizona is where they brought criminal charges against the Co
conspirators although not Trump himself.
And when I was reading this indictment Chris to me
it reads like a middle of the road indictment.
So remember in Georgia you have the Rico conspiracy case
where all the way up to Trump is charged in
Georgia.
In Michigan you have these charges brought against just the
fake electors but none of the Co conspirators that let
them down that path.
Now here in Arizona you have the the fake electors
charge plus these Co conspirators on top of them,
including a number of the people who actually brought them,
you know, LED them down this false path.
Except for Kenneth Chesbro who Mary notes is an unindicted
Co conspirator.
He is conspicuously not indicted here and yet it's his
memos really did lay the groundwork for the fake electors
scheme.
You know, in fact on the Select Committee,
one of the things I learned after the fact is
how much evidence Ken Chesboro and his coca Spears were
able to hide from us.
They hit a they had the December
6th, 2020 memo in which Chesboro made it very clear
that the intent of the fake electors had nothing to
do with being contingent on election litigation outcomes or state
legislators flipping the vote, which of course Trump and his
associates were pressuring states to do,
but in fact was basically there to gum up the
joint session of Congress on January 6th.
So this is I think necessary for this type of
of criminal,
hopefully criminal accountability in Arizona and hopefully states will follow
suit.
Yeah, we should just note,
and if folks don't remember this,
that there were sort of different incarnations of the fake
elector scheme,
The first of which I think you could characterize as
an extremely aggressive but arguably defensible legal posture to retain
the possibility of
a Donald Trump victory if fraud was found and litigation
proved effective.
The second version was just purely a bad faith,
cynical enterprise to essentially defraud people and to create this
sort of
screwed up situation top. But Chris,
can I just interject real quick?
The bottom line is that when you go through the
evidence very carefully,
the truth is that first option was off the table
by the time the fake electors met in
the the the, the documents in the Chesboro.
And his focus fears authoring and talking about it was
clearly aimed at delaying or obstructing the certification of Joe
Bidens victory at the Joint Session Congress.
This is crucially important because what's happened here,
you can even see this in the indictment that came
out today.
Some of the defendants lied about it and said,
well you know, we just voted in case,
you know, election litigation chain flipped Arizona.
Now some of the fake electors may very well believe
that.
The problem is we know the people who are pulling
the marionette strings on them did not believe that.
And that's why this indictment in Arizona is so important
because they're going upstream,
going after some of the puppet masters,
not just the fake electors.
By the way, as we roll this tape of the
that meeting,
if you can roll that again,
the B roll that we just had,
which is a December 14,
2020. Kelly is the one who's seating up at the
chair position there in blue.
Again, this was all public.
It's remarkable how much of the evidence.
There's a fair amount of evidence in the indictment itself.
It's public. You know, you've got Samuel Morehead,
who's writing. We need to take some action about the
2020 election.
I advocate in Arizona, the legislator decertify the slate of
Biden electors and certify the slate of Trump electors.
I would hate to go to my grave knowing the
electoral vote I cast was not counted.
They were doing this in public.
And to your point, Mary,
I just want to read again from the indictment,
we haven't been able to work up graphics,
so I will, I will go slowly.
One of the things they catch here on page 29,
the indictment is
is sort of in in an e-mail to the Tea
Party Phoenix Metro
e-mail listserv,
they say, by the way,
that to your point about they knew what they were
doing.
If the Electoral College doesn't result in
270 electoral votes for either presidential candidate,
the 12th Amendment is exercise.
And guess what? Trump wins because the House didn't go
the way Dems counted outgoing and our Republic is saved
from the globalists.
So this was all this is all laid out.
There's not again, they were not like that surreptitious about
this entire enterprise.
It's all fairly well documented,
Marion. That's not always the case with with most criminal
conspiracies,
but this one, it's fairly public,
yes. And like Tom said,
you know, I think, you know,
it's possible that some of the fake collectors in different
states at first really did think that there was some
legal authority.
I mean they have lawyers telling them to do this
right and that there was some legal authority.
But it's clear when you see the documents by,
as Tom referred, referred to them as the puppet masters
or the OR the
Marionette, you know, those pulling the Marionette strings.
They all along, and it's clear in the documentation
knew this scheme was just a scheme to throw things
into chaos.
To support putting pressure on the state legislatures to go
ahead and just reconvene and send up a state
a slate of electors. Which itself would have been subject
to legal challenge of course.
Or then to pressure Mike Pence to count these illegitimate
votes and worse comes to worse,
like you just said through things to the 12th Amendment.
But I'll say even with the fraudulent electors,
even if they might have some of them at the
beginning thought,
hmm, maybe this is a legit scheme.
As Tom said, by the time they voted,
they did not yet. Even Even after that,
we had in Wisconsin
someone from the, the Republican Party flying out to DC
on January 5th to try to make sure that that
fraudulent slate got to Mike Pence.
And in one of her texts,
she says, I feel like a drug dealer.
Lowell. Wow. Yeah. And that wasn't it.
Wasn't that also where like someone passed the list to
Ron Johnson to get to Mike Pence
and he was, he was the one carrying it.
The senator from Wisconsin was like,
I don't know, someone gave me something I was just
giving to the vice president.
I don't really know. You know someone gives you a
the zip lock bag you carry it over to the
vice president,
whatever it's got to be.
Can I can I just say this,
Tom, the the, the other thing that strikes me here,
22 questions. One is and I'm pulling this from memory,
if I'm not mistaken, I believe of the seven states,
New Mexico is one of those states.
Somewhat weirdly,
I think that two of the states,
the language of the the,
the thing they certified had some kind of legal hedge
where they said something like I think in Pennsylvania and
New Mexico,
I may not be remembering this correctly.
They they basically said something along lines if the litigation
proves successfully yada yada and the other ones there is
no hedge.
It's straightforward, a lie of
a fraudulent certification, signed the line saying we are the
proper electors here.
That's exactly right. So five of the seven states had
no contingency language whatsoever for the fake electors,
Arizona being one of them.
And in fact, we know subsequently there was a text
exchange from some of the conspirators,
including Michael Roman and Kenneth Chesboro.
Roman who I believe is indicted in in this indictment,
and Kenneth Chesboro who is an unindicted Co conspirator,
Where they're talking about this,
they're talking about, hey, you know should we include this
language that basically is a hedge on the fake electoral
certificates?
Mike Roman says, F these people.
In other words, we're not doing it.
We're not putting this language on the other ones.
Because if we do, then maybe people will start to
question what they're doing.
That's what I mean by puppet masters,
right? I mean some of these guys knew exactly what
they were doing.
That's not to absolve all the fake electors themselves.
Some of them knew what they were doing too,
obviously. Perhaps a lot of them did.
But the bottom line is that there's that this in
the Trump campaign and the Co conspirators around Trump and
Trump himself certainly knew that they were crossing all sorts
of boundaries here. Legal boundaries here in doing this and
you know they,
they were very cavalier in doing so and they didn't
care about people downstream who were willing to do their
bidding for them and that's really part of the story
here as well.