Rudy Giuliani in 'significant trouble' for spearheading fake electors scheme

Disgraced ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in ‘significant trouble’ for his role in orchestrating a plot to send fake Electoral College electors to Washington, DC to steal the 2020 election for former President Donald Trump, ex-prosecutors explained to The Guardian on Monday.

Giuliani served as Trump’s pro-bono personal lawyer throughout his single term.

The scheme involved individuals who claimed to be the “real” electors from seven states that Trump lost to President-Elect Joe Biden. Their objective – which was predicated on Trump’s lie that the presidential contest was rigged against him – was to have their votes counted in lieu of the legitimate electors that were chosen by voters. Or, at the very least, the imposters sought to sow doubt about which electors were legitimate. It was a last-ditch effort to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election in favor of Trump, which he did not. That, in turn, led to Trump inciting the deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

Experts believe that Giuliani and those who participated are facing serious legal repercussions for attempting to subvert an American election.

“The threats to Giuliani come from multiple directions,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general at the Department of Justice, told The Guardian. “Evidence is growing that he was at the center of a series of schemes to change the election results – by fraud and by force. As the investigations focus more closely on the people Giuliani recruited to change the election results on January 6 and before, his criminal exposure grows as the number of witnesses against him multiplies.”

Michael Zeldin, a Harvard University Institute of Politics fellow and former federal prosecutor, said that if the evidence shows that “Giuliani improperly influenced or attempted to improperly influence the election, potentially, he could be charged with state and federal crimes including: falsifying voting documents, fraud, false statements, mail/wire fraud or even conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

Others noted that Giuliani’s proximity to Trump put him in a uniquely influential position that tied him to multiple efforts to thwart democracy.

“Giuliani was the cog of Trump’s flywheel to overturn the election, getting other Trump allies to act and leaving his imprint for investigators to find,” said former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut. “He’s reportedly key in the bogus slate scheme. That’s dangerous for Giuliani, because forgeries disprove innocent intent. In a conspiracy, which DOJ could charge as to the fake electors, a conviction doesn’t require that he solicited, or even knew about the forgeries, but only that he participated in a conspiratorial plot involving fake electors to help overturn the election.”

Giuliani is also facing a possible subpoena from the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol if he refuses to cooperate.

“Giuliani’s information about various schemes that Trump promoted to block Biden’s win could potentially be very helpful to the House inquiry,” Zeldin said. “If Rudy provides significant cooperation (which is unlikely) he could help the panel unravel some of the major ways that Trump tried to thwart Biden’s election victory including, most significantly, whether there was any coordination or pre-planning between Trump and those who stormed the US Capitol.”

Lawmakers on the bipartisan congressional panel maintain that Giuliani’s testimony is critical to their probe and that they “fully expect that, in accordance with the law, we’ll hear from Rudy,” Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of only two Republicans serving on the Committee, said on CBS’s Face the Nation earlier this month.

Michael Moore, a former United States attorney from Georgia, said that Giuliani’s plan failed in part because of how haphazardly and amateurishly the entire tactic was assembled.

“For Giuliani and his crew to have legal trouble, you don’t have to get much more into the facts than to understand that he was orchestrating fake slates of electors, based on fake reports of fraud, using faked documents, to fake the outcome of the election, and then submitting those fake documents to government officials,” said Moore.

“That is a conspiracy that a kindergartener could unravel,” he added. “The submission of the pro-Trump fake elector certificates to the National Archives was about as smart as taking the note that you used to rob the bank to the frame shop.”