Trump campaign 'directly orchestrated' Mich. fake elector plot to 'maintain power': report

The effort to submit slates of so-called "fake electors" in Michigan — which then-President Donald Trump narrowly lost in 2020 — appears to have been a project of the Trump campaign itself, according to a recent report.

On Thursday night, the Detroit News reported on internal emails from the Trump campaign that showed how the former president's top legal advisers like John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Kenneth Chesebro (now cooperating in multiple states' fake elector investigations) "directly orchestrated" the effort to steal Electoral College votes from then-candidate Joe Biden.

"The revelations provide further proof that the false elector certificates advanced in seven battleground states, including Michigan, were not organic efforts by local Republican officials to question the election results in their states, but part of a larger scheme by Trump's campaign to maintain power," the News' Craig Mauger wrote.

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According to the News, both Chesebro and Eastman sought to get fake elector letters to then-Vice President Mike Pence in advance of Congress' scheduled certification of the Electoral College count on January 6, 2021. A key component of that strategy was to have the fake elector documents submitted in the names of various state Republican Party officials to make the effort look organic. However, the News reported that in Michigan, Trump campaign staffer Shawn Flynn actually prepared the mailing that was sent on December 15, 2020 to the National Archives in the name of Republican National Committeewoman Kathy Bearden.

"Just wanted to check if these need to be sent a certain class of mail along with the extra service of certified mail and registered mail respectively?" Flynn wrote in an email to Chesebro. Mike Roman, who was the Trump campaign's director of election day operations, responded to Flynn that he should "choose the fastest."

The infamous "Eastman Memo" laid out how the fake electors plot would work: If Pence received an alternate slate of electors from a certain state, he could refrain from including those states' electoral votes in the official count, giving Trump a slight advantage. Following Democrats' objections, Pence would have then sent the matter to the House of Representatives, where each state's delegation would have exactly one vote. Because Republicans controlled slightly more state delegations than Democrats, this would have also resulted in a Trump victory.

The Detroit News' report is the latest bombshell to come out of Michigan, where the former president and Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel were heard offering to pay for lawyers for two Wayne County elections officials in exchange for them not voting to certify their county's 2020 election results.

READ MORE: Michigan elections chief: 'Direct line' between Trump's Detroit call and January 6 riot