Wisconsin fake elector signed papers because he was 'scared to death' of Trump supporters

16 February 2024

Andrew Hitt, who at the time of the 2020 presidential election was chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, said he felt pressured into signing papers falsely claiming to be one of the state's presidential electors out of fear of reprisal from former President Donald Trump's diehard supporters.

In a 60 Minutes interview with journalist Anderson Cooper that was shared with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ahead of its national broadcast on Sunday, Hitt elaborated on why he went along with the scheme. Hitt told Cooper that he signed his name onto papers submitted to Congress, the National Archives, a federal judge and then-Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette stating that he was a certified presidential elector for Trump because he didn't want to be blamed for then-candidate Joe Biden winning the Badger State's electoral votes.

"If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death," Hitt told Cooper. "It was not a safe time."

During a 2022 deposition, Hitt made a similar argument, saying there was uncertainty about how Trump supporters would react if they believed the election was unjustly stolen from Trump.

"There was just a general concern about — about safety. And ... how we were going to keep everybody safe if somebody wanted to disrupt something or if there was a protest that would occur," Hitt said at the time.

"I also, throughout this time, got several phone calls to my office that my secretary relayed to me demanding to know my exact location," he continued. "I never verified, but I got a lot of threatening emails, quite frankly, from both sides of the political aisle. And so it was a volatile time, and our electors were worried, and so was I."

Hitt said they signed the paperwork saying that they were the state's presidential electors in the event that Trump's dispute of the official result showing Biden won the state by approximately 20,000 votes was successful. However, at the time Hitt and nine other Republicans met in the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison to sign the fake elector papers, Wisconsin's supreme court confirmed Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, and lawsuits filed challenging the results had already been dismissed in federal court.

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