PHILADELPHIA — Two competing versions of state Sen. Doug Mastriano’s role in Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme emerged this week. Mastriano, now the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, has yet to clear it up.
According to a New York Times report Tuesday, Mastriano had been designated as the state’s “point person” in the plot to reverse the outcome of the election. The report cites internal emails.
But some state Republicans who were part of the effort to give Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes to Trump strongly disputed that characterization, telling WESA-FM in Pittsburgh that Mastriano wasn’t even involved.
The Mastriano campaign did not respond Wednesday to a request to clarify his role. It has ignored most media inquiries since he won the Republican primary in May.
Dozens of emails reviewed by the Times show the lengths to which Trump advisers had gone in their attempts to assemble alternate electors in battleground states he’d lost:
The Times reported that lawyers for Trump had appointed a “point person” in seven states to find electors willing to sign the documents, and that Mastriano was that person in Pennsylvania. It said even he was hearing concerns from other Republicans who felt the plan might be “illegal,” according to a Dec. 12 email from Christina Bobb, who was working for One America News at the time and now works for Trump’s PAC.
“Mastriano needs a call from the mayor. This needs to be done. Talk to him about legalities of what they are doing,” Bobb wrote, referring to Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. She added: “Electors want to be reassured that the process is * legal * essential for greater strategy.”
On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Republican officials disputed the New York Times’ characterization of Mastriano’s involvement.
Sam DeMarco, who chairs the Allegheny County GOP, told WESA that Mastriano “had nothing to do with any of this.”
“I never saw him, never heard from him. To the best of my knowledge, he was never copied in” during discussions about the effort, DeMarco said.
The Times story noted that Trump’s legal team had relied on debunked information to support their claims of widespread election fraud, including a discredited document created by trade adviser Peter Navarro.
Separately, Mastriano himself was involved in spreading demonstrably false information about the election. For instance, on Nov. 27, 2020, he tweeted Pennsylvania vote totals and questioned how more than 1 million mail-in votes had been counted than ballots that were mailed out.
However, he was using the wrong arithmetic to arrive at that conclusion — subtracting the primary election mail-in vote total from general election mail-in vote total, which only shows that more people voted in November than in June. The error was quickly pointed out to him, but the original tweet is still online. It received nearly 53,000 retweets.
—What was the fake elector scheme?
The presidential candidates who win each state name official electors who formally cast Electoral College votes for them. In Pennsylvania, there are 20 for the winner.
Only in 2020, the Trump team rounded up people to pose as electors in seven states he lost. At the time, with Joe Biden acknowledged as the winner in those states and nationally, it seemed like last-gasp theater, one that elections experts said had no legal basis.
But as more details have emerged, the unauthorized electors have begun to look more like a part of a coordinated national scheme to usurp the election results. The idea, according to one email reported by the New York Times, was that even if the electors had no standing, a dispute might create enough chaos and confusion to stall the final certification of Biden’s victory.
The plot to send fake electors to Washington is now one of the main lines of inquiry for federal prosecutors who are examining potential criminal charges against Trump and some of his allies who pressed to overturn the election.
—Why was Pennsylvania different?
In nearly identical memos from the seven slates of fake electors, most of them falsely announced themselves as the “duly and qualified” electors from their state.
But in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the signers added caveats that might prove legally significant.
The Pennsylvania certificate begins: “We, the undersigned, on the understanding that if, as a result of a final, non-appealable Court Order or other proceeding prescribed by law, we are ultimately recognized as being the duly elected and qualified Electors ... ”
People who signed the document have argued that they were just ensuring that there would be a slate to represent Trump in the event one of his lawsuits turned out successful, and that their caveat — and the public announcement of their plans — shows they were not trying to undermine the results. By that point, though, Trump had already lost dozens of election-related lawsuits in numerous states, and the Supreme Court had rejected a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the results in four key swing states, including Pennsylvania.
The office of Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democrat now running against Mastriano for governor, has suggested that the caveat may have protected the Pennsylvania signers from criminal exposure.
“Though their rhetoric and policy were intentionally misleading and purposefully damaging to our democracy, based on our initial review, our office does not believe this meets the legal standards for forgery,” said a statement from Shapiro’s office in January, reported by Lancaster Online.
—Who were the Pennsylvania electors?
The 20 Trump electors in Pennsylvania included some of the state’s most prominent Republicans, but not Mastriano.
Among them were DeMarco in Allegheny County, national committeeman Andy Reilly, Bucks County GOP chair Pat Poprik, state GOP vice chair Bernadette Comfort, former congressman and gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta, and Ted Christian, a top Trump strategist in the state.
(Reilly, the former Delaware County GOP leader, was expected to co-host a barbecue fundraiser for Mastriano on Wednesday evening).
The Pennsylvania document also shows that several Trump allies balked at participating. Some have made clear that they had questions about the propriety of signing the slate of electors once it became clear Biden had won.
Among those who backed out were GOP state chairman Lawrence Tabas, an election law attorney; former U.S. Rep. Tom Marino, a close Trump ally; national GOP committeewoman Christine Toretti; and former state GOP chairman Rob Gleason.
Tabas “did not serve as an elector because Joe Biden won the election and it was Biden’s electors that were certified,” a senior adviser to the state GOP told The Washington Post in January.
Marino, one of Trump’s earliest and most prominent supporters in the state, told the Post he stepped aside after hearing then-Attorney General Bill Barr announce that there was no evidence of fraud significant enough to affect the election outcome.
“I’m a constitutionalist and have always been a constitutionalist,” he said. “I believe in the rule of law and whatever the courts determined. I’m not going to jump on a bandwagon to say that I know better than the courts.”
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