PITTSBURGH — FBI agents interviewed the chairman of the Allegheny County Republican Party at his home early Thursday morning as part of a nationwide investigation into former President Donald Trump’s attempt to send alternate electors from key swing states to Washington to overturn the 2020 election.
Agents spent about an hour at party chairman Sam DeMarco’s Oakdale home and served him with a subpoena for communications between him, members of the Trump campaign and legal team, and Trump electors in Pennsylvania, DeMarco told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Thursday.
“I’ll certainly comply with their request,” DeMarco said. He has until July 8 to turn over emails, texts and any written correspondence, he said.
DeMarco said he didn’t have direct contact with Trump’s campaign or the legal team led by Rudy Giuliani, just with the other 19 Trump electors.
Pennsylvania was one of seven key states in which the Trump campaign pressured its electors to sign declarations falsely asserting they were the duly chosen members of the electoral college, rather than the electors representing President-elect Joe Biden.
But in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the electors balked, insisting the declaration’s language be changed to say they should only be recognized as duly elected if Trump won his court challenges to Biden’s victory.
That distinction might have spared those Pennsylvania and New Mexico electors from the legal jeopardy potentially facing their counterparts in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, where electors flat-out declared themselves “duly elected.”
In Pennsylvania, the electors told a Trump campaign lawyer to add language saying they’d only be considered legitimate electors “if, as a result of a final non-appealable court order or other proceeding prescribed by law, we are ultimately recognized as being duly elected,” according to records obtained in January by the Washington-based nonprofit American Oversight.
“It was presented to us as, ‘We’re preserving the president’s rights should he win these court cases,’” DeMarco said. “A number of us pushed back — and there wasn’t any push on their side — but we said we need to make the elector certificate say that. This isn’t some verbal promise on a conference call.”
State Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, said in January that, because they hedged their language, “our office does not believe this meets the legal standards of forgery.”
Not so in other states.
After American Oversight released the slates of fake electors, attorneys general in Arizona and Michigan urged the feds to investigate their electors’ role in the scheme. In Georgia, the federal investigation has reached into the upper echelons of the state party, The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. And Wisconsin’s attorney general has said “it’s critical that the federal government fully investigates and prosecutes any unlawful actions in furtherance of any seditious conspiracy.”
The Michigan and Wisconsin portions of the plot involved Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., according to text messages the Jan. 6 committee presented at a hearing this week.
Johnson’s chief of staff, Sean Riley, told Vice President Mike Pence’s legislative director, Chris Hodgson, that the senator wanted to “hand something” to Mr. Pence before he began counting electoral votes.
“What is it?” Hodgson replied.
When Riley told him it was an “alternate slate of electors” for the two states, Hodgson replied, “Do not give that to him.”
As the legitimate Electoral College members gathered in state capitols around the country to cast their ballots on Dec. 14, Trump electors in the seven states gathered to do the same. In Michigan, one group of fake electors considered hiding in the state capitol overnight to give their vote a veneer of legitimacy, according to testimony given to the Jan. 6 committee.
In Pennsylvania, they would gather just a few blocks from the capitol, in the offices of Quantum Communications, a political consulting company run by Trump elector Charlie Gerow (Gerow and fellow Trump elector Lou Barletta would later run unsuccessfully for the 2022 GOP nomination for governor).
It was a cold, snowy morning as DeMarco walked to his car and made the nearly four-hour drive to Harrisburg.
“I didn’t want to go,” DeMarco said.
He’d already angered many in his party by disputing the conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods about a stolen election that were being peddled by Trump and his allies. DeMarco, an Allegheny County councilman and member of the county Elections Board, had heard the complaints, but he’d also seen the evidence.
“I had to come out and say I saw no widespread fraud,” DeMarco said.
After pulling up to Gerow’s office on State Street, DeMarco sat in his car for awhile, the stately green dome of the Pennsylvania Capitol looming just to the northeast. When the meeting’s 10:45 a.m. start time rolled around, he went inside, exchanged pleasantries with a few people, signed his name on the sheet of electors, grabbed one of the sandwich rolls that had been laid out for the group, and walked back outside.
“And I got back into my car and went home.”
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