On Friday, CNN's Annie Grayer reported that David Shafer, a Republican from Georgia who served on the list of "alternative" electors declaring former President Donald Trump the winner of the state, told the House January 6 Committee that the Trump campaign gave the order for the Georgia Republican Party to create the fake elector slate.
NEW: David Shafer, one of the GA Rs who served as a fake elector on behalf of Trump after the 2020 election, told the 1/6 committee today that the Trump campaign directed the GA GOP in 2020 to put forward an alternate slate of electors after Donald Trump lost the state.
— Annie Grayer (@AnnieGrayerCNN) February 25, 2022
All told, 84 people allowed their names to be put forward as fake electors in the scheme, which included slates from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — all states won by President Joe Biden. The fake electors included eight current officeholders and five former officer holders.
The fake electors were part of a bizarre legal strategy put forward by far-right Trump attorney John Eastman, who argued that if there were "competing" slates of electors, former Vice President Mike Pence could declare during the Electoral College counting process that there was no way of proving which set of electors was valid for these states and throw out the election results entirely, kicking the decision for president to the House of Representatives, where Republicans controlled a majority of the delegations needed to declare Trump the winner even though Democrats had a majority of representatives overall.
Most experts believe this plan would have been illegal, as did Pence himself, who refused to go through with it.
