Rudy Giuliani reportedly called a Michigan prosecutor in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election to demand he seize voting machines from a county that became the unlikely focus of former President Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn his election loss.
The presidential lawyer sought to get Antrim County Prosecuting Attorney James Rossiter to hand over the machines to Trump’s team so they could search for supposed signs of fraud, the prosecutor told the Washington Post.
Rossiter, a Republican, said he flatly refused the demand from the ex-mayor, which he considered improper.
“I never expected in my life I’d get a call like this,” Rossiter told the paper.
Antrim became a focus of Trump’s election lies when the heavily Republican county mistakenly reported on Election Night that President Joe Biden had beaten Trump by 3,000 votes.
Later, a county elections official said human error and clerical mistakes resulted in a miscount. Trump won by 3,000 votes, a tally confirmed by a hand recount.
Biden won Michigan by more than 150,000 votes. But Trump’s allies sought to ferret out evidence that the relatively small error in Antrim County was actually the tip of a massive iceberg of voting machine fraud that could have tipped the entire election.
That’s why Giuliani called Rossiter around Nov. 20, 2020, in hopes of getting him to allow the Trump team to examine the machines.
Around the same time, Trump considered signing a draft executive order that would have ordered the National Guard to seize voting machines across the country as part of his effort to stay in power despite losing to Biden, as first reported by Politico.
The former president infamously was caught on tape asking a Georgia elections official to “find” enough votes to overturn his narrow loss in the Peach State.
Experts say there is no evidence of any widespread fraud or errors that could have changed the results of Biden’s win.
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