Former president Donald Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani tried to pressure a Michigan prosecutor into giving voting machines to a group of the ex-president’s advisers who were then trying to prove that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was tainted by fraud.
According to the Washington Post, Antrim County, Michigan district attorney James Rossiter received a phone call from Mr Giuliani just after a clerical error caused the county to misreport 2020 election results which showed Mr Biden winning the GOP stronghold.
Mr Rossiter told the Post that he rejected Mr Giuliani’s request because he lacked legal authority to grant it.
“I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause,” he said in an interview.
He added that he “never expected” to get such a call in his life.
Mr Giuliani remained fixated on Antrim County for weeks after the election, and with the help of other Trump associates and conspiracy theorists, turned the clerical error into alleged proof of a vast conspiracy to rig the 2020 election for Mr Biden despite the fact that no such evidence exists.
Despite the clerical error, Mr Trump defeated Mr Biden by 3,000 votes in Antrim County. A state review of the matter found that the error was caused by officials not properly updating voting machines after a last-minute change was made to the ballots the machines would scan during voting.
Yet Mr Giuliani and other Trump allies continued to push the fiction that Antrim County was the site of some massive fraud, and were aided by a conspiracy theorist called Russell Ramsland and another called Phil Waldron.
Mr Waldron, a retired US Army colonel, was also the author of the 36-page powerpoint which called for Mr Trump to order US marshals to seize voting machines for a sham recount which would’ve been conducted by select national guard soldiers.
