A former ally of Rudy Giuliani, Donald's Trump's ex-attorney, reportedly concocted a scheme to have former Vice President Mike Pence relinquish his role in the January 6 vote-counting ceremony to a top Senate Republican, who was then expected to overturn the election by blocking the electoral votes in several battleground states.
The plan, CBS News reports, was outlined in a December 2020 email sent by attorney Kenneth Chesebro to Trump and Giuliani. In it, Chesebro details that Pence would hand over the baton to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the Senate president pro tempore, by claiming that he has a "conflict of interest" as a result of being on the 2020 ballot. In theory, the plan would have effectively had Pence ignore the procedures outlined by the Electoral Count Act of 1878, which required that the vice president open all the electoral votes and hand them to Congress to be officially counted. Once Grassley takes over, the memo detailed, he "opens the two envelopes from Arizona, and announces that he cannot and will not, at least as of that date, count any electoral college votes from Arizona because there are two slates of votes."
