Second paragraph of third chapter:

President Trump and his allies prepared their own fake slates of electoral college electors in seven States that President Trump lost: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And on December 14, 2020—the date when true, certified electors were meeting to cast their electoral votes for the candidate who had won the popular vote in each of those States—these fake electors also met, ostensibly casting electoral votes for President Trump, the candidate who had lost.

Like the rest of you, I was utterly appalled by the extreme right wing attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, a direct attempt to overturn the 2020 election result by violence. What was not clear on the evening, but has now been made very clear by the labours of the Select Committee set up by the House of Representatives to look into the events, is the extent to which this was a part of a premeditated and criminal plan by Trump to illegally remain in power.

The evidence is clear. Most of those who testified to the Select Committee were Republicans, a number of them working directly for Trump in the White House. I myself said on the record to Bloomberg News, the day after the election, that there was little chance of the election result being overturned in the Supreme Court because there was no case. Eight leading conservative American lawyers have reported clearly and succinctly on the justified failure of all of Trump’s legal challenges. Nobody who has looked into it can seriously maintain, in good faith, that there is any doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win in the election.

Bad faith is a different matter, and the Report lays out how Trump cast aside the sensible lawyers and started to take advice from those who told him what he wanted to hear, culminating in the massive effort on 6 January to intimidate Vice-President Mike Pence into breaking the law and disqualifying enough valid votes for Biden to enable Trump to remain in office. I must admit that Pence comes out of it rather well, sticking to his position even when the mob came within a few metres of the office were he was being protected.

The Republican National Committee does not come out looking as good. They supported Trump’s hopeless legal challenges to the election results in the states, and also legitimised his shameless and aggressive personal bullying towards election workers – some senior state officials, some just ordinary folks who happened to attract the president’s ire. They also benefited from the fraudulent fund-raising to “Stop the Steal”, which continued long after the result was beyond any doubt. It is sickening that the mayhem and deaths of 6 January were instrumentalised as a marketing tool.

The National Guard also comes out looking bad. Although there had been internal discussion of how to use them in support of public order, delays in the command chain meant that by the time they got authorisation to assist the hard-pressed police, the riot was over because the President had called it off. There are also constitutional ambiguities about Trump’s role as commander-in-chief, but the report is clear that this was not the problem on the day.

But it all comes back to Trump. There is no smoking gun demonstrating that he had operational command and control over the mob. But there is plenty of evidence that they thought they were taking orders from him. For three hours they rampaged through the Capitol while friends, allies and family begged Trump to speak out against the violence; and as soon as he told them to disperse and go home, they did. The evidence from White House staffers who were there on the day is particularly chilling.

Anyone who defends Trump, let alone the rioters, over 6 January 2021 is not worth listening to. He decided that he did not like the election results; he desperately looked for legal ways to overturn the vote, and did not find any; and he attempted to use mob violence to cling to power. He is not fit for office, and nor is anyone who supports him.

You can get the report and supporting documents here (here’s the link for the report itself).

Second paragraph of third chapter:

According to Michigan election officials who certified the results, President Biden carried Michigan by a margin of 154,188 votes out of 5.5 million cast.¹¹³ Biden received 50.6% of the vote and Trump received 47.8%.¹¹⁴ In 2016, Trump carried Michigan by a margin of 10,700 votes out of roughly five million cast.¹¹⁵ Trump received 47.3% of the vote.¹¹⁶ Clinton received 47.0%.^117
113 Michigan Election Results 2020, POLITICO (last updated Jan. 6, 2021), https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/michigan/; Michigan Bureau of Elections, Audits of the November 3, 2020 General Election 1 (2021), https://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/BOE_2020_Post_Election_Audit_Report_04_21_21_723005_7.pdf.
¹¹⁴ Michigan Election Results 2020, supra note 113.
¹¹⁵ Id.
¹¹⁶ Id.
¹¹⁷ Id.

A short but very stern report signed by eight leading American conservative lawyers; the two I had heard of are former senator John Danforth, who was briefly the US ambassador to the United Nations in 2004, and Ted Olsen, who was solicitor-general under the younger Bush and whose wife was killed on 9/11. The actual author of most of it is presumably an unnamed researcher working for one of the eight (my money would be on Michael W. McConnell, who is a university professor and thus has access to the necessary resources of both young people and information).

In any case, it’s very straightforward: the report simply summarises all 64 lawsuits initiated by the Trump campaign and its supporters in the six key states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and describes why each was lost or withdrawn. I don’t think it will be news to anyone reading this that there is simply no evidence of fraud on behalf of the Biden campaign in those states at all, let alone anything large enough to have affected the outcome. It’s forensic and not too long (69 pages).

I dabbled in this issue a bit myself, on the morning after the 2020 election when a journalist friend called me for comment on Trump’s threat to take the election result to the Supreme Court. At a moment when a lot of commentators were holding their fire (in many cases because they were still in bed), I said on the record that Trump had no case, and that even if he did, he’d have to fight through lower level courts first. I consequently found my name popping up in mentions in Chinese (both Hong Kong and Taiwan, and presumably the mainland as well), Indonesian and Vietnamese as well as the less unusual Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Greek.

I did not think I was doing anything more than stating the obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be stated, and this report does it at greater length and more effectively than me. I spoke, of course, before the 6 January 2021 attempt to overthrow the democratic results of the election, which Trump incited and directed, so it still needs to be said. You can get the report here.