LAS VEGAS (AP) — New transcripts of closed-door testimony to the Jan. 6 House committee show Donald Trump and his allies had a direct hand in the Nevada Republican Party’s scheme to send a phony electoral certificate to Congress in 2020 in a last-ditch attempt to keep the former president in power.
The documents made public Wednesday evening included interviews with state party leader Michael McDonald and Republican National Committeeman Jim DeGraffenreid in February. Both men served as fake electors in Carson City on Dec. 14, 2020.
That day, six Nevada GOP members signed certificates falsely stating that Trump won Nevada in 2020 and sent them to Congress and the National Archives, where they were ultimately ignored. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is digging into the role that these fake electors in key battleground states had in Trump’s attempt to cling to power after his 2020 defeat.
McDonald and DeGraffenreid invoked Fifth Amendment protection hundreds of times in their separate interviews with the Jan. 6 committee, refusing to answer questions about their involvement and the extent to which Trump’s top allies had helped in orchestrating the plot.
Still, the transcripts provide an unprecedented view into the Trump team’s coordinated efforts in Nevada to overturn the results of the election — efforts that included direct communication between McDonald and the president himself.
On Nov. 4, 2020, for example, the day after the election, McDonald had a conference call with Trump, his then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorney Rudy Giuliani and son Eric Trump.
“They want full attack mode,” McDonald later wrote in a text message describing that call. “We’re gonna have a war room meeting in about an hour.”
Both McDonald and DeGraffenreid turned over their communications to the Jan. 6 committee related to the fake elector scheme. The FBI also seized McDonald’s cellphone in June as part of an investigation into the scheme.
Those documents, detailed at length in the transcripts, included text messages, emails and internal memorandums distributed by the national GOP arm; handwritten charts, templates for press releases and the phony certificate itself; and talking points “explaining the rationale for the electors.”
The planning was extensive, the transcripts show, and began as early as four days before the election, when state party officials began discussing whether Nevada’s Republican secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, would sign off on the alternate slate of electors.