The 16 fake Trump electors who tried to convene in Michigan got a big surprise this week: felony indictments brought by the state attorney general.
And it's going to be almost impossible for them to defend against the case, argued New York University law professor and former Pentagon special counsel Ryan Goodman on CNN Tuesday evening, for one key reason: the documents they are accused of forging contain a glaring lie.
"If you're going to charge 16 people there and hundreds of people, you're charging a lot of people with a lot of stuff," said anchor Erin Burnett. "It'd be kind of odd to not charge one person out of all of this. Some of the evidence in Michigan that the attorney general points to is language on the fake elector slate that was submitted to Congress. So they submit this to Congress. And in that you saw something very important. It said, 'we convened and organized in the State Capitol.'"
"So if you're an elector, you're going to convene there," said Burnett. "They said that's what they did. But they actually met at the Republican state headquarters, according to the January 6th Committee report, which I guess is not in the State Capitol, the pro-Trump attorney flagged this as slightly problematic in a memo to the Trump campaign. Now, anyone watching may say this seems like a detail. It is a detail, but a detail you think matters."
"It's a detail that matters," agreed Goodman. "It mattered to the Trump campaign lawyer, and he said this is a problem. He is mapping out the secret memo how they can do these false electors across the seven states. Michigan may have a problem because it's a legal requirement that you have to convene in the State Capitol. That's why they obviously put it in their declaration that we are convened in the State Capitol. And it is just a falsehood."
That's significant, Goodman added, because, "They can say, oh, we thought Trump won the election and that's why we did this. Did you think you were in the Capitol? You are not in the Capitol, you were in the basement of the GOP headquarters in Lansing. That's where you were when you convened. It's a false statement that they submitted to state and federal authorities that is almost an open-and-shut forgery."
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Ryan Goodman says Michigan fake electors case is "open-and-shut" www.youtube.com
