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We've known for several weeks that Republicans in multiple states created forged election materials, pretending to be "duly elected and qualified electors," and sent the documents to, among others, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Archivist, as if the fake materials were legitimate. As the controversy has taken shape, answering the "why" question has been fairly easy.
It's the "who" and the "how" questions that have been murkier.
That said, the answers continue to come into sharper focus. The New York Times reported overnight, for example, on a Trump campaign lawyer in Wisconsin receiving a memo in November 2020 "setting out what became the rationale for an audacious strategy: to put in place alternate slates of electors in states where President Donald J. Trump was trying to overturn his loss."
The memo ... may not have been the first time that lawyers and allies of Mr. Trump had weighed the possibility of naming their own electors in the hopes that they might eventually succeed in flipping the outcome in battleground states through recounts and lawsuits baselessly asserting widespread fraud. But the Nov. 18 memo and another three weeks later are among the earliest known efforts to put on paper proposals for preparing alternate electors. They helped to shape a crucial strategy that Mr. Trump would embrace with profound consequences for himself and the nation.
Note the timeline of events: Election Day 2020 was Nov. 3; Joe Biden was declared the president-elect on Nov. 7; and we now know that on Nov. 18, Team Trump was circulating materials sketching out a scheme to overturn the election results by way of forged documents and fake electors.
This was not a freelance operation. It'd be a different kind of story if assorted Trump fans coincidentally engaged in a live-action-role-playing fantasy, simultaneously and independently coming up with the idea of creating fraudulent election materials as keepsakes.
Instead, what we have is a deliberate scheme coordinated by the then-president's team, in the hopes that the gambit would convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to recognize those pretending to be "duly elected and qualified electors."
The importance of the new revelations is the extent to which they help fill in the gaps. As Rachel explained on last night's show, it's the command-and-control details that have remained unclear: Who came up with the scheme? Who distributed the fraudulent templates? When and how was it communicated to the on-the-ground Republicans who intended to help execute the plot?
The overnight Times report sheds new light on this, shining a light on this Nov. 18 memo, for example. The document, sent from one Trump lawyer to another, emphasized the importance of the fake electors meeting at their state capitol on Dec. 14, and then sending their forged materials to Mike Pence "in time to be opened on January 6."
Three weeks later, the same Trump lawyer sent a second memo, shortly before actual electors were set to cast their votes, offering a step-by-step guide on what the fake electors would have to do. (No wonder the fake electors were so insistent on trying to get into state capitols: They were told it was a key part of the scheme. It's also why the Trump campaign reportedly "secured meeting rooms in statehouses for the fake electors to meet on December 14, 2020.")
In case this all wasn't quite clear enough, this same second memo also spelled out where the forged election materials needed to be sent.
All of this, of course, is now under investigation from the Justice Department, the National Archives, and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Watch this space.