Trump Campaign Secretly Corralled Cosplay Electors, Faces Secret Grand Jury Investigation

Little too ironic, doncha think?

Don't sleep on the cosplay electors! And don't sleep with them, either, because there's no telling where those weirdos have been!

Those dress-up dipshits who swore themselves in as Trump electors and submitted fake electoral certificates to the Electoral College are back in the news this week because the Justice Department's investigation of the scheme, which was spearheaded by Donald Trump's pro bono lawyer Rudy Giuliani, appears to be heating up.

The plan, if you could call it that, was to have these goobers waiting in the wings, ready to be subbed in once Republican legislatures reconvened and clawed back the electoral votes for Biden. Early versions of the plot relied on the Justice Department to announce investigations into non-existent vote fraud, supplying a pretext for legislators to toss out the votes of their own constituents. But the Justice Department leadership put the kibosh on that plan by threatening to quit en masse . So then the focus shifted to Vice President Mike Pence , whom they relied on to reject the swing state Biden electors and send the supposedly questionable votes back to Republican legislatures to "investigate."

The fraudulent electoral certificates are currently under investigation by the House January 6 Select Committee, which has interviewed multiple state-level participants in the plot; a grand jury in Georgia; and the Justice Department. And now CNN and the Washington Post have gotten their hands on a December 18, 2020, email from Trump campaign operative Robert Sinners (OMG, fire the writers!) directing the Georgia cosplay electors to conduct their operation in total secrecy — which goes some way to establishing both that the Trump campaign participated in this conspiracy, and that they knew it wasn't exactly on the up and up.

"I must ask for your complete discretion in this process," he wrote. "Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion."

"Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to media," he added, directing the recipients to lie to security guards at the statehouse that they were headed to a meeting with two Republican state senators.

In response to the story, Sinners released a statement this week claiming to have been carrying out the edicts of senior campaign officials and Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer.

“I was advised by attorneys that this was necessary in order to preserve the pending legal challenge,” he said, without specifying exactly which case he was talking about. A quick glance at the Georgia election suits shows that they'd mostly been tossed out by December 18, with the exception of Trump's suit against Governor Brian Kemp, which wasn't "pending" because it hadn't yet been filed.

“Following the Former President’s refusal to accept the results of the election and allow a peaceful transition of power, my views on this matter have changed significantly from where they were on December 13th,” added Sinners, who now works for Trump's nemesis, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

In the event, the proceedings weren't held in secret, and Shafer's lawyer claims to have turned all his comms over to the January 6 Select Committee, proving that there was no secrecy and thus no call to infer consciousness of guilt.

Whether Sinners's latter day conversion and Shafer's insistence that he was rounding up fraudulent electors totally out in the open will save them is still unclear. But safe bet we'll be hearing a lot more about these two cool cats during the upcoming hearings and beyond.

LOCK THEM UP!

[ CNN / WaPo ]

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