“Fairly Shocking”: Michigan County Prosecutor Says Rudy Giuliani Asked Him to Seize Voting Machines

Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 09:00 pm

According to a new article in the Washington Post, Trump and his team were illegally pushing their “rigged” theories far earlier than we were led to believe, as far back as when the campaign was filing legitimate lawsuits that simply lacked any evidence, legitimate or otherwise. On November 20, 2020, Rudy Giuliani and “others around him,” contacted the Antrim County, Michigan, prosecutor James Rossiter and asked him to seize the county’s voting machines.

From the Post’s article:

Rossiter said he declined. “I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause.†Even if he had had sufficient grounds to take the machines as evidence, Rossiter said, he could not have released them to outsiders or a party with an interest in the matter.

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Correct. Rossiter is referencing what we generally call “laws.” If Trump genuinely wanted to go all-in on his “coup” and seize the voting machines, he would have had to sign a presidential order directing a federal agency, DOJ, DoD, or Homeland Security, to seize the machines and then pray that the agency believed Trump had the legal authority to seize the machines. Otherwise, they were forced to go to court, just like everyone else,

And that is part of the point. Trump was very much willing to steal the election, but he is no Che Guevarra and he was not about to risk going to jail or his “health” by putting pen to paper or even calling up these departments himself.

This morning, Washington Post attorney, Jackie Alemany described the scheme as fairly shocking: (Video Below)

“Well, it’s amazing, first of all, we are continuing to find so much new information that has yet to be uncovered, which is exactly what the Jan. 6 committee is doing,”

This site, and this writer – especially, have written and continue to believe that far bigger bombs are about to drop from the Select Committee, which is one of the reasons we see so many of the GOP power players distancing themselves from Trump.

“But this story especially is just fairly shocking because it shows them actually trying to implement some of their plans that we’ve seen sketched out in executive orders to seize voting machines. Here is a situation where they dialed in on a specific county and found a reason to do so despite it being obviously quite unconstitutional.

And despite having access to presidential orders, which could and would have been blocked by a court, they chose to try a phone call, a “careful” coup.

“Even in the conversations I’ve had just in the past few months there are still a lot of people involved with this effort who believed that these voting machines needed to be seized to be protected so they could prove fraud. These people are true believers.”

No surprise there. At some point, spending weeks planning on any one thing with that level of desperation, one can make oneself believe damned near anything.

“That’s why those clips that were just played are so important for everyone to remember, especially when this investigation might potentially lead to whether or not this was negligence or actually intentional behavior.”

It was intentional and almost everyone knew it then. Everyone knows it now, we don’t feel the need to be quite as careful anymore, not with the amount of evidence available to us now.

“But it is clear that the former president knew exactly what was wrong with doing these things. He called up Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton on ripping up documents, taking classified information, accepting gifts, mischaracterizations because he knew it was politically damaging and gave the appearance of being corrupt. That’s what I think ultimately the DOJ is going to have to do if they decide ultimately to investigate the 15 boxes taken from Mar-A-Lago, which is what the archives has asked them to do according to our reporting yesterday.

Of course, Trump knew what he was doing. Trump is no genius, but he does have a genius feral survival instinct, and he knows never to get his hands too dirty on anything. If one remembers, in Trump’s January 6th speech, he told the crowd that he was going with them. They had every reason to believe that Trump would be either walking or riding to the Capitol, too. Had Trump been willing to take such risks, as dictators have in the past, he almost surely would have succeeded in at least creating enough havoc, enough violence, to ensure that Congress couldn’t perform its duty, possibly sending the election to the House of Representatives, possibly putting the count of Electoral College votes “off” for a period of time, which evolves into “indefinitely.”

Over and over we learn the same lessons. There was a serious and concerted effort to effect a coup without regard to any actual evidence that Trump won or that the election was actually “rigged.” That Trump was in the middle of the planning from the beginning until the end, including all that happened on January 6th, and – encouragingly, the guard rails of our democracy held up, judges, secretaries of states, governors, Congress, and even a district attorney in Michigan stood up against a sitting president on the basis of law… This time.

Now if we can just carry through with what the law demands in such situations, we might prevent any attempt going into the future.


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