Lansing – Members of the administration of then President Donald Trump shared “talking points” and false claims about the Antrim County election in northern Michigan with federal prosecutors, e -mails released Tuesday by the US House Committee on Oversight and Reformshown.
The documents revealed that the county of 23,000 people, where the mistakes of election workers were turned into unfounded theories of software manipulation, was on the minds of senior U.S. officials on December 14, the day presidential voters gathered to vote for Democrat Joe Biden.
December 14 was also the day Trump announced on social media that US Attorney General William Barr would step down and Assistant Attorney General Jeff Rosen would take over. At 4:57 p.m. on December 14, Molly Michael, an assistant to the president, emailed two documents about the County Antrim election to Rosen.
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The subject line of Michael’s email stated that the information was “from POTUS”, referring to the President of the United States. The attachments included a report on the County Antrim election from an organization called the Allied Security Operations Group and a set of “talking points” on the findings. The “talking points” appeared to have been drafted by the same people behind the Allied Security Operations Group report. .
The “talking points” document made unsubstantiated allegations about the Michigan election, which Biden won by 154,000 votes or 3 percentage points. Biparty canvassing committees, a series of court rulings and dozens of audits by election officials reinforced the result.
“A cover-up is underway regarding voting machines in Michigan,” said the document shared by Trump’s aide.
“Michigan cannot certify for Biden,” the document added in a section titled “Findings.”
Two minutes after the message to Rosen, a Justice Department official sent the County Antrim documents to Matthew Schneider, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, and Andrew Birge, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan. the state.
“See attachments by Rich Donoghue,” the post read, referring to the man Trump asked to become deputy attorney general when Rosen became acting attorney general.
The emails related to County Antrim were part of a batch of documents released by the United States House committee on Tuesday. The panel Democratic President Rep. Carolyn Maloney said they were showing Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to overturn the legal results of the 2020 presidential election.
“These documents show that President Trump attempted to bribe our nation’s main law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election he lost,” said Maloney of New York.
The pressure to undermine the outcome does not change the truth that Michigan’s election was the safest in state history, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The extent of the efforts of current and former elected officials to deceive voters in order to advance partisan and political agendas is appalling and dangerous for our communities, our democracy and our nation,” added the Democratic leader.
County Antrim has been at the center of unsubstantiated allegations about the 2020 election after initial election results in the Tory County won Biden by 3,260 votes with 62% of the overall total. Trump received 36%.
After realizing there were issues with the numbers, County Antrim’s office clerk Sheryl Guy reviewed the election results and reported the official tally: Trump had won the county by 3 788 votes, 61% to 37%, or 7,048 votes compared to the unofficial results.
The incorrect initial counts were fueled by human error – the inability to properly prepare the equipment after late ballot design changes. Without updates, the figures were scrambled when they were counted as unofficial figures. But Trump supporters claimed there were issues with Dominion Voting Systems software and the votes were reversed.
Dominion equipment is used in 66 of Michigan’s 83 counties, according to the company’s website.
Despite all claims, the Michigan State Department on December 17 released the results of an audit of presidential results in County Antrim. Trump got 12 votes, a 0.07% lag from the certified results. The audit was essentially a manual recount of the presidential race for every ballot in the county.
The “talking points” shared among Trump administration officials repeated a flawed claim that 68% of the votes in County Antrim were “reversed”. This claim was based on a Dec. 13 report from the Allied Security Operations Group.
The report attracted national attention from the conservative media, and Dominion’s alleged software was “intentionally and deliberately designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
The Allied Security Operations Group report, written by Russell James Ramsland Jr., said the group found a 68% “error rate” when examining the county server’s “tab log” from Antrim.
But an expert from the University of Michigan J. Alex Halderman’s analysis stated that Ramsland arrived at the figure of 68% by examining the scanner log of a new analysis of ballots on Nov. 6 in Central Lake Township, a township in County Antrim. The log consisted of 15,676 lines, with Ramsland classifying 10,667 as errors, which equates to an “error rate” of 68%.
But the 68% result is “meaningless,” said Halderman, who is also co-chair of the Michigan Election Security Advisory Commission and professor of computer science. Scanning a single bulletin produces multiple lines in the log, “often including many minor warnings or errors,” he said.
Michigan election officials publicly castigated the Ramsland report on December 14.
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel, both Democrats, issued a joint statement calling the report “another in a long series of false, vague and questionable claims aimed at eroding public confidence in the presidential election in November “.
County Antrim Clerk Guy, a Republican, said she was saddened by the efforts to discredit the equipment.
“I read the report and found that there were a lot of misleading statements that just weren’t accurate,” Guy said in December.
The “talking points” also repeated claims that a large number of County Antrim’s ballots were being sent to “arbitration”.
The arbitration feature was not activated at all in County Antrim during the November 2020 election, and Antrim did not purchase the app, Halderman said in his report.
“Far from a ‘mind-boggling number’ of ballots being judged, the actual number was zero,” said Halderman. “Therefore, Mr. Ramsland’s theories are totally inapplicable to the County Antrim incident.”
