Michael J. McDonald, Nevada Republican Party chairman, speaks during a protest at the Sawyer State Building in Las Vegas Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020. Protesters were unhappy that President Trump’s rallies scheduled for this weekend in Nevada were cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Friday, Dec. 23, 2022 | 2 a.m.
House Jan. 6 committee
The text message sent from Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald on Nov. 4, 2020, shows the beginning of a coordinated effort here by allies of former President Donald Trump to keep him in office.
“I have been on the phone this morning with the President, Eric Trump, Mark Meadows and Mayor (Rudy) Giuliani,” McDonald wrote in the message, which was released in transcripts this week by the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump extremists attempting to stop the certification of electoral votes for President Joe Biden’s general election victory.
The messaged continued, “There is a major plan. We are meeting at the hotel with attorneys and national staff in about 20 minutes.”
This message was sent one day after the 2020 presidential election and with ballots still being processed in Nevada, where Biden defeated Trump by about 30,000 votes to obtain enough electoral votes to claim the presidency.
The transcripts of the committee’s interviews with McDonald and James DeGraffenreid, Nevada’s Republican national committeeman, show their role in coordinating a fake elector scheme, where on Dec. 14, 2020, Republicans led by McDonald hosted a fake ceremony to certify the electoral votes for Trump.
The Nevada Republican Party sent the document — titled “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Nevada” — to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., with McDonald’s name listed with the return address. Republicans in a handful of states went through a similar forged and coordinated process — all with the same misleading and potentially criminal logic.
The meeting of fake electors, here and in the other five contested states, had no legal standing. Nevada’s real electors had already certified the state’s election that same day in a remote ceremony, awarding all six of Nevada’s electoral votes to Biden.
The committee’s questioning of McDonald, whose cellphone was seized by the FBI as part of the investigation, shed light on the planning to alter the election results. When asked about the “major plan” or other coordination, McDonald invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. Most of his testimony was pleading the Fifth.
DeGraffenreid also declined to answer the committee’s questions, such as wondering why they starting planning their scheme before Trump had lost.
A sample of the back and forth: When the committee asked DeGraffenreid of his understanding of the fake elector scheme, he declined to answer. And when they followed by asking of the scheme being a coordinated effort in other swing states also won by Biden — Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Mexico, Arizona and Wisconsin — he continued to plead the Fifth.
The committee released a batch of 34 transcripts late Wednesday, all of which showed witnesses repeatedly preventing parts of the panel’s inquiry from advancing by invoking Fifth Amendment rights. McDonald, in his 80-page transcript, easily used the response nearly 300 times.
The New York Times reported that John Eastman, who advised Donald Trump on how to try to overturn the 2020 election, cited his Fifth Amendment right 155 times. Roger Stone, a conservative political consultant, used the response to more than 70 questions, the Times reported.
The committee voted unanimously Monday to recommend that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against Trump for inciting or assisting an insurrection in an attempt to overthrow the result of the 2020 election.
While McDonald and DeGraffenreid refused to comment on their participation to the committee, there was plenty said in the immediate wake of the fake elector scheme. The Nevada GOP posted a photo of the fake electors on Twitter, writing “Our brave electors standing up for what is right and casting their electoral votes for @realDonaldTrump. We believe in fair elections and will continue the fight against voter fraud in the Silver State!”
It was part of the coordination revealed in the committee transcripts, which showed communications between Republican leaders in Nevada as to where to hold the fake elector ceremony, whether or not to invite a crowd, and crafting a news release to distribute after the ceremony that mirrored a release in other states.
The party issued that release after the production, playing to its inaccurate claim of irregularities that gave Biden the victory in the 2020 presidential election.
“A court of law has failed to meaningfully evaluate the evidence and our law enforcement agencies and government officials have failed to investigate,” the party said in the statement. “This left our electors no choice but to send their votes for President Trump to Congress to make a determination as to who is the rightful victor of Nevada between the dueling votes.”
DeGraffenreid’s interview with the committee also included an email he and McDonald received from Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who writes that “Mayor Giuliani and others with the Trump-Pence campaign asked me to reach out to you and the other Nevada electors to run point on the plan to have all Trump-Pence electors in all six contested states meet and transmit their votes to Congress on Monday, Dec. 14.”
And a message to McDonald from Shawn Meehan, one of the fake electors in Nevada, detailed how the fake elector scheme was going to happen in other states, the transcripts revealed. “We’re in good company,” Meehan messaged.
Meehan also messaged DeGraffenreid, according to the transcripts, about how McDonald was feeling pressure, saying “he’s concerned RNC will cut cord if (the fake elector production) looks bad and steal credit if we do well.”
Not only did the plan backfire, it helped lead to the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Multiple rioters have been sentenced for their role.
It’s unknown whether Trump will face punishment, as the referrals by the bipartisan committee are nonbinding and do not require the Justice Department to act.
Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said Trump “broke the faith” that people have when they cast ballots in a democracy and that the criminal referrals could provide a “roadmap to justice” by using the committee’s work.
“I believe nearly two years later, this is still a time of reflection and reckoning,” Thompson said. “If we are to survive as a nation of laws and democracy, this can never happen again.”
McDonald and DeGraffenreid didn’t return calls from the Sun seeking comment for this story. McDonald in July wasn’t denying his participation during comments at a function local for Republican women.
“We have people that, well, really didn’t exist that all of a sudden existed (and cast ballots in the 2020 election),” McDonald told the GOP women’s dinner audience. “All we wanted to do is have them, have them go through and investigate it. So we did this (alternate elector slate). We didn’t do it in the basement. We didn’t do it in hiding anywhere, guys. We did it on the steps of the state Capitol. It was national news.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
