Talking Points Memo brings us a mini-scoop gleaned from the defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani by two victims of his election hoaxes. We now know what Giuliani and Bernard Kerik thought it would really take to overturn Donald Trump's election loss.
Specifically, they thought it would take $5-$8 million dollars, payable to them. That's pretty cheap for a plan to overthrow the elected United States government, but even then it's unclear how the money would have been spent. The request for cash once again highlights the bizarre nature of the whole Giuliani-Kerik grift, because it wasn't the Trump campaign or the Republican National Committee that Kerik was coming to with this request for funding. In a now-released email, Kerik was asking White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for the cash.
The last-ditch plan for overturning Trump's election loss, as plotted out by Giuliani, Kerik, and an assortment of attached Republican cranks, was to "pressure" state legislatures in Republican states to nullify their election results and assign their states' electors to Trump by fiat. By Dec. 1, 2020, Kerik was apparently coordinating with Meadows on travel expenses for his election-thwarting "team," asking Meadows to transfer money for "a hotel for the team and two vehicles to pick us up" to Trump campaign attorney Christina Bobb.
Weeks later, on Dec. 28, Kerik had his estimate for what the next phase of the scheme would cost. "Between $5 to $8M," Kerik wrote to Trump's Meadows. The money was to "apply pressure" to "force the legislators to do what their [sic] constitutionally obligated to do."
From that description we can only assume that there was to be some sort of advertising blitz in the remaining week before the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress that would count up the state electoral votes, somehow convincing multiple Republican state legislatures it was both a plausible and a defensible plan.
To be honest the whole thing smells like a scam, and it sounds even more like a scam because it's coming from convicted fraudster Bernard Kerik. Kerik already landed himself a prison sentence a decade ago for tax fraud and lying to federal officials, but he landed himself a pardon from Trump early in 2020 as part of Trump's pardoning spree for crooked political allies. The most intriguing part of all of this, though, is that at least Kerik believed Trump's point man for plots to overturn the election was–yep–Meadows. It was Meadows that Kerik was giving updates to, and it was Meadows that Kerik was repeatedly contacting to shake both petty cash and seven-figure sums from.
Not Trump's campaign. Not Trump himself. Not the Republican Party apparatus that was a hub of cash and lawyers relentlessly devoted to getting Donald Trump out of legal trouble. As far as Kerik was concerned, it was Trump's White House chief of staff who was coordinating election nullification efforts.
And Meadows has been as silent as a mouse as multiple state and federal investigations swirl and America sees numerous violent backers of the election-erasing scheme convicted for their own parts in a seditious conspiracy.
Kerik? Kerik's probably the same petty grifter he always was, still attached to equally petty crook Giuliani in an effort to scrape up whatever scraps Republican rubes will give him. But Meadows keeps getting named, time and time again, as the key White House player who either knew of or coordinated each of the Trump team's various election-sabotaging plans.
That's a hell of a thing, and most of America is still waiting very, very patiently to hear what prosecutors intend to do about it.
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