At today’s hearing on election integrity, Trump Campaign
Attorneys Rudy Giuliani, the former New York Mayor, and Jenna
Ellis, senior legal advisor to the Trump campaign, addressed the
state legislature in an ongoing push to convince lawmakers that
widespread voter fraud occurred in Arizona and throughout the
country.
At one point in Giuliani’s opening statement, he said
this:
“We’ve been warned for 20 years, that going to major mail-in
ballots, as a way of doing our elections, will be fraught with
tremendous fraud. They’re very dangerous. It’s almost
impossible, for even semi-crooked politicians, to resist the
temptation to use it for ballot stuffing. We were warned by
President Jimmy Carter. We were warned by former Secretary of State
Jim Baker in a report, very very consequential report that said we
should never do it, and if we do it, it should be extremely
limited, to the real absentee situations, like we have done in the
past.”
The Trump Campaign legal team asserted that Democrats had
resorted to mail-in ballot fraud once they realized that they were
falling behind on election night. “The key fraud is the mail-in
ballot” said Giuliani.
Mayor @RudyGiuliani:
Democrats used mail-in ballots as a backup for when they fell too
far behind pic.twitter.com/zP02QVA7Wa— Team Trump (@TeamTrump)
November 30, 2020
Giuliani explained that the United States would go down in
history as a nation that did not have the courage to stand up and
fight against the certification of an election that was
“tainted.” He told the lawmakers that the current vote as it
stands is “fraudulent” and to certify the results would serve
as a “false statement to the United States.”
He continued his statement, declaring that “anybody who puts
their name on that is getting very close to committing a crime, and
I think anybody who stands by and lets it happen, maybe they’re
not committing a crime, but they’ve lost the sense of what it
means, that we have to fight to protect our values and our
rights…”
In an attempt to persuade Arizona state lawmakers to use their
authority to assign representatives to the Electoral College, as
stated in Article 2, section 1.2 of the U.S. Constitution, Giuliani
had this to say:
I’m going to ask you to fight. I’m going to ask you to try
to implore the other members of your legislature to stand up to
this. Do not be bullied. Do not be frightened. Your political
career is worth losing if you can save the right to vote in
America.
Mayor @RudyGiuliani
to Arizona state legislatures: “Your political career is worth
losing if you can save the right to vote in America.” pic.twitter.com/IPumw6Z3tB— Team Trump (@TeamTrump)
November 30, 2020
After Giuliani’s statement, Ellis added her own, directly
asking the Arizona legislature to
refuse to certify what she maintains are fraudulent election
results.
