"I will not break my oath": the Republicans who stopped Trump's electoral turnaround

Donald Trump's campaign to reverse the results of the polls in the 2020 presidential election was up against a handful of Republican state officials who refused to bend the law and the US Constitution to help their president will remain in power.

"I will not break my oath": the Republicans who stopped Trump's electoral turnaround

Donald Trump's campaign to reverse the results of the polls in the 2020 presidential election was up against a handful of Republican state officials who refused to bend the law and the US Constitution to help their president will remain in power. Several of them testified this Tuesday in a new appearance of the House of Representatives committee that investigates the "coup attempt" led by Trump, which culminated in the tragic and embarrassing assault on Capitol Hill on January 6 of last year, the day in which Congress, against the efforts of the Republican president, certified the victory of Joe Biden.

“I will not break my oath to respect the law and the Constitution,” Rusty Bowers, the president of the Lower House of Arizona, one of the most disputed states, responded time and time again to pressure from Trump and his allies to commune with his plans to reverse the outcome of the polls.

This is how this Republican leader recalled it before the committee, in which he defended that Trump and his team "never provided proof" of the allegations of electoral 'theft', such as that there were hundreds of thousands of votes from undocumented immigrants or thousands of votes from Dead people.

State authorities are key in holding elections at the national level in the US More than an election for president, there are more like fifty elections -for each one of the states-, governed by state authorities. In the case of the presidential election, the winner in each state gets a number of delegates - called voters - whose number depends on the demographic weight of each territory.

One of the strategies of Trump and his allies was to pressure the states with the most tied results to send "substitute voters" in the face of the alleged - but non-existent - massive electoral fraud. In his appearance this Tuesday, he verified how the former president had a direct role in this attempt to subvert the results and in which the Republican party apparatus also participated. In a statement before the committee's investigators, the president of the Republican National Convention (RNC), Ronna McDaniel, assured that Trump called her and put on the call the lawyer John Eastman -one of the main dollers of their anti-election campaign - to ask them to help them "get voters in case ongoing lawsuits change the outcome in any of those states."

Several lawyers and members of the Trump campaign have testified that they saw that strategy as having little legal support. But the former president and those most dedicated to the cause of electoral fraud -Eastman himself or Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York whom Trump put in charge of the campaign- moved forward.

Bowers himself was urged to move the piece as the head of the legislative power in Arizona to establish these 'substitute electors'. “Just do it and let the courts fix it,” Eastman snapped at his doubts about the legality of taking that step, contrary to the popular will. "We have no proof, but we have many theories," Giuliani once told him. Trump also participated in the calls. The idea of ​​'substitute electors' struck him as a "tragic travesty" and he refused to participate. His position has caused threats and protests outside his home by followers of 'Trump', in addition to the revenge of the former president, which calls into question his political career.

On the other side of the US South, other Republicans suffered the fury of the then president for refusing to be part of his conspiracy. Brad Raffensperger is a lifelong Republican and Secretary of State for Georgia. Because of his position, he is in charge of supervising the holding of elections. Trump lost the state - where Republicans usually win - by 11,700 votes, one of the keys to his defeat.

Trump put all the meat on the grill to try to turn the results around in Georgia. His campaign denounced that deceased or minors had voted. And, in one of the great accusations of the campaign, that late on election night suitcases with thousands of votes in favor of Biden had been introduced into a counting center that had turned the election upside down. They showed a video showing poll workers removing these allegedly fraudulent bags. It was all fake. They were the usual containers in which votes are moved from polling stations to counting centers.

Both the US attorney general -William Barr, chosen by Trump and a staunch defender during the presidency- and the attorney general of Georgia, the substitute appointed by Trump that same December or the state Republican authorities denied that there was any fraud. Trump chose to persist in the lie to warm up his supporters, in a campaign that ended with violence on Capitol Hill. And he directly lobbied the local authorities to change the result. He personally called Frances Watson, the lead investigator from Georgia in auditing the results (there were three counts, all with similar results): "Do what you can," he told her. He also to Raffensperger, in a call of more than an hour on January 2, 2021 in which he urged him to "find" the votes he needed to win.

Raffensperger, now one of the main objects of attack by 'trumpism', insisted that there was no fraud anywhere. "The numbers are the numbers," he told the committee Tuesday. "The numbers don't lie."

But Trump wanted him to lie to tilt the result in his favor. He even threatened him that if he did not act on his behalf he would have criminal repercussions against him. “Sometimes there are moments that require you to hang in there and take the hits,” he said. “We obeyed the law and the Constitution.”

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