The pro-Trump Arizona fake electors scheme: what’s in the charging document?

The indictment against the slate of fake electors in Arizona and the Trump allies who advanced the scheme there includes a host of public statements and private exchanges that show how the group intended to overturn the state’s electoral votes for Joe Biden in 2020.

Arizona’s Democratic attorney general Kris Mayes announced Wednesday that a state grand jury charged the 11 false electors and seven others with nine felony counts of fraud, forgery and conspiracy. The indictment from Mayes’ office is sure to be a talking point in this year’s elections , nearly four years after the acts themselves occurred.

The case’s net spans more broadly than the slate of fake electors itself, entangling Trump associates who perpetrated the theory that this “alternative” slate could be used by Congress and Vice-President Mike Pence instead of the state’s rightful electors who signed off that Biden won the state.

The documents detail the steps taken behind the scenes to push the concept of using electors for Trump to pressure Pence on 6 January 2021. Trump allies, both those charged in Arizona and those who weren’t, were exchanging messages, pressuring elected officials and arranging court cases to benefit the fake electors idea, the indictment shows.

And several of the fake electors themselves, by their public statements, intended for their act of signing falsely that they were the state’s true electors to be used by the Trump campaign to disrupt the electoral count and subvert the state’s Biden win.

Trump himself is not charged in the Arizona case, though he is listed throughout the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirator 1”, a “former president of the United States who spread false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election”.

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