OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked Jan. 6 Committee is continuing to solely target allies and associates of former President Donald Trump, though the latest figure allied with the former president is not as easy a mark as the Democrat-led panel may suspect.
Former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik has handed over memos sought by the committee, which show that “Trump’s team assembled a 10-day pressure campaign in December 2020 hoping to shame governors and state legislators into officially investigating allegations of Election 2020 irregularities,” Just the News reported on Saturday.
What the memos don’t show, however, is a master ‘plot’ to disrupt the counting of the electoral ballots nearly a year ago, as many Democrats have accused the former president of attempting to do.
The outlet continued:
The strategy called for “protests” at governors’ mansions and the homes of politicians ranging from secretaries of states to “weak” congressional members in key battleground states, the memos show.
The documents, turned over Friday night under subpoena to the House’s Jan. 6 commission, are remarkable in part because they show the primary focus of the Trump team leading up to the Jan. 6 certification of the 2020 vote – an event that turned violent when pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol – was to get “support for hearings” to probe allegations of voting irregularities Trump’s team had received but not vetted.
“Language in the memos even shows that the legal team, led by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and assisted by an investigative and research team led by Kerik, was even open to the possibility that there was not enough irregularities to change the outcome of Democratic challenger Joe Biden’s win,” Just the News reported.
One strategy memo that discussed an action plan outlining a period from Dec. 27, 2020, to Jan. 6, 2021, said the objective was to find “what works to prove the elections numbers are right or wrong.
“We Have 10 Days To Execute This Plan & Certify President Trump!” the memo noted.
The memo indicated that the team believed Trump would be declared the winner if all of the allegations made about voting irregularities were properly investigated. Still, the strategy focused on getting legitimate investigations underway in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The objective was to convince those states to conduct probes that gained “access to the voting machines for forensics analyses,” review ballot signatures using artificial intelligence, and vet paper ballots to “determine valid paper, creases from folding for mailing, ink type, (and) whether ballot was filled out by hand or machine,” the memo said.
Just the News emphasized:
Democrats leading the Jan. 6 commission repeatedly have said they believed Trump and his team simply created a “big lie” about non-existent voter fraud in a bold effort to overturn legitimate election results showing Biden won.
But Kerik’s lawyer wrote in a cover letter transmitting the documents that the evidence his client turned over provided a far more nuanced portrait of a team that catalogued a long list of unvetted election allegations and simply wanted them formally investigated before the final vote was certified Jan. 6.
“While I appreciate the partisan interests in constantly repeating phrases such as the ‘Big Lie’ or ‘false claims of election fraud,’ the reality is that the claims of election fraud were never fully investigated,” attorney Timothy Parlatore told the panel.
“Without a proper investigation, it is impossible for anyone to state with certainty either that President Biden stole the election through widespread fraud, or that President Trump promoted false claims of election fraud,” he also said.
The attorney also provided some hints into what testimony Kerik may provide the committee, noting that the former NYPD boss didn’t think it was appropriate for then-Vice President Mike Pence to simply certify a different set of electors and thus declare Trump the winner if no evidence of vote fraud had been found and proven.
“To be clear, while it has been reported that some may have pushed a plan for then-Vice President Pence to certify alternate slates and declare Donald Trump the winner on January 6, this is not Mr. Kerik’s understanding,” Parlatore said.
“His goal was to provide sufficient evidence through his investigation or prompt a DOJ investigation specifically to ensure that the election results accurately reflected the will of the people,” Parlatore added.
“His hope for January 6 was for sufficient evidence to be presented which would result in a delay of the election certification to ensure accuracy, not a subversion of the process.”
Kerik has also said that he is willing to testify before the panel, but that it takes place in public, not behind closed doors.
