Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward asserts fake electors only meant as fail-safe
The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, according to a court filing, became part of an alternate slate of presidential electors, sending documents falsely asserting herself and others as such to Congress, only as a fail-safe should the certified results be overturned.
Attorneys for Kelli Ward, the head of the state Republican Party since 2019, said in the filing that the 11 Republicans, including Ward and her husband, Michael, gathered in December 2020 to cast votes for then-President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence “in the event that the legal challenges to the Arizona results succeeded.”
However, the documents that she and the other electors signed and sent by certified mail to the U.S. Senate and National Archives made no mention of legal challenges. The document falsely asserted that the 11 Republicans were the “duly elected and qualified” presidential electors, with no conditional language.
In a December 2020 email obtained by The New York Times, an attorney involved with the scheme quoted Ward as fearing the action may amount to treason.
Further, weeks after meeting and casting their votes, Ward and the other non-elected and qualified electors filed a lawsuit against Pence asking the U.S. Supreme Court to declare that Pence had the power to decide to count their electoral votes and disregard those that reflected the 2020 general election victory in Arizona of President Joe Biden.
Lawsuit fights to exclude Ward's phone records
The document filed Monday was part of a lawsuit Ward and her husband filed against the Select Congressional Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. That committee had sought Ward’s phone records from Election Day 2020 through the day of the riot, which occurred on the day Congress met to open the official electoral votes from the states and count them.
Ward and her husband filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to block the subpoena from the committee.
In the filing, Ward’s attorneys said that turning over the logs of calls to Ward’s phone would have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of Republicans.
It would expose anyone who spoke to Ward to an inquiry from congressional investigators or a knock on the door from FBI agents, the filing said, noting a parallel criminal investigation into the post-election activities of those in Trump’s circle.
“Public participation in politics is the life blood of our democracy,” the filing reads. “The criminalization of political activity, if not carefully constrained by the courts, will force legitimate political actors from the field.”
Anyone who called Ward “will become implicated in the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history solely by virtue of the fact that they were in contact with the party Chair,” the filing reads.
Ward, the filing notes, runs a medical weight loss clinic and used her phone to communicate with clients. “(S)uch patients could face the uncomfortable choice of admitting that they were seeking treatment for medical weight loss or living with the implication that they might have been partially responsible for the Capitol Riot,” the filing says.
The filing compared the quest by the select committee to learn who contacted Ward to the state of Alabama, in the late 1950s, seeking to learn who had filled out membership cards for the NAACP.
Ward’s attorneys say the consequence of the disclosure of a list of the party chair’s phone calls would be dire. “The attempt to criminalize partisan political activities via an intrusive investigation of political actors poses a greater threat to our democracy than the Capitol Riot,” the filing says.
The filing also said any link between the casting of the fake electoral votes and the riot was “far from obvious.”
Though the paragraph that contained that assertion, along with the statement that the votes were cast as a fail-safe, were marked with a footnote saying they should only be relied upon for this motion only.
Ward has been subpoenaed by both the FBI and the Select Committee.
She declined an interview request Tuesday through a spokesperson for the Arizona Republican Party, deferring comment to her attorney, Alexander Kolodin.
Kolodin, who is running for a state legislative seat in November, did not immediately return a message on Tuesday.
What happened with the fake electors
In December 2020, a plan was hatched by attorneys who had become part of Trump’s inner circle to have some states send alternate slates of electors to Congress.
Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix attorney who has represented the Arizona Republican Party, shared details of the plan as he understood it from talking with Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney working for Trump’s campaign. Wilenchik’s email, which was obtained by the New York Times, called the plan “wild/creative.”
“His idea is basically that all of us (GA, WI, AZ, PA, etc.) have our electors send in their votes (even though the votes aren’t legal under federal law — because they’re not signed by the Governor); so that members of Congress can fight about whether they should be counted on January 6th,” Wilenchik wrote.
Wilenchik said in the email that he saw no legal harm in the plan. “We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” he wrote.
In a later e-mail, Wilenchik said that “alternate” was probably a better descriptor of the electors then “fake.”
Three days later, Chesebro wrote an email that said Ward and state Rep. Kelly Townsend had concerns that the Republican electors meeting to cast their votes would amount to treason. The email, also obtained by the Times, said that the two wondered if there would be an active court case with the U.S. Supreme Court on the day the electors were supposed to meet, providing a reason for an alternate slate to exist.
“Ward and Townsend are concerned it could appear treasonous for the AZ electors to vote on Monday if there is no pending court proceeding that might, eventually, lead to the electors being ratified as the legitimate ones,” the email said. The word treasonous appeared in bold type in the email.
The slate of Arizona Trump electors had filed a suit in early December against Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. The suit asked the court to disallow the state’s Biden electors from being counted, or, direct those electors to cast their votes for Trump.
That suit was dismissed in federal court on Dec. 9, five days before the Republicans met and falsely asserted themselves the state’s electors.
Republicans in seven other states won by Biden also met and filed similar paperwork — including identical font and layout — falsely asserting themselves their state’s electors. The wording on the documents was identical, though two states, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, included language clarifying that this slate of electors would only count if conditions changed.
Arizona’s document contained no such wiggle room.
The fake Arizona electors made no secret of what they were doing. They posted video of the meeting online and sent out a news release describing it. In the video, a man who appears to be Thomas Lane, who ran the Trump campaign in Arizona, passed out papers to the would-be electors seated at a table.
After the fake Arizona electors met at state Republican headquarters and cast their votes for Trump and Pence, the act was mentioned in a case filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in behalf of electors in Georgia and Michigan. Those lawsuits mentioned that Arizona’s electors tried to file a case as well, but it fell victim to a clerical error.
On Christmas Eve 2020, Arizona’s electors filed a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to take extraordinary action to consider its case. In that petition, the alternate electors were described as a “contingent slate” that had cast their votes for Trump.
Who was involved
Besides Ward and her husband, the fake elector slate included Rep. Jake Hoffman of Queen Creek; former Rep. Anthony Kern, who is making a 2022 bid to return to office; Jim Lamon, a failed U.S. Senate candidate; and Tyler Bowyer, the executive at Turning Point Action, the political arm of the nonprofit advocacy group aimed at engaging young Republicans started by Charlie Kirk.
Also signing on were: Robert Montgomery, chair of the Cochise County Republican Committee; Samuel Moorhead, second vice chair of the Gila County Republican Party; and Greg Safsten, executive director of the Arizona Republican Party.
Nancy Cottle, signed the document as president of the electors. Loraine Pellegrino signed as secretary. Both women have been subpoenaed by the Select Committee. Both have also been subpoenaed by the FBI, according to the Washington Post.