Rudy Giuliani said the Trump legal team is retooling its strategy to focus more on voting machines, even as the companies that provide the hardware and software used in the 2020 election demand retractions of fraud claims that have not held up in court.
Giuliani, who is President Trump’s personal attorney and who has been spearheading the effort to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, appeared Saturday morning on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and spoke about a concerted shift in strategy after a series of deliberations on Friday, which are beginning to generate alarming headlines about the extreme measures that the president is considering in the final month of his term in office.
“We met pretty much on and off all day yesterday, and starting this morning, there’s a completely different strategy,” Giuliani told Bannon, who was Trump’s 2016 campaign chief executive officer and later the White House’s chief strategist for much of 2017. “The strategy is going to focus a great deal on some evidence we have about some of these machines that could throw off these states in a matter of maybe a one- or two-day audit.”
The conversation took place at nearly the same time the New York Times first reported details of a White House meeting on Saturday, which included Giuliani by phone.
The president raised the prospect of Sidney Powell, an attorney involved in the Michael Flynn case who has been involved in several unsuccessful election lawsuits even after being disavowed by the Trump legal team, being made special counsel to investigate allegations of election fraud. Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s first national security adviser and was recently pardoned by the president, also participated, and Trump brought up his recent suggestion about using the military to “rerun” the election in swing states.
The report said White House counsel Pat Cipollone and chief of staff Mark Meadows pushed back on these proposals.
During his interview with Bannon, Giuliani echoed claims that voting machines were used to throw the election to Biden in several key battleground states. He said that the Trump team wants to audit voting machines in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — all states that Biden won.
He said that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a conservative who was formerly one of the president’s closest allies, and Arizona’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey were involved in a “cover-up” following the election and claimed that digging deeper into the machines could bear fruit for Trump. Despite criticisms by Trump and his allies, Kemp attended the White House Christmas party on Friday.
“I think we can get these accomplished despite the resistance and the cover-up of the Republican governors, the guy in Arizona and the guy in Georgia — if we had their cooperation, we could have it ended by Monday,” Giuliani said. “I’m tired of dealing with them. We just push them aside, and I think over the weekend, you’ll see different strategies being employed.”
When pushed to describe exactly what he meant by the new strategy and what could be done to prove there was actual fraud, Giuliani pointed to the machines.
“In the state of Arizona, make 200 machines available — we could do it publicly. We could have the press there. … Give us eight hours, and we’ll show you how many false votes were in this machine and how it was used to manipulate the vote,” he said.
Much of Giuliani and Powell’s accusations focus on Dominion Voting Systems, which recently sent Powell a letter demanding that she retract her claims that the Canadian-founded company, now based in Denver, has ties to Venezuela and China.
“This is a voting machine designed way back in Venezuela to fix elections,” Giuliani said at one point, echoing a conspiracy theory about the election.
John Poulos, the CEO of the company, voluntarily testified under oath before the Michigan Senate’s Oversight Committee on Tuesday. This event took place before the backdrop of Powell’s so-called “Kraken” lawsuits, which have failed to produce any wins.
“Dominion is not and has never been a front for communists,” Poulos said. “It has no ties to Hugo Chavez, the late dictator of Venezuela. We have never been involved in Venezuelan elections. Its machines have never been used in Venezuela.”
“There are no ownership ties to any political parties nor to foreign governments. Dominion has no ties to the Pelosi family, Feinstein family, Clinton family, or George Soros,” he added, referring to powerful names in Democratic circles.
Also this past week, Smartmatic, another company that deals with electronic voting systems, sent a letter issuing legal notices and demanding retractions from Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network for “publishing false and defamatory statements.”
On Friday, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs aired what was effectively a fact-check segment of his own claims about election security involving Smartmatic, and Mediaite reported that the same segment will air on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show Saturday night and Maria Bartiromo’s on Sunday.
In speaking with Bannon, Giuliani touched on Maricopa County, Arizona, where the Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 on Friday to fight a pair of election subpoenas, including one that called for a full forensic audit of the county’s voting machines and software. This followed what was billed as a “forensic audit” of Dominion machines in Antrim County, Michigan, that state and Dominion officials have cast as error-ridden and purposefully misleading.
“Why would you even not want people to look at voting machines?” Giuliani asked.
“The only reason you would be resisting our examining those machines is because you know you did something crooked,” he said.
In addition to hinting at a new strategy related to voting machines, Giuliani called for protests over the outcome of the election.
“I also think it’s time for Republicans in those states where we have turncoat Republicans to demonstrate,” he said. “I think it’s time to let the governor of Georgia know that we think he’s a traitor to the Republican Party. Not only that, he’s a traitor to the sense of a fair election. He won’t even listen to my evidence.”
The New York Times reported on Saturday that Trump received pushback from most of his advisers, including Giuliani, when he discussed the idea of making Powell a special counsel. During the Friday meeting, the prospect of an executive order to seize voting machines and examine them was also reportedly discussed, as was having the Department of Homeland Security involved.
The DHS’s cybersecurity agency released a joint statement with partners in mid-November that asserted the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” adding, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Trump fired its chief, Chris Krebs, while stating his disagreement with the agency’s determination. Also departing next week is Attorney General William Barr, who is in a position to appoint a special counsel, a couple of weeks after he said that the Justice Department had not seen evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud.
Biden’s share of the Electoral College is 306-232. He also bested the president in the popular vote, taking in some 81.2 million ballots, more than 7 million than who voted for Trump.
