At today’s hearing on election integrity, Trump Campaign Attorneys Rudy Giuliani, the former New York Mayor, and Jenna Ellis, senior legal advisor to the Trump campaign, addressed the state legislature in an ongoing push to convince lawmakers that widespread voter fraud occurred in Arizona and throughout the country.
At one point in Giuliani’s opening statement, he said this:
“We’ve been warned for 20 years, that going to major mail-in ballots, as a way of doing our elections, will be fraught with tremendous fraud. They’re very dangerous. It’s almost impossible, for even semi-crooked politicians, to resist the temptation to use it for ballot stuffing. We were warned by President Jimmy Carter. We were warned by former Secretary of State Jim Baker in a report, very very consequential report that said we should never do it, and if we do it, it should be extremely limited, to the real absentee situations, like we have done in the past.”
The Trump Campaign legal team asserted that Democrats had resorted to mail-in ballot fraud once they realized that they were falling behind on election night. “The key fraud is the mail-in ballot” said Giuliani.
Mayor @RudyGiuliani: Democrats used mail-in ballots as a backup for when they fell too far behind pic.twitter.com/zP02QVA7Wa
— Team Trump (@TeamTrump) November 30, 2020
Giuliani explained that the United States would go down in history as a nation that did not have the courage to stand up and fight against the certification of an election that was “tainted.” He told the lawmakers that the current vote as it stands is “fraudulent” and to certify the results would serve as a “false statement to the United States.”
He continued his statement, declaring that “anybody who puts their name on that is getting very close to committing a crime, and I think anybody who stands by and lets it happen, maybe they’re not committing a crime, but they’ve lost the sense of what it means, that we have to fight to protect our values and our rights…”
In an attempt to persuade Arizona state lawmakers to use their authority to assign representatives to the Electoral College, as stated in Article 2, section 1.2 of the U.S. Constitution, Giuliani had this to say:
“I’m going to ask you to fight. I’m going to ask you to try to implore the other members of your legislature to stand up to this. Do not be bullied. Do not be frightened. Your political career is worth losing if you can save the right to vote in America.”
Mayor @RudyGiuliani to Arizona state legislatures: “Your political career is worth losing if you can save the right to vote in America.” pic.twitter.com/IPumw6Z3tB
— Team Trump (@TeamTrump) November 30, 2020
After Giuliani’s statement, Ellis added her own, directly asking the Arizona legislature to refuse to certify what she maintains are fraudulent election results.