Mike Pence’s legal team could not verify any of Donald Trump’s major claims of election fraud following his defeat to Joe Biden, a newly revealed memo shows.
The then-vice president’s team went through Mr Trump’s allegations that he was cheated out of victory before the certification of the election results, and found them either minor or unverifiable, according to POLITICO.
The memo was made available to the House’s January 6 select committee by the National Archives and Records Administration, someone familiar with it told the news organisation.
The 10-page memo, titled “Unlawful Election Conduct in Six States”, is addressed to Mr Pence from his White House legal team.
It dealt with alleged voter fraud in six swing states and stated that the claims were not convincing, and allegations from the Trump campaign itself were unverified.
“In general, there is strong evidence that state and local election officials committed numerous procedural violations that reduced transparency and/or favored Democrat candidates,” the memo states
“However, most allegations of substantive voter fraud — defined to mean the casting of illegal ballots in violation of prevailing election laws — are either relatively small in number, or cannot be verified.”
The memo states that lawyers were unable to verify Mr Trump’s claims that thousands of votes in Georgia were cast by underage or dead people.
And it also said it could not verify “statistic-based allegations” of voter fraud in Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.
Mr Trump brought a string of voter fraud lawsuits in battlegrounds across the country, all of which were rejected by judges.
The one-term president and his supporters were furious that Mr Pence rejected the claims and went ahead with the certification of Mr Biden’s election victory.
That certification process was infamously halted when Trump supporters violently attacked the US Capitol, with some calling for Mr Pence to be “hanged” for his participation. During the first January 6 hearing earlier this week, committee vice-chair Liz Cheney claimed that Mr Trump spoke favourably of those chants against his vice president. Ms Cheney said Mr Trump thought Mr Pence “deserved” it.
Marc Short, Mr Pence’s chief of staff at the White House, told POLITICO that the memo did reflect the views of the vice president’s legal team.
“We often observed the irregularities that occurred during the 2020 election, the reality that Democrats effectively weaponised election changes that were the result of Covid,” he said.
“But ultimately it was important to catalogue the various allegations and where there was hard evidence, or lack thereof, of actual theft.”
