LANSING, Mich. — A lawyer who said he worked for former President Donald Trump's campaign and a former state senator asked a clerk in Oakland County for access to voting machines in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, according to two voicemails that were made public for the first time Thursday.
The Michigan Secretary of State's office provided an email about the voicemails to the U.S. Department of Justice in December after investigators subpoenaed the agency for communications with Trump's campaign as part of an ongoing probe into the former president's bid to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
The voicemail messages, released through an open records request, point to a broad effort to examine Michigan's voting machines, potentially involving Trump's campaign and other well-known Republicans in the battleground state.
Already, a special prosecutor is considering charges against nine individuals, including former Republican attorney general candidate Matt DePerno, over an alleged scheme to obtain tabulators from clerks, take them to rental properties and examine them.
In the voicemail messages from December 2020, a man who identified himself as Mark Foster "a lawyer with Rudy Guiliani's team" asked then-Rochester Hills Clerk Tina Barton for help accessing Dominion Voting Systems machines.
"I am a lawyer with Rudy Guiliani's team, working for the president. And we need access to some Dominion machines, which we understand may be something that you can help us with in Oakland County. If you can please call me back, I'd deeply appreciate it," Foster said in the voicemail.
However, Oakland County, where Barton was a clerk, did not use Dominion equipment.
The message from Foster came as Trump supporters were seeking to challenge Biden's victory in Michigan. Trump's team and DePerno, a lawyer from Kalamazoo, had focused on unproven claims of fraud involving Dominion equipment after problems tallying results in Antrim County, where Dominion machines were used.
The initial results in the Republican stronghold showed Biden winning. But the incorrect tallies were caused by human errors: Election workers' failure to update equipment after additions to the ballot. The issues spurred a wave of concerns and conspiracy theories about what had happened.
Foster didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. Foster's resume posted online, which included the same phone number he told Barton to call him at, listed him as working for Giuliani's campaign for president in 2007 and 2008.
Giuliani was Trump's personal lawyer in 2020.
According to emails released Thursday, Barton provided the voicemails to Jonathan Brater, Michigan's elections director, on Dec. 9, the day The Detroit News published an investigation into former state Sen. Patrick Colbeck's effort to pressure Livonia Clerk Susan Nash to hand over hard drives and voting machine data for analysis after the 2020 election.
Colbeck, who has previously spread false claims about the 2020 election, called Barton in December 2020 and said he was wondering if a group could "take a peek" at voting systems under her control, according to the former clerk.
"We've got a cyber forensics group on the ground here in Southeast Michigan. And we're looking for some additional targets of opportunity for getting access to Dominion systems," Colbeck said in his voicemail.
He added, "If you've got the ability to open up the hood so we could take a peek there, that would be useful."
Similarly, Colbeck told Nash in Livonia he wanted "a team of cyber forensic experts" to review the hard drives of Livonia city machines used to administer the election, which were also sought by committees of the Michigan Legislature, before Jan. 6, 2021, the day Congress would meet to officially count electoral votes.
In an email to Nash, Colbeck included a letter written by someone else, but with Nash's name on the bottom of it, that was addressed to Mark Meadows, Trump's chief of staff.
The letter, which Colbeck said ultimately wasn't sent to Meadows, asked for "the assistance of federal resources to undertake a cyber forensics review of the technology of the machines."
Barton shared the voicemail with Brater "after seeing the article in The Detroit News this morning."
"I absolutely never did, nor would I ever allow access to election equipment," Barton wrote to Brater. "I did not return either of their messages. I have already turned these voicemails over to my election crimes coordinator."
In an interview Thursday, Barton said the coordinator she referred to works for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Providing voting machine data to an outside group would have presented "large risks," including cybersecurity and legal dangers because it would have been a violation of the licensing agreement with the voting system's vendor, Kevin Skoglund, an election technology expert and the chief technologist at Citizens for Better Elections, a nonprofit group based in Pennsylvania, told The News in December.
Clerks should never allow access to election equipment to entities other than election officials and staff, licensed vendors and accredited voting system test laboratories, according to an August 2021 memo from Brater.
The U.S. Department of Justice subpoenaed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's office in December. The federal investigators were looking for communications with the Trump campaign form June 1, 2020, through Jan. 20, 2021.
Michael Brady, Benson's chief legal director, sent 37 responsive documents to the department on Dec. 12. He noted that he attached an email that came after the subpoena was issued but "contains voicemails involving individuals identified in the subpoena from the timeframe covered by the subpoena."
In August, Attorney General Dana Nessel's office sought a special prosecutor to consider charges against nine individuals over an alleged conspiracy to gain improper access to voting machines. The individuals included DePerno, then-state Rep. Daire Rendon, R-Lake City, and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf.
The group's efforts involved convincing local clerks to hand over tabulators, taking the tabulators to hotels or rental properties in Oakland County, breaking into the machines, printing "fake ballots" and performing "tests" on the equipment, according to the Attorney General's office.
Special Prosecutor D.J. Hilson has not announced a decision on whether to charge any of the nine individuals. And many of them have denied wrongdoing.
Nessel's office has said the potential charges included willfully damaging a voting machine, malicious destruction of property, fraudulent access to a computer or computer system and false pretenses.
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