President Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani last night told Michigan lawmakers they are the final arbiters of the election, after being invited to present witnesses and sworn affidavits to a state House committee hearing.
He claimed that the city of Detroit was one of 10 cities in swing states, all with a reputation for corruption, where the voting process had been manipulated.
Witnesses had made claims the previous day to a Michigan state Senate committee of election irregularities at the TCF center in Detroit.
Giuliani said he was not asking the legislators to hand the state’s 16 electoral college votes—currently certified for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden—to Trump. Rather, he said, he hoped state legislators would investigate and examine the evidence for themselves.
“You shouldn’t decide anything based on what I believe,” said Giuliani on Dec. 2, adding that the evidence presented at the hearing was “just a sample.”
“There’s a plethora of evidence that you can go through that will convince you that this election was stolen,” said Giuliani. “I would ask you to go through that.”
The sometimes turbulent hearing at the Michigan state House committee on the evening of Dec. 2 followed a hearing at the state Senate committee the day before.
The previous day’s testimonies were limited to three minutes, with dozens of testimonies given over the course of seven hours. In contrast, the “sample” of just six witnesses spoke at greater length during the House committee hearing.
Several times, Democrat state Representatives directly challenged the witnesses about the veracity of their claims, prompting some fiery exchanges.
In keeping with Michigan convention, the witnesses were not under oath—something challenged several times by Democrat committee members who had tried, and failed, to get Giuliani to be sworn in at the start of the hearing.
Giuliani noted he was not a witness and it that was not customary to swear in a lawyer.
Michigan House Rep. Cynthia Johnson, a Democrat from Detroit, two hours into the hearing protested the witnesses not being under oath.
“It may not be done in this state, but you are allowing people to come here and lie,” she told House Oversight Chairman Matt Hall, a Republican.
Giuliani said after the exchange: “Every single witness we’ve presented her has sworn an affidavit as to all of these facts.”
Later summing up, Giuliani said that legislators should look beyond the evidence of election fraud in their own state, and consider the “eerily similar” pattern across the swing states, citing hundreds of signed affidavits.
The hearing was bookended by Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, another lawyer for the president, telling the Representatives that they are empowered by the constitution to make the final selection of state electors.
“You are the final arbiter of how honest or not your election is in your state,” Giuliani said. “And it’s your responsibility to stand up to that.”
“All I can tell you is [if] we let them get away with this, I don’t know what happens after this.”
Ellis said that the issue was not a political one, but a legal one.
“I would ask you all to put aside your party affiliation and look, openly and honestly, at these witnesses and this evidence, because here we’re all Americans, and our founders specifically provided this tool—the state legislature—to be able to combat corruption or foreign influence.”
She earlier said that the constitution clearly bestowed the state legislators with the selection of electors. “Under article 2 section 1.2 the state legislators are the entity that our founders specifically vested with the authority to ensure against a corrupt popular vote.”
A Michigan Secretary of State official told The Epoch Times on Wednesday, amid the hearing, that “no actual evidence of any wrongdoing or fraud was presented, despite repeated questions requesting such evidence from lawmakers.”
