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- Rudy Giuliani asked a Michigan prosecutor to turn over voting machines to the Trump team, The Washington Post reported.
- Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter said he declined the request, which he “never expected” to get.
- “We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors,” he said.
Rudy Giuliani asked a county prosecutor in northern Michigan to turn over voting machines to the Trump team in the weeks after the 2020 election, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Antrim County Prosecutor James Rossiter told The Post that Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team called him in late November 2020 after the county initially misreported its election results, appearing to give then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden 3,000 more votes than former President Donald Trump, according to The Post report.
Rossiter said he denied the request from Giuliani and Trump’s legal team, saying he “never expected in my life I’d get a call like this.”
“I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here,'” the local prosecutor told The Post, adding that even if the Trump team had legal grounds to seize the machines, he couldn’t have given the machines to parties with an interest in the matter.
“We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors,” he continued. “You need probable cause.”
Representatives for Giuliani and Antrim County respectively did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment.
The clerical error by the county became a focal point for the Trump camp’s unproven claims of a rigged election, The Post reported. An Associated Press fact check of the issue explained that the miscount “was caused by a clerk’s failure to update media drives for certain tabulators to reflect the correct ballot content. It was not a machine problem.”
In the days that followed the miscount, Antrim County officials determined through a hand recount of paper ballots that Trump had won the Republican stronghold by more than 3,000 votes.
“It’s a horrible mistake,” county clerk Sheryl Guy told the county’s attorneys, per a report by TIME. “I own it.”
The news of the Trump legal team’s request of the Michigan county comes after The New York Times reported that Trump told Giuliani to call the Department of Homeland Security to ask the agency to seize voting machines following the 2020 election.
The DHS was among the other federal entities — including the military and the Justice Department — that Trump weighed the prospect of using in his efforts to overturn the election results.
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