“Is that something you ever worked on or would support, for example, in Michigan?” MSNBC’s Ari Melber asked him Friday night.
“Yes, I was part of the process to make sure there were alternate electors for when, as we hoped, the challenges to the seated electors would be heard, and would be successful,” replied Epshteyn, who is a lawyer, after insisting that the electors were indeed “alternate” and not “fraudulent electors.”
Throughout the interview Friday, Epshteyn repeated false claims about election fraud.
He also said that everything he did was legal and cited the 1960 presidential election in Hawaii as a precedent for “alternate” electors. In the 1960 presidential election, Richard Nixon initially led John F. Kennedy by 141 votes in the state, a much narrower margin than any of the contested states in the 2020 election, but Nixon ended up losing the state after a legal recount. While there were multiple panels of electors, it was because the results in the state changed after the recount showed a different result.
“So, Ari, everything that was done was done legally by the Trump legal team, according to the rules, and under the leadership of Rudy Giuliani,” he added.
Trump and some of his top advisers publicly encouraged the “alternate electors” scheme in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico.
Last week, Michigan’s attorney general asked federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into more than a dozen Republicans who submitted false certificates stating they were the state’s presidential electors, despite Biden’s win in the state.
When asked Friday by Melber how soon he’ll testify before the House committee, Epshteyn replied, “Well, Ari, as they say, we’ll see what happens.”
