Michigan prosecutor James Rossiter said that Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump‘s personal lawyer, requested that Rossiter turn over voting machines from his county to Team Trump following the 2020 election.
Rossiter, a Republican, responded that he couldn’t legally fulfill their request.
“I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause,” Rossiter said as he recounted the Nov. 20, 2020 phone call to the Washington Post.
He added that even with probable cause, he couldn’t hand the voting machines over to anyone who was connected to the outcome of the election.
Antrim County played a large role in Trump’s effort to overturn the election results in his belief that the election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him. When votes were originally counted in the Republican-majority county, then-candidate Joe Biden had won the county by 3,000 votes. A hand count later found that Trump had actually won the county by nearly 3,800 votes and officials reversed the results. An investigation into the miscount found that the mistake was due to the process of updating machine software.
In another investigation into the county’s miscount, Allied Security Operations Group which is a Texas-based company reported data that they say proved fraud.
“This new revelation makes it clear that the vote count being presented now by the Democrats in Michigan constitutes an intentionally false and misleading representation of the final vote tally,” Giuliani said at the time.
Giuliani was scheduled to speak with the House select committee investigating last year’s Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Tuesday, but he didn’t show up. Chairman of the committee Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) said that subpoenas are “on the table for discussion.”
