The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party and a Republican state senator advised the Trump campaign that submitting a slate of fake Electoral College electors to Congress would be viewed as treason by many, but the Republicans continued on with their plan anyway, the New York Times reports.  Trump and Arizona Republicans proceeded with the plan anyway.

Kelli Ward, the state GOP chair, and Kelly Townsend, a state senator, both told Trump lawyers that they were hesitant to sign on to the plan in December 2020, when Trump agents in various states were attempting to undermine the integrity of the Electoral College certification by providing the National Archives with fake or forged documents allocating their respective state electors to Donald Trump rather than Democrat Joe Biden, who actually won the states.  Ward and her husband would eventually be listed on the slate of fraudulent electors for Arizona; Townsend would not.

“Ward and Townsend are concerned it could appear treasonous for the AZ electors to vote on Monday if there is no pending court proceeding that might, eventually, lead to the electors being ratified as the legitimate ones,” Trump campaign lawyer Kenneth Chesebro wrote in an email to leaky effort head Rudy Giuliani, putting the word “treasonous” in bold for emphasis. 

An Arizona lawyer working with the campaign to overturn the state’s election results, Arizona-based lawyer Jack Wilenchik, wrote that the plans to submit an alternate slate of electors “aren’t legal under federal law” and repeatedly called the effort “fake.”

The revelation of these emails adds fuel to prosecutors’ claims–in federal and state investigations–that high-ranking officials in the Republican Party and the Trump campaign knew their plan was completely unconstitutional and would damage the fabric of the Republic, but they chose to go on with it anyway, demonstrating a criminal intent to defraud the United States.