This time, however, the only mention that this breaking story out of Arizona has received at all on Fox’s airwaves was a brief headline on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, where it received no additional editorial comment. Bartiromo herself previously helped to boost the fake electors, and she was later revealed to have taken direct instructions from the Trump campaign to promote the date of January 6 as a time when Biden’s election victory could be overturned. (Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones also teased an upcoming segment on “some breaking news overnight with Arizona, we’re going to have legal analysis for you.” But the program itself never actually aired any segment about the fake electors indictment, seemingly bumping the story in favor of other news.)
NBC News has identified the seven other people charged in the Arizona indictment as: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former White House official Michael Roman, former Trump campaign official Boris Epshteyn, and campaign attorneys John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, and Christina Bobb (the latter of whom was recently hired by the Republican National Committee and given the title of “senior counsel for election integrity”).
The indictment also refers repeatedly to Trump as “Unindicted Coconspirator 1,” describing this person as “a former president of the United States who spread false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election.” Trump was also identified Wednesday as an unindicted co-conspirator in Michigan, where the 16 fake electors in that state were criminally charged last year. (Trump was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the felony prosecution of his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen in 2018.)
One of the Arizona fake electors who has been indicted is Tyler Bowyer, who was the chief operating officer of the right-wing activist group Turning Point USA, and is now COO at its campaign arm, Turning Point Action. Turning Point USA organized buses to the District of Columbia for January 6, 2021, which included at least one passenger who assaulted police officers and was sentenced to four years in prison. Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk also publicly urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally reject the election results, when he declared: “All Pence has to do is reject electors from states that are compromised. Some people say that's not constitutional. Then try it. Make them sue and get the Supreme Court into action.”
As Kirk also noted, the Trump campaign and right-wing media allies based the scheme on a false comparison to an event from the 1960 election, when a recount in Hawaii flipped the state’s very narrow result from Richard Nixon to John F. Kennedy. In this case, however, the Trump campaign and the indicted fake electors themselves intended to have Pence simply use the fake electoral certificates as a pretext to reject Biden’s officially certified victories in those states, without any court decision or recount actually changing the election results or conferring any state authority to the fake electors.
