John Charles Eastman is an American lawyer who is the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the conservative think tank Claremont Institute. He is a former professor and dean at the Chapman University School of Law. He ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for California's 34th congressional district in 1990, and for the office of California Attorney General in 2010. He is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Scott Gordon Perry is an American politician. He is the U.S. representative for Pennsylvania's 10th congressional district. It was numbered the 4th district from 2013 to 2019. It includes Harrisburg, York, and most of the inner suburbs.
Timothy Charles Fox is an American lawyer and Republican politician who served as the Attorney General of Montana from 2013 to 2021. Fox was a candidate for governor of Montana in the Republican Primary of the 2020 election.
The 2020 United States presidential election was the 59th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020. The Democratic ticket of former vice president Joe Biden and the junior U.S. senator from California Kamala Harris defeated the incumbent Republican president Donald Trump and incumbent vice president Mike Pence. The election took place against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic and related recession. It was the first election since 1992 and the first in the 21st century, in which the incumbent president failed to win a second term. The election saw the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900, with each of the two main tickets receiving more than 74 million votes, surpassing Barack Obama's record of 69.5 million votes from 2008. Biden received more than 81 million votes, the most votes ever cast for a candidate in a U.S. presidential election.
Steven Andrew Engel is an American lawyer. He served as the United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Donald Trump administration. Engel, who previously worked in the George W. Bush administration as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel, was nominated by President Donald Trump on January 31, 2017, and confirmed on November 7, 2017. On January 20, 2021, he was succeeded by Christopher H. Schroeder, serving under the Biden Administration.
Jeffrey Adam Rosen is an American lawyer who served as the acting United States attorney general from December 2020 to January 2021 and as the United States deputy attorney general from 2019 to 2020. Before joining the Department of Justice, he was a senior partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and was the United States deputy secretary of transportation.
Jeffrey Bossert Clark is an American lawyer who was Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division from 2018 to 2021. In September 2020, he was also appointed acting head of the Civil Division. In 2020 and 2021, Clark helped then-president Donald Trump attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Clark's actions in that endeavor were reviewed by the District of Columbia Bar Association – the entity authorized by law to pursue attorney discipline and disbarment in the District of Columbia – which ordered discipline.
Richard Donoghue is an American attorney and prosecutor who served as the acting United States deputy attorney general from December 2020 to January 2021. Previously, he served as the principal associate deputy attorney general in 2020 and as United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York from 2018 to 2020. Donoghue was appointed interim U.S. Attorney by Jeff Sessions in January 2018.
Members of the United States Republican Party have reacted differently to Republican President Donald Trump's false claims about the 2020 United States presidential election, with many publicly supporting them, many remaining silent, and a few publicly denouncing them. Trump falsely claimed to have won the election, and made many false and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. By December 11, 2020, 126 out of 196 Republican members of the House backed a lawsuit filed in the United States Supreme Court supported by nineteen Republican state attorneys general seeking to subvert the election and overturn the election results. Multiple polls for months after the election found that majorities of Republicans believed the election was fraudulent and stolen and that Trump was the "true" president. By February 2021, drawing on the false allegations of voting fraud and a stolen election, Republican state legislatures had begun to implement new laws and rules to restrict voting access in ways that would favor Republican candidates. In Arizona, the Republican-controlled government proceeded with legislation to allow the state attorney general, currently a Republican, to intervene in the voting certification process managed by the secretary of state, currently a Democrat. Republican lawmakers and candidates in several states sought to seize control of the administrative management of elections.
After the 2020 United States presidential election, the campaign for incumbent President Donald Trump and others filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the vote certification process in multiple states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Among the judges who dismissed the lawsuits were some appointed by Trump himself.
After Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, then-incumbent Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented effort to overturn the election, with support and assistance from his campaign, proxies, political allies, and many of his supporters. These efforts culminated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack by Trump supporters, which was widely described as an attempted coup d'état. One week later, Trump was impeached for incitement of insurrection but was acquitted by the Senate. In June 2022, the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack said it has enough evidence to recommend that the U.S. Department of Justice indict Trump.
Jenna Lynn Ellis is a lawyer known for her work as a member of Donald Trump's legal team. She is a former deputy district attorney in Weld County, Colorado and a former assistant professor of legal studies at Colorado Christian University. As a private lawyer, she has litigated cases in state courts. In 2015, she self-published The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, a book arguing that the Constitution of the United States can only be interpreted in accordance with the Bible. Since 2018, Ellis has presented herself as a "constitutional law attorney" during cable news appearances, though The New York Times reported her background did not reflect such expertise and The Wall Street Journal reported she had no history in any federal cases.
Texas v. Pennsylvania, 592 U.S. ___ (2020), was a lawsuit filed at the United States Supreme Court contesting the administration of the 2020 presidential election in certain states, in which Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump.
The following is a timeline of major events before, during, and after the 2020 United States presidential election, the 59th quadrennial United States presidential election, from November 2020 to January 2021. For prior events, see Timeline of the 2020 United States presidential election (2017–2019) and Timeline of the 2020 United States presidential election.
On January 2, 2021, during an hour-long conference call, then-U.S. President Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the state's election results from the 2020 presidential election. Trump had been defeated by Joe Biden in the election, but refused to accept the outcome and made a months-long effort to overturn the results. Prior to the call to Raffensperger, Trump spoke repeatedly to state and local officials in at least three states in which he had lost, urging them to recount votes, throw out some ballots, or replace the Democratic slate of electors with a Republican slate. Trump's call with Raffensperger was reported by The Washington Post and other media outlets the day after it took place.
Italygate is a pro-Trump, QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theory that alleges the 2020 United States presidential election was rigged to favor Joe Biden using satellites and military technology to remotely switch votes from Donald Trump to Biden from the U.S. Embassy in Rome. The conspiracy was also rumored to involve the Vatican. Fact-checkers at Reuters and USA Today, who investigated these claims, described them as "false" and "baseless".
The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, often referred to simply as the January 6th Committee, is a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The attack was perpetratrated by a mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump, who had lost the 2020 presidential election but refused to concede, making false and disproven claims of voter fraud, in an unprecedented attempt to overturn the election.
The Eastman memos, also known as the "coup memo", are documents by John Eastman, an American law professor retained by then-President Donald Trump advancing the fringe legal theory that the U.S. Vice President has unilateral authority to reject certified State electors which would have the effect of nullifying an election in order to produce an outcome desired by the Vice President, such as a result in the Vice President's own party's favor.
The Trump fake electors plot involved a scheme devised after the 2020 United States presidential election by president Donald Trump and his allies in seven key states to create and submit fraudulent certificates of ascertainment that falsely asserted Trump had won the electoral college vote in those states. The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This effort was predicated on a false legal theory devised by Trump attorney John Eastman and others, which claimed the vice president has constitutional discretion to swap out official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. This scheme came to be known as the Pence Card.
