A Second Taped Call Imperils Trump

There are audio recordings of a call made by Trump and GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel to two Board of Canvassing members in Wayne County, Michigan in November of 2020

Wayne County Board of Canvassing members Monica Palmer and William Hartmann. Photo courtesy of the Detroit News.

Just when you think there are no more big surprises left in the case against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, along comes local journalism to prove that wrong.

The Detroit News reported on Thursday evening that then-president Trump made yet another phone call—besides the infamous “find 11,780 votes” call to Georgia’s Secretary of State—to pressure two local canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, to throw a big wrench into Michigan’s certification of its electoral count. Specifically, Trump directly urged them, in violation of their duties on the Board of Canvassers, not to sign the certification of results from Wayne County, home to Detroit, even though they had voted to certify it.

The call was captured in a series of four audio recordings that were reviewed by the Detroit News.

Also on the call was the national GOP Party Chair Ronna McDaniel. An unnamed person, who was present with both Palmer and Hartmann in a vehicle where they took the call together, made the four audio recordings.

Today, I’ll discuss the details of this bombshell. I’ll first review what was going on in Michigan at the time. Then I’ll discuss the likely reason why the then-president personally got on the phone with two local canvassers in a county in Michigan to urge them not to certify the results. Finally, I’ll also take a look at how the recordings could impact Trump’s existing case or lead to more charges for those on the call.

Lordy, there’s a tape

So, what’s on these recordings? Plenty.

According to the audio file reviewed by the Detroit News, Trump told Wayne County Board of Canvassing members Palmer and Hartmann that they’d look “terrible” if they signed the certification. They had initially voted in opposition to it, and then after a heated meeting where Detroit-area voters showed up by the scores to voice their anger, voted to approve certification.

“We've got to fight for our country,” Trump is heard saying on the recording. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.” 

These words eerily previewed what Trump would say to the crowd gathered at the Ellipse on January 6, many of whom later stormed the Capitol.

Trump also stated falsely that Republicans had been “cheated on this election” and that “everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell,” according to the recordings.

McDaniel said if Hartmann and Palmer certified the election without forcing an audit to occur, the public would “never know what happened in Detroit.”

“How can anybody sign something when you have more votes than people?” Trump asked, without basis. (Trump has insisted, falsely, that there were more votes than people in the county.)

McDaniel told the two canvassers on another point in the call, “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it.... We will get you attorneys.” Trump added, “We’ll take care of that.” (Keep this in mind, because it sounds dangerously close to offering something of value in exchange for their official inaction, known generally as a bribe.)

Palmer and Hartmann left the meeting without signing the official certification of votes for Wayne County and never came back. The next day, they attempted, unsuccessfully, to rescind their votes on certification and filed legal affidavits claiming they were pressured to certify the results.

Trump badly wanted Wayne County votes tossed out

The election in Michigan in 2020 wasn’t really even very close in the end. That state, which had voted for Trump in 2016, swung to Biden in 2020 by 154,000 votes. There was no way that recounts were going to matter. Michigan had gone solidly Biden.

But that didn’t stop Trump from trying to undo the election there. One way in was through the Michigan state legislature, which at the time, due to gerrymandering, was in the hands of the GOP. In order to create an environment where the GOP state legislature could conceivably undo the will of its own state’s voters, Trump had to concoct claims of election fraud.

I wrote earlier this month about how false claims of fraud had fueled protests by Trump supporters on Election Night 2020 at the TCF Center in Detroit, where poll workers were counting ballots late into the night. These protests were orchestrated in part by the Trump Campaign. One as-yet unindicted co-conspirator—whom I believe to be political operative Mike Roman—even exchanged text messages with an attorney at the site encouraging the protestors to riot and obstruct the count.

There was a clear reason for this. Without Wayne County’s votes, which went overwhelmingly for Biden, the state might have gone to Trump. From the get-go, the Trump Campaign had been trying to have those largely African-American votes from Detroit tossed, and it was willing to use violence or other illegal means to do so.

Deadlocking the certification

When the protests failed to stop the count, the Trump Campaign filed lawsuits with the courts. But it also concocted another devious plan: to disrupt the normally ministerial task of certifying the actual election for Wayne County. 

By law, the Board of Canvassing for Wayne County comprises four persons, two from each party. Palmer and Hartmann were the two GOP members. On November 17, 2020, the Board, which ought to have simply accepted and certified the count, instead deadlocked two to two along party lines. 

Palmer, one of the “no” votes, disingenuously cited a discrepancy in the county’s “poll books,” which were slightly out-of-balance at 70 percent of the county’s 154 precincts. That imbalance was between one to four votes for each precinct—quite a minor issue. It was also quite in keeping with past imbalances. Indeed, in the primary earlier that year, the number of precincts with minor poll book discrepancies had been 72 percent, and the same board certified the election without issue. 

And according to an affidavit by Michigan’s elections director, there were actually fewer absentee ballots tabulated than names in the poll books—something that any fraud presumably would have made sure went the other way.

But a bogus reason to refuse to certify the Wayne County results could have a big knock-on effect. Without that certification, in theory the state could not certify the overall results, and so an official state-wide certification would have to wait. And that could inspire similar mischief in other battleground states. The Trump Campaign had its eye on anything that could leave the election unsettled so that state legislatures, which were controlled by the GOP in all the battlegrounds, could step in.

The Trump Campaign was very clear about its intentions. Lawyer Jenna Ellis, who has pled guilty in Georgia and is now cooperating with prosecutors, made the plan public in a post on the social platform then known as Twitter, right after the deadlocked vote:

This evening, the county board of canvassers in Wayne County, MI refused to certify the election results. If the state board follows suit, the Republican state legislator will select the electors. Huge win for @realDonaldTrump

Trump himself also tweeted, celebrating the deadlock:

Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results! Having courage is a beautiful thing. The USA stands proud!

Later, Trump declared, “The two harassed patriot canvassers refuse to sign the papers.”

Voter outrage breaks the impasse

What the Trump Campaign and the two GOP canvassing board members didn’t expect was an immediate outpouring of voter anger over the deadlock. The outrage was understandable. After all, here were two partisan hacks actively disenfranchising as many as 878,000 largely Black voters in a transparent attempt to buy time for the GOP-led legislature to undo the election entirely.

The Board listened to hours of voter anger after its initial vote during a meeting conducted mostly by zoom due to the pandemic. Charges of racism were frequent and understandable. Finally, after one of the Democratic board members negotiated a face-saving off-ramp, where the Secretary of State’s office would agree to conduct an “audit” of the precincts with out-of-balance poll books, the board voted again, this time unanimously to certify the results.

As Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson stated, what had begun as a low point for democracy in the state became a huge win, thanks to the voters who came and spoke out.

Sometime after that vote, but before the certification itself was signed off on, Trump and McDaniel had their call with Palmer and Hartmann urging them not to sign it. That wound up not mattering for legal purposes, because the vote to certify was sufficient to make the count final, and in Chairwoman Palmer’s absence, the certification could be and was signed by the Vice-Chair. But Trump and McDaniel didn’t know that, and in any event within days both Palmer and Hartmann sought to rescind their votes, claiming they had been intimidated into voting for it. (That claim went nowhere fast.)

Filling in the details

We had known from early reports that Trump had spoken to the canvassers, but up till now we did not know what he had said to them. According to the Detroit News’s reporting at the time, Palmer appears to have covered for Trump by not mentioning how he had pressured her and Hartmann during the call:

Palmer said she left [the] Tuesday meeting prior to physically signing the final statement of votes that were certified. As she was leaving, President Donald Trump called out of a “genuine concern for my safety.”

She summarized the contents of the call with Trump as “Thank you for your service. I’m glad you’re safe. Have a good night.”

The Detroit News reported this Thursday that the segments of the audio recording it had reviewed did not contain these statements, though they conceivably could be in other parts of the audio not yet reviewed.

The Associated Press also had indicated, based on a “person familiar with the matter,” that Trump had called the two local canvassers to “express gratitude for their support” after that contentious meeting of the Board of Canvassing. It is unclear, because the Zoom feed had issues, whether Trump knew that the two GOP board members already had been convinced by the citizens of Wayne County to do their jobs and to vote to certify the results.

Many believed at the time that the call was Trump once again using mob-like tactics to get the canvassers to violate their duties. After all, if the president himself calls you personally to “thank you” for your help, you know he’s watching everything you’re doing.

But as discussed earlier, the conversation went way beyond simple “thank yous” to the canvassers. And someone who was present with the two members in their car where they took the call actually recorded it—another fact unknown until Thursday night’s bombshell report.

As for the recording itself, why it remained under wraps for three years is a mystery. The Detroit News is holding its sources close, and understandably so:

The News listened to audio that was captured in four recordings by someone present for the conversation between Trump and the canvassers. That information came to The News through an intermediary who also heard the recordings but who was not present when they were made. Sources presented the information to The News on the condition that they not be identified publicly for fear of retribution by the former president or his supporters.

Response from the call’s participants

Asked for comment, none of the participants in the call denies the substance of it, though Palmer stated repeatedly that she did not remember the substance of the call or who else may have heard it. 

Trump’s campaign, through a spokesman, stated that Trump’s actions “were taken in furtherance of his duty as president of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 presidential election.” (It is not the job of the president to do this, by the way, which is why such arguments have failed to get the case removed from Georgia state court to federal court.)

GOP Chair McDaniel issued a statement defending her actions. “What I said publicly and repeatedly at the time, as referenced in my letter on Nov. 21, 2020, is that there was ample evidence that warranted an audit,” the statement read.

Hartmann, the other GOP board member, was not only a staunch election denier but also an active vaccine denier, and he died in 2021 after contracting Covid.

Where things go from here

A key takeaway from these recordings and the Detroit News’s reporting is that Trump was deeply involved in the minutia of how to stop the electoral certification process, even down to the votes of a county board of canvassing. The call was similar in some ways to the one he made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. But in this case, it wasn’t made to a high level official. It was directed at two people who were supposed to simply do their job and certify an election clearly won by Joe Biden.

One of the Democratic Board of Canvassing members at the time, Jonathan Kinloch, described that call with Trump as “insane.” Said Kinloch, “It’s just shocking that the president of the United States was at the most minute level trying to stop the election process from happening.”

Trump on his own wasn’t likely to know that the whole election in Michigan could be upended by bad faith actions by two county-level officials. One obvious question, then, is who advised him to make the call, and why Ronna McDaniel was on it with him. Her own legal exposure just went up considerably.

It’s unclear whether Michigan has any laws similar to Georgia’s, where election interference of this nature could be charged. But it does have a standard bribery statute, and there may be sufficient evidence here to support charges. After all, Trump and McDaniel apparently offered to pay for the lawyers for the two canvassers if they violated their duties by refusing to sign the certification. That could rise to the level of an official bribe because something valuable was being offered in exchange for their actions (or here, inactions). Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has already brought charges against the 16 fake Michigan electors, and it wouldn’t be surprising if she took action here, too.

Special Counsel Jack Smith is also no doubt very interested in the audio recordings, and he may already have them. They show that Trump himself was actively involved in the multi-state campaign to sow chaos and uncertainty in what were otherwise already-certified and final election results. His intent was to leverage the chaos to cause GOP-led state legislators to undo the will of the voters.

The Trump Campaign had put similar pressure on other officials in other states to violate their oaths of office, from Arizona to Georgia. It organized fake electors in each of the battlegrounds, and Trump’s co-defendant Kenneth Chesebro is now busy cooperating with state prosecutors in Nevada and Arizona over these fake electors slates. The actions in Michigan by Trump will only add to the growing list of overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy.

One last note: There is almost nothing better than the words of the defendant himself to help a jury understand things like motive and intent. Telling officials they would look “terrible” if they didn’t do what Trump wanted them to do sure feels like a threat, especially given how his followers have been known to act toward anyone perceived as disloyal. And Trump agreeing to “take care of” any lawyers and legal fees if they agreed to act outside their ministerial duties will help a jury understand just how a mob boss like Trump operates, and it may comprise a separate crime by itself.

In sum, the existence of the Wayne County recordings is a really terrible development for Trump. And they likely will help further seal his fate before the jury when his case goes to trial.