CBS News
Regretful Wisconsin fake elector says he was tricked into signing phony document claiming Trump won in 2020
The month after the presidential election in 2020, Democratic and Republican electors representing the candidate who won the popular vote in their states gathered across the country to formally cast electoral votes for president.
But in seven states that Joe Biden won, Republican electors got together anyway and cast phony votes for Donald Trump. They’ve become known as fake electors. And according to federal prosecutors, they were part of a plan to overturn the election, orchestrated by pro-Trump attorneys with Trump’s support. State criminal charges have been filed against fake electors in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.
Wisconsin’s fake electors haven’t been charged, and several weeks ago, one of them, Andrew Hitt, an attorney and former chairman of the state Republican Party, agreed to sit down with us to explain how he says he and Wisconsin’s other GOP electors were tricked by the Trump campaign.
Anderson Cooper: You were head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin. Were you a big Trump supporter?
Andrew Hitt: I worked tirelessly for him. I, you know, day and night–
60 Minutes
ANDREW HITT: Let’s put it together for the president of the United States one more time!
Andrew Hitt: — oftentimes phone calls would start by 6:00 in the morning, and wouldn’t end until 10:30 at night. I did everything I possibly could.
DONALD TRUMP: The Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt.
Andrew Hitt was often singled out by President Trump at rallies in Wisconsin.
DONALD TRUMP: Andrew Hitt!
DONALD TRUMP: Andrew Hitt!
DONALD TRUMP: How we doing, Andrew? Gonna win this state? We gotta win it.
But Trump didn’t win in Wisconsin. He lost to Joe Biden by some 20,700 votes. The Trump campaign appealed, challenging more than 200,000 absentee ballots on technical grounds in two Democratic counties.
RUDY GIULIANI: If you count the lawful votes, Trump won Wisconsin by a good margin.
Andrew Hitt: That was false. What he said was false.
Anderson Cooper: The Trump campaign wanted the votes in Dane County and Milwaukee County tossed. Did you support that idea?
Andrew Hitt: – it wasn’t something that I was comfortable with.
Anderson Cooper: Dane County and Milwaukee County in Wisconsin– are the most liberal counties. The majority of the Black population in Wisconsin live in those two counties.
Andrew Hitt: Correct. Correct.
Anderson Cooper: Personally, you did not believe all those absentee ballots should be thrown out?
Andrew Hitt: Well, I voted that way, you know. I voted that way.
Anderson Cooper: You didn’t think your own vote should be thrown out?
Andrew Hitt: No.
On Nov. 30, Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers certified Joe Biden’s victory — authorizing the state’s Democratic electors to gather at the state capitol on Dec. 14 to cast their electoral votes for Biden.
But days earlier Andrew Hitt says he received a call from the Republican National Committee.
Anderson Cooper: What was the reach out to you?
Andrew Hitt: “Can we get a list of the Wisconsin Republican electors?”
Anderson Cooper: That made you suspicious?
Andrew Hitt: It did.
Andrew Hitt: I was already concerned that they were gonna try to say that the Democratic electors were not proper in Wisconsin because of fraud.
Anderson Cooper: You didn’t believe there was any widespread fraud–
Andrew Hitt: No, and I was very involved, obviously, in the election.
Hitt was one of 10 republicans nominated to be an elector if Trump won in Wisconsin. On Dec. 4, he says, he was advised by the state GOP’s outside legal counsel to gather the other Republican electors on Dec. 14 at the Capitol and as a contingency, sign a document claiming Trump won the state in case a court overturned the election in Wisconsin.
Anderson Cooper: In case the legal arguments that the Trump team is making actually win in court?
Andrew Hitt: Right. And I remember asking, “How– how can this be? That a court overturns the election and, just because we don’t meet and fill out this paperwork on the 14th, that Trump would forfeit Wisconsin?” And the– legal analysis back was, “The statute’s very clear: The electors have to meet at noon at the Capitol in Wisconsin on December 14th.”
60 Minutes
That morning the state Supreme Court — in a 4-3 ruling — rejected the Trump campaign’s attempt to throw out more than 200,000 votes. But Andrew Hitt says he and the other Republican electors met anyway to cast fake votes because he’d been told the Trump campaign would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kenneth Chesebro, a pro-Trump attorney — who was an alleged architect of the fake electors plan — showed up to watch.
Andrew Hitt: We got specific advice from our lawyers that these documents were meaningless unless a court said they had meaning.
Anderson Cooper: You are deciding to sign this document as an elector, and getting the other electors to sign this document based on a court challenge that you yourself don’t believe has legitimacy.
Andrew Hitt: I wouldn’t say it doesn’t have legitimacy– that’s different than not personally agreeing with it.
Anderson Cooper: You personally don’t believe that legitimate votes by Wisconsin residents should be tossed out. And yet, you are signing a document in support of a lawsuit which is alleging just that.
Andrew Hitt: And if I didn’t do that, and the court did throw out those votes, it would have been solely my fault that Trump wouldn’t have won Wisconsin.
DONALD TRUMP: Ah, beautiful kids Andrew. Good. Good. I’m going to blame you Andrew if they don’t do it.
Andrew Hitt: Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin.
Anderson Cooper: You’re saying you were scared?
Andrew Hitt: Absolutely.
Anderson Cooper: Scared of Trump supporters in your state?
Andrew Hitt: It was not a safe time. If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death.
Anderson Cooper: Signing legal documents of such consequence that you don’t believe in and you don’t believe the underlying reason for the documents, it’s– I mean, it’s not exactly a profile in courage.
Andrew Hitt: No.
Anderson Cooper: How do you feel about that now?
Andrew Hitt: I mean, terrible. If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it. It was kept from us that there was this alternate scheme, alternate motive.
That alleged alternate scheme is a prominent part of special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president.
JACK SMITH: …charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States.
According to Smith, what began as a legal strategy in Wisconsin evolved into “a corrupt plan” involving six other states as well.
ARIZONA GOP ELECTORS: Donald J. Trump, of the state of Florida. Number of votes, 11.
Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
MICHIGAN WOMAN: He said we can’t enter.
POLICE: The electors are already here – they’ve been checked in.
Where some of the fake electors couldn’t convince police to let them into the Capitol.
Jack Smith cites this Dec. 6 memo written by Ken Chesebro detailing ways “the Trump campaign can prevent Biden from amassing 270 electoral votes on January 6…”
Smith alleges the multistate scheme was designed to “create a fake controversy” and “position the vice president… to supplant legitimate electors with [Trump’s] fake electors and certify [him] as president.”
By Jan. 4, according to internal emails, some in the Trump campaign were panicking. They believed the fake electors’ documents from Michigan and Wisconsin hadn’t arrived in Vice President Mike Pence’s Senate office.
Anderson Cooper: Your colleague texted you, “Freakin’ Trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the Senate president.” You wrote, “This is just nuts.” What was nuts about it?
Andrew Hitt: I mean, we have the certification coming on the 6th. Um, how– how do you not have the paperwork?
Anderson Cooper: I mean you’ve said that you only went along with this plan to preserve Trump’s candidacy in the event of a court ruling. January 4th, just two days before January 6th, did you really think that was still possible?
Andrew Hitt: Well, remember, the Wisconsin Supreme Court had been appealed. And so January 4th, it seemed like, yeah, it’s possible that a much more conservative United States Supreme Court could overturn a four-three decision.
To get the paperwork to Washington, they picked Alesha Guenther, then a 23-year-old law school student working part time for Wisconsin’s Republican Party.
60 Minutes
Alesha Guenther: I was on break from law school, um– and wanted to make some extra money (laugh) for– to pay for books and worked for the party for my month off of school. So on January 4th, I got a call from the Executive Director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, since I was helping out at the time–
Anderson Cooper: What did you think when you got the text?
Alesha Guenther: At first, I didn’t know what it was. And then, he followed up and asked, you know, that the Trump campaign wanted these papers flown out to DC because they had gotten lost in the mail.
Guenther says she picked up the papers here at the state party headquarters, and on Jan. 5 flew to Washington.
ALESHA GUENTHER: So this is the email-
She showed us her email chain with Ken Chesebro and the Trump campaign’s senior advisor, Mike Roman.
Alesha Guenther: -explaining that I should only give the documents to Ken Chesebro. So, um, and then, they asked me to meet up with him outside the Trump Hotel.
Anderson Cooper: I mean, it sounds very secretive.
Alesha Guenther: Yeah, I thought that that email was pretty odd and dramatic-
Anderson Cooper: And you knew what was happening on January 6th?
Anderson Cooper: -in terms of the– the certification of the vote.
Alesha Guenther: I don’t know if I was very tuned into that. Truly because I thought that a court of law would have need to– needed to overturn the election for those documents to be used.
Anderson Cooper: Did you know what Chesebro looked like?
Alesha Guenther: So he had actually sent me a selfie.
Anderson Cooper: He– he sent you a selfie–
Alesha Guenther: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: –so that you would know it was him-
Alesha Guenther: Yeah.
Anderson Cooper: Can I see it?
Alesha Guenther: Yeah.
She still has the photo saved on her phone.
Anderson Cooper: That’s– that’s Ken Chesebro.
Alesha Guenther: Uh-huh (affirm).
Anderson Cooper: What did he say to you?
Alesha Guenther: He kind of took a dramatic step back, and looked at me, and said, “You might have just made history.”
Ken Chesebro told investigators he delivered the Wisconsin documents to Capitol Hill. The next day, on Jan. 6, he can be seen in videos outside the capitol near conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
ADAM SCHIFF: I now want to look even more deeply at the fake electors scheme…
According to the January 6th Select Committee, an aide to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson tried to arrange to get the fake electors slates to Vice President Pence.
DONALD TRUMP: And I hope Mike is gonna do the right thing, I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.
But Pence’s aide refused, texting “do not give that to him,” according to the committee.
When the Senate chamber had to be evacuated, the real electoral votes in these boxes were taken to safety. and when Congress resumed, they were returned into the House chamber.
MIKE PENCE: Pursuant to Senate concurrent resolution…
Vice President Pence announced the election results and closed the session at 3:44 a.m. Jan. 7.
The Supreme Court ultimately declined to hear the Trump campaign’s lawsuit in Wisconsin.
Anderson Cooper: What do you think about Donald Trump continuing to claim that the 2020 election was stolen?
Andrew Hitt: I mean, it wasn’t stolen. It wasn’t stolen in Wisconsin.
This past December, Andrew Hitt and Wisconsin’s other Republican electors settled a civil lawsuit against them by some of the state’s Democratic electors. They admitted they signed a document that was “used as part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”
Hitt resigned as chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party in August 2021.
He’s cooperated with the January 6th committee.
ANDREW HITT, SOT: -using our electors in ways that we weren’t told about, um, and we wouldn’t have supported.
And, he says, he’s also cooperated with federal prosecutors. He maintains he and the other fake electors in Wisconsin were tricked.
Andrew Hitt: Whenever anybody sees our text messages, our emails, our documents, they understand, they know they- their conclusion is we were tricked.
The January 6th Committee saw it. Jack Smith specifically in his indictment refers to some of the electors were tricked. That was us.
Anderson Cooper: The former president is known to watch “60 Minutes.” If he’s watching, what would you want to say to him?
Andrew Hitt: I would say that this country needs to move forward. That we need a leader who is– tackles serious problems and serious issues that this country faces. And we need faith in our institutions again. And the next president of the United States needs to do that.
Anderson Cooper: And in your opinion, that’s not him.
Andrew Hitt: That is not him. Correct.
Produced by Sarah Koch. Associate producer, Madeleine Carlisle. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by April Wilson.
CBS News
Tajikistan nationals with alleged ISIS ties removed in immigration proceedings, U.S. officials say
When federal agents arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with alleged ties to the Islamic State terror group on immigration charges back in June, U.S. officials reasoned that coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia would prove the fastest way to disrupt a potential terrorist plot in its earliest stages. Four months later, after being detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, three of the men have already been returned to Tajikistan and Russia, U.S. officials tell CBS News, following removals by immigration court judges.
Four more Tajik nationals – also held in ICE detention facilities – are awaiting removal flights to Central Asia, and U.S. officials anticipate they’ll be returned in the coming few weeks. Only one of the arrested men still awaits his legal proceeding, following a medical issue, though U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive proceedings indicated that he remains detained and is likely to face a similar outcome.
The men face no additional charges – including terrorism-related offenses – with the decision to immediately arrest and remove them through deportation proceedings, rather than orchestrate a hard-fought terrorism trial in Article III courts, born out of a pressing short-term concern about public safety.
Soon after the eight foreign nationals crossed into the United States, the FBI learned of the potential ties to the Islamic State, CBS News previously reported. The FBI identified early-stage terrorist plotting, triggering their immediate arrests, in part, through a wiretap after the individuals had already been vetted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News in June.
Several months later, their removals following immigration proceedings mark a departure from the post-9/11 intelligence-sharing architecture of the U.S. government.
Now facing a more diverse migrant population at the U.S.-Mexico border, a new effort is underway by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to normalize the direct sharing of classified information – including some marked top-secret – with U.S. immigration judges.
The more routine intelligence sharing with immigration judges is aimed at allowing U.S. immigration courts to more regularly incorporate derogatory information into their decisions. The endeavor has led to the creation of more safes and sensitive compartmented information facilities – also known as SCIFs – to help facilitate the sharing of classified materials. Once considered a last resort for the department, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sought to use immigration tools, in recent months, to mitigate and disrupt threat activity.
The immigration raids, back in June, underscore the spate of terrorism concerns from the U.S. government this year, as national security agencies point to a system now blinking red in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, with emerging terrorism hot spots in Central Asia.
A joint intelligence bulletin released this month, and obtained by CBS News, warns that foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the attack nearly one year ago and its aftermath to try to recruit radicalized followers, creating media that compares the October 7 and 9/11 attacks and encouraging “lone attackers to use simple tactics like firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicle ramming against Western targets in retaliation for deaths in Gaza.”
In May, ICE arrested an Uzbek man in Baltimore with alleged ISIS ties after he had been living inside the U.S. for more than two years, NBC News first reported.
In the past year, Tajik nationals have engaged in foiled terrorism plots in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as Europe, with several Tajik men arrested following March’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow that left at least 133 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The attack has been linked to ISIS-K, or the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an off-shoot of ISIS that emerged in 2015, founded by disillusioned members of Pakistani militant groups, including Taliban fighters. In August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS-K launched a suicide attack in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
In a recent change to ICE policy, the agency now recurrently vets foreign nationals arriving from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, detaining them while they await removal proceedings or immigration hearings.
Only 0.007% of migrant arrivals are flagged by the FBI’s watchlist, and an even smaller number of those asylum seekers are ultimately removed. But with migrants arriving at the Southwest border from conflict zones in the Eastern Hemisphere, posing potential links to extremist or terrorist groups, the White House is now exploring ways to expedite the removal of asylum seekers viewed as a possible threat to the American public.
“Encounters with migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries—such as China, India, Russia, and western African countries—in FY 2024 have decreased slightly from about 10 to 9 percent of overall encounters, but remain a higher proportion of encounters than before FY 2023,” according to the Homeland Threat Assessment, a public intelligence document released earlier this month.
A senior homeland security official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday, that the U.S. is engaged in an “ongoing effort to try to make sure that we can use every bit of available information that the U.S. government has classified and unclassified, and make sure that the best possible picture about a person seeking to enter the United States is available to frontline personnel who are encountering that person.”
Approximately 139 individuals flagged by the FBI’s terror watchlist have been encountered at the U.S.‑Mexico border through July of fiscal year 2024. That number decreased from 216 during the same timeframe in 2023. CBP encountered 283 watchlisted individuals at the U.S.-Canada border through July of fiscal year 2024, down from 375 encountered during the same timeframe in 2023.
“I think one of the features of the surge in migration over recent years is that our border personnel are encountering a much more diverse and global population of individuals trying to enter the United States or seeking to enter the United States,” a senior DHS official said. “So, at some point in the past, it might have been primarily a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. Now, our border personnel encounter individuals from around the world, from all parts of the world, to include conflict zones and other areas where individuals may have links or can support ties to extremist or terrorist organizations that we have long-standing concerns about.”
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that human smuggling operations at the southern border were trafficking in people with possible connections to terror groups.
“Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today,” Wray, told Congress in June, just days before most of the Tajik men were arrested.
The expedited return of three Tajiks to Central Asia required tremendous diplomatic communication, facilitated by the State Department, U.S. officials said.
Returns to Central Asia routinely encounter operational and diplomatic hurdles, though regular channels for removal do exist. According to agency data, in 2023, ICE deported only four migrants to Tajikistan.
Robert Legare and
contributed to this report.
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