MAGA Mike named sleazy Pennsylvania Republican Mike Kelly to chair the House investigation into how Trump’s ear was superficially damaged by some flying plexiglas. Kelly was an eyewitness at the Butler Farm Show grounds on July 13 in his northwest Pennsylvania district. The 76 year old Kelly has been in Congress since beating Blue Dog Kathy Dahlkemper in 2010. A MAGA nut, Kelly was a very active participant in Trump’s 2021 coup attempt.
Another MAGA loon, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) first revealed that Kelly— a multimillionaire and notorious crooked self-dealer and inside stock trader— was responsible for providing a slate of fake electors meant to overturn Pennsylvania's electoral votes.
His district has been gerrymandered in such a way as to automatically elect Republicans (R+13 PVI with an R+25 partisan lean). The DCCC long ago gave up on challenging him, and his Democratic opponent this cycle, Preston Nouri, has raised just $409,778 to Kelly’s $1,157,994. Although the biggest county in the district, Erie, is pretty blue, the backward, rural counties that extend between Erie and Pittsburgh— Butler, Mercer, Lawrence, Crawford and Venango— are MAGA hellholes. In 2022 Kelly was reelected against Democrat Dan Pastore 190,546 (59.4%) to 130,443 (40.6%). His constituents are never going to hold him accountable— not for his criminal financial dealings, not for his political extremism and not for his role in the Trump coup attempt.
Will law and order ever get around to him? No one thought so— and then, Monday, a glimmer of hope: “New security footage from the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot,” wrote Hafiz Rashid, “have revealed possible new crimes in Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election results. Former Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro and a Trump campaign staffer, G. Michael Brown, were caught on camera handing fake elector documents from Washington and Michigan to aides of Republican Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania on January 5.”
The video corroborates what Chesebro admitted in a text message on January 6: that he dropped off fake elector documents to Kelly’s aides a day prior.
The documents ultimately didn’t get to Vice President Mike Pence, who was in charge of certifying the election results, thanks to the Senate parliamentarian refusing to accept the documents from Kelly’s aides. Bizarrely, after the documents were rejected, the aides wandered the halls on the second floor of the Capitol for a half-hour, waiting for instructions.
It’s bad news for Kelly— and even worse news for Chesebro, who is already in trouble in Michigan for his involvement in the fake elector scheme in that state. Chesebro was charged with felony fraud for his efforts to overturn Wisconsin’s presidential election results in June. He was named as a co-conspirator in Georgia’s fake elector charges, where he is cooperating with the state and has pleaded guilty to planning the scheme there. He is reportedly also cooperating with prosecutors in Michigan and Wisconsin.
This new set of evidence could lead to new charges, as it apparently wasn’t previously uncovered by the House January 6 committee, according to journalist Jamie Dupree. And while Kelly’s role was known, the extent of his involvement in the fake electors plot was not. Aside from that, however, the footage shows how close Trump’s cronies got to overturning two key states’ elections, as only the Senate parliamentarian and Vice President Mike Pence stood in their way.
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