By the second week of December 2020, the presidential election was decided and put to a formal vote in the Electoral College. Like President Trump, GOP Chairwoman Rona McDaniel was not ready to concede.
“Every illegal vote steals from a valid vote, and every state that ran its elections fraudulently steals from states that ran their elections fairly,” Ms. McDaniel told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Dec. 8.
By then, key campaign aides had already told Mr Trump he had lost. The consultants had found no credible evidence of fraud or irregularities that could have overturned the result. The Electoral College would confirm Joseph R. Biden as the winner six days later.
But Ms. McDaniel’s appearance on Mr. Hannity’s show was part of her concerted efforts to help Mr. Trump challenge his election loss.
Among the major figures involved in Mr. Trump’s bid to retain power, Ms. McDaniel has received relatively limited attention. She is just now facing intense scrutiny after NBC reporters revolted over their network’s decision to hire her as an on-air contributor, which led to the abrupt end of her multi-day relationship with the network.
Ms. McDaniel had recently tried to downplay her role. But a review of her record shows that she has, at times, been closely involved in and supported Mr. Trump’s legal and political maneuvering in the run-up to the violent effort to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s Jan. 6 victory.
Ms. McDaniel was not the most aggressive or outlandish member of Mr. Trump’s team. Indeed, he has fallen short of Mr. Trump’s demands and expectations, former aides said, and has faced calls from his allies and grassroots activists to be much more aggressive. And her involvement appears to have diminished substantially — at least publicly — in the days leading up to Jan. 6, when the RNC focused its efforts on the then-upcoming Senate election in Georgia.
Later, after courts, Republican election officials and government investigations dismissed Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud, Ms. McDaniel was seen as insufficiently committed to the cause of the election’s flipping, particularly by Trump supporters who still viewed Mr. .Trump as the rightful winner. .
But before then, Ms. McDaniel, who through intermediaries declined to comment for this article, had done more to challenge a legitimate election result than any other presidency of a major American political party in modern history.
The first days: “This is theft”
In the days after the 2020 election, the RNC under Ms. McDaniel worked in coordination with the Trump campaign and his legal team in the initial effort to overturn the result for Mr. Trump.
The party set up hotlines, collected accounts of alleged suspicious activity and held White House meetings with Mr. Trump’s legal team, Ms. McDaniel later testified to a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.
At a press conference in Michigan on Nov. 6, a day before news outlets declared Mr. Biden the winner, he announced that the RNC was deploying legal teams to four states to investigate “improperties.” He cited allegations in Michigan that he claimed were evidence of potential, widespread problems, including allegedly suspicious voting machine software. The claims were disputed by election officials and later shot down.
Speaking on Fox on Nov. 10, Ms. McDaniel repeated unsubstantiated and soon-to-be-debunked claims of “absentee voters” and “lots of voided ballots,” declaring that “this is theft.”
And on social media, Ms. McDaniel has questioned “irregularities” about the election, posted fundraising appeals and pushed for hearings in states where Mr. Trump’s allies have presented fraudulent evidence of voter fraud. He vowed that the RNC would “continue this process to the end.”
After Mr. Trump changed his legal team, bringing in outside lawyers led by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the RNC also distanced itself from legal involvement with the Trump team. Of the 65 lawsuits filed by Mr. Trump and his allies after the 2020 election, the RNC attached its name to only four, according to Democracy Docket, which tracks the cases.
However, on Nov. 19, Ms. McDaniel allowed Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell to hold a press briefing at RNC headquarters. With dark liquid dripping down his face, Mr. Giuliani advanced wild theories about Dominion voting machines and dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
Ms. McDaniel later told The Times that she regretted her decision. “When I saw some of the things that Sidney was saying, without proof, I was definitely concerned that they were happening in my building,” he said.
After that news conference, party lawyers told Ms. McDaniel not to repeat conspiracy theories about voting machines and urged RNC aides to be careful when talking about the election, suggesting they use phrases like “voting irregularities ” instead of “electoral fraud”. according to parliamentary committee testimony.
Late November: Intervention in Michigan
Behind the scenes, Ms. McDaniel has at times played a more direct role, including helping Mr. Trump’s effort to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in Michigan.
On Nov. 17, two Republican board members in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, initially voted against certifying the county’s results, deadlocking the board until they were ousted amid angry protest.
Soon after, Republican board members Monica Palmer and William Hartman received a phone call from Mr. Trump. Mrs. McDaniel was also on the line.
According to the Detroit News, which reviewed audio from the call, Mr Trump told the two he would look “terrible” if they signed the official paperwork for their votes, adding: “We have to fight for our country.”
Ms McDaniel told them: “If you can go home tonight, don’t sign it,” adding: “We’ll get you lawyers.”
With no legal means to invalidate their vote, the certification went ahead.
Speaking on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ms. McDaniel said she did not pressure the two and recalled simply urging them to “vote your conscience.” Expressing regret over threats of violence against them — one of which led to an arrest in New Hampshire — she said the two officials were within their rights to request further audits of the county’s results. (The results were confirmed by the post-election audit.)
An appeal to the Supreme Court
Ms. McDaniel also helped Mr. Trump rally state attorneys general to join a Supreme Court lawsuit originally filed by the State of Texas to challenge the results in four states. Considered outrageous by legal experts, he tried to get the court to throw out essentially all of the votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, leaving the results up to their Republican legislatures.
Ms. McDaniel was a supporter of the bid. “I’m so happy about this Texas lawsuit,” she told Mr. Hannity on Fox, adding, “there will be more states joining this lawsuit.”
In the background, he joined Mr. Trump in a phone call in which he urged Arkansas Republican Party Chairwoman Johnelle Fulmer to bring the state’s attorney general, Leslie Rutledge, with him. “The president asked me to convey to our attorney general that she would like to join this lawsuit, and she immediately did,” Ms. Fulmer told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which first reported the call.
The Supreme Court threw out the Texas lawsuit a few days later.
The Electors
But Ms. McDaniel continued to support the overall effort to see the results overturned. In December 2020, he was on the phone with Mr. Trump and John Eastman, a law professor helping the effort, to discuss the plan to use alternate voters to make Mr. Trump the winner. Ms. McDaniel agreed to work with the Trump campaign to carry out the plan, but was told it was just a contingency in case Republican lawsuits succeeded in overturning the results, she said in her deposition.
A federal indictment against Mr. Trump, filed by special counsel Jack Smith, also alleged that Ms. McDaniel was misled into believing that voters would not be used if the campaign did not succeed in court.
Mr. Trump’s plans included forcing voters on Jan. 6, with the help of Vice President Mike Pence, who, the president and his allies hoped, would prevent Mr. Biden’s victory from being certified.
Ms. McDaniel also testified that she was “out of the loop” of plans to pressure Mr. Pence to do so.
On the evening of Jan. 6, she expressed regret for the riots at the Capitol, saying in a statement: “What these violent protesters are doing is the opposite of patriotism. It’s a shame and I condemn it in the strongest possible way.”
In the months following Mr. Biden’s inauguration, Ms. McDaniel continued to oversee a massive expansion of the party’s “election integrity” groups, state groups that often partnered with activists still committed to lies about the 2020 election. .
In an interview on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ms. McDaniel acknowledged that she “won fair and square.”
But he added: “I think it’s fair to say there were problems in 2020.”
Jonathan Swan contributed to the report.
