The campaign officials, led by lawyer Rudy Giuliani, told the electors they were meeting on a contingency basis only, the indictment says. After the call, campaign officials circulated language to add to the Pennsylvania elector certificates to be submitted to Washington asserting that the votes were intended to count only if Trump prevailed in litigation in the state.

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Campaign officials urged one another to keep this new language under wraps so that other states would not copy it. “If it gets out we changed the language for PA it could snowball,” one campaign official wrote, according to the indictment.

The allegation that campaign officials sought to prevent electors in other states from learning about the language used in Pennsylvania is a key new revelation in the four-count, 45-page federal indictment, which accuses Trump of a sprawling effort to “retain power” illegally with the help of six co-conspirators.

Trump’s defenders have long insisted that the elector scheme was legal because the slates met as mere placeholders, to be activated only if the campaign won in court. Prosecutors now charge that Trump, Giuliani and others intended all along to use the electors to falsely claim the outcome of the election was in doubt, facilitating an effort to obstruct the certification of Biden’s victory in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

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Legal experts said proving that Trump and his co-conspirators were lying when they said the electors were meeting just...

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