A former Justice Department official raised eyebrows when testifying that Donald Trump complained about Native Americans being paid to vote against him, but the complaint appears to have come from a White House staffer.
Richard Donoghue, who served as Trump’s acting assistant attorney general in December 2020 and January 2021, told the House Select Committee that the former president claimed voter fraud robbed him of re-election, and many observers were surprised by some of the baseless claims.
“The dead vote, Indians get paid to vote,” Trump said, according to Donoghue. “There’s a lot of fraud here.”
Donoghue testified that he told the former president those allegations were false, and it appears Trump heard the claims from Garrett Ziegler, an aide to White House economic adviser Peter Navarro.
“Young and earnest Garrett Ziegler rides to the sound of guns in Nevada,” Navarro wrote in his book “In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year.” “He will soon find himself criss-crossing an Indian reservation investigating outrageously illegitimate bribes for Biden votes.”
Although some election advocates such as the Nevada Native Vote Project offered free food, gift cards, and raffle entries to voters, the gifts were available to all voters, not in exchange for a candidate’s support. specific.
