Ryan Reilly and Jane Timm deep dive for NBC:
How this will play out on Election Day is unknown. But an NBC News investigation can now report the extent of the Republican Party and Trump campaign’s involvement in the TCF Center ordeal in 2020 — and what the party plans for poll watchers next month.
An NBC News analysis shows dozens of Trump supporters, including people linked to the Trump campaign, played roles in the unrest at the TCF Center — more than was previously known. Among them were five campaign-linked activists who held signs outside the TCF Center encouraging the crowd to chant “stop the count,” indicating that Trump himself wanted them to do so.
And NBC News has obtained a video of a training session in Michigan for 2024 poll watchers showing the RNC is giving volunteers who echo Trump’s claims of widespread fraud the tools to challenge votes and few guardrails on what makes a challenge legitimate.
“Detroit is always going to be our tier one,” Morgan Ray, the RNC’s director of election integrity in Michigan, told hundreds of supporters in the training session.
Lost amid Trump’s dire warnings about fraud in swing-state cities is that he performed better in Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee in 2020 than in 2016.
Trump’s own head of Election Day operations, Mike Roman, acknowledged that inconvenient fact. In an email exchange with a campaign lawyer right after Election Day in 2020, Roman wrote that “the margin was higher” for Trump in those three cities.
He added, “Not sure that satisfies the narrative.”….
Just before 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, Trump gave a speech at the White House falsely claiming that he had won.
Around the same time, Kellye SoRelle, a Texas attorney volunteering for Lawyers for Trump, was “camped out” in a car outside the TCF Center. With her gun and her purse and “pretty much” still in her pajamas, she started recording what would become a viral video, she later told congressional investigators.
SoRelle, who told investigators the RNC paid for her travel to Detroit, recorded a man unloading a black case from a van into a red wagon and taking it into the TCF Center around 2:40 a.m. The case “looks like one of those lockboxes,” SoRelle said in the video, suggesting it contained ballots. “Wish I could tell.”
Soon, her suspicions were all over Twitter and right-wing media. Eric Trump, the president’s son, tweeted about the video. SoRelle’s video got over a million views within a single day.
In reality, as WXYZ-TV of Detroit reported hours after the video had gone viral, it showed the station’s cameraman taking his gear into the TCF Center to cover the unfolding story. But it was too late.
“The Steal is on!!” Roman, a senior Trump campaign official, tweeted at 2:07 p.m. ET. He included a video purporting to show Republican observers being removed from the ballot-counting operation at TCF…..