In mid-December 2020, even Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano apparently had some doubts about the latest plan hatched by Donald Trump’s inner circle to select fake Electoral College electors in an attempt to reverse the results of the presidential election. The right-wing senator had heard from other Republicans that the scheme might be “illegal,” in the words of lawyer Christina Bobb, then a One America News anchor who later joined Trump’s legal team.

“Mastriano needs a call from the mayor. This needs to be done. Talk to him about legalities of what they are doing,” Bobb wrote on Dec. 12, 2020, to Trump advisers, referring to Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. That email and others from Trump’s team were reported last summer by the New York Times. But previously unreported communications obtained by The Inquirer show that, two days after Bobb’s email, Trump himself called Mastriano — this time peddling lies about Dominion voting machines.

“POTUS just called me,” Mastriano wrote in a Dec. 14, 2020, email with the subject line “Document from POTUS.” “He asked that I share the attached with you.”

Mastriano was happy to oblige. He sent the email to an unidentified group of recipients, with findings from a debunked “study” of voting machines in Michigan, including a false claim that there was a “68% error rate in votes cast.”