Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene pay $25k to firm linked to lawyer behind Trump ‘coup memo’

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz paid a combined more than $25,000 in the last two years to a legal group tied to the lawyer

Right-wing firebrand Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz paid a combined more than $25,000 in the last two years to a legal group tied to the lawyer who devised a plot for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results.

The money was paid via Put America First, a fundraising organisation operated by Ms Greene and Mr Gaetz.

Ms Greene, a freshman congresswoman from Georgia, raised $1.07m in the first three months of 2022 as she heads into reelection, according to her campaign’s filing to the Federal Election Commission.

The report showed that her campaign also paid $10,000 on 14 January of this year to the Constitutional Counsel Group, which is affiliated with John C Eastman, the lawyer who concocted a plan for Mr Pence to essentially steal the presidential election results. The New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher first reported the expenditure.

Mr Eastman, who worked with former president Donald Trump to challenge the 2020 presidential election results, spoke at the “Stop the Steal” Rally before the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

More notably, he infamously drew up the “Eastman Memo”, which featured a plot in which Mr Pence would have interrupted the certification of Arizona’s Electoral College votes by saying Arizona had sent “multiple slates of electors”. Mr Pence would then have to set aside election results from other states the Trump campaign disputed, which reduce the number of Electoral College votes from 538 to 454. At that point, Mr Pence would have certified Mr Trump as the winner of the 2020 election.

But Mr Pence rejected the plan, despite Mr Trump imploring Mr Pence to “to do the right thing”. Mr Pence has since said he did not have the right to overturn the 2020 election.

“President Trump is wrong,” he said. “I had no right to overturn the election.”

The Independent has reached out to Mr Eastman and Ms Greene’s campaign for comment.