Republican U.S. House candidate Rob Mercuri held fundraisers with fake Trump elector

Rob Mercuri, the Republican candidate for U.S. House in Pennsylvania’s 17th district, has been fundraising with an Allegheny County council member who was implicated in a scheme to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Sam DeMarco is promoted as a guest on two separate invitations to Mercuri fundraising events. The first event was held on May 23 in Pittsburgh. The second was held on June 6 in Ellwood City.

In 2020, Pennsylvania sent 20 electors to vote in the electoral college. President Joe Biden won the state by more than 80,000 votes. Associates of former President Donald Trump recruited so-called “alternate electors” or “fake electors” to sign bogus documents asserting that Trump had actually won the state. DeMarco was one of those individuals.

The aim of the fake electors was to interfere with the certification of the 2020 election by Congress on January 6, 2021. Similar schemes were attempted in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Vice President Mike Pence, who was overseeing the certification process, refused to count the fraudulent electoral votes. This refusal contributed to the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

In 2022, the FBI interviewed DeMarco about his role in the scheme. DeMarco claimed the fake electoral votes were “conditional” and would have only been counted if Trump prevailed in his lawsuits challenging the Pennsylvania vote count. DeMarco has not yet faced any legal consequences.

Mercuri launched his campaign challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Chris Deluzio last year. Mercuri described himself as a “Trump supporter” in a July 2020 interview with CBS Pittsburgh.

In a statement provided to American Journal News, Mercuri did not dispute any of the above facts and stated “I am laser focused on the issues that Pennsylvanians care about.”