How Hillsdale Got Mixed Up in the 2020 Election Plot

“It’s simply a matter of mathematics,” Northon said on a different episode of Gruber’s podcast, in late November. “We’ve got a Ph.D., Dr. Zhang, Jennie Zhang from Hillsdale College, who just did the math. And when you do the math, it shows not just a handful of improper votes, or a handful of illegal votes, but hundreds of thousands, well over 500,000 in the general election alone.” He was referring to Qianying Zhang, a finance and economics professor who goes by Jennie and was paid $5,000 as an expert witness by Amistad. Based on a survey by a firm run by a former Trump campaign aide, she estimated how many people had received absentee ballots they had not requested. (In an email, Zhang said that while Northon had offered a “plausible” account of her findings, calling the votes “improper” or “illegal” went “beyond the direct scope of my analysis.”)

In early December, Northon took part in a conference call with an old friend of Arnn’s from Claremont circles, the lawyer John Eastman. Northon, in his testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee, said this meeting, like the first one, “was set up by some Hillsdale people.” He specifically mentioned Spalding, dean of the college’s Washington graduate school, something of a nexus in the capital for academics on the right. Northon’s lawyer, Chip Chamberlain, said in an email exchange that neither Arnn nor Spalding was on the Eastman call. Northon, he said, simply “reviewed Dr. Spalding’s research on elections and constitutionalism before various filings with the courts.” (Spalding, in a statement through Hillsdale, said he had never met Northon.)

Northon told the Jan. 6 committee that the two Michigan lawmakers who attended the Giuliani meeting participated in this one too, along with a third, Daire Rendon. (Rendon was charged last year in a separate case involving voting-machine breaches orchestrated by Trump allies.) The lawmakers “were people who wanted their colleagues in the House to do more,” Northon testified, adding, “That was the impetus of the Eastman call.”

Eastman was one of the legal architects of the strategy to deploy fake electors in states Trump lost, in order to press Pence to forgo certifying Biden on Jan. 6. (He was indicted last year on charges related to this effort in Georgia, where he has pleaded not guilty.) Now, on the conference call, he explained to the lawmakers that the State Legislature held the power to take action on elections. “If somebody’s going to do something about it, it’s them,” Northon recalled Eastman saying.

Northon also prepared a draft resolution for the Legislature’s Republican leaders, hoping they would declare that they were investigating the election. As he composed the draft, he said, he showed it to Norton and Emily Davis, Hillsdale’s communications chief. When House investigators asked Northon about his running election-related documents by Hillsdale’s brass, he said: “Well, my — I represented Hillsdale and all this — although this wasn’t something I was doing for them, I thought they should be aware of it, that it was happening. I thought it was important for them.”