Tag: Trump fake voter fraud crisis

How Trump drove the lie that the election was stolen, undermining voter trust in the outcome

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Elena Parent, a Democratic state lawmaker from the Atlanta area, listened incredulously in a small hearing room in early December as a stream of witnesses spun fantastical tales of alleged election fraud before the Georgia Senate’s Judiciary Committee.

A retired Army colonel claimed the state’s voting machines were controlled by Communists from Venezuela. A volunteer lawyer with President Trump’s campaign shared surveillance video that she said showed election workers in Atlanta counting “suitcases” of phony ballots that swung Georgia’s election to former vice president Joe Biden. The president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, told the panel: “Every single vote should be taken away from Biden.”

“Since this has been debunked repeatedly, what evidence can you give to us that counters what our elections officials presented us with only an hour ago?” Parent asked one of the witnesses, her voice rising in exasperation. When she tried to ask a follow-up question, the Republican committee chairman cut her off. Continue reading.

Inside Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the election

No president has ever made such expansive and individualized pleas. 

It started with a phone call.

In mid-November, President Donald Trump rang Monica Palmer, the Republican chair of an obscure board in Michigan that had just declared Joe Biden winner of the state’s most populous county.

Within 24 hours, Palmer announced she wanted to “rescind” her vote. Her reasoning mirrored Trump’s public and private rants: The Nov. 3 election may have been rife with fraud. Continue reading.

Trump calls Bolton ‘one of the dumbest people in Washington’ after former aide weighs in on martial law report

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President Trump blasted John Bolton as “one of the dumbest people in Washington” after his former national security adviser expressed alarm over a report that Trump considered a suggestion to implement martial law.

“What would Bolton, one of the dumbest people in Washington, know? Wasn’t he the person who so stupidly said, on television, ‘Libyan solution’, when describing what the U.S. was going to do for North Korea?” Trump asked in a tweet early Sunday. “I’ve got plenty of other Bolton ‘stupid stories.’”

Bolton on Saturday reacted to a report that Trump had discussed a proposal by the president’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to “rerun” the presidential election under military supervision, calling it “appalling.”  Continue reading.

A frustrated Trump redoubles efforts to overturn election result

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President Trump has intensified efforts to overturn the election, raising a series of radical measures in recent days, including military intervention, seizing voting machines and a 13th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court.

On Sunday, Trump said in a radio interview that he had spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) about challenging the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene on Jan. 6 to formally affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

“He’s so excited,” Trump said of Tuberville. “He said, ‘You made me the most popular politician in the United States.’ He said, ‘I can’t believe it.’ He’s great. Great senator.” Continue reading.

Trump wants Supreme Court to overturn Pa. election results

WASHINGTON — Undeterred by dismissals and admonitions from judges, President Donald Trump’s campaign continued with its unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of the Nov 3. election Sunday, saying it had filed a new petition with the Supreme Court.

The petition seeks to reverse a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases having to do with mail-in ballots and asks the court to reject voters’ will and allow the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pick its own slate of electors.

While the prospect of the highest court in the land throwing out the results of a democratic election based on unfounded charges of voter fraud is extraordinary unlikely, it wouldn’t change the outcome. President-elect Joe Biden would still be the winner even without Pennsylvania because of his wide margin of victory in the Electoral College. Continue reading.

Fox News airs point-by-point fact check of wild election fraud claims during 3 of network’s most pro-Trump shows

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Fox News this weekend is airing a stunning point-by-point fact check to claims made on programs hosted by the network’s most pro-Trump voices after voting technology company Smartmatic send a 20-page legal letter demanding “a full and complete retraction of all false and defamatory statements and reports.”

The segment, which features an interview with Palo Open Source Election Technology Institute voting technology expert Eddie Perez, aired on Lou Dobb’s Friday show and Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday show. Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo will also show the segment.

In its Dec. 10 letter to Fox News Media, Smartmatic charged the company and its hosts with waging “a concerted disinformation campaign against Smartmatic. Fox News told its millions of viewers and readers that Smartmatic was founded by [the late Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez, that its software was designed to fix elections, and that Smartmatic conspired with others to defraud the American people and fix the 2020 U.S. election by changing, inflating, and deleting votes.” The company also demanded the company “match the attention and audience targeted with the original defamatory publications.” Continue reading.

Lou Dobbs debunks his own claims of election fraud — after a legal demand from Smartmatic

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A fact-check segment that aired on his Fox Business show Friday will be rebroadcast on two other Fox programs this weekend

Something surprising happened Friday night on Lou Dobbs’s top-rated show on the Fox Business Network.

Dobbs, an opinion host and conservative ally of President Trump who has consistently raged over the past month that the president was robbed of a second term by a rigged election, introduced a segment that calmly debunked several accusations of fraud that Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump supporters have lobbed against the election technology company Smartmatic.

“There are lots of opinions about the integrity of the election, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and voting software,” Dobbs told his viewers before introducing Edward Perez, an expert with the nonprofit Open Source Election Technology Institute, to give “his assessment of Smartmatic and recent claims about the company.” Continue reading.

Even as Trump vows to keep fighting, his aides are quietly starting to move on

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Vice President Pence has begun looking for a new home in the Washington suburbs, and he’s planning a valedictory foreign trip to begin the day Congress counts the electoral college votes.

Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has discussed opening a consulting firm with other White House aides and allies.

Top economic adviser Larry Kudlow has told friends he is planning to return to broadcasting, and he has his next gigs lined up. Continue reading.

Republicans Talk ’Secession,” But Who Would That Hurt?

The loudest sound on the American far right today is the angry whining emitted by sore losers who claim their candidate was defrauded but know for a fact that he was simply defeated. Their tune is grating, but their seditious words are troubling, with supporters of President Donald Trump repeatedly warning of “civil war” and even “secession.” Fans of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh hear those ominous words every day now.

Presumably, such divisive sentiment is why many “conservatives” are so enamored of Confederate flags and other such symbols of treason. If the democratic process doesn’t give them what they want, they threaten bloodshed and the destruction of the nation to which they once pretended to pledge allegiance.

For the most part, those menacing broadsides are just impotent bluster. America has a perennial surplus of bullies who brandish weapons to bolster their fragile masculinity and intimidate their adversaries. A small cohort of those goons are dangerous and even potentially deadly; the most consistent perpetrators of domestic terrorism in recent years have been white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists, not radical Islamic terrorists. Rolling up the violent political gangsters should be a top priority for President-elect Joe Biden’s Justice Department, which will follow four dark years when the Trump administration tolerated and even encouraged them. Continue reading.

Reporter details why Rudy Giuliani may have just perjured himself

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Rudy Giuliani was once of the face of New York City after 9/11; now, he’s the face of President Donald Trump’s campaign following the 2020 election. The Trump attorney and former New York City mayor has been going to great lengths to convince the courts that Trump was the victim of widespread voter fraud — although he hasn’t been able to prove his allegations — and according to Mother Jones’ David Corn, Giuliani “arguably provided false testimony several times” when he testified via Zoom at a Missouri legislative hearing on December 14.

Giuliani wasn’t challenging the election results in Missouri, a state that Trump won. Rather, Corn writes, he was the “star witness” for Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives who were making a “show of fealty to the defeated Trump” by “pushing a non-binding resolution declaring that they have ‘no faith’ in election results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.”

Corn offers some examples of possible “false testimony” from Giuliani. Continue reading.