They can do this all day
One of the features (not a bug) about Donald Trump’s Big Lie that Tuesday’s public hearing put on display is how eagerly Team Trump and the Kraken lawyers accepted and trafficked in conspiracy theories surrounding 2020 voting. Trump’s recorded conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) highlighted that, as well as Rudy Giuliani’s interactions with Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers (R).
Bowers told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that Giuliani alleged widespread voter fraud in Arizona. Pressed to present his evidence, Giuliani never did. Ever.
“In my recollection,” Bowers testified, Giuliani “said, ‘We have lots of theories we just don’t have the evidence.'”
Evidence-wise, in my experience what conspiracy theorists lack in quality they make up for in quantity. That their “evidence” cannot stand up to scrutiny is irrelevent. They know what they believe going in. They assemble volumes of evidence, no matter how flimsy, to support it. They are committed to none of it. Every piece is disposable once challenged. They simply move on to the next item from the pile. And it’s a tall pile. It’s all crap, but we are to be impressed with the quantity.
US District Judge David Carter determined in March that the plot by attorney John Eastman and Donald Trump was “a coup in search of a legal theory.” Much as the Bush II administration needed a legal rationale for torturing prisoners. They knew what they wanted to do. They just needed legal cover for doing it.
Trump too
Clips of Trump’s recorded call played Tuesday during Raffensperger’s and Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling’s testimony illustrated the behavior (NPR):
Trump raised the thoroughly debunked allegation that ballots were being transported in suitcases and that based on video footage they contained a minimum of 18,000 ballots all for Joe Biden.
Raffensperger confirmed that the U.S. Justice Department and the attorney general, as well as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and his own office, had all found those claims to be false.
Even more importantly, he added, the Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Bobby Christine, had dismissed those claims early on.
Sterling said the objects captured on video were not suitcases or trunks, but standard ballot carriers that allow for seals to be added to prevent tampering.
And, he said, there’s “no physical way” that Trump or anyone could have known who those ballots were for. A Fulton County monitor (who the state required to be on-site due to its difficulty running elections during COVID) noted that approximately 8,900 total ballots were scanned from the time he left to the time he returned around about 1 a.m. — far less than the 18,000 that Trump had mentioned.
Trump told Raffensperger that “they dropped a lot of votes in there late at night.”
Raffensperger refuted that notion, saying he believed Trump was referring to the time at which various counties would upload their results.
“But the ballots had all been accepted … they had to be accepted, by state law, by 7 p.m.,” he said. “So there were no additional ballots accepted after 7 p.m.”
Trump claimed that roughly 5,000 dead people in Georgia voted.
The Trump administration claimed in its lawsuits that more than 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, Raffensperger said — adding that neither of those numbers are accurate.
At the time that Raffensperger wrote his letter to Congress on Jan. 6, the state had found evidence of just two dead people having voted. They subsequently found two more.
“That’s one, two, three, four people — not 4,000,” he said. “But just a total of four, not 10,000, not 5,000.”
Debunk one wild allegation, push back on it, and conspiracy theorists will drop it and move on. “Well, what about this?”
Like Captain America getting his ass kicked, they can do this all day. And be just as deluded at the end of it.
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