Michigan “Stop the Steal” speaker Brandon Hall was found guilty in 2016 on 10 counts of election law forgery.
Trump supporters in Michigan (some armed) are protesting the presidential election results at the state capitol and alleging fraud with no evidence. This in spite of one of the leaders of the “Stop the Steal” effort there knowing what election fraud looks like up close.
One of the speakers is blogger and GOP activist Brandon Hall, who says he’s running for Michigan Republican Party chair. That position is currently held by former state Rep. Laura Cox (R-Livonia), who Trump announced at a pre-election rally in Grand Rapids would “be fired” if he lost the state, which he did. Cox has continued to defend the president and make unfounded claims of voter fraud after the election.
“We’re not going to give over our electoral votes to Joe Biden without a fight,” Hall said, as reported by the Lansing State Journal.
What Hall didn’t mention, and neither did the story, is that he has firsthand experience with election fraud. In 2013, Hall was charged with 10 counts of election law forgery, which is a felony. In December 2016, Hall was sentenced to 30 days in jail and 18 months probation for election fraud, the Grand Haven Tribune,FOX-17 and MLive reported.
Credibility is not highly valued in this crowd. Deceit is how they build reputations.
Accusations of voter fraud continue to be in the headlines after last week’s general election, including the claims that people who are dead voted. 11Alive confirmed that two of the four Georgia voters the president’s campaign accused of fraudulently voting while “dead” are alive.
President Donald Trump’s campaign tweeted accusations claiming that James Blalock of Covington, who is deceased, voted in the election.
“The only problem? He passed away 14 years ago. Sadly, Mr. Blalock is a victim of voter fraud,” the tweet reads.
The accusations were amplified on national television.
“Mr. Blalock was a mailman for 33 years until he passed away in 2006. Fourteen years later, according to state records, he was still mailing things. James Blalock cast a ballot in last week’s election,” Tucker Carlson said in a clip and story labeled on Fox News’ website as an opinion piece.
However, 11Alive was able to find out that James Blalock did not vote in last week’s election. Mrs. James Blalock did vote.
“He’s not voting. He didn’t vote,” Agnes Blalock told 11Alive. “It was me.”
Newton County officials confirmed that Agnes Blalock voted using her married name.
“Her voter registration was signed as Mrs. James E. Blalock, Jr. and that is exactly how she signed her name when she voted in the Nov. 3 general election,” officials said.
“Mrs. Linda Kesler of Nicholson, Georgia voted in the election,” a tweet from Trump campaign said. “The only problem,” she passed away 17 years ago, in 2003.”
11Alive was able to determine that is also false. The Jackson County Board of Elections said she did not vote.
“Linda Kesler of Nicholson was marked deceased in 2003 and did not vote. Lynda Kesler who has a different address, birthday, and zip who is entitled to vote—did vote,” the board of elections said.
I don’t think they care if it turns out not to be true. They are just following Cokie’s Law It’s “out there” and that’s all that matters. I would guess that at least 40 million Trump voters, maybe even more, will always believe the election was stolen because they heard stories like this.
There are a lot of Republican election lawyers out there. They’ve been organizing to contest elections for decades and they were prepared to contest this one if it was close enough. Trump had them lined up to do it, which isn’t surprising. He’s telegraphed for months that he was going to contest the results.
President Donald Trump’s senior campaign aides were gathered in their headquarters Saturday morning when word emerged that Rudy Giuliani would be holding a news conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business.
They knew that meant trouble.
Senior campaign aides scurried to urge organizers to kill the event, infamously staged at the wrong “Four Seasons” — a landscaping business adjacent to an adult bookstore and a crematorium. But Giuliani plowed ahead anyway, delivering a conspiracy-filled rant that undercut the legal strategy the president’s advisers had meticulously mapped out in the run-up to the election.
Campaign officials described the episode as disastrous, saying it scared off many of the lawyers they spent months recruiting, who now no longer wanted to be involved. With the campaign already facing exceedingly long odds in its recount efforts, there are widespread concerns within Trumpworld and GOP circles that Giuliani’s antics are thwarting the president’s legal machinery from within.
“I can’t imagine that a rational person” in the general public “wouldn’t be adversely affected by the way he conducts himself,” said Barry Richard, who represented George W. Bush in the 2000 Florida recount.
Yet Giuliani is taking on a heightened role. The president on Friday appointed him to oversee any new post-election litigation. The move, which was first reported by the New York Times, has distressed top campaign officials and other advisers, who worry Giuliani’s Hail Mary ploys will damage Trump’s reputation and potentially harm his future political aspirations.
Damage his reputation? Are they kidding? His reputation among normal people is as low as it can possibly be. He’s responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths not to mention the destruction of virtually everything decent in America over the course of the last four years.
And yet the Republican party has steadfastly stood by him, squeezing every last judge and arms sale out of him and laying so many landmines for the Democrats to try to defuse that they won’t have time to do anything else.
And it’s clear there is nothing he can do to damage his reputation with his cult-following. He is impervious to scandal or embarrassment with them.
And anyway, what they see as an intrusion into a sophisticated legal strategy isn’t really that. It’s not as if David Bossie and Jason Miller are the A-Team and they’re the ones who have been running the legal strategy until now:
Giuliani’s promotion also threatens to complicate a legal apparatus that has been in the works since June. The campaign began assembling a team of lawyers in swing states and counties where recounts might take place. The effort since the election has been overseen by Citizens United President David Bossie, who was tapped because of his conservative street cred and connections to pro-Trump activists around the country.
The Republican National Committee member from Maryland has also served as a bridge between the campaign and RNC, which had at times clashed during the final months of the race. He has been working the phones from home after testing positive for the coronavirus early this week.
Bossie has joined a regular 9:30 a.m. conference call with general counsel Matt Morgan, as well as top campaign officials Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Jason Miller, to discuss the day’s agenda. The group has also been holding daily conference calls with on-air surrogates to go over messaging, and with legal and political operatives in the half-dozen states with slim margins.
They have been meeting regularly with the president, allowing him to poke and prod at their ideas while presenting him with a menu of options. The group — which has told the president that he’s facing an uphill path — has outlined to him how they view each state as a mini-campaign governed by different laws.
Looking to buttress its infrastructure, the campaign has shifted staffers from Florida to neighboring Georgia, which is conducting a hand recount.
Much of the focus, however, has been on crafting lawsuits in three states that zero in on specific allegations of voting irregularities. In Arizona, the campaign has drawn attention to issues with voting machines. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, it is complaining about not having adequate observation at voting sites.
The Pennsylvania suit also revolves around the idea that voters in Democratic-heavy Philadelphia had more of an opportunity to “cure” improperly cast ballots than those in the more conservative parts of the state. While the Arizona case was dropped Friday, the Michigan and Pennsylvania cases are pending.
Campaign officials describe it as an incremental approach aimed at chipping away at Biden’s leads and creating margins that are small enough to force recounts. While they concede their lawsuits are unlikely to succeed, they insist they’re not frivolous.
They are frivolous. But that’s not good enough for Rudy and the president:
But their strategy has resulted in a clash with Giuliani, who has advocated for more of a damn-the-torpedoes approach. The former New York City mayor has been working independently of the Trump legal apparatus. He’s gone on Fox News and made allegations of widespread voter fraud. Early on, he ordered lawsuits to be filed without the consent of the campaign’s legal team.
Things came to a head during a meeting at the White House last Friday, one day before the Four Seasons Total Landscaping imbroglio. As the group batted around options before the president, Giuliani interjected and derided them as insufficiently aggressive. Some in the room were taken aback.
During a Thursday meeting at the White House that was attended by the president, Giuliani accused Trump aides of lying to Trump about his chances. Clark aggressively pushed back, and the two shouted at one another. Vice President Mike Pence was also present. The encounter was first reported by the Times.
Trump has gone with Giuliani because they are both nuts. But it’s also because Trump wants to keep his cult excited and on board with his plan to run in 2024 as the “rightful” president whose election was stolen from him — and them.
And, once again, the GOP is taking advantage of Trump’s hold on those voters to get a big turnout in Georgia in January. Trump isn’t a problem for them — he’s an asset. He always has been.
Donald Trump scams like he lies, like he breathes.
In case you missed his “legal defense fund” grift, Reuters did not:
(Reuters) – As President Donald Trump seeks to discredit last week’s election with baseless claims of voter fraud, his team has bombarded his supporters with requests for money to help pay for legal challenges to the results: “The Left will try to STEAL this election!” reads one text.
But any small-dollar donations from Trump’s grassroots donors won’t be going to legal expenses at all, according to a Reuters review of the legal language in the solicitations.
A donor would have to give more than $8,000 before any money goes to the “recount account” established to finance election challenges, including recounts and lawsuits over alleged improprieties, the fundraising disclosures show.
It’s all in the fine print. Sixty percent of small donations will go to a Trump leadership PAC (set up Monday). Forty percent goes to the Republican National Committee (RNC). The recount defense fund is an afterthought unless donors give more than $8,000.
Even the leadership PAC could be a slush fund, Reuters suggests.
Leadership PACs such as Save America are often set up by prominent political figures to spend money on other candidates, while also paying for personal expenses, such as travel and hotel stays.
Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, suggests he has no real plans for running for president again.
Basically, Trump is broke. He is in debt to his bushy eyebrows and has no source of income sufficient to keep debt collectors at bay. Post-presidency books and speaking fees may not be enough to spare him. He faces a flurry of lawsuits including one from his niece Mary and perhaps criminal charges in New York state. His tax returns will see the sunlight in due course and confirm this.
This is not a plot to steal the 2020 election. It is a decades-long campaign to undermine American democracy, which treats Democratic governance as inherently illegitimate. —Jonathan Chait
Republicans are at it again, alleging that the only way the acting president could have lost reelection was because he was cheated.
The modern manifestation of the campaign Chait cites dates at the very least from the 1981 voter suppression lawsuit brought by the New Jersey Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee in 1981. But we might trace its roots to the conservative backlash to the New Deal or even to the notion that governance of the new republic ought to fall to its “owners.” A disquisition on that will wait for another day.
Suffice to say that Republicans have long considered themselves the country’s owners and all others interlopers. When Republicans win, Real Americans™ have spoken. When they lose, Democrats cheated.
So it must be with Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. Despite “Democrats'” losing seats in the U.S. House and failing (to date) to wrest control of the U.S. Senate. Republicans who retained their seats believe their races were fairly decided. But they will go along with Trump’s wild claims that his was not.
The Republican strategy has several sources of motivation, but the most important is a widely shared belief that Democrats in large cities — i.e., racial minorities — engage in systematic vote fraud, election after election. “We win because of our ideas, we lose elections because they cheat us,” insisted Senator Lindsey Graham on Fox News last night. The Bush administration pursued phantasmal vote-fraud allegations, firing prosecutors for failing to uncover evidence of the schemes Republicans insisted were happening under their noses. In 2008, even a Republican as civic-minded as John McCain accused ACORN, a voter-registration group, of “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
The persistent failure to produce evidence of mass-scale vote fraud has not discouraged Republicans from believing in its existence. The failure to expose it merely proves how well hidden the conspiracy is. Republicans may despair of their chances of proving Trump’s vote-fraud charges in open court, but many of them believe his wild lies reflect a deeper truth.
Belief in the voter fraud bogeyman by these supposed hard-nosed realists is something akin to believing in orgone energy. The belief is unfalsifiable, as Chait observes.
They will have as much luck finding those illegal voters as finding space aliens. (If aliens can take human form, falsifying a photo ID is child’s play.) I mentioned a study on this in 2017:
As those paying attention recall, a clever study published in 2013 looked at how many people in America report having committed voter fraud. Researchers found that roughly the same percentages of the population admit to perpetrating voter fraud as admit to being abducted by aliens:
The implication here is that if one accepts that 2.5% is a valid lower bound for the prevalence of voter impersonation in the 2012 election then one must also accept that about 2.5% of the adult U.S. population — about 6 million people — believe that they were abducted by extra-terrestrials in the last year. If this were true then voter impersonation would be the least of our worries.
Republicans similarly believe Democrats never accepted George W. Bush’s win in 2000 or Donald trump’s in 2016, despite Hillary Clinton’s conceding the morning after.
Republicans blame the four-year stream of misconduct and outright criminality not on Trump but on the reporters and investigators who uncovered it. Trump faced “a political insurgency that refused in practice, if not in formal fact, to accept the outcome of an election its candidate had lost,” Wall StreetJournal columnist and recent editor Gerard Baker rants in his column today. “The members of this resistance spent four years using every lever at their disposal — bureaucracy, law enforcement, Congress, news media — to thwart, disrupt and try to bring down the duly elected president.”
Clinton may have technically accepted the election result very quickly, and the Obama administration may have technically offered full cooperation with the transition. But in reality, Trump’s opponents proceeded to expose massive corruption and wrongdoing — and the blame for this rests not on Trump but on them.
So it goes. The party of personal responsibility blames Trump’s bottomless corruption on Democrats and the press. Claims of fraud are “the process” now when Republicans lose.
Meanwhile, Trump is on track to make this the most chaotic transition in history.
The New York Times reports on the Bill Barr decision to allow prosecutors to get involved in election cases before the results are certified. This contravenes 40 years of DOJ policy but whatever. This is Bill Barr we’re dealing with:
Mr. Barr said he had authorized “specific instances” of investigative steps in some cases. He made clear in a carefully worded memo that prosecutors had the authority to investigate, but he warned that “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.”
Mr. Barr’s directive ignored the Justice Department’s longstanding policies intended to keep law enforcement from affecting the outcome of an election. And it followed a move weeks before the election in which the department lifted a prohibition on voter fraud investigations before an election.
“Given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions,” Mr. Barr wrote.
A Justice Department official said that Mr. Barr had authorized scrutiny of allegations about ineligible voters in Nevada and backdated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. Republicans have circulated both claims in recent days without any evidence emerging to back them.
Mr. Barr did not write the memo at the direction of Mr. Trump, the White House or any Republican lawmakers, the official said.
Mr. Barr has privately told department officials in the days since the election that any disputes should be resolved in court by the campaigns themselves, according to three people briefed on the conversations. He has said that he did not see massive fraud, and that most of the allegations of voter fraud were related to individual instances that did not point to a larger systemic problem, the people said.
But critics of Mr. Barr immediately condemned the memo as a political act that undermined the Justice Department’s typical independence from the White House.
“It would be problematic enough if Barr were reversing longstanding Justice Department guidance because of significant, substantiated claims of misconduct — that could presumably be handled at the local and state level,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
“But to do so when there is no such evidence — and when the president’s clear strategy is to delegitimize the results of a proper election — is one of the more problematic acts of any attorney general in my lifetime,” Mr. Vladeck added.
Mr. Pilger, a career prosecutor in the department’s Public Integrity Section who oversaw voting-fraud-related investigations, told colleagues he would move to a nonsupervisory role working on corruption prosecutions.
“Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Mr. Pilger’s message.
Justice Department policies prohibit federal prosecutors from taking overt steps, like questioning witnesses or securing subpoenas for documents, to open a criminal investigation into any election-related matter until after voting results have been certified to keep their existence from spilling into public view and influencing either voters or local election officials who ensure the integrity of the results.
“Public knowledge of a criminal investigation could impact the adjudication of election litigation and contests in state courts,” the Justice Department’s longstanding election guidelines for prosecutors say. “Accordingly, it is the general policy of the department not to conduct overt investigations.”
He wants to “impact the adjudication of election litigation and contests” on behalf of Trump. Just as he did when he inappropriately intervened in the Mueller investigation, the Roger Stone case, the Michael Flynn case, The E. Jean Carroll case, the Ukraine whistleblower situation, the false claims about voter fraud in Texas, the ordering of federal troops on peaceful protesters and his ongoing sycophantic bootlicking of Donald Trump. How many career prosecutors have resigned and protested his politicization of the DPJ? The number of former DOJ employees sounding the alarm numbers in the thousands.
He is a blight on America. This is totally expected. Whether they “find” any substantial evidence of irregularity is beside the point. (And they may very well manufacture some.) This maneuver shows once again that all a corrupt partisan Attorney General has to do is deploy his US Attorney henchmen and nothing will happen to him. They are destroying any and all institutional guardrails .
I don’t think you can make enough laws to prevent another Bill Barr from doing this all over again.
Defeating Donald Trump at the ballot box has not stopped the rot in body politic. That rot proceeds apace.
Multiple attendees of the soon-to-be-former acting president’s election night watch party are infected with COVID-19. The boss’ chief of staff, Mark Meadows; four other campaign and White House aides (that we know of); and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. And now David Bossie, the non-lawyer chosen to lead Donald Trump’s quixotic attempt to undo his reelection loss in the court of public opinion and in actual courtrooms.
For strict-father conservatives, top Republicans are insanely indulgent with the man-child still “leading” their party. Indulging his aversion to mask-wearing means the people above face weeks of isolation with coronavirus symptoms. Their indulgence means the rest of us face weeks of propaganda campaign aimed at convincing Americans that, no, Trump did not lose the election by 4.6 million votes (so far) because he is a walking disaster. Their indulgence means further decay of institutions that have upheld the republic since its inception.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will outlast Trump in Washington, D.C. He is nonetheless willing to indulge Trump’s wounded ego:
McConnell (R-Ky.) said from the floor of the Senate that the president is “100 percent within his right” to pursue recounts and litigation. McConnell did not repeat Trump’s baseless assertions that fraud had cost him the election, but he said he had met with Attorney General William P. Barr earlier in the day and supports the president’s right to investigate all claims of wrongdoing.
“We have the tools and institutions we need to address any concerns,” McConnell said. “The president has every right to look into allegations and request recounts under the law.”
Separately, Barr on Monday gave federal prosecutors a green light to pursue allegations of voting irregularities in certain cases before results are certified. The memo appeared to reverse previous Justice Department guidance that prosecutors generally should not take overt steps in cases involving alleged voter fraud until results are in and official.
John Dean once described Richard Nixon’s Watergate coverup and the payments of hush money as “a cancer on the presidency.” In Trump, that cancer has metastasized to much of the Republican Party.
Anand Giridharadas believes no amount of increased understanding, bipartisan appeals, or attempts at unity will treat this political sickness. Indulging it got us here:
Yesterday the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to acknowledge the election results and actually boosted Trump’s conspiracy theorizing. These are not people you need to reach out to. These are people you need to constrain through law, as much as possible, and beat overwhelmingly.
The Union did not persuade the Confederacy to give up slavery. The Confederacy had to be defeated on the battlefield. It was not an intellectual exercise. But that’s how we treat political battles.
Giridharadas continues:
Perhaps the way to bring the country together is not to bring the country together but to fix it. Perhaps the way to heal divisions is not to heal divisions but to get the government working again. Perhaps the way to get people to believe in science isn’t to get people to believe in science but to roll out a vaccine successfully, fairly, and efficiently. Perhaps the antidote to the poison of this era isn’t the active pursuit of kumbaya but good, old-fashioned progress: steady and palpable life betterment, and the repair of institutions so they can’t be hijacked again.
Republicans indulging Donald Trump has broken government worse than his party had since the Reagan revolution. Trump indulging rather than defeating the coronavirus contributed to 240,000 Americans losing their lives. Rather than address the crisis at hand, Republicans will now indulge Trump’s obsession with settling scores over the next two months while tens of thousands more Americans die in the latest Covid surge. Hospitals again are headed toward reaching capacity in what looks now to be a death march to Jan. 20.
It is not liberal permissiveness that led us here.
Oh look, the Sore Loser Team finally got their plan together. I think when it was reported that they went on a search for their James Baker elder statesman to run the team and came up with ratfucking operative David Bossie we knew that something had gone wrong. This is even worse than I thought it was going to be:
President Trump plans to brandish obituaries of people who supposedly voted but are dead — plus hold campaign-style rallies — in an effort to prolong his fight against apparent insurmountable election results, four Trump advisers told me during a conference call this afternoon.
Obits for those who cast ballots are part of the “specific pieces of evidence” aimed at bolstering the Trump team’s so-far unsupported claims of widespread voter fraud and corruption that they say led to Joe Biden’s victory.
Fueling the effort is the expected completion of vote counting this week, allowing Republicans to file for more recounts.
Team Trump is ready to announce specific recount teams in key states, and it plans to hold a series of Trump rallies focused on the litigation.
Let’s unpack that. Trump is going to hold a bunch more superspreader rallies and brandish obituaries? In the middle of the pandemic? Is this some kind of joke?
I would ask what they think this will accomplish but the answer is obviously nothing. It’s to placate the man-baby who is having hismelf a good old-fashioned pout and needs to be bucked up because he didn’t get what he wanted.
Meanwhile, here’s the rest of the ridiculous plan. Do they really believe they can overturn the results in all these states? Because that’s what they have to do to win.
In Georgia: Doug Collins, the outgoing congressman who lost to Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a special election to fill former Sen. Johnny Isakson’s seat, will be leading the campaign’s recount efforts. The team has also redeployed 92 staffers from Florida to Georgia, doubling its group on the ground.
In Arizona: Kory Langhofer, former counsel for Trump’s 2016 transition, will serve as lead attorney.
In Pennsylvania: Porter Wright’s Ron Hicks is heading up the legal effort.
Nationwide: They’re assembling additional surrogates and lawyers.
“We want to make sure we have an adequate supply of manpower on the ground for man-to-man combat,” one adviser said.
The group is also staffing a campaign-style media operation.The team led by Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh is now a surrogate messaging center. It will pump out “regular press briefings, releases on legal action and obviously things like talking points and booking people strategically on television,” one adviser said.
They’ll also make a big play to raise money for their legal defense fund.
Trump’s formal legal team includes 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien, lawyer Justin Clark, and senior advisers Jason Miller and David Bossie.
Reps. Jim Jordan and Scott Perry, as well as former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, are also advising.
Trump’s team claims there is “no daylight” between them and the White House — chiefly senior adviser Jared Kushner and current Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
“We all have the same goal in mind, which is using the legal process over the next many days and weeks ahead to make sure that the president is re-elected,” one adviser said.
It’s hard to believe they’re going to actually attempt this but I guess they are. It’s just pathetic. Donald Trump can’t accept that he lost so they’re going to put the country through a bunch of bullshit, spend a ton of money that doesn’t have to be spent all because he’s such a narcissistic imbecile that he can’t accept that he lost.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, was standing in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in far northeast Philadelphia, as close to a Trump enclave as a decidedly Democratic city gets, highlighting alleged examples of voter fraud when the networks called the presidential race for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The surroundings were humble for such a seminal moment — a podium set up in front of a closed garage door decorated with a campaign poster — especially after a presidential tweet in the morning had advertised something that sounded a lot more upscale.
“Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 a.m.,” President Trump tweeted Saturday morning, before issuing a corrective and explaining that he did not mean the luxury downtown hotel near the city’s convention center and was referring instead to a business called Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
The correction quickly met with derision and glee among many blue-checkmark Twitter users, who assumed the campaign had accidentally booked the wrong venue. The landscaping business, after all, was situated near a porn shop, Fantasy Island Adult Bookstore, and a crematorium.
The apparent mishap went viral, with celebrities weighing in. “Four Seasons Total Landscaping is also my secret code name for a bikini wax,” the actress Emmy Rossum tweeted Saturday evening.
The actual hotel issued its own corrective. “To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia,” the corporate account tweeted. “It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping— no relation with the hotel.”
In reality, the mistake was not in the booking, but in a garbled game of telephone. Mr. Giuliani and the Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski told the president on Saturday morning their intended location for the news conference and he misunderstood, assuming it was an upscale hotel, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
But the campaign had always intended to hold the news conference in a friendlier part of town. The president’s team had struggled with news conferences in this Democratic stronghold all week. Since Wednesday, the streets outside of the Convention Center have been filled with pro-Biden protesters chanting, “Count every vote!” On multiple occasions, the Trump campaign surrogates were drowned out and surrounded by the much larger pro-Biden crowd.
Earlier this week, Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, and Mr. Lewandowski attempted to hold a celebratory news conference after obtaining a favorable court order in Pennsylvania. But a local D.J. blasting Beyoncé completely overpowered Ms. Bondi, who was forced to simply hold up the order as most of the media gathered nearby could not hear her speaking.
Dan Scavino, the keeper of the presidential Twitter feed and a deputy White House chief of staff for communications, eventually tweeted out the corrective, people familiar with the event said, while White House officials overall were rolling their eyes and dismissing the entire embarrassing episode as another “Rudy special.”
The campaign declined to comment, as did the White House.
On Saturday evening, while Mr. Biden was addressing the country in his first remarks as president-elect, Mr. Lewandowski tweeted: “All great Americans in PA use Four Seasons Total Landscaping. They love this country and are American Patriots. Thank you!!”
Rudy, Corey … the Trump A-team. When you think about it, considering their talent, they actually overperformed,
This evening Trump gave one of the most pathetic, embarrassing speeches of his life and that’s saying something. It was yet another low point and I didn’t think he could go any lower:
A democratic emergency. The President is falsely challenging the results of an election he is very likely to lose and trying to overturn the outcome. https://t.co/M2ClTqvJjv
— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on 🟦☁️) (@BrendanNyhan) November 6, 2020
"The officials overseeing the counting in Pennsylvania and other key states are all part of a corrupt Democratic machine" — Trump smears elections officials pic.twitter.com/1Zc92xFcsK
He had a lot of conspiracy theories at his fingertips and anecdotes of individual cheating and skulduggery that nobody’s ever heard of. I wondered where he’d heard of all this.
Over the past several days, as the president’s re-election chances grow ostensibly dimmer, Fox News’ most vociferously pro-Trump stars have seemingly grown desperate, floating baseless “fraud” allegations or conspiracy theories, parroting outright lies from the internet’s fever swamps, or making wildly undemocratic suggestions for Team Trump to prevent a Biden presidency.
In fact, at least one Fox News star has suggested that Republicans should actively disregard the will of voters altogether. Mark Levin, a well-known conservative talk-radio host who hosts a weekend show for Fox, suggested in an all-caps Twitter screed that GOP-controlled state legislatures should disregard the vote tallies and appoint electors who will select Trump in the end. His suggestion to outright curtail the democratic process was boosted by Donald Trump Jr.
REMINDER TO THE REPUBLICAN STATE LEGISLATURES, YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY OVER THE CHOOSING OF ELECTORS, NOT ANY BOARD OF ELECTIONS, SECRETARY OF STATE, GOVERNOR, OR EVEN COURT. YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY — ARTICLE II OF THE FED CONSTITUTION. SO, GET READY TO DO YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) November 5, 2020
In the days since the election, Fox News has seemed internally torn on how to handle the outcome of the 2020 election. Many of the network’s opinion stars have criticized or questioned the network’s news-side projection that Biden will win Arizona, all but dooming Trump’s path to victory. The Arizona call put a damper on the Trump campaign’s election night party at the White House—which was attended by Fox News stars like Laura Ingraham—and The New York Times reported that White House adviser Jared Kushner even called network mogul Rupert Murdoch to push for a retraction.
Fox hosts have insisted without any evidence that there were widespread election “shenanigans,” fraud, and chicanery by both Democrats and the media working to tip the election in Biden’s favor.
Top election officials in key states have investigated and refuted many of the voter-fraud claims pushed by Trump supporters, but that hasn’t stopped Fox News stars from boosting the allegations.
Weekend host and Trump pal Jeanine Pirro tweeted on Thursday that the 2020 election has been a “massive fraud” on a national scale. She called for federal law-enforcement officials at the FBI and DOJ to intervene in some way. Her tweet was flagged by the social-media platform as being potentially “misleading about an election or other civic process.”
Complaints of #voterfraud on a national scale in a presidential election . Where is the @FBI Where is the #DOJ ?ADVERTISING
Other Fox News stars have given oxygen to a debunked viral claim—boosted by Trump on Twitter—that Biden was mysteriously gifted in one fell swoop with more than 100,000 votes by the state of Michigan in the middle of Tuesday night.
Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo, long one of the president’s most sycophantic allies on the network, promoted an article from far-right digital outlet The Federalist touting the baseless claim about the Michigan dump of votes, which was ultimately nothing more than a typo that was quickly fixed by both the state and electoral data site Decision Desk HQ.
Nevertheless, Bartiromo’s tweet—which was flagged by Twitter as being “misleading”—was quickly amplified by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who added: “if true, this is HIGHLY disturbing.”
Apparently not satisfied with peddling just one election-related conspiracy, Bartiromo continued unabated on Thursday morning, collecting her favorite baseless theories into one big round-up tweet, which included the bonkers conspiracy theory—dubbed “Sharpie Gate”—alleging Arizona election officials deliberately invalidated ballots for the president by giving pro-Trump voters felt-tipped pens. The state debunked the theory, confirming that felt-tipped marker ink can be read by their ballot-processing equipment.
-4am dump/Wisconsin 65,000 votes 100% for Biden -4am dump/Michigan 138,499 votes 100% 4Biden -AZ poll workers forcing voters to use sharpies thereby invalidated ballots -Trump leading in GA, NC, PA, WI, MI & they stop counting” before the vote fairy visits overnight…— Maria Bartiromo (@MariaBartiromo) November 5, 2020
Bartiromo’s fellow Trump-boosting Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who also serves as an informal presidential adviser, also pushed conspiracies about the Michigan ballots, sharing an article from disreputable right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit alleging widespread ballot stuffing in the state. The evidence: a cart seen inside a ballot-counting office that ultimately was just a local ABC affiliate photographer’s equipment in a hand-pulled wagon.
WATCH: Suitcases and Coolers Rolled Into Detroit Voting Center at 4 AM, Brought Into Secure Counting Area https://t.co/ikamH2C9mB— Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) November 5, 2020
And during a Wednesday morning appearance on Fox Business show Varney & Co., Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce worried that Democrats were acting like Soviet dictator Josef Stalin by including these “128,000 new votes in Michigan, 100 percent of which went to Joe Biden” (again, the conspiracy theory centered around what was ultimately a typo). She went on to add that this was akin to a “soft coup” as pro-Biden forces were “falsifying votes or doing shenanigans.”
Elsewhere on Fox, Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis peddled on primetime star Tucker Carlson’s show the Michigan vote dump falsehood—even though it had been thoroughly discredited well before her appearance. Nevertheless, Carlson credulously bought Ellis’ false claim, touting it as further proof of widespread election fraud being used to steal the election for Biden.
“One hundred percent of the ballots,” Carlson said in disbelief. “One hundred percent of anything ought to make you nervous because it’s probably a crock. And that does not seem believable to me.”
“Very suspicious,” Ellis responded.
“You think?!” Carlson exclaimed.
While many of Fox’s right-wing stars have pushed lies and conspiracies, some of the network’s “straight news” reporters and anchors have taken to actively shutting down their colleagues’ more bombastic suggestions.
On Wednesday, Fox News analyst Chris Stirewalt dismissed criticism of the network’s Arizona call, saying the Trump team was simply “trying to prevent a narrative” that the president might lose the election.
And during a Thursday segment, reporter Jonathan Hunt described the Trump team’s legal challenge press conference as “bizarre,” noting that there was no evidence presented for their claims of widespread voter fraud. “Perhaps they are holding that evidence so that a judge is the first person to see it but at the moment, it’s simply a grab bag of complaints trying to see what might stick to the wall,” he said.
Fox News reporter Jonathan Hunt isn’t buying the Trump campaign’s voter fraud Nevada lawsuit.
“Perhaps they are holding that evidence so that a judge is the first person to see it but at the moment, it’s simply a grab bag of complaints trying to see what might stick to the wall” pic.twitter.com/2QSbHfEiGx— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) November 5, 2020
And in another Thursday afternoon segment, veteran Fox News anchor Chris Wallace further shot down Team Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread voter and election fraud. “There is nothing that rises to the level that it could be enough fraud to switch votes when you’re talking about thousands and thousands of votes between the two candidates,” he noted.
Still, other hosts have been more subtle in their attempts to rage against a potential Biden victory. While not making any allegations of fraud, for example, The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld laid the groundwork to question overall electoral integrity based on a fundamental misreading of how elections work.
During a Wednesday segment of the late-afternoon chat show, Gutfeld made a bizarre analogy comparing how Biden was behind in the vote on Tuesday evening and then ahead by most accounts on Wednesday morning to a poorly cooked Thanksgiving turkey that someone had tampered with in the oven.
“You spend time preparing for the meal and you put it in the oven and you set it and forget it. Six hours, seven hours, that’s what it is,” he said. “I don’t expect somebody in the middle of the night to come in and open up and screw the turkey, which is what happened last night. They screwed the turkey. It’s all this stuff goes on—you wake up and something is going on. I thought that was really strange.”
When the show returned the next day, the hosts tried to clarify that they were not suggesting there was a voter-fraud conspiracy afoot, just that they were simply asking the media to prove that there was no conspiracy afoot.
“No one is specifically on this show at least accusing anybody of committing fraud. All we’re saying is, show us there isn’t fraud,” host Jesse Watters said, demanding more transparency from the election process in Philadelphia, where the state election board has been publicly live-streaming its vote-counting process.
Fox is the problem.
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