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Trump Brings Election Obsession to TV 07/16 06:21
In his second term, Trump has tried to use the levers of power to rewrite
well-settled history, something that he's expected to try again on Thursday
night with an address to the nation.
(AP) -- In the weeks after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, the
people that Trump appointed to run the Department of Justice, cybersecurity
agencies and intelligence departments all said the same thing -- the election
was fair, legitimate and free of major fraud or foreign interference.
In his second term, Trump has tried to use the levers of power to rewrite
that well-settled history, something that he's expected to try again on
Thursday night with an address to the nation.
He has already appointed loyalists who have echoed his false claims that the
2020 election was stolen and made clear he expects everyone to follow his lead.
In an indication of how fealty to Trump's lies has become a litmus test for
his administration, many of his nominees have steadfastly refused to directly
answer the question of who won in 2020, preferring to tersely note that Biden
became president. Jay Clayton, Trump's nominee to become the next national
intelligence director, was the latest to repeat that formula in his
confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
"He had the most electoral votes," Clayton said of Biden. "He was declared
the winner."
"And who has the most electoral votes? Is it the person who wins or the
person who loses?" asked Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat.
"That's your characterization," Clayton responded. "I'm not going to
continue to do this."
The president has embraced baroque conspiracy theories about an
international cabal that penetrated U.S. voting machines that have led to libel
suits against his allies when they've repeated the claims.
Ahead of his speech, Trump has teased "really big news" and said "it doesn't
get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country."
Election experts fear another round of falsehoods.
"There has been six-plus years of consistent findings from the intelligence
community and from everyone who's looked at it that there was no foreign
interference in 2020, and our voting systems were secure and accurate," said
Victoria Bassetti of States United, a nonpartisan group supporting the state
officials who run elections. "I suppose the president could come up with some
new assertion or new conclusion. It would fly in the face of all the evidence."
Huge range of reviews find same thing: No major fraud
There's been an enormous amount of reviews of the 2020 election. Trump and
his allies lost dozens of court cases challenging the results, sometimes before
judges the president appointed himself. Numerous audits, recounts and
investigations, including several by Republicans, found no major problems with
the vote or count.
Trump's own attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there were no
signs of significant fraud, a statement that earned him Trump's ire. Trump's
appointee to run the agency that watches for cyberattacks on American election
infrastructure, Chris Krebs, declared that the 2020 election was secure and
there were no signs of tampering -- which led Trump to fire Krebs and demand an
investigation of him upon returning to power in 2025.
An intelligence assessment released in the early days of the Biden
administration but completed on Jan. 7, 2021, in Trump's last days in office,
found no foreign tampering with vote totals or election equipment in 2020. And,
last year, Trump signed a federal document as part of a regular review of
possible foreign influence in elections that declared "there has been no
evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any
United States election."
'Untold taxpayer resources' re-investigating the election
Since returning to office, Trump has launched a review of the 2020 vote.
Federal agents have seized voting records in Democratic-run Fulton County,
Georgia, and Republican-run Maricopa County, Arizona -- two major metropolitan
swing state counties that figured prominently in 2020 conspiracy theories.
Trump tapped Kurt Olsen, a prominent lawyer in the world of election
conspiracy theorists, to head the probe. Olsen was previously sanctioned by the
Arizona Supreme Court for false statements in a lawsuit he brought to challenge
the 2022 loss of an Arizona governor's race by one of Trump's allies.
"He has committed untold taxpayer resources," said David Becker, a former
Department of Justice lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Integrity &
Research. "They've found nothing."
A search warrant affidavit filed in the Fulton County case was full of old,
debunked conspiracy theories about the vote in the county. The FBI reassigned
hundreds of analysts to go through the material.
Conspiracy theories have led to libel cases
Still, election conspiracy theorists have been buzzing -- as they have ever
since Election Day in 2020 -- that Trump is about to reveal irrefutable
evidence of massive election fraud.
One version alleges that Venezuela and possibly other countries manipulated
U.S. voting machines to deprive Trump of a victory. Venezuela's former
president, Nicolas Maduro, is currently awaiting trial in Manhattan on federal
charges of drug trafficking after the U.S. military took him from that
country's capital.
Those theories have led to massive payouts in libel lawsuits brought by
voting machine companies and others. Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle one
lawsuit over it airing those claims and others on the air in late 2020.
Conservative networks Newsmax andOne America News have also reached settlements
with voting companies over airing those allegations.
A Denver jury found that Mike Lindell, a prominent election conspiracy
theorist who Trump this week endorsed as a Republican candidate for governor in
Minnesota, defamed an employee with a voting machine company by calling him a
traitor.
Becker noted there has been a clear pattern over the six years of election
conspiracy theories surrounding Trump's loss. Conspiracy theorists, including
Trump himself, make sweeping allegations in public, sometimes with what seems
to be massive reams of documentation from elaborate election databases. But
they've lost regularly in court, where the threshold is whether there's any
factual basis to the claims.
He suggested that anything new from Trump on elections be subjected to that
same scrutiny.
"If someone's alleging a crime that occurred six years ago, we shouldn't be
responding to their claims," Becker said. "We should be demanding they meet the
burden of proof."
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