Debunking Trump’s Big Lie: Part 5
25 Reasons to Believe Trump Lost the 2020 Election
Introduction
I will prove three things today.
Trump lost the 2020 election.
Trump knew that he lost the 2020 election.
Trump and his associates were planning to declare victory even before the 2020 election was called, whether Trump had legitimately won or not.
This post will be a long one—possibly longer than you have time for, especially if you watch all the videos and read all the sources that I link to. Therefore, I will give you the Reader’s Digest version by pointing you to three of the most important pieces of evidence and asking you to keep one thing in mind as you read this article.
Donald Trump has a long history of crying rigged election. This suggests that he would never concede that he lost an election—any election, and that it was inevitable that he would accuse Joe Biden of stealing the election from him if he (Biden) won. I will cover this in first point.
Trump’s associates were planning to help him steal the election, even before the election was called. I covered this in points 4 – 6.
Ann Coulter supported Trump in her 2016 book, “In Trump We Trust.” Now she not only says that Trump lost the election, she explains why he lost it. This is covered in point 25.
I ask you to keep one thing in mind, especially when reading through points 4 – 6: The possibility that the 2020 election could produce a red mirage(also known as a "blue shift") was well known by September 2020. Analysts knew that Democrats would vote more heavily using mail-in ballots and Republicans would vote more heavily at the polls on election day. They also knew that some key states would count the election-day votes before they counted the mail-in votes. This would give the temporary illusion early on that Trump was doing better than he actually was since the votes counted early would be more heavily weighted towards him than average, and the votes counted later would be more heavily weighted towards Biden. And Team Trump used this illusion to claim victory early before all the votes were counted to try to steal the election for Trump.
The Evidence
Donald Trump has a long history of crying “election fraud” or “rigged election.” In 2012 Trump tweeted that Barak Obama was stealing the election from Mitt Romney. Roger Stone built a Stopthesteal.org website for the Trump campaign in March 2016. He used that website to accuse the Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction of the Republican Party of trying to steal the Republican Primary from Trump. In April 2016, Stone, acting as Trump’s proxy, told Breitbart News that Ted Cruz should be put in handcuffs for election fraud. After Trump won the primary, he predicted that Hillary Clinton would steal the presidency from him. And between May 2020 and November 2020, Trump said at least a half dozen times that Joe Biden was rigging the election against him. In fact, on August 17, 2020, Trump said, “the only way we’re going to lose the election is if the election is rigged.” Joe Biden was leading Trump in national polls by 7.7 points according to the RealClearPolitics polling average when he said this. This just proves that Trump was going to cry “election fraud”, no matter who he was running against and no matter how much he was being beaten by. He was grooming the public before the election so they would accept his claim after the election that the election was rigged. (See Trump’s History of Crying “Rigged Election” for more details.)
Most people thought that Biden would win the election. The Real Clear Politics average of polls had Biden ahead by 7.2 points on election day. Multiple betting markets predicted immediately before the election that Biden would be the winner. It would have been considered an upset if Trump had won.
J.D. Vance sent a private message through Twitter in February 2020 predicting that Biden would win. Of course, a prediction that far ahead of the election means nothing, but his message also explained WHY Trump would lose. The Washington Post reports, that Vance wrote, “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”
Trump ally, Tom, Fitton, sent Trump a draft statement for Trump’s victory speech on October 31, 2020, several days before the election. The memo contained a plan in which Trump would declare that only the votes counted by the end of the election day would matter. Of course, everyone knew that ballots would probably have to be counted well past election day, and that the ballots counted later were likely to favor Biden. And Trump did exactly what Fitton urged him to do. Trump falsely claimed victory at 2 am on November 4—just two hours after the end of election day and three days before the counting was finished. This, combined with evidence in the next two points, proves that even before the election, Trump intended to claim victory, whether he had legitimately won or not.
October 31, 2020 was a busy day for Team Trump. On the same day that Tom Fitton was drafting a plan for Trump to jump the gun to steal the election from Biden, Steve Bannon was laying out that same plan to a group of hard-right wing Chinese associates of billionaire Guo Wengui. Mother Jones published a leaked audio from that meeting that is the smoking bazooka that proves Team Trump suspected it would lose and was scheming to ensure Trump would remain in power, whether he won or lost. Why would Team Trump develop such a plan unless it thought Trump was likely to lose? The audio that Mother Jones leaked contained only snippets of Bannon’s meeting with Guo Wengui’s followers. If you want to read a transcript of the entire meeting, you can do so here.
Dan Friedman described the audio in Mother Jones:
On the evening of October 31, 2020, Steve Bannon told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night—even if he was losing. Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. His “strategy” was to use this fact to assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in vote totals toward Joe Biden must be the result of fraud, Bannon explained.
“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon, laughing, told the group, according to audio of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
“As it sits here today,” Bannon said later in the conversation, describing a scenario in which Trump held an early lead in key swing states, “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’” . . .
Speaking to this group of mostly Chinese immigrants, Bannon explained US electoral processes—and Trump’s plans to exploit them—in some detail. He emphasized that in 2020, Republicans were more likely to vote in person, casting ballots that, in many states, would be counted first. Democrats disproportionately voted by mail. Their ballots would take days to tally in a number of states. That meant that when it came to public perceptions about who was winning, Democrats would “have a natural disadvantage,” Bannon said. “And Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.”
“So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm,” Bannon continued. “You’re going to have antifa, crazy. The media, crazy. The courts are crazy. And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting shit out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’” . . .
“If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say, ‘They stole it. I’m directing the attorney general to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states,’” Bannon said. “He’s not going out easy. If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit.”
The January 6th Committee released video footage that showed that close Trump ally, Roger Stone, also knew of the plan to declare victory before the election results were known. The video, made two days BEFORE the November 3rd election, shows Stone saying, “
Let’s just hope we’re celebrating. I suspect it will be, I really do expect it will still be up in the air. But when that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. ‘No, we won. Fuck you. Sorry. Over. We won. You’re wrong. Fuck you.’
And the day before the election, Stone was caught saying, “I said fuck the voting. Let’s get right to the violence.”
(See 32:28 - 40:17 of the October 13, 2022 January 6 Committee hearing for the original video which three of the above clips were taken from.)
On November 5--two days before the vote counting was completed and before Biden was declared the winner--Donald Trump Jr. was already scheming for his father to steal the election if he lost. CNN reported that Junior texted Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows: “We have multiple paths We control them all.” CNN continued:
The November 5 text message outlines a strategy that is nearly identical to what allies of the former President attempted to carry out in the months that followed. Trump Jr. makes specific reference to filing lawsuits and advocating recounts to prevent certain swing states from certifying their results, as well as having a handful of Republican state houses put forward slates of fake “Trump electors.”
If all that failed, according to the Trump Jr. text, GOP lawmakers in Congress could simply vote to reinstall Trump as President on January 6.
Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s premier Constitutional scholars, called this evidence “a smoking rifle”. It is damning that these texts were sent before the Trump camp could have possibly had evidence that there was enough fraud to tilt a close race to Biden.
And here we have a video of Roger Stone dictating the foundation of the Fake Elector plot on November 5, 2020--again, two days BEFORE the election was called for Biden. Looks like Team Trump didn’t even have the decency to wait to see if they had lost the election before they started to plot how to steal the election from Biden.
The January 6th Committee released text messages written by Republican Senator Mike Lee and Republican Representative Chip Roy to Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, that reveal that as of November 7, Team Trump had bupkis for evidence that the election was stolen. Chip Roy wrote to Meadows that day saying, “We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend.”
It is clear from reading the texts that Lee and Roy wanted to help Trump retain power early on, but they soured on the idea as time went on. The evidence that Biden had stolen the election just wasn’t there. And the states refused to send phony electors for Trump, thus preventing them from helping Trump retain power through backdoor “legal” maneuvering. (See Amanda Carpenter’s excellent essay for more on Lee’s role in attempting to overturn the election.) In the end, both Lee and Roy voted to certify Biden’s win, despite their desire to see Trump reinstated. And on January 1, Chip Roy sent Mark Meadows a message that should be emblazoned on the web site of every Democratic candidate running against a Trump supporter:
“We’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.”
Donald Trump was told some variation of “You lost” or “Your claims of fraud are not supported by the evidence” by at least four, and probably six or more, White House and campaign officials. Several other high level White House and campaign officials also came to the same conclusion, but we do not know if they told Trump that he had lost. Click on the links to watch their testimony in the original January 6, Committee hearing, or watch the snippets below.
Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen told Trump that incidents he thought were fraud turned out not to be fraudulent at all. (1:10:06 - 1:10:56) (Rosen talked directly to Trump)
b. Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue (1:14:54 - 1:18:04) told Trump that the major allegations of election fraud were not supported by the evidence. (Donoghue talked directly to Trump)
c. Former Counselor to the President Derek Lyons said he was in a meeting where White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann told Trump that a number of allegations had not been substantiated enough to be the basis of litigation to challenge the election. (1:10:57 - 1:11:32) (Cippolone and Herschmann talked directly to Trump according to Lyons)
d. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told Trump on November 7 that he thought the odds of victory were “very, very, very bleak” He thought that the odds of a Trump victory were only five to ten percent. (41:03 - 43:03) (Stepien talked directly to the President)
e. Matt Morgan, the General Counsel of the Trump campaign, talked about a January 2, 2021 meeting among Mike Pence’s staff in which he, Marc Short (Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff), and Greg Jacob (Mike Pence’s Chief Counsel) agreed that there were not enough election irregularities to change the outcome of the election. (10:00 - 11:08). (I do not know if they told Trump this directly. We can only presume that he heard about their conclusion.)
f. Trump’s former Attorney General, Bill Barr, told him that his claim of a stolen election was “Bullshit.” (53:17 - 53:35) (Watch also 54:28 - 1:10:01 for an in-depth look of Barr’s interactions with President Trump, particularly on November 23, December 1, and December 14 where Barr tried to convince Trump that there was not evidence of enough fraud to change the election.) (Barr told Trump this directly.)
g. In addition, Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon told Peter Navarro and Mike Pence (1:11:33 - 1:14:36) as well as Mark Meadows (34:35 - 35:42) that he wasn’t able to find significant problems with the election. Cannon said that Meadows responded to that news by saying, “So there’s no there there?” (We can only presume that either Navarro, Pence, or Meadows told Trump what Cannon had told them.)
The Trump campaign hired an outside research organization called the Berkeley Research Group to find fraud in the 2020 election. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, they could not find evidence for enough fraud to change the result of the election in any of the six swing states they had examined. They held a conference call to report their results to Donald Trump and Mark Meadows in December, but Trump and Meadows and the rest of the campaign kept the results to themselves. (Of course they did. It would be hard to block the peaceful transfer of power if the public was not kept in the dark.) The Washington Post reports (emphasis added):
Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court. . . .
“They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted,” said a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings. “Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.”
The findings were not what the Trump campaign had been hoping for, according to the four people. While the researchers believed there were voting anomalies and unusual data patterns in a few states, along with some instances in which laws may have been skirted, they did not believe the anomalies were significant enough to make a difference in who won the election.
The research also contradicted some of Trump’s more conspiratorial theories, such as his baseless allegations about rigged voting machines and large numbers of dead people voting.
A person familiar with the findings said there were at least a dozen hypotheses that Trump’s team wanted tested.
“None of these were significant enough,” this person said. “Just like any election, there are always errors, omissions and irregularities. It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove, and it actually went in both directions.”
Senior officials from Berkeley Research Group briefed Trump, then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on the findings in a December 2020 conference call, people familiar with the matter said. Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and continued to maintain that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. The call grew contentious, people with knowledge of the meeting said. (Emphasis added)
The Trump campaign paid $750,000 to a second firm to find evidence of significant election fraud, and they too came up with bupkis. The Washington Post reports.
Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he said. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Block did not inform Trump directly of his findings, but he told to the campaign that he found nothing significant. Here are some excerpts from an Op-ed that Block wrote explaining what he found.
The day after the election, I was asked to look for dead and duplicate voters for every mail ballot cast in each of the swing states in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
I found fewer than 200 duplicate mail-in ballot votes fraudulently cast from all of the swing states combined.
The Trump campaign chose not to do anything with these fraudulent votes to avoid calling attention to the small amount of provable fraud my team and I had uncovered, including about a dozen so votes in Arizona.
What are these straightforward explanations as to why Trump lost? . . .
In most of Arizona’s counties, Trump’s share of the vote declined in 2020 relative to 2016. That includes what I define as red counties because Trump won there in 2016 and 2020.
A majority of Arizona’s 10 red counties saw a drop in Trump’s vote share in 2020. Exceptions were Yuma County and the state’s smallest red counties — Gila, Graham and Greenlee — where Trump cleaned up in 2020.
Trump’s underperformance meant that he lost more than 8,500 votes in 2020 in Arizona’s red counties alone — a fact that argues strongly against the voter fraud narrative. . . .
Those 8,500 votes that Trump lost are easily explained. He told moderate Republicans to take a hike, and those lost votes confirm that these voters did as they were told. . . .
Additionally, researchers have identified more votes than the margin of loss for both [Kari] Lake and Trump, where voters chose down-ticket Republicans but left the presidential or gubernatorial race blank or voted for the Democrat.
How is it possible that Kimberly Yee, a moderate Republican, won 100,000 more votes in her race for treasurer than Kari Lake did for governor in 2022? Of critical concern to hard-core conservatives, Trump did 5% less well in Maricopa County in 2020 than he did in 2016, while Yee won Maricopa County by 11% in 2022. . . .
Why don’t more people know the truth?
Conservatives mainly get their news from conservative media. Coverage of my story about working for the Trump campaign and the subpoenas I have received garnered mention in just one conservative outlet for an entire year.
Facts are only helpful if people are made aware of them.
Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba admitted that everybody was made aware that Trump had lost the election. Here is my interpretation of what Habba is saying in the following clip: They all knew Trump had lost, and many of his advisors had advised him to concede the election, but Trump chose to follow those who urged him to fight against a peaceful transfer of power by means discussed in detail in Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump. Presumably, the advisors that Habba referred to who encouraged Trump to fight against the peaceful transfer of power were the six unindicted co-conspirators described in the indictment.
Chris Krebs was appointed by Donald Trump to lead the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) in February 2018. The NPPD was transformed into the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency with Krebs as its leader. Krebs became the target of Trump’s fury when he said the 2020 election was the most secure election in U.S. history. Watch the following 60 Minutes interview with Krebs. (See also the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council’s November 12, 2020 statement.)
CISA Director, Kris Krebs was not the only high-level election security or intelligence official to call bullshit on Trump’s claim of voting machines switching votes. Politico reports:
Special counsel Jack Smith on Saturday sharply rejected former President Donald Trump’s contention that foreign governments may have changed votes in the 2020 election, laying bare new details about his team’s extensive probe of the matter and its access to a vast array of senior intelligence officials in Trump’s administration.
In a 45-page filing, Smith’s team describes interviewing more than a dozen of the top intelligence officials in Trump’s administration — from his director of national intelligence to the administrator of the NSA to Trump’s personal intelligence briefer — about any evidence that foreign governments had penetrated systems that counted votes in 2020.
“The answer from every single official was no,” senior assistant special counsel Thomas Windom writes in the filing. . . .
To rebut these claims, Windom indicates that prosecutors asked Trump’s “former DNI, former acting secretary of DHS, former acting deputy secretary of DHS, former CISA director, former acting CISA director, former CISA senior cyber counsel, former national security adviser, former deputy NSA, former chief of staff to the National Security Council, former chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, presidential intelligence briefer, former secretary of Defense and former DOJ leadership” for any evidence of that foreign or domestic actors flipped a single vote from a voting machine in 2020.
They offered none, he says.
Windom also contended that Trump’s repeated effort to describe partisan bias in intelligence about the election belied that those making the assessments were his own appointees, buttressed by conclusions at a slew of intel agencies. Windom also specified that one noted instance of bias was allegedly committed in Trump’s favor by his own acting DNI.
Trump himself declared the election “virtually impenetrable” to foreign interference just days after the vote, before shifting his rhetoric, Windom notes. This view was shared by “every other knowledgeable official” in his administration, prosecutors say.
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s assistant, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified before the January 6th Committee that Meadows had told her that Trump really thought he lost, but wanted to keep fighting to overturn the election. Trump’s Communications Director, Alyssa Farah (Griffin) testified that Trump acknowledged in private that he had lost to Biden. And Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley said he was in a meeting where either Trump or Mike Pompeo acknowledged that Trump had lost. See 46:32 - 47:38 of the October 13, 2022 January 6th Committee hearing, or watch the following clip.
Evidently, Jack Smith was able to determine that it was Trump, and not Mike Pompeo, who acknowledged that Trump had lost. This is from paragraph 83 (pages 30 - 31) of Trump’s January 6 indictment.
On the evening of January 3, the Defendant met for a briefing on an overseas national security issue with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior national security advisors. The Chairman briefed the Defendant on the issue-which had previously arisen in December-as well as possible ways the Defendant could handle it. When the Chairman and another advisor recommended that the Defendant take no action because Inauguration Day was only seventeen days away and any course of action could trigger something unhelpful, the Defendant calmly agreed, stating, “Yeah, you’re right, it’s too late for us. We’re going to give that to the next guy.”
Cassidy Hutchinson also testified that Mark Meadows said that Donald Trump didn’t think the January 6 rioters were doing anything wrong when they were chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” Meadows said Trump thought Pence deserved it for not preventing Biden from becoming President. This tracks with what Trump told ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl and shows how desperate he was to remain President. Watch 1:27:41-1:33:14 of the June 28, 2022 January 6 Committee hearing, or watch the following clip.
Texas’s Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick offered a reward of $25,000 to $1 million to anyone who could prove voter fraud in the 2020 election. If nearly 3 million people really had voted fraudulently for Hillary Clinton as Donald Trump claimed without evidence in 2016, and if a similar number had voted fraudulently in 2020, then you’d expect thousands of people to step forward to claim the reward. Pennsylvania poll worker Eric Frank collected a reward for $25,000 after turning in a Republican who voted twice for Trump in Pennsylvania. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s Lieutenant Governor at the time, reported that he had found FIVE cases of voter fraud in Pennsylvania, but Patrick refused to pay Fetterman any reward money. As far as I can tell, no one other than Frank and Fetterman have come forth to claim Patrick’s reward.
Team Trump and its supporters filed 62 lawsuits in court contesting the 2020 election. They lost all but one minor lawsuit, and the lawsuit that they won did not affect the outcome of the election. Watch the testimony of Benjamin Ginsberg, one of the country’s most prominent election lawyers, and Representative Zoe Lofgren’s commentary on his testimony from 1:48:29 – 1:56:55 of the June 13 hearing of the January 6 Committee. Ginsberg notes that though about half of the 62 cases “were dismissed at the procedural stage for a lack of standing, the proper people didn’t bring the case, or THERE WASN’T SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE AND IT GOT DISMISSED ON A MOTION TO DISMISS, but in the other [half], there were discussion of the merits that was contained in the complaints, and in no instance did a court find that the charges of fraud were real.” [Emphasis added.] Or you can watch the following clip from that hearing. Please note: Ginsberg is a REPUBLICAN whose litigation helped George W. Bush win a VERY close election against Al Gore in 2000)
Lofgren presented the following graphic that summarized these cases.
White House lawyer John Eastman wrote a plan for Mike Pence to overturn the election by thwarting the counting of the electoral votes. The January 6th Committee subpoenaed a third party to obtain Eastman’s emails, but Eastman contested the subpoena in court by claiming attorney-client and work product privileges. Judge David O. Carter had determined in a previous proceeding that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021“ and that Trump and Eastman had more likely than not entered into a conspiracy to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process. Judge Carter now used his previous ruling to determine that eight of Eastman’s emails should be turned over to the Committee because they fell within the crime-fraud exception. He based his ruling on four of these emails on the fact that Trump had submitted claims to a court under oath that he knew were false. (See pages 16 - 17 of his order)
On December 4, 2020, President Trump and his attorneys alleged in a Georgia state court action that Fulton County improperly counted a number of votes including 10,315 deceased people, 2,560 felons, and 2,423 unregistered voters. President Trump and his attorneys then decided to contest the state court proceeding in federal court, and discussed incorporating by reference the voter fraud numbers alleged in the state petition. On December 30, 2020, Dr. Eastman relayed “concerns” from President Trump’s team “about including specific numbers in the paragraph dealing with felons, deceased, moved, etc.” The attorneys continued to discuss the President’s resistance to signing “when specific numbers were included.” As Dr. Eastman explained the next day:
Although the President signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate. For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.
President Trump and his attorneys ultimately filed the complaint with the same inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them. President Trump, moreover, signed a verification swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers “are true and correct” or “believed to be true and correct” to the best of his knowledge and belief.
The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public. The Court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Accordingly, the Court ORDERS Dr. Eastman to disclose these four communications to the Select Committee.
You can read some of the emails that Judge Carter ordered released to the January 6th Committee at Politico.
Eastman fell into hot water for his efforts to destroy our democracy. He justified his actions based on his belief that election fraud cost Trump the election. And what is the quality of the evidence he used to form that belief? Well, he cited an affidavit by a truck driver named Jesse Morgan who claimed he had driven thousands of mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania in October 2020. Unfortunately for Eastman, he had to admit during his disbarment hearing that he didn’t know that Morgan had a side gig as a ghost hunter. And evidently he didn’t know that court records showed that Morgan had “a lengthy history of drug abuse, mental health issues and allegations of domestic violence” because he had not done a background check on Morgan’s credibility before accepting his “evidence” of election fraud.
I am not going to claim that all of Eastman’s evidence and all of his witnesses were as weak as this, but it is clear that he was willing to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. When you are this sloppy in your vetting, then there is reason to believe you are more interested in pushing an agenda than you are at getting to the truth.
Moreover, Eastman knew damn well that his plan to empower Vice President Pence to reject the legitimate electors and throw the election to Trump was illegal and would not stand up in Court. Congressman Louis Gohmert wanted to use Eastman’s plan as the basis for a lawsuit to overturn the election. Eastman persuaded Gohmert NOT to base a lawsuit on his plan because he was afraid the court would rule his plan was illegal. Chris Hayes laid it out for us in the following video.
And if you watch 4:27 - 10:00 of the following video, you can see Mike Pence’s General Counsel, Greg Jacob, explain how he got Eastman to admit that his plan would lose 9-0 if brought before the Supreme Court.
The California State Bar has recommended that Eastman be disbarred. Eastman appealed their recommendation and the State Bar Court’s Review Department determined that “Eastman was culpable of 10 out of 11 charges, for his egregious and deceitful conduct.” Eastman was finally disbarred from practicing law in California on April 15, 2026, though he has pledged to take his case before the Supreme Court.
Fox Corporation and Fox News allowed Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and others to use their platforms to spread lies about Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Machines. They claimed their machines used software specially designed to help steal elections and that the Democrats used their machines to either throw out votes for Trump or switch Trump votes to Biden. Smartmatic and Dominion’s businesses were harmed and their employees became the target of death threats as a result of these claims. Both companies filed defamation lawsuits against Fox, Giuliani, Powell, and others. Dominion settled its lawsuit with Fox out of court for $787.5 million, but not before we learned that Fox executives and news hosts thought that Powell’s and Giuliani’s claims about voting machines were garbage. Dominion Voting Systems gave Fox the computer code used by their machines, and Fox’s experts couldn’t find any code that would enable switching votes from one candidate to another. Read part 4 of this series for more details about Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News.
Jenna Ellis was the third and most junior lawyer at the infamous November 19, 2020 Kraken press conference that spread lie after lie about the 2020 election. On March 8, 2023, Ellis agreed to be censured by Colorado's Supreme Court for making the following false statements about the election. In other words, one of Trump's lawyers admitted the following claims by Team Trump were false. Ellis is the person referred to as "Respondent" in the following admission of falsehoods.
• On November 20, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated: “We have affidavits from witnesses, we have voter intimidation, we have the ballots that were manipulated, we have all kinds of statistics that show that this was a coordinated effort in all of these states to transfer votes either from Trump to Biden, to manipulate the ballots, to count them in secret ․”
• On November 20, 2020, Respondent appeared on Spicer & Co. and stated, “with all those states [Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia] combined we know that the election was stolen from President Trump and we can prove that.”
• On November 21, 2020, Respondent stated on Twitter under her handle @JennaEllisEsq., “ ․ SECOND, we will present testimonial and other evidence IN COURT to show how this election was STOLEN!”
• On November 23, 2020, Respondent appeared on The Ari Melber Show on MSNBC and stated, “The election was stolen and Trump won by a landslide.”
• On November 30, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated, “President Trump is right that there was widespread fraud in this election, we have at least six states that were corrupted, if not more, through their voting systems․ We know that President Trump won in a landslide.” She also stated, “The outcome of this election is actually fraudulent it’s wrong, and we understand than [sic] when we subtract all the illegal ballots, you can see that President Trump actually won in a landslide.”
• On December 3, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated, “The outcome of this election is actually fraudulent it’s wrong, and we understand than when we subtract all the illegal ballots, you can see that President Trump actually won in a landslide.”
• On December 5, 2020, Respondent appeared on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News and stated, “We have over 500,000 votes [in Arizona] that were cast illegally ․”
• On December 15, 2020, Respondent appeared on Greg Kelly Reports on Newsmax and stated, “The proper and true victor, which is Donald Trump ․”
• On December 22, 2020, Respondent stated on Twitter, through her handle @JennaEllisEsq, “I spent an hour with @DanCaplis for an in-depth discussion about President @realDonaldTrump’s fight for election integrity, the overwhelming evidence proving this was stolen, and why fact-finding and truth—not politics—matters!”
On October 24, 2023, Ellis pled guilty to the felony of helping Rudy Giuliani and Ray Stallings Smith III make the following false statements before Georgia's state legislature about the 2020 election. (See also pages 12 - 14 of the People v. Ellis PDF)
1. That at least 96,600 mail-in ballots were counted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia, despite there being no record of those ballots having been returned to a county elections office;
2. That 2,506 felons voted illegally in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
3. That 66,248 underage people illegally registered to vote before their seventeenth birthday prior to the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
4. That at least 2,423 people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia who were not listed as registered to vote;
5. That 1,043 people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia who had illegally registered to vote using a post office box;
6. That 10,315 or more dead people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
7. That Fulton County election workers at State Farm Arena ordered poll watchers and members of the media to leave the tabulation area on the night of November 3, 2020, and continued to operate after ordering everyone to leave.
Ellis expressed remorse before the court, stating, "If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges." You can watch her plead guilty in this next video.
An all-star team of conservative lawyers and election experts published a 72-page report entitled “Lost, Not Stolen”. This report debunked most, if not all, the widely circulating lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that were spread by Donald Trump and his supporters. The report is long, but the introduction summarized its key finding in two sentences on page 1.
. . . there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct.”
No doubt Trump supporters will want to dismiss the report by claiming it was written by a bunch of liberals who were out to get Trump. That is not what the libertarian Cato Institute says about its authors.
The new report’s signers include three prominent retired federal judges (Thomas Griffith, Mike McConnell, Michael Luttig), former Solicitor General Ted Olson, Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, former senators John Danforth and Gordon Smith, and longtime Congressional staff chief David Hoppe. I should mention that I have known three of these figures at various times over decades (McConnell, Ted Olson, Hoppe) and admired each for their insight, analytical skills, and dedication to principle.
Trump’s supporters are constantly screaming that all the irregularities that occurred in Fulton County, Georgia PROVE that Trump really won the Georgia election. They are not impressed by the fact that Georgia’s chief election official, Brad Raffensperger, is a Republican who voted for Trump. It means nothing to them that Raffensperger refused to waver despite Trump making a veiled threat that he could be sent to prison if he did not find 11,780 more votes for Trump. They ignore the fact that Raffensperger bravely stood his ground in defiance of death threats that he and his wife received from angry Trump supporters. They say that none of this really matters because the anomalies in Fulton County are too great to ignore. I don’t believe that they have a good case, and I will back my belief with this 52 page report by the States United Democracy Center debunking many, if not all of their claims. But fine. Let’s be generous to them and assume that Trump really had won the Georgia election. I don’t really believe this, but let’s give them this for argument’s sake. Even if we assume that Trump had won in Georgia, he still would have lost the election. Biden beat Trump in the Electoral College by 306 to 232 votes. Here are the number of electoral college votes in each of the six swing states that Biden won.
Arizona: 11
Georgia: 16
Michigan: 16
Nevada: 6
Pennsylvania: 20
Wisconsin: 10
If Trump had won Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes, then Biden would still have beaten him by 290 to 248. Actually, Trump could have won Georgia and any one of the other swing states, and Biden still would have won. Here is the combination of swing states that Trump could have won, but would have still lost to Biden in the Electoral College
Dinesh D’Souza directed a movie named 2000 Mules that claimed thousands of people (known as mules) committed massive election fraud by illegally depositing ballots that had been gathered by leftist non-government organizations into multiple ballot boxes. The producers of the movie announced that over one million people had watched it within two weeks of its release, making it “the most successful political documentary in a decade.” And indeed, election deniers frequently pointed to the movie as “proof” that Trump had won the election. But to their dismay, this video has been debunked more thoroughly than the flat Earth theory.
Ann Coulter, a far-right commentator who backed Trump in 2016, is one of those debunkers. She backed Trump so hard that she even wrote a book about him called, “In Trump We Trust.” She not only recognized that Trump lost the 2020 election, she provided an explanation of why he lost in her column that demolished D’Souza’s movie.
The second problem -- my problem with the movie -- is the idea that Trump’s 2020 loss cries out for an explanation. We know for a fact that Trump was sailing to a landslide victory on the love of a grateful nation. Only something nefarious could explain his defeat.
Hello? Trump spent four years sitting in bed, tweeting, eating cheeseburgers, and letting Mitch McConnell and Jared Kushner run the country. He lost only one demographic in 2020 compared to 2016. What was that demographic? ...
Answer: WHITE MEN.
In the five states where D’Souza deploys his hocus-pocus cellphone data -- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- Trump lost 8% of white voters, and 12% of white men, compared to 2016.
How’d liberal vote-harvesters pull that off ?
That’s according to Trump’s own pollster, the highly respected Tony Fabrizio (as well as everyone else who’s looked at the 2020 election data). It was also predicted by anyone who supported Trump in 2016 -- no, make that 2015 — and then watched him piss away his presidency for four years by betraying his base.
She goes on for quite a few more paragraphs describing how Trump had broken his promises to his base before discussing his most grievous sin (from her far-right perspective).
Most stunningly, Trump blew off the signature promise of his campaign: the wall. While he was busy sucking up to Wall Street, Kim Kardashian, RINOs, Silicon Valley, the gun-grabbers and illegal aliens, not one mile of wall got built.
He finally got around to the wall his last year in office. Total new wall across a 2,000 mile border completed during the entire Trump presidency: 47 miles.
Yeah, it’s a total baffler how a president who spent four years ignoring his base could have lost.
Coulter’s claim that Trump ignored his base seems a bit excessive. But she is right that he did not deliver on his key promise. And at least A FEW of his base must have figured out that his claim to have a plan to get MEXICO to pay for the wall was absolute bullshit. At least A FEW of them must have been smart enough to realize that he had played them for being suckers. And maybe the smartest of them sat up and noticed that he had pardoned his buddy, Steve Bannon, for ripping off donors like them who funded the scammy We Build the Wall organization to the tune of $1 million. (Bannon later pled guilty to a similar state felony in New York State court.) This would explain why his performance among his base was weaker in 2020 than it was in 2016.
And if you haven’t already watched the video in point 10f, make sure you watch Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr laughing at 2000 Mules at 12:30 - 12:49 in this video.
(OK, I lied when I entitled this post “25 Reasons to Believe Trump Lost the 2020 Election.” But 25 reasons sounds cooler than 26.) Senator Lindsey Graham is one of Trump’s closest allies in Congress. Yet even he thought that Trump lost the election. The New York Times reported on testimony that Graham gave before a Georgian special purpose grand jury.
Senator Graham, the veteran South Carolina lawmaker, recently called Mr. Trump “the greatest president of all time.” But his 2022 testimony came at a time when Mr. Trump’s political future was uncertain. At that time, Mr. Graham expressed exasperation over the president’s baseless 2020 election fraud claims, telling the grand jurors, “I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short,” and that “if you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”
He called the Trump campaign’s plan to enlist fake electors in swing states where the president had lost the election “weird — I don’t know what to tell you, just weird.” He attributed Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat in Arizona not to fraud, as Mr. Trump and his allies claimed, but rather to Mr. Trump’s bashing of the state’s longtime senator, John McCain. And he said that weakness with suburban voters had hurt Mr. Trump in a number of swing states.
“The McCain effect in Arizona was real,” Senator Graham told the grand jurors. “And when you look through the suburbs in the states in question, you sort of had a common pattern where President Trump ran behind other Republicans. I was trying to convey that to him.”
“I’m sorry he lost,” Mr. Graham added. “But he lost it.”
Conclusion
The audacity of just how far Trump was willing to go in propagating his Big Lie is breathtaking. HE BEGAN LAYING HIS PLAN TO STEAL THE ELECTION FROM BIDEN BEFORE ELECTION DAY. HE PLANNED TO DECLARE VICTORY EARLY ON, BECAUSE HE KNEW FULL WELL THAT BIDEN COULD CATCH UP TO HIM AND PASS HIM IF THE COUNTING CONTINUED UNTIL THE LAST VOTE WAS COUNTED. Read the last two sentences again. And again. Roll it over in your mind. THIS is the point you must never lose sight of. And if you have the least bit of doubt about this, then read Trump’s long history of crying, “RIGGED ELECTION! RIGGED ELECTION). Then review what Tom Fitton, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone said in points 4 - 6 above.
The historical record shows that Trump NEVER intended to honor the democratic process. He NEVER intended for the American electorate to have a say in who would be president (unless, of course, the electorate voted for him.)
People’s faith in free and fair elections is a key pillar of our democracy. Trump undermined that faith, apparently to promote two goals:
By questioning the legitimacy of the election BEFORE the election took place, Trump was priming the electorate to put himself in a position to challenge the election and possibly steal it after he lost.
Even if he could not steal the election, undermining faith in the electoral process provided Trump an excuse to blame his loss on a rigged election. His goal was to avoid personal responsibility for losing the election. Mary Trump is Donald Trump’s niece. She also holds a doctorate in psychology from the Adelphi University. That is why we should pay attention to her when she tells us that Donald Trump is psychologically incapable of admitting defeat.
It’s a great question, and it’s pretty complicated. Because on the one hand, it is impossible for Donald to believe that he lost. He’s lost before in his life, but he’s never had to be in a situation in which he can’t somehow turn that loss into a win, either through cheating or buying his way out of a jam, or using somebody else’s connections and power. There’s literally nothing he can do about this, so it’s sort of unfathomable, because in my family, losing was literally the worst thing you can do. So it’s putting enormous amounts of pressure on him. So on the one hand he can’t admit it to himself because that would suggest that there’s no way for him to get out of this mess. So he’s going to continue to undermine people’s faith in our government and our institutions And again, it’s just another 48 days he has to keep taking a wrecking ball to the United States government.
Teaser: I have just given you 25 pieces of evidence (plus one bonus piece of evidence) proving that Donald Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him in 2020 is a Big Lie. There is one more reason to believe that Trump lost the election, which I will present to you in the Part 6. (Hint: It has something to do with pedophiles and bullet holes in World War II planes.)