Falsehoods of the most extravagant press conference of the Trump campaign

By Glenn Kessler -

"What we are seeing and revealing here more and more is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and probably China, and the interference in our elections here in the United States."

 - Sydney Powell

This is just an excerpt from a frankly absurd presentation made by Donald Trump's campaign attorneys, who claimed there was massive fraud in the presidential election voting system that he lost to Democratic candidate and now president-elect Joe Biden. . 

Powell spoke of a devious scheme whereby a Democratic-rigged "algorithm" shifted votes from Trump to Biden.

But he said the scheme failed, as support for Trump was so great, so Democrats were forced to use a "back door" mechanism to manipulate the vote, adding votes by mail in the dead of night.

If it seems crazy it's because it is.

There is no evidence to support any of these conspiracy theories.

Election officials in various states would be required to have been part of a massive fraud strategy to hand over the presidency to Biden, but without taking control of the Senate from Republicans and without preventing Democrats from losing seats in the House of Representatives.

[Machines did not erase Trump's votes or change them in favor of Biden]

For his part, Powell's colleague and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said other things that have generally been dismissed by judges when analyzing alleged evidence.

There is no law that prevents lying to the media, of course, but in the courts Trump's lawyers have been more prudent and have said that they are not alleging that there was fraud or that the elections were stolen.

This is a guide to the main statements made at the press conference, more or less in the order in which they were delivered.

“I can prove to you that [Trump] won Pennsylvania by 300,000 votes.

I can prove to you that Michigan won by probably 50,000 votes.

When I went to bed on election night, Trump had the upper hand in all of those states, each of those states. "

 –Rudy Giuliani

Trump's advantage

 actually

because remote votes and early votes couldn't be counted until election night, due to rules passed by the Republican-controlled legislatures of those states.

So in-person votes, which tended to be Republican, were reported first.

In Pennsylvania alone, more than 1.4 million votes remained to be counted after midnight.

Because these votes were overwhelming for Biden, Trump's lead was erased as the clock ticked.

The opposite situation almost occurs in Arizona.

On election night, Biden had an advantage of more than 130,000 votes, with 750,000 votes to be counted.

But in this case the missing votes tended to be Republican, so when all the votes were counted, Biden's lead fell to 10,000 votes.

But Giuliani argues that all those mail-in ballots should be thrown out in Pennsylvania and Michigan, giving Trump the victory.

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"Joe Biden told us a few days before the election that he had the best voter fraud team in the world." 

- Rudy Giuliani

This is false.

Giuliani refers to a fragment of a manipulated video that originally began in a tweet from an official of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and was then quickly spread by Eric Trump, son of the president;

by White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany;

and by others.

The video was blocked on Facebook, and Twitter labeled it as misleading.

Biden was really talking about his campaign initiative to combat voter intimidation, not an organization to commit voter fraud.

In a part of the interview that the RNC removed from his video, Biden even referred specifically to the organization of the campaign: “We have more than 1,000 lawyers, more than 1,000, who will answer the phone if you think there is any obstacle for you to vote. ”.

“They made serious mistakes, as do all evildoers.

And we catch them.

One of them was to have removed Republican inspectors ”.

 –Rudy Giuliani

Pennsylvania and Michigan judges have dismissed this claim.

Trump's own lawyers have testified in court that his campaign was allowed to observe the process, both in Philadelphia and other cities, and that they have found no evidence of fraud.

[Three Latinos among the first chosen to fill positions in the White House with Biden]

"The count that is done in Georgia will not tell us anything, since these fraudulent votes will simply be counted again since they did not want to give the signatures that matched the ballots."

 –Rudy Giuliani

False.

The signatures were already reviewed (and verified) when the ballots were originally counted.

Georgia's Secretary of State, Republican Brad Raffensperger, refuted this claim on Facebook, after Trump posted it on Twitter: “Let's talk about this misinformation about signature matching.

We strengthened the signature match.

We help train election officials in matching GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] signatures, which are even confirmed twice before a ballot is sent. "

(A signature is verified when a person requests a vote-by-correspondence ballot and then again when the ballot is sent with the vote.)

"We have 17,000 provisional ballots that were mailed in Pittsburgh."

- Rudy Giuliani

At the press conference, Giuliani hinted that these ballots were primarily from Democrats who sent fraudulent votes on behalf of someone who unexpectedly went to vote in person.

But there is no evidence that this has occurred;

instead, there were miscellaneous problems, including a missing signature on one form, causing a provisional ballot to be used.

“[Jessy Jacob] was commissioned to work on the elections in September and was trained by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan.

They basically trained her to cheat. "

- Rudy Giuliani

As early as November 13, a Michigan judge ruled that the presentation by Jacob, a suspended Detroit city worker who claimed to have witnessed voter fraud, was unconvincing.

“The accusations made by Miss Jacob are serious.

In the affidavit, however, Jacob does not name the location of the satellite office, the September or October date on which these fraudulent acts occurred, nor does he say the number of times he witnessed the alleged misconduct.

In his statement, Jacob does not name the city employees responsible for the voter fraud and never told a supervisor of the wrongdoing, ”Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny wrote.

“Jacob's information is generalized.

He claims that there was a behavior of which he does not give date, location, frequency, or names of the employees.

Additionally, Jacob does not indicate whether he took any action to address the alleged wrongdoing or to alert any supervisor to the alleged electoral fraud.

Jacob only spoke about it after the unofficial results of the count indicated that former Vice President Joe Biden had won the state of Michigan, "he added.

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“They swear that at 4:30 in the morning a truck came to the center where votes were still being counted in Detroit.

People thought it was food, so they ran to the truck.

It wasn't food.

There were thousands and thousands of ballots ”.

- Rudy Giuliani

This claim arises primarily from a single affidavit submitted by an alleged witness, Melissa Carone, a Dominion computer contractor.

But not even Carone, who made several claims about electoral fraud, reaches the conclusions that Giuliani gave.

In his statement, Carone simply says that two trucks carried food, but "I never saw food come out of the trucks, coincidentally they announced on the news that Michigan had found more than 100,000 ballots not two hours after the last truck left."

Kenny also concluded that Carone's accusations "are simply not credible."

A Michigan Court of Appeals panel on Monday rejected an appeal of Kenny's decision.

Two of the three judges on the panel were appointed to their positions by Republican governors.

[Why it is important for a candidate to accept defeat and what Trump can learn from those who lost before him]

“A case we are dismissing today, because that case was intended to have the Wayne County Committee of Supervisors decertify.

Well, they did.

They decertified.

- Rudy Giuliani

The Wayne County, Michigan committee initially had a two-to-two vote Tuesday, but eventually certified the votes with a four-to-zero vote after a scandal broke out.

The next day, the two Republicans on the committee said they wanted to roll back their votes, which the Michigan Secretary of State says is not possible.

The state committee has yet to certify the total votes in the state.

"Dominion's voting systems, Smartmatic's technology software, and software that goes to other computerized code systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela under the direction of [former Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez."

- Sydney Powell

Chávez passed away seven years ago and is he influencing the United States elections from his grave?

As it stands, Trump's lawyers are firing a series of misinformation that comes mainly from internet rumors and right-wing blogs.

Dominion Voting Systems, the company that creates the software used by local governments to help organize their elections, is a Canadian company that is effectively headquartered in Denver.

[Biden turns 78.

He will be the oldest president in US history]

The company claims to be nonpartisan.

"The owners of the Dominion company do not have relationships with any member of the Pelosi family, the Feinstein family, or the Clinton Global Initiative, Smartmatic, Scytl, or any relationship with Venezuela," the company says on a page in which they deny election rumors.

“Dominion works with all political parties;

our client list and our government relations practices reflect this nonpartisan philosophy, ”he explained.

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The company operates in 28 states, including Florida and Ohio, two states Trump won without a hitch.

But their contracts are usually made with each of the counties.

For example, Dominion software was only used in two of the five counties that had problems in Michigan and Georgia, and also the problems in Michigan were due to human error, according to a detailed review published by the Michigan Secretary of State.

(The Trump campaign has requested a recount in Wisconsin, but curiously did not ask for one in counties using Dominion systems.)

Smartmatic, on its own fact-check page, also says this is absurd.

Smartmatic, an electoral technology company, was founded and incorporated in the United States in 2000, inspired by the debate over the hanging slips of the presidential elections that same year.

Its headquarters are in London.

"Two of its founders, Antonio Mugica and Roger Piñate, continue to run the company as CEO and president, respectively," the company says.

“The majority of shares (83%) are owned by SGO, a company owned by the Mugica and Piñate families.

The rest of the shares belong to employees (10%) and angel investors (7%) ”.

"Smartmatic's software is not licensed for external use, nor is it used by other companies," the company says.

[Pennsylvania authorities deny Rudy Giuliani's false accusation of alleged "illegal votes"]

There is a distant connection with Venezuela, according to 2006 press reports. Smartmatic replaced Venezuela's voting machines before a referendum that confirmed Chávez as president in August 2004, while the Venezuelan government made him a loan of $ 200,000. to another technology company owned by the same people who own Smartmatic.

With the money from its contracts in Venezuela, Smartmatic bought Sequoia Voting Systems in 2005, a company that had contracts in 17 states.

But Smartmatic sold Sequoia in 2007 after an investigation by the Foreign Investment Committee in the United States was launched into the company's possible ties to Venezuela.

(Dominion eventually bought Sequoia assets in 2010, a company spokesperson said.)

In 2017, Smartmatic reported that the Venezuelan government had announced a false turnout figure in a disputed election, adding at least one million votes to the actual figure.

The company said the absence of election observers from the opposition (which had boycotted the election) allowed for the manipulation of turnout figures.

The Venezuelan government, which needed a high turnout to give the election legitimacy, denied that the numbers had been manipulated.

The company stopped working in Venezuela in 2018.

“Our votes are counted in Germany and in Spain by a company whose owners are partners of Chávez and [current President Nicolás] Maduro.

Did you ever believe that that could be true? "

 .– Rudy Giuliani

It is not true.

Election votes in the United States are not counted in Germany and Spain.

“It cannot be believed that the company that is counting our votes, that has control over our votes, is owned by two Venezuelans who were allies of Chávez, they are allies of Maduro today, with a company whose president is a business partner and very close George Soros, the biggest donor to the Democratic Party, the biggest donor to Antifa and the biggest donor to Black Lives Matter. "

 - Rudy Giuliani

More unsubstantiated innuendo.

Mark Malloch-Brown is the President of SGO, Smartmatic's parent company.

Malloch-Brown is also a board member of the Soros Open Society Foundations, which gives grants to civil society groups like

.

Soros is a billionaire who supports liberal causes, but on top of that he has no connection to Smartmatic.

(

, for "antifascist", is not an official organization and therefore could not receive donations).

[Disinformation and fear of a false "socialism": the gasoline that drove the Venezuelan vote in favor of Trump]

"China also has a large presence in Venezuela and a great interest in making sure that President Trump does not remain in office."

 –Sydney Powell

Here Powell hints at a connection to China, but it is a ridiculously weak one, especially considering there is no connection between Venezuela and Dominion.

"That's true.

[Reports that a server was confiscated in Germany].

Somehow it relates to this, but I don't know if the good guys or the bad guys got it. "

- Sydney Powell

Here, Trump's lawyers use a particularly ridiculous claim, already disproved in many checkups and labeled by Facebook as false.

But it shows how many of their claims are derived from blog posts or other internet sites and how the Trump team is trying to get hold of anything.

The story was that the US Army raided the German offices of the Spanish electoral software company Scytl and seized their servers to look for evidence of tampering in the 2020 US elections.

But Scytl denounced that it was a "false news" and indicated that it does not have offices in Germany.

The Army denied the story as well.

The story gained momentum after Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said he had been told there was a tweet in German that said the Army had broken into and seized Syctl's server, and after the favorite TV channel Trump's One America News broadcast a program about the claim, claiming that the server would show that Trump actually won 410 votes from the electoral college, including those from California, which often vote Democrats.

The Executive Committee of the Government Coordination Council for Electoral Infrastructure and the Council for the Coordination of the Electoral Infrastructure Sector said in a joint statement that “there is no evidence that any voting system has erased or lost votes, changed votes, or had been affected in some way ”.

Chris Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency before being fired this week by Trump, posted on Twitter after the press conference: “That press conference was the most dangerous hour with 45 minutes of television in the history of United States.

And possibly the craziest.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky. "

"President Trump won overwhelmingly."

False.

Trump lost electoral college votes from 306 to 232. That was the exact same margin by which he won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, what he consistently calls a landslide victory.

Biden also got more than six million more votes than Trump.

This article was translated by Pablo Medina Uribe thanks to the FactChat agreement, coordinated by the 

#Chatbot