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      Trump Repeats Debunked Election Claims in Call With Georgia Official

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFact CheckTrump Repeats Debunked Election Claims in Call With Georgia OfficialThe president recited a number of viral online falsehoods involving dead voters, Dominion voting machines, shredded ballots and a water leak, among other baseless claims of fraud.President Trump has made a litany of false claims about election results in Georgia.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesJan. 3, 2021Updated 10:14 p.m. ETPresident Trump, in an hourlong telephone call with Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, repeated a number of false and misleading claims about election results in the state that have been circulating on social media. Here’s a fact check.What Mr. Trump Said“Then it was stuffed with votes. They weren’t in an official voter box, they were in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in voter boxes. The minimum number it could be because we watched it and they watched it certified in slow motion instant replay if you can believe it, but it had slow motion and it was magnified many times over, and the minimum it was 18,000 ballots, all for Biden.”False. Mr. Trump was most likely referring to debunked claims that a water leak at a vote counting location in Fulton County forced an evacuation and made it possible for trunks full of ballots to be rolled in. Election officials have said and surveillance videos show that this did not happen.A water leak caused a delay for about two hours in vote counting at the State Farm Arena, but no ballots or equipment were damaged. Georgia’s chief election investigator, Frances Watson, testified that a “review of the entire security footage revealed that there were no mystery ballots that were brought in from an unknown location and hidden under tables.”Throughout the phone call, Mr. Trump also repeatedly suggested that an election worker seen in the surveillance videos “stuffed the boxes” and “they thought she’d be in jail” — referring to a baseless conspiracy theory promoted on social media.What Mr. Trump Said“There were no poll watchers there. There were no Democrats or Republicans. There was no security there.”This is misleading. Election observers and journalists were present at State Farm Arena when the water leak occurred. They were not asked to leave, Ms. Watson said, but simply “left on their own” when they saw one group of workers, who had completed their task, leave.What Mr. Trump Said“So dead people voted. And I think the number is close to 5,000 people.”False. The actual number was two, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, told the president in the call.What Mr. Trump Said“You had out-of-state voters — they voted in Georgia but they were from out of state — of 4,925.”This is misleading. Ryan Germany, the chief counsel for Mr. Raffensperger’s office, refuted this description in the call.“Everyone we’ve been through are people that lived in Georgia, moved to a different state, but then moved back to Georgia legitimately,” he said. “They moved back in years ago. This was not like something just before the election. So there’s something about that data that, it’s just not accurate.”What Mr. Trump Said“In Fulton County and other areas — and this may or may not be true, because this just came up this morning — that they are burning their ballots, that they are shredding ballots, shredding ballots and removing equipment. They are changing the equipment on the Dominion machines, and you know that’s not legal.”False. Mr. Trump was likely referring to images of Fulton County ballots that circulated on social media and posted by a supporter, Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.The photos showed piles of ballots that were visibly not filled out and wrapped in plastic. Mr. Byrne characterized the ballots as “counterfeit” and said they were later shredded.But those images were simply of emergency backup ballots, said Gabriel Sterling, a Republican official who is the voting system implementation manager in Georgia. State law requires counties to prepare additional paper ballots in case voting machines cannot be used.Dominion Voting Systems, which has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories and false rumors, did not remove any machinery from Fulton County, Mr. Germany told the president.What Mr. Trump Said“In Detroit, we had 139 percent of the people voted. That’s not too good. In Pennsylvania, they had well over 200,000 more votes than they had people voting.”False. About 51 percent of registered voters and 38 percent of the entire population cast a ballot in Detroit.The figure for Pennsylvania was a reference to faulty analysis conducted by state Republican lawmakers. The analysis relied on a voter registration database that Pennsylvania’s Department of State said was incomplete as a few counties — including Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties, the two largest in the state — had yet to fully upload their data. The department called the analysis “obvious misinformation.”What Mr. Trump Said“She got you to sign a totally unconstitutional agreement, which is a disastrous agreement. You can’t check signatures. I can’t imagine you’re allowed to do harvesting, I guess, in that agreement.”False. This was an inaccurate reference to a settlement between Georgia and the Democratic Party. Under the March settlement, officials must notify voters whose signatures were rejected within three business days and give them the chance to correct issues. It does not bar officials from verifying signatures and does not allow “harvesting,” or collecting and dropping off ballots in bulk.“Harvesting is still illegal in the state of Georgia. And that settlement agreement did not change that one iota,” Mr. Raffensperger said in the call.Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump Call to Georgia Official Might Violate State and Federal Law

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Call to Georgia Official Might Violate State and Federal LawThe president’s demand for action to overturn the result of the election in the state raised questions about whether he violated election fraud statutes, lawyers said, though a charge is unlikely.President Trump and Melania Trump, the first lady, last week outside the White House. On Saturday, the president held an hourlong call with Georgia’s secretary of state, urging him to “find” the votes necessary to swing the state to Mr. Trump.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesJan. 3, 2021Updated 9:53 p.m. ETThe call by President Trump on Saturday to Georgia’s secretary of state raised the prospect that Mr. Trump may have violated laws that prohibit interference in federal or state elections, but lawyers said on Sunday that it would be difficult to pursue such a charge.The recording of the conversation between Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, first reported by The Washington Post, led a number of election and criminal defense lawyers to conclude that by pressuring Mr. Raffensperger to “find” the votes he would need to reverse the election outcome in the state, Mr. Trump either broke the law or came close to it.“It seems to me like what he did clearly violates Georgia statutes,” said Leigh Ann Webster, an Atlanta criminal defense lawyer, citing a state law that makes it illegal for anyone who “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage” in election fraud.At the federal level, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” is breaking the law.Matthew T. Sanderson, a Republican election lawyer who has worked on several presidential campaigns — including those of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor — said that while it did appear that Mr. Trump was trying to intimidate Mr. Raffensperger, it was not clear that he violated the law.That is because while Mr. Trump clearly implied that Mr. Raffensperger might suffer legal consequences if he did not find additional votes for the president in Georgia, Mr. Trump stopped short of saying he would deliver on the threat himself against Mr. Raffensperger and his legal counsel, Ryan Germany, Mr. Sanderson said. “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call, referring to his baseless assertions of widespread election fraud. “That’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.”Lacking additional clear evidence of Mr. Trump’s intent to follow up on any apparent threat, including the potential criminal charges he suggested Mr. Raffensperger or his office might face, Mr. Sanderson said, “Ultimately, I doubt this is behavior that would be prosecuted.”Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general and lawyer who represented clients that have been critical of Mr. Trump, said he believed Mr. Trump violated federal law.But the meandering nature of the phone call and the fact that the president made no apparent attempt to conceal his actions as other call participants listened could allow Mr. Trump to argue that he did not intend to break the law or to argue that he did not know that a federal law existed apparently prohibiting his actions.The federal law would also most likely require that Mr. Trump knew that he was pushing Mr. Raffensperger to fraudulently change the vote count, meaning prosecutors would have to prove that Mr. Trump knew he was lying in asserting that he was confident he had won the election in Georgia.“It is unlikely federal prosecutors would bring such a case,” Mr. Bromwich said. “But it certainly was god awful and unbelievable. But prosecuting a federal crime is obviously a very different thing.”David Worley, a Democrat and a supporter of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is a member of the State Election Board in Georgia, wrote Sunday evening to Mr. Raffensperger and other members of the board asking the secretary of state, who is the board chairman, to open an investigation into the phone call to see if it violated state law, including a provision prohibiting conspiracy to commit election fraud.If the board concludes a law has been broken, Mr. Worley said, it could ask state law enforcement authorities to consider filing criminal charges or a civil case against Mr. Trump.“To say that I am troubled by President Trump’s attempt to manipulate the votes of Georgians would be an understatement,” Mr. Worley, who is the sole Democrat on the five-member board, wrote in the email. “Once we have received your investigative report, it will be the board’s duty to determine whether probable cause exists to refer this matter.”State officials in Georgia might also face a challenge in bringing a case against a federal official, or even a former federal official, said Ms. Webster and Ryan C. Locke, a second Atlanta criminal defense lawyer.Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, said the question would largely be up to the Justice Department in the Biden administration.“There is a good argument that Trump is seeking to procure a fraudulent vote count by stating that he needs exactly 11,780 votes and is threatening the secretary of state if he does not produce them,” Mr. Potter said. “But even if the Biden Justice Department thinks they have a good case, is that how they want to start off the Biden presidency? That is a policy decision.”Congressional Democrats suggested they would examine the legal implications of the call. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the call raised new legal questions for Mr. Trump even if it was not a clear violation of the law.“In threatening these officials with vague ‘criminal’ consequences, and in encouraging them to ‘find’ additional votes and hire investigators who ‘want to find answers,’ the president may have also subjected himself to additional criminal liability,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Pence Welcomes Futile Bid by G.O.P. Lawmakers to Overturn Election

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPence Welcomes Futile Bid by G.O.P. Lawmakers to Overturn ElectionVice President Mike Pence signaled his support as 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.The group, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, brings to nearly one-quarter the proportion of Senate Republicans who have broken with their leaders to join the effort to invalidate the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesJan. 2, 2021Updated 8:35 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence signaled support on Saturday for a futile Republican bid to overturn the election in Congress next week, after 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory when the House and Senate meet to formally certify it.The announcement by the senators — and Mr. Pence’s move to endorse it — reflected a groundswell among Republicans to defy the unambiguous results of the election and indulge President Trump’s attempts to remain in power with false claims of voting fraud.Every state in the country has certified the election results after verifying their accuracy, many following postelection audits or hand counts. Judges across the country, and a Supreme Court with a conservative majority, have rejected nearly 60 attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to challenge the results.And neither Mr. Pence nor any of the senators who said they would vote to invalidate the election has made a specific allegation of fraud, instead offering vague suggestions that some wrongdoing might have occurred and asserting that many of their supporters believe that it has.The senators’ opposition to certifying Mr. Biden’s election will not change the outcome. But it guarantees that what would normally be a perfunctory session on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ratify the results of the presidential election will instead become a partisan brawl, in which Republicans amplify specious claims of widespread election rigging that have been debunked and dismissed for weeks even as Mr. Trump has stoked them.The spectacle promises to set a caustic backdrop for Mr. Biden’s inauguration in the coming weeks and reflects the polarized politics on Capitol Hill that will be among his greatest challenges.It will also pose a political dilemma for Republicans, forcing them to choose between accepting the results of a democratic election — even if it means angering supporters who dislike the outcome and could punish them at the polls — and joining their colleagues in displaying unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump, who has demanded in increasingly angry fashion that they back his bid to cling to the presidency.The conundrum is especially acute for Mr. Pence, who as president of the Senate has the task of presiding over Wednesday’s proceedings and declaring Mr. Biden the winner, but has his own future political aspirations to consider as well. On Friday, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by House Republicans to pressure Mr. Pence to do otherwise, and instead unilaterally overturn the results.But on Saturday evening, Marc Short, his chief of staff, issued a statement saying that Mr. Pence “shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election.”The vice president, the statement continued, “welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on Jan. 6th.”Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, has the task of presiding over Wednesday’s proceedings and declaring Mr. Biden the winner.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesIn a joint statement on Saturday, the Senate Republicans — including seven senators and four who are to be sworn in on Sunday — called for a 10-day audit of election returns in “disputed states,” and said they would vote to reject the electors from those states until one was completed. They did not elaborate on which states.The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.Together with Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who announced this week that he would object to Congress’s certification of the election results, they bring to nearly one-quarter the proportion of Senate Republicans who have broken with their leaders to join the effort to invalidate Mr. Biden’s victory. In the House, where a band of conservatives has been plotting the last-ditch election objection for weeks, more than half of Republicans joined a failed lawsuit seeking to overturn the will of the voters, and more are expected to support the effort to challenge the results in Congress next week.Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has said he will object to certifying the results, and with Mr. Hawley’s support, that challenge would hold weight, prompting senators and representatives to retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is not expected to this time.In their statement, the Republicans cited poll results showing most members of their party believe the election was “rigged,” an assertion that Mr. Trump has made for months, and which has been repeated in the right-wing news media and by many Republican members of Congress.“A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president,” they wrote. “We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.”They also acknowledged that their effort was likely to be unsuccessful, given that any such challenge must be sustained by both the House, where Democrats hold the majority, and the Senate, where top Republicans including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, have tried to shut it down.“We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise,” the senators wrote.Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee with jurisdiction over federal elections, called the Republican effort a “publicity stunt” that would ultimately fail, but said it was dangerous nevertheless, amounting to “an attempt to subvert the will of the voters.” She noted in an interview that hundreds of millions of votes had already been “counted, recounted, litigated and state-certified” across the country.“These baseless claims have already been examined and dismissed by Trump’s own attorney general, dozens of courts and election officials from both parties,” said Mike Gwin, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign.While lawmakers have sought to register their opposition to past presidential election results by challenging Congress’s certification, the move has generally been more symbolic than substantive, given that the loser had already conceded and senators rarely joined with members of the House to force a vote. But as Mr. Trump continues to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud, a growing number of Republicans in Congress have been eager to challenge the results, either out of devotion to the president or out of fear of enraging the base of their party that still reveres him even in defeat.That is the case even though the vast majority of them just won elections in the very same balloting they are now claiming was fraudulently administered.Mr. McConnell has discouraged senators from joining the House effort, and Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, told reporters the challenge to the election results would fail in the Senate “like a shot dog,” prompting a Twitter rebuke from Mr. Trump.Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, on Thursday condemned the attempt, calling it a “dangerous ploy” intended to “disenfranchise millions of Americans.” He accused fellow Republicans of making a political calculation to try to further their careers at the expense of the truth by tapping into Mr. Trump’s “populist base.”But Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff, warned that those involved in the effort would come to regret their stance.“Rarely can you predict with 100% assurance that years from now everyone who went down this road will wish they had a mulligan,” Mr. Holmes wrote on Twitter.Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican who has announced that he will not seek re-election in 2022, also blasted the effort, saying that Mr. Hawley, Mr. Cruz and others were “directly” undermining the “right of the people to elect their own leaders.”For years, Mr. Trump has railed against contests in which he lost, disliked the outcome or feared he might be defeated. He objected to the results of the Emmys, falsely claimed President Barack Obama did not win the popular vote, asserted that Mr. Cruz “stole” a primary victory from him in Iowa in 2016 and predicted that the election in which he defeated the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would be “rigged.” In the months leading up to November’s election, he also warned that he would be cheated out of a victory, and refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.As Mr. Biden racked up victories in November, Mr. Trump indulged in increasingly outlandish fictions, spreading disinformation about the election’s results and encouraging his followers to challenge the vote at every step. In recent weeks, as his legal defeats have stacked up, the president has become more vitriolic in his condemnations of Republicans who fail to support his false claims of having been the true victor in the election, and has lavished praise on those who parrot his accusations.On Saturday, Mr. Trump cheered on the Republican senators who announced they would object to certifying the election, writing on Twitter: “Our country will love them for it!”The vote tally and procedures in every battleground state that Mr. Trump contests have been affirmed through multiple postelection audits. Mr. Biden won the election with over seven million more votes than Mr. Trump and with 306 Electoral College votes, surpassing the threshold of 270 needed to win the presidency.Nevertheless, more than a month after Mr. Biden’s victory, with increasing numbers in their party marching in lock step with Mr. Trump, some Republicans felt the need on Saturday to explain why they planned to vote to uphold the results of a democratic election.“I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and that is what I will do Jan. 6,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said in a statement. She is to face voters next November.Senator Mitt Romney of Utah warned of the consequences of backing a bid to subvert the election’s outcome.“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world,” he said in a statement. “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”Maggie Haberman More

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      Pennsylvania man is accused of casting Trump vote for his dead mother.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyTracking Viral MisinformationPennsylvania man is accused of casting Trump vote for his dead mother.Dec. 23, 2020, 2:36 p.m. ETDec. 23, 2020, 2:36 p.m. ETShortly after the November election, the Trump campaign circulated on its Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as its website, the names of seven dead Americans in the battleground states of Georgia and Pennsylvania. The dead people were used to cast votes in last month’s election, the campaign claimed, pointing to the incidents as evidence of widespread voter fraud that enabled President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.Local officials have debunked several of the dead-voter claims, and there remains no evidence of widespread voter fraud. But now, Pennsylvania officials say one of the names held up by the Trump campaign was used to cast a vote in the election.Here’s the catch: Authorities say the fraudulent vote was cast for Mr. Trump.This week, Jack Stollsteimer, the district attorney of Delaware County, accused Bruce Bartman of Marple Township, Pa., of illegally voting in place of his deceased mother in the general election. In addition to his mother, Mr. Bartman registered his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Weihman, who died in 2019, as a voter, according to the district attorney’s office, but is not accused of voting for her. He also cast a ballot under his own name.The Trump campaign circulated claims of voter fraud on its social media accounts. Local officials have debunked several of the claims.“This is the only known case of a ‘dead person’ voting in our county, conspiracy theories notwithstanding,” Mr. Stollsteimer said in a statement. “The prompt prosecution of this case shows that law enforcement will continue to uphold our election laws whenever presented with actual evidence of fraud and that we will continue to investigate every allegation that comes our way.”Samuel Stretton, a lawyer for Mr. Bartman, said: “He’s admitted everything. He’s cooperated.” Mr. Stretton added that he was negotiating a guilty plea, and that Mr. Bartman had no criminal record.“He’s a good man,” Mr. Stretton said. “He did something very stupid under some misguided theory that this was his form of protest.”In an interview with The New York Times in November after the Trump campaign first made its claims, Mr. Bartman said he did not recall seeing a mail-in ballot for his mother. “Oh, no, no, I haven’t gotten anything,” he said. “Occasionally I would get some junk mail for her. But not in several years.”He added that he did not hear of the Trump campaign’s allegation because he did not use social media much and only infrequently logged on to Facebook to see pictures of his grandchildren.Asked whether he knew why a vote for his mother would have been recorded despite her having passed away, he said the state’s governor, Tom Wolf, “doesn’t know anything or what’s going on in the city of Philadelphia, or the surrounding counties in the middle part of the state.”“Some of the stuff that has gone on in Philadelphia is just atrocious,” Mr. Bartman added.Mr. Stretton, his lawyer, said, “He was wrong in saying that, he admits he was wrong, and since he was approached by the detectives, he has cooperated and told the truth.”The claim that a vote was fraudulently cast using Elizabeth Bartman’s name and that it was emblematic of systemic voter fraud helping Mr. Biden spread widely online. On Facebook, articles with the claim from the conservative websites ZeroHedge and The Epoch Times were shared 1,800 times and reached up to 61 million followers, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing MediaVoting machine companies threaten “highly dangerous” cases against Fox, Newsmax and OAN, says Floyd Abrams.Last week, a lawyer for Antonio Mugica sent scathing letters to Fox, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name.Credit…Niklas Hallen/Getty ImagesDec. 20, 2020Updated 9:43 p.m. ETAntonio Mugica was in Boca Raton when an American presidential election really melted down in 2000, and he watched with shocked fascination as local government officials argued over hanging chads and butterfly ballots.It was so bad, so incompetent, that Mr. Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer, decided to shift the focus of his digital security company, Smartmatic, which had been working for banks. It would offer its services to what would obviously be a growth industry: electronic voting machines. He began building a global company that ultimately provided voting machinery and software for elections from Brazil to Belgium and his native Venezuela. He even acquired an American company, then called Sequoia.Last month, Mr. Mugica initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election.“Of course I was surprised, but at the same time, it was pretty clear that these people were trying to discredit the election and they were throwing out 25 conspiracy theories in parallel,” he told me in an interview last week from Barbados, where his company has an office. “I thought it was so absurd that it was not going to have legs.”But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.” Mr. Giuliani declared on Twitter that the company “was a front for SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing. Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?”Soon his company, and a competitor, Dominion — which sells its services to about 1,900 of the county governments that administer elections across America — were at the center of Mr. Giuliani’s and Sidney Powell’s theories, and on the tongues of commentators on Fox News and its farther-right rivals, Newsmax and One America News.“Sidney Powell is out there saying that states like Texas, they turned away from Dominion machines, because really there’s only one reason why you buy a Dominion machine and you buy this Smartmatic software, so you can easily change votes,” the Newsmax host Chris Salcedo said in one typical mash-up on Nov. 18. Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business reported on Nov. 15 that “one source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a backdoor.”The Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.Credit…Monica Schipper/Getty ImagesHere’s the thing: Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.In an era of brazen political lies, Mr. Mugica has emerged as an unlikely figure with the power to put the genie back in the bottle. Last week, his lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”Now, Mr. Connolly’s target is a kind of red slime, the stream of preposterous lies coming from the White House and Republican officials around the country.“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Mr. Connolly said.Mr. Mugica isn’t the only potential plaintiff. Dominion Voting Systems has hired another high-powered libel lawyer, Tom Clare, who has threatened legal action against Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign. Mr. Clare said in an emailed statement that “we are moving forward on the basis that she will not retract those false statements and that it will be necessary for Dominion to take aggressive legal action, both against Ms. Powell and the many others who have enabled and amplified her campaign of defamation by spreading damaging falsehoods about Dominion.”These are legal threats any company, even a giant like Fox Corporation, would take seriously. And they could be fatal to the dream of a new “Trump TV,” a giant new media company in the president’s image, and perhaps contributing to his bottom line. Newsmax and OAN would each like to become that, and are both burning money to steal ratings from Fox, executives from both companies have acknowledged. They will need to raise significantly more money, or to sell quickly to investors, to build a Fox-style multibillion-dollar empire. But outstanding litigation with the potential of an enormous verdict will be enough to scare away most buyers.And so Newsmax and OAN appear likely to face the same fate as so many of President Trump’s sycophants, who have watched him lie with impunity and imitated him — only to find that he’s the only one who can really get away with it. Mr. Trump benefits from presidential immunity, but also he has an experienced fabulist’s sense of where the legal red lines are, something his allies often lack. Three of his close aides were convicted of lying, and Michael Cohen served more than a year in prison. (Trump pardoned Michael Flynn and commuted the sentence of Roger Stone.)OAN and Newsmax have been avidly hyping Mr. Trump’s bogus election claims. OAN has even been trying to get to Newsmax’s right, by continuing to reject Joe Biden’s status as president-elect. But their own roles in propagating that lie could destroy their businesses if Mr. Mugica sues.The letters written by lawyers for Smartmatic and Dominion are “extremely powerful,” said Floyd Abrams, one of the country’s most prominent First Amendment lawyers, in an email to The New York Times. “The repeated accusations against both companies are plainly defamatory and surely have done enormous reputational and financial harm to both.”Mr. Abrams noted that “truth is always a defense” and that, failing that, the networks may defend themselves by saying they didn’t know the charges were false, while Ms. Powell may say she was simply describing legal filings.“It is far too early to predict how the cases, if commenced, will end,” he said. “But it is not too early to say that they would be highly dangerous to those sued.”Lawyers said they expected that the right-wing networks, if sued, would argue that Smartmatic and Dominion should be considered “public figures” — which would require the companies to prove that its critics were malicious or wildly reckless, not just wrong.Mr. Connolly said he would argue that Smartmatic was not a public figure, a legal status whose exact meaning varies depending on whether Mr. Mugica files suit in Florida, New York or another state.“They have a very good case,” another First Amendment lawyer who isn’t connected to the litigation, the University of Florida professor Clay Calvert, said of Smartmatic. “If these statements are false and we are taking them as factual statements, that’s why we have defamation law.”Fox News and Fox Business, which have mentioned Dominion 792 times and Smartmatic 118 times between them, according to a search of the service TVEyes, appear to be taking the threat seriously. Over the weekend, they broadcast one of the strangest three-minute segments I’ve ever seen on television, with a disembodied and anonymous voice flatly asking a series of factual questions about Smartmatic of an expert on voting machines, Eddie Perez, who debunks a series of false claims. The segment, which appeared scripted to persuade a very literal-minded judge or jury that the network was being fair, aired over the weekend on the shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, where Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell had made their most outlandish claims.Newsmax said in an emailed statement that the channel “has never made a claim of impropriety about Smartmatic, its ownership or software” and that the company was merely providing a “forum for public concerns and discussion.” An OAN spokeswoman didn’t respond to an inquiry.I’m reluctant to cheer on a defamation case against news organizations, even networks that appear to be amplifying dangerous lies. Companies and politicians often exploit libel law to threaten and silence journalists, and at the very least subject them to expensive and draining litigation.And defamation cases can also collide with subjects of genuine public interest, as in the most prominent case I’ve been involved in, when a businessman sued me and my colleagues at BuzzFeed News for publishing the Steele Dossier, while acknowledging that it was unverified. There, a judge ruled that the document was an official record that BuzzFeed was entitled to publish.In this controversy, even the voting companies’ worst critics find the coverage wildly distorted.“They’ve been mining every paper I’ve ever written and any deposition I’ve ever given and it’s nonsense,” said Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who has long argued that voting software isn’t as secure as its vendors claim. He said Ms. Powell’s cybersecurity expert, Navid Keshavarz-Nia, called him on Nov. 15, apparently seeing him as a potential ally, and spent an hour going point-by-point over claims that would wind up in a deposition. “He seemed sane, but every time I would ask him for evidence that would support one of these allegations he would squirm off to a different allegation,” Mr. Jones said.As the conversation wore on, he wondered, “Was someone trying to pull a ‘Borat’ on me?”But the allegations are no joke for Smartmatic and Dominion. Mr. Mugica said he had taken worried calls from governments and politicians all over the world, concerned that Mr. Trump’s poison will seep into their politics and turn a Smartmatic contract into a liability.“This potentially could destroy it all,” he said.Mr. Mugica wouldn’t say whether he has made up his mind to sue. Mr. Connolly said that he has “a lot of people watching a lot of videos right now,” and that he’s researching whether to file in New York, Florida or elsewhere. I asked Mr. Mugica if he’d settle for an apology.“Is the apology going to reverse the false belief of tens of millions of people who believe in these lies?” he asked. “Then I could be satisfied.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      From Voter Fraud to Vaccine Lies: Misinformation Peddlers Shift Gears

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrom Voter Fraud to Vaccine Lies: Misinformation Peddlers Shift GearsElection-related falsehoods have subsided, but misleading claims about the coronavirus vaccines are surging — often spread by the same people.Sidney Powell, who was a member of President Trump’s legal team, on Capitol Hill last month. She has started posting inaccurate claims about the coronavirus vaccines online.Credit…Jonathan Ernst/ReutersDavey Alba and Dec. 16, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETSidney Powell, a lawyer who was part of President Trump’s legal team, spread a conspiracy theory last month about election fraud. For days, she claimed that she would “release the Kraken” by showing voluminous evidence that Mr. Trump had won the election by a landslide.But after her assertions were widely derided and failed to gain legal traction, Ms. Powell started talking about a new topic. On Dec. 4, she posted a link on Twitter with misinformation that said that the population would be split into the vaccinated and the unvaccinated and that “big government” could surveil those who were unvaccinated.“NO WAY #America,” Ms. Powell wrote in the tweet, which collected 22,600 shares and 51,000 likes. “This is more authoritarian communist control imported straight from #China.” She then tagged Mr. Trump and the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn — both of whom she had represented — and other prominent right-wing figures to highlight the post.Ms. Powell’s changing tune was part of a broader shift in online misinformation. As Mr. Trump’s challenges to the election’s results have been knocked down and the Electoral College has affirmed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win, voter fraud misinformation has subsided. Instead, peddlers of online falsehoods are ramping up lies about the Covid-19 vaccines, which were administered to Americans for the first time this week.Apart from Ms. Powell, others who have spread political misinformation such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, as well as far-right websites like ZeroHedge, have begun pushing false vaccine narratives, researchers said. Their efforts have been amplified by a robust network of anti-vaccination activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on platforms including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.Among their misleading notions is the idea that the vaccines are delivered with a microchip or bar code to keep track of people, as well as a lie that the vaccines will hurt everyone’s health (the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have been proved to be more than 94 percent effective in trials, with minimal side effects). Falsehoods about Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist who supports vaccines, have also increased, with rumors that he is responsible for the coronavirus and that he stands to profit from a vaccine, according to data from media insights company Zignal Labs.The shift shows how political misinformation purveyors are hopping from topic to topic to maintain attention and influence, said Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.It is “an easy pivot,” she said. “Disinformation about vaccines and the pandemic have long been staples of the pro-Trump disinformation playbook.”The change has been particularly evident over the last six weeks. Election misinformation peaked on Nov. 4 at 375,000 mentions across cable television, social media, print and online news outlets, according to an analysis by Zignal. By Dec. 3, that had fallen to 60,000 mentions. But coronavirus misinformation steadily increased over that period, rising to 46,100 mentions on Dec. 3, from 17,900 mentions on Nov. 8.NewsGuard, a start-up that fights false stories, said that of the 145 websites in its Election Misinformation Tracking Center, a database of sites that publish false election information, 60 percent of them have also published misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. That includes right-wing outlets such as Breitbart, Newsmax and One America News Network, which distributed inaccurate articles about the election and are now also running misleading articles about the vaccines.John Gregory, the deputy health editor for NewsGuard, said the shift was not to be taken lightly because false information about vaccines leads to real-world harm. In Britain in the early 2000s, he said, a baseless link between the measles vaccine and autism spooked people into not taking that vaccine. That led to deaths and serious permanent injuries, he said.“Misinformation creates fear and uncertainty around the vaccine and can reduce the number of people willing to take it,” said Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington evolutionary biologist who has been tracking the pandemic.Dr. Shira Doron, an epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, said the consequences of people not taking the Covid-19 vaccines because of misinformation would be catastrophic. The vaccines are “the key piece to ending the pandemic,” she said. “We are not getting there any other way.”Ms. Powell did not respond to a request for comment.To deal with vaccine misinformation, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites have expanded their policies to fact-check and demote such posts. Facebook and YouTube said they would remove false claims about the vaccines, while Twitter said it pointed people to credible public health sources.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 16, 2020, 9:57 a.m. ETThe latest: Domino’s will pay its hourly workers a bonus.LVMH takes a stake in WhistlePig, an American rye whiskey brand.U.S. retail sales decline more than expected in November.The flow of vaccine falsehoods began rising in recent weeks as it became clear that the coronavirus vaccines would soon be approved and available. Misinformation spreaders glommed onto interviews by health experts and began twisting them.On Dec. 3, for example, Dr. Kelly Moore, the associate director for immunization education at the nonprofit Immunization Action Coalition, said in an interview with CNN that when people receive the vaccine, “everyone will be issued a written card” that would “tell them what vaccine they had and when their next dose is due.”Dr. Moore was referring to a standard appointment reminder card that could also be used as a backup vaccine record. But skeptics quickly started saying online that the card was evidence that the U.S. government intended to surveil the population and limit the activities of people who were unvaccinated.That unfounded idea was further fueled by people like Ms. Powell and her Dec. 4 tweet. Her post pushed the narrative to 47,025 misinformation mentions that week, according to Zignal, making it the No. 1 vaccine misinformation story at the time.To give more credence to the idea, Ms. Powell also appended a link to an article from ZeroHedge, which claimed that immunity cards would “enable CDC to track Covid-19 vaxx status in database.” On Facebook, that article was liked and commented on 24,600 times, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool. It also reached up to one million people.ZeroHedge did not respond to a request for comment.In an interview, Dr. Moore said she could not believe how her words had been distorted to seem as if she was supporting surveillance and restrictions on unvaccinated members of the public. “In fact, I was simply describing an ordinary appointment reminder card,” she said. “This is an old-school practice that goes on around the world.”Angela Stanton-King, a Republican candidate for Congress in Georgia, in Atlanta last month.Credit…Megan Varner/Getty ImagesOther supporters of Mr. Trump who said the election had been stolen from him also began posting vaccine falsehoods. One was Angela Stanton-King, a former Republican candidate for Congress from Georgia and a former reality TV star. On Dec. 5, she tweeted that her father would be forced to take the coronavirus vaccine, even though in reality the government has not made it mandatory.“My 78 yr old father tested positive for COVID before Thanksgiving he was told to go home and quarantine with no prescribed medication,” Ms. Stanton-King wrote in her tweet, which was liked and shared 13,200 times. “He had zero symptoms and is perfectly fine. Help me understand why we need a mandatory vaccine for a virus that heals itself…”Ms. Stanton-King declined to comment.Anti-vaccination activists have also jumped in. When two people in Britain had an adverse reaction to Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine this month, Mr. Kennedy, a son of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy who campaigns against vaccines as chairman of the anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense, pushed the unproven notion on Facebook that ingredients in the vaccine led to the reactions. He stripped out context that such reactions are usually very rare and it is not yet known whether the vaccines caused them.His Facebook post was shared 556 times and reached nearly a million people, according to CrowdTangle data. In an email, Mr. Kennedy said the Food and Drug Administration should “require pre-screening” of vaccine recipients and “monitor allergic and autoimmune reactions,” without acknowledging that regulators have already said they would do so.Ms. Ryan, the disinformation researcher, said that as long as there were loopholes for misinformation to stay up on social media platforms, purveyors would continue pushing falsehoods about the news topic of the day. It could be QAnon today, the election tomorrow, Covid-19 vaccines after that, she said.“They need to stay relevant,” she said. “Without Trump, they’re going to need new hobbies.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Meet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMeet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?” Bob Nemanich, a former elector, doesn’t. And he is hopeful that 2020 might put future electors out of a gig.Polly Baca serves as one of the Electoral College’s 538 electors, while all but calling for the group to be abolished.Credit…Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesDec. 12, 2020Updated 7:06 p.m. ETFew critics of the Electoral College are quite like Polly Baca.Ms. Baca believes the Electoral College, which has chosen American presidents since George Washington, “has absolutely no reason to be.” This year, she brought, and lost, a Supreme Court case challenging her state’s rules over how electors vote. Before electors cast their ballots for president in 2016, she invited several members to her home to plot a way — also unsuccessful — to circumvent the outcome.But unlike Donald J. Trump, whose raft of legal filings and maneuvers has failed to change the result of this year’s election, Ms. Baca is a Democrat. And she even serves as one of the body’s 538 electors while all but calling for the group to be abolished.“There’s absolutely no reason why the world’s strongest democracy doesn’t elect its C.E.O. with the popular vote,” said Ms. Baca, who will cast one of Colorado’s nine electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president-elect. “I’ve been on the outside, but I prefer to go on the inside to see what I can do.”It is the Electoral College, not the direct vote of the American people, that will decide the next president on Monday, when its 538 electors, chosen mostly during state party gatherings earlier this year, sign their ballots and send them to Washington.For generations, the body was viewed as a rubber stump to the will of the voters — but as with many things, scrutiny came only when things seemed to go wrong. The 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush showed that a mere 537 popular ballots could tip Florida’s Electoral College votes, and with it, the presidency. The 2016 election proved that a president could lose by millions of popular votes, yet be handed the White House anyway.“The head of the student council in your middle school was elected by a popular vote,” said Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian and the author of a book called “Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?” “I know it’s an old-fashioned notion, but the most fundamental democratic value is that all votes should count equally.”(He is not a fan.)Yet it’s hard to think of a time before this year that dragged the Electoral College, and American democracy with it, into such dangerous territory.The election, where it was clear by evening on Election Day that Mr. Biden had won the popular vote, turned into a nail-biter that stretched on for days — largely because of the high volume of mail ballots in a few states rich in Electoral College votes. President Trump used the delay to make false claims from the White House that fraud was underway and that he had actually won.Mr. Trump then turned to the courts to swing the Electoral College his way, backing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. The president’s lawyers appeared to hope that a friendly judge would overturn the results in one or more states that would allow him the 270 electors he needed to remain in office.As judges dismissed his suits, the president urged Republican state lawmakers to send delegations to the Electoral College who would vote for him anyway. He then brought White House influence to bear on a county election body in Michigan — one more last-ditch effort to stall the state from sending electors for Mr. Biden.That has left electors like Ronda Vuillemont-Smith, a conservative Oklahoma activist who will cast her vote for Mr. Trump on Monday, believing the president will stay in office.“I’m going to be quite honest with you, I think Donald Trump will be president for a second term,” she said, citing continued attempts to overturn the results.Yet for other electors, the frantic moves by a sitting president — indeed, most of the election itself — has led to soul-searching, not just on who should be president, but also on how the president should be chosen.“These tactics are tantamount to those in authoritarian governments,” said Alan Kennedy, a presidential elector in Denver. He said the election reminded him of a stint when he lived in Uganda and its president jailed his main opponent ahead of an election, something Mr. Trump also has repeatedly called for during his campaigns.Mr. Kennedy plans to dutifully cast his vote on Monday for Mr. Biden. But for Mr. Kennedy, a captain in the Colorado Army National Guard who served in the Middle East, a question still looms large behind the task ahead of him: Is such a system really in keeping with the nation’s ideals?“What’s terrifying is how close we came to another election of a president who won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote,” he said.Robert Nemanich is quick to point out that he had no professional qualifications for being an elector other than being a high school math teacher.Credit…Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesRobert Nemanich, a former elector from Colorado Springs, puts it another way.“Do we really want 538 Bob Nemanichs electing our president?” he asked.Mr. Nemanich is quick to point out his only professional qualification for the job was being a high school math teacher. After volunteering as a Bernie Sanders primary delegate in 2016, Mr. Nemanich landed the job after giving out credentials at a state Democratic convention where selecting the electors was one of the agenda items.“I was one of the few asking to be an elector, and I would say 90 percent of people didn’t know what that was,” he said.And while this year’s electors include respected party officials and well-known activists — Hillary Clinton said she would be an elector for New York State — there have also been some unexpected names recruited for the task.They include Terri Hodge, a former state representative in Dallas who was sentenced to a prison term after pleading guilty to corruption charges in 2010, whom Texas Democrats selected as an elector this year. (As Mr. Trump won Texas, Ms. Hodge will not cast a ballot.)Tracking Disinformation More