Thread by @emeriticus

Democrat attack ads if Trump is the nominee will just be clips of Bill Stepien (Trump's 2020 campaign manager) and Jason Miller (Trump's 2024 senior adviser) testifying that they know Trump lost in 2020 while publicly lying about or profiting from it anyway.

Miller talks about his reaction to Fox News calling Arizona and, importantly, he doesn't say Fox was wrong: "disappointment with Fox and concern what maybe our data or our numbers weren't accurate."

That critical second part was never communicated to Republican voters.

The Trump's team knew the alternate elector plan was crazy and wouldn’t work. Here’s Miller again.

Q: "Do you know what Matt Morgan or Justin Clark's [Trump campaign lawyers] views on this were, specifically alternate electors?"

Miller: "Yeah, I think they thought it was crazy."

Q: "Did they tell you that? Did you talk to them about it?"

Miller: "Certainly had conversations I know with Justin about it. But the way it's presented is that it's crazy to think that this will work. It's not going to go anywhere."

So they knew it was doomed but did it anyway.

Miller and others knew the elector plot was doomed to fail. Nevertheless, 16 Michiganders signed certificates claiming Trump won the state and are now charged with multiple felonies. mercurynews.com/2023/07/18/mic…

This clip is titled "EXH 107 - Inside the Clown Car," and it's about the theories and strategies put forward by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Bill Barr's reaction at the end is pretty funny. "I told the president it was bullshit."

Here are Trump campaign officials admitting they were ripping off Republican voters by asking them to donate money to a fund that didn't exist to overturn an election they knew they lost.

Amanda Wick, senior investigative counsel with the House Jan. 6 committee: “Between Election Day and January 6, the Trump campaign sent millions of fundraising emails to Trump supporters, sometimes as many as 25 a day.

The emails claimed the ‘Left-wing mob was undermining the election,’ implored supporters to, ‘Step up to protect' the integrity of the election, and encourage them to, ‘Fight back.’

. . . The Trump campaign knew these claims of voter fraud were false. Yet, they continued to barrage small-dollar donors with emails, encouraging them to donate to something called the Official Election Defense Fund. The Select Committee discovered no such fund existed.”

***

Hanna Allred, former Trump campaign staffer: “I don’t believe there is actually a fund called the Election Defense Fund.”

***

Q: “Is it fair to say that the Election Defense Fund was another, I think we’ve called it a marketing tactic?”

Gary Coby, former Trump campaign digital director: “Yes.”

Q: “And tell us about these funds as marketing tactics.”

Coby: “Uh, just topic matter. Where money can potentially go to be, how many can potentially be used.”

***

Wick: “The claims that the election was stolen were so successful, President Trump and his allies raised $250 million, nearly $100 million in the first week after the election.”

The Trump campaign's main lawyers thought the alternate/fake elector plan was insane and potentially illegal. But that was kept from people on the ground. Listen to Robert Sinners, a former Trump campaign staffer, reacting to learning the truth that Team Trump kept from them like they kept it from Republican voters. Based on the video, it appears Sinners had to find out through the committee.

Sinners: "I'm, I'm angry. I'm angry because I think, I think in a sense, you know, no one really cared if people were potentially putting themselves in jeopardy.

Q: "Would you have not wanted to participate in this any further as well?"

Sinners: "I absolutely would not have, had I known that the three main lawyers for the campaign that I’d spoken to in the past and were leading up were not on board? Yeah."

Later in this video an investigative counsel talks about how the Trump campaign put people like those elderly Michiganders in jeopardy as Sinners said would happen.

The mistake liberals have made in talking about this is failing to try to understand the ordeal from the perspective of people who believed they were doing the right thing, in contrast to the utter cynicism of the Trump campaign. Good people have been ruined over this. It's a tragedy.

The mistake conservatives have made, on the other hand, is refusing to confront it at all.

Robert Sinners, the former Trump campaign staffer in the last video who was the campaign’s Election Day operations manager for Georgia in 2020, served as a notary public on a lawsuit to decertify Georgia’s presidential election and “told fake electors to conceal their schemes.” He did all of that while the Trump campaign’s lawyers knew the scheme was insane and likely illegal. Per AJC:

“Sinners says he had enough of conspiracy theories when he heard the recorded phone call of then-President Trump pressuring fellow Republican Raffensperger to ‘find’ enough votes to reverse Democrat Joe Biden’s win in 2020, an incident that’s now the subject of a special purpose grand jury in Fulton County.

‘This far-flung election conversation has turned into the ultimate grift,’ Sinners said in an interview. ‘As long as they can keep the grift going and keep these people sucked into their orbit, it’s going to be a fight that has to happen. And I want to be part of that fight against it.’

Sinners isn’t a target of the special grand jury, and he gave videotaped testimony this summer to the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Sinners told Congress he was a ‘useful idiot’ in a plan to present a phony slate of 16 Republican electors who met behind closed doors in the Georgia Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, to cast the state’s votes for Trump.

Sinners, who was the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations manager for Georgia, sent an email to the fake electors asking for their ‘complete secrecy and discretion’ to ‘ensure the end result’ of Trump winning Georgia. Three vote counts and dozens of election investigations upheld Biden’s victory.”

This is somebody who put it all on the line for Trump, convinced he was doing the right thing—because Trump and his team lied to him and it almost destroyed his life.

ajc.com/politics/renou…

Sinners’ story continued. I think it’s important these people be given a way out. The vindictiveness of liberals/leftist is part of the problem.

UPDATE: Giuliani “has admitted that while acting as a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump, he made false statements in asserting that two Georgia election workers had mishandled ballots while counting votes in Atlanta during the 2020 election.” nytimes.com/2023/07/26/us/…

Not new but it's worth remembering Sidney Powell's legal defense regarding her stolen election statements was, "No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact." nbcnews.com/politics/donal…

Democrats have a counter to the conservative focus on Biden family business dealings with these video testimonies and signed statements proving Republicans were lied to about the election being stolen and fleeced for hundreds of millions of dollars before and after Jan. 6.

In light of Giuliani's admission about Georgia, here is audio of Trump trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the outcome of the election results in the state.

Raffensperger later said about the exchange: "What I knew is that we didn't have any votes to find. We had continued to look. We investigated, like I just shared, the numbers with you. There were no votes to find. That was an accurate count that had been certified."

To be totally clear: if every other Republican dropped out of the primary tomorrow and only Trump remained, I would still be reporting on this because it's true and Republican voters need to finally confront it. The truth doesn't stop being the truth because Trump is the Republican nominee or the GOP figurehead.

In this clip, Chris Stirewalt, Hope Hicks, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone go over the dynamics of the "Red Mirage." In short, it would look like Trump would win initially due to Republican and Democrat voting behavior.

Stirewalt: "In the 40 or 50 years, let's say, that Americans have increasingly chosen to vote by mail, or early, or absentee, Democrats prefer that method of voting more than Republicans do. So basically, in every election, Republicans win Election Day and Democrats win the early vote and then you wait and start counting. And it depends on which one you count first but usually it's Election Day votes that get counted first, and you see the Republicans shoot ahead and then the process of bailing and binding and unbinding all those mail-in votes, and some states like Pennsylvania, refuse to count the votes first, so you have to wait for all of that to come in.

So in every election, and certainly a national election, you expect to see the Republican with a lead, but it's not really a lead. When you put together a jigsaw puzzle, it doesn't matter which piece you put in first, it ends up with the same image. So for us, who cares? But that's because no candidate had ever tried to avail themselves of this quirk in the election counting system.

We had gone to pains, and I'm proud of the pains we went to, to make sure that we were informing viewers that this was going to happen because the Trump campaign and the president had made it clear that they were going to try to exploit this anomaly. And we knew it was going to be bigger because the percentage of early votes was higher. Right? We went from about 45% of the votes being early and absentee to, because of the pandemic, that increased by about 50%.

So we knew it would be longer. We knew it would be more. So we wanted to keep telling viewers, 'Hey, look, the number that you see here is sort of irrelevant because it's only a small percentage of these votes.'"

Q: "So this 'Red Mirage,' that's really what you expected to happen on election night?"

Stirewalt: "Happens every time."

The Trump campaign's strategy was to declare victory on the day of the election even if the campaign knew they were actually losing because of the Election Day "mirage" that would make it appear as if Republicans were winning *before* Democrat mail votes were counted. The chaos and confusion it sowed among Republican voters was part of the campaign strategy. A lot of us entertained it. Myself included.

People are getting real mad at me for this thread but all I’m doing is letting people hear what Trump staffers and advisers said in their own words about the 2020 election

Ryan is right

Ask yourself why pundits who portray themselves as truth tellers to the right will steer clear of this issue and pretend that we don’t have so many testimonies to see and hear

Fundraising emails for election fraud went out right up to Jan. 6, with one going out to Republicans 30 minutes before the riot began. You can believe that feds or bad actors were involved in luring people into doing something reckless while acknowledging that these people were called to march on Jan. 6 for election fraud that Trump could not prove in an election that Trump's team repeatedly acknowledged they lost in private. Those who went to jail over this were effectively used and abandoned.

Amazing

This is why I wrote this thread

Do you guys think that this is how Team Trump is responding to my coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings where they all talk about how they know it wasn't stolen

People asked about whether there were any investigations into allegations of fraud. This video is good on that topic.

Barr refutes the Election Night fraud claims, including the stuff about boxes being moved around at all hours.

Barr: "I explained to him that, at that point I knew the exact number of precincts in Detroit, I think it was 630 something. I said, 'Mr. President, there are 630 precincts in Detroit and, unlike elsewhere in the state, they centralize the counting process so they're not counted in each precinct, they're moved to counting stations. And so the normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours, so there's nothing. And I said, 'Did anyone point out to you, did all the people complaining about it point out to you you actually did better in Detroit than you did last time?'

The [Justice] Department, in fact, when we received specific and credible allegations of fraud made an effort to look into these to satisfy ourselves that they were without merit."

Former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone: "It's fair to say that I agree with Attorney General Barr, Attorney General Barr's conclusion on December 1st [that he had seen no systemic fraud sufficient to undermine the outcome of the election]. Yes, I did, and I supported that conclusion."

The last part is former US Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue talking about how they repeatedly told Trump that based on all the investigations, witness interviews, reviews of documents, "that these allegations simply had no merit."

All of this was kept from Republican voters by the Trump administration.

Contrast, again, what Jason Miller, Trump's 2024 adviser, said during his testimony to what Miller said on Fox News.

Listen, again, to Sinners, the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations manager for Georgia, describe how they were screwed over and left in the dark by the Trump campaign, in contrast to Miller asking people to trust the plan on TV.

Listen to Trump’s former Acting U.S. deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue refute the allegations of ballot fraud at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, Georgia. Rudy Giuliani just conceded he falsely stated two Georgia election workers committed ballot fraud there.

Donoghue is no joke. He led the successful prosecutions of El Chapo, Nxivm sex cult founder Keith Raniere, and Thomas Spota, a politician who was convicted of obstruction, witness tampering, and conspiracy charges.

Donoghue (2:00): “And I said, ‘OK with regard to Georgia, we looked at the tape, we interviewed the witnesses. There is no suitcase. The president kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots and that and the suitcase was rolled out from under the table. And I said, ‘No, sir, there is no suitcase. You can watch that video over and over. There is no suitcase. There is a wheeled bin where they carry the ballots. And that’s just how they move ballots around that facility. There’s nothing suspicious about that at all. I told them that there was no multiple scanning of the ballots. One part of that allegation is that they were taking one ballot and scanning it through three or four or five times to rack up votes, presumably for Vice President Biden. I told him that the video did not support that.”

All conservatives saw and heard about was the selectively edited clip people described as the “smoking gun.”

“I don’t want people to know that we lost.”

Update: “At least seven currently serving advisers to former president Donald Trump took actions that are mentioned prominently in one of his three criminal indictments or have been interviewed by prosecutors, potentially setting up uncomfortable situations in which they are working for his 2024 presidential bid while also serving as witnesses at one of his upcoming trials.”

Jason Miller is an obvious one.

“‘You can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases,’ Miller wrote in an email quoted in the indictment, referring to the campaign’s loss record in court challenges to the 2020 election and disparaging the efforts to subvert the election results. ‘It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy s--- beamed down from the mothership.’

The indictment also alleges that Miller spoke with Trump and informed him that election fraud claims, such as that votes were fraudulently cast in the name of dead people in Georgia, were not true.” washingtonpost.com/national-secur…