I was sitting at dinner with my editor in early 2022 when filmmaker Dinesh D\u2019Souza challenged me to a debate.<\/p>\n
I had written an article assessing claims from the right-wing group True the Vote alleging that millions of ballots had been collected during the 2020 presidential election and dropped into ballot boxes \u2014 an effort to influence the election results that, in the words of the group\u2019s Gregg Phillips, constituted \u201can organized crime that was perpetrated on Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
The analysis from True the Vote was at the center of a movie that D\u2019Souza was preparing for release \u2014 hence his challenge to me. I quickly accepted, and D\u2019Souza provided me a copy to preview.<\/p>\n
My initial assessment of True the Vote\u2019s claims \u2014 which ran under the prescient headline \u201c\u2018Ballot trafficking\u2019 is the next front in the unending fight over 2020\u201d \u2014 noted that the group\u2019s methodology couldn\u2019t accomplish what it claimed to have accomplished. The group, allegedly acting on a tip about a ballot-collection effort, used cellphone geolocation data to identify thousands of people (dubbed \u201cmules\u201d) who had visited several ballot drop-boxes in the weeks before the election. But there were countless obvious problems with that assessment, including that the geolocation data wasn\u2019t sufficiently refined to allow that sort of determination and that the examples offered by True the Vote at a hearing in Wisconsin showed people moving all over certain cities \u2014 including on streets near places that had ballot boxes.<\/p>\n
D\u2019Souza\u2019s movie, \u201c2000 Mules,\u201d did not make a better case. After viewing it, I walked through the gaps in its arguments, including that there was no evidence of any scheme outside the alleged analysis from True the Vote \u2014 remarkable operational security from an alleged multistate illegal conspiracy involving thousands of people. When D\u2019Souza and I finally discussed the movie, he was unable to make a more compelling case or address the obvious gaps in his argument. For the most part, he defaulted to True the Vote\u2019s analysis and claims \u2014 fraught, given that Phillips had a record of making unsubstantiated claims about fraud.<\/p>\n
From the outset, in other words, the claims in \u201c2000 Mules\u201d and the assessments of True the Vote were not credible. That lack of credibility only increased over time. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, for example, indicated that it would not launch a probe into the alleged activity, asking True the Vote to reveal its whistleblower; the group ultimately said it had no names of whistleblowers to offer. The group promised to release all its information for public scrutiny before announcing that it wouldn\u2019t. There was one map of the visits to drop boxes made by an alleged \u201cmule\u201d shown in the movie, but Phillips told The Washington Post that it was fake.<\/p>\n
What the movie did have, though, was an argument that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump \u2014 an argument that was cleverly cloaked in the aesthetic of a serious investigation and a complicated, data-driven examination. D\u2019Souza explicitly argued that there was enough ballot movement to affect the election outcomes (relying, as he told me during our conversation, on True the Vote\u2019s ability to enhance video from a handful of ballot drop boxes which was then extrapolated to every mule everywhere). So the movie got a screening at Mar-a-Lago and enormous attention from Trump and his allies.<\/p>\n
There were \u201cso many things\u201d that happened in 2020, Trump claimed earlier this year at a rally in New Hampshire. \u201cYou take a look at True the Vote, where they have tens of thousands of people stuffing the ballot boxes.\u201d Even D\u2019Souza never claimed a number that high, but accuracy has never been Trump\u2019s watchword. That he continued to hype these allegations after they were debunked is evidence to that end.<\/p>\n
The film was produced in part by Salem Media Group, a right-wing outlet that hosts many prominent voices on its radio network. In our conversation, D\u2019Souza said that an approving panel of commentators shown in the film that included some of them \u2014 like Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager and Sebastian Gorka \u2014 was a request from Salem. Salem also distributed the film and published a companion book that made the same claims.<\/p>\n
That book was an early point of embarrassment for Salem and D\u2019Souza. After being sent to some stores, it was pulled to be rewritten \u2014 apparently because the initial version of the book identified specific nonprofit groups that D\u2019Souza alleged had participated in the nonexistent ballot-stuffing effort. This triggered understandable concerns about lawsuits. (True the Vote claimed at the time that they hadn\u2019t identified those organizations to D\u2019Souza.)<\/p>\n
It was a lawsuit from another source that led to Salem pulling the movie from its streaming platform late last week.<\/p>\n
A Georgia man named Mark Andrews had done members of his family a favor before Election Day in 2020 by collecting their ballots and dropping them in a ballot box. This was legal under Georgia law, and the authorities in the state cleared Andrews of any wrongdoing in May 2022 \u2014 a few days before \u201c2000 Mules\u201d was released.<\/p>\n
But the film still features Andrews putting his family\u2019s ballots in a drop box, with D\u2019Souza describing it as a crime in a voice-over. Andrews is also shown in the book, with a caption calling it \u201corganized crime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Andrews sued D\u2019Souza, True the Vote and Salem, among others. Late Friday afternoon, Salem Media Group released a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe apologize for the hurt the inclusion of Mr. Andrews\u2019 image in the movie, book, and promotional materials have caused Mr. Andrews and his family,\u201d it read, in part. \u201cWe have removed the film from Salem\u2019s platforms, and there will be no future distribution of the film or the book by Salem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Representatives for D\u2019Souza and Andrews\u2019s legal team did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Salem put the blame squarely on \u201crepresentations made to us by Dinesh D\u2019Souza and True the Vote\u201d \u2014 representations that were not credible even before the movie came out, as I wrote in early April 2022. In our conversation, D\u2019Souza indicated that he was relying on the representations from True the Vote.<\/p>\n
Those reliances were by all accounts lucrative. The film was the 13th most popular movie in movie theaters in the country the week it debuted and eventually grossed more than $1 million in theaters \u2014 despite being primarily distributed by streaming. Its errors were obvious soon after its release, but it was a cash cow. It was also essential to Trump and his supporters, as his January comments make clear: At last, here was putative evidence of the fraud they simply knew must have occurred.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t, as was always obvious. But sometimes the truth not only takes two years to get its boots on, it only reaches for its boots once it receives a subpoena.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I was sitting at dinner with my editor in early 2022 when filmmaker Dinesh D\u2019Souza challenged me to a debate. I had written an article assessing claims from the right-wing group True the Vote alleging that millions of ballots had been collected during the 2020 presidential election and dropped into ballot boxes \u2014 an effort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5195,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}