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Former President Donald Trump was subpoenaed by a House select committee on Thursday to investigate January. 6 Attack the Capitol.
Trump’s response: His consistent election lie.
In a 14-page letter to the committee chair, Rep. Benny Thompson, Trump did not say whether he would comply with the subpoena. Instead, he repeated various long-debunked election claims.
The following is a non-exhaustive fact check of some of Trump’s claims in the letter.
Trump’s headline on the document read: “2020 Presidential Election Rigged and Stolen!”
Facts first: This is wrong. The 2020 election was not rigged or stolen. Joe Biden is a legitimate winner and Trump is a legitimate loser. There is no evidence in any state that fraud was even enough to change the outcome.
Trump has listed evidence of alleged wrongdoing in the battleground state he lost. Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, with one statement: “121,240 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania as of February 2021.”
Facts first: This is Incorrect. Pennsylvania did not cast more votes than registered voters in the 2020 election; the state has about 7 million ballots and about 9 million registered voters, The turnout was about 76.5%If Trump repeated his claim that the state counted more votes in the 2020 election than the voters who participated in that election, he would also be wrong.The claim was based on a misreading of then-incomplete state data by Republican state lawmakers, in 2020 and 2021.
Trump made a dramatic statement on Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa County, where Republicans conducted a bogus partisan “audit” of the 2020 election. He wrote: “After Election Day 2020, Maricopa County accepted at least 20,000 mail-in ballots, including 18,000 received from the U.S. Postal Service on November 4, 2020, exceeding the 10,457 ballots cast for the entire election. ”
Facts first: This is wrong.If Reuters has report, the claim circulating among Trump supporters on social media was based on a misunderstanding of a document that did not actually show that Maricopa County accepted any ballots after Election Day, let alone Thousands of votes were cast. The document is a receipt for the transfer of the ballot to a company that scans the ballot envelope and captures the voter’s signature as part of the county’s process of verifying the signature.
“The 18,000 ballots were received on Election Day before the deadline and delivered to Runbeck the next day for processing in accordance with our standard operating procedures,” Runbeck Chief Executive Jeff Ellington told Reuters in June.
Trump returned to his favorite conspiracy theory about a county in Michigan, another swing state he lost to Biden. After claiming that one of his ally, Republican attorney general candidate Matthew DePerno, “found that voting machines were subverted and accessed remotely,” Trump continued: “In Antrim County, there are 7,048 The votes were changed to support Joe Biden.”
Facts first: Antrim County did not alter ballots because of the vandalized voting machines, and there is no evidence of any willful misconduct in the county.Conversely, conservative counties human error is preparing its election technology. The mistake resulted in some of Trump’s votes initially being reported as votes for Biden in unofficial preliminary results.This error was quickly corrected long before any results were officially published, and Republican-led investigation A Michigan Senate committee on the 2020 election concluded that “ideas and speculation about manual or electronic manipulation of votes by Antrim County election staff or outside entities are untenable.”
As for DePerno’s attempt to prove that something nefarious happened in Antrim County, the commission also wrote in its section on the situation in Antrim County: “The Commission has paid close attention to Mr. DePerno’s efforts and can confidently conclude , they are clearly false and based on misleading information and illogical conclusions.” DePerno and others are currently being investigated by the special counsel for their alleged post-election attempts to gain access to election technology; DePerno denies having any wrongdoing and claim the allegations are politically motivated.
Trump has suggested, as before, that he lost Georgia in part because of nefarious conduct in Fulton County, where Atlanta is located. He wrote that an investigator reported that 1,200 ballots were “pushed through the back door” days after Election Day, when President Trump’s huge lead “would swell as Fulton County continued to count more votes. shrink”.
Facts first: This is deceiving.The independent monitor employed by the state board of elections to observe the Fulton County election did not report any indication that the ballots were fraudulent; wrote in his report “I have never observed any conduct involving dishonesty, fraud or willful malfeasance by Fulton County election officials,” although he did find sloppy and other issues. Instead, he simply wrote that while “this was a judgment call,” he believed the “optics” of getting ballots through the back door two days after Election Day was poor and a “wrong request for transparency purposes.”
Also, contrary to Trump’s impression here, the monitors did not link this particular set of votes to Trump’s illusory shrinking lead in Georgia. The phrase “shrinks as Fulton County continues to count more votes” appears to be a quote from CNN — when it made clear that Trump’s lead was not the result of any evil — rather than the monitor himself.
This story has been updated.