How fake is Politico's fact check of Dinesh D'Souza's 2000 Mules?
Politico gets ** two stars for fake news
Politico’s fact check of Dinesh D’Souza’s new documentary 2000 Mules is like all the other so-called fact checks of claims the 2020 election was stolen or that there was massive fraud. They attack the character of the filmmaker. They say such claims are debunked because a bunch of people with titles say so or because no court has stated otherwise, as if something doesn’t happen until it is proven in court.
They dismiss it all as the “Big Lie,” as if people have no reason to be concerned about the mass mailing of unsolicited ballots, countless numbers of which were sent to the old addresses of their intended recipients, or as if people have no reason to be concerned about state courts and state executives breaking their own state election laws to implement unprecedented election procedures, or the privately funded drop boxes with no observation or verification required for ballots to be dropped off. During one of his debates with Biden, Trump famously predicted, "They're sending millions of ballots across the country. This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen.”
2000 Mules presents something neither the fact checkers nor the stolen election theorists have before – hard evidence. D’Souza interviewed Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote about their data acquisition, data mining and data analysis work. Phillips said, “True the Vote has the largest store of election intelligence for the 2020 elections in the world. Nobody has more data than we do."
Phillips explained how the geolocation – the latitude, longitude, elevation and time – from people’s cell phones are stored by various mobile apps and put up for sale. He said True the Vote purchased trillions of phone signals located in key metropolitan areas in swing states from October 1, 2020 through election day November 3, 2020. In the case of Atlanta, it was purchased through the Senate runoff election in Georgia on January 5, 2021.
True the Vote searched for cell phones that visited at least 10 drop boxes and 5 non-profit organizations. They believe the only reason a person would visit so many non-profits and drop boxes was to illegally traffic ballots from the non-profits to drop boxes. What wasn’t clear is if that criteria had to be met in one day or over the course of the month before election day. The time frame in which those visits occurred could affect the possibility of false positives.
Multiple video clips are shown of people stuffing multiple ballots in drop boxes. Some of these people visit the box at night and look around before putting the ballots in, apparently to make sure nobody is watching. Others do it in broad daylight in front of other people. Some are seen taking a picture of the box after placing the ballots inside, presumably to show proof to whoever is illegally paying them.
In Atlanta, they say they found 242 so-called mules (ballot traffickers) who visited an average of 24 drop boxes and 8 non-profits in a two-week period. They found one mule who visited 28 drop boxes in one day. They compared the phone signals of their designated Atlanta mules with the location of people who were rioting on other dates and found 67 mules were in the middle of riots, which along with the left wing ideology of the non-profits, reinforces the idea that their mules were left wing activists trafficking Democratic votes.
In Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, True the Vote found a ballot drop box chain of custody form with an unusually high 1,962 ballots. Surveillance video for that box only showed 271 people visit that box, which means each person averaged 7 ballots. In other swing states that determined the election outcome, they said they found 200 mules in Arizona, 100 in Wisconsin, 500 in Michigan and 1,100 in Pennsylvania.
And they say they obtained 4 million minutes of official drop box video surveillance recordings, which confirmed their geolocation data about mules going to multiple drop boxes and dropping off multiple ballots in each one.
The conclusion made in the film is that the number of illegally trafficked ballots in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia surpassed President Biden’s margin of victory in those states, and if those ballots weren’t counted, President Trump would have been reelected with 279 electoral college votes to Biden’s 259. If the data being presented is accurate, the conclusion is plausible.
On the face, there is no reason to think True the Vote’s claims are false or deceptive. The technology exists for cell phone locations to be tracked and recorded.
But what isn’t clear, and might be impossible to make clear, is how many of those illegally trafficked ballots were valid votes from valid voters, or in what realistic scenario those ballots could have been identified and thrown out. It seems impossible to resolve such a matter after the fact.
And if action had been taken beforehand to prevent the illegal ballot trafficking from happening, it also seems impossible to know how many of those valid votes would have been cast in a legal manner, and thus, whether Trump really would have been able to reverse Biden’s margin of victory based on the data presented in 2000 Mules.
So even though the film makes a compelling case that illegal ballot trafficking occurred on a massive scale and that mass mailing of ballots created a situation ripe for election crime, the case that the election was stolen from Trump is harder to make.
It’s well known that big city Democratic machines have a history and tendency to commit election fraud, if they think they can get away with it. And millions of ballots on the loose seems to great a temptation for them to resist. I can testify to the depths of lawless depravity big city Democratic machines are capable of. And with all the anomalies like bellwether counties going for Trump while urban areas had record turnout for Biden, with vote counting stopping at night and vote tallies changing so drastically from Trump’s favor to Biden’s favor in the morning, it is perfectly valid for a person to believe or hypothesize there was election misconduct within big city Democratic jurisdictions.
One other plausible hypothesis for why the vote shifted so sharply for Biden at the end is the difference between the willingness of Democrats vs. Republicans to vote in-person and the difference in the willingness to mail in ballots. There was an obvious difference with more Republicans dismissing Covid precautions and voting in-person and Democrats embracing Covid precautions and mailing their votes from home. But even if that explains the sharp shift toward Biden as vote counting continued after the polls closed, there are still many other unanswered questions.
We had an election that started with 44.2 million ballots mailed out, of which it is impossible to know how many were received by someone other than the intended voter. And we had an election that ended with millions of ballots placed into drop boxes without any verification of the person dropping them off. Due to the sheer numbers, it is impossible prove or disprove how many of those ballots were illegally cast or illegally delivered. Only a fake fact check would attempt to conclude all theories of election tampering have been debunked. It is impossible to debunk something that cannot be proven or disproven.
The film viewer has a choice, to take these election researchers at their word or not. Either they did purchase cell phone geolocation data or they didn’t. And either the data they purchased is accurate or it isn’t. And the data either says what they say it says, or it doesn’t. Apart from deliberate deception on their part, or fraud on the part of the entity who sold data to them, their conclusion that Democratic mules were used to illegally traffic ballots to drop boxes, is plausible.
True the Vote does not name the entity they purchased the cell phone data from or get very deep into how they analyzed that data. Perhaps they have a legitimate business interest in not disclosing that information. That’s something a serious investigator would want to know before making a firm conclusion about the film’s veracity. That’s something law enforcement would want to know and should want to know.
It would help if True the Vote proved their claims with more details, like publishing pictures of each of their mules going to all the drop boxes they did, from a city they obtained all drop box video recordings from. So if they had 25 pictures of each of 100 mules at 25 different drop boxes in a metropolitan area in one swing state, it would be hard to deny their claims.
The most important takeaway from 2000 Mules is that it is imperative for law enforcement to thoroughly investigate the ballot trafficking that occurred during the 2020 election; and federal, state and local law enforcement should be involved. If the election was stolen from Donald Trump there’s nothing that can be done to reverse that, but lawbreakers can still be brought to justice. And state legislative bodies should implement better election security to make sure something like that can never happen again.
And hopefully D’Souza can be proven wrong. He said, "They rigged and stole the 2020 election. We are a nation run by a criminal cartel masquerading as a democracy."
D’Souza fact-checked the NPR fact check of his film.
The AP fact check of 2000 Mules was fact checked by Uncoverdc and by Substack contributor Politique Republic here.
How fake is Politico's fact check of Dinesh D'Souza's 2000 Mules?
BTW, it's "bellwether", not "bell weather".