Having won only one of 28 court cases surrounding his claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election President Trump is getting desperate. With zero evidence of fraud, let alone enough to overturn Joe Biden’s decisive lead in the electoral college, his legal team has resorted to conspiracy theories.
Yesterday, at a bizarre press conference in which Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had a mysterious liquid, believed to be hair dye, stream down his face, lawyer Sidney Powell laid out a series of voter fraud conspiracies on behalf of the president.
One of the most egregious claims was that voting machines used in the election featured software created “at the direction” of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who died in 2013. She also claimed the company has ties to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros.
“President Trump won by a landslide,” Powell claimed. “We are going to prove it, and we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom.”
The display was so ridiculous that the usually Trump-friendly Fox News host Tucker Carlson couldn’t give it an ounce of credence.
Thursday night he revealed his show reached out to Powell looking for evidence of her claims but didn’t receive any. Carlson even admitted that he’s so open-minded his show has done segments on UFOs, but even this was a bridge too far.
“For more than a week, Powell has been all over conservative media with the following story: This election was stolen by a collection of international leftists who manipulated vote tabulating software in order to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden,” Carlson said.
“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Carlson continued. “Millions of votes stolen in a day, democracy destroyed, the end of our centuries-old system of self-government. Not a small thing.”
However, great claims require great evidence, and after asking Powell for a little, they came up empty.
“But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests,” Carlson admitted. “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
“When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they also told us Powell had never given them any evidence to prove anything she claimed at the press conference,” he continued.
Then he delivered a piece of news that had to be hard for his audience to accept. Carlson said Powell “never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.”
That’s a tough pill to swallow for the half of Republicans who believe the election was stolen from the president.
“Why are we telling you this?” he asked. “We’re telling you this because it’s true, and in the end, that’s all that matters.”
Carlson’s firm stance against Trump’s lawyers is commendable, given the fact he probably alienated a lot of his audience in doing so. Although, it shows how low expectations are for Fox when it’s lauded for not pushing baseless conspiracies.
Carlson’s sudden regard for truth is a little questionable given his history of bending the truth and carrying water for a president whose dishonesty is pathological.
Interesting to note that Carlson didn’t mention Trump in his critique of Powell. After all, Trump’s lawyers are attempting to advance his interests. Shouldn’t Trump be held accountable for their attempt to undermine democracy with such reckless abandon?
