slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Associated Press...DAVID KLEPPER...Fri, June 17, 2022

One by one, several of Donald Trump's former top advisers have told a special House committee investigating his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection that they didn't believe his lies about the 2020 election, and that the former president knew he lost to Joe Biden.

But instead of convincing Trump's most stalwart supporters, testimony from former attorney general Bill Barr and Trump's daughter Ivanka about the election and the attack on the U.S. Capitol is prompting many of them to simply re-assert their views that the former president was correct in his false claim of victory.

Barr's testimony that Trump was repeatedly told there was no election fraud? He was paid off by a voting machine company, according to one false claim that went viral this week. Ivanka Trump saying she didn't believe Trump either? It's all part of Trump's grand plan to confuse his enemies and save America.

The claims again demonstrate how deeply rooted Trump's false narrative about the election has become.

“It's cognitive dissonance,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a Syracuse University professor who has studied how Trump used social media and advertising to mobilize his base. “If you believe what Trump says, and now Bill Barr and Trump's own daughter are saying these other things, it creates a crack, and people have to fill it."

The lawmakers leading the hearings into the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol said one of their goals is to show how Trump repeatedly lied to his supporters in an effort to hold onto power and subvert American democracy.

“President Trump invested millions of dollars of campaign funds purposely spreading false information, running ads he knew were false, and convincing millions of Americans that the election was corrupt and he was the true president,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the panel's vice chair. “As you will see, this misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th.”

For those who accept Trump’s baseless claims, Barr’s testimony was especially jarring. In his interview with investigators, he detailed Trump’s many absurd allegations about the election 2020, calling them “bogus” and “idiotic.”

Barr told the committee when he talked with Trump, “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”

“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said.

Following his testimony, many Trump supporters using sites like Reddit, GETTR and Telegram blasted Barr as a turncoat and noted that he’s disputed Trump's election claims before.

But many others began grasping for alternative explanations for this testimony.

“I’m still hoping Barr is playing a role,” one poster said on a Telegram channel popular with Trump supporters.

One post that spread widely this week suggested Barr was paid by Dominion Voting Systems, a company targeted by Trump and his supporters with baseless claims of vote rigging. “From 2009 to 2018, DOMINION PAID BARR $1.2 million in cash and granted him another $1.1 million in stock awards, according to SEC filings. (No wonder Barr can’t find any voter fraud!),” the post read.

Wrong Dominion. Barr was paid by Dominion Energy, a publicly traded company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, that provides power and heat to customers in several mid-Atlantic states.

Unlike Barr, Ivanka Trump has remained intensely popular with many Trump supporters and is seen by many as her father's potential successor. That may be why so many had to find an alternative explanation for why she told Congress she didn't accept her father's claims.

Jordan Sather, a leading proponent of the QAnon theory, claims both Barr and Ivanka Trump lied during their testimony on Trump’s orders, part of an elaborate scheme to defeat Trump’s enemies by confusing Congress and the American public.

“I can just imagine Donald Trump telling Ivanka: ’Hey, go to this hearing, say these things. Screw with their heads,'” Sather said last week on his online show.

Some Trump supporters dismissed Ivanka Trump's testimony entirely by questioning whether any of it was real. That's another common refrain seen on far-right message boards. Many posters say they don't even believe the hearings are happening, but are a Hollywood production starring stand-ins for the former president's daughter and others.

“She looks different in a big way," one poster asked on Telegram. "CGI?”

Smedley_buzkill

Slat, it is a fact that in Georgia, Trump was winning until a bunch of mail in ballots magically appeared in one county in the middle of the night after the poll watchers had been sent home due to a bogus water main break. It is a fact that these votes, counted unsupervised, were allowed in the final tally, thanks to GA governor and Trump enemy Brian Kemp. It is a fact that GA Sec/State Brad Raffensperger purged about 100,000 ineligible voters off the GA registration lists AFTER the votes had been certified. It is also a fact that Biden carried Georgia by 11,700 votes out of more than five million cast, and most of these votes appeared, as I said, in the middle of the night in one county where they were counted with no poll watchers present.
It is also a fact that Brad Ratburger had allowed several thousand illegal ballots and was caught and forced to disallow them when he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
It is a fact that Biden actually "won" by 43,000 votes in five swing states, out of 160 million ballots cast. Maybe you believe that a candidate who spent most of the campaign in his basement and couldn't fill a phone booth at his rallies unless he was standing in it beat someone who drew tens of thousands to his rallies. Perhaps you believe that a mumbling, stumbling non entity like Biden somehow got more votes than Obama, who was an extremely popular president.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Sorry, my friend, but in spite of my high regard for you...I'm not buying into any of the above alternative 'facts'. I offer the following ...

Ample evidence fraud did not affect election outcome.

In the immediate aftermath of Biden's win, election officials insisted the results were legitimate.

"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its partners said in a November 2020 statement. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised."

Trump's own attorney general, William Barr, said in early December 2020 that the Justice Department had "not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election." Biden won the presidency with 306 electoral votes, which Congress certified in January 2021 after the Capitol riot.

At the time, some Republican lawmakers also pushed back on claims of widespread fraud.

"Nothing before us proves illegality anywhere near the massive scale, the massive scale that would have tipped the entire election – nor can public doubt alone justify a radical break when the doubt itself was incited without any evidence," Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate's top Republican said in his address to the chamber before it was evacuated during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Since then, a mountain of evidence – including lawsuits, recounts, forensic audits and even partisan reviews – has affirmed those results.

Dozens of lawsuits by Trump and his allies aimed at overturning the election, some of which inspired misinformation about results in contested states like Nevada, failed. The Supreme Court refused to take up several cases challenging results in battleground states that played a key role in the outcome of the election.

In those battleground states, numerous audits and recounts have affirmed Biden's win:

In Arizona, a six-month audit of election results in Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, confirmed the state's election results. The audit was conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a firm hired by the Republican-dominated state Senate and whose founder had previously promoted unfounded claims of voter fraud. Multiple hand recounts, as well as a forensic audit of voting machines, have also confirmed Maricopa County's results.

In Georgia, three separate audits found no evidence of wrongdoing affecting the state's election outcome. Georgia's Republican secretary of state has repeatedly quashed claims of widespread voter fraud.

In Michigan, an audit of ballots, voting machines and election procedures affirmed Biden's win. The bipartisan effort was the most comprehensive post-election audit in the state's history.

In Pennsylvania, a statewide risk-limiting audit found "strong evidence of the accuracy of the count of votes cast in the November 2020 presidential election. " The audit examined ballots in 63 out of 67 counties.

In Wisconsin, a recount in the state's two largest counties found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. An audit of voting machines by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, commissioned by Republican lawmakers, and an investigation by a conservative law firm also upheld the election results.

Fact check: What's true about the 2020 election, vote counting, Electoral College

Many claims of fraud stemmed from a misunderstanding of how vote counting and reporting processes work in different states.

In Wisconsin, for example, some claimed late-night vote dumps for Biden were proof of fraud. That's wrong – the state can't count absentee ballots until Election Day, so tallies for the largest counties can take all day to complete, or even into the night. On election night, that resulted in a late addition of absentee votes, which trended heavily Democratic in 2020.

Similar narratives targeted other contested states.

In Michigan, an election-night typo resulted in the addition of more than 100,000 votes to Biden's tally. Although the clerical error was quickly corrected, some falsely claimed it was evidence of voter fraud. In Georgia, footage of poll workers placing ballots in their proper storage containers was also misconstrued as evidence of fraud.

Other pervasive election conspiracy theories haven't panned out, either.

Claims from conservative pundits that voting machines deleted Trump votes and changed them to Biden are false.

Companies like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic have filed defamation lawsuits against Trump allies and conservative news outlets for promoting baseless claims about their voting technology.

Based on research, the claim that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged" is rated FALSE. Lawsuits, recounts, forensic audits and partisan reviews have all affirmed the election results. Officials from both parties have repeatedly debunked claims of widespread voter fraud. With 306 electoral votes, Biden beat Trump in the election.

Jlw Loc: Wisconsin

I just wonder how many of the so called witnesses weren't threatened by peloosie or promised something

WEBCO

Arizona did audit Maricopa County, but not Yuma County that had a turn out of 158%

5 states illegally changed there voting laws for the 2020 election.

These facts don't seem to bother you, they do bother me though

AuntiE Loc: 45th Least Free State

Though I count Slatten as one of my best friends, Trump could, personally, find a cure for diabetes and Slatten would not use it because it was from Trump.

son of witless

They couldn't prove that Al Capone was a Murderer and a Bootlegger so they convicted him of tax evasion. That doesn't mean he wasn't a Murderer and a Bootlegger. Just because we can't prove that the Democrats cheated to win in 2020 doesn't mean they did not cheat.

In my home state of Pennsylvania the State Supreme Court changed the rules on counting absentee ballots in the middle of the election. This went against a law that the Democrat Governor had signed.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

There is no freaking way on God's green earth I will ever be convinced the American people were not defrauded during the 2020 election.

I am not basing this on all that occurred during the election, the anomalies, irregularities and violations of state voting laws in the battleground states, I am looking at what occurred BEFORE voting even began, like one year before.

One year before the election, almost to the day, China unleashed Covid-19 on the world.
The politically driven overreaction to this pandemic resulted in draconian measures that
isolated Americans, divided them, even families, and forced us all into incommunicado,
shut down businesses, forced unemployment, driving many out of business, shut down schools,
churches, sports events, entertainment, closed parks and recreation, which, in turn, resulted in
emotional and psychological problems on a massive scale unprecedented in our history.

And, what became of that? It opened the door to the worst "solution" possible for an honest and fair
election - Mail in ballots. The consequences of this madness are still affecting us today.

But, beyond all this, the proof the election was fraudulent is not covid and mail-in voting,
the proof is in the enormous disparity between the Trump campaign rallies vs Biden's.

No one can convince me that Biden's covid restricted rallies, the mask and social distance requirement, the virtual online rallies, the drive by rallies, and limited number of venues that drew such small crowds can even approach the frequency, intensity, and nationwide venues of President Trump's rallies that pulled in tens of thousands of supporters, many traveling across the country to attend. Sold out, standing room only, thousands who couldn't get in the facility filled the parking lots. And, the impromptu rallies, the spontaneous rallies that weren't even on president Trump's campaign schedules - the boat flotillas, vehicle parades, and park rallies all over the country - all indicate to me that one hell of a lot of Americans were grievously and unforgivably cheated in the 2020 election.

It is absolutely impossible to believe that Creepy Joe Biden and the whore he chose for veep secured 80+ million votes
without an organized voter fraud system in place and programmed to count the votes. The notion that the 2020 election was "the most secure in American history" is patently absurd.

As Stalin said, "Those who vote decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything."

Oscar louks

The

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Really https://www.yumacountyaz.gov/government/voter-election-services/election-results

From summary report:

County of Yuma, State of Arizona
General Election
November 3, 2020
Statistics
Election Day Precincts Reporting
Precincts Complete
Absentee/ Early Precincts Reporting
Registered Voters - Total
Ballots Cast - Total
Voter Turnout - Total
TOTAL
44 of 44
44 of 44
44 of 44
103,273
70,594
68.36% <<<<<<

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

Blade, I never doubted your inability to handle the truth on certain matters.

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

I 'preciate and thank you for the vote of confidence, m'lady.