{UPDATE, 8pm/EST: MSNBC’S Chris Hayes reported on this story tonight and the NYT is aware of it as well and was interviewed.}
This is just incredible.
By now, I’m sure you’ve read the screaming headlines, prompted by the DOJ’s unprecedented public memo about “9 Ballots Tossed Out! 7 of them were for Trump! Fraud!” etc., causing apoplectic reactions from the right-wing media, Trump supporters and the “We’re following the story” MSM?
Yeah — the Trump Campaign SUED TO HAVE THEM TOSSED.
The Trump campaign and the Pennsylvania GOP in a lawsuit argued that “naked ballots” should not be counted. They won that lawsuit. These nine ballots appear to be “naked ballots,” and that appears to be the reason they were thrown out.
In other words: The Trump campaign WON their lawsuit to have “naked ballots” NOT be counted and thrown out — “naked”, meaning, ballots that aren’t mailed in a secrecy envelope. The 9 ballots in this story were all naked ballots — and because the Trump campaign won their lawsuit to have them tossed out and uncounted, they simply WERE.
They caused it THEMSELVES.
And here’s where it gets TRULY messed up:
It’s been reported that Barr “BRIEFED TRUMP” about the whole thing and the GOP’s “investigation” into it — FULLY KNOWING that the reason they were tossed was because of THEIR OWN LAWSUIT, wanting naked ballots to be tossed — so it APPEARS as if Barr conned Trump, seeing a political opportunity to create a FAKE “fraud” story, to make him think there was “fraud” against him with his votes being thrown out, so Trump would get all Twitter-frenzied about it — and then — amazingly — released a FAKE “OUTRAGE” memo to the public, INTENTIONALLY USING THE OFFICE OF THE DOJ TO MAKE THE PUBLIC THINK THERE HAD BEEN “FRAUD” against Trump, when he knew damn well that wasn’t the case and that the campaign had caused it to happen, themselves. Either that — or this entire thing was cooked up by the campaign and Barr, to find Trump ballots tossed because of their own lawsuit and then create a “fraud against Trump” story. Either way: it’s bogus.
And if the FBI is truly investigating this and that’s not a front story, too — then it means that the FBI could likely discover that Barr INTENTIONALLY MADE THE PUBLIC THINK THERE WAS VOTER FRAUD going on, when he knew there wasn’t — which, if I’m not mistaken, is a FELONY — and, lest it be forgotten — is SPECIFICALLY what the FBI warned that foreign bad actors would be doing against the 2020 election.
Now, I’m no lawyer — but I’m guessing that any future attempt by the Trump campaign or Barr to go to court, citing “fraud” over missing ballots (or at least over “naked” missing ballots) isn’t exactly going to sit well with any judge (well, any non-Trump supporting judge), given that a) they’ve now established a precedent of FAKING “fraud” stories and USING THE OFFICE OF THE DOJ to do it, which, again, I’m pretty sure is illegal — and b) because it’s a BIT hard to sue over something you literally sued to make sure happened in the first place.
But even more importantly — it shows that Barr is not only ACTIVELY HELPING Russia in spreading disinformation about “voter fraud” to the American public — but USING THE OFFICE OF THE DOJ TO DO IT.
MSNBC’S Chris Hayes:
Additionally, it’s now been confirmed that county officials where those ballots were discarded, per the Trump campaign’s *wishes*, were totally unaware of who the votes were for, UNTIL Barr’s DOJ released that memo to the public — confirming even more that this faked narrative was purely for political gain.
ALSO: Expect them to now make the individual contractor (who was simply following the guidelines established by the Trump campaign’s lawsuit to throw out those “naked” ballots) be the fall guy for the entire thing, to mask the truth that it was because of their own lawsuit that the ballots were tossed.
Full story, HERE.
NOTE: Appreciate the rec’s. Hopefully it will mean that more people see and understand the depths and lengths to which Barr and the campaign are going to spread disinformation to the public and suppress votes (especially since Trump’s SCOTUS pick announcement tonight will likely keep it from being a big story). And please tweet to news outlets and networks to report on this, to counter the initial, false narrative that’s spread over the last 2 days.
And please vote, everybody. This has to be our Normandy beach. We have to win. There’s no choice.
UPDATE: This is getting even more bizarre. The GOP lawyer (and previous GOP candidate), David Freed, who penned the original letter (which was likely done, either during or after the fact, in coordination with Barr and the state Republican party) that Barr’s DOJ released, claiming that 7 of the ballots were for Trump — has now backtracked to reduce that to just 5 being for Trump (how do you make that “mistake”?). In addition, now they’re admitting that only *two* of the ballots were even able to be identified to specific voters. In addition, considering the odd timing of this (when the ballots were found in relation to when the general election ballots were finalized, following the Dem’s lawsuit win to keep the GOP-backed Green Party candidate off the ballots) — it’s hard to imagine that these were even general election ballots, considering that military ballots for the general election couldn’t have possibly been received yet by the elections board in the county. So were they naked *primary* ballots? And if so, why were they even still in the process of being counted? In short — the further one looks into this, the more suspicious it gets in terms of the possibility that the entire thing seems to have been cooked up by David Freed, then Barr and the Trump campaign. In short: did they just pull old military ballots from the *primary* and then push a fake “scandal” to make people think they were general election military ballots? Either way, nobody seems to be digging deeply into this, to report widely on the Trump campaign’s lawsuit over “naked” ballots being the entire reason they would have been tossed in the first place; nobody seems to be clarifying whether these were primary or general election ballots; and nobody seems to be noticing that the GOP lawyer who started this entire nonsense has admitted that his original letter had false information in it and that barely half of them were “Trump” votes — nor are they looking into the fact that only a couple of them could even be linked to specific voters. And the MSM just seems content with letting the contractor who followed the guidelines set up by the Trump campaign’s “naked ballot” lawsuit win by not counting the ballots, be the fall guy for this entire thing, rather than looking into Freed’s, the Trump Campaign’s, Barr’s and the GOP state party’s role in this obviously faked narrative. But it’s clear that the more one looks into it, the more nefarious it seems in terms of Barr pushing the false story about the ballots.