For more than a year, former Attorney General William Barr has publicly and vehemently rejected former President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was lost due to widespread election fraud. After doing so again during a recorded deposition that the House January 6 committee aired on Monday evening, Barr was challenged to debate the facts.
The challenge came from conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who released the documentary “2000 Mules” in May. The documentary appears to present compelling evidence supporting Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was manipulated by ballot tampering.
The Western Journal reports that “D’Souza threw down the gauntlet after Barr laughed when referring to the movie during a recorded deposition that was aired by the House January 6 committee Monday.”
Barr said. “My opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind.” Laughing, Barr added, “including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie.”
January 6 committee member Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., asked Barr to provide his assessment of the documentary:
The Washington Post reports that Barr responded to Lofgren’s question by saying the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) told the GOP there was not enough evidence. Barr said that he was “unimpressed with” the cellphone geotracking evidence used in “2000 Mules” by the vote integrity group True the Vote, which partnered with D’Souza in making “2000 Mules.”
Without elaborating, GBI Director D. Victor Reynolds wrote to the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party David Shafer and True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips that the cellphone data True the Vote offered “while curious, does not rise to the level of probable cause that a crime has been committed.”
Barr took the same tone and offered little support for his conclusions. The Washington Examiner reports Barr saying:
“The cellphone data is singularly unimpressive. I mean, basically, if you take two million cellphones and figure out where they are in a big city like Atlanta or wherever, just by definition you are going to find that many hundreds of them have passed by and spent time in the vicinity of these boxes.”
“And the premise if you go by five boxes or whatever it was that that’s a mule is just indefensible,” Barr concluded.
D’Souza alleges that the data absolutely shows probable misconduct and responded to Barr in a series of tweets — one of which included a challenge to debate the matter.
“I’d like to invite Bill Barr to a public debate on election fraud. Given his blithe chuckling dismissal of #2000 Mules,” this should be easy for him. What do you say, Barr? Do you dare to back up your belly laughs with arguments that can withstand rebuttal and cross-examination?”
The documentary’s premise is that an illegal ballot harvesting scheme took place across the country. The film allegedly documents illegal ballot harvesting efforts in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin during the 2020 general election.
The term “mule” in the movie references those who were allegedly paid to repeatedly pick up batches of ballots and place them in drop boxes, thus altering the outcome of the election.
According to the Western Journal, on May 31, True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Phillips testified before Arizona Republican state senators, saying:
“They used cellphone geotracking data to identify people who made 10 or more drop box stops along with five or more visits to non-governmental organizations working on voter turnout during the 2020 general election.”
Engelbrecht told lawmakers True the Vote’s “mule” threshold for eliminating the possibility of error was very high.
“We wanted to focus on a very clear, narrow data set that showed what we would consider this extreme outlier behavior, and ultimately we settled on 10 times. The devices that we focused in on went to drop boxes 10 or more times,” she said.
“And here in Arizona they went an average of 21 times,” Engelbrecht added.
The Associated Press conducted a review and determined that True the Vote’s analysis was “flawed” because people might happen to travel to or pass by ballot drop boxes for other reasons.
D’Souza reiterated that the “mules” tracked in Arizona went to an average of 21 drop box sites, and that for a mule to be counted in their analysis, he or she had to go to at least 10 different drop boxes during the election cycle (located miles apart), making it very unlikely their conduct was just coincidence.
Challenging Barr’s claims, D’Souza tweeted:
“Is there anyone competent in cell phone geotracking who will defend what Bill Barr said? He insists that random people in a busy city going past ballot dropboxes cannot be distinguished from mules who each go on routes and stop specifically at 10 or more drop boxes. Is this true?”
The Western Journal reports that to “further guard against accidentally picking up those who happened to pass by drop box locations regularly, True the Vote bought cellphone data from September, October and November, showing before, during and after election tracking results.
True the Vote asserts, “Only those whose cellphones placed them at drop boxes when voting was occurring were included in the data.”
The “2000 Mules” documentary also asserts that in addition to overwhelming cellphone evidence, the True the Vote group has obtained more than 4 million minutes of surveillance footage noting activity near drop boxes. The video was obtained through public records requests and reportedly shows the mules in action.
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