During a free-wheeling Monday “hearing” in Arizona, top Trump ally Rudy Giuliani asserted that at least 100,000 votes in Maricopa and Pima Counties “should be declared null and void” on the basis of alleged systematic exclusion of Republican observers from the ballot tabulation process. The problem is that this allegation of systematic Republican exclusion is false. Trump’s allies have raised the claim elsewhere, but among other examples of evidence to the contrary: in a Pennsylvania court hearing shortly after the election at which the Trump campaign’s legal representation said that GOP observers had been excluded from ballot tabulation, the Trump campaign’s lawyers eventually admitted that their side did actually have “a nonzero number of people in the room.”
Giuliani’s conspiracies hinge on the claim that, as Trump leads emerged in the immediate aftermath of polls closing across the country, corrupt authorities stopped counting in order to give themselves time to make up the differences for Biden with fraudulent ballots. There is no meaningful evidence for this claim. Delays in ballot-counting unfolded, in part, in areas where authorities were legally barred from counting mail-in ballots until later. This concept isn’t complicated. It’s not a secret. However, ignorance — whether willful or not — underlies Giuliani’s nonsense.
Giuliani was so committed to his outrageous conspiracies that, at one point, he suggested that authorities who sign off on the results, as they stand, could be committing a crime via certifying a false statement. As the Arizona hearing got underway, Giuliani self-confidently proclaimed as follows:
‘Our side of the story is legitimate. Our side of the story needs to be heard, and it’s been uniformly censored by Big Tech, Big Media, the crooked Democrats, and basically people who are saying: “Don’t show us the facts. We’ve decided already that this was a free and fair election; it was done perfectly. Please don’t interrupt that narrative with truth.” But we’re going to interrupt that narrative this morning with the truth.’
He subsequently complained about supposed socialist tendencies on the part of leaders who have taken very basic steps to protect their communities from COVID-19. He angrily ranted as follows:
‘That kind of despotism and authoritarianism — it always starts slowly. You could see it in things done 10, 12 years ago. I think the pandemic released the tendencies of left-wing, socialist-leaning, socialist governors, Congressmen, Senators — to move to where socialism always moves to. In the history of socialism, which is an old idea, not a new idea, authoritarianism is always the end result, because when the government controls property, the government controls, and it doesn’t want to be interrupted by stupid ideas of the dumb people in the country. The elite know better. Boy, doesn’t that sound like America today?’
Giuliani subsequently reiterated his claim that a centrally-planned Democratic conspiracy to perpetrate fraud unfolded during the presidential election. There is no meaningful evidence for this claim. Giuliani talks as if his claims are proven and meaningfully supported, but they’re not.
He belligerently ranted as follows:
‘This election was the subject of a conspiracy that goes back before the election — a conspiracy that was hatched by the crooked leaders of the Democratic Party… the very very top of the Democratic Party has been corrupted, badly, since Clinton, and it’s carrying itself through, and it hasn’t been exorcised. The head hasn’t been cut off yet, of that corruption — This conspiracy… centers around the mail-in ballots and the absentee ballots… They’re very dangerous. It’s almost impossible for even semi-crooked politicians to resist the temptation to use it for ballot-stuffing.’
Watch the Arizona hearing — including Giuliani’s free-wheeling opening statement — below:
