RUTHFULLY YOURS

Shortly after noon Eastern Time, some Trump legal team members assembled for a press conference to bring the media up to speed about what Trump’s team believes it can prove in terms of election fraud. For regular American Thinker readers, much of what they said was old news. For the media, though, it was new information, and they were not happy.

Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were the main speakers, with Jenna Ellis having a small backup role. Giuliani discussed the non-computer related shenanigans in the various jurisdictions. He asserted that the Trump team had collected hundreds of affidavits attesting to old-fashioned vote stealing. He talked about illegal ballots, which primarily came in via the mail, faked vote counts, and illegal efforts to prevent Republicans from observing the counts.

Giuliani declined to make all but one of the affidavits available to the assembled reporters. His reason was simple: He knew that the media would immediately begin to harass the ordinary citizens who put their reputations on the line to attest to fraud. After the various cases go to court, there’ll be time enough for the reporters to stalk witnesses.

Giuliani did read from the affidavit of Jesse Jacob, who worked for the City of Detroit and the State of Michigan. “She said, ‘I was instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than when they were actually sent in.’”

Having read that quotation, Giuliani elaborated. “The supervisor made that announcement for all workers to engage in that fraudulent practice. That’s not me saying that. That’s this American citizen saying that under oath. Then she was instructed ‘by my supervisor not to ask for a driver’s license or any photo ID when a person was trying to vote.’ Don’t ask for identification.”

Giuliani then posed the obvious rhetorical question. “Why would you not ask for identification? Because you knew that a lot of people not entitled to vote were going to come in and early vote.”

Jacob’s affidavit also said that many people voted twice. She related, too, that she was told not to look for deficiencies in the ballot and to ignore the signatures.

The former mayor repeatedly returned to the fact that this kind of cheating was important, not just because it deprived Trump of his earned victory, but also because it was a devastating blow to the integrity of American elections.

The most significant downside to Giuliani’s statement was that, as he began to perspire, the dye he’d used to touch up his graying temples started to run down his face.

Sidney Powell made her now-familiar statement that the Dominion Software Systems had been created in socialist Venezuela specifically to steal elections; that the votes were tallied in Barcelona, Spain, and Frankfurt, Germany (and yes, there had been a raid on a German facility); and that the computer system had been used to switch millions of votes away from Trump and throw them to Biden. Powell pulled no punches and was confident in her assertions.

Jenna Ellis scolded the closed-mindedness of the assembled media. She also made a critical point: What the lawyers said at the press conference was an opening statement in a trial. This was not the time to present evidence. Instead, Trump’s team will present the evidence in their court filings.

Tucker Carlson later deliberately or accidentally missed Ellis’s point. During Thursday’s show, Carlson complained that Sidney Powell refused to make known to him the facts that support her argument and eventually told him (or his staff) to stop badgering her.

Powell’s position, though, is correct. Trump’s lawyers are frantically assembling and refining evidence that would typically take months to prepare. They shouldn’t have to defend it against ill-informed reporters. As Ellis said, this is the part where lawyers state their case, not where they prove it. Additionally, Powell must be careful identifying evidence lest Democrats destroy important data and equipment.

The biggest problem the Trump team is going to face is the media. Early in the question-and-answer session, a CNN “journalist” shouted out, “Is your goal in this to pressure officials and lawmakers in the battleground states to block or delay certification so the GOP can pick their own electors? Is that the end game here?” In other words, “All I heard was blah-blah-blah, so I assume Trump is trying to cheat.”

Trump will have to work do whatever he can to make his case to the American people because the media are going to do whatever they can to destroy him.