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New report reveals Lindsey Graham trashed Trump’s “third grade” election fraud claims

New report reveals Lindsey Graham trashed Trump’s “third grade” election fraud claims

With Peril — the new book by The Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa examining the post-election-day events in the Trump White House — due out tomorrow, more details have come to light about the initial responses of  some Republican Senators to Donald Trump’s sore-loser claims of elctoral malfeasance.

The revelations are not exactly favorable for Trump or anyone still swallowing his unsupported allegations.

According to Woodward and Costa, the former president’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, held a private briefing session arranged by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in Meadow’s West Wing office on January 2nd of this year, just days before Congress was set to confirm the election results.

Here’s how The Washington Post describes the scene in their article detailing the book’s revelations:

“Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney at the time, put forward a computer whiz who presented a mathematical formula suggesting Biden’s support in certain states was unrealistic. Graham, a lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, found the reasoning too abstract. He wanted hard evidence. “Give me some names,” Graham said at the Saturday meeting. “You need to put it in writing. You need to show me the evidence.”

While Giuliani promised to deliver proof of his claims of irregularities in just two days, it appears that whatever Senator Graham may have said in support of Trump at the time, behind the scenes he was unconvinced that the evidence he was presented with had any value whatsoever, privately referring to Giuliani’s arguments on behalf of the defeated president as “third-grade” level.

When Giuliani did deliver the promised proof, in the form of a document entitled “Voting Irregularities, Impossibilities, and Illegalities in the 2020 General Election,” Graham immediately forwarded it to Lee Holmes, his head lawyer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to analyze.

Giuliani’s proof it turns out “included sweeping claims lacking references or evidence,” according to The Washington Post.

“One said Pennsylvania had processed 682,777 mail-in ballots without proper observation — an assertion underlying a suit rejected by a federal judge two months earlier. “If you deduct just this number, President Trump wins the state by hundreds of thousands,” the memo argued. Another claimed hundreds of dead people had voted in Georgia, based on an extensive analysis of “mail-in and absentee ballot voter names and obituaries.”

Holmes noted that it was impossible to discern what documents had actually been used in Giuliani’s calculations and that the data proved absolutely nothing on a conclusive basis.

“Of the more sensational claims, such as ballots from the deceased, Holmes thought it was much more likely, based on Giuliani’s own evidence, that some people had voted and then died, according to the book. He was equally unconvinced by theories about people voting twice, improper absentee ballot applications and fraudulent ballots cast from vacant or nonexistent addresses. ‘Holmes could find no public records that would even allow someone to reach these conclusions,’ according to the account in Peril,” the newspaper writes.

When Holmes did check the proferred evidence against public records, Giuliani’s arguments fell apart completely.

“Claims of nearly 12,000 so-called “overvotes” in Arizona — when someone picks more than the maximum number of selections allowed — masked the fact that only 180 applied in the presidential contest, not nearly enough to close Biden’s margin of victory in the state,” The Washington Post explains.

The authors of Peril summed up Graham’s attorney’s overall response to the supposed proof in a devastating turn of phrase.

“Holmes found the sloppiness, the overbearing tone of certainty, and the inconsistencies disqualifying,” Woodward and Costa write. The memos, Holmes determined, “added up to nothing.”

The article in the Post goes on to detail the similar investigation into Trump’s claims of electoral fraud conducted by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) who also found that the defeated president’s attempts to overturn the results were unjustified.

You can read the complete details of the new revelations contained in the new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in The Washington Post article here (paywall).

While the fact that Trump’s stolen election complaints have no basis in evidence isn’t surprising, the fact that both Senators Graham and Lee continue to support Trump despite actually investigating his claims and dismissing them as garbage simply provides a new example of how far the Republican Party has sunk into a defensive posture rathert than trying to uphold the truth.

Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter. 

Original reporting by Isaac Stanley-Becker at The Washington Post. 

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Vinnie Longobardo
Managing Editor
Vinnie Longobardo is the Managing Editor of Occupy Democrats. He's a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.

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