Fact check: Trump responds to Jan. 6 committee subpoena with usual election lies

Former President Donald Trump was subpoenaed Thursday by the Home choose committee examining the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Trump’s action: his typical election lies.

In a rambling 14-page letter to committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, Trump did not state whether he would adhere to the subpoena. Rather, he duplicated numerous long-debunked election claims.

Here is a non-exhaustive reality check of a few of Trump’s claims in the letter.

Trump’s title on the file was this: “THE GOVERNMENTAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!”.

Information First: This is incorrect. The 2020 election was not rigged or taken. Joe Biden was the genuine winner, Trump the genuine loser. There is no proof, in any state, of scams even near adequate to have actually altered the result.

Trump noted supposed proof of misbehavior in swing states he lost. Among his claims about Pennsylvania, which Biden won by more than 80,000 votes, was this: “In Pennsylvania, since February 2021, there were 121,240 more votes than citizens.”.

Information First: This is incorrect Pennsylvania did not have actually more votes cast in the 2020 election than it had actually signed up citizens; the state had about 7 million votes cast and about 9 million signed up citizens, for a turnout of about 76.5% And Trump was likewise incorrect if he was duplicating the claim that the state counted more votes in the 2020 election than it counted citizens who took part in that election. This claim, which was based upon a Republican state lawmaker’s misreading of state information that wasn’t finish at the time, was consistently exposed in 2020 and 2021

Trump made a significant claim about Arizona’s most populated county, Maricopa County, where Republicans carried out a sham partisan “audit” of the 2020 election. He composed: “Maricopa County accepted a minimum of 20,000 mail-in tallies after Election Day 2020, consisting of 18,000 on November 4, 2020, got from the U.S. Postal Service– more than the whole Election margin of 10,457 tallies.”.

Information First: This is incorrect. As Reuters has reported, this claim, which has actually flowed amongst Trump advocates on social networks, is based upon a misconception of a file that does not really reveal that Maricopa County accepted any tallies after Election Day, not to mentioned countless tallies. The file was an invoice for transfer of tallies to a business that scans the tally envelopes, catching citizens’ signatures, as part of the procedure of the county confirming the signatures.

Runbeck president Jeff Ellington informed Reuters in June: “These 18,000 tallies were gotten on Election Day prior to the due date to cast a vote and provided to Runbeck the next day for processing, following our standard procedure.”.

Trump went back to a preferred conspiracy theory about a specific county in Michigan, another swing state he lost to Biden. After declaring that a person of his allies, Republican attorney general of the United States prospect Matthew DePerno, “discovered ballot devices were overturned and accessed from another location,” Trump continued: “In Antrim County, 7,048 votes were altered in favor of Joe Biden.”.

Information First: No votes were altered in Antrim County due to the fact that of voting devices being overturned, and there is no proof of any deliberate misbehavior of any kind in the county. Rather, the conservative county made a human mistake in preparing its election innovation. The mistake led to some choose Trump being at first reported as choose Biden in informal initial outcomes. The mistake was quickly fixed, long prior to any outcomes were made authorities, and a Republican-led examination of the 2020 election by a Michigan state Senate committee concluded that “that concepts and speculation that the Antrim County election employees or outdoors entities controlled the vote by hand or digitally are indefensible.”

When it comes to DePerno’s efforts to show something dubious occurred in Antrim County, the committee likewise composed this in its area on the Antrim County scenario: “The Committee carefully followed Mr. DePerno’s efforts and can with confidence conclude they are demonstrably incorrect and based upon misinforming details and illogical conclusions.” DePerno and others are now under examination by an unique district attorney over their own supposed efforts to access to election innovation after the election; DePerno has actually rejected any misbehavior and declared that the allegations are politically encouraged.

Trump insinuated, as he has previously, that he lost Georgia in part due to the fact that of dubious behaviors in Fulton County, house to Atlanta. He composed that a detective reported 1,200 tallies being “‘ wheeled in through the back entrance’ days after Election Day, when President Trump’s enormous lead ‘diminished as more votes continue to be tallied in Fulton County.'”.

Information First: This is misleading. The independent display who was worked with by the state election board to observe the election in Fulton County did not report any indication that these tallies were deceptive; in reality, he composed in his report that “at no time did I ever observe any conduct by Fulton County election authorities that included dishonesty, scams, or deliberate impropriety,” though he did discover sloppiness and other concerns. Rather, he merely composed that, although “it was a judgment call,” he believed the “optics” of bringing tallies through a back entrance 2 days after Election Day were bad which this was “the incorrect require openness functions.”

Likewise, contrary to the impression Trump left here, the display did not link this specific group of tallies to Trump’s illusory lead in Georgia diminishing. The words “diminished as more votes continue to be tallied in Fulton County” seem a quote from CNN– which clearly mentioned at the time that Trump’s diminishing lead wasn’t the outcome of anything dubious– and not the display himself.

This story has actually been upgraded.