Court documents
While a larger majority of Americans recognize that President Biden won the 2020 election, a recent poll suggested that only 51 percent of Arkansans do. Nationally, as of August, 69 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still believe the election was stolen from the former president.
This is despite William Barr, a lifelong Republican who served as Donald Trump’s hand-selected attorney general, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, reportedly her husband Jared Kushner, and a host of other former Trump officials acknowledging the results as legitimate.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of former Trump officials who have parted ways with him on the 2020 election and other issues, which includes his then-Defense Secretary James Mattis, Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer, National Security Adviser John Bolton, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert . . . the list goes on.
The former president’s claims of election fraud were rebuked in 62 of 62 court cases immediately following the election by judges of all political stripes, some of whom were appointed by Donald Trump.
During the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, Vice Chair Liz Cheney challenged the former president’s actions even though she voted with his political agenda 97 percent of the time while in office. Further, almost all of the evidence provided to the committee against Donald Trump came from members of his inner circle who were in the White House and eyewitness to the discussions and strategy sessions conducted before, during and after the events that occurred at the Capitol.
And in a move that many thought would put the issue to rest in April, Fox News settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Machines to the tune of about a quarter of its annual revenue ($787 million) admitting its people had knowingly and repeatedly perpetuated a lie about the existence of an algorithm in Dominion’s voting machines that switched Trump votes to Biden.
One of the recurring guests on Fox who disseminated this false claim was Sidney Powell, a top legal aide to Trump. The other day she joined a growing chorus of guilty pleas in regard to claims and actions after the last presidential election.
Powell’s guilty plea was followed by that of another co-defendant, Kenneth Chesebro. And just last week, a third co-defendant, Jenna Ellis, who served as a top lawyer to Trump and was part of his so-called “elite strike force team,” pleaded guilty as well.
If you count them all, it comes to nearly one-quarter of the 18 co-defendants in the case who have entered guilty pleas.
All of this leads us to one question: What’s it going to take for everyone to believe that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square? Even his lawyers are admitting it in court.