Stefanik’s wages of falsehood
On Jan. 6, mere hours before an angry mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, the Times Union published a fact-check of the claims made by U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik to justify her decision to vote against certification of the Electoral College votes of four states won by Joe Biden because of what she described as “serious questions.”
Most of her concerns, as expressed in an open letter to her constituents, related to her contention that courts shouldn’t hold sway over debates about election law — which seems strange for an elected official who swore an oath to uphold the nation’s laws.
When it came to Georgia, the Schuylerville Republican went beyond imposing her own legal theories — which were rejected by state and federal courts — and alleged massive fraud: Stefanik wrote that “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased, and otherwise unauthorized voters — in Fulton County alone.”
Fulton County encompasses almost all of Atlanta and boasts the Peach State’s largest Black population. Stefanik was claiming that 25 percent of its votes were fraudulent. The sort of felony that lands people in jail for years. It was quite a claim.
Or it would have been, if Stefanik’s allegations had any basis in fact. When we called Stefanik’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt — a recent hire from the Trump White House — to inquire of the source of this specific claim, she wrote that the “evidence that Congresswoman Stefanik discussed was gathered from publicly available sources such as lawsuits, affidavits, testimony, and court documents,” but would not elaborate.
Right-wing organizations had claimed that 140,000 votes were cast by people who do not live in Georgia, though this allegation covered the whole state and not simply Fulton County, and had already been debunked by state officials and rejected by judges. A self-described data journalist and pollster claimed that 132,000 votes in Fulton County were “likely ineligible,” a claim that had been picked up by the loony conspiracy site Gateway Pundit.
To be fair to Stefanik or whichever one of her staffers had written the open letter, it was produced at a time when anyone with seriously low standards could write almost anything about the presidential election and back it up with “publicly available sources.” One could accuse the Trilateral Commission, or the Daughters of the American Revolution, or the members of Aerosmith of masterminding the Democratic victory and almost certainly count on finding backup from some sweaty-palmed “expert” having some counterfactual fun in his folks’ basement. With a
little more effort, you could pour these things into a legal claim — it wasn’t the proof that mattered, merely the raising of questions.
The odd thing was that Stefanik had robustly insisted that she had never, ever made claims of widespread fraud, going so far as to brand a North Country news station’s observation that she had done so with a “FAKE NEWS ALERT” on Twitter: “Where did I say widespread fraud? I didn’t . ... Report the facts not your opinion.”
Someone in Stefanik’s camp must have recognized that her claim of widespread fraud in Fulton County was a howler, because it was the one major element of the open letter to her constituents that she didn’t see fit to present to what she presumably saw as a more important audience when she spoke, post-riot, on the floor of the House.
And that’s pretty much where things sat for the ensuing four months, until it became clear that Stefanik was in line to replace Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney as House GOP conference chair due to what many Republicans viewed as Cheney’s pain-in-the-keister insistence on telling the truth about the election and Trump’s culpability in the assault on the Capitol. Over the past few weeks, Stefanik’s Fulton County claims have been rede bunked by national outlets who got the same nothing burger response from her spokeswoman that we received in January.
Stefanik’s most extensive response to those fact-checks came last week in an interview with John Mccormack of the National Review, which is conservative but decidedly not pro-trump. Stefanik again pointed to allegations made in an unnamed court case. Pressed by the reporter as to whether she still believed that roughly a quarter of the votes cast in Fulton County were illegitimate, she dodged: “I think there are questions that are important for the American people to hear answers to.”
But Stefanik offered her answer on Fulton County’s vote back in January, and it was wrong; it has been proven wrong over and over again by journalists and state and local officials. Rather than admit a mistake — that she had taken a look at that claim and found it faulty, and therefore dumped it from her House speech — she was, five months later, still refusing to acknowledge the verifiable truth.
On Friday — two days after Cheney was formally booted from her leadership post — Stefanik was elevated to the role of conference chair, where she will play a central role in shaping the Republican message.
You could see her Fulton County claims as an error. Or you could see them as an audition piece.