‘2000 Mules’ event at Capitol can’t verify voter fraud claims
Makers of a documentary about alleged fraud in the 2020 presidential election presented their findings to lawmakers and an enthusiastic crowd Tuesday at the Arizona Senate.
Left out of the presentation, however, was any supporting detail of the movie’s claims, which journalists and experts have roundly debunked in the past few weeks, to the clear frustration of the filmmakers.
About 200 people, including top Trump-endorsed politicians, showed up at a Senate committee room for the afternoon presentation by Gregg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, the group behind the rightwing voting conspiracy documentary “2000 Mules” released in early May.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko, Republican Party of Arizona Chair Kelli Ward, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb and state Sen. Wendy Rogers sat among the enthusiastic crowd listening to the two guests go over some of their claims before a panel of seven lawmakers.
Much of the roughly 90-minute event, though, including a questionand-answer period with the panel of lawmakers, was about general concern over voter fraud and possible legislative fixes.
Along the way, the presenters slammed their critics and the news media as “haters” and “journalistic terrorists” and tossed out another conspiracy theory, claiming the federal government was tracking participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot for months prior.
The pair, along with conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza, contend in the movie that a trove of 10 trillion bits of cellphone tracking data they purchased
from unnamed brokers for $2 million proves that operatives — called “mules” in the movie — made repeated, illegal deposits of ballots in key swing states, causing Trump to lose to Biden.
It follows a string of unproven claims about fraud since the 2020 election, many of which were touted and examined in the Arizona Senate’s ballot review of Maricopa County — and subsequently discarded.
Yet the movie doesn’t offer any independent verification of its primary claim or show any surveillance videos of the same person making multiple deposits in the same ballot drop box. Engelbrecht and Phillips offered various excuses for the lack of proof including that they didn’t want to release “proprietary” methods they used to interpret the cellphone data.
They showed excerpts from a Maricopa County surveillance video of a drop box in downtown Phoenix, pointing out that a tent blocked the view of the drop box. Yet vehicles and people approaching the drop box were still visible in the county video, meaning the documentarians potentially could have found video evidence of some of the “mules,” if they existed. True the Vote claims that 200 people in Arizona made an average of 20 ballot deposits each at drop boxes.
The movie makes use of an actual investigation into “ballot harvesting” in Yuma County, conflating it with the alleged multi-state fraud. Ballot harvesting, the term for collecting and submitting other voters’ ballots, is legal in Arizona only for family members, household members and for caregivers – for everyone else, it’s a felony.
Is single ‘witness’ an actor?
But Rep. Tim Dunn, R-Yuma, said he wasn’t aware of any links between the Yuma County investigation, which involves allegations of ballot harvesting by local officials in the August 2020 primary election, and claims involving the November 2020 general election. The ongoing investigation in Yuma County has produced one guilty plea in January and another is expected this week.
An unnamed, alleged witness to Yuma County ballot harvesting is the only person in the movie who alleges they saw something illegal. Engelbrecht told the crowd Tuesday that the New York Times was preparing an article saying that person, an unnamed woman from Yuma County, was an actor. She disputed that.
Gregg Phillips, who has never proved his 2017 claim that millions of noncitizens voted in 2016, was asked by Rep.
Quang Nguyen, R-Prescott Valley, if the group turned over its findings to a law enforcement agency.
Phillips said he said he met with three people from the Attorney General’s Office a year ago and gave them a “disk” with the group’s findings, but the office informed him just yesterday that they never received anything from him.
He didn’t say what kind of disk it was, but a standard DVD holds only 4.7 gigabytes of data — a tiny fraction of the trillions of bits of data True the Vote claims it has.
Phillips said he didn’t want to engage in a “verbal fistfight” with the office over whether he really gave them anything, but that he was scheduled to meet with representatives of the attorney general Wednesday morning. He added, though, that True to Vote had turned over its findings to the FBI, and that he would not give data to the Attorney General’s Office if the FBI tells him not to.
After the event, Phillips denied to an Arizona Republic reporter that he knew the movie included images of a map of Moscow on a computer screen that was portrayed in the movie as Gwinnett County, Georgia, saying he had no “creative control” over the production.
Asked another question, Phillips grew frustrated and stormed out, yelling, “Just back off, man!”