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00:15:32.900Voting fraud, Russian collusion was the only thing we heard from the media party for the first three years trying to delegitimize Trump's election.
00:15:43.060When we have genuine problems in key states, battleground states this time, though, the media couldn't be hastier in their unanimous view that Joe Biden must be crowned the president right away.
00:15:58.340In that press conference, there was also a lawyer named Sidney Powell, who made more dramatic allegations about a foreign internet conspiracy, I suppose, to literally revise and undo votes electronically.
00:16:19.060A spectacular claim that has yet to be proved, but some would say you save your evidence for the court of law, not for press conferences.
00:16:27.420Joining us to help digest this huge story is our friend, Joe Pollack, senior editor at large at Breitbart.com.
00:16:37.940There were a lot of work-a-day allegations, like regular election fraud allegations in the press conference.
00:16:45.980What Sidney Powell talked about, this Venezuelan company changing millions of votes, I've never heard anything so spectacular like that in my life.
00:16:53.700And it makes me nervous when I hear something that spectacular because it's almost like I want it to be true to explain this election loss, but it feels like it's too far.
00:17:04.980Well, I think she's operating on a theory, and I've heard it from a couple of other people who are studying what they see are patterns in the data, and they're also looking at the ownership of some of these companies that run the voting machines and so forth.
00:17:25.460I mean, I can't rule anything out, but it's not the kind of thing that's going to be easily provable, even if it is presented to a court of law.
00:17:34.020You'd actually have to show evidence of a crime.
00:17:38.980So that would obviously take significant proof and development of evidence, and I don't know that that's going to be something they can even do, even if it did happen.
00:17:50.700Let's assume, for argument's sake, that it did.
00:17:52.940I don't know that they're going to be able to do that in the time they have left before states certify their votes.
00:17:59.480But Giuliani's accusations seemed to hang together a little better, and they seemed a little more credible to me because I think they are the kind of errors or, in his estimation, deliberate interference with the election that you would expect in mass mail-in voting.
00:18:20.740There's no civilized country that does an election through mass mail-in voting, and the reason is, as Jimmy Carter said in 2005, absentee ballots are the most vulnerable to fraud.
00:18:33.620And we saw in early attempts this year to run elections through mass mail-in voting where it hadn't been done before that roughly one in four of the ballots were rejected.
00:18:44.980Either they didn't have signatures on them, or they were sent by voters who were ineligible, or the addresses were wrong.
00:18:54.160You can imagine how awful it would be to try to determine the outcome of a national election if one out of every four ballots submitted by mail, and two-thirds of the early ballots in this election were submitted by mail, one out of four is wrong.
00:19:08.020I mean, that could swing the results in any number of states.
00:19:11.380And what Democrats did was they sued in a lot of states, I think 18 states altogether, to weaken some of the rules on absentee ballots.
00:19:23.680That made the ballots easier to accept, harder to reject.
00:19:27.180So that's probably the most plausible explanation for the rejection rate plummeting from around about 25 percent to well below 1 percent.
00:19:35.800They did it through the courts, and they were able to, in some cases, negotiate these consent decrees, which Democrats did in Georgia, for example.
00:19:44.800The consent decree in Georgia makes it almost impossible to check ballot signatures, even though you're required to do that by state law.
00:19:52.280In Georgia, the consent decree, again, which didn't go through the legislature, it just went through the courts, makes it almost impossible to actually practically check the ballot signatures.
00:20:01.680So Democrats succeeded in weakening all these protections, and they then ran a turnout operation based on vote by mail.
00:20:08.120So what Giuliani describes, where ballots are not being checked properly, not being observed properly, perhaps are being included when they shouldn't be, that sounds like what you might expect.
00:20:19.400And you might expect that even through a quasi-legal process, because the Democrats were able to obtain these agreements or these judgments that allowed some of that stuff to happen.
00:20:29.540In Pennsylvania, for example, they're now supposed to accept ballots that are received even without postmarks.
00:20:35.760So there's no guarantee they even went through the mail.
00:20:38.520Somebody might have just put it in a box somewhere.
00:20:42.800So there are all these safeguards that have been dropped.
00:20:46.220So Giuliani's claims, he's alleging a little bit more than I'm stating.
00:20:50.180He's saying that there were deliberate violations of the rules.
00:20:53.100Another claim the campaign is making is that the rules as adopted were invalid and unconstitutional, which I think is actually a good argument.
00:21:01.260So Giuliani's allegations hang together a little bit better for me.
00:21:05.320Sidney Powell is out there talking about an issue that is going to be difficult to prove, I think, even if she has evidence.
00:21:12.000How do you how do you develop a case that is so complicated?
00:21:17.820And, you know, it's on the level of Democrats saying that Russians interfered in the election.
00:21:23.780It's not impossible that they interfered.
00:21:26.160We know that Russians may have been involved in some of the hacking of DNC emails, for example, earlier in the 2016 campaign.
00:21:33.540But what she's saying is exactly the kind of things Democrats and the media did say for four years almost.
00:21:45.760She seemed to deliver them with a lot of passion.
00:21:48.100But as Giuliani pointed out also in a moment in the press conference, the allegation that the election was improperly decided doesn't hang on Sidney Powell's allegation that Giuliani's case is independent.
00:22:44.060And I think they helped themselves by making it yesterday, although the media, of course, are only focusing on the parts of the case they find least plausible.
00:22:54.340I know that Justice Alito of the Supreme Court asked that Pennsylvania set aside votes that were received after Election Day, if I'm recalling correctly.
00:23:04.540So that sounds to me like a very clear thing when you have a group of ballots that are suspects, set them aside, and then maybe those baskets will be discounted later.
00:23:15.480That sounds very practical and something you can measure and count.
00:23:19.620But for example, I'm reading your article on Breitbart.com.
00:24:01.080So even if a judge says, yes, I agree, scrutineers were banned, these five things weren't done, is that enough to make a judge say, therefore I throw out, throw out what?
00:24:16.940So it's important to make these distinctions.
00:24:19.780I hope I'm going to help clarify things.
00:24:22.460Some of the cases, particularly I think where you saw the boards being put up to keep people out, I think that involved excluding people who may not actually have been official observers, who tried to enlist as observers or scrutineers, but they were in excess of the observers who were already in that particular counting place.
00:24:44.220So I don't want to allege that they kept people out.
00:24:47.640I don't even think the Trump campaign is saying they kept people out in that part of the case.
00:24:51.000I think they've complained about it in other ways.
00:24:53.220And we do know some poll workers were excluded.
00:24:55.300I know of at least one case where someone was excluded accidentally or mistakenly because a local official got the law wrong.
00:25:01.200But anyway, what everyone agrees on, and you can see this in the court filings, is that the observers were kept a far distance away from the area where the absentee ballots were being opened.
00:25:14.780And the only dispute between Democrats and Republicans is whether that was lawful or not.
00:25:22.780In the trial court in Pennsylvania, Democrats prevailed.
00:25:26.160In the Commonwealth court, which I guess is the appellate court in Pennsylvania, the Republicans prevailed.
00:25:32.180And then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned that decision.
00:25:35.520And what they said was the law only requires that observers be present.
00:25:40.120It doesn't be it doesn't require that they actually wait for it doesn't require that they actually observe anything.
00:25:47.700So so it just requires them to be in the room.
00:25:50.700And the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that if the state legislature had wanted to stipulate that people must actually be able to observe something, they must actually be able to see something.
00:25:59.580They would have said so. Oh, it's an unusually it's an unusually deferential approach to the law.
00:26:06.880The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has often not been deferential to the text of the law.
00:26:10.740In fact, when making up the rule that you could accept ballots after Election Day, they simply went out on their own and not not adhering to the state statute.
00:26:18.680But anyway, is that appealable or is that the end of it?
00:26:21.920That can. No, no, I think that is appealable.
00:26:23.960It's going to go. I think that could go to the Supreme Court and it is going to involve enough votes to overturn the result in Pennsylvania.
00:26:30.360I think it's between six hundred and seven hundred thousand of the other part of the case, though, you have to understand is this.
00:26:38.320The reason observing the envelopes was important was they had to match the signature on the envelope to a signature on file on the voter roll.
00:26:47.740And you can't make that match happen unless you actually look at the signatures.
00:26:53.700And so the observers wanted to be sure that the signatures were being matched properly and that the ballot counters weren't simply ripping open the envelopes and using the ballots regardless.
00:27:06.480Normally, you wouldn't necessarily overturn six hundred, seven hundred thousand votes just for a small procedural mistake like that.
00:27:13.740The reason that's important is it's a mistake that can't be undone.
00:27:16.280Apparently, they threw the envelopes away.
00:27:19.060So those ballots are now just mixed into the rest of the pile of ballots and they can't really be traced back to the original envelopes.
00:27:26.540There's no way, in other words, to go back to those six hundred or seven hundred thousand ballots and to double check whether they indeed were cast by voters who were on the rolls.
00:27:37.320So what Giuliani is saying is that the exclusion of observers from a critical stage in ascertaining the legality of those votes means the entire collection of votes that was counted during that period ought to be invalidated because there's no way to validate whether they're legal or not.
00:27:56.260So I think that is a actually a serious claim.
00:28:00.380It's probably the most serious claim out of all the ones we've seen so far.
00:28:04.520And I've said before, and I think Alan Dershowitz has also said that the Trump campaign's strongest case is in Pennsylvania.
00:28:14.020But again, this is the problem with mail-in voting.
00:28:17.320You're going to get these kinds of challenges.
00:28:19.140And also, even if everything is done by the book, what happens typically with mail-in voting is that the result after Election Day is very different from the result on Election Day.
00:28:28.920Mail-in voting creates the impression of fraud even when there isn't fraud.
00:28:32.000It's something we in California have unfortunately become used to, and the first time you see it, it feels like something horrible has taken place.
00:28:41.220You can't think of any other explanation than fraud, but it's just the fact that mail-in ballots work this way.
00:28:47.600Sometimes it works to the advantage of Republicans.
00:28:49.800Two California Republicans just won their congressional races.
00:28:53.120They were losing on election night, but the mail-in ballots came in for the Republicans this time.
00:28:57.240So it can go either way, although it tends to go more often for Democrats.
00:29:00.460But the first time you watch this happen, it does lead you to think it must be fraudulent.
00:29:06.160And it's just the major problem of mail-in ballots.
00:29:09.060They create this impression that the politicians or the election officials simply waited to see how far behind one candidate was on election night and then gone and found the ballots they need to make up the difference.
00:29:21.920I mean, I'm reminded of when Richard Nixon had the election stolen from him in 1960 by the Chicago Kennedy Democrat machine, and he chose not to fight it.
00:29:33.940He said it would rip the country apart too badly, and he was a patriot first.
00:29:39.120And he waited, and he had his chance later.
00:29:43.140I think that the tone and the drama is so much worse.
00:29:47.500What I wonder is if the Supreme Court will have the courage or the bloody-mindedness to overturn this, or I know you've suggested this before, if they just throw it back to the Constitution, as in, hey, the Constitution says that these electors are chosen by the states in any manner.
00:30:10.140So I suppose, and let's wrap up on this because I know you've got to go, if these elections are so compromised and some of it's unfixable, like you mentioned, the envelopes are thrown away, could it happen that the Supreme Court says there's so many anomalies here, the patterns, the facts we do have, putting aside the wilder theories that would probably take a Mueller-like investigation to find out what happened in Venezuela,
00:30:38.480according to Sidney Powell's points, let's just throw it back to the states under the Constitution and have them choose in, what is it, a statehouse vote or a vote of their congressional delegation.
00:30:52.180If the Supreme Court wanted to stop this election but have someone else make the final decision, who would they throw it to in, say, the case of Pennsylvania?
00:31:00.100I think they would probably say the state legislature would have the responsibility to choose the electors, and I think that's the right approach.
00:31:12.520I do think the state legislature would probably find some formula that split the electoral vote proportionally, rather than giving all of the votes to Trump.
00:31:21.340I think they're going to have to find some way to do it.
00:31:24.720If it does go back to the state legislature, they'll find some way to do it that doesn't antagonize the people who voted.
00:31:31.520They'll probably find some way of approximating what the vote might have looked like.
00:31:35.940Maybe they'll just split it down the middle.
00:31:37.720Either way, Joe Biden would still win the election.
00:31:39.560So I think that state legislators in this case, or members of Congress, if it goes up to the House of Representatives, which it could eventually, I think they're going to be reluctant to do anything that will overturn the election because it would cause a public backlash.
00:31:53.700And even though the Constitution allows them to do it, I think that in this circumstance, I can imagine other circumstances where they might be much bolder about doing something.
00:32:04.840But in this circumstance, I just think they're not going to do anything that changes the result of the election.
00:32:09.760So I don't really see a path there for the president.
00:32:13.540I think he's doing the right thing by fighting.
00:32:15.580This is, by the way, the minimum that Democrats want their candidates to do.
00:32:18.680Every time, 2000, 2004, Democrats insisted on fighting for every vote.
00:32:23.440It was the minimum a candidate had to promise.
00:32:26.000So the idea that this is somehow undemocratic is just ludicrous, especially because the way these voting rules were changed.
00:32:32.620I mean, the voting rules were changed in an undemocratic way through the courts.
00:32:37.380So the idea that what Trump's doing is undemocratic is just ridiculous to me.
00:32:40.940But I think most Americans are actually just waiting for the process to play out.
00:32:46.740It's the media and the chattering political classes that have gotten themselves worked up about this.
00:32:51.340But I think most Americans who've had to deal with courts and who've watched these elections before pretty much know how this is going to end.