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WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump’s campaign continues its mad attempts to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s victory with a string of tenuous lawsuits, he was faced with a media appeal on Tuesday with reports that one of his witnesses who allegedly claimed to have falsified the ballot had retracted his story.
What followed was several seconds of silence.
Then the campaign offered without proof that the witness may have been doxed – and that he was not a big part of the case anyway.
The response is in line with the Trump team’s broader strategy of dismissing signs that the election was decided fairly while clinging to often fragile or nonexistent evidence of electoral fraud in support of the claim that the president did not lose.
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Three members of Trump’s campaign who are leading efforts to challenge the Michigan election results – which Biden won by around 146,000 votes – held a call with reporters Tuesday night to announce an unresolved lawsuit challenging access from their observers to the supervision of the ballots in the state. But at the end of the call, a New York Post reporter asked the campaign about its reliance on an affidavit from a United States Postal Service employee who has since retracted his story, according to the Washington Post and the House Oversight Committee.
USPS employee Richard Hopkins told Project Veritas, an incredibly dubious organization that frequently edited videos and misleading statements benefiting Tories, that he heard from the postmaster in Erie, Pa. , tell a postal supervisor to cancel all received ballots. after polling day as if they had been received in time to be counted. Hopkins was not named in the initial Project Veritas video and his image was blurry, but the site later revealed his identity with his permission, the organization said.
On Monday, however, Erie Postmaster Robert Weisenbach posted on Facebook that Hopkins’ allegations were “100% false” and “made by an employee who was recently disciplined on several occasions” . And on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Hopkins told the USPS Inspector General’s office that his story was not true and that he signed a new affidavit retracting his previous story. The House Oversight Committee also tweeted on Tuesday that the Inspector General’s office informed committee members that Hopkins had signed the affidavit under oath that his earlier story was not true.
The Republicans had already run with Hopkins’ statement. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, has tweeted repeatedly on his allegations. Senator Lindsey Graham has asked the Justice Department to investigate his allegations. And Trump’s campaign included some of Hopkins’ now canceled testimony in a court filing Monday asking the Pennsylvania Middle District U.S. District Court to delay the state from certifying its election results.
When asked Tuesday night if he had a comment on Hopkins rescinding his demands, the campaign initially had no response, leaving the line silent for several seconds.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, then spoke, telling reporters he found it “remarkable” that most news outlets did not respond to Hopkins’ claims in the first place. “Whether it is newsworthy today is debatable,” he said.
Murtaugh then went on to say that Hopkins had “named names” in his initial claims to Project Veritas and that he had “explicitly described what he had been through”, unaware that now the postal worker would have said it didn’t. was never produced.
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“We don’t know what kind of pressure he’s been under since making these public statements,” Murtaugh said, noting that some of the campaign’s own advocates were doxed on Twitter Tuesday.
A member of Trump’s campaign legal team then said that Hopkins’ allegations only amounted to a more than 240 “paragraph” in Monday’s filing.
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