(CNN) Former President Donald Trump has spent months spreading lies about the 2020 election, which he himself is now calling “THE BIG LIE” as he continues to claim that a massive conspiracy robbed him of a second term.

The result is that many Republicans now question the election results — and the lie has taken on a life of its own.

In Washington, congressional Republicans who recently ousted Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from the party’s leadership over her decision to call Trump out for his lies mostly united Wednesday against a review of the January 6 Capitol insurrection those lies helped incite.

Trump’s allies in Arizona are undertaking a sketchy, circus-like review of 2020 ballots in Maricopa County, even though local officials — themselves Republicans — are openly objecting to the process, which comes months after the state’s election was certified by its Republican governor. (Trump allies are now pushing for a similar review in Georgia, where Republican officials also certified President Joe Biden’s victory.)

Read CNN’s fact checks on 2020 disinformation here

In key states around the country, more restrictive election laws are being enacted, ostensibly to guard against fraud that did not happen.

I went back to CNN’s fact checks and historical warnings to put together this guide to the Big Lie and its various elements.

Where did the term “the Big Lie” come from?

It comes from Adolf Hitler, actually. In Mein Kampf, he accused Jews of spreading lies about how the German army performed in World War I.

The historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson wrote about it in The Washington Post a few years ago:

Adolf Hitler first defined the Big Lie as a deviant tool wielded by Viennese Jews to discredit the Germans’ deportment in World War I. Yet, in tragically ironic fashion, it was Hitler and his Nazi regime that actually employed the mendacious strategy. In an effort to rewrite history and blame European Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I, Hitler and his propaganda minister accused them of profiting from the war, consorting with foreign powers and “war shirking” (avoiding conscription). Jews, Hitler contended, were the weak underbelly of the Weimer state that exposed the loyal and true German population to catastrophic collapse. To sell this narrative, Joseph Goebbels insisted “all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands.”

Why did people start using that term to describe the 2020 election?

Use of the phrase started as a way for Trump critics to warn about the toxic nature of his election lies.

Here’s Joe Lockhart, a Democratic communications specialist and CNN commentator, writing about it in January.

And historian Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” used it in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. “The idea that Mr. Biden didn’t win the election is a big lie,” he told CNN’s Brian Stelter. “It’s a big lie because you have to disbelieve all kinds of evidence to believe in it. It’s a big lie because you have to believe in a huge conspiracy in order to believe it. And it’s a big lie because, if you believe it, it demands you take radical action. So this is one way we have really moved forwards towards authoritarianism and away from democracy. It’s coming to a peak right now.”

How did Trump come to adopt the term?

This is another irony.

There have long been warnings about Trump’s lies. That Jacobson story in the Post is from 2018. Trump falsely claimed after the 2016 election, which he won, that millions of people had illegally voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Leading up to the 2020 election, Trump again routinely asserted that voting in the US would be rigged against him, and afterward, when he denied his loss, critics began using the term “the Big Lie” to describe his rejection of the factual world.

Trump, master propagandist, has since seized the term from his critics and now routinely uses it to claim it is he who is the victim of untruths and conspiracies. “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE! ” he said in a statement issued by his PAC on May 3.

Since then, Trump’s use of it to claim his own persecution has arguably eclipsed its use to warn about his lies as a form of propaganda.

What are the elements of Trump’s big lie?

1. The election was stolen because it’s not possible Trump didn’t win.

In Trump’s telling, the big lie is that the election was stolen from him. A lie as massive as the stealing of an election with hundreds of millions of voters requires a bunch of smaller lies Trump’s used to sow doubt about the election.

CNN’s Facts First team has been writing about Trump’s specific election lies for many months, first leading up to the election, which he falsely claimed was rigged, and after he lost, when he falsely claimed it had been stolen in a variety of ways, all of which have been disproved. Look at this fact check from Daniel Dale, which addresses these crazy quotes, none of which are accurate:

• “… millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats.”
• “All of the mechanical ‘glitches’ that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes.”
• “700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!”

In every key state he lost, Trump has pushed an explanation, sowing doubt without actually proving anything.

In Georgia, he claimed, there were suitcases of ballots, the state didn’t verify signatures, there was general mass cheating, military ballots went missing.

That’s just Georgia.

In Trump’s mind, there were also dead voters in Michigan, “fake votes” in Nevada, Pennsylvania had more votes than voters, Detroit had more votes than voters … when you view it in totality, it feels desperate.

Some of the smaller lies require some more explanation, such as Trump’s idea that he won with “legal votes” and that illegal votes led to Biden’s win. In clear human errors, he saw vote theft.

2. There was a massive technological conspiracy to rig the election.

A key element of Trump’s system of lies is that the voting equipment and software company Dominion Voting Systems was biased against him, had “bum equipment” and helped rig the election.

Dominion has since sued Trump campaign lawyers and Fox News and accused other Trump allies of spreading falsehoods. When mail-in ballots Trump had discouraged were counted and Democrats gained ground after the early hours of election night, he saw a conspiracy: “surprise ballot dumps‘!” and “finding votes!”

This notion was revived in the Arizona audit, where Trump this past weekend seized on the idea that an election database had been deleted. The auditors hired by the state GOP acknowledged on Tuesday that it had not been.

3. Theories and wild claims pushed on the internet find their way into lawsuits and are then pushed by Trump.

Here’s one example. Viral video from footage Fulton County, Georgia, led to allegations there were suitcases of votes smuggled in to be counted. This video was mentioned in a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and pushed by Trump. Officials in Georgia — Republicans! — investigated the claim and found the suspected suitcases were ballot bins and the video captured normal processes. The lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general was ultimately thrown out by the US Supreme Court, a court which, by the way, has a conservative majority and three justices appointed by Trump.

Another example, from just this past week, is when Republican lawmakers in Arizona fed that false allegation that an election database had been deleted. It wasn’t deleted, as a Republican election official made clear — but not until after the allegation had been pushed to close followers of the conspiracy theories.

4. Investigators are biased, too.

Just as recounts that found no change to the election results were labeled by Trump as frauds and hoaxes, a review of the January 6 insurrection launched after his election lies can only be slanted. Trump turned hard on a bipartisan agreement to investigate the insurrection.

“Republicans must get much tougher and much smarter, and stop being used by the Radical Left. Hopefully, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are listening!” he said in a statement.

5. Trump supporters questioning the results are just being good citizens.

In the growing case of collective amnesia many Republican lawmakers are developing about the January 6 insurrection, there’s the idea that the people who stormed the Capitol were just concerned and wanting to be heard. Similarly, the lawmakers who voted to throw out the election results were just channeling the concerns of voters who think the process might be flawed, despite the lack of evidence there was any actual fraud.

McConnell and McCarthy, who as Senate and House minority leaders are the two top Republicans at the federal level, had both been critical of Trump’s false claims on the election and had previously criticized the insurrection in strong terms.

But now that it’s clear many Republicans are willing to tolerate, and potentially believe, Trump’s lies, McConnell and McCarthy are finding ways to support his views. Both, for instance, turned against the agreement struck for a January 6 commission, which many Republicans had, at least in principle, supported.

“Republicans must get much tougher and much smarter, and stop being used by the Radical Left,” Trump said Tuesday night after both leaders had come out against the commission. “Hopefully, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are listening!”

There is no room for rejecting Trump’s Big Lie, as Republicans who do so are ostracized by the party leadership.

Trump’s big lie worked

The sham audit in Arizona continues, although behind closed doors, unlike the open counts and recounts of ballots the first time. A similar “forensic review” of ballots in Georgia is being pushed by allies of the former President.

Polls suggest a majority of Republicans — 55% in an April Reuters poll — think Biden’s victory was the result of illegal voting or rigging.

“What is perfectly clear,” wrote CNN’s Harry Enten after examining the data, “is that Republicans’ lack of faith in our current election infrastructure is a direct result of Trump’s historic efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 results.”

This story has been updated to reflect Wednesday’s House vote on a January 6 commission.

FILE PHOTO: Trump Campaign Senior Legal Advisor Jenna Ellis speaks during a news conference about the 2020 U.S. presidential election results at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, U.S., November 19, 2020. Photo by REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

DENVER (AP) — Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Donald Trump ‘s reelection campaign and a prominent conservative media figure, has been censured by Colorado legal officials after admitting she made repeated false statements about the 2020 presidential election.

Ellis acknowledged making 10 “misrepresentations” on television and Twitter during Trump’s fight to stay in power after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, according to the censure from the office of attorney regulation counsel in Colorado, where Ellis is from. The statements include claiming on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show on Dec. 5, 2020 that “we have over 500,000 votes (in Arizona) that were cast illegally” and telling the conservative network Newsmax on Dec. 15 that Trump was “the true and proper victor.”

READ MORE: Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch said under oath 2020 election was ‘not stolen,’ according to court filings

On November 20, 2020, Ellis appeared on the Newsmax show of former Trump spokesman Sean Spicer and said: “with all those states (Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia) combined we know that the election was stolen from President Trump and we can prove that.”

Ellis was one of several prominent conservative voices who, in the final weeks of 2020, echoed Trump’s lies that the election was stolen from him. Those falsehoods helped fuel the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Respondent, through her conduct, undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election, violating her duty of candor to the public,” wrote Bryon M. Large, the disciplinary judge in the case.

Ellis becomes the latest pro-Trump attorney penalized for their attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Nine lawyers in Michigan in 2021 were ordered to pay $175,000 in sanctions for a sham suit seeking to overturn the election in that swing state. The District of Columbia’s bar association disciplinary counsel in December called for the suspension of former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s law license for pursuing a baseless lawsuit challenging Biden’s win in Pennsylvania.

Ellis is based in Washington, DC, but is from Colorado and has also practiced in the state. Through her attorney, Michael Melito, she stipulated to both the findings that she’d made misrepresentations and the censure. Melito did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Left:
FILE PHOTO: Trump Campaign Senior Legal Advisor Jenna Ellis speaks during a news conference about the 2020 U.S. presidential election results at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, U.S., November 19, 2020. Photo by REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

ATLANTA (AP) — An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.

Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.

The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.

The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.

The findings build on a mountain of other evidence that the election wasn’t rigged, including verification of the results by Republican governors.

The AP review, a process that took months and encompassed more than 300 local election offices, is one the most comprehensive examinations of suspected voter fraud in last year’s presidential election. It relies on information collected at the local level, where officials must reconcile their ballots and account for discrepancies, and includes a handful of separate cases cited by secretaries of state and state attorneys general.

Trump’s false claims of a stolen election fueled the deadly Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol, have led to death threats against election officials and have become deeply ingrained within the GOP, with two-thirds of Republicans believing Biden’s election is illegitimate. Republican lawmakers in several states have used the false claims as justification to conduct costly and time-consuming partisan election reviews, done at Trump’s urging, and add new restrictions for voting.

The number of cases identified so far by local elections officials and forwarded to prosecutors, local law enforcement or secretaries of state for further review undercuts Trump’s claim. Election officials also say that in most cases, the additional ballots were never counted because workers did their jobs and pulled them for inspection before they were added to the tally.

“There is a very specific reason why we don’t see many instances of fraud, and that is because the system is designed to catch it, to flag it and then hold those people accountable,” said Amber McReynolds, a former director of elections in Denver and the founding CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, which promotes mail voting.

The AP’s review of cases in the six battleground states found no evidence to support Trump’s various claims, which have included unsupported allegations that more votes were tallied than there are registered voters and that thousands of mail-in ballots were cast by people who are not on voter rolls. Dozens of state and federal courts have rejected the claims.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the AP’s reporting offered further proof that the election was fairly conducted and decided, contrary to Trump’s claims.

“Each time this dangerous but weak and fear-ridden conspiracy theory has been put forward, it has only cemented the truth more by being completely debunked — including at the hands of elections authorities from both parties across the nation, nonpartisan experts, and over 80 federal judges,” he said.

Experts say to pull off stealing a presidential election would require large numbers of people willing to risk prosecution, prison time and fines working in concert with election officials from both parties who are willing to look the other way. And everyone somehow would keep quiet about the whole affair.

“It would be the most extensive conspiracy in the history of planet Earth,” said David Becker, a senior trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who now directs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Separate from the fraud allegations are claims by Trump and his allies that voting systems or ballot tallies were somehow manipulated to steal the election. Judges across the country, of both parties, dismissed those claims. That includes a federal judge in Michigan who ordered sanctions against attorneys allied with Trump for intending to create “confusion, commotion and chaos” in filing a lawsuit about the vote-counting process without checking for evidence to support the claims.

Even Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, said a month after the election that there was no indication of widespread fraud that could change the result.

For its review, AP reporters in five states contacted roughly 340 election offices for details about every instance of potential voter fraud that was identified as part of their post-election review and certification process.

After an election is over, officials research voter records, request and review additional information if needed from the state or other counties, and eventually decide whether to refer potential fraud cases for further investigation — a process that can take months.

For Wisconsin, the AP relied on a report about fraud investigations compiled by the state and filed public records requests to get the details of each case, in addition to prosecutions that were not initially reported to the state elections commission. Wisconsin is the only one of the six states with a centralized accounting of all potential voter fraud cases.

A state-by-state accounting:

—ARIZONA: Authorities have been investigating 198 possible fraud cases out of nearly 3.4 million votes cast, representing 1.9% of Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Virtually all the cases were in Pima County, home to Tucson, and involved allegations of double voting. The county has a practice of referring every effort to cast a second ballot to prosecutors, something other offices don’t do. In the Pima cases, only one ballot for each voter was counted. So far, nine people have been charged in the state with voting fraud crimes following the 2020 election. Six of those were filed by the state attorney general’s office, which has an election integrity unit that is reviewing an undisclosed number of additional cases.

—GEORGIA: Election officials in 124 of the state’s 159 counties reported no suspicious activity after conducting their post-election checks. Officials in 24 counties identified 64 potential voter fraud cases, representing 0.54% of Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia. Of those, 31 were determined to be the result of an administrative error or some other mistake. Eleven counties, most of them rural, either declined to say or did not respond. The state attorney general’s office is reviewing about 20 cases referred so far by the state election board related to all elections in 2020, including the primary, but it was not known if any of those overlapped with cases already identified by local election officials.

—MICHIGAN: Officials have identified 56 potential instances of voter fraud in five counties, representing 0.04% of Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Most of the cases involved two people suspected of submitting about 50 fraudulent requests for absentee ballots in Macomb, Wayne and Oakland counties. All the suspicious applications were flagged by election officials and no ballots were cast improperly.

—NEVADA: Local officials identified between 93 and 98 potential fraud cases out of 1.4 million ballots cast, representing less than one-third of 1% of Biden’s margin of victory. More than half the total — 58 — were in Washoe County, which includes Reno, and the vast majority involved allegations of possible double voting. The statewide total does not include thousands of fraud allegations submitted to the state by local Republicans. Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske has said many of those were based “largely upon an incomplete assessment of voter registration records and lack of information concerning the processes by which these records are compiled and maintained.” It’s not known how many remain under investigation.

—PENNSYLVANIA: Election officials in 11 of the state’s 67 counties identified 26 possible cases of voter fraud, representing 0.03% of Biden’s margin of victory. The elections office in Philadelphia refused to discuss potential cases with the AP, but the prosecutor’s office in Philadelphia said it has not received any fraud-related referrals.

—WISCONSIN: Election officials have referred 31 cases of potential fraud to prosecutors in 12 of the state’s 72 counties, representing about 0.15% of Biden’s margin of victory. After reviewing them, prosecutors declined to bring charges in 26 of those cases. Meagan Wolfe, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said the number of cases in 2020 was “fairly run of the mill.”

AP’s review found the potential cases of fraud ran the gamut: Some were attributed to administrative error or voter confusion while others were being examined as intentional attempts to commit fraud. In those cases, many involved people who sought to vote twice — by casting both an absentee and an in-person ballots — or those who cast a ballot for a dead relative such as the woman in Maricopa County, Arizona. Authorities there say she signed her mother’s name on a ballot envelope. The woman’s mother had died a month before the election.

The cases are bipartisan. Some of those charged with fraud are registered Republicans or told investigators they were supporters of Trump.

Donald Holz is among the five people in Wisconsin who face voter fraud charges. He said all he wanted to do was vote for Trump. But because he was still on parole after being convicted of felony drunken driving, the 63-year-old retiree was not eligible to do so. Wisconsin is not among the states that have loosened felon voting laws in recent years.

Holz said he had no intention to break the law and only did so after he asked poll workers if it was OK.

“The only thing that helps me out is that I know what I did and I did it with good intentions,” Holz said after an initial court appearance in Fond du Lac. “The guy upstairs knows what I did. I didn’t have any intention to commit election fraud.”

In southeast Pennsylvania, 72-year-old Ralph Thurman, a registered Republican, was sentenced to three years’ probation after pleading guilty to one count of repeat voting. Authorities said Thurman, after voting at his polling place, returned about an hour later wearing sunglasses and cast a ballot in his son’s name.

Las Vegas businessman Donald “Kirk” Hartle was among those in Nevada who raised the cry against election fraud. Early on, Hartle insisted someone had unlawfully cast a ballot in the name of his dead wife, and state Republicans seized on his story to support their claims of widespread fraud in the state. It turned out that someone had cast the ballot illegally — Hartle, himself. He agreed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of voting more than once in the same election.

Hartle’s attorney said the businessman, who is an executive at a company that hosted a Trump rally before the election, had accepted responsibility for his actions.

Additional fraud cases could still surface in the weeks and months ahead. One avenue for those is the Electronic Registration Information Center, a data-sharing effort among 31 states aimed at improving state voter rolls. The effort also provides states with reports after each general election with information about voters who might have cast ballots in more than one state.

In the past, those lists have generated small numbers of fraud cases. In 2018, for example, Wisconsin used the report to identify 43 additional instances of potential fraud out of 2.6 million ballots cast.

Official post-election audits and other research have shown voter fraud to be exceptionally rare. A nonpartisan audit of Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election found no evidence of widespread fraud and a Republican lawmaker concluded it showed that elections in the state were “safe and secure,” while also recommending dozens of changes to how elections are run. In Michigan, Republican state senators issued a report earlier this year saying they had found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in the 2020 election.

Not only do election officials look for fraud, they have procedures to detect and prevent it.

For mail voting, which expanded greatly last year because of the pandemic, election officials log every mail ballot so voters cannot request more than one. Those ballots also are logged when they are returned, checked against registration and, in many cases, voter signatures on file to ensure the voter assigned to the ballot is the one who cast it.

If everything doesn’t match, the ballot isn’t counted.

“Often, we don’t get to fraud,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former local election official in Utah and Colorado who advises election officials on security and other issues. “Say we have evidence that something might not be correct, we ask the voter to provide additional documentation. If the person doesn’t respond, the ballot isn’t accepted. The fraud never happened.”

If a person who requested a mail ballot shows up at a polling place, this will become apparent when they check in. Typically, poll workers either cancel the ballot that was previously issued, ensuring it’s never counted, or ask the voter to complete a provisional ballot that will only be counted if the mail ballot is not.

In Union County, Georgia, someone voted in person and then election officials found their ballot in a drop box. Since the person had already voted, the ballot in the drop box was not counted and the case was referred to the state for investigation, Deputy Registrar Diana Nichols said.

“We can tell pretty quick whenever we pull up that record — wait a minute, this person has already voted,” Nichols said. “I’m not saying it’s foolproof. We are all human, and we all make mistakes. But as far as the system is set up, if you follow the rules and the guidelines set up by the state, I think it’s a very good system.”

The final step is the canvassing process in which election officials must reconcile all their counts, ensuring the number of ballots cast equals the number of voters who voted. Any discrepancies are researched, and election officials provide detailed explanations before the election can be certified.

Often, an administrative error can raise questions that suggest the potential for fraud.

In Forsyth County, Georgia, election officials were asked by Arizona investigators for records confirming that a voter had also cast a ballot in Georgia last November. It turns out that voter didn’t cast a ballot but was listed as having done so because their registration number was mistakenly associated with another voter’s record in the county’s system, according to a letter sent by county election officials.

In other cases, it could be as simple as a voter signing on the wrong line next to another person’s name in a paper pollbook at their polling place. Once researched, it quickly becomes clear no fraud occurred.

Republican lawmakers have argued there are security gaps in the process, using concerns of fraud to justify restrictions on voting laws. This has happened even in places where Republican lawmakers have pushed back against Trump’s false claims and said the 2020 election was valid.

The review by Republican lawmakers in Michigan that found no systemic fraud cited various claims they had investigated. For example, senators were provided with a list of over 200 voters in Wayne County who were believed to be dead. Of these, the report noted, only two instances involved actual dead voters. The first was due to a clerical error in which a son had been confused with his dead father and the second involved a 92-year-old woman who had died four days before the election.

And yet, Republicans in the state are collecting signatures for a citizen initiative that would allow the GOP-controlled legislature to approve voting restrictions and bypass a veto by the Democratic governor. Republicans say mail voting needs to be more secure as more people embrace it.

“These bills will restore confidence in our elections,” said GOP Rep. Ann Bollin, chairwoman of the Michigan House Elections and Ethics Committee and a former township clerk. “Voters want to know their vote will count and that they, and only they, are casting their own ballot.”

Overall, 80% of counties in the six states reviewed by the AP reported no suspicious activity after completing their post-election reviews. This was true of both small and large counties, something experts said was to be expected given how rare voter fraud has been.

Limited instances of fraud do occur, as the AP review illustrates, but safeguards ensure they are few and that they are caught, said Ben Hovland, a Democrat appointed by Trump to serve on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which supports the state and local officials who administer elections.

“Every credible examination has shown there was no widespread fraud” in the 2020 presidential election, Hovland said. “Time and again when we have heard these claims and heard these allegations, and when you do a real investigation, you see that it is the exception and not the rule.”

___

Contributing to this report were Associated Press data journalist Camille Fassett in Oakland, California; reporter Colleen Long in Washington; AP state government reporters Scott Bauer in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; Bob Christie in Phoenix; David Eggert in Lansing, Michigan; Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee, Florida; and Michelle L. Price in New York City; and other AP reporters in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Author’s note: This essay below was originally written in September 2018, first posted on TomDispatch.com and reposted the same month on Salon. Spurred by the wave of reminiscences and revelations surrounding the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, I retrieved this piece from my files and read it again. When I did, I was stunned by how much truer and more troubling my words felt now than when I wrote them nearly three and a half years ago. Yes, Donald Trump has been out of office for nearly a year, but instead of fading into the past, his war on truth has only continued to gain ground. His enablers are more subservient and his challengers, to all appearances, less effective. And because his lies now are aimed directly at destroying public trust in U.S. elections — an issue that was not yet prominent in 2018 — they represent a much graver threat to our fundamental democratic process and values. Those realities lead me to think that my observations and analysis, and my recollections of some moments long before the Trump era that taught me significant lessons about the power of lies, may have something meaningful to offer now. It appears here in lightly edited form, to acknowledge the passage of time.

It’s easy — and not wrong — to think that truth is in dire danger in the era of Donald Trump.

His own record of issuing breathtaking falsehoods from the exalted platform of the White House is unprecedented in American history. So is his consistent refusal to back down when a statement is proven false. In Trump’s world, those who expose his lies are the liars and facts that show he was wrong are “fake news.”

In this war on truth, Trump has several important allies. One is the shameful silence of Republican politicians who don’t challenge his misstatements for fear of giving offense to his true-believing base. Another is a media environment far more cluttered and chaotic than in past decades, making it easier for people to find stories that fit their preconceived ideas and screen out those they prefer not to believe.

These trends come in the context of a more general loosening of the informal rules that once put some limits on the tone and content of political speech. American politicians have always done plenty of exaggerating, lying by omission, selecting misleading facts and using slanted language. Typically, though, if not always, they tried to avoid outright, provable lies, which it was commonly assumed would be politically damaging if exposed.

RELATED: Do GOP voters actually believe Trump’s Big Lie about “rigged” elections?

Nowadays, the cost of being caught lying seems less obvious. Some politicians show no apparent embarrassment about lying. Take, for instance, Corey Stewart, the Republican candidate trying to unseat Virginia’s Democratic senator, Tim Kaine [in the 2018 midterms]. Stewart unapologetically told the Washington Post about a doctored photograph his campaign distributed, “Of course it was Photoshopped.”

In the altered photo, an image of a much younger Kaine is spliced in to make it appear that he is sitting with a group of armed Central American guerrillas. The caption under the picture says, “Tim Kaine worked in Honduras to promote his radical socialist ideology,” suggesting the photo proves that he consorted with violent leftist revolutionaries while working at a Jesuit mission in Honduras at the start of the 1980s.

In reality, the guerrillas in the original photograph (which dates from well after Kaine’s time in Central America) were not leftists and not in Honduras, but right-wing Contra insurgents in Nicaragua. So the visual was a double fake, putting Kaine in a scene he wasn’t in and then falsely describing the scene. When I read the story, I wondered whether Stewart would think it legitimate if an opponent Photoshopped him into a picture of American Nazis brandishing swastika flags. (If anyone asked him that question, I have not found a record of it.)

It may still be uncommon for a politician to acknowledge a deception as forthrightly as Stewart did, but it does seem that politicians today feel — and probably are — freer to lie than they used to be.

So, yes, truth is facing a serious crisis in the present moment. But two things are worth remembering. First, that crisis did not begin with Donald Trump. It has a long history. Second, and possibly more sobering, truth may be more fragile and lies more powerful than most of us, journalists included, would like to believe. That means the wounds Trump and his allies have inflicted — on top of earlier ones — may prove harder to heal than we think.

An early lesson

I began learning about the fragility of truth many years ago.

George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, taught me an early lesson. In the spring of 1964, less than a year after his notorious “stand in the schoolhouse door” attempt to block two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama, he came to Maryland as a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary (not to be confused with his more widely remembered presidential runs in 1968 and 1972).

His real target wasn’t the presidential nomination but the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then being filibustered in the Senate. There were plenty of segregationist Democrats in Maryland then, and Wallace calculated that scoring a significant vote there (as well as in a couple of other states) would send a message to Senate Democrats that supporting civil rights was politically perilous.

I was 23 that spring, barely halfway through my second year as a reporter, when I was assigned as the (very) junior half of the Baltimore Sun‘s two-man team covering the primary campaign. I was under the direction of the Sun‘s chief political reporter, an old-timer named Charlie Whiteford. But Charlie didn’t hog all the big stories, as would have happened on most newspapers. In an effort to show balanced and even-handed reporting — an appearance the Sun in those days went to extreme lengths to maintain — he switched off with me, so that his byline and mine would appear alternately over stories about each candidate. As a result, young and green as I was, I got to cover Wallace’s rallies on a roughly equal basis with my senior colleague.

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From the start, I heard the governor saying things about the civil rights bill that weren’t just misleading or slanted in ways I was already accustomed to hearing, even that early in my reporting life, but unequivocally false. (For example, he regularly warned his crowds that homeowners would be sent to prison for refusing to sell or rent to African Americans. In fact, the 1964 law did not mention housing at all.) After the first rally I attended, I got a copy of the bill from the Sun‘s library and carried it with me for the rest of the campaign, so I could accurately cite Wallace’s misstatements as I was typing my stories.

The first time I nailed his lies in print, I was smug. Maybe he can get away with this stuff in Alabama, I remember thinking, but the Baltimore Sun will keep him straight in Maryland. Very soon, though, I found out that I couldn’t have been more wrong. The people Wallace was speaking to believed him, not the Sun, and Wallace knew that. He didn’t care in the least what I wrote about him and kept right on offering his untruths about the civil rights bill.

More than a half-century has passed since I learned that lesson, and it’s still sobering: When people like a politician’s lies better than they like the truth, it’s tough to change their minds, and even after lies are proven false, they can remain a powerful force in public life.

Learning another lesson, far from home

Thirteen years later, in a factory on the other side of the Earth, I had another moment of truth that taught what might be an even more chilling lesson: Lies can still have power even when we know they’re lies.

That moment came during my first trip to China in May 1977, eight months after the death of that country’s leader, Mao Zedong. As the Sun‘s correspondent in Hong Kong, still under British rule at the time, I had been writing about Chinese affairs for nearly four years. But that visit, seven days in and around the city of Guangzhou (then commonly called Canton), was the first time I was able to look with my own eyes at a country still largely closed to the outside world.

On one of those days, my minders took me to the Guangzhou Heavy Machinery Plant, which manufactured equipment for oil refineries, chemical and metallurgical factories, and other industrial facilities. Its walls were plastered with posters showing standard images of Chairman Mao and of soldiers, workers, and peasants heroically struggling to realize his socialist ideals. The scene I saw from a catwalk over the factory floor, however, looked nothing like those melodramatic images. A few workers were tending machines or trundling wheelbarrows across the floor, but most were standing around idly, sipping tea, chatting in small groups or reading newspapers.

I was startled by that very unheroic scene and even more startled when it dawned on me why I was so surprised. It wasn’t discovering that those propaganda images were false. I knew that already. Instead, I realized that, even knowing that, I had still unconsciously expected to see workers looking like the men and women shown on those posters, faces glowing with devotion while giving their all to carry out “Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line.”

Until that moment, I would have said with absolute certainty that I was immune to such Chinese propaganda. I had seen too many of its crude falsifications, such as the doctored photographs of Mao’s funeral that had run only months earlier in the same publications that regularly showed those heroic workers. Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, and her three principal associates had been in the front row of mourners when the photos were taken. Only a couple of weeks later, they were arrested and denounced as counterrevolutionary criminals. The Chinese media kept on publishing those funeral photos, but with Jiang and her allies — now labeled the “Gang of Four” — airbrushed out. Blurred smudges or blank spots appeared where they had been shown in the originals, while vertical rows of X’s blotted out their names in the captions. (Had anyone asked about the retouching, it’s a safe bet that Chinese authorities would have answered with the 1976 equivalent of “Of course they were Photoshopped.”)

Having seen those and so many other transparently false words and images, I could not believe I would ever confuse any official Chinese lies with reality. Still, there I was on that factory catwalk, stunned to realize that those propaganda images had shaped what I expected to see, even though I knew perfectly well that they were unreal.

That moment, too, taught me a lasting lesson: that truth could be a fragile thing not just in the outside world but inside my own mind and memory.

An immunodeficiency disease?

By these recollections from four or five decades ago, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s nothing new about the immediate crisis. Quite the opposite. Trump’s outlandish untruthfulness, an increasingly chaotic media landscape and the decline of traditional habits of political speech unquestionably represent a new and deeply alarming threat to public discourse and the foundations of democratic government.

One element of that crisis might be considered analogous to what doctors call an immunodeficiency illness — a disease that destroys or weakens the body’s ability to cure or control its symptoms. The immunodeficiency disease in today’s political and cultural wars is the campaign to undermine public trust in journalists and other watchdogs, the very people who are supposed to counter fake facts with real ones.

That campaign isn’t new. Attacks on news organizations (most prominently from the right but also from the left) go back at least to the 1960s. Under Trump, however, that assault has become uglier, more intense — and more dangerous.

Calling journalists “enemies of the American people,” for example, doesn’t just raise echoes of past totalitarian regimes. It gives aid and comfort to present-day officials and lawmakers who want to avoid being held publicly accountable for their acts. That applies not just in the United States but internationally. Trump’s anti-media rhetoric abets repressive rulers across the world who suppress independent, critical reporting in their countries.

A recent column by the Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl documented the worldwide impact of Trump’s anti-media assault. He reported that his search for examples “turned up 28 countries where the terms ‘fake news’ or ‘false news’ have been used to attack legitimate journalists and truthful reporting” during Trump’s time in office. Around the world, Diehl found, authoritarian leaders like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Cambodia’s Hun Sen and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have explicitly endorsed the American president’s attacks or echoed his exact words while cracking down on press freedom in their own countries.

Journalists have responded to Trump with an outpouring of indignant commentary — an understandable reaction, though it’s far from clear whether it helps or hurts their cause. A gesture like the Boston Globe‘s initiative that led more than 300 newspapers across the country to publish editorials on the same day calling for freedom of the press and attacking Trump’s stance on the media raised valid challenges to the president’s charges, but also may have cemented in place a kind of equivalency in the public mind: Trump is against journalists, journalists are against Trump.

Beyond any reasonable doubt, that equivalency reinforces Trump’s side more than it defends good reporting or strengthens public knowledge. For his supporters, it validates his posturing as a president besieged by a hostile media — and his repeated insistence that stories he doesn’t like are “fake facts.” Pious editorials declaring journalists’ devotion to truth and fervently exalting the First Amendment may be justified, but as a practical matter, eloquent self-righteousness seems unlikely to be an effective weapon in the war against the war on truth.

It would be nice to think that tougher, more factual reporting would be more helpful, but as I learned covering the Wallace campaign all those years ago, that has its limits, too.

How to be right (always)

I couldn’t read George Wallace’s mind in 1964 and can’t read Donald Trump’s 54 years later. So what follows is speculation, not verifiable fact. With that qualifier, my impression is that Trump’s falsehoods come from a different place and have a different character than Wallace’s. If there’s a Wallace reincarnation on the landscape today, it would be someone more like Corey Stewart. Wallace might not have said it to a reporter — though I did sometimes sense an unseen wink in our direction when he delivered some outrageous statement — but I strongly suspect that “of course it was Photoshopped,” adjusted for the different technology of that era, exactly reflected his attitude.

Trump looks like a quite different case. He clearly lies consciously at times, but generally the style and content of his falsehoods give the impression that he has engaged in a kind of internal mental Photoshopping, reshaping facts inside his mind until they conform to something he wants to say at a given moment.

A recent report in the Daily Beast described an episode that fits remarkably well with that theory.

As told by the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng, at a March 2017 White House meeting between the president and representatives of leading veterans organizations, Rick Weidman of Vietnam Veterans of America brought up the subject of Agent Orange, the widely used U.S. defoliant that has had long-term health effects on American soldiers and Vietnamese villagers.

As Suebsaeng reconstructed the discussion, Trump responded by asking if Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie” — a reference evidently to the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” Several veterans in the room tried to explain to the president that the scene he remembered involved napalm, an incendiary agent, not Agent Orange. But Trump wouldn’t back down, Suebsaeng recounted, “and proceeded to say things like, ‘No, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.'” His comment directly to Weidman was, “Well, I think you just didn’t like the movie.”

What makes the Daily Beast report particularly revealing is not just that Trump was ignorant of the facts and would not listen to people who clearly knew better. That behavior is all too familiar to anyone even casually aware of Trump’s record. The argument with the veterans was different because his misstatement did not arise from any of the usual reasons. He was not answering a critic or tearing down someone who frustrated him or making an argument for a policy opinion or defending some past statement.

Sticking to his version of Agent Orange was purely a reflection of his personality. On a subject one can safely assume he had not thought about until that moment, he seized on a fragmentary memory of something he’d seen on a screen years earlier, jumped to a wrong conclusion and was then immediately convinced that he was correct solely because he had heard himself saying it — not only certain that he was right, but oblivious to the fact that everyone he was talking to knew more about the subject than he did.

In effect, this story strongly suggests, Trump’s thought process (if you can call it that) boils down to I am right because I am always right.

Lots of people absorb facts selectively and adapt them to fit opinions they already hold. That’s human nature. But Trump’s ability to twist the truth, consciously or not, is extreme. So is his apparently unshakable conviction that no matter what the subject is, no one knows more than he does, which means he has no need to listen to anyone who tries to correct his misstatements. In a person with his power and responsibilities, those qualities are truly frightening.

As alarming as his record is, though, it would be a serious mistake to think of Trump as the only or even the principal enemy of truth and truth-tellers. There is a large army out there churning out false information, using technology that lets them spread their messages to a mass audience with minimal effort and expense. But the largest threat to truth, I fear, is not from the liars and truth twisters, but from deep in our collective and individual human nature. It’s the same threat I glimpsed all those years ago at George Wallace’s rallies in Maryland and on that factory floor in China: the tendency to believe comfortable lies instead of uncomfortable truths and to trust our own assumptions instead of looking at the evidence.

That widespread and deep-rooted failure of critical thinking in American society today has helped make Trump and his enablers, like other liars before them, successful in the war against truth. In the words of the mid-20th-century cartoonist Walt Kelly’s comic-strip character, Pogo the Possum, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” That’s a powerful enemy. Whether there’s an effective way for the forces of truth to oppose it is far from clear.

Read more on Donald Trump’s long history of saying untrue things:

Washington(CNN) Many of former President Donald Trump‘s own officials knew that his false claims about the 2020 election were false. In some cases, they told him to his face that his information was wrong.

Testimony to the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol has revealed that it wasn’t only journalists, elections officials and Democrats who were rejecting Trump’s lies about what happened in the election he lost but claimed to win. People Trump selected for important positions, from his campaign manager to the US attorney general, were also saying — mostly in private — that Trump’s fraud allegations were baseless.

The January 6 hearings are ongoing, and the public has only seen committee-selected video clips of certain former officials’ testimony. We know that some other figures in Trump’s orbit were joining him in promoting lies about the election, not rejecting those lies.

But the hearings have already shown that Trump’s government appointees or people on his campaign dismissed at least 10 of his false claims — from the overarching lie that the election was stolen to various specific tales about what happened in swing states he lost.

Here’s a list.

1) The false claim of a ‘stolen’ election

Trump has incessantly repeated the false claim that the election was stolen from him — baselessly insisting that he would have been returned to the White House if not for massive fraud and other nefarious Democratic behavior.

But William Barr, who served as attorney general under Trump, testified to the committee: “I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the President was bullshit.” Barr testified that “my opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud.”

Richard Donoghue, who served as principal associate deputy attorney general and then as acting deputy attorney general, also testified that claims of major fraud were untrue — and that he told Trump directly: “I said something to the effect of, ‘Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We’ve looked at Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada. We’re doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false.'”

Jeffrey Rosen, who served as deputy attorney general and then briefly, after Barr’s resignation in December 2020, as acting attorney general, said that when Trump would cite a supposed election impropriety, claiming that “people are telling me this” or “I heard this” or “I saw on television,” they could correct him: “We were in a position to say, ‘Our people already looked at that. And we know that you’re getting bad information. That’s — that’s not correct. It’s been demonstrated to be incorrect from our point of view. It’s been debunked.”

Derek Lyons, who was White House staff secretary and counselor to Trump, testified that, at a meeting about a month and a half after Election Day, top White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann “told the group, the President included, that, you know, none of those allegations had been substantiated to the point where they could be the basis for any litigation challenge to the election.”

Alex Cannon, who was a lawyer for the Trump campaign, testified that he told Vice President Mike Pence at the White House in November 2020 that he had not found “anything sufficient to alter the results of the election” and that he had told White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on a November 2020 call that “we weren’t finding anything that would be sufficient to change the results in any of the key states.”

Matt Morgan, who was the Trump campaign’s general counsel, testified that, as of early January 2021, he and top Pence advisers — chief of staff Marc Short and attorney Greg Jacob — were in agreement that even “if aggregated and read most favorably to the campaign,” election “fraud, maladministration, abuse or irregularities” were “not sufficient to be outcome-determinative.”

2) The false claim that Trump had won on Election Night

Trump falsely claimed in a speech on Election Night that he had won the election because he had leads in the vote counts in several key states. Trump used similar language in his rally speech on January 6, 2021 — claiming that “our election was over at 10 o’clock in the evening,” when the vote counts showed him leading in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, but “then late in the evening or early in the morning, boom, these explosions of bullshit.”

But it was clear to other key figures in Trump’s orbit — as it was to millions of others — that his leads in the early Election Night count, as millions of votes remained uncounted, did not mean he had won. Bill Stepien, who was Trump’s campaign manager, testified that Election Night was “too early to call the race”: “It was far too early to be making any calls like that. Ballots — ballots were still being counted. Ballots were still going to be counted for days.”

Stepien said he had explained to Trump that early returns would be “positive,” but they would then have a long night waiting for the counting of additional ballots. The fact that states’ vote counts got worse for Trump as the hours went by, Barr said, was not indicative of fraud: Barr noted that “people had been talking for weeks, and everyone understood for weeks, that that was going to be what happened on Election Night.”

Indeed, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, testified that people at the White House on Election Night were a little nervous to see what would happen with “the red wave or the red mirage.” Red mirage was a term media outlets had been citing for months to explain that early results would almost certainly be misleadingly favorable to Trump because it would take time for states to count the mail-in ballots Trump had warned his own supporters against using.

Miller testified that he recalled saying on Election Night “that we should not go and declare victory until we had a better sense of the numbers.” Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, testified that she didn’t know if she had held a “firm view” about what Trump should say on Election Night, but she added, “The results were still being counted. It was becoming clear that the race would not be called on Election Night.”

3) A false claim about fraudulent totals in Philadelphia

Trump tweeted in December 2020 that there were “MORE VOTES THAN ACTUAL VOTERS” in Philadelphia. He repeated that claim in a January 2022 interview with NPR, though he phrased it as a question.

Barr testified that the claim was “absolute rubbish.” (In reality, about two-thirds of Philadelphia’s registered voters cast a ballot in the 2020 election.) Barr added: “The turnout in Philadelphia was in line with the state’s turnout and in fact it was not as — as impressive as many suburban counties. And there was nothing strange about the Philadelphia turnout. It wasn’t like there was all these unexpected votes that came out in Philadelphia.”

4) A false claim about absentee ballots in Pennsylvania

Trump tweeted in late November 2020 to promote a graphic that suggested Pennsylvania had recorded far more mail-in votes in the general election than the number of mail-in ballots it had actually distributed to voters. Trump added, “The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air.”

But the graphic was plain wrong; the supposed 1,126,940 extra votes did not exist at all, as Pennsylvania journalists quickly explained. The graphic — which had been posted by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, now the Republican gubernatorial nominee — improperly contrasted numbers from the November 2020 general election with numbers from the state’s June 2020 primaries.

Barr explained in his testimony that Mastriano had been comparing apples to oranges. “Once you actually go and look and compare apples to apples, there’s no discrepancy at all,” he said.

5) A false claim about a truckload of ballots being driven from New York to Pennsylvania

In December 2020, Trump tweeted out a video clip featuring a Fox interview with a truck driver who claimed he had been unwittingly used in a scheme to transport numerous completed mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania.

Donoghue testified that he told Trump: “I essentially said, ‘Look, we looked at that allegation. We looked at both ends, both the people who load the truck and the people unload the truck. And that allegation was not supported by the evidence.”

6) False claims about Dominion voting technology

Trump and some of his allies made multiple false claims about the election technology provided by a company called Dominion Voting Systems. They inaccurately alleged that Dominion technology had switched Trump votes to Biden votes in large numbers and that Dominion was a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections for late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. (Dominion is pursuing a series of defamation lawsuits over such claims; the company was actually founded in Canada, is not connected to Chavez, and did not flip or otherwise manipulate 2020 votes.)

Barr testified: “I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn’t count and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense. And it was being laid out there. And I told them that it was — that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that. And it was doing a great, grave disservice to the country.”

Barr added of Trump and Dominion: “And I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff he has, you know, lost contact with — with — he’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff.” Barr also said of Trump: “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”

Cannon testified that he told Trump adviser Peter Navarro in mid-November 2020 that he “didn’t believe the Dominion allegations.” And Herschmann dismissed various theories put forward by lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted a variety of conspiracy theories about election technology and foreign interference. (Powell is one of the people being sued by Dominion.) Herschmann called at least one theory “completely nuts” — it wasn’t clear in the clip shown by the committee which theory he was referring to — and scoffed at claims about “Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelans.”

7) A false claim about Dominion machines in Michigan

Trump tweeted in December 2020 to claim that there was a “68% error rate in Michigan Voting Machines” — exaggerating a conspiratorial consultant’s finding, about a single Michigan county, that was itself quickly debunked by Michigan media.

Donoghue, too, rejected the “68% error rate” claim. He testified of a conversation with Trump: “And then I went into, for instance, this thing from Michigan, this report about ‘68% error rate.’ Reality is it was only 0.0063% error rate, less than 1 in 15,000. So the President accepted that. He said, ‘OK, fine, but what about the others?'”

8) A false claim about non-citizens voting in Arizona

Trump falsely claimed in his January 6, 2021, rally speech that, in Arizona, “over 36,000 ballots were illegally cast by non-citizens.”

Stepien testified that the claim that “thousands of illegal citizens, people not eligible to vote” had cast Arizona ballots was a “wild claim” that “on its face didn’t seem, you know, realistic or possible to me.” He said that after asking Cannon to look into the claim, it turned out “the reality of that was not illegal citizens voting in the election” but rather that the votes were cast by “people who were eligible to vote.”

9) The false story about election workers in Georgia

Trump and some of his allies, notably including lawyer Rudy Giuliani, repeatedly made false claims about fraud they insisted had been committed by elections workers in Fulton County, Georgia, home to Atlanta. Trump declared in his January 6, 2021, rally speech that workers had pulled “suitcases of ballots out from under a table” and illegally scanned “tens of thousands of votes.”

Donoghue testified that he debunked the claim at length to Trump: “The President kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots and that the suitcase was rolled out from under the table. And I said, ‘No sir, there is no suitcase.’ You can watch that video over and over. There is no suitcase. There is a wheeled bin where they carry the ballots, and that’s just how they move ballots around that facility. There’s nothing suspicious about that at all. I told him that there was no multiple scanning of the ballots — one of the — one part of that allegation was that they were taking one ballot and scanning it through three or four or five times to rack up votes, presumably for Vice President Biden. I told him that the video did not support that.”

Byung “BJay” Pak, a Trump-appointed former US attorney in Georgia who was previously a Republican state legislator, testified that the supposed “suitcase” was actually an “official lockbox” for storing ballots at that facility and that the full video disproved the fraud claims Giuliani had tried to promote by showing Georgia legislators a limited section of the footage. Pak, who resigned in January 2021, testified: “We interviewed — the FBI interviewed — the individuals that are depicted in the videos, that purportedly were double, triple counting of the ballots, and determined that nothing irregular happened in the counting, and the allegations made by Mr. Giuliani were false.”

10) The false claim that “2000 Mules” proves the election was rigged

Trump has seized on a movie called “2000 Mules,” made by a right-wing filmmaker, that claims to contain proof of a major fraudulent scheme involving Democrats and the submission of mail-in ballots at drop boxes. Trump has suggested that the movie proves his assertion that the election was rigged.

But similar to numerous others who have pointed out major holes in “2000 Mules,” Barr described the movie’s purported cell phone evidence as “singularly unimpressive,” said its purported photo evidence was “lacking,” and noted that it “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting” of ballots.