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Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, has spread a litany of falsehoods and conspiracy theories in media and social media appearances over the past week.
Mr. Giuliani, who has a long history of falsifying the truth And who has led the largely unsuccessful legal fight of the Trump election campaign, has particularly focused on the discredited claims of excluded poll workers and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about a voting software company affecting the election result.
In interviews on Fox News, Giuliani has repeatedly claimed that Democratic officials prevented Republican election watchers from observing the vote count in “10 different crooked Democratic cities,” including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, Reno, Phoenix and Atlanta. And in the counties where Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are, He has said, lack of access affected more than 680,000 votes.
There is no evidence to support any of these accusations. Trump’s own legal filings acknowledged the presence of Republican observers in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona and there were at least 134 Republican contenders in the polls present inside the TCF Center in Detroit, a convention center where votes were counted.
Giuliani has mentioned Philadelphia and Pittsburgh several times. That’s because a Trump campaign lawsuit had claimed that some 682,000 ballots were processed in the two boroughs of those cities “when no observation was allowed” and those votes were sought to be rejected.
But as The Washington Post and The Associated Press have reported, and as Giuliani said In court on Tuesday, the Trump campaign recently reviewed their lawsuit and dropped this particular claim.
“My judgment is that when Hillary Clinton told Biden about four weeks ago: Don’t give in no matter what, she meant even if you’re behind 800,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Joe, don’t worry, we’ll fix it by,” said Mr. Giuliani misleadingly on Nov. 9. (Mrs. Clinton did not say that Mr. Biden “never” should budge, but that he shouldn’t “never” budge, but shouldn’t budge on election night because the count of Mail ballots may “take” days.)
Conspiracy theories about a software company
Giuliani has also accused Dominion Voting Systems, a voting software company, of having foreign and seemingly dire ties.
The company, he has said in several appearances on Fox News, is associated with those who were “very close” to two Venezuelan presidents, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, as well as the billionaire financier George Soros, because it is “owned by another company.” called Smartmatic “.
That is wrong. Smartmatic has said that it has never owned shares, held financial interests, or provided software or technology to Dominion. Dominion’s chief executive said in an April letter to Congress that he owned a 12 percent stake in the company, while a private equity firm, Staple Street Capital Group in New York, owned about 76 percent. (No other investor owned more than 5 percent of Dominion.)
Smartmatic previously owned a voting machine company, Sequoia Voting Systems, before selling it in 2007, as reported by the Washington Post Fact Checker. Dominion purchased some assets from Sequoia Voting Systems in 2010.
Smartmatic itself was founded in Florida, incorporated in the United States, and based in London. He reviewed Venezuela’s electoral machinery in 2004 and obtained a loan from the country. In the 2017 elections there, the company said the Venezuelan government falsified turnout figures. That led the government to reject his claims and threaten legal action, undermining Giuliani’s claims that Smartmatic was “close” to Maduro.
Smartmatic’s connection to Soros is equally tenuous. Its president, Mark Malloch-Brown, sits on the board of directors of Soros’s Open Society Foundations and, Smartmatic notes, of a dozen other organizations.
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