A lawsuit from Donald Trump’s campaign pointing to potential election fraud in the state of Michigan is actually based on data taken from Minnesota, a new report finds.
The president’s campaign has come under fire for making claims of widespread fraud benefitting Joe Biden but not releasing proof to back it up. A new report from the conservative news blog Power Line found that a court filing from the president’s team points to “significant anomalies and red flags” in election results suggesting that they may have been electronically manipulated.
The report noted that the affidavit pointing out the alleged anomalies was signed by Russell Ramsland, a Texas resident and cybersecurity expert, and filed in a lawsuit in the state of Georgia by attorney Lin Wood. The court filing pointed to alleged evidence that the number of votes cast in several precincts exceeded the number of estimated voters, which it called an “anomaly so far outside of every statistical norm as to be virtually impossible.”
As lawyer and author John Hinderaker pointed out, the data that Trump’s campaign claimed had come from Michigan was really from Minnesota. He attacked the mistake, saying it invalidated their claims.
“This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn,” Hinderaker wrote. “Trump’s lawyers are fighting an uphill battle, to put it mildly, and confusing Michigan with Minnesota will at best make the hill steeper. Credibility once lost is hard to regain. Possibly Trump’s lawyers have already discovered this appalling error, and have undertaken to correct it. But the Ramsland Affidavit was filed in Georgia just yesterday.”
The mistake has attracted some viral attention and scorn online, with the report trending on Twitter and many criticizing Trump’s lawyers for making what appeared to be a careless error. There has been mounting scrutiny on Trump’s campaign for not presenting proof of what it alleges is widespread fraud, with much of the criticism now coming from those normally aligned with the president. As the Daily Wire noted, Fox News host and Trump defender Tucker Carlson called out lawyer Sidney Powell during his show on Thursday night for failing to produce evidence for her claims that voting software changed votes from Trump to Biden.
Carlson said Powell had not responded to his requests for an interview to explain their evidence for such allegations.
“In the end, that’s all that matters, the truth,” he said, later adding, “Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it — maybe she will.”