Jack Cashill began his May 22 WorldNetDaily column by complaining that Bill Maher and Megyn Kelly conceded that Donald Trump’s election fraud claims are discredited conspiracy theories, then tried to push back with, well, more conspiracy theories:
With less than six months left in the campaign, that is not good enough. Trump backers have to counter attack head on.
You start with the understanding that leftists will never admit that the election itself was anything but free and fair, so, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, you concede the point.
Granted, you say, for the first time in the century and a half since Boss Tweed perfected the art of ballot harvesting – or “granny farming” as it is sometimes known – the Democrats surrendered their monopoly on this historic practice. Indeed, they did none of it at all.
Also irrelevant is the fact that postal workers, who were told their jobs were at stake if Trump won, delivered 60 million ballots. Flawlessly, I’m sure. There was no cause for concern in any of this.
In 2020 Democrats rose above their history and treated each mail-in ballot as though Jesus Christ himself had notarized it.
Unsurprisingly, Cashill offers no actual evidence to back up his claims. From there, it was on to another bogus conspiracy:
For all of their scrupulous work protecting the sanctity of the election, you insist, the Democrats did rig the election in two inarguable ways.
For one, several states flouted the Constitution by changing their election laws prior to the 2020 election without legislative approval.
Article I, Section 4, of the Constitution specifically entrusts the state legislatures with responsibility for prescribing the “Times, Places, and Manner” of elections for federal office.
In several states, however, the courts and election administrators exploited the media-driven COVID panic to assume this right for themselves. The Republicans responded with lawsuits, but the courts could not or would not respond in a timely fashion.
In fact, those lawsuits had no merit. As PolitiFact reported in response to a similar claim by Republican Rep. Steve Scalise:
Scalise’s claim draws on a legal doctrine based on a strict reading of Article 2 of the Constitution. But it ignores the fact that courts have shut the door on challenges based on his argument, made in dozens of lawsuits by Donald Trump and his allies seeking to invalidate certified election results. It also ignores that some election officials have powers to set rules without legislative changes, especially during emergencies.
[…]On the other hand, many states have laws that allow officials to suspend statutes or regulations due to emergencies such as a pandemic. Some of these emergency laws are specifically about elections, while others are more broad.
After Hurricane Michael hit north Florida in 2018, then-Gov. Rick Scott cited these emergency laws in his order to lift some rules related to mail ballots and in- person voting.
Scalise’s argument was the basis of several Republican-backed lawsuits challenging changes to election procedures, but no court agreed to a remedy that would have changed the fact that Biden won the election.
From there, it was on to another dubious election-fraud trope:
The second example of election rigging was more outrageous than the first, and there was nothing spontaneous about it.
On Oct. 14, when their apparatchiks saw the New York Post headline, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad,” they were ready to roll.
The conspirators had known since December 2019 that this story might drop. That was when Mac Isaac alerted the FBI to a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at his computer repair shop in Delaware.
Before handing it over, Isaac made a copy of its contents. Had he not done so, we would still be unaware of the role the “Big Guy” played in the Biden family’s seamy global enterprises.
Cashill got the repairman’s name wrong; Mac Isaac is his last name, and his first name is John Paul. That demonstrates the level of shoddiness in Cashill’s research. He also gives Mac Isaac a pass in rooting through someone else’s personal property for incriminating material that could be exploited for partisan purposes, which is exactly what Mac Issac did when he handed out numerous copies of the laptop’s contents to pro-Trump political operatives.
Cashill then rehashed the bogus right-wing narrative about the laptop:
During the Oct. 23 debate, when Trump played the laptop card, Biden countered with the Russia card as planned. “Look, there are 50 former National Intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan,” said a well-rehearsed Biden.
“They have said that this has all the characteristics – four – five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him, his, and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
In an estimate more conservative than many, Trump pollster John McLaughlin found that 4.6% of Biden voters would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the contents of Hunter’s laptop.
Even if those people had simply not voted, their absence at the polls would have handed several swing states to Trump. Kept purposefully in the dark, too many Americans chose to believe Biden and his co-conspirators.
Trump’s pollster cannot be considered an objective source on such things — he’s paid to make Trump look good and boost his campaign, after all. Further, that poll was bought and paid for by the Media Research Center, which was and is a pro-Trump outlet and an arm of the Republican Party.
Cashill omits one key piece of evidence here: There was no reason to trust the New York Post report at face value because it too is a pro-Trump outlet and effective arm of the Republican Party. There was also good reason to treat the story as Russian disinformation, given that the Russians were, in fact, trying to interfere in the 2020 election. If the Post wanted to avoid questions about the veracity of the laptop data, it could have offered independent verification of it. It did not.
Further, the arrest of Alexander Smirnov, an FBI informant whose claims were at the core of the legal case against Hunter, on charges of lying to authorities and working with Russian intelligence to spread misinformation, have provided some vindication to the intelligence officials who signed the letter stating that the laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Instead of being mad at media and social media outlets for not spreading a story that couldn’t be verified, Cashill should be mad at the Post for not providing that verification at the time its story came out. It pandered to Biden-haters like Cashill and made no effort to convert the justifiably skeptical, which made the whole thing look even more like a bogus October surprise. instead, he’s locked into peddling discredited talking points in a desperate attempt to justify his conspiracy theories about the election.