The Patriot Post® · A 'Conservative' Case That Trump Lost the Election?

By Douglas Andrews ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/90037-a-conservative-case-that-trump-lost-the-election-2022-07-25

No, the ghost of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez didn’t commandeer our nation’s Dominion voting machines and thereby rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden. But that doesn’t mean he beat Donald Trump fair and square, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t have serious problems with our electoral system.

The combination of the pre-election coverup by Big Tech and the mainstream media of Biden’s corrupt ChiCom business deals, coupled with the Democrats’ massive bulk-mail ballot fraud scheme paved Biden’s path to the White House.

Still, a group of Trump-hating establishment Republicans self-described “conservatives” would prefer that you forget all about it and just move on. Indeed, its collective hatred for Donald Trump is so visceral that it has produced a 72-page report called “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Predictably, though, as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway points out in a devastating rebuttal, the report mostly just recites the results of court decisions and recounts, and focuses on traditionally understood fraud rather than the “significant and extremely well-substantiated concerns” that various groups have raised about the election.

“Their methodology obscures the vast majority of actual material to consider if one were honestly engaging the problems,” said Capital Research Center President Scott Walter about the Never-Trumpers’ report. Walter’s group has taken a far more serious look at the problems of the 2020 election, including the $419 million pumped into it by Facebook CEO and anti-Republican censor Mark Zuckerberg in a highly effective effort to privatize local election offices and get out the vote in the Democrat-dominated cities and counties of the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, the latter three of which were decided by a mere 43,000 votes. Oddly — or perhaps not oddly at all — the report almost completely ignores this unprecedented act of electoral meddling.

Indeed, Time magazine told some inconvenient truths in a detailed report last February called “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”

“Saved”? For whom? Time went on to describe these plotters as “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

That’s right. They changed rules and laws. As Hemingway writes: “The successful effort to change hundreds of laws and processes across the country to enable tens of millions of unsupervised ballots to flood the system was led by Marc Elias, the same Democrat attorney who had been behind the creation of the Russia collusion hoax, the lie that Trump didn’t win in 2016 but stole the election by colluding with Russia.”

In Wisconsin, for example, the state’s Supreme Court recently ruled that unsupervised ballot drop boxes and third-party ballot trafficking both violated the state’s election laws. Good luck finding coverage of this in the Never-Trumpers’ report. But, as Hemingway points out, here’s how Zuckerberg’s takeover of government election offices in Wisconsin’s biggest cities affected the outcome:

Without [the involvement of Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life] in Wisconsin in 2020, Wisconsin would be a solidly red state. We estimate that CTCL’s investment in seven Wisconsin counties resulted in 65,222 votes for Biden that would not have occurred in CTCL’s absence. That’s more than three times as big as the final 20,800-vote margin between Biden and Trump in 2020.

And that’s just Wisconsin. Zuckerbucks were also hard at work in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.

Having exposed the report’s shoddy methodology, Hemingway then exposes the anti-Trump bona fides of the report’s eight authors: retired RINO Senators John Danforth and Gordon Smith, longtime GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, Thomas B. Griffith, David Hoppe, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell, and Ted Olson. It reads like a donor list for The Lincoln Project. Not a Trump supporter among them, but plenty of impeachment advocates.

“We urge our fellow [sic] conservatives to cease obsessing over the results of the 2020 election,” the authors implore us, “and to focus instead on presenting candidates and ideas that offer a positive vision for overcoming our current difficulties and bringing greater peace, prosperity, and liberty to our nation.”

That’s easy for them to say. After all, their guy won the election.