Fox News host Tucker Carlson laid out in great detail the incredible allegations about massive, nationwide election fraud put forward by Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell — and then patiently explained how she was unable to provide any evidence to back up her claims, despite numerous, polite requests from his show.
During tonight’s show, Carlson began by reviewing the latest in President Trump’s increasingly desperate attempts to reverse his 2020 election loss.
Just hours earlier, at a bizarre press briefing, Powell had trotted out on Trump’s behalf a byzantine election fraud conspiracy theory, one that roped in a large cast of conservative boogeymen, including the Communist Party, Antifa, George Soros, the deceased Hugo Chavez, and, for good measure, the Clinton Foundation.
Powell was joined by the similarly bonkers spectacle of Rudy Giuliani re-enacting a courtroom scene from My Cousin Vinny, leaking what looked to be hair coloring product down both cheeks, and lashing out at reporters who dared to ask to see the evidence to back up his claims.
Rudy Giuliani is making wild accusations about vote fraud, without convincing any judge.
Calling the Powell claims a “bombshell,” Carlson explained that she is accusing “international leftists” of changing seven million votes across the country via Dominion election software — a claim that has already been debunked by numerous news sources.
“Sidney Powell has been saying similar things for days, on Sunday night, we texted her after watching one of her segments. What Powell was describing what amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Carlson noted. “Millions of votes stolen in the day. Democracy destroyed, the end of our centuries-old system of self-government, not a small thing.”
Carlson, who has one of the highest rated shows on Fox News, said they had invited Powell on the show.
“We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually, and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention,” he said. “But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they also told us Powell had never given them any evidence to prove anything she claimed today at the press conference.”
WATCH: Tucker Carlson Calls Out Sidney Powell
Tucker Carlson calls out Sidney Powell, saying he asked her for evidence to support her election fraud claims, but “she never sent us any evidence despite a lot of requests, polite requests, not a page.”
“When we kept pressing she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.” pic.twitter.com/IOlOdhp6MJ
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 20, 2020
Powell, who represented the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, has been a major source and promoter of viral conspiracy theories about vote switching.
Since the election, Powell has advanced claims of voluminous voter fraud and a rigged election.
She falsely claimed that a supercomputer called Hammer hacked votes, that Trump won the election by “millions of votes” and that voting software company Dominion Voting Systems altered the tallies.
Last week, she promised that coming evidence would overturn the election’s results and said she would “release the Kraken,” a reference to the 1981 movie “The Clash of the Titans,” reprising a catchphrase that began trending on Twitter.
On Monday, Powell posted some of her so-called evidence on Twitter.
It consisted of three screenshots of an affidavit that she said was signed by a former military official from Venezuela about elections there.
The screenshots were incomplete and did not include a name or signature, and Powell did not respond to requests to view the full document.
But according to her and excerpts from the affidavit, the elections software company Smartmatic helped the Venezuelan government rig its elections by switching votes and leaving no trail.
The military official said in the excerpts that the U.S. election was “eerily reminiscent” of what happened in Venezuela’s 2013 presidential election, though no evidence was provided that votes had been switched in the United States.
Powell promoted the affidavit and its claims in interviews on conservative media that have amassed at least four million views on YouTube.
Smartmatic does not provide technology to the battleground states that sealed President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
And electronic voting security experts said they were unimpressed with what Powell presented.
“The essence of the affidavit is that voting machines could have been hacked. This is not news,” said David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University and founder of the Verified Voting Foundation. “Every single vote that has been counted by computer in the U.S. in the last 50 years was counted by a computer that ‘could have been hacked.’ So far as I know, none of them actually were.”
Dan Wallach, a professor of computer science at Rice University and an expert on electronic voting system security, said: “If this class of attack was happening, the odds of it going undetected is quite low. So far, we have no evidence suggesting an abnormal number of spoiled ballots.”
Previous claims that Smartmatic’s voting machines were rigged in Venezuela have been disputed and are “unsubstantiated,” according to The Associated Press.
It’s worth noting that Smartmatic accused the Venezuelan government of election fraud in 2017, pointing out that its machines were used when the opposition party won a majority in the country’s National Assembly in 2015.
The excerpts from Powell also included numerous inaccurate claims to imply a similarity between Venezuela’s elections and the U.S. election, chiefly drawing dubious parallels between Smartmatic and Dominion, which was used in several key states.
Powell took the claims one step further, telling the right-wing media company Newsmax that Venezuela’s vote counting system was then “exported” to the United States.
The official she cited also said that Dominion’s system was “a descendant” of Smartmatic’s system, that they “did business together” and that Biden had overtaken Trump only when “vote counting was stopped.”
Smartmatic and Dominion have denied any exchange of technology and maintain that they are competitors.
Dominion bought assets from a company three years after Smartmatic sold the company.
And Biden overtook Trump in Pennsylvania and Georgia after days of consistent counting, while maintaining a lead in Arizona that narrowed as tallying continued.
The official also claimed to Powell that voting machines display and print out a paper ballot showing the results the voter intended, while the software itself “changes the information electronically.”
But Dominion’s system does not work like that.
“The process that we see happening in Georgia and elsewhere that use similar ‘ballot marking device’ systems,” Wallach said, “is that the voter selects their choices with a computer of some sort, which then prints their ballot. The voter then typically carries that ballot to a ballot box, often with a scanner on top, and deposits the ballot.”
Any difference or attack on the tabulation system would be caught in postelection recounts, and “so far, none of them have caught anything other than human errors in the tabulation process, such as forgetting to load a memory card,” he said.
Dill said: “Courts demand strong evidence to overturn an election. From that perspective, this affidavit does not help make a case.”
Meanwhile Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) slammed Powell’s allegations today that Democratic and Republican politicians may have paid to change the general-election results.
Powell has implied that politicians from both parties may have paid to skew the results.
“That is an offensive comment,” Senator Ernst said. “For those of us that do stand up and represent our state in a dignified manner, we believe in the honesty, we believe in the integrity of our election system.”
Ernst added, “I do believe that if there is fraud out there, it should be brought to the courts’ attention. . . . I think all of us agree on that. But to insinuate that Republican and Democratic candidates paid to throw off this election, I think is absolutely outrageous.”