Fact check: Trump responds to Jan. 6 committee subpoena with usual election lies
By Daniel Dale, CNNUpdated: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 15:44:38 GMTSource: CNNFormer President Donald Trump was subpoenaed Thursday by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.T
By Daniel Dale, CNNUpdated: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 15:44:38 GMT
Source: CNN
Former President Donald Trump was subpoenaed Thursday by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Trump's response: his usual election lies.
In a rambling 14-page letter to committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, Trump did not say whether he would comply with the subpoena. Instead, he repeated various long-debunked election claims.
Here's an initial list of three of Trump's false claims in the letter. We will update this article as we write more fact-check items.
The legitimacy of the election
Trump's title on the document was this: "THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!"
Facts First: This is false. The 2020 election was not rigged or stolen. Joe Biden was the legitimate winner, Trump the legitimate loser. There is no evidence, in any state, of fraud even close to sufficient to have changed the outcome.
Votes in Pennsylvania
Trump listed purported evidence of wrongdoing in swing states he lost. One of his claims about Pennsylvania, which Biden won by more than 80,000 votes, was this: "In Pennsylvania, as of February 2021, there were 121,240 more votes than voters."
Facts First: This is false. Pennsylvania did not have more votes cast in the 2020 election than it had registered voters; in reality, it had about 7 million votes cast and about 9 million registered voters, for a turnout of about 76.5%. This claim about the state having had more votes than voters -- based on a Republican state legislator's misreading of state data -- was repeatedly debunked in 2020 and 2021.
Votes in Maricopa County, Arizona
Trump made a dramatic claim about Arizona's most populous county, Maricopa County, where Republicans conducted a sham partisan "audit" of the 2020 election. He wrote: "Maricopa County accepted at least 20,000 mail-in ballots after Election Day 2020, including 18,000 on November 4, 2020, picked up from the U.S. Postal Service—more than the entire Election margin of 10,457 ballots."
Facts First: This is false. As Reuters has reported, this claim, which has circulated among Trump supporters on social media, is based on a misinterpretation of a document that does not actually show that Maricopa County accepted any ballots after Election Day, let alone thousands of ballots. The document was a receipt for transfer of ballots to a company that scans the ballot envelopes, capturing voters' signatures, as part of the process of the county verifying the signatures.
Runbeck chief executive Jeff Ellington told Reuters in June: "These 18,000 ballots were received on Election Day prior to the deadline to cast a vote and delivered to Runbeck the next day for processing, following our standard operating procedure."
