Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/243

 concluding that, among other things, Dominion machines "Did Not Affect The Final Vote Count." The memo also addressed various claims of foreign influence regarding Dominion. Jason Miller told the Select Committee that by November 12th he had told President Trump the results of the analysis of the Dominion claims by the campaign's internal research team, specifically telling him "that the international allegations for Dominion were not valid." Emails and text messages show that this same analysis was shared with Mark Meadows, President Trump's chief of staff. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told the Select Committee that she found herself "waving [President Trump] off of the Dominion theory," encouraging him to use more "fact-driven" arguments. But it was to no avail.

Even though members of the Trump Campaign team reported that the result of the election was not compromised by any problems with Dominion machines, the President continued to assail Dominion on Twitter in the days that followed, for example retweeting a false claim that Dominion's machines were "engineered by China, Venezuela, [and] Cuba" and claiming that Dominion had "[r]igged" the election.

Officials in the Trump administration also worked to debunk the false rumors about vote manipulation. The United States Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a joint statement of election security officials on November 12, reassuring voters that the election was "the most secure in American history." CISA emphasized: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."

This was another decision point for the President. He could choose to endorse the findings of his administration's own cyber security experts, or he could continue to promote baseless fictions about Dominion. President Trump chose the lies. The President and his supporters never did produce any evidence showing that Dominion's machines affected the results of the election. But President Trump was undeterred by the facts. Indeed, the President and his supporters seized upon a simple human error in a small Michigan county as their initial pretense for these allegations as well as to keep the Dominion conspiracy theory alive.

During the early-morning hours of November 4th, Sheryl Guy, a clerk in Antrim County, Michigan, reported the unofficial results of the vote count. Guy's online report was odd. It showed that former Vice President Biden had somehow won Antrim, a county that is majority-Republican and President Trump was expected to easily win. Trump's supporters quickly pointed to Biden's improbable win as evidence that Dominion had tampered with the votes. That wasn't true. Guy had made a mistake in updating the