Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/246

 President's first interview since he lost his bid for reelection. He claimed the election was "rigged" and rife with "theft" and "a total fraud." He repeated various conspiracy theories, leading with the claim that Dominion's voting machines had "glitches," which he alleged moved "thousands of votes from my account to Biden's account." He claimed that there had been "big, massive dumps" of votes—a reference to the Red Mirage. He rambled off various other, spurious allegations, including that dead people voted in significant numbers. None of it was true.

On December 1st, Attorney General Barr met again with President Trump and told him that "the stuff his people were shoveling out to the public was bullshit." Attorney General Barr specifically told President Trump that the claims about Dominion voting machines were "idiotic claims." President Trump was still not dissuaded from continuing the lie. The day after his meeting with the Attorney General, President Trump released a video in which he repeated several claims of election fraud, including a claim that "votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden" using Dominion voting machines.

By early-December, courts had assessed and rejected claims that Dominion machines were manipulated to affect the outcome of the 2020 election. In Michigan, a Federal judge found that claims, including those related to fraud due to the use of Dominion voting machines, were based on "nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes were destroyed, discarded or switched" In Arizona, a Federal judge dismissed claims that Dominion machines had deleted, switched, or changed votes. But President Trump and his supporters refused to accept denunciations of the fabricated Dominion claims.

Through December, President Trump and his legal team tried to echo the Dominion conspiracy theory by claiming to have found evidence that votes were switched in Antrim County. The clerk's unintentional error was fixed weeks earlier and there was no evidence showing that Dominion had altered the vote tally in Antrim, or anywhere else. But President Trump's legal team used a case challenging a local marijuana ordinance that had passed by one vote to gain access to Dominion's voting machines. An Antrim County judge issued an order granting the plaintiff's experts access to the county's computer, Dominion voting machines, thumb drives and memory cards. Although the purpose of the order was to allow the plaintiff to seek evidence related to his ordinance challenge, it soon became clear that President Trump's legal team was behind the effort.

An organization named Allied Security Operations Group ("ASOG"), led by Russell Ramsland, conducted an analysis of Antrim County's voting machines and related systems. On December 13th, ASOG released a report