Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/247

 on its findings. The inspection yielded no evidence of vote manipulation. Still, the report included an unsubstantiated assertion that the Dominion voting machines used in Antrim County and throughout Michigan were "purposefully designed with inherent error to create systemic fraud and influence election results" and that a malicious algorithm was used to manipulate the results of the 2020 election. Documents obtained by the Select Committee show that President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were briefed on ASOG's findings by Giuliani's team. On December 14th, President Trump widely disseminated the ASOG report and accompanying talking points prepared by Giuliani's team. He also trumpeted the report on Twitter, writing on December 14th: "WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!"

During a meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr that day, President Trump claimed the ASOG report was "absolute proof that the Dominion machines were rigged" and meant he was "going to have a second term." Barr told the Select Committee that he believed the ASOG report was "very amateurish," its authors lacked "any real qualifications," and it failed to provide any supporting information for its sweeping conclusions about Dominion. Barr told President Trump he would look into the report, but that the DOJ already had a good idea of what happened in Antrim County and it was human error, not a problem with the machines. In any event, Barr promised President Trump they would have a definitive answer within a couple of days because a hand recount was being conducted.

In the ensuing days, as Barr predicted, the ASOG report was swiftly and soundly criticized by experts within and outside the Trump Administration, including the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. The initial analysis of election security experts at the Department of Homeland Security was that the ASOG report was "false and misleading" and "demonstrates a callous misunderstanding of the actual current voting certification process." Subsequent analyses of the ASOG report and the underlying data from Antrim County were even more critical. These thorough assessments of the Antrim County data and the ASOG report demonstrate that virtually every one of the claims that President Trump and his surrogates made about the report was false. ASOG's inspection did not reveal any malicious software or algorithms or any other evidence that the voting machines had been compromised.

Most importantly, as Attorney General Barr had promised President Trump, within days of the release of the ASOG report, a full hand recount of every ballot cast in Antrim County confirmed the results reported by the Dominion machines and refuted ASOG's assertion that an algorithm has