Conspiracy theories blaming Venezuela for Trump's loss originated inside his White House: report
Former president Donald Trump during an interview with Newsmax. (Screenshot)
March 17, 2022
At least one White House aide secretly produced a report that blamed Donald Trump's election loss on Dominion Voting Systems.
The report, which alleged foreign entities secretly manipulated votes, was initially prepared so it could be sent to legislatures in states where Trump was trying to overturn his loss, and it was amplified in early December 2020 by the conservative Gateway Pundit blog -- but originated in the White House, reported The Guardian.
The publicly available version of the report identifies Katherine Friess, a volunteer on Trump's post-election legal team, as its author, but the original version reveals it was actually produced by White House policy aide Joanna Miller with the help of other Trump aides.
A source familiar with the matter confirmed that Miller, who worked under senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro, authored the report but had her name replaced when the document was publicly released, and Friess herself has said she had nothing to do with it and doesn't know how her name came to be associated with the document.
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The report, which included false claims that Dominion placed technical glitches in its voting machines that allowed thousands of votes to be added to Joe Biden's totals, was sent to Trump's then-attorney Rudy Giuliani on Nov. 29, 2020, and publicly released Dec. 2, 2020, with the White House's involvement obscured.
Navarro folded the report's claims into his own three-part report, produced with his White House aides -- including Miller and another policy aide, Garrett Zieger, who told a right-wing podcast that he and other aides, which The Guardian identified as Christopher Abbott and Hannah Robertson, started working on the report before the 2020 election even took place.
“Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those,” Ziegler told The Professor’s Record with David K Clements in July.
The unsubstantiated claims were promoted by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell in a widely mocked news conference and formed the basis a White House meeting, facilitated by Ziegler, where the former president was pitched on the idea of appointing Powell special counsel to investigate allegations of election fraud.
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