In his latest Substack post Peter Navarro addressed the role of attorney Sidney Powell in the controversy surrounding claims of election fraud.
Navarro accuses Powell of making “wild claims of voter fraud” and damaging the cause of investigating voter fraud more than any other person in the Trump movement.
Navarro’s comments reflect a broader divide within the conservative movement over the credibility of claims of election fraud and the tactics used to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.
While some Republicans, such as Powell, have championed conspiracy theories and unsupported allegations of voter fraud, others have sought to distance themselves from such claims and move on from the 2020 election.
https://twitter.com/duty2warn/status/1432660871940124672
Via Peter Navarro:
You may have seen recently in the news what the Left has described as a “treasure trove” of emails and documents from Fox executives and on-air personalities purporting to dump all over Trump’s claims of a stolen election. But the story is a bit more complex.
You can think of this story is a tale in two acts – Act One takes place between the November 3rd, 2020 presidential election and the filing of a $1.6 billion lawsuit by a voting machine company on March 26, 2021. Act Two includes the rise of blatant Never-Trumpism within Fox after the filing of that lawsuit.
In Act One, we first see understandable outrage over the premature calling of Arizona for Joe Biden by the Fox News desk. Tucker Carlson, in particular, was deeply concerned how such a call would damage the credibility of the network at the same time that it would alienate pro-Trump viewers. He was absolutely right about both concerns.
Biden allegedly won Arizona by the slimmest of margins, but that slim margin is proof in and of itself that the election was way too close to call so early. And yes, there is considerable evidence the Trump actually won.
Either way, the real point of that bogus early Fox call was that it suppressed Republican turnout in Arizona because discouraged Trump voters stayed home; and Fox saboteurs thereby, in and of themselves, put their thumb on the scale.
We also see a great debate in the email correspondence over how much credence to give President Trump’s stolen election claims. What is remarkable about this debate from a news organization is that the concerns did not center primarily on the credibility of the claims that were being made. Rather, many inside the Fox tent were simply concerned about losing pro-Trump viewers to rival Newsmax and therefore did not want to dismiss the stolen election claims. Of course, the Never-Trump folks inside the Fox tent, who were on the other side of that debate were more than happy to debunk Trump’s claims.
The crux of this particular matter boils down to the attorney Sidney Powell who, to the consternation of folks like myself who had actually done a deep analysis of the election returns, made wild claims of voter fraud, always dangling the existence of a so-called “Kraken” that would blow the whole case up.
As I document in my In Trump Time book, Powell did more damage to the cause of investigating voter fraud than any single person in the Trump movement. Not so politely, I called her a total idiot – and that is exactly what she was. The Fox correspondence emphatically proves my point because it was Sidney Powell’s rants that would prove to be the fulcrum for moving the election fraud issue off the Fox network.
Leading Fox News hosts called foul on Powell, Giuliani claims
The filing includes a number of text messages and emails between Fox’s top talent showing them insulting pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who made many of the on-air claims at the center of the suit.
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Tucker Carlson wrote to fellow prime-time host Laura Ingraham on Nov. 18, according to the filing.
“Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” Ingraham purportedly responded, apparently referring to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Both Powell and Giuliani publicly promoted claims that Dominion shifted vote counts to steal the election from Trump.
Carlson at one point allegedly confronted Powell directly about her claims, saying, “You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon. You’ve convinced them that Trump will win. If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.”
