Warnock: Americans Must ‘Repent’ for Backing Trump and ‘Worship of Whiteness’

Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock argued in late 2016 that Americans needed to "repent" both for supporting Donald Trump and for the country’s "worship of whiteness."

The comments came in an address at Atlanta’s Candler School of Theology shortly before Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

"If it is true that a man who has dominated the news and poisoned the discussion for months needs to repent, then it is doubly true that a nation that can produce such a man and make his vitriol go viral needs to repent," Warnock said to raucous applause. "No matter what happens next month, more than a third of the nation that would go along with this, is reason to be afraid. America needs to repent for its worship of whiteness, on full display this season."

A full version of Warnock’s remarks can be found here. The Warnock campaign did not respond to a request for comment. While Trump’s support among white men eroded in the 2020 presidential race, he gained ground with African-Americans and Hispanics.

The senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Warnock is now locked in a tight Senate race against Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler. He is already under fire for a bevy of his previous statements, from calling Israel an "oppressive regime" to his defense of the anti-Semitic Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He is also come under scrutiny for praising his religious mentor, Dr. James Cone, who argued that white Christians practice the "theology of the Antichrist" and described whites as "satanic."

In the same sermon, Warnock also argued for raising the minimum wage, telling the audience that refusing to do so while demanding Americans work is dehumanizing. "Whenever we refuse to raise the minimum wage while demanding that people ought to work, we are saying, ‘I can do with them whatever I want,’" he said.

Warnock is headed into a runoff election against Loeffler on Jan. 5. National political organizations are expected to pour record-breaking funds and resources into the highly contested race, which is one of two runoff elections in Georgia that will determine party control of the U.S. Senate next year.

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Republican Burgess Owens Defeats Democrat Rep. Ben McAdams in Utah


Republican Burgess Owens proved victorious over his challenger, Democrat Rep. Ben McAdams, in Utah’s Fourth Congressional District for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

As of Friday night, with 99 percent of precincts reporting, the Salt Lake Tribune considered Owens’ 2,095-vote lead over McAdams to be “insurmountable.” The Tribune also noted that Owens had 47.50 percent of the vote on Friday compared to McAdams’ 46.93 percent.

“If Owens’ lead holds as those and any remaining ballots in Utah County are counted ahead of the final canvass next week, he will be one of two new members in Utah’s six-member congressional delegation,” the Tribune stated.

Owens’ campaigned focused heavily on the far-left’s “socialist policies” and extreme “Marxists.”

Earlier this year, in May, Owens said that he must take back Utah’s Fourth Congressional seat in an attempt to help Republicans “take back our country.”

Owens, a former Oakland Raiders Superbowl Champion, has also been very critical of Colin Kaepernick and his decision to kneel during the national anthem before football games.

“We have a responsibility as we pass the torch down to the next generation, and there is an example of someone we all respect: Kobe,” Owens told Breitbart News in February. “There is a difference in Kobe’s approach to life, and maybe some other athletes who don’t quite get it.”

Owens added:

My generation has dropped the ball. We have allowed the socialists and Marxists to get in our school systems and teach our kids a different way than we were brought up. Kaepernick is a good example. In today’s society, our greatest enemy is socialists and Marxists who lay in wait and attack our most vulnerable. In this case, you have kids going to school fresh-eyed and excited about life and looking forward to a great future, but they come out anti-American Marxists.

Up until Owens’ success, Utah’s Fourth Congressional District was one of 30 districts represented by a Democrat that President Donald Trump had won in 2016.

In the same district’s 2018 race, McAdams narrowly defeated incumbent Rep. Mia Love (R) by 700 votes.

Owens’ victory marks the twelfth seat in the House of Representatives to be flipped from Democrat to Republican on Election Day.

Other candidates and districts where Republicans were successful this year include CA-39: Young Kim; CA-48: Michelle Steel; FL-27: Maria Elvira Salazar; FL-26: Carlos Gimenez; IA-01 Ashley Hinson; MI-03: Peter Meijer; MN-07: Michelle Fischbach; NY-11: Nicole Malliotakis; NM-02: Yvette Herrell; OK-05: Stephanie Bice; and SC-01: Nancy Mace.

Follow Kyle on Twitter @RealKyleMorris and Facebook.

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New federal lawsuit seeks to throw out 1.2 million votes in Michigan, flipping the state for Trump

Another federal lawsuit was filed in Michigan this week that seeks to toss out up to 1.2 million votes, which would flip the Great Lakes State in President Donald Trump’s favor.

Media-declared president-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump in Michigan by approximately 146,000 votes.

What are the details?

The lawsuit, filed by four voters in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, seeks to toss out ballots in three Democratic strongholds — Wayne, Ingham, and Washtenaw counties — over allegations of voter fraud, according to Michigan Live.

Those three counties are responsible for about 1.2 million votes, favoring Biden by more than 2:1. Eliminating ballots from those counties would give Trump a victory in Michigan.

Plaintiffs claim that "sufficient evidence" exists "to place in doubt the November 3 presidential-election results" in the three identified counties, citing "issues with transparency, fraudulent changing of dates, a software glitch, clerical errors, illegal votes, and many other issues and irregularities."

More from Michigan Live:

Plaintiffs also cite ongoing investigations launched by the Michigan Legislature and a variety of other claims that have been debunked. The allegations include charges of Republican ballot challengers being harassed and illegal tampering with ballots.

Plaintiffs conclude that "this evidence suffices to place in doubt the November 3 presidential election results in identified counties and/or the state as a whole." However, the group of voters also claims to have additional evidence of illegal ballots being included in unofficial results, based on "expert reports" and data analysis.

The lawsuit further says that certifying the votes would violate voters’ First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights by "vote-dilution disenfranchisement."

Defendants include Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, members of the Michigan State Board of Canvassers, Wayne County Board of Canvassers, Washtenaw County Board of Canvassers, and Ingham County Board of Canvassers.

Are the lawsuits working?

Lawsuits alleging unproven claims of voter fraud are losing the legal battle in court.

The most recent loss came on Friday, when Wayne County Circuit Chief Judge Timothy Kenny denied a request for an independent audit of Wayne County votes, according to the Detroit Free Press. The lawsuit had claimed local election officials managed a fraudulent election.

Also on Friday, Trump’s campaign dropped a legal challenge in Arizona and shut down its voter fraud hotline. The campaign also suffered a loss in federal court when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled against the campaign’s efforts to block mail-in votes received after Election Day from being counted.

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GOP Officials In Georgia Flag ‘Issues’ With Ordered Audit, Recount

Republican officials in Georgia have sounding the alarm over “issues” pertaining to the ordered presidential election recount and audit in the Peach State. As noted by GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Thursday, state Republicans say the the protocols for the audit do not include signature review and the timeline for Georgia counties is set to […]

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PAUL SPERRY: Pro-Biden Bug Also Suspected in Georgia’s Vote-Counting Software

Via Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations:

A curious thing happened as Fulton County, Ga., election officials counted mail-in ballots at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena in the days after the election. In the early hours of Nov. 5, a surge of some 20,000 mail-in votes suddenly appeared for Joe Biden, while approximately 1,000 votes for President Trump mysteriously disappeared from his own totals in the critical swing state, where Biden holds a razor-thin lead.

A poll watcher noticed the suspicious shift in votes while monitoring the interim election results on the Georgia secretary of state website.

“I concluded from looking at these results that this was an irregularity, since there was no obvious reason for President Trump’s totals to have decreased while former Vice President Biden’s totals increased dramatically,” Voter GA co-founder Garland Favorito swore in an affidavit he filed this week with the secretary of state’s office.

Favorito suspects a variety of factors, including that votes were “artificially inflated” for Biden while using the same Dominion Voting system used by Antrim County, Mich., which erroneously transferred 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden. Last year, Georgia contracted with Dominion to automate vote tabulations in all 159 of its counties.

“The software appears to have thrown votes from Trump to Biden here too,” he said in a RealClearInvestigations interview. “Or Biden ballots were manufactured.”

The large disparity of gains between the two candidates “was something I had never witnessed before in my years of election monitoring,” said Favorito, a career IT professional who has been a leading advocate for election integrity in the state over the past two decades. He says he is not a Republican or Trump supporter.

On Nov. 10, Favorito sent his affidavit to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, recommending a full, by-hand ballot recount. The next day, his office announced it will conduct such an audit for the presidential race. Biden currently leads Trump by more than 14,000 votes in the state.

“It’s a good first step,” Favorito said. “A recount will be able to determine if there was electronic vote fraud.”

In addition to helping certify the presidential race, he said it’s imperative investigators identify the source of the irregularities before the state holds its two U.S. Senate run-off elections on Jan. 5 so they don’t repeat themselves.

Georgia is now Ground Zero in the battle for control of the Senate. Republicans currently hold a 50-48 edge, but if they lose both Georgia seats, presumptive Vice President-elect Kamala Harris could cast tie-breaking votes to carry out the Democratic agenda.

On Dominion Voting’s website, a page titled “Election 2020: Setting the Record Straight” says “claims about Dominion switching or deleting votes are 100% false.”

While noting that “no election is without isolated issues,” Dominion states:  “Election safeguards – from testing and certification of voting systems, to canvassing and auditing – prevent malicious actors from tampering with vote counts and ensure that final vote tallies are accurate.”

But Favorito, who lives in the Atlanta area, said the Fulton County shift was so dramatic it seemed as if someone had “dumped” a huge batch of mail-in ballots for Biden into the system overnight.

“One candidate could not go up by 20,000 and the other do nothing — in Fulton County or any county in Georgia,” he asserted. “That’s just not going to happen.”

Added Favorito: “I think they’re going to find the root cause of the irregularity was something electronic, and I think it’s going to change the results substantially.”

He suggested it may have been the result of a software or equipment malfunction or possibly even vote-swapping “malware” infecting the system. Of greatest concern, however, is the possibility of intentional misconduct by an election official or worker.

“There’s always the chance it was an inside job,” Favorito said, though both Republican and Democratic officials in the state say they have found no credible evidence of election fraud.

He said he also sent his affidavit to the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections for investigation, but has not heard back. The board did not respond to requests for comment.

Precincts across the state reported problems with the Dominion system during this summer’s primary elections, including malfunctioning machines. Even before June’s voting meltdown, Favorito said, he and his nonprofit, Voter GA — which stands for Voters Organized for Trusted Elections Results in Georgia — warned Raffensperger and his staff not to buy the pricey equipment and software from the Canadian company.

“They knew good and well they should never have bought this system in the first place,” he said. “We explained that Dominion was rejected in Texas for failing to meet basic security standards before they bought it.”

Favorito suspects similar surges in Biden ballots may have taken place during the counting of mail-in ballots on other nights, including Election Night. On Nov. 3, Fulton County elections officials informed observers that they were shutting down the tabulation center before midnight, only to continue counting throughout the night while no one was watching.

“Fulton County elections officials falsely announced that the counting of ballots would stop at 10:30 p.m.,” Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer complained in a recent Tweet. “Officials unlawfully resumed the counting of ballots after our observers left the center.”

Favorito fears that what he observed on Nov. 5 was not an isolated incident. “There could have been multiple 20,000-batch irregularities,” he said, “but they never got reported because they cleared out the observers.”

He does not rule out “ballot harvesting” as the culprit behind the sudden surges of mail-in votes for Biden.

He said the hundreds of drop boxes Raffensperger agreed to distribute at shopping centers and other cities throughout the state may have encouraged third parties to collect ballots in the name of other voters and stuff them into the boxes, which is illegal.

“That’s just begging for fraud,” Favorito said.

Previously, voters who didn’t want to mail in their absentee ballots had to go to the county elections office and deliver their ballot in person while showing an ID to prove they were the individual who filled it out. But in this election, anybody could drop ballots into the otherwise unregulated boxes the state installed for the first time this year.

Fair Fight Action, a voting-rights group founded by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, helped convince Raffensperger to install hundreds of them across the state — including dozens in Fulton County — by arguing that the cost of a 55-cent stamp was a modern-day “poll tax” for many African-Americans who didn’t want to risk voting in person during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There is evidence there was some type of ballot harvesting going on in Georgia,” Favorito said, “but we don’t know yet if it’s tied to the drop boxes.”

Favorito cited the disproportionately large number of “Biden-only” ballots cast, or ballots that had only the presidential vote marked and filled out for Biden, with no down-ballot races checked, indicating ballots may have been collected from voters and filled out for them — that is, “harvested” — and then delivered to the drop boxes.

Mail-in or drop-off ballots are notorious for creating opportunities for voter error and fraud. In a typical election, 1 in 20 mailed ballots are rejected, according to recent studies. More than 534,000 mail-in ballots were rejected during the Democratic primaries alone.

‘Curing Defects’ in Biden Ballots

“Curing” or fixing errors in rejected provisional ballots is another area ripe for potential fraud, election watchdogs warn.

Voters are required to cast provisional ballots if their name does not appear on the list of registered voters. Or if they lack proper ID. Or if there’s a problem with their signature. Or if they cast their ballots after polls close, among other reasons.

Provisional ballots are last to be counted and rarely factor into election outcomes — except in tight races such as this one in Georgia.

Democratic activists have scrambled to make these otherwise rejected votes for Biden count. They claim thousands of provisional ballots cast for Biden in Georgia have “curable defects,” and they’ve been deploying volunteers to go door-to-door to help voters in Fulton and surrounding counties fix their ballots so they will be counted.

The statewide Democratic operation is revealed in post-election court filings. In neighboring Forsyth County, for example, Democratic lawyers have sued to obtain the dates of birth, home addresses and phone numbers of rejected voters so they can contact them and help fix their ballots.

The law firm representing the Democratic plaintiffs — Krevolin and Horst LLC — also represents Abram’s Fair Fight PAC, according to Federal Election Commission vendor reports. Her group, funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg and other wealthy Democrats, has sued the state of Georgia over allegations of “systemic suppression” of black voters.

In its lawsuit filed Nov. 5, the firm argued that Biden voters “will be “disenfranchised” if Forsyth County election officials do not provide the activists the personal information they seek to contact them and “cure” their deficient ballots.

County officials, however, refused to provide the information, and a judge ruled in their favor, dismissing the complaint in its entirety.

“Several other counties including some surrounding us like Fulton allowed the activity that our local judge prevented,” Forsyth County Commissioner Dennis Brown, a Republican, told RCI.

“It is my understanding that this has been successful for the Democratic Party in many jurisdictions throughout the state,” he said. “The end result is they were able to ‘cure’ many votes for Democrats up and down the ticket, including for Biden, that would not have been counted otherwise.”

Advised Favorito: “Provisional ballot-fixing is definitely another area for potential fraud.”

This RealClearInvestigations article was republished by The Gateway Pundit with permission.

Paul Sperry is the former D.C. bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, Hoover Institution media fellow, author of several books, including bestseller INFILTRATION

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Pennsylvania Election Data Analysis: Some Very Suspect Counties

By Stu Cvrk

Much has been written and commented on about voter fraud since Election Day, 3 November, from anecdotal evidence of poll watchers, to observations of concerned citizens, to various whistleblowers. Speculation has also been rampant about electronic ballot tampering, as well as the magical “discovery” of tens of thousands of ballots in key swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Facts are slowly leaking out, and President Trump’s team has filed lawsuits based on those facts in a number of states, as noted in this summary here. But what about statistical analysis of the votes counted?

At the request of the President’s team last weekend, a technical team was formed to conduct a statistical analysis of certain voter data in key states in order to determine whether there were any significant statistical anomalies evident, and if so, which counties were most suspect. The team’s election objective was to help ascertain that all legal votes — and only legal votes, be counted. The team consisted of five statistics experts who were sympathetic to that objective. Based on the datasets they are being provided, the team is looking for “where the bodies were buried” in terms of possible fraudulent behavior.

In one part of the team’s analysis of Pennsylvania, four counties were identified as being suspect: Montgomery, Chester, Cumberland, and Pike. Here is one graph that plotted Democrat-to-Republican registration ratio by Biden/Other Democrat votes.

The key to understanding that graph is this: Biden’s vote totals in the four counties were 1.24 to 1.43 times greater than the totals for Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama (both elections). This is an absurd result, especially in the three Republican-leaning counties, given that Republican support for President Trump has hovered at 95% over the past year-plus. What is the probability that more Pennsylvanians in these counties voted for a thoroughly compromised candidate who did not even campaign down the stretch than voted for either Barack Hussein Obama or Hillary Clinton?

Another graph plotted the Biden versus Trump ratio of votes by the number of extra votes Biden got.

Dots in the below-the-zero-line reflect counties in which President Trump received more votes than Joe Biden. Blue dots indicate counties that have more registered Democrats than Republicans registered and red dots vice versa. Chester, Delaware, Allegheny, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties added the most “excess votes” to Biden. Chester is an outlier because it is predominantly Republican. These counties are ripe for an audited recount.

Another aberration in Montgomery county is that some 90%± of registered voters voted. That is an extraordinarily high – and suspicious – percentage. For comparison purposes, the Pennsylvania state average turnout in the 2016 national election was 61%.

The next graph plotted aggregate county vote totals over 92 equal increments of time, as officially reported on 3 November.

The Biden count curve starts about 18% below the Trump count curve and ends up being about 1% above it. It is striking that the two time-series curves that start so far apart end up so very close together; this is NOT a very likely outcome. There was a time period in the middle of the night where counting stopped for several hours (the “Pause”) and then resumed. At that point, it was known how many votes were needed by Biden to win. The jump in the blue curve is the filling in of those needed votes. This cannot be a coincidence. [Note: it takes time to count paper ballots; otherwise, the up-tick in the above graph for Biden would have been more vertical – and more starkly anomalous!]

There are two anomalies related to that time-series graph above. The first is that President Trump “lost” just under 10,000 votes at 21:15 on 4 November, but curiously from three different counties simultaneously: -1,063 Allegheny; -2,972 Bucks; -7,135 Chester. Biden never lost any votes at all over the several days of counting through 7 November. The second is that Biden received a big increase of 27,396 votes at 08:53 on 6 November over one consecutive reporting period. That bump equates to the “jump” in the blue line. Both of those anomalies account for Biden’s 34,000 vote lead in the datasets that were analyzed by the team.

The team also examined Biden votes versus the number of Democratic registered voters. Here is a sampling showing excess votes for Biden over the number of registered Democrats in these counties:

In all these counties, especially in Montgomery and Chester counties, there are more Biden votes counted than registered Democrats. It is not statistically reasonable for Biden to have received more Democratic votes, by 38,500± in Montgomery county and 36,600± in Chester country, then there are registered Democratic voters. Researcher Corey’s Digs has also been doing work into this anomaly which will be published later this week.

There were ten Pennsylvania counties in which Biden received excess votes above the Democrat totals in three prior presidential elections. Five counties alone had more Democrat excess votes added than the maximum number of votes added in the 2012 and 2016 elections. The team performed simple linear regressions to compare the number of registered Democrats who voted in those ten counties that delivered the most excess votes for Biden in 2020 versus the Democrat turnout in other Pennsylvania counties. They found that an average 70%± of registered Democratic voters voted in other than those ten counties. In comparison, some 76% of registered Democrat voters supposedly voted in those ten counties that delivered the excess votes for the Biden “win.” That is an unexpected statistical aberration.

Lastly, a Benford’s law analysis was conducted on votes tabulated in heavily-Democrat Allegheny county. In simplified terms, the law asserts that the number 1 should appear more frequently as the lead digit in a precinct voter count. The number 2 should be less frequent, etc. The distribution, with no fraud, should decline exponentially. Here are the Benford graphs from the voter datasets analyzed for Allegheny county:

Note that the shape of the voter count first digits follows Benford’s Law rather closely for President Trump but does not for Joe Biden. This anomalous result lends support for a complete audit of Allegheny county votes tabulated. A team member conducted a more detailed analysis of Pennsylvania’s results (linked here). [Note: additional datasets have been requested by the team in order to complete a more exhaustive Benford’s law analysis across multiple states, as the larger the datasets analyzed, the more accurate and conclusive the resulting Benford’s law analysis.]

Keep in mind that this team — which is doing this all for free, and they all have busy lives otherwise — have only examined Pennsylvania and Milwaukee datasets so far. In both cases, they were given just a few hours to wade through pages of data, graph multiple possibilities, and then write a report. More exhaustive analyses are in process, and more datasets from other states will be forthcoming. The information summarized in this article is just a window into the “anomalies” reported in many swing states over the past week. Still, it is becoming clearer that audits are required to achieve the team’s admirable objective of ascertaining that all legal votes — and only legal votes, be counted. This story is developing….

 

Stu Cvrk served 30 years in the US Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. An oceanographer and systems analyst through education and experience, Stu is a graduate of the US Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education. This functions as the key foundation for his political commentary. He threads daily on Twitter on a wide range of political topics, such as the military, foreign policy, government, economics, and world affairs.

Twitter: @STUinSD

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Pennsylvania Whistleblower Interrogation Audio Causes Stir

Amid a fierce information war between voter fraud deniers, mainstream media and independent journalists, Project Veritas released audio yesterday of Pennsylvania USPS whistleblower and military veteran Richard Hopkins being interrogated by federal investigators about his concerns regarding possible ballot backdating. The 2-hour recording was released on the heels of a Washington Post article that falsely claimed Hopkins had recanted his original statement.

In what has been tagged #BackDateGate on Twitter, the story began when Hopkins received troubling instructions on Nov. 5 from his superiors at an Eerie, PA post office about the handling of ballots received after Election Day. Suspicious of these directives vis a vis PA law concerning ballot deadlines, Hopkins then overheard two of his supervisors quietly discussing ballots and postmarks. Alarmed and “freaked out” by what appeared to him as tampering, he contacted independent media production company Project Veritas, because he didn’t know who to trust.

Project Veritas videotaped a shrouded Hopkins testimony and assisted him in filing a sworn affidavit. The release struck a blow to the large-scale effort currently underway to delegitimize election fraud claims in key swing states including Pennsylvania. When Hopkins returned to work, he says he was met by representatives of the American Postal Union who began questioning him about long-resolved issues involving his employment. Fearing impending blow-back, Hopkins told Project Veritas he wanted to unmask himself. Veritas founder James O’Keefe encouraged him to set up a crowdfunding campaign as a life raft in the event that he was terminated from his job. The Go Fund Me campaign raised more than $100,000 before being frozen days later. (Go Fund Me has a history of canceling campaigns that clash with its sociopolitical ideologies.) He also gave him a recording device or “wire” to use at work in case anyone tried to intimidate him.

At this point, Senator Lindsay Graham got wind of Hopkins’ story and said he would incorporate it into the Senate Judiciary Committee’s election-fraud investigation, a development that brought even more attention to Hopkins and the USPS.

On Nov. 9, USPS Office of the Inspector General investigator Russell Strasser and USPS Postal Inspector Charles “Chris” Klein showed up at his workplace and conducted an unscheduled interview with Hopkins who was wearing the wire provided by Project Veritas.

“I’m not willing to give up until they fire me,” Hopkins says at the beginning of the discussion, adding, “I’m an introverted person, I don’t like to be noticed.” Strasser attempts to put Hopkins at ease, with what some have criticized as manipulative and misleading language to gain trust and, ultimately, submission.

“I actually believe what you’re saying,” he tells Hopkins, “ but we need to make sure it’s 1,000 percent correct. What I want to do, in the best way I can protect you, is to leave today with the absolute truth, the barest truth, that nobody can chip away at.” He continues, “I’m literally going to be here in your corner, OK?”

Strasser then goes over Hopkins’ rights as a citizen of the U.S. before having him initial documents to verify that he understands: The right to remain silent, the right to not be punished for his silence, the right to leave the interview at any time, the right to not be coerced into signing. After small talk about military service, Strasser asks Hopkins if he has legal representation. He says no, though Veritas lawyers are available should he need them. “I ask because I’m protecting your rights,” says Strasser.

Strasser never advises that Hopkins might want to have a lawyer present and doesn’t give him the option to contact one before proceeding. Instead, he lets him know that the absence of a lawyer means he doesn’t have to interrupt the proceedings waiting for one to show up, saying, “That’s a hurdle we don’t have to jump.” Then he apologizes for the “legalese.”

Hopkins mentions that he studied criminal justice and is not intimidated by legal discussion, but rather enjoys it. Strasser laughs and says, “Well, sit back brother, ’cause you’re about to learn!”

This is where Strasser begins what some legal experts have characterized as coercive interrogation through the use of tactics that, while not uncommon in investigation settings, can be employed unethically.

In a series of tweets, Wednesday evening, attorney Leslie McAdoo Gordon gave a brief analysis of the audio, accusing Strasser of “completely inappropriate conduct.” While she admitted that the interview wasn’t handled as poorly as it could have been, mainly due to Hopkins’ good character, she wrote that Strasser did use bullying to establish control of Hopkins—something he would not have gotten away with had a lawyer been present. McAdoo Gordon also expressed concern about Strasser’s repeated insistence that he was there to “protect” Hopkins. “That is a lie,” she tweeted. “ He reassures Hopkins of it many, many times in various formulations during the interview to make Hopkins believe it’s true, but it’s not.”

McAdoo Gordon also squashed the idea that Hopkins recanted his original testimony. While he did rephrase one small portion of his story, throughout the interview he maintained his position that highly suspicious handling of ballots was occurring at the Eerie, PA post office, both before and after Election Day.

After an exhaustive analysis of what Hopkins had overheard his superiors discussing on Nov. 5, Strasser eventually manages to get Hopkins to agree to rewrite a paragraph in his affidavit. Hopkins was led to the conclusion by Strasser that what he actually heard had been slightly embellished by his “logical assumption” of what they were discussing. In other words, his gut feeling, coupled with unusual official directives concerning ballot handling caused him to fill in some blanks, but the actual words he overheard were not enough to build a case on. As McAdoo Gordon explained, “He never says the original facts in his affidavit were false or did not happen. The very most he says is that it is possible that he may have misunderstood or made assumptions. That is definitely not a recantation.”

This statement from McAdoo Gordon echoes Hopkins’ own rebuttal to the Washington Post article (published before Veritas released the audio, likely using leaked information provided by Strasser) which maintained Hopkins’ had entirely recanted his testimony. Other news outlets piggybacked on the article causing a storm of misinformation in mainstream media that quickly flooded social media environments.

While reporters and pundits were busy trying to discredit Hopkins on Wednesday, Project Veritas tweeted screenshots of what it called a “burner” anti-Trump Twitter account secretly managed by Strasser. As of this morning, that account no longer exists.

Hopkins, currently suspended without pay, was able to launch his fundraiser on the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo where he has raised $211,000 in just a few days.

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