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Yeah, Ted Cruz’s book doesn’t show any voter fraud

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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For a guy looking to sell a book to a right-wing audience, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) couldn’t have landed a much better spot than his interview with Fox News’s Mark Levin on Sunday. Levin, less an interviewer than town crier, gave Cruz plenty of time to explain what his new book, “Justice Corrupted,” would offer readers.


“This book is the first inside account of what happened on Jan. 6,” Cruz said in his practiced manner. “And so I take the reader through the events of the 2020 election leading up to Jan. 6. I take them through the evidence of election fraud and voter fraud in November 2020, which the Democrats and the corporate media insists doesn’t exist.”
The book was released Tuesday. This particular “corporate media” outlet can now report that, in fact, rampant fraud continues not to exist — as demonstrated, here at least, by Cruz’s failure to present any of his promised evidence of election or voter fraud.
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The thrust of Cruz’s book echoes the one released by former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway earlier this year: Had but the authors been in charge, none of this would have happened. If only everyone in November 2020 had the benefit of their hindsight, a hindsight that is near-perfect!






In Conway’s case, that sentiment was focused on the 2020 election. Her assertion that Trump lost made headlines as a break from his repeated claims, but it was offered mostly as a pretext for her to claim that she could have gotten him across the finish line. In Cruz’s case, the failure that could have been avoided was the flurry of post-election lawsuits aimed at proving illegalities.
“I called President Trump, and told him that he needed to assemble a far better legal team, and he needed to do so immediately,” Cruz writes at one point, with the tone of a guy trying to impress his friends. But, sadly, no lawyers would take Trump’s case — a failure Cruz chalks up, no doubt accurately, to Trump’s reputation. When Trump asked if he, Ted Cruz, would argue Texas’s last-ditch lawsuit should it get to the Supreme Court, Cruz readily agreed. Unfortunately for Trump (Cruz would have us think), Cruz never got the chance. The suit, a pastiche of nonsense, was quickly turned away.
Then there was Cruz’s effort to leverage Trump’s claims of fraud to his own benefit. Beaten to the punch by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in early 2021, Cruz invented a way to object to the results of the election while maintaining plausible deniability that he was doing so. What if they simply held off on certifying electors until fraud claims had been adjudicated? Never mind that they had been, of course; this was a way for him to wink at Trump’s base while still nodding soberly at his colleagues. And when this course of action wasn’t adopted, it opened the door for him, writing a book months later, to suggest that if only it had been, everything would have turned out fine.







When Cruz does talk about fraud in the book, he does so in an amusingly lawyerly way. He’s more than willing to warm over a wide array of right-wing boogeymen from the days of yore — both ACORN and the New Black Panther Party make appearances — but he generally constrains his claims about fraud in ways that leave him an escape hatch back to reality.
For example, he quotes from the speech he gave shortly before the Capitol riot:
“Voter fraud has posed a persistent challenge in our elections, although its breadth and scope are disputed. By any measure, the allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election exceed any in our lifetimes.”
Let’s shift the focus to make the gambit here clear: “UFOs remain a threat to our nation’s cows. By any measure, the claims of people seeing UFOS exceed any in our lifetimes.” See how that works?
All of his assertions about fraud are similarly nebulous in a very politician-y way. He says enough so that people who track this stuff closely know what he’s talking about, but not enough to be able to be pinned down as being dishonest. It’s always 2020 “might have been the most fraud-ridden election in the history of the United States” this and “no one would ever find out whether there had been serious fraud that tipped the election in one direction or the other” that. Scratching an itch by brushing a feather against it.









 
Some things he does say are simply false. For example, he makes this claim:
“In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, with the citizens of Pennsylvania mostly confined to their homes thanks to the stay-at-home orders of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, the state legislature had enacted a new law providing, essentially, for universal mail-in voting.”
Nope. The law passed in 2019, before the novel coronavirus had emerged in the United States. What’s more, this argument — that this expansion was unconstitutional and therefore mail ballots were suspect — was adjudicated before the election. The then-chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote that there had been “too much good-faith reliance” on the method to vote in 2020 for those votes to be discounted even if the 2019 law violated the state’s Constitution (which the Supreme Court later determined it didn’t).
In other words, Cruz isn’t arguing that this was fraud. He’s just arguing that more people shouldn’t been able to vote (presumably to Joe Biden’s benefit) because there might be fraud in mail ballots. Mail ballots are “one of the surest ways to ensure more voter fraud, according to Jimmy Carter and James Baker,” Cruz writes, citing a 2005 report that was widely misrepresented in 2020 as it is here. Misrepresented so extensively, in fact, that Carter released a statement defending mail ballots.











One of the stars of Cruz’s book is Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of the group True the Vote. True the Vote is the organization that purports to have analyzed geolocation data showing an organized effort to collect and submit ballots in drop boxes — a claim that is at the heart of Dinesh D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules.” The organization has been called out even by Republicans for failing to back up its assertions, and the movie, infamously, offers literally no evidence in support of the claim. But Engelbrecht is a Texan, and Cruz presents her as the eternal victim of left-wing machinations — even as he mostly elevates her group’s purportedly earthshaking claims to asides like noting that there were “multiple reports of fraudulent ballots being dropped in the dark of night.” More UFOs flitting away before we can get out our cameras.
At one point, Cruz takes credit for the pardon D’Souza was granted by Trump following a guilty plea for making illegal campaign contributions in 2014. Cruz celebrates this as a wrong having been righted, a freeing of an important voice.
“Today, Dinesh D’Souza continues to fight valiantly in the arena of ideas,” Cruz writes. “ … His latest movie and book, 2000 Mules, is a powerful exposé of voter fraud in 2020, exposing ballot harvesters caught on camera stuffing drop boxes with handfuls of ballots in the middle of the night.”







Again, it doesn’t show this. It simply presents a narrative crafted by True the Vote that’s buttressed with misrepresented snippets of video.
Cruz, undeterred by such considerations, continues to enthuse: “It’s also the top-grossing political documentary since his prior film 2016: Obama’s America.”
Sure. Because D’Souza presented an indefensible allegation that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election thanks to this alleged fraud. D’Souza recognized that there was a market for someone to make a claim along these lines that was backed with “evidence,” so he stepped up to fill the niche. D’Souza made a ton of money by telling people that this movie proved them right all along.
Imagine someone promising an audience that he would tell them exactly what they wanted to hear if they would only purchase his product — even if he ended up not doing that at all! Seems like the sort of pitch that might find a home on, say, Mark Levin’s TV show.
 
For a guy looking to sell a book to a right-wing audience, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) couldn’t have landed a much better spot than his interview with Fox News’s Mark Levin on Sunday. Levin, less an interviewer than town crier, gave Cruz plenty of time to explain what his new book, “Justice Corrupted,” would offer readers.


“This book is the first inside account of what happened on Jan. 6,” Cruz said in his practiced manner. “And so I take the reader through the events of the 2020 election leading up to Jan. 6. I take them through the evidence of election fraud and voter fraud in November 2020, which the Democrats and the corporate media insists doesn’t exist.”
The book was released Tuesday. This particular “corporate media” outlet can now report that, in fact, rampant fraud continues not to exist — as demonstrated, here at least, by Cruz’s failure to present any of his promised evidence of election or voter fraud.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
The thrust of Cruz’s book echoes the one released by former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway earlier this year: Had but the authors been in charge, none of this would have happened. If only everyone in November 2020 had the benefit of their hindsight, a hindsight that is near-perfect!






In Conway’s case, that sentiment was focused on the 2020 election. Her assertion that Trump lost made headlines as a break from his repeated claims, but it was offered mostly as a pretext for her to claim that she could have gotten him across the finish line. In Cruz’s case, the failure that could have been avoided was the flurry of post-election lawsuits aimed at proving illegalities.
“I called President Trump, and told him that he needed to assemble a far better legal team, and he needed to do so immediately,” Cruz writes at one point, with the tone of a guy trying to impress his friends. But, sadly, no lawyers would take Trump’s case — a failure Cruz chalks up, no doubt accurately, to Trump’s reputation. When Trump asked if he, Ted Cruz, would argue Texas’s last-ditch lawsuit should it get to the Supreme Court, Cruz readily agreed. Unfortunately for Trump (Cruz would have us think), Cruz never got the chance. The suit, a pastiche of nonsense, was quickly turned away.
Then there was Cruz’s effort to leverage Trump’s claims of fraud to his own benefit. Beaten to the punch by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in early 2021, Cruz invented a way to object to the results of the election while maintaining plausible deniability that he was doing so. What if they simply held off on certifying electors until fraud claims had been adjudicated? Never mind that they had been, of course; this was a way for him to wink at Trump’s base while still nodding soberly at his colleagues. And when this course of action wasn’t adopted, it opened the door for him, writing a book months later, to suggest that if only it had been, everything would have turned out fine.







When Cruz does talk about fraud in the book, he does so in an amusingly lawyerly way. He’s more than willing to warm over a wide array of right-wing boogeymen from the days of yore — both ACORN and the New Black Panther Party make appearances — but he generally constrains his claims about fraud in ways that leave him an escape hatch back to reality.
For example, he quotes from the speech he gave shortly before the Capitol riot:

Let’s shift the focus to make the gambit here clear: “UFOs remain a threat to our nation’s cows. By any measure, the claims of people seeing UFOS exceed any in our lifetimes.” See how that works?
All of his assertions about fraud are similarly nebulous in a very politician-y way. He says enough so that people who track this stuff closely know what he’s talking about, but not enough to be able to be pinned down as being dishonest. It’s always 2020 “might have been the most fraud-ridden election in the history of the United States” this and “no one would ever find out whether there had been serious fraud that tipped the election in one direction or the other” that. Scratching an itch by brushing a feather against it.










JUST ANOTHER GOP GRIFT!!!


"BUY MY BOOK AND LEARN ALL ABOUT THE 2020 VOTER FRAUD!!!"

(NOT)
 
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The only book that comes with a remainder mark straight from the printer.
 
Cruz doesn't need to have any evidence in his book. It was written for the rubes who are already convinced that Dominion was ordered by Soros to steal the election. Cruz is every bit as amoral as Donald Trump, he just isn't a total psychopath like Trump.
 
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