Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich pushed back on the notion that it was Republicans who were embracing the “Big Lie” about election theft, during an interview last week with Mollie Hemingway for his “Newt’s World” podcast.
“The last time Democrats actually accepted the legitimacy of losing in a presidential campaign was in 1988 when George H.W. Bush won by a huge margin,” he said.
The next Republican victory—that of Bush’s son, George W. Bush, laid the framework for Democrats’ pattern of denial as they attempted to use court challenges to count votes in Florida’s Broward County ad infinitum until a favorable outcome emerged.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court shut that effort down. However, it helped inspire billionaire oligarch George Soros to begin targeting down-ballot elections for positions like secretary of state, sheriff and district attorney. Once elected, his hand-picked candidates would then be able to exercise their discretion in pushing a radical leftist agenda.
The strategy came to fruition when Soros-linked secretaries including Michigan’s Jocelyn Benson and Arizona’s Katie Hobbs acted in overtly partisan ways to promote vote fraud during the 2020 election and then certify their states before GOP-led challenges could succeed.
‘SUE TILL BLUE’
The Bush vs. Gore challenge of the 2000 election also may have helped influence the rise of Democrat mega-lawyer Marc Elias, who had begun implementing his “sue till blue” strategy as early as 1996.
Elias is believed currently to be a subject of Special Counsel John Durham‘s Russia-hoax investigation due to his role in helping engineer the Steele Dossier on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Nonetheless, he was recently secured by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, who has been plummeting in polls against GOP contender Glenn Youngkin.
Hemingway, currently promoting her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, said that the purpose of such lawsuits and election challenges was simply to sow confusion.
“The chaos is the point,” she said, noting that Elias “was also the guy who led the effort on mail-in balloting” last year.
In fact, Elias—who a month earlier had secured a settlement between Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and activist Stacey Abrams—pushed for an expansion of mail-in voting on the very day that then-President Donald Trump declared the coronavirus pandemic to be a national emergency.
Doing so allowed left-wing activists potentially to “expand the sphere of litigation,” Hemingway told Gingrich.
Elias gloated about his dubious list of election reversals in a now-deleted tweet from Nov. 4, 2018:
“During my career handling recounts, we have averaged one statewide recount-able election (excluding for president),” he wrote. “Not all of these have resulted in recounts, but almost all have involved some post election legal activity.”
PROPAGANDIST PRESS
Hemingway told Gingrich that a key factor in the success of such blatant malfeasance was the gaslighting of a propagandist mainstream media, which was now working in overt collusion with the Democrats and their deep-state allies.
“The 2016 situation really deserves focus,” she said. “… That was one where they could not accept that they lost to the point that they spread this completely insane conspiracy theory that they had not lost, that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia.”
While talking points—which Elias himself may have had a hand in crafting—now claim challenges to the 2020 race are conspiracy theories, that stands in stark contrast with the actual conspiracy theory that the Left spent years promoting as fact—and still does in some cases.
The Russia hoax “was not something that was a fringe that some people held to,” Hemingway said.
“It was embraced by the entire corporate media environment, the entire Democrat Party,” she continued. “… They kept that drumbeat going for years, it was based on nothing, and it was extremely damaging to the republic.”
However, after they engineered a Biden victory in 2020, Democrats flip-flopped yet again from vociferously staging election challenges to complaining that skepticism was tantamount to terrorism.
“The same individuals who [amplified these conspiracies] and gave each other awards for four years then said that 2020, an election unlike any one that we have seen in this country…then they said you cannot have any questions about the election,” Hemingway noted.
A TREACHEROUS PATH
Gingrich noted Democrat efforts to codify their pandemic practices in the controversial HR1 voting overhaul. If passed, he said, “it would make the entire election process more corrupt.”
But the measures they now endorse were denounced by Democrats not long ago—when they were trying to push the narrative of a stolen election during George W. Bush’s 2000 victory and subsequent 2004 landslide.
According to Gingrich, the changes that Democrats want to institutionalize via HR1 fly in the face of the findings of “both the CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project back in 2001 … and in 2005 a bipartisan commission co-chaired by Jimmy Carter” which found that the greatest risk of fraud occurs when voting absentee.
And yet, Gingrich concluded, Democrats’ new strategy is to “maximize the likelihood of people voting absentee.”
Hemingway concurred that the sudden change of heart didn’t pass the smell test.
“Up until about a year ago, everyone acknowledged that mail-in balloting was the largest source of fraud or just election irregularities,” she said. “… The Washington Post and The New York Times acknowledged this; it was true in France where they banned it because of problems with fraud.”
Hemingway concludes by stating that the 2020 election was determined months in advance by several factors, including but not limited to:
- a number of partisan lawsuits
- a lack of funding and organization for GOP lawyers
- inaction/counterproductive moves by foolish GOP state officials
- Democrats’ successful commandeering of nonpartisan election offices via massive donations by Mark Zuckerberg
- media collusion
- general Republican pusillanimity and unwillingness to engage in the pre-election legal circus
Hemingway, who interviewed former President Donald Trump for her book, said that contrary to what Trump has said about the election being stolen, the procedure was rigged before the voting ever started.
Only if Republicans organize, focus, and acquire more resources will they be able to combat these tactics, she warned.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
