MAGA 'left holding the bag' as Trump lies put them in legal jeopardy

Although President Donald Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him has been repeatedly debunked on both the left and the right, he continues to promote the Big Lie. And prominent MAGA influencers, from Dinesh D'Souza to MyPillow's Mike Lindell, are joining him in that claim. But according to Salon's Sophia Tesfaye, MAGA Republicans are paying a heavy legal price legally for pushing Trump's favorite conspiracy theory.

"The Big Lie continues to cost its most committed promoters," Tesfaye explains in Salon. "Many of the MAGA men who cashed in on screaming — falsely — about the 2020 presidential election being stolen are finally facing a legal reckoning for manufacturing the project's most enduring images. Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative commentator and filmmaker, settled a defamation case on the eve of trial in Atlanta this month, ending a lawsuit over a so-called documentary released in 2022 that became one of the most influential pieces of post-2020 election conspiracy propaganda."

The film Tesfaye is referencing is D'Souza's "2000 Mules," which even ultra-conservative firebrand Ann Coulter attacked as "stupid" nonsense.

According to Tesfaye, "The suit should have stripped '2000 Mules' of any remaining pretense of credibility the moment it was filed, as it claimed that thousands of people were paid to collect and illegally deposit ballots in battleground states. The film grossed more than $9 million and Trump screened it approvingly at Mar-a-Lago."

D'Souza, in "2000 Mules," accused Gwinnett County, Georgia auditor Mark Andrews of election fraud — and Andrews, according to Tesfaye, filed a lawsuit when the false accusation was easily disproven.

"While D'Souza's unraveling took years," Tesfaye reports, "the next chapter of MAGA's fraud theater is falling apart in real time. Earlier this month, conservative provocateurs James O'Keefe and Cam Higby dressed in what they described as traditional Muslim clothing. With O'Keefe in a thobe and Higby in a burqa, the pair walked into Minneapolis polling places during the state's primary to test a decades-old voter vouching law, which lets a registered voter attest that a newly arrived or recently moved neighbor lives in the precinct. O'Keefe used a badly affected accent and, in one instance, gave poll workers the name of a real registered voter, William Pomeranz, who learned days later that his identity had been used in a viral video without his knowledge."

Tesfaye continues, "A third member of the group, Anthony Rubin, reportedly told poll workers he wanted to vouch for people he described as recently arrived Hamas members from Gaza. None of them actually cast a ballot or completed a registration. Rather than uncovering a loophole, they appear to have landed themselves squarely in legal jeopardy."

Tesfaye notes that "falsely signing a vouching oath is perjury under Minnesota law" and is "punishable by up to five years" in prison — and that "misrepresenting your identity to obtain a ballot is a separate felony."

The Salon journalist points out that Democratic Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, was "slamming the stunt" when he noted that fewer than 0.6 percent of the state's 2024 votes involved vouching at all, and that roughly 71 percent of those were already registered voters simply updating an address." And according to Tesfaye, "local law enforcement in Hennepin County is now reviewing the footage, which has reportedly been viewed more than 7 million times."

"O'Keefe, who was ousted in 2023 from Project Veritas, the right-wing organization he founded, over what its own board called financial malfeasance, built his career on precisely this kind of stunt," Tesfaye observes. "He targeted Minneapolis after Trump zeroed in on the state as a hotbed of election fraud based on nothing but racist vibes. Now, it looks like O'Keefe is left holding the bag. That is the recurring joke at the heart of MAGA's election theater: The people who arrive promising to expose a corrupt system keep discovering that the system has rules for them too…. The Big Lie was never just a rhetorical grievance nursed by Trump's inner circle. It was a lucrative enterprise built to destroy our faith in elections. Instead, it continues to expose the people who sold it."