EP. 45 — DEBUNKING “2000 MULES”

(Transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.)

Weston Wamp: I'm Weston Wamp, and this is “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One. 

Weston Wamp: “2000 Mules.” By now, you’ve probably heard the name of the film, which has been marketed as a documentary. It’s spread like wildfire among conservative audiences. You might have even watched it, and found some of its claims convincing. 

Now, if you’ve followed this show and my work debunking bogus claims about the 2020 election, it won’t surprise you when I say: the majority of claims made in this film are not true. And I’ll walk you through that in detail.

But the best place to start is perhaps with the creator of the documentary himself, Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza’s embrace of conspiracy theories did not begin with “2000 Mules.” He’s a professional provocateur with a decades-long career of peddling salacious claims for profit. A similarly successful pseudo-documentary of his makes widely discredited claims about former president Barack Obama. Another film compares Democrats to Nazis. D’Souza was also convicted of violating federal campaign finance laws, undermining the integrity of our election process. D’Souza was then pardoned by the same man who “2000 Mules” argues was defrauded: Donald Trump. 

D’Souza’s latest work should be seen as a continuation of this notorious career. It is popular with people who believe what they want to believe, aimed at conservatives with pre-existing doubts about election security. It also has a 100% verified audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Both D’Souza and the leaders of the conspiracy driven organization True the Vote have been featured across conservative media outlets.

But that doesn’t make it true – or any less incendiary and destructive to the conversation among people who might have concerns about the election but are only interested in facts. 

And actual facts are what’s missing from the film. So let’s take a closer look.

This is episode 45: Debunking “2000 Mules”

Weston Wamp: Somewhat surprisingly, the film attempts to establish its credibility by opening with prominent conservatives expressing doubt that there was a specific fraud scheme that changed the outcome of the 2020 election. 

Then D’Souza drops what he thinks is the big bomb. The new evidence. The thing we all missed – geo-tracking of cell phone data.

That’s right – the entire film is a complicated and convoluted explanation of how commercially available cell phone data confirms that in the 2020 election, it was Democrats who used expanded ballot drop boxes to tilt the election for Biden.  

But the simple technological claim about the cell phone data has been disputed by experts who don’t have a vested interest in the debate about the election. Maybe that’s why the film doesn’t make any measurable claims about the number of ballots in question.

Weston Wamp: The film’s unsubstantiated claims come at viewers fast, often without any context about the supposed technological basis for their sweeping allegations about Democrats committing fraud. A few select video clips of voters casting ballots at night, with gloves on, and while taking a picture of themselves are used as evidence. 

Then D’Souza offers rough napkin math to show that 2,000 so-called mules, allegedly ballot traffickers, voted illegally for Joe Biden enough times in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona that it flipped the outcome of the 2020 election.

Amber McReynolds: I think that the film is clearly designed to spread more bad info and kind of confuse the viewers, utilizing data that's not even clear where some of that was collected. But also just ignores a lot of very important facts, such as the fact that every state's laws are different on a lot of these topics. And so they're kind of alleging and creating this fear and almost trying to confuse their viewers.

Weston Wamp: Amber McReynolds is a political independent who previously served as Denver’s director of elections before leading a national nonprofit. She was recently appointed to the Board of Governors for the U.S. Postal Service. 

Amber McReynolds: Do they think that the public and the people that are watching this are not smart enough to see through some of these issues that are raised? I think a lot of it is all done in that vein, to confuse and create fear and cast doubt on all election processes, not just the topics they cover here but this is another effort by certain groups who want to discredit the process and use bad info to do it.

Weston Wamp: McReynolds spent much of 2020 warning the public that disinformation about the security of our elections could be used against us for political purposes.

Weston Wamp: Both McReynolds and another of the nation’s most prominent former election officials told me the film conveniently ignores the scrutiny and security protocols that apply to mail ballots and so-called “drop boxes” across the country.

Neal Kelley: In Orange County, we use drop boxes that are quarter inch steel. They're under surveillance cameras. They have fire suppression systems in them. I have satellite track teams that go out and collect those ballots daily. 

Weston Wamp: Neal Kelley is the recently retired Registrar of Elections in Orange County, California, the fifth largest voting jurisdiction in the United States. He’s a Republican who believes the best way to build public trust is to give people the facts.

Weston Wamp: McReynolds agrees, and points out that “2000 Mules” conveniently spins its tall tale without describing any of the existing and extensive security measures in place.

Amber McReynolds: The film completely glosses over the fact that not only is there the act of dropping the ballot off in a box, but then when it comes back into the election office, there's various verification tools, including a lot of the states they talked about had things like ballot tracking. So literally that's tracking just like you would a package throughout the process. Election officials can see that information, voters can see that information. They know what the status is of their ballot. It ignores signature verification or other ID verification checks that are done before that ballot is, number one, even opened, and, number two, scanned and counted.

Weston Wamp: Another important point, says McReynolds, depending on the state, political parties helping people vote is nothing new, nor a Democratic Party tactic.

Amber McReynolds: Where I grew up in Illinois, I was visiting in the summer of 2020 and my parents' neighbor showed me a notice they got in the mail and it was from the GOP party in their county in Illinois and saying, "Hey, once you get your absentee ballot, make sure you sign up and then give it back to us and we'll turn it in for you." And they even wanted people to send it to their postal box to then have it dropped off. So, these campaigns to encourage people to vote happen on all sides of the aisle have happened for decades. Again, every state law is different. Some states do allow you to drop off for a friend or a neighbor or a family member drop off your mail ballot. That's not a blank ballot. That's a completed ballot with a seal and other states don't. So, there's varying laws on this, which he completely glosses over in this film.

Weston Wamp: Let’s remember that more than 60 plus lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and allies failed because they were without merit.

Let’s also remember that Sidney Powell, Trump’s own attorney who claimed that Dominion Voting machines were manipulated to help Biden, changed her story altogether once she faced a lawsuit from the company. Her attorney actually said that people shouldn’t have been foolish enough to believe her, saying that, “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” That was her actual defense. 

In fact, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick offered a $25,000 bounty to anyone who came forward with a tip that led law enforcement to a criminal prosecution of fraud stemming from the 2020 election. To date, the Lieutenant Governor has paid out only one bounty to a man in Pennsylvania who turned in a Trump supporter who attempted to vote twice.

Weston Wamp: What the makers of “2000 Mules” claim they are bringing to light is a never-before-analyzed data trove that points to, or is evidence of, widespread fraud.

So about that data. First, the data firm featured in the film claimed their data solved a murder by using geolocation tools in the vicinity of a crime in the state of Georgia. But after “2000 Mules” was released, law enforcement officials there confirmed that they had only heard from the data firm involved in the documentary two months after they had already made arrests and the suspects had already been indicted. So the claim about solving a murder is false.

Second, in an interview with Charlie Kirk, who like D’Souza, works for Salem Media, Gregg Phillips of True the Vote said they had access to supercomputers at Mississippi State. But Sid Salter, Chief Communications Officer and Director of the Office of Public Affairs at Mississippi State University, told National Public Radio that quote "Mississippi State University, to our knowledge, has done zero analysis or computing on behalf of True The Vote.” So that claim is also totally false.

Third, both in the film and in promotion for it, D’Souza and Phillips claim that they could prove some of the mules had been involved in BLM protests leading up to the 2020 election. If that were true, what’s the point? But it’s not true. Not even close. D’Souza claimed that they had matched the data from a nonprofit called ACLED to draw these conclusions. But the director of research and innovation at ACLED told NPR quote “we never heard from the filmmakers.” And, according to ACLED, their data does not include specific device IDs, specific locations, or specific times of day.

D'Souza's film tells a good story but it doesn’t tell the truth. The data is simply not there and it doesn’t prove what the film claims it does. It didn’t solve murders, it wasn’t processed with supercomputers at Mississippi State, and it didn’t confirm that the mules were also at BLM protests.

Weston Wamp: But many of those who watch the film are most compelled by the scant video footage, which appears to show ballots being shoved, legally or illegally, into ballot boxes. Though claiming to have thousands and thousands of hours of video, the documentary makers produce only a few clips. The feature clip shows a gentleman in Georgia inserting several ballots in what appears to be the middle of the night. When I watched the documentary, I too thought it was an interesting piece of potential evidence. 

It turns out that the video clip was investigated by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office and it was a man delivering the ballots of family members in Georgia, and that is a practice that is permissible under Georgia state law.

Finally, to bring things full circle, many of the media figures that appear throughout the film have a vested interest in peddling profitable but outrageous claims. Neal Kelley pointed out that this motive is at least partially in play.

Neal Kelley: I think there's economics behind every claim, to be honest with you, of election fraud. I mean there are people that are on the sidelines just waiting to pounce on how they can either benefit from that, or further an agenda. There absolutely is a profit motive for this, and it's driving some of this narrative, for sure. 

Weston Wamp: “2000 Mules” does not hold up to scrutiny, but its popularity is an example of why it is so important that we continue to improve election processes and address skeptics and those with questions about election security with humility and seriousness so that we can move forward together. 

Neal Kelley: You have to be, first of all, transparent in the process. But I would advocate that you have got to be 100% behind audits beyond just ballot counting audits. You've got to go into voter registration audits. You've got to look at signatures. You've got to do things beyond what is required in the law. And that's what I've been doing, because look, my friends, who I love dearly, come at me right and left nonstop with things they read on the internet, and things that they might start to go down that path of believing. But when I can walk them through the things that are done to show that the system is sound and the verification is sound, that gives them confidence.

Weston Wamp: That way, we can begin to ensure all Americans have confidence in the integrity of our elections which people like Neal Kelley and many others have spent much of their lives working to do.

Neal Kelley: You can just look around the world at third world countries right now. People are fighting in the street and lighting fires because they don't trust the election outcome. It's absolutely critical that there's a fair playing field. And election officials like myself have to be calling balls and strikes and nothing else.

Weston Wamp: On the next episode of “Swamp Stories,” I’ll bid y’all farewell in an exit interview conducted as I prepared to be sworn in to serve as the County Mayor of my home county of Hamilton County, Tennessee, the fourth largest county in our state, anchored by the city of Chattanooga. But don’t worry, the Swamp Stories podcast will continue, and the search is on, as we speak, for our new host.

Weston Wamp: Thanks for listening to “Swamp Stories” presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better rate and review it on Apple Podcasts to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at SwampStories.org. I'm your host, Weston Wamp. A special thank you to Executive Producer Dokhi Fassihian, Senior Producer Evan Ottenfield, Producer Sydney Richards, and Editor Parker Tant from ParkerPodcasting.com. “Swamp Stories” is recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas, and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

HOW TO LISTEN