While Hurricane Nicole was approaching Mar-a-Lago, Trump refused to evacuate the resort, and instead blew hurricane force attacks at the Florida governor, thought to be his 2024 rival.
Trump claimed he was responsible for getting the Florida governor elected in a tirade he posted to Truth Social.
Fox News read the Truth Social tantrum to the Fox faithful — with an omission.
Again, here’s what Fox News left out:
I also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart. I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…
As the Washington Post explains, this is — not surprisingly — another false claim by Trump.
- To add context, DeSanctimonious won his 2018 election by 30,000 votes, and Senator Rick Scott won by 10,000. As we are now familiar with Republican claims of election skepticism, Rick Scott started rumors of fraudulent voting in Florida on November 8, 2018.
- Scott alleged (without any evidence) that the slow process of counting votes in Democratic-heavy counties like Broward offered the opportunity for illegal ballots to be injected.
- By this time, DeSanctimonious’s race had been already called, two days previously.
And even so….
Did Trump call in the FBI to STOP THE COUNTING and save Rick Scott’s campaign?
No.
By all accounts, the process of counting ballots in the targeted counties continued slowly — and not without contentiousness — until all of the votes were tallied. The AP called the race for Scott on Nov. 20. An investigation later determined that a number of problems had surrounded the counting in Broward County, but that none of them affected the outcome of any races. There was no evidence of rampant illegal voting.
WaPo