Because an analysis of True the Vote was at the center of a film D’Souza was preparing for release, he challenged me to take on the challenge. I readily accepted, and D’Souza provided me with a copy to preview.
My initial assessment of True the Vote’s claims, which bore the prescient headline “‘Ballot Smuggling’ is the Next Front in the Never-ending Battle for 2020,” noted that the group’s methodology failed to achieve the results it claimed. The group, which allegedly acted on a tip about ballot harvesting activities, used cellphone location data to identify thousands of people (known as “mules”) who visited multiple ballot drop boxes in the weeks leading up to the election. But there were a myriad of obvious problems with its assessment. For example, the location data was not refined enough to make such a determination, and the example True the Vote gave at the Wisconsin hearing showed people moving around a particular city, including on the streets near ballot drop box locations.
DeSouza’s film 2000 Mules did not present a better argument. After viewing the film, I examined the flaws in his argument, including the lack of evidence of any conspiracy beyond the purported True the Vote analysis, which boasted astonishing operational security in thwarting an illegal multistate conspiracy involving thousands of people. When DeSouza and I finally discussed the film, he was unable to present a more persuasive argument or address the obvious flaws in his argument. For the most part, he relied on the analysis and arguments in True the Vote, which was risky given Phillips’ history of making unsubstantiated claims about fraud.
So from the start, 2000 Mules’ claims and True the Vote’s assessments were unreliable. That lack of credibility only grew over time. For example, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation indicated it would not open an investigation into the alleged activity and called on True the Vote to identify the whistleblower, but the group ultimately said it had no whistleblower name to provide. The group promised to release all the information for public scrutiny, but then announced it would not. One map in the film showed the alleged “mules” visiting ballot boxes, but Phillips told The Washington Post that it was fake.
But the film also contained a claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, a claim cleverly cloaked in an aesthetic of serious investigation and complex, data-driven validation. D’Souza explicitly argued that there was enough voting activity to affect the election’s outcome (which, as he told me in our conversation, relied on True the Vote’s ability to power video from a handful of ballot boxes, which then extrapolated to all mules everywhere). So the film screened at Mar-a-Lago, attracting a great deal of attention from Trump and his allies.
“A whole lot of stuff” happened in 2020, Trump claimed at a New Hampshire rally earlier this year. “If you watch True the Vote, you see tens of thousands of people stuffing ballot boxes.” Even D’Souza has never claimed a figure that high, but accuracy has never been Trump’s watchword, as evidenced by his continued fuss even after these allegations were denied.
The film was produced in part by Salem Media Group, a right-wing outlet that hosts many prominent voices on its radio network. During our conversation, D’Souza said that the panel of approving commentators, some of whom appear in the film, such as Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, and Sebastian Gorka, was at the request of Salem, which also distributed the film and published a related book that made the same claims.
The book became an early embarrassment for Salem and D’Souza. After being sent to several outlets, it was withdrawn for rewrites, apparently because the first version had identified certain nonprofits that D’Souza alleged had participated in a vote-stuffing operation that didn’t exist. Naturally, this raised fears of litigation. (True the Vote maintained at the time that it had not identified those organizations to D’Souza.)
It was a lawsuit from a different source that led Salem to remove the film from its streaming platform last weekend.
A Georgia man named Mark Andrews collected ballots for his family and dropped them off in drop boxes before Election Day in 2020, a move that was legal under Georgia law, and state officials exonerated Andrews in May 2022, days before “2000 Mules” was released.
But the film depicts Andrews dropping off family members’ ballots in a drop box, and D’Souza’s narrator describes it as a crime. Andrews also appears in the book, where a caption calls it “organized crime.”
Andrews filed the lawsuit against DeSouza, True the Boat and Salem Media Group in a statement late Friday afternoon.
“We apologize for any hurt caused to Mr. Andrews and his family by the inclusion of his image in the film, book and promotional materials,” the statement read. “The film has been removed from Salem’s platforms and Salem will no longer distribute the film or book.”
Representatives for DeSouza and Andrews’ legal teams did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Salem placed the blame entirely on “the explanation given to us by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Boat,” an explanation that, as I wrote in early April 2022, was not credible even before the film was released. In our conversation, D’Souza indicated that he relied on the explanation given by True the Boat.
This reliance paid dividends in anyone’s eyes. The film was the 13th most popular movie in theaters in the country during its opening week and ultimately grossed more than $1 million in theaters, despite being released primarily through streaming services. It was a cash cow, even though its errors were obvious from the moment it was released. And it was essential to Trump and his supporters, as evidenced by his comments in January. Here, at last, was the presumptive evidence of wrongdoing they knew without a doubt had occurred.
As was always clear, the truth never came out, but not only can it take up to two years for the truth to come out, but sometimes it only comes out once a subpoena is received.
