During his January 6th speech, President Trump told the crowd that "in Fulton County, Republican poll watchers were ejected, in some cases, physically from the room under the false pretense of a pipe burst." The President continued:
… then election officials pull boxes, Democrats, and suitcases of ballots out from under a table. You all saw it on television, totally fraudulent. And illegally scanned them for nearly two hours, totally unsupervised. Tens of thousands of votes. This act coincided with a mysterious vote dump of up to 100,000 votes for Joe Biden, almost none for Donald Trump.[260]
No part of President Trump's story was true. He had already been informed that it was false.
In June 2021, when Giuliani's law license was revoked by a New York State appellate court, the court's ruling cited his statements about supposed suitcases of ballots in Georgia as one of its reasons for doing so. "If, as respondent claims, he reviewed the entire video, he could not have reasonably reached a conclusion that illegal votes were being counted," the court's ruling reads.[261]
President Trump's conspiracy-mongering endangered innocent public servants around the country, including in Fulton County. For example, during a December 10, 2020, appearance in Georgia, Giuliani falsely accused Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Black public servants shown in the Fulton County video, of "surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they're vials of heroin or cocaine."[262] In fact, Moss had been given a ginger mint by her mother, Freeman.[263] As described in Chapter 2, baseless accusations like these forever changed the lives of election workers like Freeman and Moss. All in service of President Trump's Big Lie.
THE FAKE BALLOT MYTH
The Trump Campaign's distortion of the State Farm Arena video is just one example of the "fake ballots" lie. President Trump frequently claimed that "fake ballots" for Biden were injected into the vote-counting process. To hear the President tell it, there were truckloads of ballots delivered in the middle of the night to vote-counting centers and millions more votes were cast than there were registered voters. Judges, Trump administration officials, State authorities, and independent election experts found each iteration of the "fake ballot" claim to be just that: fake. The Trump Campaign and its surrogates brought nine cases that raised some version of a "fake ballots" claim. Every one of those cases was promptly dismissed.[264] For example, in Costantino v. City of Detroit, a Michigan court ruled that the plaintiff's claims regarding forged, backdated and double-counted votes in
