Topic: WorldNetDaily
Art Moore dutifully reported in a Dec. 17 WorldNetDaily article:
The Bush v. Gore election dispute in 2000, centering on some 500 votes in one state and "hanging chads," was easy for the American people to digest.
But the Trump campaign's hotly disputed challenge to the outcome of the 2020 campaign is based on evidence of many kinds of fraud compiled from numerous lengthy hearings in six battleground states and thousands of sworn affidavits.
It's why White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has compiled a comprehensive report to back the Trump campaign's claim of "theft by a thousand cuts."
Titled "The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities," it employs charts and other graphics to summarize the evidence from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Navarro charges Democrats carried out a "coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket," the National Pulse reported.
He concludes that "the weight of evidence and patterns of irregularities uncovered in this report are such that it is irresponsible for anyone – especially the mainstream media – to claim that there is 'no evidence' of fraud or irregularities."
Moore is strictly in stenography mode here -- he doesn't bother to fact-check anything in Navarro's report. If he had, not only would he have provided something of added value to the nascent WND News Center that might make some other website actually want to publish it, he would have learned that pretty much the entire report is bogus.Meanwhile, an actual news outlet did the fact-check that Moore wouldn't:
He also repeated obvious mistakes that have been pointed out by judges and national media outlets, such as mixing up Michigan and Minnesota.
But Navarro’s “Immaculate Deception” report is, by its own admission, just a re-hashing of lawsuits and press conference fodder that judges across the country have laughed out of court.
Discussing the impact of “fake ballot manufacturing,” for example, Navarro said one of the most “disturbing” instances of the practice came from a contract truck driver for the U.S. Postal Service, who claimed to have transported thousands of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania in October.
Left unmentioned: the same man moonlights as a ghost hunter and has a lengthy criminal record, and the suit in which his claims were cited was summarily rejected because it was filed more than a month after Election Day.
Navarro went on to cite security camera footage of elections workers moving around boxes of ballots in Atlanta, which pro-Trump theorists claimed was actually a “smoking gun” of fraud… somehow. The video clip made it to Fox News and the President’s legal team’s court filings, despite showing the normal processing of votes.
Navarro acknowledged that Republican elections officials have insisted the video shows nothing unusual, but then pivoted back to “just-asking-questions” mode: The video tape itself, he wrote, “has contributed to the current climate of skepticism surrounding the fairness and integrity of the election.”
Elsewhere, Navarro played a shell game to hide the fact that there was no evidence to support his claims.
Another fact-checker summed up the report this way:
The burden of proof here lies with Trump and Navarro, the ones claiming fraudulent activity for which they have presented no credible evidence. The key word there is “credible,” of course — they’ve presented lots of evidence that is the electoral equivalent of shadowy photos of the Loch Ness monster. Navarro’s report is the functional equivalent of one of those shows where ghost-hunters bring various homemade electronic devices into abandoned townhouses before declaring authoritatively that the photo they took of a dust mite is, in actuality, a poltergeist.
Despite the fact that Navarro's report was discredited almost immediately, WND continued to tout upates Navarro issued. A Dec. 22 article by Bob Unruh touted an update claiming that it was "insisting that a full review is required of 2020 election misbehavior." Unruh didn't note that the original report was debunked, though he did admit (though not until the 13th paragraph of his article) that the Washingotn Examiner found that "Navarro's conclusions clash with claims from state and local officials that there may have been problems due to clerical errors but not vote fraud."
On Jan. 5, Unruh gushed that Navarro "has released chapter 2" of his "comprehensive report' claiming election fraud, iuncritically repeating Navarro's assertion that "Volumes 1 and 2 of the Navarro Report — The Immaculate Deception and The Art of the Steal — together make the strong case for a full investigation of the election irregularities and strategic gaming of our political process that in all likelihood have led to a stolen presidential election." Unruh, like Moore, was in stenography mode; he didn't tell readers that since the first report was discredited, this one likely would be too.
WND wasn't making any money trying to attract readers to its own website to read this kind of stuff. It's hard to imagine anyone else wanting to publish it.