MAGA Filmmaker Trump Praised Admits 2020 Election Fraud Doc Was B.S.
MAGA filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza issued a statement on Sunday admitting that his most notorious project — the 2020 election conspiracy film 2000 Mules — was produced “on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team.”
The statement includes an apology to Mark Andrews, a Georgia man who sued D’Souza, Salem Media Group, and True the Vote (his partners on the film) for defamation in 2022.
Released in May 2022, 2000 Mules claimed that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump in part through the use of “mules” who were paid to stuff drop boxes with ballots favoring Joe Biden. The film’s claims hinged on supposed “data” from True the Vote, a Trump-aligned election monitoring group, tracking cellphone data around drop boxes. 2000 Mules provided no concrete evidence related to their claims of ballot harvesting, paid mules, and stash houses for fraudulent ballots, instead relying on sensationalist accusations and conjecture to stir up conservative rage — and a profit.
Profit it did, politically and financially. According to Salem Media Group, the film grossed over $10 million in revenue. Trump himself heavily promoted 2000 Mules on social media, and even held a private screening of the “documentary” for his most outspoken election deniers at his Mar-a-Lago resort. He called the film “the greatest & most impactful documentary of our time,” going so far as to cite its claims in a personal rebuttal to the Jan. 6 investigative congressional hearings held in 2022.
Andrews, who was one of the alleged “mules” highlighted in the film, sued D’Souza and others involved in the movie in 2022. 2000 Mules used surveillance footage of Andrews dropping off his and his family’s ballots (with his face blurred), claiming it was evidence of ballot fraud. The lawsuit also alleges that D’Souza and the film’s promotional team used images of Andrews’ unblurred face and video featuring his license plate number in the promotion of the film. Days before the film’s release, the Georgia State Board of Elections rejected several of the film’s allegations of illegal ballot harvesting as false — including the accusations against Andrews.
In May, the distributors of 2000 Mules, Salem Media Group, reached an undisclosed settlement with Andrews and pulled the film from distribution. As part of the settlement agreement, the distribution company also issued a public apology to Andrews. D’Souza has now apologized to Andrews himself.
“I apologize to Mr. Andrews. I make this apology not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress, but because it is the right thing to do, given what we have now learned,” he writes. “While I do not believe Mr. Andrews was ever identified by the film or book, I am sorry for any harm he believes he and his family has suffered as a result of ‘2000 Mules.'”
D’Souza claims that he had no idea the data provided by True the Vote was faulty at the time the film was released.
“True the Vote provided my team with ballot drop box surveillance footage that had been obtained through open records requests. We were assured that the surveillance videos had been linked to geolocation cell phone data, such that each video depicted an individual who had made at least 10 visits to drop boxes,” D’Souza writes. “We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data.”
That D’Souza didn’t know the claims in his film were faulty until “recently” is laughable. Andrews was exonerated of the accusations against him days before the film’s premiere, and the misuse of geolocation data by 2000 Mules was quickly clocked as false by fact-checkers (and by any viewer with a functional cerebral cortex).
Despite the public admission that his film is predicated on bunk data and junk pseudoscience, D’Souza still refuses to commit the capital sin of Trumpworld: admitting the 2020 election was not fraudulently stolen from Trump.
“We operated in good faith and in reliance on True the Vote,” he writes. “We continue to have confidence in their work and also in the basic message of ‘2000 Mules,’ namely, that the 2020 election was not the ‘most secure election in US history’ — far from it! — and that there was systematic election fraud sufficient to call the outcome into question.”
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