Yet another publication has conceded, albeit seemingly under pressure, that its claims about vote fraud and vote-switching by Dominion voting machines were false. Mediaite reports that “American Thinker has issued a retraction of false, unsupported, and debunked stories it published about Dominion Voting Systems and the company’s role in the 2020 presidential election. Dominion is one of the companies that has been targeted by conspiracy theorists claiming President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election.”
Here is American Thinker’s retraction:
American Thinker and contributors Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan have published pieces on www.AmericanThinker.com that falsely accuse US Dominion Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively “Dominion”) of conspiring to steal the November 2020 election from Donald Trump. These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion’s supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud on Dominion’s machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence that Dominion acted fraudulently.
These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims.
It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion’s track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.
The retraction was preceded by a statement from author Thomas Lipson explaining, “We received a lengthy letter from Dominion’s defamation lawyers explaining why they believe that their client has been the victim of defamatory statements. Having considered the full import of the letter, we have agreed to their request that we publish the following statement.”
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The statement appears to suggest that American Thinker’s decision was based at least in part on the threat of a lawsuit by Dominion.
As Mediaite notes:
Following the 2020 presidential election, American Thinker ran multiple stories about Dominion, alleging that the company was involved in a conspiracy to overturn the election results. Unsupported claims included a report that Dominion “deleted” millions of votes for Trump, and attempts to link Dominion executives to both “antifa” and Venezuela.
As Mediaite observes, the American Thinker’s retraction resembles other “fact checks that ran on Fox News and Fox Business in December regarding false claims made about Smartmatic” by people like Lou Dobbs. He, along with Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell had pushed false “claims that Smartmatic had changed votes for Trump to Biden, and suggested that Dominion Voting Systems was a front for Smartmatic. Newsmax also issued a fact check after repeating similar claims about Smartmatic.”
At least 59 court rulings have rejected challenges to the 2020 presidential election results. That includes many rulings by judges appointed by Donald Trump himself.
On Jan. 7, Trump’s lawyers withdrew a challenge to the election results in Trump v. Kemp, in order to avoid sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit. If they had actually possessed any evidence of widespread vote fraud, they could have presented it at a trial scheduled for January 8. But they didn’t have it.
Some lawyers earlier dropped out of court challenges to the election results, realizing that they were baseless. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that “a lawyer who represented President Donald Trump’s campaign in challenges to Philadelphia’s election sought to withdraw his representation…saying the president had used his services ‘to perpetrate a crime.’”
On the eve of the election, public opinion polls showed Trump would lose the election. The Trump campaign’s own internal numbers on the eve of the election showed Trump would lose every state he later lost, except Georgia.
