Another Trump crony has been caught on tape admitting claims of election fraud promoted by the former president and his allies were nonsense. This time it’s former Trump advisor Peter Navarro.
In a recording obtained by MSNBC, Navarro laments to former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg that Trump lawyer Sidney Powell killed the campaign’s chances of having claims of fraud taken seriously — blaming her for the unraveling of Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.
“I’m telling you Abby” Navarro said, “when the history is written on this, she was like the turning point in our inability to prove the case because she was like so far out there that people like pulled back. We were on the verge of breakthroughs in the states and state legislature level and then that shit happened.”
Navarro is referring to conspiratorial claims made by Powell that voting machine and software companies, like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, had rigged the election against Trump. The former president and his campaign boosted these claims multiple times in the aftermath of the election, despite having knowledge that they were false.
In a statement to MSNBC, Navarro called Sidney Powell “the worst thing that ever happened to the election integrity issue.” He added, “As always, I’m being candid with Abby Grossberg just as I am being candid with the American people.”
The recording came from a trove of materials released by Grossberg, who is suing her former employer Fox News. Grossberg alleges that the network coerced her into changing her testimony in a deposition given to Dominion. The voting systems company sued Fox to the tune of $1.6 billion, alleging that their spreading of conspiracy theories regarding their role in the election constituted defamation. Fox and Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement on Tuesday.
Several of the recordings made by Grossberg during her time at Fox News contain admissions from Trump allies, and even his campaign, that they had not managed to produce concrete evidence of voter fraud.
In one recording, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who backed Trump’s judicial efforts to overturn the election, pleaded with Fox News to show “specific evidence” of fraud. In a separate recording, a member of Trump’s campaign admits to Grossberg that their audit of Georgia’s election machines had found that “there weren’t any physical issues with [Dominion] machines on those inspections.”
Dominion may have settled its lawsuit with Fox News, but there is a slew of impending lawsuits against Trump’s most staunch allies threatening to continue exposing just how much bullshit the former president and his friends hawked to the public.
