Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham brought up the allegation on Tuesday night that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could have somehow bribed local Georgia officials who were “on the take” through a charitable donation intended to help local election offices during the pandemic, as President Donald Trump continues to challenge the 3 November election results.
Citing the Amistad Project, a conservative activist group that has been legally challenging the vote outcomes, the host pointed out that their head, Phillip Kline, had “sounded the alarm” that Zuckerberg had injected an eye-watering contribution during the pandemic, implying that it looked like a bribe.
“Now, on its face, this arrangement creates a lot of questions and potential conflicts, but few in power took it seriously,” Ingraham started off. “Well, though, maybe they should have. At least $6.3 million of it went to Fulton County, Georgia, which is ground zero for voter fraud concerns in that state,” she went on to say.
The host then welcomed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), whom the Georgia secretary of state recently accused of pressuring him to recount legal ballots, to discuss her concerns over Zuckerberg’s donations.
While noting that “it’s not illegal,” he complained that “we need to stop it because we have had a liberal man spending millions of dollars to help election officials at the state level,” adding that Democrats “would be all over this” if a conservative went ahead with such donations.
“Do you think—this is what a lot of people are wondering, given the huge influx of cash into Georgia, that people are on the take here?” The Ingraham Angle host pondered.
“In one way or another, with a promise of—we did an ‘Angle’ on how all of these big Wall Street types are getting sweetheart deals with new IPOs, other investments, sweetheart deals with China. What is going on here with Zuckerberg and the Democrats? Are people just laying down, lying down, thinking, ‘Well, I’ll get ultimately rewarded in the future?’”
In response, Graham stopped short of engaging in anti-Zuckerberg conspiracy theories, saying he doesn’t believe “private groups should be able to fund public elections.”
‘Have Audit of Signatures’
Echoing the incumbent president’s stance, Graham then went on to slam Republicans among the local authorities for not meeting Trump’s demands for a comprehensive investigation:
“The reason we don’t have an audit is not because of any Democrats, it’s because we have Republicans in Georgia that refuse to allow President Trump to look at the ballots in a bipartisan way, the signatures on the envelopes, and see if they are actually genuine,” he fumed. “Until you do that, I don’t really accept the outcome of the Georgia election as being accurate until you have an audit of the signatures.”
The Zuckerberg allegations have been included in a number of conservative lawsuits seeking to prove that this year’s vote was “rigged”, in line with President Donald Trump’s accusations, which have led to a slew of lawsuits across the country. In one of them, filed in the Fulton County Superior Court, in Atlanta, the plaintiffs, lawyers L.Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, promised to prove that millions of Biden votes were illegally cast via a nefarious international conspiracy involving China, left-leaning philanthropist George Soros, etc.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is currently suing four battlegrounds states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – over alleged voter fraud, with the suit looking to block them from partaking in the Electoral College, which is due to convene on 14 December.
As follows from court files, state officials are purported to have usurped the authority of their state legislatures when they put into practice election laws that allowed for mail-in voting back in summer, with the GOP raging at the time over its inherently fraudulent nature due to superficial checks of voters’ identities.
Video ''Evidence'
During a hearing with a Georgia Senate committee earlier this month, a witness who presented herself as a "volunteer" for the Trump legal team and a lawyer, Jacki Pick, rolled out what she described as "evidence" of election fraud in the state - video footage allegedly showing the counting of absentee and military ballots at State Farm Arena in Georgia's Fulton County. It purportedly reveals that at some point during the night, after the supervisors, Republican observers and the press were told the counting was over for that day, the election staffers continued to count ballots from the boxes placed under tables.
The Texas attorney’s move comes amid Donald Trump’s ongoing battle to invalidate the “rigged” outcome of the November presidential vote, although he noted some time ago that he would “certainly” leave his top role should the Electoral College certify Biden as the new president, saying he instructed his White House staff to prepare for the incoming administration to take power.
Donald Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to laud the move and pledge his team will be "intervening in the Texas case."
"This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!," POTUS posted.
