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- President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale told Fox News that the Trump campaign planned to capitalize on baseless fears about “rampant voter fraud” in the 2020 election.
- Parscale claimed that he devised a plan to have “lawyers everywhere” monitoring polling places across the country and somehow preventing voter fraud on Election Day.
- “If it’s not going to be rampant, everyone’s going to think it’s rampant,” Parscale said he told his team about potential voter fraud.
- Parscale said his plan to closely monitor voter fraud fell apart after he was ousted from the campaign.
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President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who was removed from his role in July, said in a lengthy Fox News interview that the Trump campaign planned to capitalize on baseless fears about “rampant voter fraud” in the 2020 election.
Parscale claimed that he devised a plan to have “lawyers everywhere” monitoring polling places across the country and somehow preventing voter fraud on Election Day.
“In April of 2019, I sat down with my team, and I said, let’s come up with the biggest Election Day operation ever, because voter fraud is going to be rampant,” Parscale told Fox. “If it’s not going to be rampant, everyone’s going to think it’s rampant. Or they’re going to game it.”
Parscale said his plan fell apart after he was ousted from the campaign amid reports of the many millions of dollars Parscale had raked in from the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee.
“In April of 2019, I came up with the largest budget ever of Election Day operations, in partnership with the RNC. What that meant was to have lawyers everywhere, file suits beforehand, protect beforehand,” he said. “And somehow, between July of 2020 and Election Day, that fell apart. And that’s a question. I don’t know exactly what the answer is. But, from everything I’m hearing, it did not occur.”
For months before Election Day, Trump falsely claimed that the only way he could lose reelection is if Democrats committed mass voter fraud and the president refused to agree to the peaceful transfer of power should he lose. Since Election Day and President-elect Joe Biden's decisive victory, Trump has relentlessly spread false claims and conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Trump's attorney general, William Barr, announced on Monday that the president's claims that there was enough fraud to overturn the election results are unsubstantiated.
"To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election," Barr told The Associated Press.
Parscale was arrested and hospitalized by police in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida in late September after his wife called 911 reporting that he had brandished a gun and threatened to hurt himself at their home. The police report also noted that Parscale's wife said he "hits her" and that she had "several large-sized contusions on both of her arms, her cheek, and forehead" as a result.
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