Dissecting 2000 Mules: An Editor’s Perspective
I was challenged to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, 2000 Mules. The film purports to reveal a nationwide conspiracy in which hundreds and hundreds of people were coordinated to deliver illegal ballots to election drop boxes. The documentary focuses on five battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. The premise is this coordinated effort of submitting illegal ballots would have shifted the election from Joe Biden to then president Donald J. Trump. The key investigative tools, per the documentary’s producers, were the purchase of 4 trillion data bytes of geo-location cellphone data in those states in the six weeks preceding the Nov. 5 election, and then publicly availability video surveillance of ballot drop boxes also in those five states.
Who is behind the film?
Dinesh D’Souza is the creator and the narrator; he is a well-known conservative writer and film maker who has promoted various conspiracy theories over the years. He is an author with several controversial books including The End of Racism (“In summary, the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”), and The Roots of Obama’s Rage, a psychological analysis of the former president based on his childhood and his relationship with his father and a 2006 book titled The Enemy at Home, which wove a narrative about how the American liberal left was responsible for 9/11. Since the election of Donald Trump, he has been an ardent defender of the former president.
True the Vote, which describes itself as an election integrity organization, is identified as the executive producer of the film. The founder of True the Vote is Catherine Engelbrecht, a conservative activist with a specific interest in election integrity. She is seen in the film endorsing the validity of the cellphone data. It has been noted in published reports that the data purchase amounted to $2 million (Associated Press reporting) , and was paid for by True the Vote. Greg Phillips is a self-identified election integrity expert, and his firm conducted the bulk of the cellphone data analysis for True the Vote; he is also a board member of True the Vote. I could not find any public information of how much the film cost, but the average cost of documentaries runs from $1000 up to $10,000 per minute of finished product (newbiefilmschool.com), the higher estimate based on a film with production values that could be shown in movie theaters, and not just on YouTube. The cost of the film would be range from $2.1 million to $2.6 million; both numbers include the $2 million for the geodata.
I approached watching this documentary as a civic duty, to be informed about the essence of the Stop the Steal movement, which since Nov. 5 2020, has been in search of an explanation of how Trump lost the election. 2000 Mules does explore new ground in its attempt to find voter fraud. However it’s reporting needs to be judged against standards of investigative journalism. I kept a notepad handy, as if I were listening to a reporter bringing a story to my desk and pushing for immediate publication.
Here are some of those notes, which come from my own study of the 2020 election, and the Trump phenomenon, and questions that arose during my viewing.
— Any notion of balance is absent. Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), Sebastian Gorka, Larry Elder and Dennis Prager sit on the far right spectrum of today’s conservative ideologues. They were the panel that, in the documentary’s timeline, were interviewed before they saw the documentary and then again after watching it. D’Souza also is nowhere near the center of the political spectrum; he has been a Trump apologist almost since the beginning, and a fierce opponent of the Democratic Party for decades.
— The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has conducted its own analysis of voter fraud for decades, and has only found 1357 provable cases in review of nearly 40 years of elections. One of the people in the documentary is a current employee of The Heritage Foundation; this previous research is never mentioned, and he is quoted saying fraud could be a problem. But offers no proof.
— Accepts prima facie that geo-tracking data is accurate.
— Asserts ballot harvesters were paid. Who paid them? Who coordinated their efforts? Where are the interviews with some of the 2000 mules? There’s one obscured face of a woman in Arizona, and she’s not a harvester; she was asked to make the deposit of ballots already collected by someone else.
— Liberal non profits involved in the deception. Which ones? Same in each city? (Not one institution is identified)
— Ballot harvesting is an illegal activity. Is it? Cite laws and regulations. (In this case, I’ll answer my own question…it is a false assertion. Only one state totally prohibits any form of “ballot harvesting” or the collection of ballots to be delivered by 3rd parties. 27 states allow it in many specified instances; others restrict it to family members, or caregivers, the latter often defined as nursing home staff.)
— Videos are mostly from fall of 2020, and possibly explains people wearing latex gloves…height of Covid epidemic when many people were doing grocery shopping with latex gloves on. Why not make this more obvious instead of citing it only as a proof of nefarious activity to eliminate fingerprints on the ballots.
— Video of man delivering ballots on bicycle and then stopping to take a picture, cited as evidence of his need to prove his deposit so he could be paid. (Ed. Note: In Philadelphia, the election commission encouraged voters to take pics of their ballot drops and post them on social media to encourage turnout). We don’t know where this bicycle guy was filmed.
— Why doesn’t film explain that in every state, every absentee ballot and every mail in ballot has a signature that is matched to voting records…very deceptively suggests than any ballot received in a ballot box is suspect…simply not true… ballots from drop boxes are generally subjected to a rigorous verification. The signature is subject to examination and verification. Please explain the lack of clarification, and why the discrepancy.
— Simply excise the dubious assertions about someone delivering ballots at 3am…I guess no one on the film has ever worked an overnight shift, or even a night shift. There’s no proof of anything suspicious just because it took place in the wee hours.
Those would have been my first observations and questions to the reporter. But to cross the hurdle for publication, the story needs this:
— Interviews with mules, not one or two, but dozens spread across all five states to show the extent of the conspiracy and the proof it was coordinated.
— Proof of coordination and source of money to pay ballot harvesters..a conspiracy of this size didn’t just happen, and wouldn’t be cheap…their own $10 estimate (they stipulate it could be more or less) means that it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to have shifted the election. (In Pennsylvania alone, the vote margin was more than 75,000 votes in Biden’s favor, or $750,000 in that state alone.)
—Interview with geo-data analysts to provide credibility to the 2000 mules assertions about that data. Story must have a countervailing point to the main assertion that the data is valid; there are many.
—Interview people whose phones were identified as having met the threshold of 10x visits in a 24 hour period to ballot boxes (same as Mule interviews), but find someone who maybe drove back and forth on one of those days for any other possible reason. Determine other possible causes for the geodata results.
— It is simply inconceivable in the year 2022 that with a conspiracy of this magnitude and the associated outcome affecting a presidential election, someone wouldn’t have had second thoughts and come forward. Look at Jan. 6; people involved have revealed that it wasn’t a spontaneous outpouring of good feelings on a tourist visit to Capitol Hill. Find me someone behind the whole operation, a coordinator, a leader, a mastermind.
Where are the mules?
Those are some of my questions —a few but not all — that I would have been scribbling in the margins with my red editor’s pencil. Someone might argue I was still wrong, but the questions are valid, and demonstrate some of the gaping holes in the 2000 Mules narrative. Here are links to people with more time, and possibly full time jobs to do fact-checks. The bottom line is pretty simple: it does not meet the standards of credible investigative journalism. There are serious gaps in the reporting. I strongly suggest reading these analyses too; they are much more complete than my observations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Mules (this is a compendium of many articles about the documentary)
Finally, after I told the the person who encouraged me to watch 2000 Mules that I had fulfilled his challenge to me, I asked if he was watching the Jan. 6 hearings. His only comeback was to say that the hearings were proving Trump supporters had been duped by government agents and provocateurs into storming the Capitol. That statement, on top of his belief that 2000 Mules proves election fraud against Trump, reveals an unstinting, and uncritical point of view.
After the six hearings from the U.S. Congressional Jan. 6th committee, I can’t imagine anyone believing that the events of Jan. 6th, 2021 were just a spontaneous and peaceful political protest—the evidence and testimony confirms, if nothing else, that the day’s events were premeditated and knowledge of those plans extended into the oval office. Any attempt to rationalize those day’s events any other way simply ignores the facts.
And no documentary can provide the foundation for the attack on the Republic that took place on Jan .6th. In the end, that is what 2000 Mules is about: a justification for using any means to overturn the election. It does not meet the standards of basic journalism rules, and it fails to provide any basis for that justification. That is why it needs to be challenged.
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GORDON MOTT 