Former Attorney General William Barr could barely hold back his laughter at the mere mention of election-denying MAGA pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s fact-averse 2000 Mules quasi-documentary.
In videotaped testimony aired during Monday morning’s Jan. 6 House committee hearings, Barr told lawmakers about his efforts to convince former President Donald Trump that his voter-fraud claims were bogus, definitively stating, “My opinion then and now is that the election was not stolen by fraud. And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that,” before pausing and adding, “including the 2,000 Mules movie.”
Barr then let out a hearty chuckle.
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Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) jumped in to ask the former attorney general: “Maybe you can assess that 2000 Mules since people are talking about that?”
“Just, in a nutshell, you know, the [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] was unimpressed with it, and I was similarly unimpressed with it,” said the former top DOJ official. “I was holding my fire on that to see what the photographic evidence was. If they have a lot of photographs of the same person dumping a lot of ballots in different boxes, you know that’s hard to explain.”
Barr went on to explain that the film’s key assertion about geotagged cell phone data proving voter fraud is “singularly unimpressive.” He explained: “Basically, if you take two million cell phones and figure out where they are physically in a big city like Atlanta or wherever, just by definition, you will find many hundreds of them have passed by and spent time in the vicinity of these [voting drop] boxes and the premise that, you know, if you go by five boxes or whatever it was, that’s a mule is just indefensible.”
He concluded that the film “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting,” before pivoting back to noting how, following the 2020 election, Trump “wasn’t listening to my advice.”
D’Souza didn’t respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment, but he did tweet that Barr’s testimony displayed a “level of ignorance” that is “truly stunning.” The pro-Trump filmmaker fumed, “He doesn’t seem to understand the very concept of geotracking.”
Following the 2020 election, Barr quickly became a foe of the hardcore MAGA set due to his lack of appetite for chasing down Trump’s every whim on baseless voter-fraud allegations. The fallout was so swift, that longtime Republican operative and informal Trump adviser Roger Stone in December 2020 claimed Barr was “block[ing] for the deep state.”
D’Souza’s film, meanwhile, has been thoroughly shredded and debunked by news outlets and fact-checkers. In fact, the film’s baseless claims are so toxic that even some of right-wing media’s biggest players, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson and The Daily Wire boss Ben Shapiro, have either given it the silent treatment or outright criticized it. In turn, D’Souza appeared to nuke his relationships with Fox and Newsmax by publicly raging against them for not giving his movie any significant airtime.
