Fox News weekend anchor Eric Shawn on Sunday delivered a robust fact-checking of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.
Shawn’s debunking came just hours after Trump-boosting Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo devoted the bulk of her show to promoting the president’s latest conspiracy theory about computer software stealing votes from him.
While the president has essentially declared war against Fox News for being the first network to call Arizona for President-elect Joe Biden, urging his supporters to abandon the conservative-leaning network, he has still spent the weekend plugging pro-Trump Fox News stars who have backed his lies and false claims about the election.
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Sharing multiple clips from opinion hosts Jeanine Pirro and Jesse Watters that featured the Trump loyalists peddling the narrative that Biden “stole” the election—one clip revealed Watters even saying “I can’t prove this allegation but it’s a gut feeling”—the president told his millions of Twitter followers to watch Bartiromo’s Sunday interview with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
During her conversation with Giuliani, whom Trump has now placed in charge of his election legal challenges after multiple law firms dropped the president after a series of embarrassing court losses, Bartiromo lent credence to the allegation that Dominion voting machines were used to flip votes from Trump to Biden.
“One source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a back door, that allows it to be or that allows the votes to be mirrored and monitored allowing an intervening party a realtime understanding of how many votes will be needed to gain an electoral advantage,” she said at one point. “Are you saying the states that use that software did that?”
Giuliani, meanwhile, repeatedly claimed he had direct evidence of voter fraud related to the Dominion software and voting machines, but isn’t able to share that information at this time.
“We have people that I can’t really disclose that can describe the hardware in great detail,” he declared. (The ex-New York City mayor, of course, was involved in the president’s dirt-digging operation against Biden and his son Hunter, long making unsubstantiated claims that never came to fruition.)
Bartiromo also hosted Trump legal team member Sidney Powell, who also repeated the baseless claims that Dominion changed “millions of votes” but added, “I’m not gonna tell on national TV” when asked how she’ll prove the election was “rigged” against Trump.
“Well, let’s clarify the election facts as we know them right now,” Shawn said on Sunday afternoon. “Rigged election or your own government election officials across the country and voting experts say it’s not true? Baseless claims that are inflammatory, designed to undermine your faith in American democracy.”
The Fox anchor went on to air a clip of a federal election commission official saying that this year’s election was “the most secure election we’ve ever had” while warning about the impact conspiracy theories have in eroding trust in the system.
Shawn, as he did days earlier, further noted that the president is lying when he claims that Republican poll watchers were blocked from observing the ballot-counting process in Pennsylvania and other states, replaying an interview he had with Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt.
He finally addressed the Dominion conspiracy theory, reading aloud a statement from the company denying right-wing claims—peddled by Bartiromo and other Fox stars—that they have ties with Venezuela or prominent Democratic politicians and organizations.
“Prosecutors say any voter or election fraud allegation will be thoroughly investigated and if a fix were in, if there was wrongdoing, we will know about it,” Shawn concluded. “But election officials across the country insist, as of today, there is no evidence of any widespread fraud affecting the outcome the presidential election, that our precious democracy was not tampered with and that such baseless and false claims are an insult to the thousands of election officials and workers across the country who we have seen dedicating themselves 24/7 to ensure a fair and free election for all of us.”
Shawn’s forceful denouncement of Trump’s conspiracies comes on the heels of Fox News weekend anchor Leland Vittert unloading on a Trump campaign spokesperson over the president’s refusal to admit he’s lost the election. The president, naturally, took to Twitter on Sunday to rail against Vittert, once again urging his followers to try Trump-loyal cable news outlets One America News and Newsmax instead.
