Fox News host Laura Ingraham implied on Tuesday night that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was involved in bribing Georgia election officials in order to swing the election for President-elect Joe Biden, wondering aloud if they were “laying down” and “on the take.”
The same day that President Donald Trump’s latest longshot legal challenge was dismissed from the Supreme Court with a one-line ruling, Ingraham reached deep down into the well of voting fraud conspiracies to offer her viewers a faint ray of hope. Georgia certified its election results for the third time the day prior.
Citing the Amistad Project, a right-wing activist group that has filed a slew of dead-end election lawsuits, the Fox News star noted that the organization’s director Phillip Kline had “sounded the alarm” that Zuckerberg had donated $250 million to a foundation to help local election offices amid the pandemic.
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“Now, on its face, this arrangement creates a lot of questions and potential conflicts, but few in power took it seriously,” Ingraham declared. “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.”
Ingraham then brought on Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), whom the Georgia secretary of state recently accused of pressuring him to toss out legal ballots, to discuss her concerns over Zuckerberg’s charitable contributions.
While Graham noted 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 it was a conservative involved.
“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?’”
While Graham wasn’t quite as willing to go down that conspiratorial rabbit hole with Ingraham, he did humor her suggestion.
“I just don’t think private groups should be able to fund public elections,” he stated. “There is no good outcome here. He may be civic-minded and have a good purpose, but it just doesn’t pass the smell test. Look at what happened in Fulton County.”
Echoing the president, Graham then went after state-level Republicans for not ceding to Trump’s demands and finding a way to flip the state to the president.
“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.”
Ingraham, meanwhile, pointed out that Graham is the Senate Judiciary chairman, wanting to know if he had the power to conduct hearings on “all of this,” which not only included Zuckerberg’s donations but also “Chinese spies working for U.S. elected officials.” (The Fox host was referencing an Axios report about a suspected Chinese spy targeting California politicians, including Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).)
“I think after this election is over, I want to do a deep dive into the 2020 election about mail-in voting,” Graham responded.
The Zuckerberg allegations have been included in a number of conservative lawsuits seeking to invalidate the presidential election results, including one in the Fulton County Superior Court that included QAnon-supporting Trumpist lawyer L. Lin Wood as a plaintiff. The lawsuit was summarily denied.
Wood, along with one-time Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, has promised to prove millions of Biden votes were fraudulently cast via a nefarious international conspiracy that involves China, a long-dead Hugo Chavez, George Soros, and corrupt voter software. While their cases have been completely fruitless, Trumpworld has also distanced itself from the “fool” Wood after he told Georgia Republican voters to sit out next month’s Senate runoff races.
