Rudy in the sky with diamonds It was the wildest news conference of the Trump presidency. Led by Rudy Giuliani, attorneys for President Trump's reelection campaign this week outlined a demented conspiracy theory that Trump actually won the election instead of President-elect Joe Biden. Let's be clear: Biden earned 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232 and under the Constitution is set take office on Jan. 20, provided all states certify their votes in coming weeks. The president's repeated cries of voter fraud and a rigged election have been dismissed by judges at every turn, and no proof has emerged. As Trump and Giuliani's rather-elaborate fantasy goes, an "algorithm" manipulated by Democrats switched votes from Trump to Biden, but it didn't quite work, so there was more fraud on top of that. Trump attorney Sidney Powell helpfully explained that the "algorithm" was brewed in the communist jungles of Venezuela for the benefit of strongman Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013), and somehow wound up here — something to do with George Soros — and began eating up Trump votes and spitting out Biden votes at its happy pace, only to be brutally overpowered by an unstoppable torrent of millions of Trump votes, thus forcing Democrats to use a "back door" method: mail-in ballots slipped in during the dark of night. Let that sink in. Giuliani: "They swear to you that at 4:30 in the morning, a truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were kept counting ballots. The people thought it was food, so they all ran to the truck. Wasn't food. It was thousands and thousands of ballots." This claim largely stems from a single affidavit, filed by an alleged witness, Melissa Carone, a contract IT worker for an election systems company. But Carone, though she made a number of voter-fraud claims, does not leap to the conclusions that Giuliani drew. In her affidavit, Carone simply says that food was brought in on two vans, but "I never saw any food coming out of the vans, coincidentally it was announced on the news that Michigan had found over 100,000 more ballots — not even two hours after the last van left." A Wayne County Circuit Court judge concluded that Carone's "allegations are simply not credible." Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Trump had access to Philadelphia's vote count "They didn't even allow Republican Observers into the building to watch," Trump tweeted about Philadelphia. "A terrible insult to our Constitution!" But, in fact, Trump's own lawyers have attested in court that his campaign was granted access and observed the process, both in Philadelphia and in other cities, and has found no evidence of fraud. Had Trump done the slightest bit of research, he would have learned that a lawyer, Jeremy A. Mercer, was representing him inside the room and monitoring the election workers' activities in Philadelphia. According to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, which ruled against Trump this week: "Attorney Mercer witnessed Board employees inspecting the back of ballot envelopes containing the voter's declaration, before sending them on for processing; witnessed ballots being removed from their secrecy envelopes, and naked ballots which had been delivered to the Board without a secrecy envelope being segregated from ballots which arrived within such envelopes; saw that the ballot processing methods utilized by the Board were not destroying the ballot envelopes containing the voter's declaration; and perceived that the ballot secrecy envelopes were being preserved during their processing." We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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