In newly revealed audio from December 2020, a Trump campaign official admitted that when the Secretary of State of Georgia audited Dominion voting machines, the findings came “pretty darn close” to the machines’ count, and that “there weren’t any physical issues” with them.
The admission contradicts the false claim made by Donald Trump and his allies that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Listen to the recording at the top of the page right now.
In the recording, aired exclusively on Wednesday’s episode of “Alex Wagner Tonight,” the official can be heard talking to former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg. Grossberg was a senior booking producer for Maria Bartiromo, and later head of booking for Tucker Carlson, prior to being fired by the network.
Grossberg asked the Trump official if any of the voting machines have been looked at in Georgia.
“I’d have to check on that in terms of Georgia, I know during the audit they did check on those machines,” the official said in the recording. “Can just go off the record for one sec here?”
Grossberg replied, “Yeah, sure. Of course. I don’t want us to say it, if it’s not. That’s why we’re checking.”
“I think they have looked at the machines. When the secretary of state did its audit. There was a lot, I think a fair bit of looking at the machines. The audit came in pretty darn close to what the machine count was with the receipts. So, you know, I don’t know the outcome of those, but our understanding, again, this is from the Secretary of State’s office, was that there weren’t any physical issues with machines on those inspections.”
The recordings are among the evidence that Fox failed to turn over during discovery in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network. The company played the recording in court on Wednesday. The recordings were given to Dominion, and subsequently to Wagner, by Grossberg’s legal team.
Fox was sanctioned Wednesday by the presiding judge in the lawsuit, for withholding that evidence.
Grossberg’s legal team said they gave the recordings over to Dominion when they realized months after discovery that Fox didn’t hand them over. She also said the transcripts and audio recordings were widely circulated and discussed within the network.
In a statement provided to TheWrap, Fox News responded to the audio’s release, writing, “As our lawyer explained in court today, we learned that there might be responsive audio recordings for the first time on March 20 from Grossberg’s errata sheet. Our attorneys then accessed the forensic image of Grossberg’s phone and reviewed the recordings, which were produced within 15 days of first learning of their existence.”
Fox News is also being sued by Grossberg, who claims the network pressured her to air falsehoods about the 2020 election, and that it is attempting to set her up to take the fall in the Dominion lawsuit.
THURSDAY UPDATE: Fox News sent the following statement Thursday:
“Alex Wagner’s desperate attack on FOX News is nothing more than a pathetic play for ratings. Given how sloppy and error-laden tonight’s episode was, misappropriating quotes throughout the broadcast, it’s no wonder she loses more than a million viewers on average from Rachel Maddow’s weekly hour.”
