Jeff Swensen/Getty
In Dinesh D’Souza’s twisted, widely maligned and discredited pseudo-documentary 2,000 Mules, he accuses a number of American voters of behaving as “mules” — trading fake ballots to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
These so-called couriers featured prominently in the film, which used surveillance footage of them placing ballots in drop boxes and allegedly catching them in their villainy. As D’Souza’s ominous voiceover proclaimed in the film, “What you see is a crime. Those are fraudulent votes.”
The only problem, of course, is that it was all wrong, according to one of the voters who was spotlighted as an alleged mule. Mark Andrews filed a lawsuit against D’Souza on Wednesday, insisting that D’Souza and his associates falsely accused him of voter fraud by combining “pseudoscience junk and cropped surveillance video of innocent voters” in the May 2022 documentary.
2,000 mules showed Andrews, with a blurry face, dropping five ballots into a Georgia drop box in 2020, according to his federal complaint. “Indeed, the video shows Mr. Andrews legally casting ballots for himself and his family, a voting method expressly permitted by Georgian law,” it said.
A state investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found Andrews to have committed no wrongdoing and dismissed a complaint filed against him over the documentary in May.
“The defendants knew at all times that their portrayals of Mr. Andrews were lies, as was the entire narrative of 2,000 mules,” the lawsuit explains. “But they continued to peddle those lies to enrich themselves. As of the filing of this lawsuit, defendants’ social media accounts and website are still promoting the film, using Mr. Andrews as an example of a criminal ‘mule’.”
Later in the 123-page complaint, the 123-page complaint explains: “The defendants promoted the film and its ‘mules’ narrative on television, radio, online and through other media – including to millions of Fox News viewers – and repeated images of Mr Andrews as a model ‘mule’.”
The story goes on
Named co-defendants in the lawsuit are D’Souza’s partners Gregg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, a controversial conservative election monitoring organization. In September, the group was sued by Konnech, an election logistics software company, which accused Phillips and Engelbrecht of stealing data and running a xenophobic “smear campaign” against their chief executive.
“The organization is confident that the allegations regarding True the Vote will be proven unfounded in this lawsuit,” a True the Vote spokesperson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Andrews is seeking an undisclosed amount of money in his lawsuit and alleges defamation, intimidation and invasion of privacy. “As a black man who grew up in the American South before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Mr. Andrews deeply values the right to vote, has always taken pride in casting his vote and has worked tirelessly to instill those same values in his family,” it reads.
“Because of the conspiracy by the defendants to defame and intimidate Mr. Andrews, he will now never again be able to vote without looking over his shoulder.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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