Flashback: Jonah Goldberg Destroyed Mollie Hemingway Over Defense of Trump’s ‘Insane Bat Guano Crazy’ Election Lies He’s Now Been Indicted For

The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg offered a scathing critique of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in November 2020 that looks prophetic in the wake of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment of Trump on charges related to that effort.

During a segment with Fox’s John Roberts, a former Democratic congressman, and the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, Goldberg minced no words.

“Donald Trump is trying to steal an election by pretending that the Democrats have stolen the election,” argued Goldberg after Hemingway submitted that the concerns about the integrity of the election were “legitimate” and called it a “major issue” for Republicans moving forward.

“Mollie’s absolutely right about there are issues of fraud and these kinds of things that are very minor, they’re very small, they’re very scattershot. They don’t hold up very well in front of judges, but it’s something that we should care about in the long term,” he conceded before pivoting back to his main point:

That’s not what Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and the President of the United States are saying. They’re alleging an insane, bat guano crazy conspiracy theory where Rudy Giuliani is actually saying that most ballots are counted out of the country. They’re alleging that those internationally recognized cyber ninjas, the Venezuelans, have hijacked our democracy. And while I don’t think that Donald Trump thinks he’s gonna pull it off, he’s trying to keep his options open and one of the options he would like to keep open is to literally steal an election by claiming that the Democratic party has stolen an election. It’s a pervasive, unpatriotic lie. Look, I care about voter fraud. But saying this is an important story because it illuminates voter fraud is like saying the Watergate burglary’s an important story because it highlighted the problems with security at the Watergate Hotel. It’s missing the point.

Hemingway responded by insisting that there were “really serious things” in Trump’s allegations and declaring that “it is really, really hard to hear someone say that this is inappropriate when for four years we had people allege that the 2016 election was stolen through a conspiracy of collusion, or to not say anything against people saying that,” implying that Goldberg had “let that conspiracy theory run wild for four years.”

“Trump’s lawyers are failing time and time again when they go to court because they’re not allowed to lie,” shot back Goldberg. “Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell are constantly lying.”

Goldberg left Fox News in 2021 over its release of Patriot Purge, which alleged that the January 6 attack on the Capitol may have been a false flag event aimed at justifying the persecution of conservatives. Hemingway remains a contributor at Fox, and is the author of Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, another attempt to excuse Trump’s actions after the 2020 election.

Smith’s indictment of Trump alleges that the former president was “determined to remain in power,” and was at the head of a conspiracy to “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud” in order to overturn the results of the election. Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are referenced but not named in the indictment as co-conspirators.

Watch above via Fox News.

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