THE FACTS: After Harris wrapped up her trip to Georgia to meet with grieving members of the Asian American community following a mass shooting, social media users began sharing a video of her boarding Air Force Two claiming she had failed to salute the troops at the base of the stairs. The video, viewed more than 900,000 times on Twitter, was shared widely by conservative social media accounts in an attempt to paint the vice president as unpatriotic and disrespectful to service members. “DISGRACEFUL
“Finally, a judge has ruled Dominion Voting Machines were designed to create fraud.”
THE FACTS: No judge has made such a ruling. In December, a judge handling a Michigan lawsuit allowed the release of a report that contained false claims about a human error in Antrim County and about Dominion Voting Systems election technology, including the unsubstantiated assertion that the company’s machines were designed to create fraud. The release of that report, which has since been debunked, did not amount to the judge endorsing its claims. Social media users spreading the false claim based their arguments on a December article, which covered Michigan 13th Circuit Court Judge Kevin Elsenheimer’s decision at the time to allow the release of a flawed report contained in a lawsuit seeking to challenge Antrim County’s election results. Elsenheimer did not make a ruling supporting the report’s contents. The 23-page report – signed by a former Republican congressional candidate with a history of spreading misinformation about Michigan’s election – claimed Dominion was “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.” It claimed the results of the election in Antrim County, Michigan, should not have been certified because a forensic analysis of voting machines found a “machine error built into the voting software designed to create error.” But that analysis is “critically flawed, filled with dramatic conclusions without any evidence to support them,” according to a joint statement from the Michigan Department of State and the Michigan attorney general’s office in December. Antrim County officials concurred in a press release, saying, “An analysis which should have been data and fact based is instead riddled with false and unsupported claims, baseless attacks, and incorrect use of technical terms.” Dominion has presented evidence to show that its technology did not err in Antrim County during the 2020 election. Officials have thoroughly explained the human mistake that caused the small, Republican-leaning county to temporarily report unofficial results that reflected a landslide win for Joe Biden. Former President Donald Trump ultimately won the county with 61% of the vote. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced in early March that the state had completed more than 250 election audits, all of which “confirmed the integrity and accuracy of the 2020 election.” In her statement, Benson specifically mentioned the Antrim County audit, saying it found that “the Dominion machines used there accurately counted ballots throughout the county.” There’s also no evidence the election technology firm Dominion Voting Systems switched or deleted votes, used algorithms to unevenly weigh vote tallies, colluded with Democrats, or used foreign servers – despite repeated efforts by Trump and his supporters to claim it did.
– Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in Seattle contributed this report.
CNN banner did not say Boulder shooting suspect was ‘morally white’
CLAIM: CNN displayed a banner during coverage of the mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, stating the gunman was “factually Arab, but morally white.”
THE FACTS: The network didn’t display such text, according to a CNN representative and a recording of the broadcast. A manipulated screenshot of a CNN broadcast was shared thousands of times on Facebook this week, fooling social media users who did not realize it was initially shared as satire. The fabricated image showed CNN host Brooke Baldwin and correspondent Lucy Kafanov in a split-screen display, with Kafanov reporting from Boulder at “1:01 p.m. MT.” A banner below the journalists read, “DEVELOPING STORY: INVESTIGATION: SHOOTER WAS FACTUALLY ARAB, BUT MORALLY WHITE.” However, a recording of the same moment on Tuesday in an online TV news archive shows the text on the screen actually read, “COLORADO SHOOTING SUSPECT BOOKED INTO JAIL TODAY.” Further investigation of the fabricated image shows it originated on the Christian satire website The Babylon Bee. Emily Kuhn, senior director of communications at CNN Digital Worldwide, confirmed in an email to The Associated Press that the banner was fabricated and didn’t match the network’s font. Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the 21-year-old suspect in a Boulder supermarket shooting that killed 10 people on Monday, appeared in court Thursday for the first time, and his attorney asked for a health assessment “to address his mental illness.” According to two law enforcement officials, Alissa was born in Syria in 1999, emigrated to the U.S. as a toddler and later became a U.S. citizen. He would need to be a citizen to buy a gun. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.
