Maria Bartiromo and Newt Gingrich push a stream of debunked conspiracy theories about the election

Gingrich appeared with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, who has been a major conduit for election misinformation

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the December 7, 2020, edition of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo

MARIA BARTIROMO (ANCHOR): Newt, do you think this president still has a path to victory, knowing all that you've seen? I mean, time is running out going into the certification process. But what's your take on where we are?

NEWT GINGRICH (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Well, a good friend of mine said they had just reviewed Arizona, and thought the chance of his recapturing Arizona jumped from 5 to aobut 40%, based on all the new evidence. I would say with the emergence last night — and this is to me, Maria, this is what's fascinating.  The longer this has gone on, the more citizens have shown up bringing all sorts of evidence we never dreamed of.

You know, a truck driver who drove a truckload from New York to Pennsylvania, of ballots, the video from the security camera. Every time you turn around, there's more and more examples. And it's almost like the American people are out there right now, being their own election investigators, because the FBI's not doing its job, and because they so deeply distrust the government. And I think with every passing day, you're going to get more examples of this kind of news.

By the way, this doesn't even get to the question of these voting machines, and who owned them, and whether or not they were rigged, and what did it mean that they went through Barcelona, Spain, to Frankfurt, Germany to be counted. I mean, there're so many things wrong with this election, that it's astonishing.

BARTIROMO: Yeah, well, it really is. And people need to understand that any election fraud carries a 5 to 10-year jail sentence. So these are felonies, for those people who were driving the truck, driving ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. You need to understand the consequences.

All of the allegations offered up by Gingrich have been debunked.

  • The claim of a truckload of absentee ballots delivered into Pennsylvania was described by a local paper in Lancaster as “a story presented without hard evidence, a tale without even a clear allegation of what kind of fraud occurred, or how it happened.” Furthermore, the paper found that it is normal for some amount of absentee ballots to come from out of state, all the more so this year because the coronavirus pandemic could leave people stuck elsewhere.
  • The story about security camera footage of a vote-counting center in Georgia has already been reported to have not shown anything improper going on. State monitors were present the entire time that ballots were being handled, according to the office of Georgia’ Republican secretary of state. Fox News has even posted a piece on its website about the affadavit signed to that extent by the chief investigator for Georgia's secretary of state.
  • Finally, Gingrich appeared to have alluded to another debunked conspiracy theory about the U.S. military seizing computer servers in Germany that belong to a voting technology company Scytl, which is based in Spain. (Not only did the U.S. Army say the allegation is false, but Scytl doesn’t even have any current offices or servers in Germany.)