Far-right conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza admitted that his widely debunked election conspiracy theory movie “2000 Mules” used inaccurate data.
The movie claims ballot “mules” were paid by Democrats in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to illegally collect and drop off ballots in the 2020 election.
Experts debunked the film noting that its entire premise is based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cell phone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm that somebody deposited a ballot into a drop box.
Still, the movie went viral in MAGA circles and was even screened by Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Two years later in a statement quietly posted on his website, D’Souza admitted that the cell phone geolocation data his movie is based on was provided by conservative non-profit group True the Vote and turned out to be false.
“We were assured that the surveillance videos had been linked to geolocation cell phone data, such that each video depicted an individual who had made at least 10 visits to drop boxes. Indeed, it is clear from the interviews within the film itself that True the Vote was correlating the videos to geolocation data,” he wrote. “We recently learned that surveillance videos used in the film may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data.”
D’Souza also apologized to Mark Andrews, an Atlanta man who filed a defamation lawsuit against D’Souza, True the Vote and Salem Media, the publisher of 2000 Mules, after the film wrongly identified him as a ‘mule’ dropping off ballots to sway the election to Biden.
“While all of these individuals’ images were blurred and unrecognizable, one of the individuals has since come forward publicly and has initiated a lawsuit over the use of his blurred image in the film and the book,” D’Souza said in the statement. “I owe this individual, Mark Andrews, an apology. I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team.”
Andrews alleged in the suit that the baseless claims made in the film led to violent threats against him and his family. He reached a settlement with Salem Media for an undisclosed amount in May.
D’Souza said in his statement that his apology to Andrews was not court mandated, it was simply the “right thing to do, given what we have now learned.”
Trump pardoned D’Souza in 2018, four years after he was convicted of violating campaign finance laws.
