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Video: Virginia Democrats' Nominee for Governor Pushed 'Big Lie' After 2000 Election

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  June 10, 2021 10:05 AM

We flagged this for you last week, but now there's video evidence to accompany the quotes. Terry McAuliffe is the former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a Clinton acolyte, and served as governor of Virginia from 2014 to 2018. He has just been nominated by his party to serve another term in that capacity, and in anticipation of his match-up with GOP nominee Glenn Youngkin, McAuliffe has been trying to directly link his opponent to the "big lie" of the 2020 election. As we noted, after Youngkin prevailed among the Republican field, McAuliffe directly accused him of believing in that lie – which was, in fact, a lie. We have the audio and transcript to prove it, thanks to Youngkin's response to a question I posed to him on this exact subject on my radio show.  He's given similar answers elsewhere.

McAuliffe is smearing Youngkin in order to render the longtime businessman toxic among heavily anti-Trump Northern Virginia voters, but perhaps it's also a form of projection. After his party lost the 2000 election, McAuliffe peddled angry conspiracy theories, falsely asserting that Democrats had "won" the election, baselessly accusing GOP officials in Florida with "tampering" with the results. I recently obtained footage of McAuliffe launching this attack on democracy, generating applause from his fellow partisan paranoiacs: 


Fact check: Bush won, Gore lost, and the rightful victor of that election was inaugurated. Even under the Gore campaign's preferred, cherry-picked scenario of a partial recount, Bush would have actually expanded his statewide victory margin, thus clinching the presidency: 

In the first full study of Florida’s ballots since the election ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled “undervotes” — ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through — to be counted. The study, conducted by the accounting firm of BDO Seidman, counted over 60,000 votes in Florida’s 67 counties, tabulating separate vote totals in several standards categories.

This private exercise tabulated ballots using many different hypothetical scenarios and standard, and Bush won under nearly all of them. More importantly, Bush also won under the legal process, despite the networks prematurely and wrongly calling Florida for Gore while polls were still open in one of the most conservative areas of the state – not to mention most of the country. And yet, Terry McAuliffe stoked the flames of fury within his party's base, lying to them about what happened and refusing to acknowledge the true outcome of the race. McAuliffe now purports to be so deeply offended by lies about election results that he's cynically putting them in the mouth of his Republican opponent. Will McAuliffe denounce himself and his own big lie as DNC chairman in the aftermath of a bitterly contested election? It was a lie that contributed to much of his party never fully accepting Bush as a legitimate president.

Many of them also went on to embrace another wild-eyed conspiracy theory: That Bush was somehow "in on" 9/11, a baseless view shared by a sizable majority of Democrats by the end of Bush's second term. Will McAuliffe recognize his own significant role in undermining faith in our institutions and our republic? Will he apologize for fueling the anger and paranoia? And will he finally confirm that George W. Bush was the rightful winner of the 2000 election, or will he continue to indulge his big lie? I'll leave you with this observation from Politico, published just prior to this week's Democratic primaries: 

Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe entered Tuesday’s primary with a large lead over his three main challengers — all of whom are Black. Money and name recognition have shaped the contours of Virginia’s off-year Democratic primary. They have also edged out the women and people of color vying for some of the state’s top offices. Heading into Tuesday's primary, Democrats are poised to nominate two well-known white men: former Gov. Terry McAuliffe and state Attorney General Mark Herring...A ticket led by two white men is the opposite scenario from what many in Virginia were expecting in 2021, which they believed would be the year voters sent a Black woman to the governor’s mansion

Herring, for reference, is one of two currently-serving top Democrats in the state who has worn blackface, alongside current governor Ralph Northam (with whom President Biden just appeared, despite previous calls for Northam to resign). Republicans are generally far less fixated on race and identity than Democrats, but it's worth pointing out that this is the GOP's statewide 2021 ticket in Virginia: