December 3, 2020

To call these hearings embarrassing sadly understates things. A travesty really doesn't do justice either to the spectacle the Trump campaign is subjecting the nation to right now.

Source: Washington Post

Weeks after Melissa Carone was tapped by the Trump campaign as a star witness in Michigan, little appeared to be going as planned with the contract IT worker’s testimony — an unverified series of claims about ballot fraud at Detroit’s vote-counting center.

In interviews with conservative-leaning media last month, her offbeat tale suggesting ballots were being smuggled inside food vans seemed to baffle even Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. Two days later, a Wayne County judge ruled that her allegations “simply are not credible.”

Yet, there she was in front of a Michigan House panel on Wednesday, dressing down a Republican lawmaker as she loudly insisted, without proof, that tens of thousands of votes had been counted twice. At one point, she was audibly shushed by Trump campaign attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

“I know what I saw,” Carone told state Rep. Steven Johnson (R), raising her eyebrows sharply. “And I signed something saying if I’m wrong, I can go to prison. Did you?”

On social media, her pointed declarations, Midwestern lilt and poofy, blond updo drew comparisons to “Saturday Night Live” characters played by Victoria Jackson and Cecily Strong. By early Thursday, one clip of her exchange with Johnson had been viewed about 9 million times.

An uncanny mashup.

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