The ironically named True The Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht isn't taking Salem Media Group yanking 2,000 Mules from its platforms, and the apology they issued very well. And really, it's Engelbrecht who should be apologizing, too, after her group told a Georgia judge in February that it doesn't have any evidence to support its claims of illegal ballot stuffing during the 2020 general election and the runoff two months later.
Dinesh D'Souza's widely debunked film used research from True the Vote as a basis to prove its false claims of ballot stuffing.
"On Friday, we were surprised to read that Salem Media had announced that they had settled in a lawsuit that was filed several years ago by an individual that appeared in the 2000 Mules movie and that individual sued Salem Media and Dinesh D'Souza and True the Vote and myself and Gregg Phillips," she said, Media Matters reports.
Engelbrecht sees a conspiracy theory behind the well-deserved apology.
"And so when we read Salem's position — you know, the way that I read it was Salem is a publicly traded company, and they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders," she insisted. "And they have a bunch of advertisers that are — you know, can be easily pressured. And they made — they made a business decision. Do I wish that they would have made a different decision? I don't even know. I — they made the decision that they made. Does it change our position at all? No."
"You know, the movie and book are pulled because that's what Salem wanted to do," she added. "It has nothing to do with the accuracy of the material that was presented into that climate when it was first all done."
The apology was issued after the film falsely accused a man of ballot stuffing when, in reality, Mark Andrews, whose image they used, was dropping off ballots for himself, his wife, and their three adult children, who all lived at the same address. That is legal in Georgia. The publisher is likely trying to get ahead of a defamation lawsuit.
