‘2000 Mules’ Filmmaker Joins Growing Coterie Of Election Deniers Quietly Dropping The Act

Last updated: 2024/12/03 at 1:27 AM

Trump ally and MAGA influencer Dinesh D’Souza posted a statement on his website over the weekend at long last admitting that his conspiracy theory film “2,000 Mules” was produced “on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team” — joining a growing group of election deniers who have been quietly dropping the act in the wake of Trump’s victory last month.

You’ll remember “2,000 Mules” as the wildly inflammatory film that riled up Trump supporters in the wake of his 2020 defeat by President Joe Biden. The film was released in May 2022 and argued for the existence of paid “mules” who stuffed ballot drop boxes with pro-Biden ballots during pandemic voting that year. It relied on junk data, surveillance footage and supposed geolocation tracking pulled together by the Trump-aligned election denialism group True The Vote to make its argument. None of the accusations were backed up by any real evidence, as multiple journalists reported at the time and in the years since.

Nonetheless, the film predictably set off a firestorm among right-wingers, who had, until this point, been relying on characters such as Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell to make their widespread voter fraud claims for them. The film was repeatedly used as fodder for Trump’s unsuccessful Big Lie gambit. Trump at one point held a private screening of the film at Mar-a-Lago and has called it “the greatest & most impactful documentary of our time.”

You can read D’Souza’s statement in full here. It is centered around an apology to a Georgia man named Mark Andrews who sued D’Souza, along with his production company Salem Media Group and True The Vote, for defamation in 2022. While D’Souza acknowledges that he’s issuing an apology from the goodness of his heart and “not under the terms of a settlement agreement or other duress,” Salem Media Group did reach a settlement with Andrews in May of this year and stopped distributing the film. It also issued an apology to Andrews as part of its settlement agreement.

D’Souza still would not acknowledge that there’s no proof the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

“While the video in the film created an incorrect inference as to Mr. Andrews, the underlying premise of the film holds true,” he said.

D’Souza is one of several big name election deniers who has quietly eaten their words in recent weeks. Trump allies like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), for example, used his slim House majority to cram through legislation requiring that anyone registering to vote in a federal election provide proof of citizenship (even though it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections) just ahead of November. The bill passed the House and was dead-on-arrival in the Senate, but it served its purpose. It gave congressional Republicans a platform to fear monger about the widely debunked myth that non-citizens are voting en masse for Democrats in federal elections, giving themselves something to point to if Trump lost the election. Just days after Trump’s victory, Johnson gave a press conference in which he credited himself and other Republicans across the nation for ostensibly eradicating the issue that wasn’t an issue in the first place.

Kari Lake is another example. As my colleague Khaya Himmelman reported last month, the loudest and most notorious election denier outside Trump himself not only refused to fight her electoral defeat against Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego, she also quietly settled a years-old defamation lawsuit with an Arizona election official, whom she falsely blamed for her 2022 gubernatorial defeat, just days after the election.

One person who has still not let the Big Lie go is Trump himself. According to a person close to Trump who spoke to the Washington Post, he is planning to push his DOJ to substantiate claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election that were long ago proven to be baseless.