In yet another unhinged election fraud hearing on Wednesday night, Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani—who recently had hair dye leaking down his face during a press conference in which he quoted My Cousin Vinny—appeared to be so embarrassed by one of his witnesses that he tried to shush her.
With Team Trump’s lawsuits and legal challenges repeatedly getting laughed out of court, the legal team’s latest gambit to keep President Donald Trump in the White House is to try to convince legislatures in states President-elect Joe Biden won to dismiss their states’ certifications and flip their electoral votes to Trump.
After holding unofficial “hearings” in Arizona and Pennsylvania hotels, Giuliani and fellow Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis appeared in front of a Michigan House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday. The hearing comes amid pressure from Trump and his Republican allies for the GOP-led state legislature to step in and give the state to the president, despite Biden’s 154,000-vote victory.
One of the witnesses the Trump legal team presented on Wednesday night—the second day of hearings—was Mellissa Carone, who claims she worked as a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems.
Despite struggling to coherently explain her job duties during her first day of testimony, Carone was brought back by the Trump team—and again had trouble articulating what exactly she did as a Dominion contractor. That, however, did not stop her from confidently insisting that she did indeed witness blatant and massive fraud when ballots were being counted.
Alleging that she witnessed poll workers running the same ballots through voting machines “thousands of times,” Carone—noticeably slurring— took issue when a state representative said that she should be “under oath” during her testimony.
"I have an affidavit!" Carone exclaimed. “I am a mother, I have two children, I have two degrees. I don’t know any woman in the world that would write an affidavit under oath just to write it. You can go to prison for this!”
The affidavit Carone is referencing was included last month in a Michigan lawsuit that sought to stop the election certification of Wayne County. The request was denied by the judge, who deemed her allegations as “simply not credible.”
At one point, during an exchange with GOP Rep. Steve Johnson, Carone grew animated and began yelling when the lawmaker questioned how her claim that a batch of 30,000 votes counted multiple times wouldn’t be reflected in the poll book.
“We’re not seeing the poll book off by 30,000 votes,” Johnson said.
“What’d you guys do, take it and do something crazy to it?” Carone fired back, dramatically raising both of her eyebrows.
“I’m just saying the numbers are not off by 30,000 votes,” Johnson calmly replied.
“I’d say that poll book is off by over 100,000 [votes],” she declared with an air of complete confidence. Then she started lecturing the lawmaker, telling him there were “zero registered voters” in the county’s poll book.
When Johnson tried once more to ask her about her outlandish claims, Carone loudly wondered about the turnout rate being “120 percent,” prompting Giuliani to reach over to calm her down, all while audibly “shushing” her.
Needless to say, the rest of Carone’s testimony was just as fact-free, unhinged, and jaw-dropping. And she continued to deliver it with an amazing amount of self-confidence.
Giuliani, meanwhile, made a point to note during the hearing that he had just met Carone that day and had first spoken to her on Tuesday.