Podcaster Joe Rogan confronted former President Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, about his 2020 election fraud claims, asking for what evidence he has to prove such claims.
In the wake of his 2020 election loss to now-President Joe Biden, Trump repeatedly claimed that the election was stolen from him via widespread voter fraud. There is no evidence to support such claims and when Rogan asked him about it during a three-hour interview on Friday on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Trump seemed to struggle to give a clear answer.
“I wanna talk about 2020 because you said over-and-over again that you were robbed in 2020. How do you think you were robbed?” Rogan asked Trump
Trump said he’d rather talk about it another time when he would “bring in papers that you would not believe.”
When pressed by Rogan for some examples of how the 2020 election was stolen, the former president said, “They were supposed to get legislative approval to do the things they did and they didn’t get it. In many cases, they didn’t get it.”
It is unclear who Trump was referring to but many states modified their absentee/mail-in voting procedures for the 2020 election due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rogan then asked “what things” didn’t get legislative approval.
“Anything. Like for extensions of the voting, for voting earlier. All different things. By law, they had to get legislative approvals. You don’t have to go any further than that,” Trump said. “If you take a look at Wisconsin. They virtually admitted that the election is rigged, robbed and stolen. They wouldn’t give access in certain areas to the ballots because the ballots weren’t signed. They weren’t originals.”
Rogan then asked: “Are you going to present this ever?” To which, Trump replied: “Uh.”
Trump challenged the 2020 election results in over 60 cases across the country, including in Wisconsin, but he lost all the cases, except for one in Pennsylvania that focused on a small number of ballots that wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election.
Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, told Newsweek via email late Saturday morning, “[Former] President Trump was extremely clear about what happened and offered clear evidence. The media can’t seem to understand or get it through their thick skulls.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on October 22 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Podcaster Joe Rogan confronted Trump about his 2020 election fraud claims, asking for what evidence he has to prove such claims.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Trump then started to talk about the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story during his appearance on Rogan’s podcast.
“Let me give you just one more. Fifty-one intelligence agents come up that the laptop was from Russia. It turned out to be totally false…they lied…they knew it was. It was Hunter’s. It was from his bed,” he told Rogan.
In October 2020, weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post ran a front-page story about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, sharing emails from a laptop reportedly dropped off at a repair shop by Hunter. The laptop was later confirmed to be real.
One of the emails related to the introduction of a top executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma to his father who was vice president under President Barack Obama at the time. Hunter Biden served on the Burisma board from 2014 to 2019.
A few days after the story broke, dozens of former intelligence officials claimed the emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Joe Biden cast doubt on the authenticity of the emails and said during a 2020 presidential debate, “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s [Donald Trump] accusing me of is a Russian plant.”
The intelligence officials said the emails “purportedly” belonged to Hunter Biden and said,” We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
When asked to clarify parts of Trump’s interview such as the impact the intelligence officials’ letter had on the 2020 election outcome in Trump’s eyes, Cheung sent Newsweek a link to an article published by TIPP Insights titled, “Shock Poll: 8 in 10 Think Biden Laptop Cover-Up Changed Election” that shared results from a poll conducted in August 2022.
The poll asked 437 adults following the Hunter Biden laptop story at the time, “How likely would a truthful interpretation of the laptop have changed the outcome of the election?” 79 percent said a truthful interpretation would have very or somewhat likely changed the outcome of the election. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8 points.
The article stated that “Trump likely would have won reelection if voters had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop—that it was real and not ‘Russian disinformation…'”
