'Just incredible': Woman's 'crazy' claims steal show at US election hearing
A Trump witness, who’s been compared to a character from Saturday Night Live, appears to have been shushed by the US president’s lawyer during a hearing into alleged election fraud.
The Trump campaign continues to make unsubstantiated claims about the outcome of the 2020 US election after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.
On Wednesday (local time), Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani brought in Melissa Carone, allegedly a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, as a witness to back claims votes had been illegally counted during a hearing in Michigan.
Ms Carone made a number of unsubstantiated claims including that the poll book - which is a record of polling information - was off by 100,000. This was after she was asked to clarify if it was off by 30,000.
She also continued to interrupt Michigan Representative Steven Johnson as he asked questions.
“We’re not seeing the poll book off by 30,000 votes,” he said.
Ms Carone accused the representative of taking the book and doing “something crazy to it”.
“I know what I saw, and I signed something saying that if I’m wrong, I can go to prison. Did you?” she said.
“It’s wildly off and dead people voted.”
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At one point, Mr Giuliani, who was seated next to Ms Carone, leaned over and appeared to try and reel his witness in and calm her down.
In a previous court appearance on November 13, where she aired similar allegations, Mr Carone’s accusations of votes being tampered with were found to be “not credible”.
Testimony sparks criticism on social media
Her appearance as a key witness raised a few eyebrows to say the least on Twitter.
One man compared her to a character from Saturday Night Live.
“Anyone who’s watched SNL has seen a character just like this,” he wrote.
This person is Trump team’s star witness in Michigan: pic.twitter.com/C71ApzQjuU
— Frederica Iatti (@FredericaIatti) December 3, 2020
“Rudy's star witness appears to be some drunk soccer mum he picked up at the local watering hole,” another man tweeted.
One woman called Ms Carone’s allegations “crazy”.
“Even Rudy was trying to get her to stop talking,” she tweeted.
Another man was surprised to see that Michigan Republicans would consider Ms Carone “remotely believable”.
“Just incredible,” he said.
Holy smokes the sequel is even better!
Rudy Giuliani tries to shush her to calm her down and the Republican even tries to reel her in!
She treats this Republican* like he’s a Chick-fil-A employee and the milkshake machine went down.
*corrected pic.twitter.com/CK1HqGpp2d— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) December 3, 2020
Trump’s 46-minute conspiracy speech
Ms Carone’s testimony comes after Trump made a 46-minute speech with unfounded claims about the election result.
Trump said the purpose of the speech was to “provide an update” on his efforts to overturn the election result, erroneously claiming counts in previous elections were tabulated on the day.
“Now we have election days, weeks and months,” he said.
“And lots of bad things happened during this ridiculous period of time.”
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