Atlanta (AP) In a statement, the director of the widely discredited movie 2000 Mules apologized to a Georgia man who was wrongly accused of ballot fraud during the 2020 election after claiming that he was given false information regarding ballot box surveillance footage that was included in the movie.
In the statement, filmmaker and conservative commentator Dinesh D. Souzas claimed that True the Vote’s mobile geolocation data served as the basis for both the movie and the book of the same name. Additionally, he received drop box surveillance footage from the Texas-based NGO. D Souza claimed his team was given assurances that the surveillance footage was connected to cell phone geolocation data, meaning that each video showed a person who had visited the drop boxes at least ten times.
One of the films shows Mark Andrews, a resident of Gwinnett County, placing five ballots in a drop box in Lawrenceville, an Atlanta suburb, while D Souza says, “What you are seeing is a crime.” Andrews’ face is blurry. These votes are not legitimate.
Andrews was delivering ballots for himself, his spouse, and their three grown children, who all resided at the same home, according to a state inquiry. That is lawful in Georgia, and according to an investigator, Andrews did not exhibit any malfeasance.
In Georgia and four other carefully watched states, the movie implies that Democratic-aligned vote mules were paid to unlawfully gather and distribute ballots. According to an investigation by the Associated Press, it is predicated on incorrect assumptions, anonymous accounts, and a poor examination of location data from cellphones.
It is evident from D. Souza’s words and interviews in the movie that True the Vote was using geolocation information to correlate the videos. However, we have discovered that the surveillance footage utilized in the movie might not have been correlated with the geolocation information, he wrote.
He admitted that the book and movie give the idea that these people were mules who had been accused of harvesting ballots using their geotracked mobile phone information. Andrews has openly sued over the usage of his image, despite the fact that their faces were blurry, and D Souza stated that he should apologize to Andrews.
He said that the surveillance footage in the movie was described based on false information that I and my team were given, and that I would have explained this and changed the way the movie was made and edited if he had known that the footage wasn’t connected to geolocation data.
However, D. Souza stated that he still believes in True the Vote’s efforts and the film’s main thesis, which is that the 2020 election was not safe and that there was enough systemic election fraud to cast doubt on the results. According to federal and state officials, there was no proof of massive electoral fraud.
On Monday, True the Vote released an explanation about D. Souza’s remarks. It claims that while the film’s core idea is still true, it lacked editorial control and did not choose the images or videos that were used. Mr. D. Souza’s team was informed that Andrews was not involved in the geospatial study True the Vote conducted.
According to the statement, D Souza’s team nevertheless used a grainy footage of this person in their 2000 Mules book and film projects.
In October 2022, Andrews filed a federal lawsuit against Salem Media Group, True the Vote, and D Souza.
In May, 2000 Mules’ publisher, Salem Media Group, apologized to Andrews in a statement, stating that it had taken the movies down from its platforms and would no longer be distributing the book or movie. Andrews rejected his allegations against Salem a few days later.
D. Souza stated that he apologized to Andrews because it was the appropriate thing to do in light of what we now know, not because he was under any kind of duress or the terms of a settlement agreement. A request for comment was not immediately answered by Andrews’ attorneys.
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