La Jolla resident and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza has released a statement about the data he used for his 2,000 Mules film, a 2022 production that trafficked in disinformation while purporting to be a documentary.
The admission shows that — just as debunkers said at the time — the film consisted of volatile lies intended to degrade trust in the American electoral system.
In a lengthy statement posted to his website, D’Souza blamed True the Vote for providing the “documentarians” with bad information and apologized directly to one individual.
“I know that the film and my book create the impression that these individuals were mules that had been identified as suspected ballot harvesters based on their geotracked cell phone data,” said D’Souza in the published apology.
“While all of these individuals’ images were blurred and unrecognizable, one of the individuals has since come forward publicly and has initiated a lawsuit over the use of his blurred image in the film and the book. I owe this individual, Mark Andrews, an apology.”
“I now understand that the surveillance videos used in the film were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team. If I had known then that the videos were not linked to geolocation data, I would have clarified this and produced and edited the film differently.”
D’Souza also said that the apology had nothing to do with the lawsuit.
The film claimed to draw on a database of 10 trillion cellphone pings provided by True the Vote, a right-wing group best known for making wildly untrue, conspiracy theory-laden claims about election interference.
It was originally hosted on right-wing platform Rumble.
“The documentary film created by Dinesh D’Souza, exposes widespread, coordinated voter fraud in the 2020 election, sufficient to change the overall outcome,” its producers said at the time.
The “mules” in the title are people who D’Souza falsely claimed delivered fraudulent and illegal votes to mail dropboxes in the five key states.
Allegations of election fraud were dismissed by courts across the country, but Donald Trump continues to falsely claim that he won reelection in 2020.
Trump pardoned D’Souza, who was on probation for campaign finance violations, in 2018.
D’Souza previously produced several right-wing films, including 2016: Obama’s America and Death of a Nation, and written multiple books, including What’s So Great About America and The End of Racism.
