‘2000 Mules’ but No Evidence

President Trump keeps insisting the 2020 election was stolen, and in a recent interview he referred to the group True the Vote, saying “they have people stuffing the ballot boxes on tapes.” This was the thesis of the movie “2000 Mules,” but then why is True the Vote refusing to work with law enforcement?

This month Georgia officials sued the group for ignoring a subpoena for substantiation of its claims. True the Vote submitted a complaint in 2021 about ballot trafficking in Georgia. In April 2022, the State Election Board issued a subpoena for, to pick one thing, “the identities of the ‘ten hubs’ in Atlanta that you allege participated in a ballot harvesting scheme.”

Shouldn’t they be eager to comply? Instead, after the subpoena arrived, True the Vote asked to withdraw its complaint. The state board declined, given the gravity of the allegations, and now it’s telling a judge the subpoena is being flouted: “True the Vote continues to indifferently vacillate between statements of assured compliance and blanket refusal.”

Curious. In a letter to the FBI and the IRS last fall, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office said True the Vote also gave it the runaround. Reggie Grigsby, chief special agent, wrote that True the Vote publicly asserted “they had provided us with the information—to include a hard drive.” He called this “patently false.”

According to Mr. Grigsby, True the Vote told the FBI they’d given their evidence to the state, while telling the state they’d given it to the FBI. Because the nonprofit group was using its fraud claims to raise “considerable sums of money,” Mr. Grigsby said, “further review of its financials may be warranted.” True the Vote did not reply to a request for comment on Georgia’s and Arizona’s contentions.

The group and Dinesh D’Souza, who narrates “2000 Mules,” are also being sued for defamation by a Georgia voter depicted in the movie. Surveillance tape shows Mark Andrews putting ballots into a drop box. “What you are seeing is a crime,” Mr. D’Souza says. “These are fraudulent votes.” Mr. Andrews responds that he was legally delivering his family’s ballots. His unblurred face and license plate appeared in True the Vote media hits. State investigators cleared him three days before “2000 Mules” was released.

What sticks out most is the movie’s elisions. True the Vote says it bought 10 trillion signals of cellphone data and looked for phones near 10 drop boxes and five unnamed liberal nonprofits. Voilà: 250 mules in Georgia, 200 in Arizona, 1,100 in Philadelphia.

Yet the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told the group in 2021 it lacked probable cause to examine 279 phones that “made multiple trips to within 100 feet of a voter drop box.” A hundred feet? That might snag any visitor to a public library where a drop box was placed. With 10 trillion pings, what are the odds that some random patterns would show up even in states that Mr. Trump won?

The film shows a map of an alleged mule’s route in Atlanta, but critics say the dots don’t exactly match actual drop box sites. “The movie graphics are not literal interpretations of our data,” a True the Vote analyst told the Washington Post. Philadelphia is cited as having the most mules. But wait, Mr. Trump won 17.9% of ballots there, notably better than his 15.4% in 2016. Also, Philly fell to 10.7% of the state’s total vote, from 11.6%. Heckuva job, liberal mules.

To bolster the phone data, True the Vote says it obtained four million minutes of surveillance video, but why doesn’t “2000 Mules” show any of the alleged footage of the same person going to multiple drop boxes? “It was taken out,” True the Vote said, “because the video is extremely poor quality.”

Four million minutes of tape, and no clear shot of illegality. If activists want to double-check voter lists and surveillance videos, go ahead. But if they take liberties with facts and refuse to help law enforcement, what game are they really playing?