Team Trump's Latest Witness Is an Absolute Trainwreck

It was going to take something special to outdo President Donald Trump’s unhinged 46-minute video of off-the-wall conspiracy theories and QAnon talking points published on Wednesday afternoon.

But just hours later, Mellissa Carone managed to do it.

Carone was the latest in a long line of “witnesses” the Trump campaign has rolled out to claim electoral fraud on a mass scale during last month’s vote.

On Wednesday evening, just hours after the president had published his unhinged video on Facebook, Carone sat next to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani at a Michigan House Oversight Committee hearing and claimed she saw poll workers running ballots through voting machines “thousands of times.”

Carone claims she was working on Election Night at the TCF Center in Detroit as a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has been at the center of the Trump campaign’s baseless, QAnon-fueled claims. 

Those allegations — which have been repeatedly debunked and dismissed by judges in multiple states — have led to death threats and harassment of employees and earlier this week the placing of a noose outside one Dominion contractor’s house.

The hearing in Lansing on Wednesday evening was part of the Trump campaign’s latest gambit to try and keep the president in office. With lawsuits being laughed out of court on an almost daily basis, Giuliani’s latest tactic is to try to convince lawmakers in states President-elect Joe Biden won to flip their electoral college votes to Trump (Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes).

To do this, they’re trying to convince the lawmakers that the vote was rigged. To do this, Giuliani was granted permission to question witnesses, a highly unusual situation given that lawmakers typically question those who come before the committee.

Besides a witness who claimed “all Chinese people look alike,” Giuliani called on Carone —and almost instantly regretted it.

Carone, who has worked as a model and actress, claims she saw evidence of election fraud while working for Dominion. 

A source at Dominion, who was granted anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the record, confirmed that Carone was “one of several thousand technicians we hired for a day or two” and her role “was to troubleshoot level 1 problems for City staff,” such as cleaning the read heads on the scanners.

The source pointed out that the TCF Center, where Carone was stationed, was used to process absentee ballots en masse, and said if Carone’s allegations that thousands of ballots were processed twice, the numbers would simply not tally.

“She alleges that she saw staff count ‘over 30,000’ ballots multiple times. If true, there would be 30,000 more scanned ballots than ‘returned ballots.’” The source added that covering up an operation like this would “require massive coordination between hundreds of staff and the poll watchers.”

During her first day of testimony on Tuesday, she was unable to clearly explain what exactly she did for Dominion, but Giuliani decided to bring her back for a second day.

Carone, who was slurring her words, leading many to speculate that she was drunk, attacked lawmakers, spoke over questions, and made outlandish claims she could not back up.

“I know for a fact that there was illegal activity going on there,” Carone declared, without producing any evidence to back up the claim beyond saying she had seen pictures of people carrying boxes of ballot out of the count center—another conspiracy that has already been debunked. 

Her comments were so out there that Giuliani—who recently held a press conference with black hair dye running down his face while quoting the movie “My Cousin Vinny”—tried to shush her.

But Carone took little notice, and continued to berate lawmakers.

When one state representative took issue with the fact Carone was not giving testimony under oath, she lashed out saying: “I have an affidavit. I am a mother, I have two children, I have two degrees. I don’t know any woman in the world that would write an affidavit under oath just to write it. You can go to prison for this.”

The affidavit Carone referenced was included in a lawsuit filed in Michigan last month that was found to be not credible by a Wayne County judge.

“Ms. Carone’s description of the events at the TCF Center does not square with any of the other affidavits,” Judge Timothy Kenny found. “There are no other reports of lost data, or tabulating machines that jammed repeatedly every hour during the count. Neither Republican nor Democratic challengers nor city officials substantiate her version of events. The allegations simply are not credible.”

Ever since the election, Carone has been a vocal supporter of Trump’s increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories about the election being stolen. She has appeared on Fox News, in interviews with the far-right Epoch Times, as well as on the RedPill78 show on Twitch, a well-known show among the QAnon community. She also took part in #StoptheSteal protests last month, according to posts on social media.

Carone told the state representatives in Lansing on Wednesday night that she’s “had to get rid of social media.” 

However, a quick review of her Facebook page, which has a #Trump2020 hashtag in its bio, shows that she updated her page late on Wednesday evening with a picture of her alongside a beaming Giuliani, and updated her cover photos with a screenshot of her appearance on the Lou Dobbs show on Fox News on Wednesday.