On MS NOW's The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone discusses the right-wing influencers working with the Trump administration to find proof of election conspiracy theories
Carusone: “They're working directly with the Trump administration to say, now it's time, now that you're in power, go back and find proof of the things and the conspiracies that we were pushing five or six years ago”
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From the February 16, 2026, edition of MS NOW's The Weeknight
SYMONE SANDERS (CO-HOST): Clean up on aisle nine, Angelo. Here's the thing. Who are the right people? These are the questions. Who are the right people? For whom do we want them voting for? And furthermore, where is the evidence of the widespread voter fraud? Even the Heritage Foundation has not determined there is widespread voter fraud. Their own data and research says there's not. So is this a case of if they just say it enough, people start to believe it?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, so I think that's part of it, you know, in terms of their execution. But there's something to also consider, is that where's the evidence when you can actually find them? There are people now, there's not evidence, but the source of it is there's this constellation of right-wing influencers that have been pickled in these lies now for six years. And they're not just out there, you know, talking about it. They're working directly with the Trump administration to say, now it's time, now that you're in power, go back and find proof of the things and the conspiracies that we were pushing five or six years ago.
So if you look at what happened in Fulton County. Just a week before the raid in Fulton County, Patrick Byrne, who was in the Oval Office in 2020 with Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, saying, seize the -- when Trump said to seize the voting machines, he had to leave a TV hit before it happened to do an emergency meeting at the White House, which apparently was about some upcoming thing related to election conspiracy.
So to me, where's the source? It's all of these influencers out there that they are now basically running the playbook around whatever false claim they have been holding on to for six or seven years. And they're everywhere. There's a bunch of people percolating in Maricopa County now in Arizona. And so that's the thing that's sort of giving it some fuel. Obviously, Trump's own narrative and all the externalities for it. But you can really zero in and that's what you'll find.