handle reviewing for accuracy, noting "I deferred to the legal team on the legitimacy and the ability to substantiate claims that were made that were put through these approvals and whether or not we could, again, substantiate them or they were in line with our legal efforts."[60] Parkinson, as the head of the research team, the very campaign team meant to fact-check and ensure accuracy in the Trump Campaign's statements, said he was "simply looking for messaging consistency."[61] Whether Democrats were engaged in fraud to steal the election was a "political argument" to Parkinson, which he did not review for accuracy.[62]
Like Parkinson, Michael Reed, then the RNC's Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, was not reviewing the TMAGAC emails about election fraud for broader accuracy. Notably, Reed could not recall a single email that he researched to do a fact-check or follow up on to see if claims contained in the email were, in fact, true.[63]
Boedigheimer and the copywriters believed the research staffers were looking for messages that they believed were inaccurate, but they were doing no such thing.
Alex Cannon, the Trump Campaign's legal representative in the Approvals Group, was no different—the TMAGAC fundraisers thought he was doing far more than he was in fact doing. The Select Committee received a November 4, 2020, email from Nathan Groth, counsel for the Trump Campaign, to Alex Cannon. This email reflected that Cannon was not tasked with substantively reviewing fundraising emails like Boedigheimer thought. Groth wrote to Cannon, "Matt [Morgan, Trump Campaign's General Counsel] has instructed me to hand off all compliance matters, including approvals, to you."[64] Cannon confirmed, "I saw myself as doing exactly what I was instructed to do here, which is do what Nathan had previously been doing. So it's this. It's compliance issues like disclaimers and typos."[65] Therefore, when Cannon received emails that included claims such as "the Democrats are trying to steal the election," he viewed reviewing the veracity of this statement as "outside the purview of what [he] was tasked."[66] When asked, Cannon stated that he did not know who was tasked with ensuring that fundraising emails were true and accurate.[67]
Boedigheimer, and other members of the digital fundraising team he led, claimed to see the Approvals Group as a guardrail of sorts in the fundraising effort to protect from the dissemination of false messaging about the election, but the Approvals Group served no such role. The very staffers in the Approvals Group repeatedly told the Select Committee that they did not review the claims about election fraud to confirm whether they were even true.
