One of the lawyers of the self-described Elite Special Force Team challenging President-elect Joe Biden’s election win shared a falsified quotation on Twitter Wednesday, and then once she was caught in the lie, claimed that the truth didn’t really matter anyway.
For people asking, this quotation has been attributed to Roosevelt, but there isn’t a specific record of him saying this in a speech. I posted it because the ifea itself is true, whether or not he said it! 🙂
— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) November 25, 2020
Just after midnight, Jenna Ellis posted the meme featuring a quote she attributed to Teddy Roosevelt. The problem: the quote seems to have first appeared in text just 13 years ago, in an anonymous internet post. There’s no record of TR ever saying it.
The legitimacy of the attribution notwithstanding, nine hours later, Ellis responded to her own tweet, saying the authenticity of the quote didn’t matter.
Ellis seems to live by the adage (inaccurately) attributed to P.T. Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”