Carroll County GOP posts theory Nashville bombing was Dem coverup

The Carroll County Republican Party reposted a conspiracy theory on social media that the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville was part of a cover-up of voter fraud.

The party also re-posted a message on Facebook that called for President Donald Trump to declare a “limited form” of martial law, suspend the Constitution and order the military to oversee a new election.

The party wrote that a “Socialist Left” has “openly staged a four-year long coup attempt to remove the duly elected President.” It goes on to say that if Trump does not act, “we will also have no other choice but to take matters into our own hands, and defend our rights on our own ….”

The posts are among several on the Carroll County GOP’s Facebook page that seek to cast doubt on the results of the presidential election.

The post about the Nashville bombing, which was put up Sunday, was deleted Tuesday afternoon. Carroll County Republican Chairman Jeffery Mangun could not be reached for comment.

The deleted post started by saying, “The Democrats made a big mistake today.”

It claimed, without, evidence that the AT&T data center that was extensively damaged by the blast held the data from Dominion voting machines. The post cited its source as the social networking site Parler, which many Trump supporters have joined since the Nov. 3 election to discuss their beliefs about voter fraud.

“They didn’t want to hurt anyone. They just wanted to destroy the business that held all of the information regarding the Dominion voting machine results,” the Carroll County Republican Central & Executive Committee post said.

Spokespeople for AT&T and Dominion told The Associated Press that AT&T had no contract to audit Dominion voting machines and no such machines were in the data center.

The blast killed Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, who set off the bomb, and wounded three other people. Investigators are still trying to determine a motive.

Mangun told the Ohio Capital Journal that he did not write or put up the post about the Nashville bombing. But someone else in the Carroll County GOP leadership had.

He declined to name the person saying he did not want to “undermine” them. He told the publication he didn’t know whether the allegations in the post were true or not.

The Carroll County GOP post on the Nashville bombing also referred to a fire that destroyed a printing business in Rochester, New York, last week. It claimed the business was suspected of printing fake ballots used in Pennsylvania.

The Rochester printing business, City Blue Imaging, which lost its building on Christmas Eve, said in a Facebook post that it did not print ballots for the 2020 election. According to the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper in Rochester, the business Phoenix Graphics in Rochester printed the wrong names of voters on envelopes with absentee ballots for two counties in New York. City Blue Imaging said in its Facebook post it was not owned by Phoenix’s owner and has not done work for Phoenix.

Reaction

The Carroll County GOP’s posts have garnered plenty of comments.

“Darn Democrats!” one person wrote. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Another person wrote, “Fake news, not true. Stop spreading lies. Reporting your page to Facebook.”

The account that appeared to belong to former Democratic state Sen. Bob Hagan of Youngstown responded to the post. He repeatedly wrote in all capital letters, “Evidence please?”

“I represented Carroll County years ago as a state senator and love to leave the chaos of Youngstown to visit the quiet serene county, only to read this garbage,” he wrote. “Did you ever hear about EVIDENCE? … Put your rebel flags away and come join reality.”

Not surprised

Tom Postlethwait, the chairman of the Carroll County Democratic Party, called such posts and comments part of a “coup to take over a government.”

“It’s just beyond me,” he said Tuesday. “(Trump) lost. He lost the election by 6 million votes, 8 million votes. It’s over. He lost by the same amount of electoral votes that he won by (in 2016). Time to give up. …

“Carroll County has an awful lot of Republicans and I’m not really surprised some of the comments I’ve heard over the course of the year,” Postlethwait added. “I’ve heard stuff that we’re going to have a civil war if we don’t watch out and Trump loses. Various comments like that I’m not surprised that someone would put that on Facebook.”

Carroll County is a rural community south of Canton with a population of about 27,000.

Reach Repository writer Robert Wang at (330) 580-8327 or robert.wang@cantonrep.com.

On Twitter: @rwangREP.

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