Meet Minnesota artist Marlene Bourne. Bourne thinks she may be a ghost and finds messages hidden in movies, song lyrics, and overheard conversations. Fox News found Bourne credible enough to base its election fraud claims on a letter Bourne sent to notoriously unreliable Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Even thirty seconds of research would have determined a legitimate news organization could not accept Bourne as a source. Fox clearly used Bourne as she was saying garbage Fox wanted to repeat, regardless of how "kooky" they knew it to be.
But the ideas' origin is even more "kooky" than Bartiromo might realize. In an interview with The Daily Beast, the woman behind that email—a Minnesota artist named Marlene Bourne—said that she based her now nationally prominent ideas about election fraud on a wide variety of sources, including hidden messages she detects in films, song lyrics she hears on the radio, and overheard conversations she hears while in line at the supermarket checkout.
"Yeah, I'm crazy," Bourne told The Daily Beast. "Crazy like a fox."
Powell didn't respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Dominion declined to comment.
In a statement provided after this article was published, Fox called the lawsuit an effort to "silence the press."