Martin Pushed Bogus Claims After Knowing They Were False

Ed Martin's initial press conference "asking questions" about voter fraud pointed to a late surge of votes for Congressman Carnahan coming in on Tuesday night. Here's what he initially said:

Then just before midnight seven precincts within the city and county delivered an astonishing late night dump of votes. In such a hotly contested race and with so many voters concerned it only makes sense to make sure in fact every vote counts. Since Missouri’s Secretary of State is in fact Congressman Carnahan’s sister it is suggested she recuse herself from the investigation and appoint an independent investigator to look into these three main points of question.

In Ed Martin's concession announcement, he stated that he learned on Wednesday afternoon that there was nothing wrong with these numbers:

Since Wednesday afternoon we have learned that the votes were not from three to seven precincts in the City, but rather included unreported votes from the northwest precincts of St. Louis County encompassed by Missouri’s Third Congressional district. In light of this new information, the implausibility factor evaporates along with my concerns about voter fraud in that late surge. And, although I have concerns about other incidents and improper conduct on election day, I no longer believe these concerns are sufficient to continue our review of what has occurred or delay agreeing that this election is over.

Yet if Ed Martin knew on Wednesday afternoon that the "late surge" conspiracy was a non-issue, why did he continue to push the story? When Martin called in to Jamie Allman's show on Friday morning, he continued to raise his vague conspiracy theory about the late numbers.

Here's what Martin said:

Uh, well, you know we're still trying to figure out a little bit about what's going on, but uh, obviously we've had good cooperation from the city and st...county election board so...you know there was some late number numbers that came in, votes that came in, that gave people pause and there was some provisional balloting that looked a little odd. So we've got some more work to do to make sure that the election we went through on Tuesday was totally on the up and up. But we're getting to the bottom of it.

At no point in the interview does Martin indicate that he had already determined that the "late numbers" were perfectly legit. You can listen to the whole thing here (although it gets pretty boring after the initial quote):
Absolutely shameful that this guy continues using conspiracy theories to attack the Carnahans, even when he knows they're wrong.