Tag: 2020 election

Trump Repeats Debunked Election Claims in Call With Georgia Official

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President Trump, in an hourlong telephone call with Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, repeated a number of false and misleading claims about election results in the state that have been circulating on social media. Here’s a fact check.

WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID

“Then it was stuffed with votes. They weren’t in an official voter box, they were in what looked to be suitcases or trunks, suitcases but they weren’t in voter boxes. The minimum number it could be because we watched it and they watched it certified in slow motion instant replay if you can believe it, but it had slow motion and it was magnified many times over, and the minimum it was 18,000 ballots, all for Biden.”

False. Mr. Trump was most likely referring to debunked claims that a water leak at a vote counting location in Fulton County forced an evacuation and made it possible for trunks full of ballots to be rolled in. Election officials have said and surveillance videos show that this did not happen. Continue reading.

Rep. Louie Gohmert Backpedals On ‘Be Violent’ Comments After Election Lawsuit Loss

The Texas lawmaker compares his philosophy to Martin Luther King’s, even as he rails to overthrow the democratic election.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) issued a statement Saturday backpedaling on his controversial comments indicating that street violence is the only recourse in the wake of his lawsuit loss to overturn the results of the democratic presidential election.

Gohmert made the remarks about violence Friday on the far-right news channel Newsmax. He spoke after U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle shot down his court case that argued Vice President Mike Pence has the power to unilaterally reappoint Donald Trump as president by selectively choosing the electoral votes he’ll recognize, and replacing the others with votes for Trump.

The judge ruled Gohmert had no standing to sue. Continue reading.

Carl Bernstein Says Latest Trump Tapes Are ‘Far Worse’ Than Watergate

Audio of the president trying to persuade a Georgia official to change election results is “the ultimate smoking gun tape,” the Watergate journalist said.

The leaked tapes of Donald Trump trying to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the president’s election defeat are “far worse” than what occurred in the Watergate scandal, journalist Carl Bernstein said Sunday.

Bernstein, whose reporting of the 1972 political scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, said the bombshell tapes of Trump were evidence of an attempted coup.

“It’s not déjà vu. This was something far worse than occurred in Watergate,” Bernstein told CNN. “We have both a criminal president of the United States in Donald Trump and a subversive president of the United States at the same time in this one person.” Continue reading.

Trump’s pressure on Georgia election officials raises legal questions

In audio from a Saturday phone call, the president is heard urging the officials to reverse his loss.

President Donald Trump’s effort to pressure Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory could run afoul of federal and state criminal statutes, according to legal experts and lawmakers, who expressed alarm at Trump’s effort to subvert democracy with less than three weeks left in his term.

“We have won the election in Georgia based on all of this. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, Brad,” Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on an hourlong Saturday phone call, according to a recording of the conversation, which also included Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and legal advisers to the president. “And the people of Georgia are angry. The people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

POLITICO has confirmed the recording, which was first obtained by The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The leaked audio comes as Congress is set to certify the Electoral College votes on Wednesday. At least 12 incoming and current Republican senators, along with well over 100 Republican representatives, have said they are going to challenge the results based on unsupported allegations of voter fraud. Continue reading.

Who is on Team Trump Coup?

UPDATED January 7, 2021, to show who actually voted to overthrow the 2020 election.

Here’s a list of individuals elected to Congress, who swore an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, who are now throwing their word aside to swear fealty to Donald Trump.

  • U.S. Vice President
    • Mike Pence — on January 6, Vice President Pence said he had no power to overturn the votes of the American people during the Electoral College vote certification
  • U.S. Senators
    1. Marsha Blackburn (R, Tennessee) — after Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, decided not to contest
    2. Mike Braun (R, Indiana) — after Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, decided not to contest
    3. Ted Cruz (R, Texas)
    4. Steve Daines (R, Montana) — after Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, decided not to contest
    5. Bill Hagerty (R, Tennessee) — after Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, decided not to contest
    6. Josh Hawley (R, Missouri) — even during the Trump rioters’ storming of the Capitol, Sen. Hawley was fundraising, and when the Senate debate was restarted, he will continue objecting to legally-cast electoral votes.
    7. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R, Mississippi)
    8. Ron Johnson (R, Wisconsin) — after Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, decided not to contest
    9. John Kennedy (R, Louisiana)
    10. James Lankford (R, Oklahoma) — after Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, decided not to contest
    11. Kelly Loeffler (R, Georgia) — after Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, Sen. Loeffler decided not to contest
    12. Cynthia Lummis (R, Wyoming) — after Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, decided not to contest
    13. Roger Marshall (R, Kansas)
    14. Rick Scott (R, Florida)
    15. Tommy Tuberville (R, Alabama)
Continue reading “Who is on Team Trump Coup?”

Trump’s Focus as the Pandemic Raged: What Would It Mean for Him?

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President Trump missed his chance to show that he could rise to the moment in the final chapter of his presidency and meet the defining challenge of his tenure.

WASHINGTON — It was a warm summer Wednesday, Election Day was looming and President Trump was even angrier than usual at the relentless focus on the coronavirus pandemic.

“You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Mr. Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office on Aug. 19. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting.”

Mexico’s record in fighting the virus was hardly one for the United States to emulate. But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases. Continue reading.

Poll: Striking Number Of Americans Believe Baseless Conspiracy Theories

A scary percentage of our neighbors believe in next-level crazy conspiracy theories.

According to a new NPR/Ipsos poll, forty percent of Americans believe the wild claim that Covid-19 was produced in a Chinese lab, despite science and evidence disproving this. One-third of people believe that election fraud is the reason that President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election, again with no proof. 

Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos, told NPR that “increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn’t have any basis in reality or fact.” Continue reading.

Newsmax issues sweeping ‘clarification’ debunking its own coverage of election misinformation

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Online and on the air, the network said it ‘would like to clarify its news coverage and note it has not reported as true certain claims made about’ two election technology companies.

The conservative news channel Newsmax joined its much larger competitor, Fox News Media, in attempting to “clarify” inaccurate comments that have been made on the network about election technology company Smartmatic.

Newsmax, which is attempting to outflank Fox News from the political right, posted a notice on its website Sunday night and then had a host read the full two-minute statement on the air Monday. 

The clarification came after Smartmatic sent legal demand letters to Newsmax, Fox News Media and the much smaller One America News (OAN) demanding that they correct inaccuracies and innuendos in their coverage of the presidential election and any role Smartmatic may have played in the voting process. Continue reading.

Trump turns on everyone

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President Trump, in his final days, is turning bitterly on virtually every person around him, griping about anyone who refuses to indulge conspiracy theories or hopeless bids to overturn the election, several top officials tell Axios.

The latest: Targets of his outrage include Vice President Pence, chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Secretary of State Pompeo and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Why it matters: Trump thinks everyone around him is weak, stupid or disloyal — and increasingly seeks comfort only in people who egg him on to overturn the election results. We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are by the conversations unfolding inside the White House. Continue reading.

The psychology of fairness: Why some Americans don’t believe the election results

The electoral votes have confirmed Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election. The presidential electors gave Biden 306 electoral votes to President Donald Trump’s 232 votes. Biden also recorded a solid lead of over 7 million in the popular vote.

Nonetheless, results from a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist surveyfound that approximately three-quarters of Republicans did not trust the election results. Corroborating this finding, a separate study of 24,000 Americans found that nearly two-thirds of Republicans lacked confidence in the fairness of the election and over 80% feared fraud, inaccuracy, bias and illegality. In addition, nearly 60 lawsuits filed by Trump claiming various forms of election fraud have been dismissed, including two evaluated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course, doubting the fairness of a disappointing decision is not a Republican phenomenon – it’s a human one. Continue reading.