Senate Republicans are shooting down a long shot effort to challenge the Electoral College vote early next year.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus, grabbed headlines when he announced that he would challenge the votes when Congress officially certifies President-elect Joe Biden‘s victory on Jan. 6.
But GOP senators are dismissing the effort, even as President Trump publicly praised Brooks. Continue reading.
Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Joe Biden’s win over President Trump a month after the former vice president’s clear victory of more than 7 million votes nationally and a convincing electoral-vote margin that exactly matched Trump’s 2016 tally.
Two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence showing otherwise. And another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate — about 88 percent of all Republicans serving in Congress — will simply not say who won the election.
Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president. Continue reading.
It’s among dozens of court defeats around the country for attempts to undo Biden win.
The Minnesota Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a Republican lawsuit to stop certification of Minnesota’s Nov. 3 election results and order a full recount, the latest in a long line of failed legal attempts around the country to challenge the outcome of the 2020 vote.
In a five-page order rejecting the case, Chief Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea cited the late filing of the petition — just hours before the state canvassing board met to certify the election’s results on Nov. 24 — and errors in the manner in which the case was brought.
Unsuccessful GOP congressional candidate Tyler Kistner, numerous other Minnesota Republicans who lost their elections and members of a breakaway GOP state House caucus were behind the petition. Their challenge took aim at a consent decree agreed to earlier this year by Secretary of State Steve Simon that suspended witness requirements for absentee and mail ballots. The Republican petitioners also challenged the process used in some counties for conducting their post-election reviews. Continue reading.
Trump administration health officials are issuing increasingly dire warnings about the coronavirus and its rapid spread across the country, drawing a sharp contrast to the president’s reluctance to acknowledge the severity of the crisis head-on.
President Trump has been largely silent when it comes to warning the public about the need for precautions or announcing major new steps aimed at curbing the spread of the virus before a vaccine is widely available.
Instead, many of his public statements have focused on election conspiracy theories and his refusal to accept the results, underscored by a 46-minute video he posted to Facebook on Wednesday. Continue reading.
President Trump has raised $495 million since mid-October, with $207.5 million of it pouring in after Election Day — an extraordinary haul resulting from Trump’s post-election fundraising effort using a blizzard of misleading appeals about the integrity of the vote.
The sum raised since Oct. 15 far exceeds fundraising records set by the Trump operation in roughly comparable time periods at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign and is an unusually large amount to raise after the election.
That means between Oct. 15 and Nov. 23, Trump raised an average of nearly $13 million per day — a massive amount fueled by a deluge of email and text fundraising appeals sent out by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising committee that raises money for the president’s campaign, the Republican Party and Trump’s new leadership PAC, Save America.
President Trump declined Thursday to say whether he retains confidence in Attorney General William P. Barr, who this week undercut the president by saying he had not seen any evidence of fraud on a scale that would alter the election results.
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to the presidential election filed by Trump’s campaign, a new blow to his floundering efforts to overturn the election.
Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris named Tina Flournoy as her chief of staff and selected other key aides Thursday as the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden forged ahead with its transition to power. View the post here.
WASHINGTON — The last throes of Donald Trump’s presidency have turned ugly — even dangerous.
Death threats are on the rise. Local and state election officials are being hounded into hiding. A Trump campaign lawyer is declaring publicly that a federal official who defended the integrity of the election should be “drawn and quartered” or simply shot.
Neutral public servants, Democrats and a growing number of Republicans who won’t do what Trump wants are being caught in a menacing post-election undertow stirred by Trump’s grievances about the election he lost. Continue reading.
Not long after Attorney General William P. Barr said on Tuesday that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the election last month, the pro-Trump media world began circulating a falsehood about him. In this telling, Mr. Barr had been part of a plot by a secret cabal of elites against President Trump all along.
The most prominent right-wing personality who spread the baseless narrative was the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. In his nightly show monologue on Tuesday, Mr. Dobbs said that Mr. Barr must be “either a liar or a fool or both” and suggested that he was “perhaps compromised.” Mr. Dobbs added that Mr. Barr “appeared to join in with the radical Dems and the deep state and the resistance.”
Mr. Dobbs’s unfounded accusation inspired dozens of Facebook posts and more than 14,000 likes and shares on the social network, as well as hundreds of posts on Twitter, over the past 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Continue reading.
Escalating his attack on democracy from within the White House, President Trump on Wednesday distributed an astonishing 46-minute video rant filled with baseless allegations of voter fraud and outright falsehoods in which he declared the nation’s election system “under coordinated assault and siege” and argued that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
Standing behind the presidential lectern in the Diplomatic Reception Room and flanked by the flags of his office and of the country whose Constitution he swore an oath to uphold, Trump tried to leverage the power of the presidency to subvert the vote and overturn the election results.
The rambling and bellicose monologue — which Trump said “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made” and was delivered direct-to-camera with no audience — underscored his desperation to reverse the outcome of his election loss after a month of failed legal challenges and as some key states already have certified Biden’s victory. Continue reading.
By the time President Trump released a lengthy recorded speech Wednesday delineating his various false and debunked claims about fraud in the presidential election, it was already too late.
He insisted it wasn’t, of course.
“There is still plenty of time to certify the correct winner of the election,” he argued, “and that’s what we’re fighting to do.”
But there wasn’t still plenty of time. That’s not just in the sense that, over the past month, he’s been unable to provide any evidence to bolster his claims of fraud. It isn’t just in the sense that races had already been called in each state, showing that President-elect Joe Biden would surpass the required number of electoral votes. And it wasn’t just that states were beginning to certify those results, locking Trump’s losses in cement. Continue reading.
