2020 Election
Trump’s Unprecedented
Attempts to Overturn the Election
BY PHILIP RUCKER, AMY GARDNER AND JOSH DAWSEY
11/19/20 11:02 PM
The Washington Post
President Trump is using the power of his office to try to reverse the results of the election, orchestrating a far-reaching pressure campaign to persuade Republican officials in Michigan, Georgia and elsewhere to overturn the will of voters in what critics decried Thursday as an unprecedented subversion of democracy.
After courts rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud, the president is now trying to remain in power with a wholesale assault on the integrity of the vote by spreading misinformation and trying to persuade loyal Republicans to manipulate the electoral system on his behalf.
In an extraordinary news conference Thursday at the Republican National Committee headquarters, Trump’s attorneys claimed without evidence there was a centralized conspiracy with roots in Venezuela to rig the U.S. presidential election. They alleged voter fraud in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and other cities whose municipal governments are controlled by Democrats and where President-elect Joe Biden won by large margins.
“We cannot allow these crooks — ’cause that’s what they are — to steal an election from the American people,” said one of the attorneys, Rudolph W. Giuliani. “They elected Donald Trump; they didn’t elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden is in the lead because of the fraudulent ballots, the illegal ballots that were produced and that were allowed to be used after the election was over. Give us an opportunity to prove it in court and we will.”
Neither Giuliani nor other Trump attorneys have furnished evidence to support that or any other claim of widespread fraud.
Thursday’s show by Trump’s lawyers disquieted many, including Christopher Krebs, the Trump-appointed director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency whom the president fired Tuesday after he stated publicly that the election had been secure.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest,” Krebs wrote on Twitter.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the 2012 GOP presidential nominee and a prominent Trump critic, decried the strategy.
“Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election,” Romney said in a statement late Thursday. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic act by a sitting American President.”
In defiance of the vote, Trump and his lawyers are scrambling to stop key states from certifying their results and to enlist Republican state officials to overturn Biden’s wins by seating Trump electors to the electoral college.
Biden’s team expressed confidence Thursday that Trump’s intensifying effort to keep power would fail.
“None of it is legally significant,” said Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign, who runs the election protection legal efforts. “They are pivoting from this completely failed litigation strategy to a strategy of misleading people into believing that he now has a political option. It is a response to failure. It is the last card that he thinks he can pull from his deck here, but his hand remains a completely losing hand.”
But other Democrats voiced more concern about the threat of Trump’s moves.
“Other people looked at me like I was insane, but I have fully anticipated that Donald Trump would try every trick in the book,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.). “The kind of stuff that’s being done now is undermining people’s confidence in the election process and the integrity of the election and it is fundamentally attacking the roots of our democracy, and it is unacceptable.”
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From The Washington Post
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