R&I – TxPAT ***
If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, then much of the Democratic Party and media establishment should have been indicted for their behavior following the 2016 election. In fact, the last time Democrats fully accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.
After the 2000 election, which hinged on the results of a recount in Florida, Democrats smeared President George W. Bush as “selected, not elected.” When Bush won re-election against then senator John Kerry in 2004, many on the left claimed that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver fraudulent votes to Bush.
HBO even produced and aired the Emmy-nominated “Hacking Democracy,” a documentary claiming to show that “votes can be stolen without a trace,” adding fuel to the conspiracy theory fire that the results of the 2004 election were illegitimate. But nothing holds a candle to what happened in 2016 after Donald Trump’s surprising defeat of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Rather than accept that Trump won and Clinton lost fair and square, the political and media establishments desperately sought to explain away Trump’s victory. They settled on a destructive conspiracy theory that crippled the government, empowered America’s adversaries, and illegally targeted innocent private citizens whose only crime was not supporting Hillary Clinton.
The Russia collusion hoax had all the elements of an election conspiracy theory, including baseless claims of hacked voting totals, illegal voter suppression, and treasonous collaboration with a foreign power. Pundits and officials speculated openly that President Trump was a foreign asset and that members of his circle were under the thumb of the Kremlin.
“I know he’s an illegitimate president,” Clinton claimed of Trump a few months later. She even said during an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that “voter suppression and voter purging and hacking” were the reasons for her defeat.
Former president Jimmy Carter agreed. “[Trump] lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf,” he told NPR in 2019. “Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.”
Their view was shared by most prominent Democrats in Congress. Representative John Lewis of Georgia, for example, said he was skipping Trump’s inauguration in 2016 because he believed Trump was illegitimate: “[T]he Russians participated in helping this man get elected…. That’s not right. That’s not fair. That’s not an open democratic process.” Lewis had also skipped the inauguration of President George W. Bush, claiming Bush, too, was an illegitimate president.
Gellieman
Article URL : https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2020-election-investigated-discussed-mollie-hemingway