Kentucky Senator Rand Paul still can’t admit the election was not stolen

Four days after Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States, Senator Rand Paul found himself unable to admit that the election that sent Biden to the White House was legitimate.

In a Sunday morning appearance on ABC This week, the Republican senator from Kentucky, who has repeatedly asserted former President Donald Trump’s discredited fraud allegations in the Nov. 3 election, declined to say that this election was not stolen.

“The debate on ‘whether there has been fraud or not’ should take place,” said Paul. “We never had a presentation in court where we reviewed the evidence. Most of the cases were dismissed for lack of standing, which is a procedural way of not really hearing the question. “

In fact, while some of the dozens of lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign in battlefield states have been dismissed or voluntarily withdrawn, many have been heard and found to be without merit, a fact that host George Stephanopoulos has raised in response. .

“After investigations, counts and recounts, the Department of Justice, headed by William Barr, said there was no widespread evidence of fraud,” Stephanopoulos said, referring to the former attorney general American, who had been a staunch ally of Trump until he publicly stated. that there was no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.

As Ian Millhiser of Vox explained, “Trump’s post-election prosecutions failed for a variety of interrelated reasons,” but one of them was simply that “Trump and his allies just didn’t have a great deal to do with it. good legal arguments ”:

In some cases, they have presented penny-ante claims that could not have changed the outcome of the election even if they were successful. In others, they made factual claims that were based entirely on speculation – or even relied on conspiracy theories incubated on social media. In some cases, Trump or his allies presented legal arguments that were the exact opposite of arguments they made in other cases. There are no good legal arguments that could have justified rejecting the election results, and the clownishness of Trump’s legal strategy has only drawn attention to the weakness of his claims.

Stephanopoulos kept urging Paul: “Can’t you just say the words, ‘This election was not stolen?'”

The senator refused to do so, referring instead to a poll that shows a majority of Republicans do not trust the election result.

This mistrust is due to a host of factors, including the repeatedly baseless claims made by lawmakers and other prominent Conservatives that fraud has taken place. Trump himself led the effort, repeating claims so often that, after a rally dedicated to the topic on January 6, his supporters attempted to violently stop the certification of election results by storming the U.S. Capitol, in an attempted insurgency that ended in five deaths.

Nonetheless, after dozens of court cases, tense “Stop the Steal” rallies and violence at the seat of government, Paul vowed to spend his last two years in office fighting alleged electoral fraud.

He said the same about Twitter, following the televised appearance in which he refused to grant legitimacy to the same electoral process that twice propelled him to power.