McConnell Admits He Tolerated Trump’s Election Lies For Political Expediency

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, right, and former President Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, right, and former President Trump.

Photo by The White House (Public domain)

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed in an account published Sunday that he declined to publicly confront former President Donald Trump's election lies because he did not want to upset Trump and wanted to win Senate elections in Georgia.

The Atlantic's Jonathan Karl reported that ahead of two January runoff Senate elections in Georgia, McConnell told then-Attorney General William Barr that he wanted Barr to confront Trump over his lies about the 2020 election results and would not do so himself.

"Look, we need the president in Georgia," he said. According to Karl's reporting, McConnell was afraid Trump would "sabotage" the Georgia campaigns if he declared Joe Biden had won the election. "And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you're in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it."

Karl said Barr provided the story in an interview and noted, "McConnell confirms the account."

Campaigning for then-Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, Trump continued to promote conspiracy theories and falsehoods about the election he had lost to Biden.

"They cheated and rigged our presidential election, but we'll still win," Trump said at a rally in Valdosta, Georgia, on December 5. On January 4, the day before the runoffs, Trump repeated the lies at a rally in Dalton, saying, "By the way, there is no way we lost Georgia. There's no way. That was a rigged election. But we are still fighting it."

Although in a speech in the Senate on December 15, 2020, McConnell did acknowledge that Biden was president-elect, he did not push back against Trump's lies.

On January 6, after Republicans lost both elections in Georgia and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were declared to have won election to the Senate, Trump appeared at the "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., during which he reiterated his lies about the election results.

Trump's comments at the rally were cited as evidence during his impeachment in the House on charges of inciting a mob of his supporters to walk to the Capitol and break in, in an attempt to overturn election results he and they still called fraudulent.

It was only after the attack that McConnell admitted that Trump had circulated "wild falsehoods" and that his incitement of the mob was a "disgraceful dereliction of duty." Nonetheless, McConnell still sided with a majority of Senate Republicans to acquit Trump during his second impeachment trial.

Trump has continued to lie about losing the election. On Sunday, he told supporters at a rally in Ohio that the result of the 2020 election was "the scam of the century and this was the crime of the century."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Advertising

Start your day with National Memo Newsletter

Know first.

The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning

Narcissist Trump Disdained The Wounded And Admired The War Criminal

Former President Donald Trump, Gen. Mark Milley and former Vice President Mike Pence

We’ve long known who Donald Trump is: narcissistic, impressed with authoritarian displays, contemptuous of anyone he sees as low status, a man for whom the highest principle is his own self-interest. It’s still shocking to read new accounts of the moments where he’s most willing to come out and show all that, to not even pretend to be anything but what he is—and holy crap, does The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg have the goods in his new profile of outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, which focuses on Milley’s efforts to protect the military as a nonpartisan institution under Trump.

Keep reading...Show less
Ben Wikler

Ben Wikler

White House

From Alabama Republicans' blatantly discriminatory congressional map, to the Wisconsin GOP's ousting of a the states' top election official and attempt to impeach a liberal Supreme Court justice, to North Carolina's decision to allow the majority-Republican legislature to appoint state and local election board members, News from the States reports these anti-democratic moves have all recently "generated national headlines" and stoked fears ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Keep reading...Show less
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}