Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham spent his Christmas Eve defending Donald Trump’s continued claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Speaking with Pierre Thomas on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Graham was asked if Trump’s election denial is the best standard to set for future generations. The senator replied, “Well, you know, Hillary Clinton had the same view that she was cheated.”
“He’s not the first politician to claim to have been denied a fair election,” Graham added. “I accept the election results of 2020,” he continued. “I’m worried about 2024. If President Trump puts a vision out improving security and prosperity for Americans, he will win. If he looks back, I think he will lose. So at the end of the day, the 2020 election is over for me.”
In 2019, Clinton told CBS that Trump’s insistence on leading crowds in chants of “lock her up” years after their own presidential face-off didn’t bother her because “he knows he’s an illegitimate president.” Clinton added, “I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”
Her sentiment echoed the words of former President Jimmy Carter, who a month earlier told the audience at a Carter Center event that Trump “didn’t actually win the election in 2016” and, “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
While on the pair’s “Evening with the Clintons” tour with her husband in 2020, Clinton told an audience in Los Angeles, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.” She added that Russia continued to pose a “very significant counterintelligence threat” and that, “Social media is still an incredible channel to communicate information that is untrue and defamatory about someone else.”
Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election concluded that the country used social media and other methods to influence American voters, but that Trump and his campaign did not directly conspire with Russia’s government to aid that effort.
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