More signs of Republican dissent
Legal team deemed `national embarrassment'
WASHINGTON • Several prominent Republicans said Sunday that U.S. President Donald Trump's legal arguments had run their course, and called on him to allow the presidential transition process to begin.
Chris Christie, a Trump confidant who helped prepare the president for the debates, called the conduct of Trump's legal team a “national embarrassment.” Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said Trump had “exhausted all plausible legal options,” and urged him to concede. Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said it's time to begin the transition.
The comments were the latest signs of dissent from within the president's party, with increasingly more Republicans urging Trump to accept the results of the election and move on.
In an interview on ABC News's This Week, Christie said the president should give up his legal strategy. “Elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn't happen,” he said.
“The conduct of the president's legal team has been a national embarrassment,” Christie added, noting that Trump's lawyers have made a flurry of fraud allegations but have offered no evidence to back them up in court.
Christie criticized Trump's lawyers for proffering false conspiracy theories at news conferences and other media appearances.
“They don't do it in the courtroom,” the 2016 Republican presidential candidate said, suggesting that attorneys are fearful of making baseless arguments under oath before federal judges.
“It must mean the evidence doesn't exist,” Christie said.
Late Saturday night, after a federal judge threw out an attempt by Trump's legal team to invalidate millions of votes, Toomey congratulated president-elect Joe Biden and vice-presidentelect Kamala Harris on their victory and encouraged the president to accept that result.
“President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania,” Toomey said in a statement, noting that the deciding judge, Matthew Brann, is a “longtime conservative Republican.”
The Trump campaign on Saturday night requested a recount of paper ballots in Georgia, but this is unlikely to change the outcome in the state.
The campaign on Sunday also told a judge it was appealing Saturday's ruling that denied its request to halt Biden's win in Pennsylvania.
Trump weighed in on the Pennsylvania decision in a Sunday morning tweet shortly before he arrived at his golf club in Sterling, Va., for the second day in a row.
“Other than politics, how do you lose a case where large numbers of voters, far more than you need to flip Pennsylvania, are disenfranchised? Vote Observers thrown out of counting rooms,” he tweeted, even though his campaign's attorneys have acknowledged that Republican observers were granted access to polling locations.
Trump and some of his defenders have argued that Democrats sought to delegitimize his 2016 election by investigating his business interests and his campaign's ties to Russia and voting to impeach him last year. Trump was later acquitted by the Senate.
Kate Bedingfield, Biden's deputy campaign manager, on Sunday pushed back against that comparison, calling it “absurd” and “an apples-and-oranges comparison at best.”
“I don't think that when a president gets elected that he is no longer held accountable as he moves through his administration,” Bedingfield said on Fox News Sunday. “I think that's an incredibly different thing.”
The president also on Sunday lashed out at Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who said earlier in an appearance on CNN's State of the Union that he was “embarrassed that more people in the party aren't speaking up” against Trump.
Soon after, Trump shared a link to a report on how Hogan spent $9.46 million on coronavirus tests from South Korea that turned out to be flawed. Later Sunday afternoon, Hogan took to the president's favourite medium to return fire.
“If you had done your job, America's governors wouldn't have been forced to fend for themselves to find tests in the middle of a pandemic, as we successfully did in Maryland,” he tweeted at Trump. “Stop golfing and concede.”