Senate hearing elevates claims of election fraud

WASHINGTON » Republican senators on Wednesday further perpetuated President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, two days after Democrat Joe Biden’s victory was sealed by the Electoral College.

Lawmakers bickered heatedly at times during a committee hearing as Democrats pushed back against the unfounded allegations and a former federal cybersecurity official who oversaw election security said continued attempts to undermine confidence in the process were corrosive to democracy.

The session, held by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee over Democratic protests, elevated the groundless claims of fraud to the highest levels of government and provided two of Trump’s lawyers with one more public opportunity to make the false assertions after repeatedly losing in court.

The hearing mimicked those held in some battleground states with local lawmakers, where Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani led some Republicans in airing their election grievances without any proof. Those hearings were held after consistent legal defeats.

GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the committee chairman and one of Trump’s fiercest defenders, said his goal was to have a bipartisan hearing to examine the election. But he repeated Trump’s assertions without evidence and focused heavily on the claims being made by the president’s team.

There was no testimony from state or local election officials who conducted extensive checks to ensure the accuracy of the election before certifying the results. Those officials have said there was no indication of any widespread fraud.

Democrats did solicit the testimony of Christopher Krebs, who led the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency until he was fired by Trump in a Nov. 17 tweet. Under Krebs, the agency operated a “rumor control” webpage that debunked some of the conspiracy theories being perpetuated by Trump and his allies.

Under quest ioning, Krebs acknowledged that some of his staff had been approached about making changes to the webpage but none was made and he said voting systems were secure in the 2020 election.

Trump and his allies have pushed conspiracies involving voting machines manipulated by dead foreign leaders and argued that tens of thousands of fraudulent mail ballots somehow escaped layers of security and scrutiny by election workers. The president and his supporters have filed the lawsuits without evidence, tried to pressure state lawmakers into seating their own presidential electors and sought to inf luence lowlevel party members who sit on the state and local boards that certify election results.