Trump rants on polls, pardons aide as Biden calls for unity
WASHINGTON: President-elect Joe Biden urged Americans for a united fight against the coronavirus and not divisions against each other, but President Donald Trump continued to rant and rave against the election that he said was stolen from him.
Trump also tweeted that he was pardoning Michael Flynn, his former national security advisor who had pleaded guilty twice of lying to federal investigators probing the Russian meddling in 2016 elections.
Biden, in an address to the nation on Thanksgiving holiday, put the surging pandemic front and centre, pledging to tap the “vast powers” of the federal government and to “change the course of the disease” once in office. But for that to work, he said, Americans must step up for their own safety and that of their fellow citizens. “I know the country has grown weary of the fight. We need to remember we’re at war with the virus, not with one another,” he said.
Trump, who has scarcely mentioned the pandemic in recent days even as it has achieved record heights, remained fixated on his election defeat. He sent his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other members of his legal team to meet Pennsylvania Republican state senators in Gettysburg. Inside a hotel near the hallowed battlefields of civil war, they again aired complaints about the election and repeated allegations of Democratic malfeasance that have already disintegrated under examination by courts.
“We have to turn the election over,” Trump said from the Oval Office, where he joined the meeting by speakerphone.
“This was an election that we won easily,” he said. “We won it by a lot.” In fact, the election gave Biden a clear mandate, and no systemic fraud has been uncovered. Judge after judge has dismissed the Trump campaign’s accusations as baseless, and the transition to Biden’s presidency is fully underway.
Nevertheless, Trump repeated: “This election has to be turned around.”
Trump’s pardon of Flynn-who is the associate convicted in the Russia probe to be granted clemency the president-was part of a broader effort to undo the results of an investigation that for years has shadowed Trump’s administration and yielded criminal charges against a half dozen associates.