FRAUD! CHEAT! HACK!
What this Biden official said when Trump won in 2016
Democrats are outraged that P resi dent Tr u mp refuses to concede, but in 2016, Neera Tanden, Joe Biden’s nominee for the Off i ce of Management and Budget, said Trump only won because Russian hackers changed votes, and she promoted the idea of electors going against voters and putting Hillary Clinton in office.
Neera Tanden, President-elect Joe Biden’s appointee as director of the Office of Management and Budget, spread baseless conspiracy theories after the 2016 election insisting that Hillary Clinton lost to President Trump because Russian hackers flipped votes.
Tanden, 50, who is president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress and a longtime Clinton loyalist, served as an unpaid adviser during Clinton’s 2016 White House bid and repeatedly claimed in the weeks after Trump’s victory that he won only because of Kremlin operatives.
In a series of tweets, some still online Monday, Tanden claimed the “Russians did enough damage to affect more than 70k votes in 3 states,” referring to Clinton’s losing margin in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
As first reported by Intercept cofounder Glenn Greenwald, Tanden began just days after the 2016 election baselessly suggesting that Russian hackers had switched votes from Clinton to Trump.
“Why would hackers hack in unless they could change results? What’s the point?” she speculated, suggesting this was why “Trump was as surprised as everyone else” by his win.
Greenwald pointed to a Nov. 25, 2016, tweet in which Tanden shared an article promoting the notion that presidential electors ignore their states’ votes, citing the emoluments clause to claim Trump could not be made president unless he sold off his companies.
“Imp story here on Electors and constitutional violation of the emoluments clause,” she tweeted.
Her selection on Monday as Biden’s OMB chief, a hugely important role, quickly went down in flames as Republicans said there was no chance she would be confirmed by a GOP-controlled Senate.
Josh Holmes, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), speculated on Twitter that Tanden’s nomination was a “sacrifice to the confirmation gods,” while Garrett Ventry, a former adviser to the Senate Judici
ary Committee’s GOP majority, said it would be “a funeral.”
Tanden would need 51 votes in the Senate to become chief of the OMB. Democrats control 48 seats but are hoping to pick up two more in the Georgia Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5.
Drew Brandewie , a spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), put her chances at “zero.”
“Neera Tanden, who has an endless stream of disparaging comments about the Republican Senators’ whose votes she’ll need, stands zero chance of being confirmed,” he wrote Monday.