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A day after Justice Dept. found no evidence of widespread election fraud, Trump posts video filled with falsehoods.
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Increasingly isolated in the White House, President Trump on Wednesday released a 46-minute videotaped speech filled with lies in which he spoke angrily about a “rigged” election even though his own attorney general and election officials across the country have attested to his loss.
Mr. Trump posted a short, two-minute version of the speech on Twitter, recorded in the Diplomatic Room of the White House and delivered behind a lectern bearing the presidential seal, with a link to the full version on his Facebook page.
Saying that his remarks “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made,” the president once again refused to concede defeat in his bid for re-election almost one month after Election Day. Instead, he repeated a long series of false assertions about voter fraud, accusing Democrats of a conspiracy to steal the presidency.
Twitter quickly labeled the post as “disputed.” Facebook added a note that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who received almost 81 million votes and 306 electoral votes, is the projected winner of the election.
The video, which a White House official said was recorded last week, was the in-person embodiment of Mr. Trump’s staccato tweets during the past three weeks: one falsehood after another about voting irregularities in swing states, Democratic conspiracies, attacks on state officials and signature verifications.
The president’s rambling assertions in the video were drastically undercut on Tuesday, when Attorney General William P. Barr told The Associated Press that despite inquiries by the Justice Department and the F.B.I., “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Mr. Trump continued to rage about voting irregularities in the video, a day after a Republican elections official in Georgia lashed out at him, saying the president was inspiring violence and was to blame for a wave of death threats.
“Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language,” said Gabriel Sterling, a voting systems manager in Georgia. “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.”
At the end of the video, Mr. Trump improbably described himself as the defender of America’s election system, saying he had been told that the single most important accomplishment of his presidency would be protecting the integrity of the voting system.
It was unclear why Mr. Trump waited until Wednesday to release the video. But he made it public after a series of rebukes by members of his own party who have increasingly abandoned him as he clings to power by making baseless assertions about voter fraud that have been roundly rejected.
The president’s legal team, led by his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, has lost dozens of lawsuits in courts across the country while making wild allegations without any proof to back them up.
Some of the president’s key Republican allies on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have urged him to move on in recent days. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, referred this week to the “new administration” that would be taking over next year, a clear signal to Mr. Trump that his time in office was coming to an end.
Lawmakers in both parties have also signaled that they may be willing to defy his threat to veto the military spending bill unless Congress eliminates a legal provision that provides liability protection for social media companies.
Those social media platforms remain the president’s favorite method for disseminating false and misleading information. Within a few hours, his tweet had been “liked” by almost 134,000 Twitter users, and his Facebook video had been shared 93,000 times.
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December 03, 2020 at 05:04AM
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A day after Justice Dept. found no evidence of widespread election fraud, Trump posts video filled with falsehoods. - The New York Times
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