Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Donald Trump says 'they're not taking the White House', vows to continue fighting

By Mirror
President Donald Trump

Donald Trump told his supporters "they're not taking the White House" during a rally in Georgia - the state where he urged officials to "find" votes.

The outgoing President continues to deny the result of last year's election, which he lost to Joe Biden and makes claims of voting irregularities.

The electoral votes are due to be certified on Wednesday before President-elect Biden takes office on January 20, but Trump is still refusing to bow out.

During a speech in the city of Dalton on Monday evening, Trump said: "We have to go. We have to go all the way. You watch what happens over the next couple of weeks...

"They're not taking this White House. We're going to fight like hell."

He was campaigning for Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue ahead of Tuesday's crucial run-off election against Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

Defeat could hand incoming President Biden control of the Senate, paving the way for him to more easily pass legislation.

"There's no way we lost Georgia, there's no way," Trump told supporters, before adding: "The election was rigged."

He later claimed he would campaign against Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger - officials who he was recorded begging to help him overturn the election result.

"I'll be here in about a year-and-a-half campaigning against your governor, I'll guarantee you that," he said. "I had two elections. I won both of them," he falsely claimed.

"Your governor and your secretary of state are petrified of Stacey Abram," Trump continued, before labelling them Republicans in name only.

"What they've done to your state, these two people, they say they're Republicans, I really don't think so."

It comes as city officials in Washington warned Trump supporters not to bring guns to protests against congressional certification of his election defeat and enlisted hundreds of National Guard troops to help keep order.

In a call on Saturday, the President told Raffensperger and Kemp to "find" enough votes to make him the victor in the Southern state, according to a recording published by the Washington Post.

Raffensperger has since told ABC: "I never believed it was appropriate to speak to the president, but he pushed out, I guess he had his staff push us. They wanted a call."

Two Democratic members of Congress asked FBI Director Christopher Wray yesterday to investigate the call.

"We believe Donald Trump engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes. We ask you to open an immediate criminal investigation into the president," they said in a statement.

Raffensperger and his office's general counsel rejected Trump's assertions of electoral fraud in the hour-long conversation.

"We took the call, and we had a conversation. He did most of the talking, we did most of the listening," Raffensperger said.

"But I did want to make my points that the data that he has is just plain wrong. He had hundreds and hundreds of people he said that were dead that voted. We found two. That's an example of just he has bad data."

Trump for two months has been claiming contrary to evidence that his loss to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud.

Multiple state and federal reviews, as well as courts, have rejected those claims as unsupported.

Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College by 306-232 and carried the popular vote by more than seven million ballots.

 

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