Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, on Wednesday suggested that he supports challenging the 2020 presidential election when Congress meets to certify the Electoral College votes on January 6.
Speaking in Brunswick, Georgia, at a campaign event on Wednesday supporting Republican candidates in Georgia’s Senate run-off, Tuberville encouraged a crowd to not give up on President Donald Trump, and later, outside the event, seemed to indicate to Lauren Windsor, producer of the left-leaning political web-show, The Undercurrent, that he approved of the Senate challenging the presidential election outcome.
“They’re going to do everything they can to lie, cheat and steal — to win this election, like they did in the presidential election,” Tuberville said to a crowd during the event, in an edited clip tweeted by Windsor on Thursday.
“It is impossible. It is impossible what happened, but we’re going to get that all corrected. I’m going to tell you. Don’t give up on him. Don’t give up on him,” Tuberville said of Trump, to a round of applause from the crowd.
“Are you going to fight to make this election right?” Windsor asked Tuberville outside the event, to which he said: “We’re going to fight hard.”
BREAKING: Defying McConnell, Sen-elect Tuberville suggests he will challenge Electoral College, while stumping in Georgia pic.twitter.com/1z5wJ2ajVP
— Lauren Windsor (@lawindsor) December 17, 2020
Windsor asked what could be done on Jan. 6, and a staffer could be seen in the video trying to walk Tuberville away, but Tuberville stopped to respond.
“Just wait,” Tuberville told the staffer. “Just… well. You see what’s coming. You’ve been reading about it in the House. We’re going to have to do it in the Senate,” seeming to suggest he would support challenging the vote in the Senate as Alabama GOP Congressman Mo Brooks has said he plans to do in the House.
Tuberville did not say clearly in that videotaped exchange that he planned to challenge those results himself on Jan. 6, and APR’s attempts to reach Tuberville and a member of his transition team for comment Thursday weren’t successful.
Tuberville told Yellowhammer News by phone Thursday that he was going to do his “due diligence” on the matter before deciding whether he supports challenging those results, and that “people take stuff out of context” in reference to his statements to Windsor, and assertions that he was opposing McConnell in the matter.
Tuberville in the video, however, can clearly be heard saying “You’ve been reading about it in the House. We’re going to have to do it in the Senate.”
Brooks has said he plans to challenge the election results in the House on Jan. 6 based on Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud, but to be successful, he’ll need a counterpart in the Senate willing to do the same. So far, no Republican senator has agreed to do so.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during a private caucus call with Republican senators Tuesday warned them not to object to the election results on Jan. 6, according to Politico, and said doing so would force Republicans to vote the measure down, thus appearing to be against Trump.
Multiple lawsuits by the Trump’s campaign and his supporters over the election have been dismissed. The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday tossed out a lawsuit brought by Texas saying that Texas lacked standing to bring the suit. Republicans have no provided any substantial evidence of widespread voter fraud that could have affected the outcome of the election.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday rejected Trump’s lawsuit attempting to overturn the results in that state, saying three of Trump’s claims were filed too late and a fourth was without merit.
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris won by 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232 — the same margin by which Trump won in 2016. Biden and Harris also topped Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote nationwide (Trump did not win the popular vote in 2016).
On Monday, the Electoral College officially voted Biden as president. McConnell on Tuesday for the first time recognized Biden as president-elect, and Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican, said Wednesday that the GOP should move on from the election, ostensibly acknowledging Biden’s victory.
“I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden,” McConnell said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “President-elect is no stranger to the Senate. He’s devoted himself to public service for many years.”
McConnell also congratulated Harris, a member of the Senate from California, and said “beyond our differences, all Americans can take pride that our nation has a female vice president-elect for the very first time.”
