Confident that no smoking guns have been produced to support the claim by many on the right that the Democratic Party manipulated the voting process in November, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos was eager to use Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to establish as fact that the election was not stolen.
With Donald Trump out of office for five full days, much of the media remains fixated on the former president, and Stephanopoulos was quick to dispel Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him.
“This election was not stolen, do you accept that fact?” he asked Paul.
“What I would say is that the debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur, we never had any presentation in court where we actually looked at the evidence,” Sen. Paul replied. “Most of the cases were thrown out for lack of standing, which is a procedural way of not actually hearing the question. There were several states in which the law was changed by the secretary of state and not the state legislatures. To me, those are clearly unconstitutional and there’s still a chance that those work their way up to the Supreme Court.”
The laws referenced involve mail-in ballots. Millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots were sent out in many states, flooding the playing field with ballots. Ultimately, Joe Biden garnered over 12 million more votes than Barack Obama’s record in 2008.
“Yes, whether people who voted twice, whether dead people voted, whether illegal aliens voted? Yes, we should get to the bottom of it,” Paul said, noting that Democrats always oppose cleaning up voter rolls.
Not getting the answer he was hoping for, Stephanopoulos interjected to say Trump filed many challenges — remarkably, the ABC News anchor would add, “No election is perfect.”
Again, Paul said the cases were dismissed over lack of standing, not by judgement of the evidence.
Stephanopoulos pushed forward to point out that the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Bill Barr, said there’s no widespread of fraud, before pressing Paul to say the election was not stolen.
Not about to play his patsy, Paul noted that 75% of Republicans feel election integrity is a problem.
“What I would suggest is that if we want greater confidence in our elections, and 75% of Republicans agree with me, is that we do need to look at election integrity and we need to see if we can restore confidence in the election,” he said.
For a third time, Stephanopoulos pressed his guest to say the election was not stolen, insisting that 75% of Republicans agreed with him “because they were fed a big lie by President Trump and his supporters.”
Paul tore into Stephanopoulos, who he called a liberal, saying that instead of looking at the story from both sides, he inserts himself in the middle to say one side is lying.
The exchange got intense as the ABC anchor insisted that the election was not stolen, saying the results “were certified in every single state.”
“You’re saying that absolutely — you’re saying there was no fraud and that it’s all been investigated. That’s just not true,” Paul shot back.
“It’s not what I said, sir,” Stephanopoulos replied. “I said the Department of Justice found no evidence.”
They continued to talk over each other, before Paul said, “You said we’re all liars. You are simply saying we’re all liars.”
“I said it was a lie that the election was stolen,” Stephanopoulos countered — which is quite a finding, coming from a news anchor.
Sharing details of voting irregularities in Wisconsin, Paul said he plans to spend the next two years going around state by state, fixing some of the unconstitutional issues seen in 2020.
“And I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud.” he said. “No! Let’s have an open debate, this is a free country.”
Using Barr as his crutch, Stephanopoulos repeated the familiar media refrain, “There’s no widespread evidence of election fraud.”
A mantra that’s part of a concerted effort to refuse to hear any of the evidence.
“There’s been no examination — thorough examination, of all the states to see what problems we had and see if they could fix them,” Paul insisted.
The lawmaker pointed out that he voted to certify the state electoral counts, but only because he believes it would be wrong for Congress to overturn them.
“There were lots of problems and secretaries of state who illegally changed the law, and that needs to be fixed and I’m going to work hard to fix it,” Paul said, slamming the media for saying all Republicans are liars.
“There are two sides to every story,” he said.
“Sir, there are not two sides to this story,” Stephanopoulos replied, drawing a laugh from Paul. “This has been looked in every single state.”
After further back and forth, he asked for the fourth time was the election stolen or not?
“I think there was great deal of evidence of fraud and changing of the election laws illegally,” Paul answered. “A thorough investigation is warranted.”
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The longest-tenured writer at BizPac Review, Tom grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills.
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