Trump acknowledges Biden ‘won’ for the first time, insists election was ‘rigged’
'He won because the Election was Rigged,' Trump says in a Sunday morning tweet
It took one week before President Donald Trump addressed former Vice President Joe Biden‘s election victory, although the message he delivered was not a clear-cut concession.
Trump acknowledged in a tweet Sunday that Biden “won,” but he continued to express his unfounded belief that the election results are not valid due to cheating. The message was offered in a quote tweet that included a video of Fox News host Jess Watters, from his “Watters’ World” show account, proclaiming that Biden did not earn the victory and that he ran a losing campaign, though the Electoral College tally says otherwise.
“He won because the Election was Rigged. NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more!” Trump said in the tweet, which has been flagged by Twitter for his false claims.
Watters in the video claimed that Biden’s win “doesn’t add up,” saying that “notoriously dirty Democrat precincts” of Philadelphia and Detroit, two Democratic strongholds, helped flip the states of Pennsylvania and Michigan to Biden days after Election Day, Nov. 3. Pennsylvania and Michigan, along with Wisconsin, are critical states that helped give Trump a victory in his 2016 race against then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
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Biden was projected as the winner of the election on Saturday, Nov. 7, but Trump refused to concede the election to Biden and questioned the media’s role in calling elections.
Both Trump’s retweet and Watter’s original tweet were flagged by Twitter with the caption: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
Several lawsuits issued by the Trump campaign alleging voter fraud, but lacking evidence, were lost or thrown out in courts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, the first time that state went blue since reelecting Bill Clinton to the White House in 1996. Before then, Arizona had not gone for a Democrat since President Harry S. Truman 1948 victory.
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As previously reported by theGrio, U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued a memo to several government agencies, including the FBI, to investigate voter fraud in these states. However, several federal prosecutors concluded there was no substantial evidence to prove that fraud took place.
NBC News reports that Biden has yet to receive the president’s daily briefs, which is customary during a transition of power.
