Trump personally asked Pa. speaker to change election results
Pennsylvania is now the third state where Trump has pressured lawmakers to join his baseless allegations of election fraud.
President Donald Trump personally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in yet another state.
Trump called Bryan Cutler, the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, twice in the past week to pressure him into subverting the election results.
According to The Washington Post, the calls were confirmed by Speaker Cutler’s office.
“The president said, ‘I’m hearing about all these issues in Philadelphia and these issues with your law,'” said Cutler spokesman Michael Straub, describing the House speaker’s two conversations with Trump. “‘What can we do to fix it?'”
Straub said Cutler told the president that the legislature has no power to overturn the state’s slate of electors, who will head to the Electoral College and certify the election on Monday, Dec. 14.
However, Cutler, a Republican, has signed on to a letter, along with 60 other lawmakers in his party, to urge Pennsylvania’s congressional representatives to object to the state’s electoral slate. The move is unlikely to change the outcome or delay certification.
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Pennsylvania is now the third state where Trump has personally pressured state lawmakers to join his baseless allegations of election fraud. The president had previously invited Michigan Republicans to the White House to seek their assistance, and on Saturday, he called Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, directly.
Trump also targeted Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in tweets and during a rally Saturday supporting Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the Republican senators facing respective runoffs against Rev. Rafael Warnock and Jon Osshoff in the state next month.
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“We will find that hundreds of thousands of ballots were illegally cast in your state and all over the country, by the way, more than enough to give us a total historic victory,” Trump said. “This is our country . . . they are trying to take it from us through rigging, fraud, deception and deceit.”
“Hopefully, our legislatures and the United States Supreme Court will step forward,” said the president, “and save our country.”
Trump has lost 33 lawsuits related to election fraud.
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