Author Archives: Warren Stewart

Christopher Krebs last night offered a cool, rational defense of the election’s integrity in his first interview since President Trump fired him as the nation’s top election security official.  It was a stark contrast with President Trump, whose attacks on the 2020 contest are becoming increasingly fantastical. Krebs, who led the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, gave “60 Minutes” interviewer Scott Pelley a point-by-point refutation of the unfounded election fraud claims made by Trump and his allies, which he called “nonsense” and “farcical.” Those baseless claims include a conspiracy theory positing that Democrats operated a secret algorithm changing how machines recorded votes on an extensive scale and that votes were mysteriously tabulated overseas. Krebs’s bottom line: Such fraud claims fail the smell test because, as of 2020, there are paper records for 95 percent of ballots cast by American voters. And hand counts of those ballots in Georgia, Wisconsin and elsewhere show no significant difference between what was tabulated by machines. “The proof is in the ballots,” he said. “The recounts are consistent with the initial count. To me that’s further evidence, that’s confirmation that the systems used in the 2020 election performed as expected and the American people should have 100 percent confidence in their votes.” That’s been a consistent message for Krebs, who has trumpeted the importance of paper ballots and post-election audits as vital protections against election hacking or other malfeasance for more than three years. Trump, by contrast, has  frequently shifted his claims about election fraud depending on where he thinks he can gain an edge.

President Trump’s political operation has raised more than $150 million since Election Day, using a blizzard of misleading appeals about the election to shatter fundraising records set during the campaign, according to people with knowledge of the contributions. The influx of political donations is one reason Trump and some allies are inclined to continue a legal onslaught and public affairs blitz focused on baseless claims of election fraud, even as their attempts have repeatedly failed in court and as key states continue to certify wins for President-elect Joe Biden. Much of the money raised since the election is likely to go into an account for the president to use on political activities after he leaves office, while some of the contributions will go toward what’s left of the legal fight. The people with knowledge of the fundraising amounts spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal numbers. The Trump campaign declined to comment. The surge of donations is largely from small-dollar donors, campaign officials say, tapping into the president’s base of loyal and fervent donors who tend to contribute the most when they feel the president is under siege or facing unfair political attacks. The campaign has sent about 500 post-election fundraising pitches to donors, often with hyperbolic language about voter fraud and the like.

Wisconsin and Arizona on Monday became the last two of six states where President Trump has contested his defeat to finalize their vote counts, dealing a fresh blow to his quest to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory as a chorus of Republicans and Democrats offered support for the election’s integrity. Trump and his allies vowed to continue pressing legal claims challenging the election results in several states, but such efforts have met with resounding failures in the courts across the country. Monday’s certifications brought to a close a key period in which Trump and his advisers had said they would be able to derail Biden’s win. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) certified her state’s election results alongside the Republican governor and attorney general. Several hours later, the Democratic chairwoman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Ann Jacobs, completed her state’s canvass and declared Biden the winner of the state’s 10 electoral votes, a declaration that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers promptly certified. Their actions brought Biden one step closer to an official victory on Dec. 14, when the electoral college meets. While Trump has kept up a stream of baseless claims that the election was corrupted by fraud, a growing number of state officials on both sides of the aisle pushed back against that notion.

The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost. But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ” However cleareyed that Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ” Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin, for instance, discussed with Trump a poll he had conducted after the election that showed Trump with a positive approval rating, a plurality of the country who thought the media had been “unfair and biased against him” and a majority of voters who believed their lives were better than four years earlier, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. As expected, Trump lapped it up. The result was an election aftermath without precedent in U.S. history. With his denial of the outcome, despite a string of courtroom defeats, Trump endangered America’s democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public health, and duped millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately.