To support his call for a sweeping federal inquiry into his claims of vast voting fraud, President Trump turned on Friday to a little-known conservative activist whose work on the issue has been widely discredited and who has trafficked in conspiracy theories. “Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, a reference to a claim by Mr. Phillips, who helped create an app to report voter fraud, that he had “verified” such irregularities. With those words, Mr. Trump bestowed the imprimatur of the presidency on new ground: the feverish online fringes of American politics. In elevating Mr. Phillips, who last month on Twitter cited “spook friends” to claim that “the Israelis impersonated the Russians” and interfered in the American election, Mr. Trump returned to a familiar pattern. After a campaign in which he gave voice to outlandish falsehoods, including claims that Justice Antonin Scalia was suffocated by a pillow and Senator Ted Cruz’s father had a connection to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Trump has not left his penchant for conspiracy-mongering at the White House door.
And he is fixated on an issue that he raged about both during the campaign and in the weeks after his victory: the integrity of the country’s voting procedures. After his loss by about three million votes in the popular vote, and the questions about his legitimacy that have followed, he is now pushing for an investigation that could cost millions of dollars.
On Monday, Mr. Trump shocked congressional leaders at a White House reception by recounting a story he said he had heard from Bernhard Langer, a professional golfer, about voters in Florida he assumed to be illegal. (Mr. Langer later said that he had never talked to Mr. Trump about voting, but had only passed along an anecdote he had heard from a friend to another friend, “who shared it with a person with ties to the White House.”)
On Wednesday, the president explained on prime-time television why he had lost the popular vote. “Of those votes cast, none of them come to me,” Mr. Trump told ABC News about what he has called millions of illegal votes. “They would all be for the other side.”
Full Article: Dubious Vote-Fraud Claim Gets the Trump Seal of Approval – The New York Times.