President Donald Trump retweeted a post this week from a conservative attorney that suggested two Republican officials in the state of Georgia deserved to be jailed because they refused to support the president’s efforts to overturn election results in that state.
President-elect Joe Biden received 11,700 more votes than Trump in Georgia in the election last month, becoming the first Democrat since 1992 to win the state. Two recounts since the election have affirmed Biden’s win.
The tweet that Trump shared was originally produced by attorney Lin Wood, who has been part of several lawsuits seeking to help Trump overturn election results in a number of states across the country to help him attain a second term in office. Trump retweeted Wood’s tweet on Tuesday.
“President Trump … is a genuinely good man. He does not really like to fire people. I bet he dislikes putting people in jail, especially ‘Republicans,'” the tweet from Wood read.
Wood went on to say that Georgia Republicans Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who have refuted Trump’s anti-democratic attempts to dismiss votes in the state, deserved imprisonment for not supporting Trump..
“[Trump] gave @BrianKempGA & @GaSecofState every chance to get it right. They refused. They will soon be going to jail,” Wood said in the tweet that Trump shared.
There is no evidence of election fraud of any kind in Georgia (or in any other state in the U.S.) that would warrant the overturning of results in that state’s presidential election. Additionally, a number of claims that Trump and his allies have made in recent weeks have been thoroughly debunked, including allegations that Kemp and Raffensperger were refusing to call a special session of the state legislature to demand an audit of absentee voter signatures.
In fact, signatures of absentee voters have already been checked and verified twice, during the election process. Moreover, auditing the signatures at this stage would be impossible, as state law requires the ballots and the signature envelopes to be separated after the second check takes place, to ensure ballot secrecy.
Last week, a number of Republican officials from Georgia urged the president to stop his errant and bogus claims of election fraud, and to discontinue his attacks on GOP officials — particularly because it was creating a rift within his own party in the state, and likely doing harm to the two Republican candidates in the upcoming runoff election for the Senate.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” program earlier this month, Gabriel Sterling, the voting systems implementation manager for Georgia, said that Trump’s comments against officials in the state “undermines democracy.” Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, appearing on CNN on the same day, also decried Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election, even though Duncan himself is a Republican.
“On January 20th, Joe Biden is going to be sworn in as the 46th president. And the Constitution is still in place,” Duncan said.
Trump immediately went to Twitter to call Duncan a “puppet” for making that statement.
It would be virtually impossible at this point for Trump to overturn the election results in any state, barring an extraordinary and unprecedented move from the Supreme Court, which seems very unlikely. Electors within the Electoral College have already voted, securing a win for Biden to become president next month. Objections to the outcome of the Electoral College in Congress, which could happen on January 6, are also extremely unlikely to be successful.
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