First lady Melania Trump on Sunday stressed the importance of maintaining the integrity of American democracy by making sure each vote is legal.
“The American people deserve fair elections,” Melania said. “Every legal – not illegal – vote should be counted. We must protect our democracy with complete transparency.”
The American people deserve fair elections. Every legal – not illegal – vote should be counted. We must protect our democracy with complete transparency.
— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) November 8, 2020
Melania’s statement followed an anonymously-sourced CNN story published Sunday that claimed both she and senior adviser Jared Kushner had approached the president urging him to concede the election, despite ongoing litigation and razor-thin margins in battleground states.
As CNN reported:
Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has approached the President about conceding the election, two sources told CNN Saturday.
And first lady Melania Trump has advised the President the time has come for him to accept the election loss, a separate source familiar with the conversations told CNN on Sunday.
Though the first lady has not publicly commented on the election, she has privately weighed in with her opinion, the source noted. “She has offered it, as she often does,” the source said.
Trump has yet to concede the election, despite establishment media calling the race for his opponent Saturday morning. On the contrary, lawyers for his campaign plan to file lawsuits throughout the week alleging widespread voter fraud in states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada.
According to Fox News senior White House correspondent John Roberts, as noted by The Daily Wire:
“The legal action is flying fast and furious,” Roberts told Fox News host Shannon Bream. “You mentioned Arizona, specifically Maricopa County, the Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit alleging that many in-person votes were rejected because people who came in to vote had accidentally overvoted, that is voted accidentally for two people for the same office.”
Roberts said that the lawsuit alleges that those ballots were “rejected as opposed to being allowed to correct their ballots.”
“In just the last hour, in Nevada, an election worker, whose job was to process mail-in ballots, says he witnessed irregularities in counting those ballots and was told by a supervisor, whom he names, to put through ballots he believed needed signature verification without that verification first being done,” Roberts continued. “He says he was also told to ignore discrepancies with addresses. That worker has sworn out an affidavit which has been sent to the Department of Justice here in Washington.”
Roberts then read off the following statement from the campaign: “The affidavit makes clear that we’re not dealing with oversights or sloppiness, this was intentional criminal conduct.”
[…]
“The president believes, he’s also being encouraged by his family, that he owes it to the 71 million people who voted for him to make sure that every legal vote has been counted and to make sure to the best of his ability that every illegal vote that might have made it through was not counted,” Roberts continued. “Now, everybody’s wondering what might happen with the president eventually. I’m told that when he goes through this legal process, and there’s also recounts involved as well … and comes out the other end, if there is no path to a second term, then the president will graciously concede and he will cooperate in an orderly transition of power.”
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