On Thursday, The Washington Post announced that they would ask “every Republican member of Congress the same three questions,” which were: “Who won the presidential election?” “Do you support or oppose Donald Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory?” and “If Joe Biden wins a majority in the electoral college, will you accept him as the legitimately elected president of the United States?”
The Post added in their tweet, “We will report back their answers.”
The Post is asking every Republican member of Congress the same three questions today. We will report back their answers.
The questions are: pic.twitter.com/P1ptrZU4cr
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 3, 2020
Strangely, the Post didn’t ask similar questions after the 2016 presidential election, when President Trump’s election prompted efforts from Democrats to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency, from accusing Trump of having won the election because of Russian interference to even going so far as impeaching the president almost three years after he had been inaugurated.
And the Post itself harped on the supposed Russia-Trump connection for weeks after the 2016 election:
November 9, 2016, when the Post referred to Trump as the Kremlin’s man:
A striking change came over Moscow just hours after Donald Trump’s surprise election: Suddenly, the Russian capital was a hotbed of zealous supporters of the U.S. electoral process. Throughout the campaign, Russia rooted for Trump as much as any other foreign country. According to the White House, Moscow also interfered as much as any other foreign country ever has in a U.S. election. But the Kremlin’s commentators — convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win — had also trashed the U.S. election as dirty, corrupt and unable to produce a legitimate result.
Now that their man was in, and with Russian TV showing cheery Americans lining up to vote for Trump, they had to change their tune.
Russian government officials conferred with members of Donald Trump’s campaign team, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday, a disclosure that could reopen scrutiny of the Kremlin’s role in the president-elect’s bitter race against Hillary Clinton.
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.
Even months later, in March 2017:
Congress and U.S. intelligence agencies are scrutinizing connections between Russia and the Trump campaign as they investigate evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Here are members of Team Trump who are known to have Russian connections and the story lines that have made those ties relevant.
Conservatives expressed their anger on social media about the Post’s latest tactic:
Great questions. What did the Democrats say when you asked them similar questions in 2016? Oh, you never asked? Okay https://t.co/yChT44c1SB
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) December 3, 2020
The Post never felt the need to ask every Democratic member of Congress questions of if Democrats believed Tara Reade or not… https://t.co/gn3WLt1F0J
— MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) December 3, 2020
It would be a good thing if @HouseGOP stopped answering any and all questions from the Post on every topic. https://t.co/aJ9bS9TE3Z
— Derek Hunter (@derekahunter) December 3, 2020
https://twitter.com/Harry1T6/status/1334610727932473351
