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A Flashback on Challenging the Legitimacy of a President – Opinion

By Pluralist / January 6, 2022

Today is a good day to discuss people questioning the legitimacy of elections.

I’m talking about all the Democrats and folks on the left who questioned the election of President Donald Trump in 2016.

But Democrats didn’t just question the election: They actively stoked misinformation about things like Russia collusion to undermine Trump. This was despite Trump being the clear winner. Russian interference never made his election questionable. We had both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris publicly agree and promote the claim that Trump was “illegitimate.”

Here’s Biden agreeing with a woman during the campaign in May 2019 that Trump was an “illegitimate” president and stoking the Russia collusion hoax that Democrats paid to help feed. Biden agreed with her lies and joked that she could become his running mate.

Then, there’s Kamala Harris agreeing with Charlamagne tha God that Trump was an “illegitimate” president because of Russian interference.

The bottom line: Bottom line: There’s no evidence of Russian intervention in any vote. Yet, that hasn’t ever stopped the Democrats’ misleading claims.

Democrats were in a mad rush to change Trump’s election results after he won. They were determined to prevent Trump from taking office. This is why they began their quest to convince enough people not to vote Trump. Their theory was that if they managed to convince 37 Republican electors to vote for a Republican who would deny Donald Trump a majority, then they could force a contingent electoral election in the House of Representatives. Now that was nuts and never going to succeed, but that didn’t stop people.

The voters were targeted with harassment, inundated by hate mails, and threatened with death. To stop them voting for Trump, people actively attempted to kill them. Not only was the Clinton campaign involved in the spreading of the phony Russia collusion story to interfere in the election, but people forget they were also in favor of a last-minute effort by the Democrats, spearheaded by Christine Pelosi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, to have the intelligence community “brief” the electors on Russian “interference” to try to influence their votes. If claiming Russia collusion didn’t work the first time they put it out there, the Clinton campaign was all-in to try to have it pushed directly to the electors.

But that wasn’t all. Congress had to still certify that the election was valid.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee stated Jan. 6, 2017 that at least 10 Democrats were going to challenge the validity of multiple state’s electoral votes. Jackson Lee said that there will be difficulties trying to make electors unfit to vote. “This is an American question of justice and fairness and the appropriate running of presidential elections,” Jackson Lee said. If you felt there were a problem, you had the right to protest an electoral vote. That only became an “attack on democracy,” apparently, when Republicans objected. However, Democrats did the same for Trump as for previous Republican presidents over many years.

Let’s not forget that even after that gambit failed, Democrats — including the late Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) — said they would not attend the inauguration because they claimed Trump was “illegitimate.” Trump criticized Lewis saying he should be concerned about crime in his own district and he was all talk, no action.

And so, Democrats stood up to the norms and disciplined Lewis for his comments. Trump was attacked by more Democrats. 67 of them said they would be sitting out the inauguration — including people who were defending Lewis and/or those claiming Trump was illegitimate.

Among the people who said that they would not attend and questioned the legitimacy of the election was — wait for it — Rep. Bennie Thompson, the current head of the Jan. 6 Committee.

Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, claimed concerns about reports of Russia’s alleged role in the election. “The Russian hack was, at its core, an attempt to delegitimize our democracy,” Thompson said in a statement earlier this month. His legislative director said, “Congressman Thompson continues to have concerns about the role that Russia had in our country’s democratic process.”

January 20 was the day for peaceful power transfer. But not so. Many thousands of leftist radical protesters marched through D.C. to block the inauguration. This was an organised effort to protest the election. However, it wasn’t peaceful and got outof control. They planned to prevent a peaceful transition. They set fire to buildings and assaulted police officers.

Daily Caller

One protester, Tom Faison, told The Washington Post that the property damage was done with “nuance and intention.”

The Post further reported that the majority of protesters arrested weren’t residents of Washington, D.C., Maryland, nor Virginia. Tom Massey, 32, of Philadelphia was among those arrested, and he told The Post, “I think there should have been more violence yesterday.”

In the violence, more than 200 were detained. Where was the DOJ investigating this attack against democracy? The FBI was unable to find all the people involved in the peaceful transfer. Surely some of the 200 arrested people must have been punished for their attack on democracy and especially police officers?

Is our system of justice being undermined in any way? There were some acquittals because it’s hard to prosecute when everyone looks the same — dressed in black bloc — which is the point of dressing that way, which is why Antifa does it. The majority of charges were dismissed. There were more than 200 arrests and no one was ever held responsible for the violence. They got away. They all got away. “Protecting democracy” apparently doesn’t matter when the attackers are leftists. No FBI page was created, and no promise to follow all those involved. “One rule” of law for all, Attorney General Merrick Garland claims? That’s a lie.

So to wrap up, you didn’t just have three hours of people rioting. An organized campaign was waged for many years against the legitimacy and integrity of the democratically elected president. The law enforcement authorities of the government were engaged in unprecedented actions against your political rival.

These are just a few ideas that you might want to think about today.

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Pluralist

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