Corey Lewandowski, a former campaign manager for then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, says there’s no constitutional pathway for the former president to be reinstated.
Lewandowski, who now heads the Fight Back Now America PAC, said the topic of reinstatement has never emerged in his “dozens” of conversations with Trump since his departure from office, adding he knows of no constitutional process by which the former president could be reinstated.
“The president and I have never had a conversation about him being reinstated, so I can’t specifically comment on what he has said to other individuals because it hasn’t been a conversation that I’ve had with them,” he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “And I know of no provision under the Constitution that allows that to occur, nor do I know of any provision under the Constitution that allows an individual who lost an election to come back if a recount is dubbed inaccurate.”
TRUMP DOESN’T APPEAR TO BELIEVE HE’LL BE REINSTATED THIS YEAR, SOURCE CLAIMS
Lewandowski added that “election integrity matters,” maintaining the Trump campaign notified the media of at least one incident of voter fraud in Pennsylvania that was not widely reported.
“The media’s obligation and responsibility should be making sure we have a fair and honest account of what the election results were,” he continued.
Trump and many of his allies have filed several lawsuits alleging widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, most of which were tossed out by the courts.
Sidney Powell, an attorney who was briefly associated with the Trump campaign’s legal battle, set off a flurry of speculation last weekend, when she told a right-wing conference in Dallas the former president could “simply be reinstated.”
“There are cases where elections have been overturned, but there’s never been one at the presidential level, which everybody will jump to point out, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done,” Powell said, earning loud applause from an audience. “It should be that he can simply be reinstated, that a new inauguration date is set.”
Subsequent reports suggested the former president himself had adopted the theory, with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reporting Trump was “telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.”
Haberman’s post was shared along with a clip of former national security adviser Michael Flynn allegedly endorsing a “Myanmar-style coup” in the United States at an event in Dallas on June 30.
“I want to know why what happened in [Myanmar] can’t happen here?” a member of the audience asked Flynn.
“No reason, I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That’s right,” Flynn responded.
Powell denied Flynn had called for “any act of violence or any military insurrection” with his comments, which she said had been “grossly distorted” by the media, and Flynn himself has denied calling for a U.S. coup.
Despite the initial speculation, Trump reportedly does not truly expect to be reinstated in August. On Thursday, CNN‘s Jim Acosta told anchor Erin Burnett that Trump “believes it” and “thinks that there is some chance that he could somehow be reinstated as president, somehow this year,” but he went on to talk about a “well-placed source” who cast doubt on the notion that the former president is convinced he’ll assume the presidency this year.
“I’m told by one source, one well-placed source familiar with these conversations, [Trump has] been asking, ‘What do you think of this theory?’ And what this one adviser told me is that he’s been told it’s not true,” Acosta said. “Now, this adviser, who is familiar with these conversations, went on to say that it doesn’t appear that Trump really believes that he could somehow be reinstated or assume the presidency later on this year.”
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Others in Trump’s inner circle have publicly denounced the theory. Former Trump legal adviser Jenna Ellis dismissed Powell’s claim, saying, “No, President Trump is not going to be ‘reinstated,'” and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, appeared on Fox News to cast doubt on whether Trump has been having talks about being reinstated, although she didn’t preclude the possibility.
“As far as I know, there are no plans for Donald Trump to be in the White House in August. Maybe there’s something I don’t know,” she said, adding that one explanation could be “a lot of folks getting a little worked up about something just because maybe there wasn’t enough pushback from the Republican side.”
