Sen. Joni Ernst rebuked assertions from the Trump campaign that politicians may have bribed their way into winning their respective races.
The Iowa Republican, who won her own tightly contested Senate race in Iowa, said that what Sidney Powell, one of the attorneys assisting the Trump campaign’s legal battles nationwide, suggested during a press conference on Thursday was “absolutely outrageous.”
Powell insisted that any number of “Republican or Democratic candidates” could have “paid to have the system rigged to work for them,” but did not provide evidence to support the claim.
“To insinuate that Republican and Democratic candidates paid to throw off this election, I think, is absolutely outrageous, and I do take offense to that,” Ernst said during a Thursday interview with Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson.
“For those of us that do stand up and represent our states in a dignified manner, we believe in honesty. We believe in the integrity of our election system, which is why I do believe that, if there is fraud out there, it should be brought to the court’s attention,” Ernst added. “To have that accusation just offhandedly thrown out there, just to confuse our voters across the United States, I think that is absolutely wrong.”
The office of Sen. John Cornyn, another Republican incumbent who was victorious in the November election, sent the Washington Examiner a quote that the senator said a day earlier in response to a question about Powell’s claims.
“Obviously, if you’re going to make allegations of election misconduct and fraud and inadvertent mistakes like not counting ballots, you’re going to have to have proof of that. But I don’t begrudge the president or any candidate from seeing that all lawful votes are counted and that votes that did not comply with the law are not counted,” he told reporters.
The Trump campaign held a press conference to provide an update on a number of lawsuits they’ve filed in battleground states across the country that went for President-elect Joe Biden. The campaign claims to have affidavits to back up its allegations of voter fraud and irregularities, although none have shown evidence of a widespread conspiracy that Rudy Giuliani, the leader of the legal team, and the others have claimed.
The campaign repeatedly took shots at the media for saying that its allegations were unsubstantiated or uncorroborated, arguing that the campaign has yet to lay out its case fully and won’t do so until the legal team is in the courtroom. Powell, who said Trump would have won by a “landslide” if not for fraud, claimed that electric voting firms have the capability to change the results secretly.
