Schiff’s remarks come days after President Joe Biden said he didn’t know whether the upcoming election would be “peaceful.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., on Sunday echoed President Joe Biden’s remarks last week that the upcoming election would be “free and fair,” but maybe not “peaceful.”
“If it is close, if [former President] Donald Trump loses again, as I expect that he will, he will contest it,” Schiff told moderator Kristen Welker on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “He has more reason to contest it than he did before, not because of any flaw in the election, but because Donald Trump believes, and perhaps with reason, that if he doesn’t succeed at the ballot box, he may be going to jail. So he’s going to challenge the results.”
His comments follow remarks from Biden at the White House press briefing room on Friday, in which the president told reporters he was confident that the upcoming election “will be free and fair” but didn’t know “whether it will be peaceful.”
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Frankly, I hope Biden and Schiff are deliberately downplaying the problem to assuage the public and encourage voting, because if they genuinely believe what they say then they don’t fully grasp the magnitude of MAGA’s attack on the elections system.
In reality, the best you could optimistically say is that the voting itself will be mostly free and fair, aside from all the voter suppression, voter intimidation, and tactics like allocating too few voting booths to increase wait times and then criminalizing handing out water to people waiting in line. The rest of the election process – the counting and certification of the votes – is unlikely to be free and fair at all in places like Georgia and Arizona, and that’s even before we get into all of Trump’s bullshit lawsuits challenging the results and trying to get a SCOTUS coronation.