Pennsylvania Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman said this week that he plans to kick off hearings on the results of the 2020 presidential election as part of his effort to conduct a full forensic audit.
“We’re going to have some hearings this week to start the process,” Corman said during an interview with conservative radio host Wendy Bell. “We can bring people in, we can put them under oath, right, we can subpoena records, and that’s what we need to do, that’s what we’re going to do.”
Corman said he has run into opposition from other state Republicans who do not believe Pennsylvania’s presidential election was affected by vote fraud.
“I don’t necessarily have faith in the results,” Corman said. “I think there were many problems in our election that we need to get to the bottom of.”
Regardless of the circumstances, he noted that the end outcome was President Joe Biden being certified the winner in the state by roughly 80,000 votes.
“Now the Senate doesn’t have the authority to change those results,” he said. “What we have the authority to do is go in and review those results.”
Even if Biden did legitimately win the state of Pennsylvania, there are tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians who no longer trust the state’s election system, Corman added.
“Clearly, a lot of shenanigans, a lot of things went on in Pennsylvania that were not right, and clearly the people of Pennsylvania do not have confidence in the results, and that is a problem,” he said.
Corman also said he has been in contact with former President Donald Trump, even though Trump recently blasted Corman for opposing a forensic audit in the state and “fighting as though he were a Radical Left Democrat.”
Several other Republicans have been critical of Corman, who they believe is attempting to hijack their election audit in order to stonewall it.
They pointed to Corman’s recent decision to reassign state Sen. Doug Mastriano’s staff after Mastriano began to push for an election audit similar to the one Arizona Republicans were conducting in Maricopa County.
Corman also ousted Mastriano as the head of state Republicans’ effort to review the 2020 election results and replaced him with state Sen. Cris Dush.
Mastriano, Trump’s closest ally in the state, accused “the powers that be”—an apparent reference to Corman—of undermining his election investigation.
Corman, however, claimed he got rid of Mastriano because he was more interested in grandstanding than in conducting a true investigation.
“Despite this setback, we remain committed to conducting a full investigatory audit of recent elections to improve our election system going forward,” Corman said in a statement. “We need someone to lead this effort who is more interested in real results than grandstanding at rallies.”
Corman said he has not launched a full-fledged audit yet because he wants to make sure state Republicans are in a position to fight off any legal challenges, like Arizona’s Republican Senate was able to do.
Pennsylvania’s Democrat Attorney General Josh Shapiro has threatened to fight the effort and instructed the counties that were subpoenaed by the state legislature not to comply.
“We’ve already had people threatening to shut us down legally. We have a Democrat Supreme Court that is just dying to shut us down,” Corman told Bell. “We have to make sure legally we’re in the right spot so we can absorb a challenge.”
