Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-NY, has had visions of remaking America dancing in his head as he hopes gobs of outside money, influence and other Democrat election assurances will deliver two Senate runoff routs in Georgia to hand him the majority.
But his glee came crashing down on Wednesday when Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he would be initiating a new probe into vote fraud during the Nov. 3 election.
“This has gone beyond ridiculous,” Schumer ranted on the Senate floor.
“No court in this country has found any of President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud credible,” he falsely claimed. “No serious state election official—Democrat and Republican—has found them credible. Even the Trump Administration’s Justice Department, so browbeaten into political activities over the past four years, has not found a scrap of evidence that would affect the final result.”
Although some court cases have been tossed on technicalities, such as claims that the plaintiffs waited too long or lacked proper standing to press them, the US Supreme Court is among those currently slated to weigh the merits of evidence.
Schumer acknowledged—perhaps tipping his hand to the source of his own insecurities—that 17 Republican attorneys general were supporting the effort and planned to meet with President Donald Trump.
At least five legislatures in key battleground states had also convened panels to hear and consider the evidence uprooted by Trump’s own legal team and other independent election-integrity watchdogs.
Schumer likewise mischaracterized comments made by Attorney General William Barr that indicated the DOJ had not—in its own investigations—uncovered evidence that would be sufficient to overturn the election.
However, Barr did not indicate how aggressively the department had been pursuing leads. Rather, he lamented in his remarks the weaponization of the DOJ for political ends, much as Schumer sought to do in his deceptive statement.
He subsequently qualified his comments, saying the department’s lack of sufficient evidence to pursue legal action should not be construed to mean the vote fraud did not occur.
“And yet, rather than accept the simple truth that Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States, there are actually sitting Senators and Congress members who would prefer to undermine our democracy by indulging President Trump’s wild conspiracy theories about a stolen election,” Schumer continued.
The rhetoric marked a dramatic shift in tone from before the election, when powerful Democrat operatives were attempting to prepare the public for a drawn-out contest fraught with legal challenges from left-wing lawyers and activist groups.
Although anarchist groups like Antifa and the pro-Marxist Black Lives Matter have continued to engage in violent rioting in parts of the country, Democrats have downplayed that civil unrest while insisting that Trump’s commitment to seeing through the democratic process was “dangerous.”
It is unclear why Democrats do not themselves seem concerned by the strong evidence of fraud in both mail-in voting and rigged electronic voting machines that threatened to, at best, cast aspersions on a Biden presidency if left unresolved, deepening the partisan divisions in the country.
But Johnson has been one of the Senate’s most unflappable guardians of democracy, even as Schumer and others falsely smeared him with claims that he had colluded with Russia to spread disinformation.
Johnson said he had scheduled a hearing for Wednesday, Dec. 16 on the topic “Examining Irregularities in the 2020 election” and would soon be announcing the list of witnesses.
“I am mindful that many of the issues that have been raised have been, and will continue to be, appropriately resolved in the courts,” he said in a statement.
“But the fact remains that a large percentage of the American public does not view the 2020 election result as legitimate because of apparent irregularities that have not been fully examined,” he continued. “That is not a sustainable state of affairs for our country. The only way to resolve suspicions is with full transparency and public awareness. That will be the goal of the hearing.”
Schumer’s attack likely offered a sneak preview of the level of support he could expect from committee Democrats.
Johnson conducted a similar hearing last week to address issues of corruption within the media and intelligence community that might have resulted in political interference during the 2016 and 2020 elections.
However, only one committee Democrat, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, made the effort to be present for the hearing, and he later dropped off the teleconference link while the testimony was still in progress.
