President Donald Trump engaged in what could best be described as a lengthy airing of grievances on Sunday morning, venting to sycophantic Fox News host Maria Bartiromo during his first post-election television interview while baselessly suggesting his own FBI and Department of Justice were “involved” with a “rigged” election against him.
Since decisively losing the election to President-elect Joe Biden earlier this month, the president has been holed up inside the White House tweeting unhinged conspiracies about widespread voter fraud while his “elite strike force” legal team has had its attempts to overthrow the election repeatedly laughed out of court.
With Team Trump suffering another series of humiliating defeats as their Pennsylvania appeal was denied by an all-Republican federal judge panel and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected a Republican lawsuit to declare mail-in ballots unconstitutional, Trump called into Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures to rant and rave about how the election was “stolen” from him.
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Bartiromo, who has loudly boosted the president’s false voter fraud conspiracies since the election, essentially handed over her hour-long show to the president, giving him a free platform to at times incoherently ramble and repeat lies and falsehoods uncontested. Much of Trump’s focus was on the unfounded claim that Dominion Election Systems—which was used in some key swing states and counties—had used corrupt software to flip millions of Trump votes to Biden.
“We have affidavits from many people talking about what went on with the machines they had glitches,” Trump fumed early on, baselessly claiming they had already “caught” the machines moving thousands of votes from “my account to Biden’s account.”
He also took issue with large cities and counties in Rust Belt states voting heavily for Biden via mail-in ballots, grousing about the huge tranches of Biden votes that were reported late on Election Night and later in the week.
“This election was over and then they did dumps, they call them dumps, big massive dumps in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and all over,” he exclaimed. “If you take a look at you just take a look at just about every state that we're talking about every swing state that we're talking about, and they did these massive dumps of votes and all of a sudden, I went from winning by a lot to losing by a little, and in some cases, it took a period of time to do it.”
Throughout the segment, the president would repeatedly swing himself back to a handful of comfortable talking points, such as his belief that “Joe Biden did not get 16 million more votes than Barack Hussein Obama” due to a grand conspiracy to destroy him.
“We won the election easily! There’s no way Joe Biden got 80 million votes. There’s no way Joe Biden beat Barack Obama in the Black communities of various cities,” Trump grumbled. “This election was a fraud. It was a rigged election!”
“This is disgusting!” Bartiromo agreed wholeheartedly. “And we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted.”
The president then went on to claim that his Justice Department could be “involved” in this made-up plot to steal the election from him.
“This is total fraud, and how the FBI and Department of Justice, I don’t know, maybe they’ve involved but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable,” he shouted. “This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud!”
The Fox host also wanted to know where the FBI and DOJ were in terms of investigating the president’s “serious charges” about Dominion, prompting the president to grouse that they are “missing in action” while suggesting they are part of the conspiracy against him.
“So you’re asking a question. These people have been there a long time and I know FBI and the FBI is great at the levels that we talked about, but it’s inconceivable,” he seethed. “You would think if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is the biggest thing you could be looking at. Where are they? I’ve not seen anything.”
The president also repeatedly invoked former FBI Director James Comey, a favorite “deep state” target of his, while complaining that the much-hyped Durham Report that he hoped would prove his Spygate allegations about the Obama administration never materialized.
“People don’t understand this, they’ve been there for a long time,” he huffed. “Some have served a lot of different presidents, and they have their own views. All I can say is I haven’t heard, with all of the fraud that’s taken place, nobody has come to me and said, ‘Oh, the FBI has nabbed, you know, the people that are doing this game.’”
“The FBI is looking at Dominion, which nobody even knows where they’re based, which nobody even knows where the votes are counted,” Trump continued. “You know the votes and Dominion, they say, are counted in foreign countries, okay? Can you believe this? Now, Dominion is also based in a number of foreign countries one of them is Canada and Canada refuses to use Dominion and they’re based there.”
The president apparently suggesting that the FBI is covering for Dominion is similar to his one-time lawyer Sidney Powell’s baseless allegations that the CIA is involved in a supposed vote-rigging scheme, which she also alleges included dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, liberal philanthropist George Soros, and Chinese communist money.
While Powell was dropped from the Trump legal team for not providing any evidence to back up her claims and accusing Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp of accepting bribes from Dominion, Trump took aim at Kemp for certifying the results of the Georgia election for Biden.
“The governor’s done nothing. He’s done absolutely nothing. I’m ashamed that I endorsed him,” the president whined.
And when Trump wasn’t blaming other Republicans or his own intelligence community for not finding a way to subvert the will of the people and keep him in the White House, he was tossing bombs at the court system.
“From what everybody is saying—and I don’t even think we have to prove this—they say that I was doing so much better than they thought, that they panicked, and they started just doing ballot after ballot very quickly and just checking the Biden name on top,” he muttered.
“We have stories that are unbelievable, but we’re not allowed to put in our proof. They say you don’t have standing. I said I’d like to file to the lawyers. I would like to file one nice big beautiful lawsuit,” Trump added. “They say, ‘Sir, you don’t have standing.’ I say, ‘I don’t have standing you mean as president of the United States, I don’t have standing?’ What kind of a court system is this? And the judges stay away from it.”
