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Murphy: “It’s incredibly disturbing and chilling.”
First Ukraine. Now Georgia.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy made that connection during a stop in New Haven Monday, as he called out President Donald Trump for repeating a form of illegal election-related bullying that got him impeached, this time much closer to home.
Murphy offered that take at the end of a half-hour press conference about Yale New Haven Hospital’s Covid-19 vaccine distribution progress. The conference was held inside a Park Street medical building.
Murphy was asked for his thoughts on the Washington Post’s story and an accompanying leaked audio recording that detail Trump’s attempts to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” him over 11,000 votes that would swing the state’s electoral votes towards the incumbent president.
“It’s incredibly disturbing and chilling,” Murphy responded.
“The president is actively engaged in trying to overturn the election,” he continued. “He is using the White House to try to bully election officials to find him additional votes, and he’s threatening criminal liability to those officials if they don’t abide.”
The Connecticut senator was asked how this latest breaking news story compares to Trump’s conversation with Ukraine’s president in the summer of 2019, during which the president threatened to withhold military aid if the foreign government did not investigate his Democratic rival in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden. That conversation ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives, and subsequent acquittal by the U.S. Senate on a near-party line vote.
“They’re very different conversations in terms of subject,” Murphy said Monday. “One of the reasons I supported impeachment was my belief that by endorsing the president’s use of the Oval Office to try to get a foreign country to interfere in an American election, we were incentivizing him to do more of that. This is what he’s doing now. He’s using the Oval Office to try to bully the Georgia Secretary of State to find him 11,000 votes.”
Murphy said it is “extraordinary” that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sat in on the Georgia phone call and appeared to endorse Trump’s behavior and demands.
“He is unapologetically using the White House, the Oval Office to try to win an election,” the senator said about the president. “That is not allowed under federal law.”
He said he supported impeachment based on the Ukraine affair because he wanted to “send a signal to any president that you cannot use the White House to try to win an election.”
Murphy was also asked for what he would say to his Republican colleagues who are planning on voting against the certification of Biden’s Electoral College win during a special joint session of Congress slated for Wednesday.
His response: “There is a huge cost to democracy of normalizing this effort to throw out the voters’ intent. It’s not going to succeed this year. But at some point down the line, it will succeed.”
He said he worries that only “hard-line partisans, QAnon supporters” are going to run to become election officials on the Republican ticket, because “straight-shooters” will be scared away by a bullying president. And these hard-liners, he said, will never accept the electoral victory by a Democrat as legitimate.
“That will lead to an election being overturned. That will lead to democracy being destroyed. Not in 2020, but maybe in 2022.”
Murphy’s comments come a day after both of Connecticut’s U.S. senators took to Twitter on Sunday to denounce Trump’s behavior as described in the Post story.
Following are tweets from Murphy and fellow Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal about the latest efforts to overturn the election result.
Click on the Facebook Live video above to watch Murphy’s comments on Monday. He starts responding to Georgia-related questions at the 19:38 mark.
This is an audiotape of the President threatening criminal charges against an election official unless he “recalculates” the vote to “find 11,780” votes. And hundreds of Republicans in Congress (a dozen in the Senate) are cheering him on.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 3, 2021
Revolting. https://t.co/cLDrf3vHoC
It’s not just that Trump’s Overturn the Election backers in Congress are empowering this particular behavior.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 3, 2021
Their endorsement of this destruction of democracy guarantees it will happen again. They are normalizing all this (at least within the GOP). https://t.co/cLDrf3vHoC
I remember how scary the 2020 State of the Union speech felt. The maniacal euphoria for Trump from House Republicans was cult like. I had never seen it before in person. So it’s not shocking to me that these folks are willing to burn down democracy and the Constitution for him.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 3, 2021
This pathetic, opportunistic stunt is an attack on our democracy. It’s un-American & unconscionable. Votes have been counted, recounted, certified, & all challenges totally discredited. Time to govern & get things done. https://t.co/PVvK0A1n01
— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) January 2, 2021