[ad_1]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More prominent Republicans joined the call on Monday for President Donald Trump to end efforts to reverse his electoral defeat and allow President-elect Joe Biden to begin the formal transition to a new administration.
Twenty days after Election Day, most members of Trump’s party on Monday were still refusing to refer to Biden as president-elect, or questioning Trump’s insistence, without evidence, that he had only lost on November 3. due to fraud.
Trump’s legal team has suffered a series of court defeats in their bid to prevent states from certifying Biden as the winner of the presidential election, and legal experts say the remaining cases do not give Trump a viable path to overturn. the election results.
Republican Sen. Shelly Moore Capito, who represents West Virginia, a state that overwhelmingly backed Trump, issued a statement saying there was no indication that the election irregularities were widespread enough to cast doubt on Biden’s victory.
Republican Sen. Rob Portman, a co-chair of Trump’s Ohio campaign who rarely breaks with party leaders, said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud and called for the transition to begin.
“Now is the time to quickly resolve any outstanding questions and move on,” Portman wrote in an opinion column for the Cincinnati Enquirer on Monday.
However, Portman did not refer to Biden as “president-elect” and referred to his becoming the next president as a “likely event.” Capito also did not refer to Biden as president-elect.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who charts a more independent course and has acknowledged Biden’s victory, said late Sunday that it was time to begin the full transition process. He denounced the efforts of some Trump supporters to overturn election results in some states as “not only unprecedented but incompatible with our democratic process.”
Calls for Trump to accept defeat have been loudest outside of Washington, including from some of his staunchest supporters, including former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who called Trump’s behavior “a national disgrace” in an interview on ABC.
And more than 100 former Republican national security officials released a letter Monday asking party leaders to denounce Trump’s refusal to concede, calling it a dangerous attack on democracy and national security. [L1N2I901Q]
(Information from Patricia Zengerle, additional information from Richard Cowan; edited by Scott Malone and Cynthia Osterman)
[ad_2]
