Legal challenges and hand counting of ballots are daily occurrences in Michigan, and the head of an anti-Hillary Clinton political action committee says the former Democratic nominee is deeply involved in an effort to give the perception Donald Trump’s victory is illegitimate while Green Party candidate Jill Stein is just in this for herself.
The courts have been back and forth on the issue. After Stein pressed the issue in court, federal judge Mark Goldsmith ordered the recount to begin on Monday, despite Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette trying to stop the process. The state is arguing that since Stein has no chance of winning she has no standing to make the request.
On Tuesday, the Michigan Court of Appeals agreed with Schuette and ordered to recount to be stopped. However, a three-judge panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the recount ought to continue. The various parties were arguing the case again before Goldsmith on Wednesday morning.
After all 83 Michigan counties certified their vote totals last month, the Michigan Board of Canvassers declared the winner of the state’s 16 electoral votes by a 10,704 vote margin. Stein successfully triggered a recount in neighboring Wisconsin, where Trump leads by roughly 22,000 votes, and Pennsylvania, where the margin is more than twice the spread in Wisconsin.
The Committee to Defend the President is also wading into the legal waters. Formerly known as the Stop Hillary PAC, the group says this recount drama is nothing more than an expensive circus.
“I think it is a waste of taxpayers’ money first and foremost. The taxpayers in these three states are going to have to pick up the tab for these recounts,” said Committee to Defend the President Chairman Ted Harvey.
“The recounts will achieve nothing. Jill Stein received one percent of the vote in these states. There is no way that she can get the votes necessary to overcome Trump’s victory and I don’t believe she has any standing in these states to file lawsuits to do a recount because of that,” said Harvey.
He says Stein’s true motives are fairly obvious.
“She is simply doing this to raise money for her organization, to raise her profile as an individual and to raise the profile of the Green Party,” said Harvey.
The Clinton campaign is officially joining Stein in it’s stated cause of ensuring the vote was not subject to hacking, error, or fraud. However, the Clinton team has publicly stated it doesn’t expect any changes in the results.
Harvey doesn’t believe Clinton is just a silent bystander in all of this. He sees the former secretary of state as a raging hypocrite.
“After the (final) debate, she stood up in speech after speech after speech and said Donald Trump is attacking democracy by questioning the election. That was easy for her to say when she thought she was going to win. Now that she is losing, her fingerprints are all over this recount,” said Harvey, who also has scathing reviews for how the media is covering this.
“I think it’s typical of the agenda of the left-wing media, which is all of the CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC in this country. They are run by leftists and they have an agenda,” said Harvey.
He says the media roundly mocked Trump for suggesting voting irregularities could be a factor in the election but they are only too eager to treat Stein and Clinton’s challenge as serious news.
On the contrary, he says there are plenty of examples of truly concerning issues across the country, including in his home state of Colorado.
“Here in Colorado, they passed legislation to allow for same-day voter registration without proof of voter ID. When it was brought up that this was only going to lead to massive voter fraud, they laughed at it and they pushed it through. Now here we are with an election that they lose and they’re coming before the American people and the press and they’re claiming voter fraud. It’s just hypocrisy left and right,” said Harvey.
Harvey says the media has been toeing the liberal narrative since the moment Trump won the election.
“You saw what happened the day after the election when you had ‘spontaneous’ rallies around the country protesting Donald Trump’s election. That didn’t just happen overnight. That was organized by (George) Soros and the Clinton campaign to rally young people around the country to protest. The media gobbled that up and ran with that hour after hour after hour,” said Harvey.
He says the media then jumped to new stories when the protesting became stale, namely an obsession with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote and then treating the recounts as legitimate.
Harvey believes all these different tactics have the same long-term goal.
“Their whole agenda is to discredit Donald Trump and discredit his duly legal election. I think they will continue to do this for the next four years to say that everything that he is going to do as president is not legitimate,” said Harvey.
