Clinton Joining Recount Gets Sore Loser Jibe From Team Trump
Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer announced plans to participate in vote recounts of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan if they take place, drawing a sharp response from Donald Trump’s team that the Democrat is being a “sore loser.”
If Green Party candidate Jill Stein initiates recounts in those states as she intends, the Clinton campaign “will participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” lawyer Marc Elias said Saturday in a post on the blogging website Medium.com. He added that he doesn’t expect the action to overturn Donald Trump’s election as president.
The move prompted a rejoinder from Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, now a senior adviser to the president-elect.
“What a pack of sore losers,” Conway said in a statement to Bloomberg. “After asking Mr. Trump and his team a million times on the trail, ‘Will HE accept the election results?’ it turns out Team Hillary and their new BFF Jill Stein can’t accept reality.”
“Rather than adhere to the tradition of graciously conceding and wishing the winner well, they’ve opted to waste millions of dollars and dismiss the democratic process. The people have spoken. Time to listen up. #YesYourPresident,” Conway said.
Stein says on her website that she’s raised more than $5.7 million for her recount effort so far, with a $7 million goal. The funds raised so far will cover costs in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
No ‘Actionable’ Evidence
The Democrat’s campaign didn’t plan to initiate the recounts on its own because it hasn’t found “any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology,” Elias wrote.
A senior administration official, meanwhile, said in a statement that the government didn’t observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting the election on election day and believes the elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.
Elias also isn’t expecting the recounts to erase what he said was a 107,000 combined vote margin separating the candidates in the three battleground states and overturning the election of Trump, who is due to be sworn in as president in January.
Obligation to Voters
Cook Political Report shows Clinton ahead in the nationwide popular vote by about 2.2 million votes, 64.6 million to 62.4 million. In 13 swing states Trump received almost 22.2 million votes to Clinton’s 21.3 million. He won the Electoral College by 306 to Clinton’s 232.
