DNI Ratcliffe Says Election ‘Issues’ Must Be Resolved Before Winner
Declared Tyler Durden
Mon, 12/07/2020 – 17:00
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
The top U.S. intelligence official suggested on Sunday
that�election lawsuits
and other issues need to be resolved first before the winner of the
Nov. 3 presidential election is declared.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox
Business that issues brought up by President Donald Trump’s legal
team have to be heard in court.
“These election issues, we’ll see who is in what
seats and whether there is a Biden administration,†he
told the broadcaster.
Ratcliffe said that due to the unprecedented expansion of
mail-in voting, many questions remain about the results.
“Essentially we had universal mail-in balloting across this
country in a way we hadn’t seen before, and to that point,
almost 73 percent of the American people this year voted
before Election Day, a good percentage of those by
mail,†he said.“That’s about an 80 percent increase over anything
we’ve ever seen before, so it’s little wonder that we see
what’s happening around the country as a result of that,
with mail-in balloting and all of the questions—and the questions
that are being raised in lawsuits and by everyday Americans about
what happened in the election,†Ratcliffe said.
In the interview Sunday, Ratcliffe made note of allegations that
were brought up in recent days, including a truck driver who
claimed to have transported hundreds of thousands of apparently
completed mail-in ballots from a town in Long Island, New York, to
Pennsylvania. He also referred to recent footage obtained by
Trump’s team that shows election workers pulling out black,
suitcase-like ballot containers from beneath a table after poll
observers and other election workers were apparently told to go
home for the night at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
“But people need to understand that’s different than
election fraud issues—things like postal drivers saying they took
200,000-plus ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. Tens of
thousands of ballots supposedly mailed in, but no folds or creases
in them. More votes than ballots issued in places,†the
intelligence chief said.“People pulling out suitcases and video evidence of that with
questionable explanations for that. Those are issues of
election fraud that need to be investigated and there’s a lot of
them and it’s not just one person or one group of
people. It’s across the country.â€
Georgia election officials said the video showing containers
being pulled from the table is not unusual, while Trump’s team
said it is evidence of fraud. Officials in Fulton County, Georgia,
and election officials have provided conflicting accounts of what
happened on the night of Nov. 3, with one Fulton County
spokesperson, Regina Waller, telling ABC
News and other outlets at 11:30 p.m. on Election Night that vote
counting was done for the night.
Later that week, other Fulton County officials confirmed that
counting had continued for several hours longer. Georgia’s
Republican Party chief, David Shafer, has said that poll observers
were not present during this time period.
As a result, Ratcliffe said numerous Americans don’t
believe “the votes were counted fairly, that the processes at the
state and local level weren’t administered
fairly.â€