Two weeks after pissing off a crowd of Trump supporters with allegations of electoral fraud before the January 6 Capitol rebellion, Republican MP Madison Cawthorn tried to rehabilitate his position in the presidential election on Saturday night – just to get his point across. collapsing in a spectacular way.
Pressed by CNN’s Pamela Brown to explain what evidence motivated him to challenge the election results in the first place, Cawthorn visibly struggled to put together a coherent argument.
“The things I was not opposing the election for in name were things like the Dominion voting machines exchanging ballots or these U-Haul trucks arriving full of ballots for Joe Biden as president. What I was objecting to is things like, as I said in the state of Wisconsin, particularly in the city of Madison … there was an official named in that city who actually went against the wishes of the state legislature and created ballot boxes, which is basically the harvest of votes that was happening in the parks, ”he said.
After Brown noticed that everything mentioned by Cawthorn had already been litigated in court and tried by Trump-appointed judges, the 25-year-old turned to a vague murmur.
“In fact, I believe specifically … and this is the one that I debated on behalf of the House floor … in Wisconsin that was never heard because they rejected him for standing up. Now, I don’t believe it is a concrete enough way … to reject it, ”he said.
Asked to give specific examples of fraud, Cawthorn found himself in a corner.
“As I said, that’s not why you contested the election,” he said, just going deeper.
“So, you wanted to throw away millions of votes without really seeing any concrete evidence of fraud?” Brown asked. “Because this is what you were doing when you were running for election.”
After briefly squirming in silence, Cawthorn replied, “I disagree with you on that point”, and insisted that he had only contested the election to “hinder the Constitution”.
Bizarrely, after Brown pointed out that North Carolina’s Cawthorn state itself also changed election laws in connection with the coronavirus pandemic – something that the Republican Party representative discussed in Wisconsin – he admitted that he did not know about the laws in his home state.
“In fact, I am not aware of the laws that have been changed within North Carolina. I believe that we had a very safe election here, ”he said.
While Cawthorn joined other Republicans in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s victory before and after the deadly riots on January 6, and even praised Trump supporters gathered on the Capitol that day for the “struggle” they had to stop “All the frauds ”in the election, at the end of Saturday night’s interview, his entire narrative collapsed around him.
“Yes, I think I would say the election was not fraudulent,” he told Brown. “The Constitution allowed us to step back as far as we could and I did it within the constitutional limits I had at my disposal, so now I would say that Joseph R. Biden is our president.”