White House press secretary Jen Psaki finally acknowledged Thursday that the outcome of November’s midterm election would be on the up and up, even if sweeping election reform measures pushed by Democrats do not pass Congress before then.
“If there are no changes in terms of voting rights legislation going forward, the president does still feel confident that the elections this fall will be protected?” NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander asked Psaki during her regular briefing.
“Yes,” she replied.
The response represented a further cleanup by Psaki of President Biden’s comments in a Wednesday news conference in which the president questioned the integrity of this year’s votes if the legislation was not approved.
“I think it easily could be — be illegitimate,” Biden said, later adding: “I’m not going to say it’s going to be legit. It’s — the increase and the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these — these reforms passed.”
Hours later, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act died in the Senate after Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema voted to uphold the chamber’s 60-vote legislative filibuster rule.
Alexander confronted Psaki with Biden’s words at Thursday’s briefing and asked: “Does the president believe, if all remains as it is right now, that the elections this fall will be legitimate?”
“Yes,” Psaki began, “but the point he was making is that as recently as 2020, as we know, the former president was trying to work with local officials to overturn the vote count and not have ballots counted.
“And we have to be very eyes-wide-open about that and clear-eyed that that is the intention, potentially of him and certainly members of his party,” the press secretary added.
Earlier Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris had been asked about Biden’s remarks during an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.
“Is he really concerned that we may not have fair and free elections?” asked host Savannah Guthrie.
“The president has been consistent on this issue,” Harris responded.
“Does he think, now that these bills haven’t been passed, that the ’22 midterms won’t be legitimate, or fair, or free?” Guthrie later pressed.
“Let’s not conflate issues,” Harris dodged. “So what we’re looking at and the topic of so much debate last night was that we as America cannot afford to allow this blatant erosion of our democracy and in particular, the right of all Americans who are eligible to vote, to have access to the ballot unfettered.”
At the same time Harris appeared on morning TV, Psaki was posting damage control on Twitter.
“Lets be clear: @potus was not casting doubt on the legitimacy of the 2022 election. He was making the opposite point: In 2020, a record number of voters turned out in the face of a pandemic, and election officials made sure they could vote and have those votes counted,” she said.
“He was explaining that the results would be illegitimate if states do what the former president asked them to do after the 2020 election: toss out ballots and overturn results after the fact. The Big Lie is putting our democracy at risk. We’re fighting to protect it,” she added.
Also Thursday, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga. asked a judge to impanel a special grand jury to investigate “possible criminal disruptions” in the state’s 2020 presidential election.
District Attorney Fani Willis — a Democrat — opened an investigation last spring into “attempts to influence” the election, including a phone call Trump made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 asking him to find enough votes to overturn President Biden’s win in Georgia.
“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said in the recorded call. “Because we won the state.”
