Senator Chuck Grassley (file photo)
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says he has no complaints about the actions fellow Republican President Donald Trump is taking since the election.
The president refuses to cooperate with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team and is blocking Biden from getting national security briefings. Grassley notes how Trump has filed multiple legal challenges in multiple states, claiming widespread voter fraud.
“It’s all within what would be appropriate under the laws,” Grassley says, “to make sure that everything is done according to the law and the right votes have been counted and everything.” While Biden is the projected winner, leading the popular vote by more than five-million votes, Grassley says there’s plenty of time between now and when members of the Electoral College meet on December 14th.
“President Trump is well within his rights to ask the courts to review certain election disputes just as candidates have done before,” Grassley says. “We’ve even got a race in Iowa that people could say would still be in question and it hasn’t been certified yet.”
That’s a reference to Iowa’s Second Congressional District race where Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks leads Democrat Rita Hart by 47 votes. Hart’s requested a full recount in all 24 counties. Grassley says Trump has questions about how the presidential election was handled and he’s entitled to answers, as is everyone else.
“For the sake of confidence in the system, you’d want to make sure that everybody, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat candidate for president or any other office, you want to make sure they were actually the ones elected,” Grassley says, “and we’ll soon know that.”
Grassley recalls how he was “sitting on pins and needles” in December of 2000 until Democrat Al Gore conceded to Republican George W. Bush after weeks of legal wrangling.