President-Elect Trump Responds to Calls for Election Recount

If you didn’t know about her before, Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is determined you will soon.

Even if she’s successful in her effort to push a recount of the 2016 presidential election that she says will reverse the outcome for President-Elect Donald Trump, she will become little more than a footnote in history. But for now, she’s aiming to keep the rancorous division alive in America.

And now, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—the only candidate who could possibly, however unlikely, benefit from Stein’s recount—is joining in. Yes, the same Hillary Clinton who, after Trump said during the third debate he would “wait and see” about the outcome of the election before deciding whether or not he would accept the results on Election Night, had this to say:

That’s not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections and we’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election. President Obama said the other day that when you’re whining before the game is even finished, it just shows you’re not even up to doing the job.

And let’s be clear about what he’s saying and what he means. He’s denigrating—he’s talking down our democracy. I, for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our major two parties would take that kind of position.

It would hardly be the first time Clinton has offered two completely divergent views on an issue relating to the presidential campaign. Then again, Election Night was certainly a roller coaster for the Democratic Party nominee.

The New York Times was reporting Monday morning that Clinton has sent members of her campaign team to “assist” with the recount effort now underway in Wisconsin. It also indicated it would like to see similar recounts take place in Michigan and Pennsylvania, the other two states she would need to flip in order to win the presidency.

The Times does report, however, that the Clinton machine sees “little hope” the outcome will change:

The Clinton campaign held out little hope of success in any of the three states, and said it had seen no “actionable evidence” of vote hacking that might taint the results or otherwise provide new grounds for challenging Donald J. Trump’s victory. But it suggested it was going along with the recount effort to assure supporters that it was doing everything possible to verify that hacking by Russia or other irregularities had not affected the results.

In a post on Medium, Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, said the campaign would take part in the Wisconsin recount being set off by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and would also participate if Ms. Stein made good on her plans to seek recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Clinton lost those three states by a total of little more than 100,000 votes, sealing her Electoral College defeat by Mr. Trump.

Meanwhile, the federal government agrees: there wasn’t any evidence of “hacking the election” by Russia or anyone else. The Times published a statement from an unnamed “senior official” in the Obama Administration that included the following:

The Federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day. As we have noted before, we remained confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out on Election Day. As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.

Republican National Committee Political Director Chris Carr said that while the president-elect has been working to unite Americans, Stein and Clinton would instead “rather continue to bicker and protect the broken Washington status quo.” He said $6 million has been raised so far to fund the recount effort.

“It’s a political ploy by the left to further divide our country, gin up support from their extremist base and threaten President-elect Trump’s mandate,” he wrote to GOP donors. “This recount is nothing but a distraction—and a preview of the lengths to which liberals are willing to go over the next four years to try to stop us.

“But now that the recount is set to take place, we need to be ready to fight back and win, just like we did during the campaign.”

Carr reminded the donors that if Trump had done what Clinton and Stein are now attempting to do, the media would be “eating him alive” right now. Calling the recount effort a “charade,” he said that it proves the left has not yet learned the lesson of the 2016 election.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the president-elect took time to issue the following statement about the recount effort:

The people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, ‘We must accept this result and then look to the future.'”

It is important to point out that with the help of millions of voters across the country, we won 306 electoral votes on Election Day—the most of any Republican since 1988and we carried nine of 13 battleground states, 30 of 50 states and more than 2,600 counties nationwide, the most since President Ronald Reagan in 1984.

This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount. All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes.

This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing. {eoa}