„Don’t listen to my friends,“ the president says, referring to supporters who took his fraud allegations seriously.
For weeks Donald Trump has been insisting that Joe Biden stole the presidential election through a massive fraud that gave the Democratic nominee an edge in several battleground states. Those states include Georgia, where the results certified on Friday gave Biden a lead of about 12,700 votes. Notwithstanding his argument that Georgia’s election system is fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy, Trump wants Republicans there to vote in two runoff elections next month that will decide party control of the Senate. The contradiction between those two messages came to a comical head on Saturday, when the president told his supporters in Georgia to ignore pro-Trump lawyers who have suggested that voting in the January 5 Senate runoffs would be futile. „Friends of mine say we are not going to vote because we are angry about the presidential election,“ Trump said at a rally in Valdosta, Georgia. „Don’t listen to my friends.“ One of the friends to whom Trump referred was L. Lin Wood Jr., an Atlanta attorney who agrees that Trump actually won the election. „Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election?“ Wood asked at a rally last Wednesday. Wood filed an unsuccessful lawsuit that sought to block certification of the election results in Georgia. „Because Georgia has already certified its results, Wood’s requests to delay certification and commence a new recount are moot,“ the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled on Saturday. The court, in a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel, also found that Wood did not have standing to sue, saying „he fails to allege a particularized injury.“ It added that „we may not entertain post-election contests about garden-variety issues of vote counting and misconduct that may properly be filed in state courts.“ The same day that Trump spoke, Wood told Republicans there was no need to participate in the elections that will determine whether Republicans David Perdue, elected in 2014, and Kelly Loeffler, appointed by Gov.
