by Paul Bedard
Indiana Sen. Mike Braun takes pride in visiting the state’s 92 counties and keeping in touch with the business community, even during the coronavirus crisis.
During the Thanksgiving Day break, he kept up his meetings, asking what he could do to help. But no matter what, he said, “the people I’m talking to come right back to election fraud and irregularities, and it’s just heartburn that’s not going away.”
While much of the Washington press corp ignores the growing reports of voting and voter registration irregularities, Braun in an interview with Secrets and op-ed for the Washington Examiner’s opinion section said the half of the nation that supports the president are just getting angrier that little effort is being put into investigating the claims.
“All I can tell you is that there’s a restlessness out there in places like Indiana, and I don’t think it is going to settle down in terms of any type of unification on addressing any issues as long as that lingers,” said the Republican lawmaker.
“I thought there would be maybe people getting over it. I think it’s just as intense now as it was the day after the election,” he said in the interview.
He said that the intensity is driven by the media’s effort to dismiss those who believe the fraud claims as “fringe” and conspiracists, as they did during the Hunter Biden China cash scandal.
And worse, Braun added, it’s the same media that seized on the Russia conspiracy when it appeared it would take Trump down.
“Why is the media doing it? I think that that’s pretty well explained in terms of how aggressive they were to delegitimize Trump’s election, through the Mueller report and impeachment, pushing that so vehemently. And now, dismissing it as they kind of did the Biden-Ukraine stuff as being just conspiracy theory, already been debunked, there’s no evidence and so forth,” he said.
The senator said that states should move quickly to determine if fraud took place, if only to assure Americans that the system is credible.
“We’re not putting some amount of energy and detail into ferreting out some of this stuff as simple as sampling, whether absentee ballot requests in applications match the ones that were sent back. That’d be a simple thing to do, finding out how many mailing ballots were just kind of dumped arbitrarily into addresses that morning, a lot of stuff like that,” he said.
“I think that would really put people with some peace of mind, if there was an effort made other than saying it’s ridiculous,” he added.
With the Electoral College vote coming Dec. 14, Braun said that he hoped a greater scrutiny of the fraud evidence would take place even if there is no conclusion.
“I’m hoping there’s some significance to the efforts that have been made. And if there is not I think you’re going to have the Trump base disgruntled for a long time,” he said.
