Donald Trump slams Supreme Court for refusing to overturn election, as thousands protest
- Trump, who faces certain Electoral College defeat, also lashed out at Attorney General Bill Barr as he headed to the annual Army-Navy college football game
- Four people were stabbed and one shot at rallies held across the country backing his claims of electoral fraud
He repeated his claims about election fraud and blasted the top court for rejecting the long-shot Texas lawsuit that effectively sought to hand the election to him.
“The Supreme Court had ZERO interest in the merits of the greatest voter fraud ever perpetrated on the United States of America,” Trump tweeted.
Trump issued the tirade before jetting to West Point military academy in New York to watch the annual Army-Navy college football game. His Marine One helicopter flew over thousands of cheering supporters who had returned to Washington on Saturday for rallies to back his efforts to subvert his election loss.
The top court ruled Texas had no standing to object to the voting procedures in four other states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden.
Almost all states with Republican attorneys general lined up behind the Trump-backed suit.
Trump now faces certain defeat when the Electoral College meets on Monday to certify Biden’s 306 electoral votes. The president-elect beat Trump by nearly 7 million votes, although the margin was tight in several decisive swing states.
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The president also ramped up his feud with his own Attorney General Bill Barr, once considered one of his most loyal lieutenants.
Barr has said investigators have seen no evidence of widespread fraud, directly contradicting Trump’s drumbeat of wild claims that his own lawyers have failed to present in courts.
Trump is now raging over reports that Barr knew months ago about the federal tax investigation into Biden’s son, Hunter. Trump claims he could have won the presidential race if the inquiry had been publicly disclosed.
“Why didn’t Bill Barr reveal the truth before the election?” Trump wrote on Twitter, retweeting a call for Barr’s ousting.
Department of Justice rules generally prohibit the disclosure of information about investigations that could affect the election.
Trump also unleashed anger at some Republicans who have been less than enthusiastic backers of his effort to overturn the election results.
He called Governor Brian Kemp (Republican, Georgia) and Governor Doug Ducey (Republican, Arizona) “Republicans in name only” because they failed to deliver their states to him in the November vote. Biden narrowly won both traditionally GOP states.
“Vote them out of office!” Trump railed.
Some Republicans are especially concerned about Trump’s attacks on Kemp because the party faces a pair of tricky run-off elections in Georgia with control of the US Senate at stake.
In Washington on Saturday, the gatherings of mostly unmasked Trump loyalists were intended as a show of force ahead of the Electoral College meeting to formally elect Biden as the 46th president. Trump, whose term will end on January 20, refuses to concede, while clinging to baseless claims of fraud that have been rejected by state and federal courts, and Friday by the Supreme Court.
Trump tweeted his apparent surprise on Saturday morning at the rallies, publicly known for weeks: “Wow! Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal. Didn’t know about this, but I’ll be seeing them! #MAGA”
Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser recently pardoned by Trump, was speaking from the stage at the time that Marine One flew overhead.
“That’s pretty cool. Imagine just being able to jump in a helicopter and just go for a joyride around Washington,” said Flynn, whose pardon wiped away his conviction for lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation.
At a pro-Trump demonstration in Washington a month ago, Trump thrilled supporters when he passed by in his motorcade en route to his Virginia golf club. That demonstration, which drew 10,000 to 15,000 people to the capital, ended with scattered clashes between Trump’s loyalists and local activists near Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House.
On Saturday, police took steps to keep the two sides apart, closing a wide swathe of downtown to traffic and sealing off Black Lives Matter Plaza.
But while Saturday’s rallies, including one on Freedom Plaza downtown, were smaller than on November 14, they drew a larger contingent of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group known to incite street violence. Some wore bulletproof vests as they marched through town.
The group saw its profile raised after Trump in September famously told them to “stand back and stand by”.
After the rallies ended, downtown Washington quickly devolved into crowds of hundreds of Proud Boys and combined forces of antifa and local black activists – both sides seeking a confrontation in an area flooded with police officers. As dusk fell, they faced off on opposite sides of a street, with multiple lines of city police and federal Park Police, some in riot gear, keeping them separated.
One Proud Boy yelled out, “You cops can’t be everywhere!” The Proud Boys later dispersed.
Antifa activists also were more organised this time, with their own bicycle corps to form bike walls to match those of the police.
Across the US, four people were stabbed and one shot as rallies backing Trump’s claims of election fraud led to clashes, in many places between rally-goers and counterprotesters who turned up to criticise the president.
Washington state police said in a tweet late on Saturday that a shooting had taken place after clashes near the capitol building in Olympia, and that a suspect had been detained.
In the US capital, officials said four people had been stabbed and were now hospitalised “with serious injuries”, amid reports that 23 had been arrested throughout the day.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
