'That's insane': Panel reams GOP election denier to his face

Former LA congressman Garrett Graves got himself bushwhacked by a panel that included a Republican strategist after he refused to admit that Democratic Georgia Senators were legitimately elected to their seats.

“I mean, congressman, do you think that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were duly elected?” demanded CNN anchor Kasie Hunt after confronting the possibility that Trump may publicly call both senators illegitimate due to bogus claims of election tampering.

But, like the vast majority of the modern Republican Party, Graves was leery of stating what countless judges have already declared, that the elections were legit.

“Um, I haven't gone in and studied the elections, but I haven't. Let me be clear on this: I have not seen—”

At that point the panel attacked.

“That should be an easy answer,” muttered panelist Charles M. Blow.

“There were three — there were paper ballots that were counted three separate times. How can you not say that they didn’t win there?” demanded Democratic strategist Meghan Hays.

“Because I haven't studied the Georgia elections,” Graves blurted.

“You don’t have to study the elections to know,” said Blow, publisher of the Blowstack Newsletter.

“But hang on. Let me let me answer the question that I was asked,” Graves insisted. “I was asked the question if I believed that they were elected. I haven't seen anything to the contrary. So, I've never, ever said that there was anything in question about those folks being elected.”

“When did we get to this point? And do you think it's good for America — so, have your opponents conceded to you? They called you and said, ‘hey, you know, like, thanks for a good race. Congratulations. You won.’ Like, when did it get to be so hard, right? Like sporting events are won and lost. So are elections.”

“Hey, I'm going to I'm going to agree with you,” said Graves. “I think that politics … is a blood sport. I think it's gotten out of hand. I'll be the first one to say that. I think closed primaries have absolutely made it worse, including in our home state. But, but I don't think that, um, the president coming in and presenting … new evidence is something that we should all be afraid of. Let us look at the evidence, let us judge it, and then decide if it's something that's actually, uh, that we need to take seriously and find safeguards to protect or prevent from happening.”

“Where is this evidence in the 43 lawsuits that he litigated and lost?” said Hays. “So why are we doing it now? I just don't understand.”

Graves then made an appeal to new evidence that may have “popped up.”

“If we found a way that a foreign government was influencing our elections and caused outcomes to be distorted, that's something every American, regardless of if you’re liberal or conservative, should be concerned about. Integrity in elections is critical,” he said”

“Just saying that somebody caused an outcome to be distorted is something an influencer can do. That's very different. Changing any part of the electoral system, changing votes, changing tallying. That is the question, and that is what Donald Trump has been suggesting. And that has never, ever been found,” said Blow. “And I find it personally upsetting about Georgia because I voted in that election where Warnock and Ossoff won. There was no influence that was making me say, oh, I'm going to just these just these two lines are cheating. But the rest of the votes are legitimate. That's insane.”

Former Trump White House Communications Director Republican strategist Alyssa Farah Griffin, who was advising the Georgia Republican Party in 2020, said she was hoping the incumbents’ GOP opponents would win, but they did not.

“They lost fair and square to Warnock and Ossoff,” said Griffin. “But I'd also note this: Donald Trump was legitimately elected in 2016. The Obama administration was overseeing the federal government in 2020. The Trump administration was overseeing the federal government in 2024 when it was the Biden administration [that won]. So he's basically saying that the failure to administer, at least at the federal level, the elections, the failure to stop these interferences only happened under his watch.”

“I don't think it's the flex for the Trump administration that he thinks it is, that the one election that was stolen in 2020 was when he was in power as president,” said Griffin.

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