Healey: Lawyers aiding in Trump’s “disinformation campaign”

Chris Lisinski

Republican-led efforts alleging that election disparities cost President Donald Trump a second term are “un-American” and a waste of resources amid an escalating public health and economic crisis, according to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, citing increasing reports that there was no wrongdoing.

In a virtual press conference alongside other Democratic attorneys general, Healey said it is “long past time” for Republican elected officials to recognize President-Elect Joe Biden as the rightful winner. “The election was safe, free and fair,” Healey said. “Elected officials from both parties and nonpartisan civil servants have said repeatedly that there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing. The Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security said the same this week. So any attempts to sow confusion or cast doubt on the process is un-American, and it wastes time and taxpayer dollars when what we should be doing is focusing on rebuilding our economy, confronting rising COVID cases and keeping our communities safe.”

Healey praised Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, who on Tuesday described the Trump administration’s push for Department of Justice prosecutors to review election results as “wildly inappropriate” and urged the administration to cooperate with a Biden transition immediately. “Stalling an orderly transition process, especially at a time like this, is equally unacceptable. I can’t think of a worse time to stall a transition than amid a deadly pandemic that the federal government continues to own primary responsibility for responding to,” said Baker, who said he did not vote for a presidential candidate in either 2016 or 2020.

None of the challenges Trump’s team has filed has been successful, Healey and other Democratic attorneys general on the call — including Washington, DC’s Karl Racine, Iowa’s Tom Miller, and Virginia’s Mark Herring — said. “The courts are being used, or rather misused, in an attempt to sabotage democracy,” Herring said. “It won’t work, but it continues to be alarming that there is an army of lawyers trying to do that who know better and are enabling a tantrum from the President of the United States. Their actions in the last 10 days are about trying to lend credibility to the president’s disinformation campaign.”