WASHINGTON — Several prominent Republicans said President Trump’s legal arguments had run their course, and called on him to allow the presidential transition process to begin.
Chris Christie, a Trump confidant who helped prepare the president for the debates, called the conduct of Trump’s legal team a “national embarrassment.” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said Trump had “exhausted all plausible legal options,” and urged him to concede. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said it’s time to begin the transition.
The comments are the latest signs of dissent from within the president’s party, with increasingly more Republicans urging Trump to accept the results of the election and move on.
“Elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen,” said former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Julio Cortez/Associated Press file
And they come as President-elect Joe Biden moved forward with his selection of key members of his administration, with incoming chief of staff Ronald Klain saying Biden’s first Cabinet picks will be revealed Tuesday.
In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Christie said the president should give up his legal strategy. “Elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen,” he said.
“The conduct of the president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment,” Christie added, noting that Trump’s lawyers have made a flurry of fraud allegations but have offered no evidence to back them up in court.
Christie criticized Trump’s lawyers for proffering false conspiracy theories at news conferences and other media appearances.
“They don’t do it in the courtroom,” the 2016 Republican presidential candidate said, suggesting that attorneys are fearful of making baseless arguments under oath before federal judges.
“It must mean the evidence doesn’t exist,” Christie said.
Christie said the Republican Party should focus on trying to win Georgia’s two runoff elections Jan. 5 to secure the Senate majority, rather than continuing with its unsuccessful legal challenges of the presidential election results.
“The rearview mirror should be ripped off,” Christie said.
Late Saturday night, after a federal judge threw out Trump’s legal attempt to invalidate millions of votes, Toomey congratulated Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory and encouraged the president to accept that result.
“President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania,” Toomey said in a statement, noting that the deciding judge, Matthew Brann, is a “longtime conservative Republican.”
This result, Toomey noted, followed Georgia’s certification Friday of Biden’s victory there and Michigan’s GOP legislative leaders rejecting efforts to block the certification of Biden’s clear victory in that state.
“I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country,” Toomey said.
Senate Republicans have by and large avoided commenting on Trump’s actions, with more than 40 not responding to requests for comment Thursday and Friday about the president’s effort to have Michigan legislators reject the Biden victory there of more than 150,000 votes.
Republicans are aware that any perceived lack of loyalty to the president could prompt him to attack the defectors – just as Trump did Saturday night when he called Brann a “product of Senator Pat ‘No Tarriffs’ Toomey.”
“No friend of mine,” Trump tweeted.
Even some Trump backers who support pushing ahead with legal challenges said that Biden probably will take office and that the General Services Administration should allow the Democratic transition team access to the federal agencies and key briefings, as well as office space and millions of dollars in funding, so the administration can begin work Jan. 20.
“I just think that you have to begin that process, give the incoming administration all the time they need,” Cramer said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Cramer said that transition process should have begun at least a week ago. But he added that the transition could begin even as Trump’s legal team continued to press its cases in the states.
This is, Cramer said, “just a simple legal process.”
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