Sunday on ABC”s “This Week,” interim chairman of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile disputed President-elect Donald Trump’s legitimacy because of the Russian’s hacking intended to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, saying the result was “tainted by this intrusion.”
Partial transcript as follows:
RADDATZ: Donna, given all you said about this hack, do you think Donald Trump’s win was legitimate?
BRAZILE: No, I was involved a close election in 2000. And it was an election where we believed that every vote should count, and every voter should matter. At the end of the day, the electors had an obligation to do their job. And George Bush won the election, and Al Gore had the most electoral — I mean, the most popular vote. Donald Trump used this information in ways to also sow division. I was very disappointed in his repeated usage some of the stolen information. He used it as if he received daily talking points. But that’s politics. It’s behind us. What we should focus on now is how do we protect our country from foreign intrusion? How do we protect and strengthen our democratic institutions? And how do we protect votes.
RADDATZ: Was the election legit?
BRAZILE: The election is — was tainted by this intrusion, but —
RADDATZ: Would Hillary Clinton have own without it? Do you think?
BRAZILE: You know, I’m not going to sugarcoat what happened on Election Day. We, the Democratic Party has a lot of things that we have to do. Donald Trump cracked the blue wall, OK? He cracked the blue wall. We had a blue wall; we should’ve maintained it. We should’ve kept it. But there’s no question that having a foreign adversary, a foe interfere and to use hacked stolen e-mails and weaponize them against the Democrats, not the Republicans, not Trump, but against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party, the president’s party, we should be outraged by it. I know I’m still outraged by it but I want to make sure this never happens again. This country deserves to have the kind of cyber security experts involved to make sure that our homeland is protected. at every stage.
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