Appearing on CNN Tuesday, the network’s senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, rushed to take aim at President Donald Trump for accusing Twitter of election interference over their decision to fact-check his tweets regarding Democrats’ push to enact vote-by-mail plans ahead of November’s presidential election.
A partial transcript is as follows:
JIM ACOSTA: The president was lashing out at Twitter just a few moments ago, saying he’s not going to stand for — as he describes it — interfering in the 2020 election. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said they saw this coming, that Silicon Valley will pull out all the stops to prevent the president from getting his message out. The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, was putting out tweets just a short while ago trying to establish a claim between mail-in balloting and widespread voter fraud when there isn’t a proven connection. This has been going on for some time now. This is one of the president’s oldest lies. It goes all the way back to the 2016 campaign. He explained that the reason why he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton was because of undocumented immigrants voting in the 2016 election. We should point out that he established a voter fraud commission to find widespread voter fraud. That commission produced no evidence of widespread voter fraud. And so the president is going back to essentially a social media trick that he has pulled before and he’s trying to do it again. And now Twitter and other social media platforms, perhaps others, will follow, are starting to do something about it.
The question is whether or not the president can really do anything about this at this point. He’s threatening to do something about it, but that’s all we have tonight from the president, an empty threat he’ll do something about it. We should point out that both know this is a problem going on with this president, this administration for four years now. Not only does the president have a problem with telling the truth, he has a problem with accepting the truth. And all the studies have shown on this subject there is no widespread voter fraud in the U.S. and there is no proven link between mail-in balloting and voter fraud. Republican-led states have been doing it for years.