Sen. Rand Paul and ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos on Sunday got into a fiery exchange over President Joe Biden winning the 2020 presidential election — with the Republican lawmaker claiming there were “two sides” to every story.
The tense interview on “This Week” started out with Stephanopoulos asking Paul if he accepts that the election was “not stolen.”
“What I would say is that the debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur, we never had any presentation in court where we actually looked at the evidence. Most of the cases were thrown out for lack of standing, which is a procedural way of not actually hearing the question,” the Kentucky lawmaker responded, adding that he thinks some of the cases may “work their way up to the Supreme Court.”
Paul went on to question whether people voted twice, or dead people or illegal aliens voted, saying “we should get to the bottom of it.”
“I have to stop you there. No election is perfect. But there were 86 challenges filed by President Trump and his allies in court, all were dismissed. Every state certified the results,” Stephanopoulos said.
After some back and forth between the two men, Stephanopoulos pointed out that former Attorney General Bill Barr said there was no “evidence of widespread fraud” and asked: “Can’t you just say the words, this election was not stolen?”
“What I would suggest is that if we want greater confidence in our elections, and 75 percent of Republicans agree with me, is that we do need to look at election integrity and we need to see if we can restore confidence in the elections,” the senator said.
Stephanopoulos countered that the reason 75 percent of Republicans agree is because they were “fed a big lie” by the president that the election was stolen.
“George, where you make a mistake is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything’s a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything,” Paul said, adding that the ABC News anchor was trying to be “absolute” without hearing opinions from the other side.
“But you say it’s all lies,” Paul said.
“You said something that was not true,” Stephanopoulos said.
“You say we’re all liars. You just simply say we’re all liars,” Paul continued.
“I said it was a lie — that the election was stolen,” Stephanopoulos replied.
Paul said he voted to certify the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6 because “it would be wrong for Congress to overturn that” but he believes the election still needs to be examined.
“And I’m going to work hard to fix it. And I won’t be cowed by people saying, ‘Oh, you’re a liar,’” he said.
He then blamed the media for painting all Republicans as “liars” and called on Stephanopoulos to interview somebody on the “other side” without inserting “yourself into the story to say we’re all liars.”
“The investigations that have taken place have shown there’s not enough fraud to change the results of this election. That has been certified by every state,” Stephanopoulos said.
“I accepted the states’ certifications. But it doesn’t mean that I think there wasn’t fraud and that there weren’t problems that have to be investigated. And it doesn’t mean that the law wasn’t broken,” Paul said.