Trump backtracks and says he ‘concedes NOTHING’ after finally admitting Biden beat him in ‘rigged election’
DONALD Trump has backtracked after finally admitting Joe Biden won a "rigged election" - saying he "concedes nothing".
The president’s admission comes as he continues to fight the results with legal challenges and after he called the election the “greatest theft in the history of America”.
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The President appeared to have finally accepted that Biden was the victor when he used the words "he won" for the first time - albeit by then saying "because the Election" was rigged.
But it wasn't long before he backtracked and made it clear that he wasn't conceding anything and "we have a long way to go".
His initial apparent concession came when he once again took aim at Dominion Voting Systems, a technology used by most states, including Michigan and Georgia.
A former top aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a lobbyist for the company - which also employs a one who worked for Republicans Dick Cheney and John Boehner.
“He won because the Election was Rigged," the President tweeted.
"NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more!"
With a White House official event telling NBC news “It looks like it” when asked if Trump had conceded, it appeared as President had in fact grudgingly admitted defeat.
But as his words became widely reported, Trump soon hit back with another furious tweet in which he emphatically declared: "I concede NOTHING!"
Biden's incoming chief of staff Ron Klain said Trump's tweets had no bearing on the actuality of the election.
"Donald Trump’s Twitter feed doesn’t make Joe Biden president or not president,” he told NBC News' ‘Meet the Press’.
“The American people did that.”
He said the federal government needs to sign off on transition team efforts this week so that Biden's team can receive national security briefings and address Covid-19.
"What we really want to see this week," he said.
Trump has also revived hisclaims that the former president masterminded the Russia investigation and forcing into for lying to the .
He singled out James Comey, who was fired as director of the FBI in 2017 after probing whether Trump's campaign colluded with Russia and deputy director Andrew McCabe, who was dismissed in 2018.
Comey for the Biden campaign during the election and continues to be the object of Trump's ire.
“It’s amazing but nothing happened to [Jim] Comey and [Andrew] McCabe, even though they were caught cold,” he said of the former FBI leaders.
“Then this, the greatest theft in the history of America. And everybody knows it.”
It comes after tweeted that Barack Obama was "caught" spying, an assertion he's made prior to the .
His comments echoed similar ones he made last month, where he asserted that there's
The president was speaking during his first press conference since Joe Biden was pronounced the winner.
Despite his claims he did, however, get closer to admitting he lost the election, but was still far from conceding.
The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in a half-dozen battleground states and on Friday in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
In Arizona, the Trump campaign dropped a legal challenge in Maricopa County, acknowledging that Joe Biden’s lead was too large for the ballots in question to swing the results in the president’s favor.
Meanwhile in Michigan, a judge turned down Trump supporters’ request to block ballot certification in Detroit, which helped carry Joe Biden’s win in the state.
And Pennsylvania’s secretary of state declined to order a recount—required only if Trump were trailing by less than .5 percent of votes—in 67 counties.
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The president on Friday spoke with conservative media outlets including Fox News, suggesting that he would only admit defeat after he has explored all his legal options.
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Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera, who spoke with Trump on the phone, said, “He told me he was a realist, he told me he would do the right thing.”
he got the impression that “if the process went against [Trump] and he was satisfied that every legitimate vote had been counted and every illegitimate vote had been thrown out … he would surrender.”