(LifeSiteNews) – Former President Donald Trump has once again called for re-litigating the 2020 election to recognize him as the winner, in the wake of revelations about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s involvement in suppressing a potentially damaging story about his opponent, current President Joe Biden.
On August 26, LifeSite covered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s admission to podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI told the social network to “be on high alert” for an impending information “dump” similar to “Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,” before news broke about a discarded laptop belonging to Biden’s son Hunter, which contained scores of emails and texts detailing how the Biden family made millions of dollars through Hunter’s facilitation of meetings between his father, the Vice President of the United States under Barack Obama, and business interests around the world.
The next day, LifeSite covered U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) comments that FBI whistleblowers told his office “that local FBI leadership told employees, ‘you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop’ and that the FBI is ‘not going to change the outcome of the election again.’ Further, these whistleblowers allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election — potentially a year after the FBI obtained the laptop in December 2019.”
The explosive story was widely derided as “misinformation” at the time. But more than a year after Trump had been defeated and Biden was safely inaugurated as president, left-wing media outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post began to admit the authenticity of the material from the laptop.
Suppression of the story had paid off; a survey of key swing states conducted by the conservative Media Research Center and The Polling Company weeks after the election found that 45.1% of Biden voters in those states had been unaware of the Hunter scandal, and that 9.4% of them would not have voted for Biden had they known.
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This effect was the focal point of Trump’s ire in his August 29 post on Truth Social, the president’s own social network.
“So now it comes out, conclusively, that the FBI BURIED THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY BEFORE THE ELECTION knowing that, if they didn’t, ‘Trump would have easily won the 2020 Presidential Election,’” Trump wrote. “This is massive FRAUD & ELECTION INTERFERENCE at a level never seen before in our Country. REMEDY: Declare the rightful winner or, and this would be the minimal solution, declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election, immediately!”
The U.S. Constitution has no mechanism for repeating presidential elections after an official winner has been certified and inaugurated, though Trump’s calls reflect the anger and suspicions many continue harbor over the validity of the 2020 outcome, which was marred by allegations of vote fraud and the massive expansion of mail-in ballots (under the pretext of COVID-19 social distancing).
The belief that Trump was cheated out of a second term fuels much of the support for him to run again in 2024. Trump is all-but certain to enter the race, though he also faces discontent among conservatives due to issues such as his continued advocacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, and his management of the agencies that ultimately turned against him, such as the FBI.
In mid-2021, it was revealed that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who had been hired by Trump on the recommendation of Delaware Democrat Sens. Tom Carper and Chris Coons, had agreed in the summer of 2020 to hold off on seeking search warrants and issuing grand jury subpoenas related to Hunter’s foreign business dealings and potential tax violations, and that he specifically did so on the advice of unidentified “officials involved in the case” who wanted to avoid the investigation becoming a campaign issue, which deprived the public of relevant context as to the laptop story’s credibility.
Some conservatives also argue that Trump’s fixation on being recognized as the true 2020 winner would detract from making the 2024 election a referendum on Biden’s performance as president, and argue instead for nominating someone else, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, to challenge Biden instead.