DeSantis says Trump’s fraudulent 2020 election claims are false

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that his chief rival Donald Trump pushed “unsubstantiated” theories of widespread voter fraud following the 2020 election, issuing his sternest rebuke yet to the former president and 2024 Republican primary frontrunner.

“The election is what it is. All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true … It was not an election that was conducted the way I think that we want to, but that’s different than saying [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro stole votes or something like that,” DeSantis, 44, told reporters in Iowa, referencing one notorious theory circulated by the 45th president’s legal team which stated voting machines in key states had been hacked and results changed.

“And I think those theories, you know, proved to be unsubstantiated.”

Trump, 77, was arraigned in Washington, DC, federal court on Thursday on four counts including conspiracy and obstruction for allegedly trying to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.

The 45th president pleaded not guilty to charges that he made “knowingly false” claims of fraud following the election, setting in motion a chain of events that culminated in the breach of the US Capitol building by a mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump is also accused of unlawfully approving a plan to put forward fraudulent electors in battleground states and urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to decline to certify Biden’s victory, prosecutors said.

In a Dec. 8, 2020, email, a senior campaign adviser to the former president referred to the tactics as “conspiracy s— beamed down from the mothership,” the indictment revealed.

DeSantis criticized the indictment soon after it was handed up Tuesday night by a grand jury convened by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.

“While I’ve seen reports, I have not read the indictment. I do, though, believe we need to enact reforms so that Americans have the right to remove cases from Washington, DC to their home districts,” the Florida governor said on Twitter.

“Washington, DC is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality. One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law,” he also said. “No more excuses—I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”

Trump remains more than 30 percentage points ahead of DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, but has seen his support dwindle in some early voting states.

Just 44% of likely Iowa GOP caucus-goers support the former president, while 20% support DeSantis, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Friday. However, the same survey found that the Florida governor has higher favorability ratings than the former president and was also judged to be more moral and likable.

DeSantis said Friday that he “saw a little bit” of Trump’s arraignment but “was tied up” for most of it.

“Unfortunately, one of the things as governor that you have to do is oversee executions,” he said. “So we had an execution yesterday, so I was tied up with that for most of the day.”

DeSantis has avoided direct attacks on Trump, instead referencing a “culture of losing” following the loss of the House of Representatives in 2018, the White House and Senate in 2020, and a worse-than-expected performance in 2022.

The governor has also criticized the conduct of the 2020 election, taking issue with last-minute expansion of mail-in voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the suppression of The Post’s reporting about documents found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.

“The way you conduct a good election that people have confidence in [is] you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game,” DeSantis said Friday. “You don’t ballot harvest. You don’t do Zuckerbucks, and clearly, having the agencies work with Facebook to censor things like Hunter Biden, that’s unfair.”