GOP lawmaker, CNN anchor battle over lack of evidence for fraud claims

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) got into a row with CNN anchor Jim Sciutto Tuesday morning after being unable to provide evidence to back up President Trump’s continued claims of election fraud.

In the interview, Sciutto noted that Higgins had cited “reasonable suspicion of election fraud” when announcing his intention to oppose the Electoral College and asked the representative to share what evidence he had.

“We have a preponderance of evidence that election crimes may have been committed in six of the sovereign states, especially four of the sovereign states,” Higgins replied.

“Give me one example.”@jimsciutto pushes GOP Rep. Clay Higgins, who will object to certification of electoral votes, over baseless claims of election fraud. https://t.co/4crnhPKNpY pic.twitter.com/tejZNnq6n5

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) January 5, 2021

Sciutto pressed the lawmaker to provide a specific example, to which Higgins brought up claims that Georgia had changed statutory requirements for voting.

The CNN anchor swiftly shot down Higgins’s evidence, pointing out that Georgia’s voting systems manager, Gabriel Sterling, had addressed and debunked such claims the day before.

“This is all easily, provably false, yet the president persists, and by doing so undermines Georgians’ faith in the election systems, especially Republican Georgians in this case,” Sterling said in a press conference yesterday addressing Trump’s multiple claims of elections crimes in Georgia.

Sciutto continued to ask Higgins to provide an example. The interview quickly became heated, with both men speaking over each other. At one point Higgins said to Sciutto, “You’re being rather combative, I do believe you invited me on your show.”

Higgins claimed he had “hundreds and hundreds of pages” of evidence that an election crime may have occurred, though he did not cite where the evidence came from or provide an example of the evidence.

“To disenfranchise the word of thousands of your fellow American citizens is quite disingenuous of you,” Higgins said later in the interview.

Sciutto shot back, “The fact is, you’re trying to overturn the votes of millions of Americans.”

Claims of voter fraud made by the Trump campaign have been dismissed or found to be lacking in evidence by several courts. As Sciutto pointed out in the interview, multiple Trump-appointed judges have ruled that there has been no evidence or reason to suspect that election fraud had occurred in the 2020 presidential election.