By Justin Baragona Contributing Editor Updated Aug. 16, 2020 10:51AM ET Published Aug. 16, 2020 10:50AM ET
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Sunday defended President Donald Trump’s continued push to delegitimize mail-in voting, brushing off CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s insistence that there’s no evidence of “widespread voter fraud” by retorting that “there’s no evidence that there’s not, either.”
In a wild and combative State of the Union interview that spanned nearly 30 minutes, Tapper repeatedly pressed the top aide on the president’s admission last week that he is blocking aid to the United States Postal Service in order to impede mail-in voting this fall.
“They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in a Thursday interview with Fox Business. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
Meadows, for his part, denied that the president was undercutting the post office as more states shift towards universal mail-in voting. Claiming that Trump is open to additional postal service funding as part of a broader coronavirus stimulus package, Meadows later expressed openness to supporting a standalone bill to expand postal aid.
Tapper, meanwhile, confronted Meadows on reports that high-volume mail sorters were being decommissioned across the nation to slow down delivery, something the Trump aide claimed was a false narrative concocted by Democrats. Meadows even called on the CNN anchor to get one of the host’s producers to “whisper” the facts into his ear, prompting Tapper to circle back to the subject minutes later.
“In terms of the fact check that you asked me to look into, one of my great producers did, it’s in
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