President-elect Joe Biden on Friday said Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are part of the “big lie” about election fraud and invoked Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, but stopped short of calling on the two senators to resign.
Hawley, a Missouri Republican, faces a wave of condemnation for supporting a bid to block certification of Biden’s victory in two states even after a violent mob breached the U.S. Capitol. Top Senate Democrats have demanded his resignation and previously-supportive politicians have denounced him.
The junior senator quickly seized on Biden’s remarks in an effort to turn the tables, saying the incoming president had called him and Cruz Nazis.
Biden’s comments came in response to a reporter’s question at a news conference about whether Hawley and Cruz should resign. The two were the first senators to promise support for objections to certifying Biden’s electoral victory in some states.
Biden responded by saying the senators should “just be flat beat the next time they run.” He added that the American public has a “real clear, good look at who they are.”
“They’re part of the big lie,” Biden said. He soon added, “Goebbels and the great lie. You keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie.”
Joseph Goebbels was a close ally of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi’s propaganda chief. The statement attributed to him is: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Hawley, in a statement, called on Biden to retract his remarks. He labeled them “utterly shameful.”
“This is undignified, immature, and intemperate behavior from the President-elect,” Hawley said.
It is the second time in 24 hours that Hawley has struck back against a torrent of criticism unprecedented in his political career. The first came Thursday afternoon, when he called publishing house Simon & Schuster a “woke mob” after it canceled the release of his upcoming book.
With the exception of President Donald Trump, no one has drawn as much blame for Wednesday’s siege of the Capitol as Hawley and Cruz. Hawley was the first senator to back an objection to certification, ensuring what is typically a half-hour formality would stretch on for hours.
And both senators pressed on with their objections when Congress resumed debate hours after the building was cleared.
“Any Senator who stands up and supports the power of force over the power of democracy has broken their oath of office,” Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, tweeted Friday. “Senators Hawley and Cruz should resign.”
David Humphreys, a Missouri mega-donor who had bankrolled Hawley’s 2016 campaign for state attorney general, told the Missouri Independent that Hawley had “revealed himself as a political opportunist willing to subvert the Constitution and the ideals of the nation he swore to uphold.”
Former Sen. John Danforth, a longtime mentor to Hawley, this week called his support the “biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”
Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article248382050.html#storylink=cp
