By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Northern Missouri Congressman Sam Graves claims his vote against accepting the Electoral College results after the 2020 elections had more to do with legislative races than casting a vote in favor of former President Donald Trump.
Graves, a Republican, is critical of how states such as Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona conducted their elections in 2020.
“Just the simple fact that states allow mail-in voting with no signature verification is just flat-out wrong,” Graves tells a caller on the KFEQ Hotline. “My vote had more to do with those outcomes in Senate and House races than it did with the president.”
The caller challenged Graves on his vote, asking if he regretted it.
Graves says he is more concerned about how state voting irregularities might affect the majorities in the Senate and House in Washington, D.C. than who occupies the White House. Graves says he doesn’t favor a federal takeover of elections, but does believe there needs to be guidelines for the states in conducting elections.
Pressed about the federal indictments accumulating around the former president, Graves says every citizen should be concerned about the role of the FBI and the Biden Administration Department of Justice in the criminal charges being filed against the Republican front-runner.
“I don’t care if it’s a Republican administration or a Democrat administration,” Graves insists. “The fact that we have weaponized federal agencies like that that is something that scares me more than anything else, because that means that they can come after anyone.”
Trump is under four indictments, total.
One accuses the president of taking classified documents from the White House. Another accuses Trump of trying to overturn the 2020 election results. The most recent case brought against Trump is similar. It accuses him of interfering with the Georgia elections.
The initial case brought against Trump accuses him of paying hush money to a porn star for her silence about their alleged affair.
Graves says Americans will need to wait and see how the criminal justice system plays out in those four indictments.
Graves declines to speculate too much about what motivates Trump to keep pursuing the Republican nomination to run again.
“President Trump is very ego driven, for lack of a better way of describing it, and I think he’s very frustrated and he wants to get another chance at another term,” Graves says. “Obviously, that will play out and we’ll see what happens.”
Republican primary voters once again face a crowded field of candidates. Fourteen Republican candidates, including Trump, have declared for president.