PA GOP Chair — and Election Law Expert — Lawrence Tabas Believes “…Joe Biden won the election and it was Biden’s electors that were certified”
PENNSYLVANIA — The “Super MAGA” primary candidates are all-in on Trump’s election conspiracies — even causing concern among fellow Republicans that their obsession with the 2020 presidential election will cost them this November — but after months of peddling the Big Lie, do the Republican gubernatorial candidates agree with the PAGOP chairman’s recent statement that “Joe Biden won the election?”
In case you missed it, check out The Washington Post’s new reporting on the Trump-endorsed attempts to overturn the will of the people in 2020 presidential election — and the new statement from the PAGOP chair on President Biden’s victory:
By Beth Reinhard, Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Emma Brown and Rosalind S. Helderman, 01/20/22
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‘Joe Biden won’
The Post attempted to interview the 15 Trump electors in those key states who were replaced ahead of the electoral vote. Several of them said they were recovering from covid-19 at the time or had other obligations. All the names are listed in documents the watchdog group American Oversight obtained through a public records request to the National Archives and Records Administration.
Among the electors who declined to participate was Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas, an election-law expert who had defended Trump in 2016 against a recount push by Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
“While Lawrence was originally selected to be an elector by the Trump campaign, he did not serve as an elector because Joe Biden won the election and it was Biden’s electors that were certified,” Vonne Andring, a senior adviser to the state party, said in a statement to The Post.
Andring also said that it was the presidential campaign that drove the process. The party, she said, “did not select electors, nor did it coordinate elector events and communications.”
In Georgia, John Isakson, an original Trump elector, told The Post that he bowed out because he did not want to attend what he had perceived as a “political rally.” Isakson has spent his career in real estate and has never served in public office or as a party official. His father, who was elected to the Senate three times, was hailed after his death in December as a bipartisan statesman, known for his friendship with the late John Lewis, the Democratic congressman and voting rights icon.
“It seemed like political gamesmanship, and that’s not something I would have participated in,” Isakson said in an interview last week. “We have a process for certifying the election. We have a process for challenging the election. The challenges failed, so I wouldn’t have participated in something that was going against all of that.”
By the time of the electoral college vote, efforts by Trump and his supporters to overturn the results had been rejected by at least 86 judges, including nine Supreme Court justices.
Former congressman Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, another original Trump elector, had been among the first members of Congress to back Trump’s presidential bid in 2016. But he, too, balked at casting an electoral vote for Trump in a state where Biden was the certified winner. Earlier in December, then-Attorney General William P. Barr said he had not seen widespread fraud that could have upended the election.
“I was disappointed in the election,” Marino said in an interview, “but as a former prosecutor, when the attorney general says he’s not finding anything here, that’s good enough for me.”
Marino, who retired in 2019, added: “I’m a constitutionalist and have always been a constitutionalist. … I believe in the rule of law and whatever the courts determined. I’m not going to jump on a bandwagon to say that I know better than the courts.”
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