Barack Obama has voiced concern over the Republican leaders' attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and said that they are defending President Donald Trump's "bogus claims" of voter fraud because they are "intimidated" by it.
Democrat Joe Biden was declared the winner of the November 3 presidential election, but President Trump, a Republican, has refused to concede defeat and has filed multiple lawsuits, challenging poll results in several states.
"I have been troubled, like I think every American, whether you're a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, should be troubled, when you start having attempts to block, negate, overturn the people's vote when there's no actual evidence that there was anything illegal or fraudulent taking place," former president Obama told MSNBC.
He also criticised the conservative-leaning news outlets for giving a platform to Trump's unsubstantiated claims.
"And the degree to which you've seen some news outlets that cater to the right and the conservative viewpoint, somehow try to prop up these, you know, bogus claims," Obama, the first Black American president said.
In the last phase of the campaign, Obama had campaigned for former vice president Biden and Kamala Harris Harris in some of the key battleground States of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Georgia.
The embattled Trump campaign has challenged vote count in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, among other states. A number of their lawsuits have been dismissed.
"They've been repeatedly rejected by the courts. I'm less surprised by Trump doing this; he has shown only a flimsy relationship to the truth. I'm more troubled that you're seeing a lot of Republican officials go along with it, not because they actually believe it but because they're intimidated by it," Obama said.
Obama said that there is a difference between 2008 and now in 2020.
"The way Trump is behaving in transition is very different than the way George Bush behaved in his final months, when he was in office - and because we're in the middle of a pandemic we don't know what inauguration is going to look like," he said.
President-elect Biden is scheduled to be inaugurated on January 20, 2021.
"But I think Biden is right to say that we should all make an effort to do our best to lower the temperature and listen to the other side. But, I think when you have a current president whose entire style is to fan division, that's hard while he's on the stage," Obama said.
Biden on Thursday won the Republican stronghold of Georgia, becoming the first Democrat to have won the key battleground state
since 1992.
With Georgia's 16 electoral votes, Biden will now have 306 electoral votes to Trump's 232. To win the race to the White House, the successful candidate should have at least 270 electoral votes out of the 538-member Electoral College.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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