ABC News(NEW YORK) — President-elect Donald Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared to dodge answering whether Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that “millions” voted illegally is true when she appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America Friday morning.
Trump inaccurately wrote in a tweet last week that millions of people voted for Hillary Clinton illegally — a claim without any known basis in fact.
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump said.
Clinton currently leads the national popular vote by more than 2.3 million votes.
When asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if it is appropriate for Trump to make false statements like that, she said, “Many people are questioning the victory. You got people spending millions of dollars, wasting money and time in the Clinton and [Jill] Stein camp in Wisconsin, Michigan, tried in Pennsylvania to recount. So not everybody has … accepted the election results.”
“But to your question,” Conway continued, “the president-elect has been talking to different people including Kris Kobach, [secretary of state] of Kansas, about voting irregularities or the number of illegal votes that may have been cast, and I believe that he bases his information on that.”
Asked again by Stephanopoulos if the statement by Trump is true, Conway responded, “Well, he’s been receiving information about the irregularities and about the illegal votes, particularly from sources, officials like Kris Kobach as I mentioned, but he is messaging to his supporters and to the rest of the country the way he feels.”
Conway said it had been a “bruising” presidential campaign, but said Trump won because he had a message that connects with Americans.
Addressing the Americans who did not vote for Trump, Conway said that they now “can’t get past the grief, denial and anger stages and into the acceptance stages,” which she said, “really defies what Secretary Clinton and President Obama themselves had said” about coming together as a nation.
Though Clinton won the popular vote, Conway said Trump will still reach those Americans who did not vote for him, because he will “be the president of all Americans, including those that did not vote for him.”
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