Florida’s outgoing Democratic agricultural commissioner, Nikki Fried, is asking the Justice Department to knock down former President Donald Trump’s claims that he used the FBI to help Gov. Ron DeSantis win the gubernatorial race in 2018.
Last week, Trump said in an online post without citing any evidence that he sent the FBI and U.S. Attorney to end unspecified ballot theft before Democrats ran out of votes necessary to win the Florida governor’s race.
With Trump’s endorsement that year, DeSantis narrowly beat then-Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum – after a mandatory recount – by less than one-half a percentage point out of more than 8.1 million votes.
“I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of votes necessary to win,” Trump said in his statement. “I stopped his election from being stolen.”
Fried, who lost this year’s Democratic nomination in the governor’s race, wrote to the Justice Department asking it to declare Trump’s statement to be false. Fried was elected in 2018 to her post as agricultural commissioner, the only Democrat elected to statewide office that year.
“We need the Department of Justice to clarify that they were not engaged and that this was just the president...
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