Democratic House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., claimed that there are "no election deniers" in the Democratic Party, despite previously claiming on social media that the 2016 presidential election was "illegitimate."
After Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was re-elected to the top House post for the 119th Congress on Friday, Jeffries addressed lawmakers.
"There are no election deniers on our side of the aisle," Jeffries said while speaking on the House floor on Friday, prompting applause from the Democratic members in the chamber.
Despite claiming that members of his party don't deny election results, Jeffries himself claimed on X, previously known as Twitter, that President-elect Trump's 2016 election victory wasn't legitimate.
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"The more we learn about 2016 election the more ILLEGITIMATE it becomes," Jeffries wrote in February 2018. "America deserves to know whether we have a FAKE President in the Oval Office."
Jeffries again made a similar claim several years later.
"Keep pouting. History will never accept you as a legitimate president," Jeffries wrote to Trump in a 2020 post. A screenshot of the post was shared by Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska following the speaker's vote on Friday.
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who ran against Trump as the Democratic nominee in 2016, also said that Trump was an "illegitimate president" after his election win that year.
"He knows he's an illegitimate president," Clinton said of Trump during a CBS News interview. "I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories - he knows that - there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did."
Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., did not attend Trump's 2017 inauguration due to claims that his presidency was not legit.
"He was legally elected, but the Russian weighing-in on the election, the Russian attempt to hack the election and, frankly, the FBI's weighing-in on the election, I think, makes his election illegitimate, puts an asterisk next to his name," Nadler told CNN in 2017.
Additionally, several Democratic representatives challenged the results of the 2016 election in their states following Trump's win.
