CNN's Harwood: Republicans would 'smack their moms in the face' to please Donald Trump
White House correspondent slams GOP for election lawsuit
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}CNN White House correspondent John Harwood said Friday that Republican members of Congress would hit their own mothers if President Trump wanted.
"These are people who, if Donald Trump said, 'I'm going to trash you on Twitter unless you go smack your mom in the face,' they would go smack their moms in the face and try to explain it to them afterwards," he said.
"In reality, what they're doing is smacking American democracy in the face."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Harwood made the remark while criticizing the 106 House Republicans who have signed onto what he called a "preposterous" Texas lawsuit seeking to delay certification of the electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, four battleground states won by President-elect Joe Biden.
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"What we're seeing is a demonstration by House Republicans of the extent of the rot inside the Republican Party right now," Harwood said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The lawsuit is considered a longshot and critics have derided it as an effort to invalidate legally cast votes, but Republicans have defended it as a challenge of what they call unconstitutional voting law changes that usurped the authority of state legislatures.
Trump has repeatedly called the election rigged and claimed he is the true winner, but the Justice Department said it has not found evidence of the sort of widespread fraud that would overturn Biden's victory.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Harwood is known for anti-Republican editorializing in his reporting. In 2019, he declared the party "fundamentally broken," shortly before joining CNN as its new White House reporter, and he said Trump revealed himself to be in "deep psychological distress" after he was acquitted in his impeachment trial in February.
In 2015, he came under fire for his moderation of a Republican primary debate, which included him asking then-candidate Trump if he was running a "comic book" campaign.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}He has also shown coziness with Democrats, turning up in leaked Hillary Clinton emails asking Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta what he should ask Republican Jeb Bush in an upcoming interview and expressing disbelief that journalists were covering Clinton's private email server.
He later tweeted the press exaggerated the significance of her emails in a "ridiculous" fashion.