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Aaron Blake of the Post dug up these statements from Elise Stefanik, the representative from New York State who is likely to replace Liz Cheney once she’s ejected from the House GOP leadership. Stefanik was a garden variety Upstate New York Republican before she hitched her wagon to Trump around 2018 and went all in with the Trump personality cult.
In the lead-up to the January 6th insurrection most congressional Republicans were careful to avoid repeating Trump’s most outrageous lies about a stolen election. They focused on the purported unconstitutionality of pandemic-related changes to election regulations. In other words, they weren’t directly claiming a stolen election in the sense of stuffed ballot boxes or dead voters or other similar stuff. They were arguing that states had exceeded their constitutional authority in doing things that making voting by mail easier. So those votes were illegitimate though not ‘fraudulent’ in the way most of us understand the term. This allowed them to back Trump’s claims of an illegitimate election by hanging their hat on a very weak constitutional argument rather than racist lies about ‘inner city’ vote fraud and other conspiracy theories.
But Stefanik wasn’t so careful.