GOP Congressman-elect Burgess Owens says 'there's no question' that Trump was reelected to a second term
- GOP Congressman-elect Burgess Owens of Utah on Thursday said that he will support the challenge to President-elect Joe Biden's presidential victory on the House floor and contended that there was "no question" that President Donald Trump was reelected to a second term.
- In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, Owens said that his goal was "to make sure that I'm doing everything I can to take this to every legal end we have."
- Owens defeated first-term Democratic Rep. Ben McAdams in one of the closest Congressional races in the country.
In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, GOP Congressman-elect Burgess Owens of Utah on Thursday said that he will support the challenge to President-elect Joe Biden's presidential victory on the House floor and contended that there was "no question" that President Donald Trump was reelected to a second term.
Owens, a strong Trump supporter and a featured speaker at the 2020 Republican National Convention, said that he believes Trump was victorious in the election, despite Biden securing 306 Electoral College votes to Trump's 232 electoral votes and winning over 7 million more votes than the president.
"There's no question in my mind that I think he won," Owens said.
His comments come as Congress is set to certify the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, with many GOP lawmakers, including Sen. Josh Hawley, opting to challenge the election results.
Owens, a former NFL player, compared the Republican effort to his days playing football.
"In 10 years in the NFL, I played in a lot of losing games," he said. "If you leave everything on the field and you've done everything you can and there's nothing left, then it's a winning game regardless of what the score might be."
Owens said that contesting the Electoral College was "the right thing to do" because "seventy-plus percent of conservatives say that this [election] is not fair" and their views deserve to be heard, according to the Tribune.
The congressman-elect claimed that 42,000 votes were incorrectly added to the final vote total in Nevada, an allegation that state officials have firmly denied.
Owens also said that after living in Pennsylvania, "the Democratic Party has done things" in the state that are not "fair," but didn't provide any solid evidence of any electoral wrongdoing in the 2020 presidential election.
"My goal basically is just to make sure that I'm doing everything I can to take this to every legal end we have," he added. "And once the official count is done, then we'll respect whoever the president is."
Since November, the Trump legal team has contested the election across the country, unleashing an array of high-profile but overwhelmingly unsuccessful lawsuits to overturn the election results.