Written by via newsandsentinel.com
CHARLESTON — Since making controversial comments about the 2020 presidential election last week, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner continues to say the election was stolen from former president Donald Trump without providing evidence to back up those claims.
During a forum last week on WV MetroNews with several Republican candidates for governor, host Hoppy Kercheval asked the candidates whether they agreed with Trump’s assertion that the 2020 election was stolen, Warner was the only candidate to definitively say yes.
“The (election) was stolen, and it was stolen by the CIA,” Warner told Kercheval. (They) colluded…to sell a lie to the American people two weeks before the election.”
Warner was referring to an Oct. 19, 2020, letter signed by 51 former intelligence and national security officials mostly from Democratic presidential administrations raising concerns about an Oct. 14, 2020, story published by the New York Post based on information obtained from a hard drive from a laptop linked to Hunter Biden, the troubled son of President Joe Biden.
In multiple media interviews this week and in an op-ed, Warner has attempted to further explain his reasoning on why he believes that actions taken by former federal officials, media, and tech companies in the fall of 2020 helped lead to a result where Trump lost and Biden — then the former Democratic senator from Delaware and a former vice president to former President Barack Obama — won.
In a sit-down interview Wednesday, Warner said he answered Kercheval the way he did because he does believe that the actions of former intelligence officials, the FBI, and tech companies unfairly placed a thumb on the scales of the 2020 election in favor of Biden over Trump.
“Hoppy asked that in a binary choice, yes or no,” Warner said. “When I answered yes, it’s because if I’d answered no, I would’ve been untrue to myself and untrue to the voters of West Virginia because there were problems with that election. And the main bottom line up front is I don’t want three-lettered agencies determining the outcome of presidential elections in the United States of America.”