Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Newsmax TV on Friday that he still believes Joe Biden should be receiving intelligence briefings, saying, “there’s no reason to be able to stop those,” until the election is officially decided.
“Joe Biden has received intel briefings all summer long,” Lankford said on “The National Report,” noting that it’s “the nature of all our [presidential] elections, once you get past the Democratic and Republican conventions in the summer, once the nominee is actually set, both of those individuals receive intelligence briefings for months leading up to the election, because we don’t know who the president is going to be at that point [because] the election hasn’t happened.”
He added that “Joe Biden’s security briefings stopped when the election actually occurred, and so my challenge is, let’s keep those same briefings going through this whole time period, there’s no reason to be able to stop those. We still don’t know what the outcome’s going to be, have it in the exact same position as it was before the election because nothing has changed, because we don’t know who the winner is. This is one of the things that happened in 2000, during that dispute as well, which stretched on for 37 days with [former Vice President] Al Gore and [former President] George W. Bush.”
Lankford said that “for a couple of weeks, George Bush stopped receiving his briefings, and then they shifted it and said, ‘no, both sides should actually receive briefings until we actually know who the winner is.’ I’m just pushing [General Services Administration] to say, ‘when you make a decision on this, do it the same way we did it in 2000.’”
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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