Former Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) would like everyone to know that unlike his rival Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), he would’ve taken things into his own hands following President Trump’s bogus claims of a “stolen” 2020 presidential election were he governor at the time.
Perdue told Axios on Wednesday afternoon that he wouldn’t have signed off on his state’s results.
“Not with the information that was available at the time and not with the information that has come out now. They had plenty of time to investigate this. And I wouldn’t have signed it until those things had been investigated and that’s all we were asking for,” he said.
Perdue also told Axios that he would have called for a special session of the legislature if he were Georgia’s governor last year. The former GOP senator then claimed he had asked Kemp to call the session at the time to “protect and fix what was wrong for the January election.”
Last year, Kemp signed the state’s election certification, which he was required to do by state law. Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, also pushed back on the possibility of calling a special session, which he said would lead to “nullifying the will of the people.”
Under Georgia law, neither Kemp nor Raffensperger had the ability to reject the certification of an election. Challenges to an election’s integrity must go through the courts — and all such challenges failed in Georgia last year.
Perdue’s latest bolstering of the Big Lie comes just days after he officially launched his bid for Georgia governor, pitting himself against Trump punching bag Kemp in the GOP primary.
After saying that he is running for governor to ensure that Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams doesn’t win, Perdue in his campaign announcement video on Monday insisted that his run against Kemp “isn’t personal,” but painted the Georgia governor as someone who “caved” to Abrams by refusing to engage with the former president’s election fraud falsehoods in the battleground state.
“Think about how different it would be today if Kemp had fought Abrams first, instead of fighting Trump. Kemp caved before the election and the country is paying the price today,” Perdue said in the video. “It’s time for a change. If our governor was ever going to fight for us, wouldn’t he have done it already?”
In the past year, Perdue has pushed Trump’s bogus claims. Prior to his loss to Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) in the January runoff, Perdue backed the unsuccessful Big Lie lawsuit waged by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton late last year, which aimed to challenge the election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Additionally, Perdue also demanded the ouster of Raffensperger, who defied Trump’s repeated demands that he “find” votes to help him win the battleground state.
