A top Republican congressional aide is resigning over his party’s support for President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election after it fueled deadly riots at the Capitol.

In a scathing resignation letter obtained by POLITICO, Jason Schmid, a longtime senior House Armed Services Committee staffer, slammed the GOP members of the panel who objected to President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win, particularly after a mob incited by Trump stormed the Capitol last Wednesday and left five people dead.

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North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a Republican freshman who voted last week to overturn the presidential election results, expressed regret about claims of election fraud in a local TV interview.

"Once you start floating this idea of election fraud and people outright stealing an election and cheating, that has only one outcome,” Cawthorn said in an interview with North Carolina's WTVD-TV news, an ABC affiliate. “The party as a whole should have been much more wise about their choice of words.”

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President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday demanded that President Donald Trump go on national TV to call off the rioters who have stormed the U.S. Capitol.

“I call on this mob to pull back and allow the work of the democracy to go forward,” Biden said as armed rioters caused the Capitol to go into lockdown. “The words of a president matter, no matter how good or bad that president is.”

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Republican lawmakers on Wednesday afternoon issued their first challenge to the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, objecting to Arizona's electoral vote count.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) formally made the objection at the outset of the joint session of Congress, after lawmakers approved the electoral vote counts of Alabama and Alaska, states won by President Donald Trump, without objection.

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Donald Trump has privately acknowledged he lost the presidency. He knows Joe Biden will replace him. He recognizes Congress will formally certify the results on Wednesday.

To one person, Trump even confided he was “just disappointed we lost.”

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The Senate Republicans opposed to certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s win are heading toward a hefty defeat on Wednesday. The only remaining question is this: how badly do they lose?

Just 11 GOP senators have signaled support for separate efforts led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). That makes 13 supporters — and many more have come out swinging against it.

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President Donald Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence publicly on Tuesday to reject the results of the Electoral College when they come before Congress on Wednesday, part of Trump's doomed-to-fail, last-ditch effort to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's victory.

“The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors,” Trump tweeted Tuesday.

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Attorneys for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Monday lit into a “thirteenth hour” effort by President Donald Trump to decertify the results of the state’s Nov. 3 election, calling it a belated bid to nullify the ballots of millions of voters.

“There have been numerous suits filed since the November 3, 2020, general election, challenging most of the issues set forth in [Trump’s] motion. In all resolved suits, the claims have been flatly rejected,” lawyers from Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr’s office said in a filing on behalf of the state leaders.

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Mitch McConnell explicitly warned Senate Republicans not to challenge Joe Biden’s presidential win. But now that a dozen of his members are going there, the GOP leader is taking his thumb off the scale.

The Kentucky Republican actively sought to avoid a divisive circus over the election results, making his position well-known throughout the GOP conference. Yet senators and aides say he is not actively whipping his members to side against Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who are leading the electoral objections in the Senate. Instead, he’s offering guidance when it’s sought, fielding calls from at least half the Senate GOP conference, according to a source familiar with the matter.

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America’s business leaders are ready to put the presidential election to rest.

More than 100 business executives, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, released statements on Monday urging Congress to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral win. Executives and founders of industries ranging from finance to media to fashion pushed back against President Donald Trump’s quixotic effort to overturn the election and insisted that Congress focus instead on the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

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President Donald Trump warned Sen. Tom Cotton on Monday that Republican voters would "never forget" GOP lawmakers who fail to embrace Trump's baseless effort to contest President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.

“How can you certify an election when the numbers being certified are verifiably WRONG,” Trump tweeted. “You will see the real numbers tonight during my speech, but especially on JANUARY 6th. @SenTomCotton Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!”

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Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Sunday declined to endorse Republican efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election but disagreed sharply with his CNN interviewer on what has undermined confidence in the electoral process.

“We have not seen anything that rises to the level that would have changed the outcome of the election,” the Republican governor said, when asked about efforts by significant numbers of House and Senate Republicans to prevent the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory by Congress on Jan. 6.

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The ongoing coronavirus pandemic loomed large over every aspect of Sunday’s opening day of the 117th Congress, with fears of spreading the virus front and center and lawmakers fighting over masks on the floor of the House.

Lawmakers crowded into the Capitol in the closing days of Donald Trump’s presidency for the swearing-in of hundreds of members and the election of Nancy Pelosi to speaker, all amid a Republican effort to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

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Nearly a quarter of Senate Republicans are officially preparing to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win on Jan. 6, a stunning development that demonstrates just how far some in the GOP will go to align themselves with President Donald Trump’s flailing claims that the election was stolen from him.

Eleven more Republican senators announced Saturday they will challenge Biden’s election victory next week when Congress gathers to certify the Electoral College vote. The movement is led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who circulated the idea among Senate Republicans of voting against certification of the election unless there’s an election audit.

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A federal appeals court has thrown out GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert’s last-ditch attempt to subvert President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, his second rejection in two days in the Texas lawmaker’s attempt to empower Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals gave very short shrift to Gohmert's legal effort, dismissing it summarily in a one-paragraph opinion issued Saturday evening.

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Vice President Mike Pence has the unilateral power to decide the outcome of the 2020 election, according to the latest filing in a lawsuit brought by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and other Republicans mounting a last-ditch bid to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“Under the Constitution, he has the authority to conduct that proceeding as he sees fit,” Gohmert argues. “He may count elector votes certified by a state’s executive, or he can prefer a competing slate of duly qualified electors. He may ignore all electors from a certain state. That is the power bestowed upon him by the Constitution.”

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Sen. Ben Sasse late Wednesday delivered a blistering, 2,200-word critique of his Republican colleagues who he says are engaged in a “dangerous ploy” to placate President Donald Trump in his doomed effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Sasse (R-Neb.) wrote, just hours after his colleague, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced his intention to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania and perhaps other states.

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Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and President Donald Trump's defeated electors from Arizona may force Vice President Mike Pence to publicly pick a side in Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Gohmert and a handful of the would-be electors sued Pence in federal court on Monday in a long-shot bid to throw out the rules that govern Congress' counting of electoral votes next week. It’s an effort they hope will permit Pence — who is tasked with leading the Jan. 6 session of the House and Senate — to simply ignore President-elect Joe Biden's electors and count Trump's losing slates instead.

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The foreign cyberattacks that so many intelligence officials feared didn’t upend the 2020 elections — but this year’s contests nonetheless showed how much the nation still needs to do to fix its security weaknesses.

Paper trails protected the integrity of the votes in closely watched states, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid, but many counties still lack that protection. States mostly rejected the riskiest voting technology — internet balloting — but a few embraced it. And a pandemic-ravaged nation managed to vote safely and reliably, but election offices are still woefully short of money and staff.

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