US election not over for Donald Trump until courts have their say: Robert O’Brien

Name: Disbelief among Trump voters in Pennsylvania as Pence says US presidential election ‘ain’t over’
Uploaded: 2020-11-23T09:27:55.000Z
Duration: 2 min 1 s
Description: Disbelief among Trump voters in Pennsylvania as Pence says US presidential election ‘ain’t over’

The outgoing US National Security Advisor made the comments after an Asia tour, during which he slammed China over issues including trade and Covid-19

O’Brien said officials in Japan, Philippines and Vietnam had not conveyed concern about a potentially messy power handover by Trump to President-elect Joe Biden

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Robert O’Brien says US President Donald Trump has not exhausted his legal remedies. Photo: EPA-EFE

Bhavan Jaipragasin Hong KongandRaissa Roblesin Manila

Published: 5:27pm, 23 Nov 2020Updated: 10:05pm, 23 Nov 2020

The outgoing US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien on Monday said that senior officials he had met in a three-nation Asia tour had expressed no concerns over a potentially messy transition of power from President Donald Trump to his putative successor Joe Biden, and suggested – like other Trump allies – that the election was not a done deal.

The Trump appointee, speaking in a telephone briefing with regional journalists from the Philippines after earlier stops in Vietnam and Japan, did not repeat comments he had made in a forum last week, when he said the Democrat president-elect “obviously” looked like the victor.

Observers interpreted those remarks as the closest that someone from Trump’s inner circle had come to conceding the president lost the vote.

Instead, O’Brien in Monday’s press briefing said Trump had not exhausted his legal remedies – even though various challenges were being almost uniformly rejected by US courts and senior Republicans had begun urging the president to accept Biden’s victory.

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Disbelief among Trump voters in Pennsylvania as Pence says US presidential election ‘ain’t over’

Asked by This Week in Asia if his counterparts had expressed concerns about the messy and truncated transfer of power, O’Brien said: “No. What I have heard from my counterparts at the highest level of government in Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, is that they understand that Donald J. Trump will be president of the United States until January 20.