Incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer blamed the spat between the Trump team and Rep. John Lewis on the civil rights icon. | AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Vice President-elect Mike Pence said Monday that he was “disappointed” to hear Rep. John Lewis call into question the legitimacy of President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.
And it is precisely because of Lewis’s stature as an icon of the civil rights movement that Pence and other Trump allies have said they were so taken aback by the congressman’s comments.
“I served with John Lewis, I disagreed with him on many issues, but I respect the role that he’s played in the civil rights movement and the voting rights movement, and that’s why I was just so disappointed that he would make the statement that he made,” Pence said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” Monday morning. “For someone of John Lewis’ stature to lend credibility to the baseless assertions of those who question the legitimacy of this election is deeply disappointing. I hope he reconsiders it.”
The dust-up between Lewis (D-Ga.) and Trump’s team began late last week when NBC News released an excerpt of pre-taped “Meet the Press” interview in which that Georgia lawmaker told host Chuck Todd that “I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president.”
“I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected,” Lewis explained when asked why he views Trump as illegitimate. “And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”
Trump responded, as he often does, on Twitter, lashing out at Lewis Saturday morning.
“Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results,” Trump wrote on Twitter, breaking his message into two posts. “All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad!”
Lewis, a member of Congress since 1987, represents Georgia’s 5th district, which encompasses much of the city of Atlanta. As a young man, he was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Lewis also spoke at the rally.
Lewis is part of a group of Democratic lawmakers who have said they will not attend Trump’s inauguration on Friday. Speaking to “Fox & Friends,” Pence said “this is a week where we ought to be coming together,” noting that four of the five living presidents will attend the event, with only former President George H.W. Bush missing due to health reasons. The presidential inauguration “is a testament to the world of the vibrancy of our democracy,” he said.
In his own interview on NBC’s “Today” show, incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer blamed the back-and-forth on the Georgia Democrat, telling host Tamron Hall that “you know, Congressman Lewis started this.” Lewis’s comments were made all the worse, Spicer said, because they fell over the long weekend marking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“You have this icon of voting and civil rights claiming that an election was illegitimate, when there’s zero evidence of that. Everybody has confirmed that the election was duly held. There was no tampering with anything,” Spicer said. “And to see somebody of John Lewis’ stature, and iconic nature, who has worked so hard to enfranchise people and talk about getting people involved in our voting systems and getting and talking about the integrity of our voting system, to then go out when the candidate of his choice doesn’t win, and try to talk about the delegitimization of the election is frankly disappointing.”
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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/john-lewis-trump-fight-233655