Trump-Backed CA Gov. Candidate Steve Hilton Distances Himself from President’s ‘Rigged’ Election Claims

Steve Hilton, the Republican gubernatorial candidate backed by President Donald Trump, publicly distanced himself from the president’s claims that California’s election results were “rigged” as he argued his team had “seen nothing” to suggest this was the case.

Speaking on CNN’s OutFront on Monday, Hilton was pressed by host Erin Burnett on Trump’s repeated allegations, without evidence, that both the California governor’s race and the Los Angeles mayoral contest were “crooked” and “rigged.”

“Just in terms of where you stand, are you worried that there’s fraud right now? Or are you just frustrated that the count is slow, but that you believe the process is fair?” Burnett asked.

“Yeah. So look, there’s so many things wrong with the system. I’ve been saying all along that we take it very seriously because we don’t want to let people down and we’ve been very vigilant on it,” Hilton said.

He continued: “We’re keeping an eye on it. We’ve got teams standing by, lawyers standing by, and actually it’s the same answer that actually I’ve been giving for a few days now, we’ve seen nothing that would give us cause to intervene in that way.”

“But more importantly than that, Bill Essayli, the U.S. Attorney, who’s actually got the full weight of the Justice Department, and he’s there, and he’s taking a look at it. And I trust that if there is anything that needs to be investigated, that he will make sure it happens,” he added

Hilton, however, reiterated his belief that the “whole system needs to be improved” and said that he had offered California Governor Gavin Newsom suggestions on how to “speed things up.”

“One of the reasons it’s so slow is that it’s done county-by-county, there just aren’t enough people in the offices doing the counting. One reason for that is because you’ve got a lot of complexity, a lot of signature verification. One way around that we can actually vote for in November in California, voter ID that would remove the need for all the signature verification that would really speed things up. So there’s a lot of sensible things we could do to avoid this kind of fiasco,” he said.

He said that the slow pace was “making California look like a laughing stock around the world” as he advocated for “positive” and “practical” changes to speed up the counting process and “to prevent the opportunity” for people to look at the state’s elections and suspect there’s “something fishy.”

Watch above via CNN.

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