- Trump denied that he asked Rep. Mo Brooks to rescind the presidential election.
- The former president refused to rule out that he should be returned to office.
- "If you are a bank robber, or you're a jewelry store robber, and you go into Tiffany's and you steal their diamonds and get caught, you have to give the diamonds back," he said.
Former President Donald Trump said that he did not ask embattled Republican Rep. Mo Brooks to unconstitutionally reinstate him as president, but he refused to rule out a scenario in which President Joe Biden would be booted from office and he would return.
"I can't imagine that somebody who won the election based on fraud, that something doesn't happen?" Trump told The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey in an interview posted Thursday morning. "How has it not happened? If you are a bank robber, or you're a jewelry store robber, and you go into Tiffany's and you steal their diamonds and get caught, you have to give the diamonds back."
Trump originally endorsed Brooks for his Alabama Senate run before yanking back his support on March 23. Trump said he withdrew his support due after Brooks "went woke" by suggesting that the GOP would be better off focusing on the midterms than relitigating Trump's widely debunked claims about widespread election fraud.
"I didn't ask him to do it. He's in no position to do it. I certainly didn't ask him to do it," Trump told The Post.
Brooks, whose campaign has struggled after an initial lead, responded by going public with what he said were Trump's repeated attempts to get him to overturn the election by booting Biden from office. As Brooks pointed out, such a scenario is unconstitutional and far outside the purview of a single lawmaker.
Brooks has refused to budge from his version of events. He told a local Alabama news station after Trump's announcement that the former president "always brings up" rescinding the election.
A spokesperson for Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.