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Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who has faced renewed questions about the 2020 election since refusing at the vice-presidential debate this month to acknowledge that former President Donald J. Trump lost, falsely suggested on Saturday that the election had been “rigged.”
“I think the election of 2020 had serious problems,” Mr. Vance said at a campaign event in Johnstown, Pa. “You want to call it rigged. Call it whatever you want to, it wasn’t OK.”
Mr. Vance was asked five times in an interview with The New York Times this week whether Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, and he declined to answer each time. Taking questions from reporters at a rally at a factory for military vehicles in Johnstown, Mr. Vance again refused to acknowledge his running mate’s defeat and downplayed the severity of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol even as he condemned it.
“Yes, there was a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but there was still a peaceful transfer of power in this country,” Mr. Vance said, describing the rioters as “a few knuckleheads who went off and did something they shouldn't do.” The rioters, hundreds of whom were convicted of crimes in connection to the attack, had interrupted the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory as they stormed the Capitol that day.
Johnstown, which has a storied history in the Pennsylvania steel industry, is in an overwhelmingly Republican county east of Pittsburgh that Mr. Trump won by 38 points in 2020. Some members of the audience at the event, filling roughly half the seats in the venue, stood up in their chairs and booed reporters as they asked questions about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 riot.
Mr. Vance repeated his assertion that censorship by tech companies had hurt Mr. Trump in 2020. And he chided the press for asking him about that election, saying that he had not been asked one question about inflation or the economy.
“I’m a hell of a lot more worried that American citizens can’t afford a good life in their country,” Vance said, “because Kamala Harris has been the vice president, and that is what I’m trying to change.” The audience of Trump supporters gave Mr. Vance a standing ovation, and broke out into chants of: “JD.”
Later, after Mr. Vance departed Johnstown for a town-hall event in a packed airport hangar in Reading, Pa., Mr. Vance said that the attorney general would be the most important job in a second Trump administration. He vowed to “clean house” at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, and to fire those people who were responsible for Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, which he characterized as “fake.”
“Here’s what President Trump and I are going to do when we get in there: We’re going to fire the people responsible,” Mr. Vance said to raucous applause.
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