The head of the NAACP warned Thursday that his group will “resist” if President Donald Trump goes forward with his “major investigation” into voter fraud.
The President claims without providing evidence that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 US election, although this belief has been widely debunked.
“The President has claimed millions of fraudulent ballots were cast. The only place you will find millions of fraudulent ballots are right beside that fake birth certificate for Barack Obama, inside the imagination of President Trump. They don’t exist,” Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.”
Brooks said over the course of the past election there has been “unrelenting voter suppression.”
“We have seen our rights denied as Americans. Particularly seniors, African-Americans, Latinos and younger people,” Brooks said. “So, if the President insists upon conducting an investigation into voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression, the NAACP, along with millions of Americans of every human heritage, will resist. We will push back.”
Earlier in the day, Brooks tweeted, “Dear #POTUS, I assure you, in the memory of @NAACP martyrs, any exec. order suppressing votes will meet unrelenting #resistance.”
Blitzer asked Brooks if this was a threat in any way, to which he replied, “no threat at all.”
“This is a new, old, bad, expensive idea. The definition of fraud, waste and abuse. We don’t need to go down that road. In fact, what he needs to do is strengthen voting rights.”
Brooks said he would strongly encourage Trump to “focus on ensuring access to the ballot box instead of erecting barriers to the ballot box. This is something literally people have died for.”
“If the President goes down this road, we must resist, and we must resist massively,” Brooks said.