Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz invoked CNN’s Jim Acosta’s name in a joke he made Monday night on “Hannity” while discussing Broward County’s voting problems.
Up to this point, Gaetz has been very critical of the handling of ballots in Broward and Palm Beach counties in Fla., as those are the only two in the state that were unable to submit their voting tallies by the deadline.
The Florida congressman got into a debate with CNN’s Chris Cuomo a couple days prior about this same issue.
WATCH:
The segment began with Hannity airing a clip of Gaetz from Friday where he approached an office for the supervisor of elections officials demanding to see what they were transporting in the middle of the night. (RELATED: Cuomo Says Trump Got ‘Shellacked’ In Midterm ‘Popular Vote’)
“I’ll be damned if the people in South Florida are going to dilute the legal votes of my constituents who have a right to a honest, fair, representative republic,” Gaetz stated. “In the video you just showed, there were armed police that [were] stopping me just from trying to get an accurate record of what’s going in and out of the supervisor of elections office in the middle of the night. I do not know if it was furniture, I did not know if it was election equipment, ballots.”
“What I do know is there is no chain of custody for 80,000 ballots. Those ballots reach five pages long, so you’re looking at over 404,000 pages of information,” he continued. “We had the Palm Beach supervisor of elections tell the media that if they didn’t turn their cameras off, she was going to have them arrested. That’s the type of thing you would expect in a communist or fascist dictatorship.”
BREAKING: I took this video as the riot police removed me from where trucks were secretly loading stuff in/out of Broward Supervisors office. All this while they are violating constitutional rights & a court order! #BrowardCounty pic.twitter.com/DbxyKRde4f
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) November 10, 2018
Gaetz added, “Listen if I was Jim Acosta, this would be viewed as a human rights violation. But because I’m a congressman trying to represent my constituents, I was told I couldn’t get an accurate record of what’s going on and no chain of custody for ballots.”
Three different Florida races are now under a recount because they ended with the two primary candidates within half of one percent. Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis originally beat his opponent Andrew Gillum, but Gillum later retracted his concession. In the Senate, Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson originally lost to Governor Rick Scott, but that race now appears up for grabs. The agriculture commissioner race is featuring Democrat Nikki Fried and Republican state Rep. Matt Caldwell.