US election: Pompeo mocked for cheering ‘free and fair elections’ abroad even as Trump challenges result

President is issuing a torrent of misinformation about his defeat, which he insists is fraudulent

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is being ridiculed for comments celebrating electoral integrity abroad even as Donald Trump spreads misinformation to insist that he has in fact won re-election — and sues in various states to have votes thrown out altogether.

Mr Pompeo made the remarks while visiting the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, where he met with prime minister Giorgi Gakharia, a key US ally in the region.

During his visit, the secretary tweeted that it was “great” to “discuss the importance of holding free, fair, and transparent elections in Georgia”, while affirming the US’s support for the country’s sovereignty “in the face of Russian occupation”.

In another tweet, he celebrated Georgia’s progress in “fighting corruption, developing modern state institutions, and enhancing security”.

Mr Pompeo’s messages found a caustic reception, with other users criticising him for issuing high-minded statements about election integrity even as his own government attempts to have the result of a recent election overturned.

“I don’t think your boss supports free and fair elections," wrote one.

ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman reported from Mr Pompeo’s home country: “Hello! I report domestically from our state of Georgia, where the Trump campaign repeatedly demanded an endorsement from the state’s chief election official and threw him under the bus when it didn’t get one.” 

Mr Trump and his allies’ behaviour since losing the election has been described as a “coup attempt” by many onlookers, including experts on authoritarianism around the world, who see in the president’s actions a clear parallel with anti-democratic regimes elsewhere.

Among them is academic and writer Anne Applebaum, who pointed out the “hypocrisy” of Mr Pompeo’s remarks in Georgia.

Ms Applebaum’s latest book, The Twilight of Democracy, interrogates why the Republican Party and many US conservatives have embraced Mr Trump even as he directly violates many of their own long-held principles — a phenomenon seen in other countries, such as Poland and Hungary, where authoritarian leaders and parties have made strides towards dismantling democratic institutions.

As Mr Pompeo tweeted from Tbilisi, Mr Trump continued to tweet furiously about his loss to Joe Biden, which has lately dominated his feed to the excursion of almost any other concern. Many of his recent tweets have been flagged by the platform as false or misleading, repeating as they do various allegations and versions of events that have been roundly debunked.

The Trump campaign’s legal battles to overturn the result are not going well. Of the 25-odd lawsuits it has filed in various states, the overwhelming majority have already been thrown out.

The president’s top lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spent Tuesday in a Pennsylvania court arguing that hundreds of thousands of votes cast in the state could be thrown out, even as he presented no evidence of voter fraud that could have made a difference to the outcome.

Meanwhile, the campaign’s efforts to challenge the result in the state of Georgia have met with resistance from the top Republican election official, Brad Raffensperger, who has claimed that Trump allies including senator Lindsey Graham have inquired about the possibility of discarding some counties’ entire stack of mail-in ballots.