The Republican National Committee has reached out to donors as it seeks to raise at least $60 million to fund legal challenges brought by President Donald Trump over the results of the US presidential election, two sources familiar with the matter said. The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in several states following the Nov 3 election pitting the president against Democrat Joe Biden.
Democrat Joe Biden took the lead in key battleground state Pennsylvania on Friday, where a victory for the former vice president would push him past the threshold of electoral votes needed to win the White House, official data showed.
US President Donald Trump erupted in a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he has been cheated out of winning the US election as vote counting across battleground states early Friday showed Democrat Joe Biden steadily closing in on victory.
"They are trying to steal the election," an increasingly isolated Trump said in an extraordinary appearance at the White House on Thursday, two days after polls closed.
According to Trump, Democrats were using "illegal votes" to "steal the election from us."
Joe Biden, 77, was just one or at most two battleground states away from securing the majority to take the White House. Donald Trump, 74, needed an increasingly unlikely combination of wins in multiple states to stay in power.
Biden, who has promised to heal a country bruised by Trump's extraordinarily polarizing four years in power, appealed for "people to stay calm."
"We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator (Kamala) Harris and I will be declared the winners," he said in comments to reporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
"The process is working," he said. "The count is being completed. And we will know soon."
The big shift to postal ballots this year reflected the desire of voters to avoid risking exposure to Covid-19 in crowded polling stations during a pandemic that has already killed some 235,000 Americans.
