Former GOP Sen. Corker slams Trump legal challenges, calls on Republicans to 'challenge demagoguery'

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President Trump, Sen. Bob Corker trade jabs over border security, poll numbers and the Iran nuclear deal

The outgoing Republican senator from Tennessee spars with President Trump on Twitter; Rich Edson reports from Washington.

Former Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker broke with the leader of his party and called on fellow Republicans to “challenge demagoguery and patently false statements” in President Trump's legal pursuit to overturn election results.

“While the president has the right to legitimate legal challenges, responsible citizens cannot let the reckless actions by him and his legal team stand,” Corker, who retired in 2019, wrote on Twitter Friday. “Republicans have an obligation when the subject is of such importance to challenge demagoguery and patently false statements.”

This week the president has repeatedly tweeted that “I WON THE ELECTION,” has vowed that “I concede NOTHING!” while continuing to charge that there was “VOTER FRAUD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!”

Utah GOP Sen. Mitt Romney also hit the president’s legal efforts. 

“Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election," Romney emphasized in a statement posted to Twitter. "It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.”

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Another Republican senator, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, also criticized the president on Thursday.

Sasse said in a statement that he is telling his constituents to look at what the Trump legal team court argues rather than what they’re saying in public.

"Based on what I've read in their filings, when Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud -- because there are legal consequences for lying to judges," Sasse wrote in his statement. "President Trump lost Michigan by more than 100,000 votes, and the campaign and its allies have lost in or withdrawn from all five lawsuits in Michigan for being unable to produce any evidence."

The president’s legal team has been filing lawsuits in bulk alleging voter fraud and procedural violations in the vote count in key swing states where the race has been called for President-elect Joe Biden. President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani took the fight a step further Friday, alleging in a fiery news conference that there was a "centralized" plan to carry out voter fraud around the country.

 While Giuliani did not present any direct evidence of a massive fraud scheme, the former New York mayor asserted that this is the "logical conclusion" reached as a result of incidents he said took place in several states.

Giuliani also claimed that while Pennsylvania does not allow absentee voters to fix any errors with their ballots, some were given that opportunity -- but not those from Republican areas.

He cited sworn affidavits from cases in Pennsylvania and Michigan from poll workers who spoke about instructions from supervisors. One affidavit said that workers in Pennsylvania were instructed to assign ballots without names to random people, resulting in thousands of people in Pittsburgh showing up to the polls to find that votes had been cast in their names.

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Another affidavit said that a supervisor in Michigan instructed workers to change the dates on absentee ballots to show that they arrived earlier than they had. An affidavit also claimed that workers were told not to request photo identification from Michigan voters, even though state law requires it.

Giuliani also said that approximately 100,000 absentee ballots in Wisconsin should have been deemed invalid because there were no applications for them. President-elect Joe Biden leads President Trump in that state by roughly 20,000 votes.

Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis explained the lack of new evidence at the news conference to support their allegations by saying this was merely an "opening statement," and that more evidence would be forthcoming in court.

Meanwhile, Sidney Powell, an attorney on Trump’s election legal team, claimed to have found massive election fraud.

“What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States,” Powell said.

She attempted to link election software in several states with a company founded “at the direction” of former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013.

“The Dominion Voting Systems, the Smartmatic technology software, and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out," Powell claimed. 

Dominion has repeatedly rejected accusations about vote switching and software issues. The company's international headquarters are in Toronto, where it was founded in 2002, and its U.S. base is in Denver.

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“The latest flood of absurdities is deeply concerning, not just for Dominion but also for our dedicated state and local partners and the electoral process on whole,” the voting software company said in a statement following the press conference.

Fox News' Caitlin McFall and Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.