Schwarzman Says Trump Needs to Move On From the Election

(Bloomberg) -- Stephen Schwarzman, President Donald Trump’s most high-profile supporter on Wall Street, said it’s time for him to accept that he lost the election.

The Blackstone Group Inc. chief executive officer said in a statement Monday that the outcome of the Nov. 3 vote was “very certain today,” signaling that even Trump’s most prominent supporters want to see an end to his efforts to change the result.

“I supported President Trump and the strong economic path he built,” Schwarzman said. “Like many in the business community, I am ready to help President-elect Biden and his team as they confront the significant challenges of rebuilding our post-Covid economy.”

The New York Times and Axios reported on Schwarzman’s comments earlier.

Schwarzman, 73, was among the biggest financial backers of Trump’s re-election campaign, and was quoted in a recent Financial Times story as questioning some vote-counting occurrences in Pennsylvania. But at a virtual event last week he nodded to Biden’s win, saying “it looks like Joe Biden,” in a discussion of who prevailed in the vote.

“I’m a fan of good process. In my comments three days after the election, I was trying to be a voice of reason and express why it’s in the national interest to have all Americans believe the election is being resolved correctly,” he said in Monday’s statement. “But the outcome is very certain today and the country should move on.”

GSA Letter

About 150 New York business leaders signed an open letter Monday demanding that Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, affirm that Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have won, a move that would release federal resources and money to assist in the transition.

“Every day that an orderly presidential transition process is delayed, our democracy grows weaker in the eyes of our own citizens and the nation’s stature on the global stage is diminished,” they wrote. “Withholding resources and vital information from an incoming administration puts the public and economic health and security of America at risk.”

While the list of those signing the letter wasn’t immediately available, the New York Times reported that Blackstone President Jonathan Gray, a Biden supporter, was among them.

Trump has been pushing back against Biden’s victory ever since news organizations projected that the former vice president had won the election. His efforts have included multiple lawsuits and calls for state legislators to ignore results that he has said are fraudulent without providing any evidence.

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