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Maryland's GOP governor says he hopes Trump will 'do the right thing in the end' and concede election

Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said Sunday he hopes that President Donald Trump's campaign team will "do the right thing in the end" and concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden.

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By
Nikki Carvajal
and
Chandelis Duster, CNN
CNN — Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said Sunday he hopes that President Donald Trump's campaign team will "do the right thing in the end" and concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden.

Hogan, who has been an outspoken critic of the President and wrote in Ronald Reagan when he cast his ballot for President last month, told CNN's Jake Tapper that Trump "ought to at least acknowledge that he will" concede, "even if it may take a few more days for cooler heads to prevail and to convince him it's the right thing to do for the nation."

"The way our system works is we all cast the votes, we count the votes, and then we live with the results," Hogan said on "State of the Union."

CNN projected on Saturday that Biden will be the 46th president of the United States after projecting the Democrat had won Pennsylvania and clinched more than the 270 electoral votes needed to win the race. The President has tweeted, without evidence, baseless claims of fraud in ballot counting and has continued to push his attorneys to pursue legal challenges that would delay formal certification of the results.

The President has claimed publicly and falsely that he won the election, but sources told CNN that Trump is not denying the outcome privately. And two people told CNN Saturday that Jared Kushner, the President's son-in-law and senior adviser who oversaw his campaign from the White House, has approached Trump about conceding.

First lady Melania Trump is advising the President the time has come for him to accept the loss, another source familiar with the conversations told CNN on Sunday.

Hogan told Tapper on Sunday that he hasn't "seen any evidence" of the election fraud alleged by the President.

"Look, if there is evidence of widespread voter fraud, we ought to come out with it," he said. "A couple of Republican governors are the ones responsible for a couple of the states that are still in question. They haven't questioned the results."

He continued, "I think there are legal processes if you think there are mistakes, but I don't think we are going to see anything that's going to overturn the election. Whether you like it or not, it's time to get behind the winner of the race."

Hogan was one of the first prominent Republicans to acknowledge the former vice president's win on Twitter, writing on Saturday that "everyone should want our president to succeed because we need our country to succeed. We have great challenges ahead of us as a country."

"Now more than ever," Hogan wrote, "we need to come together as Americans."

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