Trump to set up voter fraud commission

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump said on Sunday he is creating a commission headed by Vice President Mike Pence to investigate what the US leader alleges was massive voter fraud in the 2016 election.No public evidence has emerged of large-scale illegal voting in the November election, and Trump and the White House have failed to substantiate the president's claim.

However, Trump listed the ways he believed voter fraud had occurred during an interview with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly which aired before the Super Bowl on Sunday.

The fraud was apparent, Trump said, "when you look at the registration and you see dead people that have voted, when you see people that are registered in two states that voted in two states, when you see other things, when you see illegals - people that are not citizens - and they are on the registration rolls".

"It's really a bad situation. It's really bad," Trump said.

Trump's own lawyers have stated in legal filings that there was no evidence of fraud in the November 8 election. But on Sunday the president promised "to set up a commission to be headed by Vice President Mike Pence and we're going to look at it very, very carefully".

Trump has previously argued that were it not for illegal immigrants voting, he would have won not just the electoral college but also the popular vote, which was taken by Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin yesterday said it wanted an apology from Fox News over what it said were "unacceptable" comments one of the channel's presenters made about Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview with US counterpart Trump.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly described Putin as "a killer" in the interview with Trump as he tried to press the US president to explain fully why he respected his Russian counterpart. O'Reilly did not say who he thought Putin had killed.

"We consider such words from the Fox TV company to be unacceptable and insulting, and honestly speaking, we would prefer to get an apology from such a respected TV company," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.

Trump's views on Putin are closely scrutinised in the US where US intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of having sponsored computer hacking to help Trump win office, and critics say he is too complimentary about the Russian leader.

Trump, when commenting on the allegations against Putin in the same interview, questioned how "innocent" the US itself was, saying it had made a lot of its own mistakes. That irritated some Congressional Republicans who said there was no comparison between how Russian and US politicians behaved.

Trump, who has said he wants to try to mend battered US-Russia ties and hopes he can get along with Putin, was asked a question about some of those allegations by Fox Business before he won the White House.

In January last year, after a British judge ruled that Putin had "probably" authorised the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, Trump said he saw "no evidence" the Russian president was guilty.

"First of all, he says he didn't do it. Many people say it wasn't him. So who knows who did it?" Trump said.

In another development, Russia says it disagrees with the Trump administration's characterisation of Iran as a "terrorist state."

Several officials in Trump's inner circle are known for visceral acrimony toward Iran. Trump himself, has also been striking a belligerent tone on Iran, particularly regarding a nuclear deal that Tehran negotiated with six other countries - including the US - back in 2015. Trump has said the deal benefited the other parties to the deal more than it did American businesses.

But in a first remark that closely resembled his aides' rhetoric on the Islamic Republic, Trump told Fox News on Sunday that Iran was "terrorist state number one."