The Department of Homeland Security has called the presidential election "the most secure in American history" Yet Trump has continued his legal efforts despite losing in courts over and over again.
A Michigan lawyer for Donald Trump’s campaign filed a case in the wrong court. Lawsuits in Arizona and Nevada were dropped. A Georgia challenge was quickly rejected for lack of evidence. His Pennsylvania legal team just threw in the towel.
The president’s legal machine — the one papering swing states with lawsuits and affidavits in support of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud — is slowly grinding to a halt after suffering a slew of legal defeats and setbacks.
In the effort to stop Joe Biden’s victory from being certified, so many
lawsuits have been filed in so many state and federal courts that no one
has an exact number. But one thing is certain: the Trump campaign has
an almost perfect record, having won only one case and lost at least a dozen.
An appeals court in Pennsylvania rejected an objection by Trump's lawyers to practices involving mailed ballots; a Michigan judge threw out claims made by the campaign as "incorrect and not credible."
In a case in Arizona, where Democrat Joe Biden holds a slender lead over Trump, the president's lawyers admitted the judge no longer needed to weigh in because "the tabulation of votes statewide has rendered unnecessary a judicial ruling as to the presidential electors."
A Trump attorney dropped his star-crossed case in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where the campaign was pushing the so-called SharpieGate
conspiracy theory, a bogus claim that ballots were spoiled because
voters used a marker to bubble in their choice of candidates. During the
hearing, Trump’s team abandoned mentioning the issue after elections
officials made the case that it was an invalid argument.
Another Michigan judge dismissed a Republican lawsuit to delay the certification of that state’s vote count. Another lawsuit in Michigan, filed by the conservative Great Lakes
Justice Center on behalf of two Republican poll watchers, was rejected
Friday by a state judge who found that the plaintiffs’ allegations of
fraud were really an exercise in speculation fueled by unfamiliarity
with the vote-counting process.
As Trump's legal efforts start circling the drain, two of the law firms representing his campaign have now quit. Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, the law firm leading the Trump campaign’s efforts to challenge the presidential election results in Pennsylvania, abruptly withdrew from a federal lawsuit that it had filed on behalf of the campaign. That followed a similar move by an Arizona law firm that was representing the Republican Party as it challenged that state’s results. Yesterday, a top lawyer at Jones Day, which has represented Trump’s campaigns for more than four years, told colleagues during a video conference call that Jones Day would not get involved in additional litigation in this election.
Trump's efforts have resulted in one minor victory in Pennsylvania when late Thursday, a judge ordered that the state could not count ballots that had been set aside because they had been cast under a policy changing the relevant deadline. However, the number of ballots involved isn't close to being sufficient to change the outcome of the election.
Even Trump toadie Bill Barr has failed to come up with any legal ammunition in the doomed struggle against Biden's victory. Federal prosecutors in the Department of Justice who were assigned to monitor election malfeasance are now telling Barr they see no evidence of substantial irregularities . Even worse, the assistant U.S. attorneys told Barr that the release of his memorandum (which changed long-standing Justice Department policy on the steps prosecutors can take before the results of an election are certified) “thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics." The policy change was "not based in fact,” the assistant U.S. attorneys wrote.
The only issue left to debate is when Trump will acknowledge Biden's victory and if Trump will attend Biden's inauguration. Anyone taking bets?
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