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Post by Admin on Dec 10, 2020 4:19:44 GMT
Election experts scoffed this week when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced he would be filing a lawsuit in the Supreme Court against four key states in an attempt to block presidential electors from finalizing Joe Biden's election victory. But now President Trump and 17 states he carried are joining that effort. Officials in the states targeted in the suit — Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — derided it as nothing more than an unfounded publicity stunt. The lawsuit may be a typically adept Trump move to get attention, but election law experts said he has little chance of getting the Supreme Court to support his move. As election law expert Richard Hasen put it about the Texas filing, "This is a press release masquerading as a lawsuit. ... What utter garbage. Dangerous garbage, but garbage." Just how little legal support there is for the lawsuit is evidenced by who signed the briefs asking the high court to intervene. Trump's brief was not signed by acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall or any other Justice Department official. Rather, the brief was signed by John Eastman, a conservative law professor at Chapman University. (A Trump campaign statement said the president intervened "in his personal capacity as candidate for re-election.") The Texas brief was not signed by the state's solicitor general, Kyle Hawkins. Paxton, who signed the Texas brief, remains under indictment over securities fraud and is also facing an FBI investigation on bribery and abuse of office allegations. All of the briefs filed so far are in the form of a motion seeking permission to sue the states in the Supreme Court. As legal experts have noted, it is unclear what legal standing Trump, Texas or the 17 states supporting their move have for challenging the results of elections in other states. Moreover, with the Electoral College slated to meet next week, this legal action amounts to little more than an eleventh hour Hail Mary pass. It is more like trying to stop the game clock from ticking when all the players are walking off the field.
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Post by Admin on Dec 13, 2020 6:51:28 GMT
A federal judge in Wisconsin on Saturday bluntly dismissed a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump challenging Joe Biden’s win in that state, further cementing Biden’s victory in the national presidential election.
Trump’s latest court loss — one of almost 60 in the past month by his campaign and allies in state and federal courts — came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a likely fatal blow to his bid for a second term.
The Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit by Texas that sought to revoke Biden’s national victory by attacking results in four key states.
The high court’s denial came after it likewise refused to hear a challenge to Biden’s win in Pennsylvania filed by a congressman there.
In the Wisconsin case, Trump was suing the state elections commission.
The judge in the case, Brett Ludwig, who was appointed by Trump to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, on Thursday held a hearing where the president’s lawyers made their arguments to set aside the result of the state’s popular election, which Biden won by more than 20,000 votes.
“This is an extraordinary case,” wrote Ludwig in his decision Saturday.
“A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred.”
“This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits,” the judge wrote.
“In his reply brief, plaintiff ‘asks that the Rule of Law be followed’ .... It has been,” the judge continued.
Ludwig dismissed the lawsuit “with prejudice,” underscoring his belief that Trump had no valid claim.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that guidance issued by the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to absentee ballots, “along with election officials’ conduct in reliance on that guidance,” deviated so much from state election law “that the election was itself a ‘failure,’ ” Ludwig wrote.
But Ludwig wrote that Trump “has not proved that defendants violated his rights under the Electors Clause.”
“To the contrary, the record shows Wisconsin’s Presidential Electors are being determined in the very manner directed by the Legislature, as required by Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution,” the judge said.
Trump has claimed for weeks that he was swindled out of a win in the national election, and by extension in the Electoral College, by illegal changes to voting procedures in a number of states, and by widespread fraud in states that sealed Biden’s victory.
No court has accepted those claims, and Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly failed to produce evidence in court that would substantiate their allegations of massive fraud.
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Post by Admin on Dec 13, 2020 20:38:38 GMT
President Trump said in an interview broadcast early Sunday that his attempts to overturn the vote are “not over.”
In the “Fox & Friends Weekend” interview recorded Saturday, Brian Kilmeade asked the president whether his challenges to the election results were “over” after the Supreme Court on Friday rejected a Texas lawsuit seeking to toss the results in four states.
“No, it’s not over. We keep going. And we’re going to continue to go forward,” the president replied.
Trump also continued his broadsides against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) for refusing to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state, accusing him of harming Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) in their upcoming Jan. 5 runoffs, which will determine control of the Senate.
“We have a governor, Republican governor, that’s worse than a Democrat. He’s terrible, and he’s hurting Kelly and David very badly, the senators that are terrific people,” Trump added.
Kilmeade went on to ask how Monday's meeting of the Electoral College, which is expected to elect Biden as the next president, and Congress's count of its votes on Jan. 6 would affect Trump’s efforts.
“I don’t know. We’re going to speed it up as much as we can. But you can only go so fast. They give us very little time,” Trump said, going on to repeat conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud. Experts, local officials and Attorney General William Barr have all said there is no indication of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
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Post by Admin on Dec 19, 2020 20:45:59 GMT
The battle is lost. The supreme court and electoral college have spoken. Even the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, so adept at remaking the rules for political advantage, has acknowledged that Donald Trump will not be the next president.
But the money flowing into Trump’s political coffers suggests that defeat will not drive the soon-to-be-former president into the political shadows.
Trump has been on a fundraising drive since the election, rapidly bringing in an astonishing $200m or more on the back of his false claims that the vote was rigged.
His campaign bombarded supporters with emails and text messages – as many as 30 a day – pleading for donations to a fighting fund to challenge the result. But with the election settled, that is not where the money is going.
Most of the cash is directed to Save America, an organisation formed as a leadership political action committee (Pac) shortly after the election. Leadership Pacs were designed to allow individuals to raise money in support of a favoured candidate and Trump cannot legally use the proceeds to directly fund a run for office himself, such as another bid for the presidency in four years.
But Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance specialist at the Campaign Legal Center, said Trump’s fundraising was unprecedented and evidence of undimmed political ambition.
“I can think of no other president who has set up a leadership PAC immediately after losing an election and begun fundraising for it furiously. This is entirely, entirely unique,” he said.
“I think it’s basically going to be the vehicle for Trump’s post-White House political operation.”
Trump raised the money in a blitz of appeals for donations to what was billed as an “official election defense fund” without clear mention of Save America. An aggressive sales pitch was built around the president’s false claims that the election was rigged – even as one legal challenge after another was struck down.
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Post by Admin on Dec 20, 2020 19:34:47 GMT
Donald Trump on Friday considered bringing in the military to overturn his key swing state defeats to president-elect, Joe Biden, it has been reported.
White House insiders allegedly said Mr Trump discussed imposing martial law in a move aimed overturning the result of the 2020 election.
It reportedly came after Michael Flynn, the president's first national security adviser, floated the idea in an interview with the right-wing news outlet, Newsmax last week.
Flynn, recently pardoned by Mr Trump after his Russia investigation conviction, told Newsmax martial law was not "unprecedented" as he laid out his case for military involvement in the democratic process.
During Friday's White House meeting, at which Flynn was present, Mr Trump asked aides how martial law works, sources told the New York Times.
According to the NYT report, Mr Trump also suggested naming Sidney Powell, a lawyer and ally who has pushed his false election claims, as a special counsel overseeing alleged voter fraud at the election.
The White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows - and other top advisers - opposed the ideas being put forward at the meeting, saying there was no constitutional authority for them, the NYT reported.
In response to Flynn’s calls to invoke martial law, army secretary Ryan McCarthy and chief of staff general James McConville issued a joint statement saying there "is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election".
It was not immediately clear if the president plans to press ahead with appointing Ms Powell as a special counsel.
Mr Trump responded to the martial law claim early on Sunday morning, describing it on Twitter as "Fake News". "Just more knowingly bad reporting!" he added.
Despite the electoral college (EC) meeting last week to certify Mr Biden's election victory, the defeated incumbent continues to falsely insist that the won and that the 3 November poll was "stolen" from him.
The president and his legal team continue to allege, without evidence, that mass voter fraud took place in key swing states across the country.
Thousands of Mr Trump's supporters took to the streets last week in a show of support of those baseless claims, with violent clashes breaking out in state capitals across the US.
And there is another protest planned to take place on 6 January, the day Congress meets to officially recognise Joe Biden as president following the 14 December EC vote.
As the coronavirus continues to ravage vast swathes of the country, the outgoing president called on his legion of loyal fans to descend on the capital and join the demonstration.
"Big protest in D.C. on January 6th," he tweeted on Saturday. "Be there, will be wild!"
Mr Trump's campaign and his allies have now filed roughly 50 lawsuits alleging widespread voting fraud and almost all have been dismissed or dropped.
Team Trump has lost before judges of both political parties, including some he appointed, and some of the strongest rebukes have come from conservative Republicans.
The Supreme Court has also refused to take up two cases — decisions that the president has scorned.
With no further tenable legal recourse, Mr Trump has been fuming and peppering allies for options as he refuses to accept his loss.
That includes his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who during the Friday meeting pushed the president to seize voting machines in his hunt for evidence of fraud.
The Department of Homeland Security made clear, however, that it had no authority to do so. It is also unclear what that would accomplish.
Sacked attorney general William Barr earlier this month said that the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have looked into claims that voting machines "were programmed essentially to skew the election results ... and so far, we haven't seen anything to substantiate that."
Paper ballots are also retained under federal law and have been used to verify results, including in Georgia, which performed two audits of the vote tally using paper-ballot backups.
Ms Powell was initially part of the president's campaign legal team but was booted out after a bizarre news conference with Giuliani in which she made a series of outlandish claims of election fraud, including an assertion that election software was created in Venezuela "at the direction of Hugo Chavez" — the Venezuelan president who died in 2013.
In interviews and appearances, Ms Powell continued to make misleading statements about the voting process, unfurled unsupported and complex conspiracy theories involving communist regimes and vowed to "blow up" Georgia with a "biblical" court filing.
Trump's team soon announced it had cut ties with Ms Powell. "She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity," Giuliani and another Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement.
Dominion Voting Systems, a particular target of Ms Powell's, has also demanded she retract the "wild" and "knowingly baseless" claims she has made about the voting machine company and threatened a defamation lawsuit.
Since parting ways with the campaign, Powell has continued to file litigation on Trump's behalf, teaming up with conservative attorney L. Lin Wood in Georgia.
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