| From: pocotrader | 11/14/2020 7:38:37 AM | | | | | | Trump campaign files election lawsuit at wrong court in latest blunder‘Presumably by accident’
It was a mix-up that would have made Rudy Giuliani blush.
The Trump campaign ramped up its legal battle against the presidential election vote count by filing a law suit at the wrong court.
While the United States Court of Federal Claims responded to the suit, Judge Elaine D Kaplan made clear the court's usual jurisdiction over monetary actions doesn't cover the Trump team’s claims against state and local governments.
The complaint is captioned as though it were filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan," Ms Kaplan wrote.
"Instead, however, it was filed with this Court, presumably by accident."
The suit was transferred to the correct court in Michigan, where the complaint had already been filed separately.
The misfiling was first identified by CNN's Katelyn Polantz, who reported that the lawyer on record for the case said it was a mistake. Pacer, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, supposedly misfiled the suit in the wrong court.
The mix-up follows the now-infamous press conference of Mr Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer, in Four Seasons Total Landscaping car park as the results of the election were first projected by The Associated Press on Saturday.
There was widespread confusion and mirth when the press conference was announced at the Four Seasons, only for the Four Seasons hotel to clarify it was not involved.
The Trump campaign has filed a string of lawsuits, some of which have since been withdrawn, in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona as the president attempts to stall certification of votes in states that were key to delivering Joe Biden the election.
While the president has been publicly repeating claims of fraud on his Twitter feed, the lawsuits have had little to do with fraud and have instead focused on irregularities in the process.
States have until 8 December to certify results before the Electoral College formally selects the next president on 14 December.
If legal challenges delay certification of results and the Electoral College can't convene, there are other legal pathways for Mr Trump to retain the presidency. |
| | Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: Bonefish who wrote (1278365) | 11/14/2020 8:57:05 AM | | From: Brumar89 | | | | BLM and antifa don't bother me. A man of evil running my country does.
The part about mythical Biden Super Spreaders is funny. You Trumpers LOVE Super Spreaders. Now THAT's hypocrisy. |
| | Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: Bonefish who wrote (1278385) | 11/14/2020 8:57:10 AM | | From: sylvester80 | | | | DONALD tRUMP CONFRONTS A NEW LABEL: LOSER.
politico.com
For the first time in a life that has been free of consequences for his failures, Trump has been held to account on the world’s largest stage.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
11/07/2020 11:34 AM EST
Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.
“I win, I win, I always win. In the end I always win,” Donald Trump once said. Now, though, for the first time in his life, in a public and historic way, he has lost.
As he has so relentlessly in the past, Trump is fighting against being tagged with a label that he has considered toxic to his brand. He has refused to concede. “The simple fact is this election is far from over,” he said in a statement just after the election was called. He promised to fight the results in court, alleging, without evidence, that a massive electoral fraud had robbed him of victory. But his talent for recasting reality to his advantage was incapable of overcoming a statistical truth not only accepted but dictated by the majority of the nation. He lost.
He lost because he lost Pennsylvania. He lost because he lost Wisconsin. He lost because he lost Michigan. Although he held Florida and Ohio and got more total votes than he did in 2016 and again overall outperformed most polls, the embattled incumbent ultimately lost in 2020 because he lost the support of just enough people in just enough places to lose.
For a half a century, time and again, Trump was able to fail and yet persuade the world that he hadn’t. He shirked personal bankruptcy by shunting to others the financial wreckage in his wake, fogged over defeats by insisting they were not, developed over time an armor of seeming untouchability, benefiting from people failing to act who could have held him to account — lenders, regulators, prosecutors and political power brokers. In this election, however, hundreds of millions of voters have done what all of them did not, making Joe Biden the next president and saddling Trump with a decision not as decisive as some pundits had predicted but nonetheless a loss.
Beyond the electoral math, the 45th president was rendered a one-term president because of the well-chronicled collection of his most core characteristics. What fueled Trump’s appeal during his improbable 2016 campaign turned steadily more untenable over the course of his four-year term. Normally, a president with a thriving economy builds up a reservoir of public approval and support — but Trump never did. His unappeasable need for affirmation, adoration and attention inhibited him from adding to his base of ardent supporters; it also led to the constant churn and uncertainty of his White House, as he dismissed those in the administration willing to push back and promoted the yes-men who were content to “let Trump be Trump.” His abiding conviction in the utility of division and chaos led to a whirl of staff turnover and a cascade of head-spinning feuds and inflammatory tweets that unnerved and exhausted a larger and larger share of the population as well as a share of his Washington allies. And his obsession with blind positivity, with image over reality, with the flouting of fact — his congenital unwillingness to share any credit or take any blame, his practically pathological commitment to putting up a tough front — all of it prevented him from demonstrating sufficient empathy to acknowledge the sweeping pain of the coronavirus pandemic that overshadowed his final year in office. In the end, the problem for Trump was “his Richter scale narcissism,” in the words of biographer Tim O’Brien. “If the only person you care about is yourself,” he said, “you can’t do things for other people.”
"Everything revolved around his own ego,” Brendan Buck, a former top aide to Republican speakers of the House John Boehner and Paul Ryan, told me. “The narcissism wasn’t necessarily used to advance some overarching goal or agenda or to change the world in any particular way. It was the end in and of itself — to just get the attention.”
“You can’t run the presidency by id and instinct, and that’s what he’s done,” longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said.
“His narcissism prevented him from ever pivoting to broaden his appeal beyond his base,” said Republican consultant Rob Stutzman. “He simply chose over and over and over,” added Michael Steel, a former Boehner aide who worked for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, “not to reach out, not to expand his coalition, but simply to double and triple and quintuple down on that same low-40s percentage of the American populace that thinks he can do no wrong.”
For Trump himself, the consequences to come loom large — politically, legally, financially, historically, personally. Even so, and even with this outcome, Trump stands as one of the more influential presidents in modern history. In addition to exacerbating the country’s polarization, hastening the decline of discourse and legitimizing disreputable, illiberal elements of America’s patchwork electorate, he steered to the right for years the judiciary up to and including the Supreme Court, rolled back environmental regulations as the dire effects of climate change became more and more clear and alienated democratic global allies while currying favor with some of the planet’s most menacing despots.
Going forward, too, his loss almost certainly will not strip him of so much of what he most fundamentally covets — more than enough adherents who grant him the energy and the sway that sustain him, his penchant for mischief and a platform to make it matter, and the built-in clout, of course, of any former president. Though he is and always will be seen by many as a disgrace, Trump, distractible but irrepressible, transactional and vengeful, ever a formidable mix of entitled and aggrieved, nonetheless is set to vacate the White House as a disruptive social, cultural and political force.
For now, though, he is a loser — a figure whose departure from by far the most important public stage of his life will make him the one thing he never could bear.
To those who know him and have watched him over the years, Trump’s comeuppance at the hands of voters, narrow as it was, had an almost mythological feel. What built him up is what brought him down. What made him win, or at least claim victory, again and again, is what made him lose. He never moderated. He never modulated. He was who he was, and so he is who he is — in the judgment of the bulk of the voters of America, a failed president.
“It’s the opposite of the hero’s journey,” said Tony Schwartz, the co-author of "The Art of the Deal." Defeated by a decisive crisis — unlike the classic protagonist, though, going home unchanged.
Much more than wealth or fame, what Donald Trump’s always wanted is attention.
He had as parents an unaffectionate father and an emotionally absent mother. Fred Trump worked “nine days a week,” he once said, and when around was dour, strict and stern. Mary Trump could be distant even before she suffered near fatal complications that resulted from the birth of her youngest child and left her persistently unwell. Their big house in Jamaica Estates, Queens, visitors said, was “stiff,” “staid” and “cold.” The Trump kids, in the recollection of a neighbor, “never got a hug or a kiss.”
And the second son was “a brat” from the start, according to his oldest sister — a desk-crashing, spitball-spewing, pigtail-pulling, detention-getting “surly” “little shit,” said his teachers in grade school. He was shipped off to New York Military Academy when he was 13. He was admittedly “aggressive” and “rebellious” and “a ball-breaker” who “talked back” to his parents and “people in general.”
As a young avaricious adult, he picked as his most essential mentor Roy Cohn, the vile and besmirched former aide of red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Cohn, one of the 20th century’s foremost fixers and rogues, by the ’70s “had lived down his past and come into a new, preeminent present,” in the estimation of his biographer, widespread celebrity serving as “its own exculpation.” Fame for Cohn was more than a shield. It was power. “His motto,” his secretary once told me, “was any publicity is good publicity.”
Trump kept, too, more on than off, as his most indispensable political adviser Roger Stone, a Cohn protégé, a self-styled agent provocateur whose “rules” read like the playbook of a shameless cynic. Always attack. Never defend. Nothing’s on the level. The most powerful human motivator is not hope and love but hate. Better to be infamous than anonymous. Stone has always been interested not in government but in politics. Politics as a tool to divide — not unite. Politics as “performance art” — because the only thing worse than “being wrong” is “being boring.”
These lessons in tow — the chosen heir and beneficiary of the money and political connections of his “strong, strict” father, with whom he had a relationship he described as “almost businesslike” — Trump spent the ’80s making his name a brand, first in New York, then in New Jersey, then seemingly everywhere else. In the ’90s, he survived the specter of financial and reputational ruin, not by avoiding the onslaught of bad press but by embracing it. And the ether of his knownness is what allowed him to be reintroduced a decade later within the misnomer of the medium of “reality” TV as a decisive big business boss on “ The Apprentice.”
“He made more money playing a fictional version of himself than he made being himself,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told me. “Make-believe was where he made bank.”
He carried these credos, of course, into presidential politics. Stoking racist, nativist, isolationist, conspiratorial and anti-intellectual fervor, he hatched in 2015 a chaotic, can’t-look-away cocktail of a campaign, manifestly unencumbered by any sense of propriety or precedent. He won because he ran in a change cycle, on the heels of a two-termer from the opposite party. He won because he ran against a woman, and a woman who’d been twisted into a caricature by decades of effective attacks. More than anything, though, he won because of the attention-getting extremes — the fights and the feuds, the fun-making and the name-calling, an outrage machine amped up to overdrive.
His presidency was the same. The persistent backdrop a dramatic uptick in angst, unrest and alarm, Trump’s tenure instigated the most stringent stress test for this democracy since the Civil War. But from the Oval Office and Air Force One, on Twitter and on Fox News, plonked at the podium at his telltale rallies, he hardly ever stopped. His list of enemies always was more carefully tended to than any set of policy priorities. His shambolic administration, the onrush of all-hours alerts, the Mueller report, the grift and the graft and the lies, impeachment — throughout, and no matter what, Trump if nothing else commanded more nonstop mindshare than any prior commander in chief.
“Donald Trump has used his office, has abused his office, in such a way that every morning and every afternoon and every evening news about that abuse is saturating our daily lives. And the American people are just sick of it,” former administration staffer Miles (no longer “Anonymous”) Taylor told me. “More than anything,” he said, “I think that’s why voters decided to kick this guy out of office.”
“He was banking, literally and figuratively, on our lack of attention span — that he would flood us with stories, distractions, counternarratives, this person, that person, chaos, disruption, conflict, outrageous thing after outrageous thing after outrageous thing, accusations — that we couldn’t take it all in,” said Gwenda Blair, another Trump biographer. “But I think what he wasn’t banking on is Trump fatigue.”
“Trump is the outrage president,” said Jen Mercieca, a Texas A&M professor and the author of a book about his rhetoric. “He uses outrage bait all day long to get his supporters engaged — to activate them — to keep our attention. And he says things that are so outrageous that his opposition has to respond to them. And he’s controlled the public sphere through outrage for the last five years and kept all of our attention. But it’s exhausting to give your attention to the president of the United States for five years. And people are tired of outrage and of being outraged. And they just wanted to go back to normal. They don’t want to wake up first thing in the morning and wonder what their president did or what their president said.”
For Trump, it wasn’t enough, because it’s never enough. But for enough of everybody else, it had become too much. The first season of “The Apprentice” was the most watched season of “The Apprentice,” the appetite for the antics dimming from there. Viewers turned him off.
Voters voted him out.
“Trump,” Mercieca said, “was too greedy with our attention.”
And yet it might have taken a once-in-a-century public health calamity to take Trump down.
He was indignant that the pandemic destroyed his preferred message for reelection by crippling the economy. Having downplayed it, he couldn’t admit that mistake — so he doubled down on the downplaying. He couldn’t let go of his more favorable headlines to attempt to handle the spread of sickness for what it was.
“He got hoisted on his own petard,” Alan Marcus, a former Trump publicist, told me. “He kept saying, ’I’m a winner, I’m a great deal-maker, I’m a this, I’m a that.’ And now he had not only the chance to prove it — he had the need to prove it. And he couldn’t do it.”
“It could have been avoided,” former Trump Organization Executive Vice President Barbara Res said, referring to the extent of what the pandemic wrought, “but not by him. He could never have avoided it. Because it would take admitting he’s wrong. It would take asking people for help. He can’t do that — ‘Tell me the numbers, tell me what could happen if X happened’ — he never did that. And he can’t do that. Because he thinks he knows.”
“And you have to string together days, weeks and months in order to get your arms around this,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell explained. “And his lack of patience, his lack of discipline — it doesn’t allow him to do that.”
The scourge would have been a singular challenge for any president. Trump’s response, though, was pointedly misguided and mangled by his own pathological worries about the appearance of weakness. With few exceptions, Trump minimized the threat of the virus all along, disregarding the early warnings of advisers; telling the public it would be “just fine”; likening the pathogen to the flu when in fact he knew it was “deadly stuff”; insisting it was “dying out” and “fading away” and that it would “like a miracle” “disappear”; presiding over faltering testing, contact tracing and procurement of protective equipment; shifting the onus of the task as well as blame for failures to states and their governors and China; undercutting the credibility of public health agencies and officials; rarely wearing a mask to model helpful behavior and defying other best practices to keep himself and others safe; staging crowded rallies after the onset of the outbreak and beginning them again well before it had subsided; agitating for schools, churches, bars and other entities to “open up”; pushing treatments and medicines not recommended or approved and at one point floating the notion of a potential remedy of an injection of household disinfectant. Even as Covid-19 wreaked unremitting havoc on the nation he was elected to lead, infecting millions of Americans, killing hundreds of thousands, staggering the economy and upending nearly all aspects of life, the lifelong devotee of Norman Vincent Peale and the tenet of the “power of positive thinking” gave himself A-plus grades.
“I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said in March in response to the mounting criticism of his response. “I couldn’t have done it any better,” he said in April. “We have met the moment,” he said in May, “and we have prevailed.”
He said the country was “rounding the corner” the week he and dozens of others around him in the White House took tests that showed they themselves were ill.
“The coronavirus pandemic laid bare all of the president’s worst qualities,” Taylor said.
“An utter lack of empathy,” Steel said. “An inability to focus for a sustained period of time on detailed questions of governance.”
“He was,” said Buck, “a remarkably fortunate president for three years to avoid the serious type of crisis that a president has to confront several times throughout a term. And when the one real big crisis came, he was fully unprepared and unfit.”
“Eventually, every president faces a presidential-level test of leadership, whether it’s 9/11 or the decision to go after bin Laden or the Oklahoma City bombing or whatever,” Steel added. “The pandemic is Donald Trump’s presidential-level test. And he has failed.”
“No Covid, he would have been reelected,” said veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf. With Covid? “He’s the mortuary president. He’s created one great big funeral. He killed the economy and people at the same time.”
“The emergence of the pandemic could have presented him the opportunity to get reelected,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, told me, “had he handled it in a very different way — in a way that would be inconsistent with who he is.”
Instead, Trump turned his own brief convalescence into the latest spate of episodes of his warped ongoing show. And in the closing days of the campaign, as case counts around the country skyrocketed to record levels, Trump only ramped up his rampant unreality, jetting from one packed-in, mostly maskless rally to the next, state after state after state, causing Covid spikes and deaths, spewing baseless conspiracy theories, making dubious promises about an imminent vaccine, telling his backers “it’s going away,” “it’s going away,” “it’s going away,” as the chanting crowds clamored for the unceremonious ouster of the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases.
“Ted Kennedy once told me a story that I think applies to Trump,” said longtime Democratic strategist Shrum. “It was the summer of ’63, and he was sitting with his brother on the Truman balcony at the White House, and JFK remarked, ‘If you ever get to be president, you always have to have two or three or four people around who are allowed to tell you when you’re being a dumb SOB — and you have to reward them, not punish them.’” Trump? “I think he has none of that. It’s a disastrous trait in a president. Because you will make terrible decisions if you think you are the only one who’s right all the time.”
“Many of us hoped that Donald Trump would be a president who could evolve and grow into the job, and that’s happened to a lot of people who held the office — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush. They all talked about how the responsibilities of the office sobered them,” Taylor said. “We hoped that would happen to Donald Trump. I mean, no one thought he was a paragon of virtue, nor would he become one, but maybe he would moderate a bit. And that didn’t happen. Because I think, fundamentally, at the end of the day, what we all discovered through hard experience is he truly is a narcissistic man. And he doesn’t just lead his personal life through that narcissism. He governs in a narcissistic manner. And I think that’s what it really came down to.”
“For all that he has done in his life, he’s never been responsible for anything that mattered, and so the consequences of his failures had never taken him down,” Ferguson said. “Until now.” |
| | Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1278420) | 11/14/2020 10:15:28 AM | | From: Wharf Rat | | | | Giuliani Scared Off Trump’s Lawyers
Political Wireby Taegan Goddard
“President Trump’s senior campaign aides were gathered in their headquarters Saturday morning when word emerged that Rudy Giuliani would be holding a news conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business. They knew that meant trouble,” Politico reports.
“Senior campaign aides scurried to urge organizers to kill the event, infamously staged at the wrong ‘Four Seasons’ — a landscaping business adjacent to an adult bookstore and a crematorium. But Giuliani plowed ahead anyway, delivering a conspiracy-filled rant that undercut the legal strategy the president’s advisers had meticulously mapped out in the run-up to the election.”
“Campaign officials described the episode as disastrous, saying it scared off many of the lawyers they spent months recruiting, who now no longer wanted to be involved.” |
|
| | Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| To: Bonefish who wrote (1278388) | 11/14/2020 11:20:02 AM | | From: sylvester80 | | | | OOPS! Giuliani wrecks Trump campaign's well-laid legal plans
The campaign spent months building a legal apparatus to contest close elections. Then along came the former New York City mayor.
politico.com
By ALEX ISENSTADT
11/14/2020 07:00 AM EST
Updated: 11/14/2020 10:39 AM EST
President Donald Trump’s senior campaign aides were gathered in their headquarters Saturday morning when word emerged that Rudy Giuliani would be holding a news conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business.
They knew that meant trouble.
Senior campaign aides scurried to urge organizers to kill the event, infamously staged at the wrong “Four Seasons” — a landscaping business adjacent to an adult bookstore and a crematorium. But Giuliani plowed ahead anyway, delivering a conspiracy-filled rant that undercut the legal strategy the president’s advisers had meticulously mapped out in the run-up to the election.
Campaign officials described the episode as disastrous, saying it scared off many of the lawyers they spent months recruiting, who now no longer wanted to be involved. With the campaign already facing exceedingly long odds in its recount efforts, there are widespread concerns within Trumpworld and GOP circles that Giuliani’s antics are thwarting the president’s legal machinery from within.
“I can’t imagine that a rational person" in the general public "wouldn’t be adversely affected by the way he conducts himself,” said Barry Richard, who represented George W. Bush in the 2000 Florida recount.
Yet Giuliani is taking on a heightened role. The president on Friday appointed him to oversee any new post-election litigation. The move, which was first reported by the New York Times, has distressed top campaign officials and other advisers, who worry Giuliani's Hail Mary ploys will damage Trump's reputation and potentially harm his future political aspirations.
Giuliani's promotion also threatens to complicate a legal apparatus that has been in the works since June. The campaign began assembling a team of lawyers in swing states and counties where recounts might take place. The effort has been overseen by Citizens United President David Bossie, who was tapped because of his conservative street cred and connections to pro-Trump activists around the country.
The Republican National Committee member from Maryland has also served as a bridge between the campaign and RNC, which had at times clashed during the final months of the race. He has been working the phones from home after testing positive for the coronavirus early this week.
Bossie has joined a regular 9:30 a.m. conference call with general counsel Matt Morgan, as well as top campaign officials Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Jason Miller, to discuss the day’s agenda. The group has also been holding daily conference calls with on-air surrogates to go over messaging, and with legal and political operatives in the half-dozen states with slim margins.
They have been meeting regularly with the president, allowing him to poke and prod at their ideas while presenting him with a menu of options. The group — which has told the president that he's facing an uphill path — has outlined to him how they view each state as a mini-campaign governed by different laws.
Looking to buttress its infrastructure, the campaign has shifted staffers from Florida to neighboring Georgia, which is conducting a hand recount.
Much of the focus, however, has been on crafting lawsuits in three states that zero in on specific allegations of voting irregularities. In Arizona, the campaign has drawn attention to issues with voting machines. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, it is complaining about not having adequate observation at voting sites.
The Pennsylvania suit also revolves around the idea that voters in Democratic-heavy Philadelphia had more of an opportunity to “cure” improperly cast ballots than those in the more conservative parts of the state. While the Arizona case was dropped Friday, the Michigan and Pennsylvania cases are pending.
Campaign officials describe it as an incremental approach aimed at chipping away at Biden’s leads and creating margins that are small enough to force recounts. While they concede their lawsuits are unlikely to succeed, they insist they’re not frivolous.
But their strategy has resulted in a clash with Giuliani, who has advocated for more of a damn-the-torpedoes approach. The former New York City mayor has been working independently of the Trump legal apparatus. He's gone on Fox News and made allegations of widespread voter fraud. Early on, he ordered lawsuits to be filed without the consent of the campaign’s legal team.
Things came to a head during a meeting at the White House last Friday, one day before the Four Seasons Total Landscaping imbroglio. As the group batted around options before the president, Giuliani interjected and derided them as insufficiently aggressive. Some in the room were taken aback.
During a Thursday meeting at the White House that was attended by the president, Giuliani accused Trump aides of lying to Trump about his chances. Clark aggressively pushed back, and the two shouted at one another. Vice President Mike Pence was also present. The encounter was first reported by the Times.
Neither Giuliani nor a spokesperson responded to requests for comment. Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said, "Everybody on the team is getting along great."
Giuliani has been joined by Sidney Powell, an attorney for retired Gen. Michael Flynn. During a Sunday appearance on Fox News, she described a “massive and coordinated effort to steal this election” and said there had been an effort to “delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump” and “manufacture votes for Joe Biden.”
She added that Democrats “used an algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip and they used computers to flip those votes from Trump to Biden and from other Republican candidates to their competitors also.”
Powell was apparently referring to a debunked conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems, an election software company, altered vote counts in Michigan and Georgia.
Bossie has told the president there needs to be a more nuanced, state-by-state approach targeted to specific instances of irregularities, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
With Giuliani's ascendance, there are now expected to be two parallel legal teams working on different tracks. Senior Republicans doubt Giuliani’s ideas will go anywhere and say Bossie’s team will proceed with its own efforts.
Republican officials said they viewed Trump's decision to promote Giuliani as an implicit acknowledgment that his legal options are closing and a sign that he's determined to go out guns blazing. Top Republicans described a feeling of resignation late Friday that the election was coming to a close.
The president made the move after advisers informed him in the morning that the Arizona lawsuit had been dropped. Giuliani spent part of the day working out of the campaign's headquarters.
Trump’s legal team is also facing pressure campaigns from outside detractors. On Thursday evening, the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur told a federal judge that it was withdrawing from a Pennsylvania lawsuit the reelection effort had filed. The move came after the anti-Trump Lincoln Project published a tweet urging supporters to contact the firm’s attorneys through their social media accounts.
Still, the president’s team has pushed forward, working 12- to 15-hour days as they race against certification deadlines. They’ve set up a hotline staffed by 40 people to collect reports of irregularities. Prank calls have proven disruptive, however.
While the campaign is expected to lay off much of its staff in the coming days, it is keeping on employees whose work is relevant to the legal fight, including people in the communications and research departments.
Trump advisers have begun looking at the possibility of pushing Republican-controlled state legislatures to put forward a slate of Trump electors to the Electoral College rather than Biden ones.
But there is mounting skepticism even in Republican circles that Trump can pull it off in the courts. He has suffered a string of legal defeats in recent days and Biden’s lead in the contested states has climbed well into the thousands, making it unlikely that any recount could put Trump over the top.
And many see little evidence of irregularities.
“There’s zero, zero basis” for overturning the election, said Richard, the ex-Bush attorney. “They’re not going to win this. All these cases, I think, will be dismissed by the end of next week.” |
| | Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices | Political Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| |
