Trump: The Legal Strategy to Try to Block Biden’s Certification

President Donald trump is carrying out a campaign of different legal attacks in key states where the President-elect has wonor Joe Biden, in a long-term effort to try to prevent officials from certifying the results, advisers and attorneys involved in the matter said.

How seriously the campaign is considering this idea is unknown, one person said. Many of the advisers and attorneys said they doubt the effort will succeed, adding that it is primarily intended to appease Trump, who believes his election was stolen and that he hopes his legal team will keep fighting.

Some of Trump’s advisers and lawyers said that there is no dominant legal theory or a coordination behind the campaign efforts. The legal battle will likely end with Trump denouncing that the election was fraudulent and that he fought the outcome, a White House official said.

The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona in which judges are asked to stop state officials from certifying votes. A conservative legal group has made similar requests in state court in Michigan, where a judge is expected to issue his ruling this week.

By denying Biden all 47 electoral votes in those three states, they would block his path to securing a majority. Biden leads by about 50,000 votes, or 0.75% in Pennsylvania, about 146,000 votes, or 2.6% in Michigan, and about 13,000 votes, or 0.4% in Arizona.

Few courts have considered similar requests in the past, leaving little precedent. Legal experts say judges are unlikely to block final votes in a state unless there is evidence of a widespread fraud.

The Trump campaign has offered no evidence of fraud in Arizona and Pennsylvania. In Michigan, he has offered affidavits from Republican election observers who say they were harassed, forcibly excluded from absentee voting facilities and witnessed ballot tampering.

States use their popular vote for President to send a specified number of electors to formally vote for President in the Electoral College. The Constitution says state legislatures will determine how voters are chosen, which has led to speculation about what would happen if there is a lock on results.

In Pennsylvania, the campaign lawsuit contends the state did not give observers enough access to ballots and it gave voters in Democratic-leaning counties more opportunities to correct deficiencies on their mail-in ballots.

Officials in every state have defended their voting processes as fair and free from major problems. Democrats said they would fight any effort to stop the certification of the vote.

Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said the lawsuits in Michigan were aimed at prevent the state from certifying the results in the hopes that the Republican legislature will send congressional constituencies in favor of Trump. “We are prepared to combat that,” he told a conference on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for the Arizona secretary of state, the Democrat Katie hobbs, said his office is confident that he will certify the election results on time. “The Arizona courts have a lot of experience handling and expeditiously resolving election-related lawsuits within strict legal timelines”said spokeswoman Sophia Solis.

Arizona is scheduled to certify the results of its election on November 30. Michigan and Pennsylvania have a November 23 deadline, under most circumstances.

Trump’s own family is divided over how intensely to push through legal challenges. Their children Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump they have pushed to move forward, people familiar with the discussions said. Jared Kushner, a senior White House aide and son-in-law to the President, called the chair of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel on Monday to suggest that the Party apparatus get more involved, people familiar with the matter said.

Some Trump advisers said there is confusion over who is leading the legal effort.

David bossie, Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016, was elected on Friday to lead the legal push, But he has not assumed a particularly visible role since testing positive for Covid-19 on Sunday.

One person involved in the efforts said that Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal attorney, has been in regular contact with attorneys on the ground in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment. The Republican leadership in Congress has supported Trump’s legal battle. Some advisers see the efforts as a way to keep Trump’s base energized ahead of the runoff elections in Georgia in January that will determine the control of the Senate.

The lawsuits also offer Republicans a broader platform to draw attention to potential voting irregularities. And they provide an opportunity for political revenge on the part of Trump, who has long complained that the special counsel’s investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia in 2016 was a way for his opponents to delegitimize his victory that year.