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President Donald Trump will move forward Tuesday with legal challenges to last week’s election results after US Attorney General William Barr told federal prosecutors to investigate any “substantial” allegations of wrongdoing. in voting.
Barr’s directive to prosecutors caused the top attorney overseeing the voter fraud investigations to resign in protest.
It came after days of attacks on the integrity of the election by Trump and his Republican allies, who have denounced widespread electoral fraud, without providing evidence.
Trump has not granted the election to Democrat Joe Biden, who on Saturday got more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.
The Trump campaign has filed several lawsuits alleging that the election results were flawed. Justices have thrown out lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia, and experts say Trump’s legal efforts have little chance of changing the outcome of the election.
Barr told prosecutors Monday that the “fanciful or implausible claims” should not be a basis for the investigation, and his letter did not indicate that the Justice Department had discovered voting irregularities that affected the election outcome.
But he said he was authorizing prosecutors to “pursue substantial allegations” of irregularities in voting and the counting of votes.
Richard Pilger, who for years has served as director of the Election Crimes Branch, announced in an internal email that he was resigning after reading “the new policy and its ramifications.”
Biden’s campaign said Barr was fueling Trump’s unlikely fraud allegations.
“Those are the kinds of claims the president and his attorneys make unsuccessfully every day, as their claims are mocked in court after court,” said Bob Bauer, senior adviser to Biden.
Earlier Monday, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit to prevent Pennsylvania officials from certifying Biden’s victory in the battlefield state.
He alleged that the state’s vote-by-mail system violated the United States Constitution by creating “an illegal two-tier voting system” where voting in person was subject to more supervision than voting by mail.
He ran against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the boards of elections in Democratic-leaning counties including Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Boockvar’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Rehash’
Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the latest lawsuit in Pennsylvania was unlikely to be successful and “seems like a repeat of many of the arguments that Trump’s legal team has made in and out of. the courtroom “.
Trump’s re-election team asked for patience Monday in pursuing allegations of voter fraud.
“This election is by no means over,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, told reporters at a briefing in what she said was her capacity as Trump’s campaign adviser.
Trump and Republicans have repeatedly tried to crack down on the 2010 law passed under former President Barack Obama, when Biden was his vice president.
The Supreme Court defended itself from previous challenges in 2012 and 2015. The Court now has a conservative majority of 6-3 after the third Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, was confirmed last month.
As Biden begins work on his transition, his team is considering legal action over a federal agency’s delay in acknowledging his victory over Trump.
The General Services Administration (GSA) typically recognizes a presidential candidate when it is clear who won so that a transition of power can begin.
But that has not happened yet, and the law does not specify when the GSA must act. GSA administrator Emily Murphy, appointed by Trump in 2017, has yet to determine that “a winner is clear,” a spokeswoman said.
A Biden transition official told reporters that it was time for the GSA administration to grant what is known as a verification that recognizes the president-elect, and said the transition team would consider taking legal action if it was not granted.
“Legal action is certainly a possibility, but there are also other options that we are considering,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declining to outline other options. – Reuters
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