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US President Donald Trump will meet with Republican leaders from the Michigan state legislature at the White House today as his campaign pursues an increasingly desperate attempt to reverse the November 3 election amid a series of losses in court.
Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden is scheduled to meet with Democratic leaders in Congress, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, after spending most of the week huddled with advisers while planning his administration.
The latest Trump campaign strategy, outlined by three people familiar with the plan, is to convince Republican-controlled legislatures in battlefield states that Biden won, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, to undermine the results of the elections and hand over those states to the Republican president. corner.
Trump’s attempts to reverse the outcome through lawsuits and recounts have met with little success.
A manual recount of Georgia’s roughly 5 million votes concluded last night, affirming Biden’s victory there, while judges from three states rejected campaign offers to challenge the vote count.
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Biden has obtained 306 votes to Trump’s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the winner.
Electoral votes for each state, which are based primarily on population, are generally awarded to the winner of the state’s popular vote, which is cast in December in what is usually a formality.
A senior Trump campaign official said the idea is to cast doubt on the results in certain states while pressuring Republican politicians to intervene by appointing their own constituents to support Trump.
Legal experts have sounded the alarm at the notion of a sitting president seeking to undermine the will of voters, though they have expressed skepticism that a state legislature can legally replace its own constituents.
Michigan state legislative leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Speaker of the House of Representatives Lee Chatfield, both Republicans, will visit the White House at Trump’s request, according to a source in Michigan.
They will listen to what the president has to say, the source said. Shirkey told a Michigan news outlet earlier this week that the legislature would not name a second voters list.
Trump communicated separately with a local election official in Wayne County, where Detroit is located, after she questioned whether to certify the results there.
His approach to state officials represents a game changer for his re-election campaign, which has been unable to gather evidence to back up the president’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. Election officials have said they saw no evidence of any major wrongdoing.
Biden called Trump’s attempts “totally irresponsible,” though he has expressed little concern that they will prevent him from taking office on January 20.
Biden spent the week putting together his team.
His incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, told CNN that Biden would announce more White House officials today, after appointing several high-level members earlier this week. Biden said he has selected a Secretary of the Treasury and could announce his election next week.
Despite the setbacks, the Trump campaign has not abandoned its legal efforts to overturn the election results.
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, told a news conference yesterday that he planned to file more lawsuits, accusing Democrats of plotting a “national conspiracy” to steal the election without offering evidence to support the claim.
In a statement, campaign legal counsel Jenna Ellis dismissed Georgia’s recount as simply a second recount of “the illegal ballots” included in the original recount and said the campaign would pursue “all legal options.”
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