US Elections: Legal Experts Dismiss Donald Trump’s Legal Challenges

OPINION

A federal judge will hear the arguments of Donald Trump’s campaign today, as the president seeks to prevent the crucial state of Pennsylvania from certifying its election results.

Trump and his supporters have suffered a series of court defeats since the election fifteen days ago, and most legal experts believe there is no plausible path for the president to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

As long as there is hope for Trump, Pennsylvania and his 20 electoral votes are critical. If you changed the state to your column, you would have to do the same in two other states.

Without Pennsylvania, the task becomes exponentially more difficult. The president would then have to reverse the results in four states – Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada – to exceed the winning threshold of 270 electoral votes.

The deadline for Pennsylvania to certify its results is next Monday, November 23. Joe Biden currently leads the state by 73,000 votes.

Hence the demand of the Trump campaign. Their argument, simply put, is that different Pennsylvania counties unfairly took different approaches to handling mail ballots.

Democratic-leaning counties, such as those that span the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, gave voters a chance to “cure” problems with their ballots. For example, if a ballot did not arrive in the proper envelope, the voter was notified.

Meanwhile, the campaign argues, counties in Republican-leaning areas “followed the law” and did not give voters that opportunity, “disenfranchising” the people who were most likely to support Trump.

The lawsuit seeks to prevent mail ballots that were “improperly allowed to cure” from being counted in seven counties that voted for Biden.

Attorneys representing Pennsylvania argue that Republican-leaning counties could have allowed their voters to fix problems with their ballots and simply chose not to.

Like many of the Trump campaign’s post-election lawsuits, this case has not gone well.

The campaign is now in its third team of lawyers. On Thursday, the Porter Wright law firm withdrew from the lawsuit, and last night the remaining three attorneys also asked the court to let them go.

They did not provide a reason for the last-minute request, simply saying that their removal “would better serve the plaintiffs.”

The file said that a new lawyer, Marc Scaringi, would take over the case and stressed that he was “aware of the timetable established by the court in this matter and will be prepared to proceed according to that timetable.”

In addition to being a lawyer, Scaringi is a conservative radio host and a former Republican Senate candidate.

Judge Matthew Brann allowed two of the three previous campaign attorneys to drop the case. Ninety minutes later, at 7.40 pm, Scaringi asked him to postpone today’s hearing.

“Having been hired until today, the plaintiffs’ new attorney needs additional time to properly prepare this case for the next oral argument and evidence hearing,” Scaringi said.

Judge Brann denied that request and told the new legal team that he hoped he would be prepared for today’s arguments and questioning, as scheduled.

Things got even more complicated this morning when Trump’s personal attorney, former New York attorney and mayor Rudy Giuliani, filed a request to appear formally on behalf of the campaign. It will be his first appearance in federal court since 1992.

Giuliani held a press conference in the parking lot of a landscaping company on the day the election result was called to make unsubstantiated claims about widespread fraud.

Trump’s legal team isn’t the only thing that has changed recently. The content of the lawsuit was also significantly reduced Sunday night.

Previously, the Trump campaign had attempted to invalidate 680,000 ballots in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, arguing that its election observers had been prevented from properly witnessing the vote count.

That was always a long shot, partly because the evidence contradicted the president’s claims on the matter, but also because the campaign asked a judge to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters based on the mere suspicion that some of their ballots were contaminated.

“The problem is that even if some degree of fraud could be proven, the remedy would have to be commensurate with illegality,” Conservative prosecutor and legal commentator Andrew McCarthy explained over the weekend.

In other words, no judge is going to cast more than 600,000 votes, en masse, unless it can be proven that they are all fraudulent.

Still, since that element of the lawsuit was unlikely to get anywhere, it at least referred to enough votes to theoretically eliminate Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania.

The new version of the Trump campaign case, as of Sunday, still includes claims about the obstruction of his election observers.

But he no longer seeks a legal recourse for those claims, as the Washington Post has discussed in some detail here.

“References to observers remain in the lawsuit, but the Trump campaign is no longer seeking legal redress based on that allegation. Instead, those claims are more or less full at this time,” the newspaper says.

The campaign has issued a statement refuting that characterization. However, the changes in court filings are pretty straightforward.

“The processes were hidden during the reception, review, opening and tabulation of those 682,479 votes in direct contravention of the Electoral Code,” said the lawsuit earlier.

“The processes were hidden during the reception, review, opening and tabulation of those 682,479 votes,” it reads now.

The claim is still there. The argument that election officials violated the Electoral Code has been removed. National Review writer Dan McLaughlin probably did a better job summarizing why that’s important, so here are his tweets.

The broader context for all of this is a series of Trump legal challenges since the election that, thus far, have been overwhelmingly denied or withdrawn.

Several judges in more than one state have rebuked campaign attorneys for the lack of evidence to support their claims.

Returning to Pennsylvania, for example, Judge Paul Diamond asked the president’s attorneys if they were actually claiming that observers had not been allowed to enter vote counting centers. Trump’s legal team admitted that there was “a non-zero number” inside.

“Sorry then what is your problem?” replied the judge in exasperation.

In Michigan, the campaign tried to argue that mail ballots that had arrived too late had been earlier and then illegally counted.

As evidence, he offered testimony from a Republican observer, who said that an unidentified poll worker had handed him a sticky note that revealed what was happening.

Judge Cynthia Stephens spent some time questioning Trump’s attorneys in disbelief before dismissing the evidence as “an inadmissible rumor within a rumor.”

The rapid defeat pattern of the Trump campaign has convinced most legal experts that the president has no chance of overturning the election result.

“With an overwhelming number of losses and case withdrawals, there is no way for the Trump campaign to nullify the results in a single state, let alone states that make up more than 36 electoral college votes,” wrote the professor of Rick Hasen right on his choice. law blog yesterday.

“It’s over. Trump can still say he won the election. But there is no way. Even the two key federal cases in Pennsylvania don’t involve enough votes to overturn the results there, even if they were successful.” [and I don’t expect them to be].

“There is no way. Rudy Giuliani can say what he wants and the president can continue to declare that he has won, but there is no plausible legal way to annul this election.”

Hasen’s assessment was supported by Franita Tolson, another University of Southern California law professor.

“Anyone who has been paying attention for at least a week, in which the lawsuits became more plentiful but the evidence less, would say that the writing has been on the wall,” Tolson told Law & Crime.

“It is not surprising that the lawsuits are dropped and the litigation is over before the judges lose patience.”

Writing for CNN, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said the president and his attorneys were “humiliating themselves” with pointless litigation.

“All that Trump’s lawyers have delivered is a ridiculous hodgepodge of lawsuits ranging from feeble to completely meritless to downright frivolous.

“There is no delicate way to say this. So far, Trump, his campaign, and his surrogates have taken an absolute beating in court.

“One of the best things about our legal system is that it requires real evidence, not tweets, public statements, viral videos, but real verifiable evidence.

“And the Trump campaign’s efforts to, well, overcome the evidence of voter fraud have failed spectacularly.”