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A group of 1,000 attorneys, including retired federal and state judges, state attorneys general, and law professors criticized the Trump administration for unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“Every candidate has the right to guarantee that an election is carried out legally. However, legal challenges, if any, must be based on facts, on evidence,” said the letter, which asked public officials to stop of making false claims of systemic fraud that US President Donald Trump has claimed “stole” his election.
Patrick Semansky / AP
The current president of the United States, Donald Trump.
“The president of the United States has ordered the presentation of court cases that seek to prevent ballots from being counted on the grounds that there has been widespread electoral fraud. His children have harshly criticized Republicans who do not support their father’s claims.” added.
Republican lawmakers, including Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have made statements supporting Trump’s lawsuits and allegations of fraud.
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Trump has yet to give in to President-elect Joe Biden and instead has sought to challenge the results in key states he lost while making broad and unproven allegations of massive fraud.
The White House has also locked down most resources for Biden’s team, potentially jeopardizing the chances of a smooth transition to the new administration, as the country faces a record new number of coronavirus cases.
In a statement, Trump’s campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said: “The president owes it to the 73 million people who voted for him to ensure that the elections were fair and safe, and he owes it too. to everyone who voted for Biden. Every American deserves the reassurance that our elections are strong. “
Trump had 72,319,510 votes. More than 77 million Americans voted for Biden, winning the popular vote by about 5 million.
Trump campaign lawsuits
The Trump campaign has filed a series of state and federal lawsuits in five states where Biden won to challenge election results, stop vote counting or block certification of results.
But legal experts said Trump’s campaign is highly unlikely to succeed in court. The president’s legal team would have to convince the judges that widespread fraud exists and that it could change the outcome of the elections, but they have provided scant evidence and such allegations of systemic problems have so far failed to stand up in court.
In Michigan, a federal lawsuit filed earlier this week relied heavily on dozens of anecdotes from poll watchers affidavits to back up the claim that something sinister had happened.
Although witnesses claimed they were denied access to vote counting, intimidation, vote counting problems, technical failures, and ballot feedback, the allegations do not show widespread electoral fraud. Local election officials have also denied that the ballots were incorrectly backdated, saying that an incident was the result of human error and that it has been corrected.
John Locher / AP
In this Nov. 8 photo, supporters of President Donald Trump protest the election outside the Clark County Elections Department in North Las Vegas.
A Detroit judge on Saturday (New Zealand time) denied a request by the Trump campaign to stop the certification of election results in Wayne County.
In Arizona, where the president’s campaign has alleged that “up to thousands” of ballots were improperly processed in Maricopa County, a campaign attorney acknowledged during a hearing that he is not alleging fraud but is simply raising concerns about a limited number. of “errors in good faith”.
A lawyer for the campaign acknowledged in a court file that the allegations were moot, given Biden’s insurmountable numbers.
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign has alleged that poll watchers were denied access to the vote count in Philadelphia. But during a recent hearing, a campaign lawyer acknowledged otherwise, saying there are “a non-zero number” of observers present during the vote count.
The campaign also filed a lawsuit this week broadly attacking the state’s vote-by-mail system, but legal experts said the case has little chance of success.
‘Abuse of the rule of law’ and ‘assault on democracy’
The letter, which was signed by former Democratic and Republican administration officials, called on lawyers representing Trump, citing the American Bar Association’s code of conduct that prohibits lawyers from misleading the court.
“While a seemingly defeated candidate has the right to file challenges authorized by law, it is an abuse of the rule of law to file charges that lack an objective evidentiary basis, and it is a violation of attorney ethics to represent a party bringing such charges for purely political purposes, “said Stuart Gerson, a former Justice Department official under Presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton and one of the signatories to the letter.
Michael Frisch, the ethics adviser at Georgetown Law and a former disciplinary prosecutor in Washington, DC, said the president is trying to cast doubt on the legitimacy of an election he lost by creating a narrative “that closely resembles birtherism.”
“Elected officials, whether they are senators, cabinet members, or attorneys representing the president, must have a responsibility to ensure that when claims are brought to court, there is a substantial basis of fact on those claims,” said Scott Harshbarger, former Massachusetts State Attorney General.
“What we have seen is that there is simply no basis for this ongoing assault … it is an assault on democracy.”
Brynn Anderson / AP
The Attorney General of the United States, William Barr.
The letter also pointed to Attorney General William Barr, who, earlier this week, authorized federal prosecutors to pursue allegations of voting irregularities before the election results were certified.
The action, detailed in a carefully crafted two-page memorandum, contradicted decades of Justice Department policy that prohibited interventions that could influence election results and opened the department to claims of partisan interference that could delay the traditional post-election transfer of power.
The attorney general told prosecutors that they could open investigations “if there are clear and apparently credible allegations of wrongdoing that, if true, could affect the outcome of a federal election in an individual state.”
A Justice Department official previously said Trump did not order Barr to take action. But the timing of the memo attracted almost as much attention as its content, and Trump’s legal team largely failed in its efforts to challenge the vote in several swing states.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Richard Painter, a former White House chief ethics attorney during the George W. Bush presidency who signed the letter, said the behavior of the US president could be “very damaging” to the country.
“We are in the middle of a pandemic … It’s really a shame that Donald Trump can’t act decently,” Painter said, adding that Trump’s refusal to accept the results would make things much more difficult for the incoming administration.
Laurel Bellows, a former president of the American Bar Association who also signed the letter, said the post-election events are reminiscent of McCarthyism, when Americans were blacklisted on suspicions of ties to communism and internment. of Japanese Americans during World War II.
“There were two moments when fear ruled our entire country and erased any semblance of constitutional protection … Our rule of law is fragile unless we educate the people,” Bellows said.
Contributors: Kevin Johnson, Courtney Subramanian, Joey Garrison, Dennis Wagner, Donovan Slack and Kevin McCoy of USA TODAY, The Detroit Free Press and The Arizona Republic.
USA Today
