Trump attacks former allies, Republicans in his final weeks as president

Humiliation in court, witnesses who provide more comedy than facts, and a chief lawyer fighting the coronavirus: Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the November 3 presidential election are not going well.

And time is running out.

The Electoral College will meet on December 14 to certify the victory of Democrat Joe Biden and today is the deadline for the challenges to be resolved at the state level.

But before Trump leaves the White House in January, the president has turned his attention to targeting any Republicans who have denied his unfounded voter fraud comments.

The attacks have become so severe that reports have emerged that Attorney General William Barr is considering leaving office before January 20.

A source told CNN that Barr may step down before Trump leaves office because the attorney general “is not someone who accepts bullying and turns the other cheek.”

Barr was caught in the president’s crosshairs last week when he acknowledged that the Justice Department had not discovered any widespread electoral fraud that could overturn the elections.

After admitting they had found no fraud, the two men allegedly had a “contentious” meeting at the White House last Tuesday before Trump refused to confirm his trust in Barr.

“Ask me that several weeks from now. They should be looking at all this fraud,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday.

Trump has also turned against Georgia and its Republican secretary of state and governor after the state moved to certify its election results.

“We have now counted the votes legally cast three times and the results have not changed,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a news conference Monday morning.

“Whether it is the president of the United States or a failed gubernatorial candidate, misinformation regarding the electoral administration must be condemned and rejected. Integrity matters. Truth matters.”

President-elect Joe Biden is the first Democrat to win Georgia in nearly 30 years after he won the state by more than 12,000 votes.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp certified the results of Biden’s victory on Nov. 20, following a statewide recount that included a manual tally of the nearly five million votes cast in the election.

Trump used Twitter yesterday to attack his Georgian counterparts and asked them “what’s wrong with them.”

Nowhere has the pushback against Trump been stronger than in Georgia, where Republican officials from the governor onward have rebuffed his efforts.

Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan yesterday accused Trump of spewing “mountains of misinformation” in his attempt to discredit the vote in Georgia.

Duncan told CBS This Morning that the Trump campaign’s claims of voter fraud were “literally things that can be debunked in 10 seconds or less.”

And last week, another Georgia official, voting system administrator Gabriel Sterling, said Trump’s rhetoric could lead to violence.

“Someone is going to get hurt. Someone is going to get shot. Someone is going to die. It’s not okay,” Sterling said.

One of the latest blows to Trump’s attempt to tarnish the vote with unsubstantiated fraud allegations was the announcement Sunday that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani had been hospitalized with Covid-19.

Giuliani, 76, has been leading the Trump campaign legal team, filing lawsuits that seek to expose voter fraud and holding public hearings in swing states where Trump narrowly lost.

When the lawsuits brought by Giuliani and other Trump allies reached court, the judges threw them out, sometimes in scathing terms.

The latest loss, which brought the Trump campaign win-loss record in court to 1-47, came Monday in Michigan, where Trump lost to Biden by 154,000 votes.

“People have spoken,” wrote US District Court Judge Linda Parker.

“This case represents well the phrase: ‘This ship has sailed.'”

Judge Parker said the lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden’s Michigan victory was “dazzling in scope and impressive in scope.”

“If granted, the relief would disenfranchise the more than 5.5 million Michigan citizens who, with dignity, hope and the promise of a voice, participated in the 2020 general election,” he said.

The judge said the lawsuit appeared to be primarily aimed at shaking “people’s faith in the democratic process and their confidence in our government.”