Trump Legal Team Says Election To Be Overridden, Hair Dye Runs Down Rudy Giuliani’s Face At Marathon Press Conference

The legal team of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has held an extraordinary press conference to defend their cause for the annulment of the electoral results, alleging that the election was stolen by “criminals” and infiltrated by “communist money.”

The president’s legal team, led by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Assistant United States Attorney Sidney Powell, along with attorneys Jenna Ellis, Joe DiGenova, and Victoria Toensing, described several cases in a 90-minute press conference that the campaign was bringing in key states. where Trump narrowly lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

Giuliani, hair dye dripping down the side of his face at one point, echoed allegations of massive absentee voter fraud, including during counting in key Democrat-controlled urban centers where Republican election watchers say they are being hit. illegally prevented observing the process.

“In the states that we have indicated in red, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, we have more than double the number of votes needed to reverse the election in terms of verifiable illegal ballots,” Giuliani told reporters at Headquarters. of the Republican National Committee in Washington DC.

“Look at the lawsuits, look at the allegations, look at the affidavits. We have at least a thousand.”

Brandishing witness affidavits, Giuliani rebuked the assembled media, telling them that it was “his job to read these things and not falsely report that there is no evidence.”

Citing four witnesses in the campaign’s Michigan case, he said they described an incident “that under any other circumstances would have been on the front page of his newspapers” were it not for his “irrational and pathological hatred for the president.” .

“What they swear is that at 4.30 am, a truck stopped in downtown Detroit where they were counting the ballots,” he said.

“People thought it was food, so they all ran to the truck. It wasn’t food, it was thousands and thousands of tickets, and the tickets were in garbage cans, they were in paper bags, they were in cardboard boxes. center, were placed on various tables. “

Giuliani said the witnesses swore that “every ballot they could see, all they could hear, were Biden ballots, and when they saw a ballot, they were Biden-only ballots, which means there was no negative ballot.”

“Many of them had nothing in the outer envelope because these ballots were produced very quickly, very quickly, and it is estimated that they are a minimum of 60,000, a maximum of 100,000,” he said. “A lot of them were counted three times, which means they were put into the counting machine one, two, three times.”

Lawyers also doubled down on outlandish allegations of fraud from voting machine company Dominion, which Trump sensationally claimed last week had “changed 2.7 million Trump votes across the country.”

“We largely use a Venezuelan voting machine, in essence, to count our vote,” Giuliani said.

“If we let this happen, we will become Venezuela. We cannot allow this to happen to us. We cannot allow these criminals, because that is what they are, to steal an election from the American people.”

Powell, who focused on the Dominion allegations, said that “what we are really dealing with here and discovering more day by day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and probably China in interfering with our elections here in United States”.

“The Dominion Voting Systems, the Smartmatic software and the software that is included in other computerized voting systems here as well, were created in Venezuela under the leadership of Hugo Chávez to ensure that he never lost another election,” he said.

“We have a very strong witness who has explained how everything works. It is an impressive and detailed affidavit because he was with Hugo Chávez while he was briefed on how it worked, he saw him operate to make sure the elections went his way. That was the express purpose. to create the software. “

Powell said that as soon as the witness “saw various states close the (count) on election night, he knew the same thing was happening here.” She claimed that “one of his most characteristic features is his ability to flip votes.”

“You can set up and run an algorithm, which probably ran across the country, to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and transfer them to Biden, which we would never have found out if the votes for President Trump hadn’t been so overwhelming in so many of these states that they broke the algorithm that had been connected to the system, “he said.

“That’s what caused them to shut down in the states where they closed, that’s when they came in the back door with all the mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually manufactured.”

Dominion and Smartmatic have vehemently denied the allegations.

Trump, who has not been seen in public in several days, tweeted to promote the press conference.

“An open and closed case of electoral fraud. Massive figures!” he said.

Trump’s electoral demands plagued with elementary errors

When Trump sends lawyers to court, it appears that he is not sending the best.

Fighting to challenge an election he lost to Biden, Trump has launched a series of lawsuits across the country.

Top Republicans backed him, saying they will wait for those cases to be resolved before officially recognizing the winner, a standard that is unprecedented in modern times.

But his attorneys have repeatedly made elementary mistakes in those high-profile cases: misspelling “poll watcher” as “post watcher,” forgetting the name of the presiding judge during a hearing, inadvertently filing a lawsuit in Michigan before an obscure court in Washington and having to resubmit complaints after deleting entire arguments they are using to question the results.

“The oversight only serves to underscore the lack of seriousness with which these claims are presented,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Experts have pointed out that Trump is not employing the Republican Party’s top election attorneys, including those who represented the Republican Party in the Florida recount two decades ago. Law firms have faced public pressure from Trump opponents not to fight the election on his behalf. Legal giant Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from a Pennsylvania case last week.

Attorneys for the larger, more established firms that had been representing Trump have privately expressed concerns about pushing forward a legal strategy without a body of evidence, and are concerned that he is wrongly promoting a false narrative that the election was fraudulent, according to two people familiar with the litigation. The people were not authorized to speak about the litigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The day before a major argument in Pennsylvania, three Trump attorneys stepped down and were replaced in part by Marc Scaringi, a lawyer and talk show host who wrote a post-election blog post referring to “President-elect Joe Biden “. Scaringi himself had told listeners on his radio show days after the elections that “there really are no bombs” about to fall “that would derail Biden’s presidency,” and noted that several of the demands “don’t seem to have much evidence to support their claims. “

Much of the mockery has centered on Giuliani, who appeared in court this week in the Pennsylvania case. It was the first time he represented a client in federal court in nearly three decades.

During the hearing, Giuliani forgot the name of an opposition lawyer, misstated the name of the presiding judge, and confused the meaning of the word “opacity.”

Hasen pointed to Giuliani’s apparent lack of knowledge about the meaning of “strict scrutiny,” the highest of the three standards used by judges to assess how a law or action taken by the government affects someone’s constitutional rights. The Trump campaign has claimed without providing evidence that Pennsylvania violated voters’ rights by allegedly allowing voter fraud.

Close scrutiny is a basic concept taught to aspiring lawyers and constitutional law classes.

“I’ve never seen an election attorney handle a case as badly as Giuliani,” Hasen said. “The idea that the lawyer defending the biggest case in Pennsylvania wouldn’t understand what it means to apply the strict scrutiny standard in a constitutional case is mind-boggling.”

Yesterday, the Trump campaign asked to file a new complaint in Pennsylvania in part to “restore the claims that were inadvertently removed,” according to its filing. An attachment to the submission, citing state election law, refers to “a post watcher only” rather than “poll watcher.”

Experts say Trump has almost no chance of reversing his loss.

“It’s kind of a fallacy to say, well, Trump would do better if he had better lawyers,” Hasen said. “Part of the reason you don’t have good lawyers is that you don’t have good claims to make.”

– with AP