Philadelphia:
As they frantically searched for ways to salvage President Donald Trump‘s failed reelection bid, his campaign pursued a dizzying game of legal hopscotch across six states that centered on the biggest prize of all: Pennsylvania. The strategy may have played well in front of television cameras and on talk radio. But it has proved a disaster in court, where judges uniformly rejected their claims of vote fraud and found the campaign’s legal work amateurish.
In a ruling late Saturday, US District Judge Matthew Brann — a Republican and Federalist Society member in central Pennsylvania — compared the campaign’s legal arguments to “Frankenstein’s Monster,” concluding that Trump’s team offered only “speculative accusations,” not proof of rampant corruption. Now, as the legal doors close on Trump’s attempts to have courts do what voters would not do on Election Day and deliver him a second term, his efforts in Pennsylvania show how far he is willing to push baseless theories of widespread voter fraud.
It was led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who descended on the state the Saturday after the November 3 election as the count dragged on and the president played golf. Summoning reporters to a scruffy, far-flung corner of Philadelphia on November 7, he held forth at a site that would soon become legendary: Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The 11:30 am. news conference was doomed from the start.
At 11:26 am, news outlets had started calling the presidential contest for Democrat Joe Biden. The race was over. Just heating up was Trump’s plan to subvert the election through litigation and howls of fraud — the same tactic he had used to stave off losses in the business world. And it would soon spread far beyond Pennsylvania.
“Some of the ballots looked suspicious,” Giuliani, 76, said of the vote count in Philadelphia as he stood behind a chain link fence, next to a sex shop. He maligned the city as being run by a “decrepit Democratic machine.” “Those mail-in ballots could have been written the day before, by the Democratic Party hacks that were all over the convention center,” Giuliani said. He promised to file a new round of lawsuits. He rambled. “This is a very, very strong case,” he asserted.
Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who specializes in election law, called the Trump lawsuits dangerous. “It is a sideshow, but it’s a harmful sideshow,” Levitt said. “It’s a toxic sideshow. The continuing baseless, evidence-free claims of alternative facts are actually having an effect on a substantial number of Americans. They are creating the conditions for elections not to work in the future.” Not a single court has agreed with the strength of the case, but that did not stop Trump’s team from firing off nearly two dozen legal challenges to Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania, including an early morning suit on Election Day filed by a once-imprisoned lawyer.
The president’s lawyers fought the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots to arrive. They complained they weren’t being let in to observe the vote count. They said Democratic counties unfairly let voters fix mistakes on their ballot envelopes. Everywhere they turned, they said, they sniffed fraud. “I felt insidious fraud going on,” Philadelphia poll watcher Lisette Tarragano said when Giuliani called her to the microphone at the landscaping company.
In fact, a Republican runs the city’s election board, and has said his office got death threats as Trump’s rants about the election intensified. No judges ever found any evidence of election fraud in Pennsylvania or any other state where the campaign sued — not in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada or Georgia. Instead, Trump lawyers found themselves backpedaling when pressed in court for admissible evidence, or dropping out when they were accused of helping derail the democratic process.
“I am asking you as a member of the bar of this court, are people representing the Donald J Trump for president (campaign) … in that room?” US District Judge Paul Diamond asked at an after-hours hearing on November 5, when Republicans asked him to stop the vote count in Philadelphia over their alleged banishment..
