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      Trump thought courts would help him win but judges were his harshest critics

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      Donald Trump and his allies say their lawsuits aimed at subverting the 2020 election and reversing his loss to Joe Biden would be substantiated, if only judges were allowed to hear the cases.There is a central flaw in the argument. Judges have heard the cases and have been among the harshest critics of the legal arguments put forth by Trump’s legal team, often dismissing them with scathing language of repudiation.This has been true whether the judge has been appointed by a Democrat or a Republican, including those named by Trump himself.The judicial rulings that have rejected Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud have underscored not only the futility of the lame-duck president’s brazen attempt to sabotage the people’s will but also the role of the courts in checking his unprecedented efforts to stay in power.On Monday, US district judge Linda Parker threw out a lawsuit challenging Michigan’s election results that had been filed two days after the state certified the results for Biden. Parker, appointed by Barack Obama, said the case embodied the phrase “This ship has sailed.”“This lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the relief plaintiffs seek … and more about the impact of their allegations on people’s faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government,” she said.The lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of voters claimed Biden benefited from fraud, alleging, as in much of the other litigation, a massive Democrat-run conspiracy to shift the results. It sought to reverse the certification and impound all voting machines for inspection – “relief that is stunning in its scope and breathtaking in its reach,” the judge said.“Plaintiffs ask this court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters. This, the court cannot, and will not, do,” she said.“The people have spoken.”Her ruling stands alongside others in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada that have a common thread: they all rejected Trump’s claims.Even in the face of these losses in court, Trump has dangerously contended that, in fact, he won the election. And he’s moved out of the courts to directly appeal to lawmakers as his losses mount.He brought Michigan lawmakers to the White House in a failed bid to set aside the vote tally, and phoned Georgia governor Brian Kemp, asking him to order a special legislative session to overturn the states results. Kemp refused. Trump also called the Pennsylvania Republican House speaker, Bryan Cutler, who said state law did not give the legislature the power to overturn the will of voters.And Trump tweeted in all caps, “I WON THE ELECTION, BIG.”While that is not the case, what is true is that Trump is rapidly running out of legal runway. Out of roughly 50 lawsuits filed, more than 35 have been dropped or dismissed. The US supreme court was expected to weigh in later this week in a case from Pennsylvania.In Georgia, US district judge Timothy Batten, appointed by George W Bush, dismissed a lawsuit filed by attorney Sidney Powell, who was dropped from the Trump legal team a few weeks ago but has still continued to spread faulty election claims.The lawsuit claimed widespread fraud meant to illegally manipulate the vote count in favor of Biden. The suit said the scheme was carried out in different ways, including ballot stuffing, votes flipped by the election system from Trump to Biden and problems with absentee ballots. The judge summarily rejected those claims.Batten said the lawsuit sought “perhaps the most extraordinary relief ever sought in any federal court in connection with an election.”He said the lawsuit sought to ignore the will of voters in Georgia, which certified the state for Biden again Monday after three vote counts.“They want this court to substitute its judgment for that of two-and-a-half million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden and this I am unwilling to do,” Batten said.Trump has appointed more than 150 federal court judges who have been confirmed by the Senate and pushed through three supreme court justices.Much like Trump, his lawyers try to blame the political leanings of the judge after their legal arguments are flayed.When a federal appeals panel in Philadelphia rejected Trump’s election challenge just five days after it reached the court, Trump legal advisor Jenna Ellis called their work a product of “the activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania”.But Trump appointed the judge who wrote the 27 November opinion.“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” the judge, Stephanos Bibas, who wrote as the third US circuit panel refused to stop the state from certifying its results for Democrat Joe Biden, a demand he called “breathtaking.”All three of the panel members were appointed by Republican presidents.And they were upholding the decision of a fourth Republican, US district judge Matthew Brann, a conservative jurist and Federalist Society member. Brann had called the campaign’s legal case, which was argued in court by Rudy Giuliani, a “haphazard” jumble that resembled “Frankenstein’s monster.”In state courts, too, the lawsuits have failed. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump says 'Rudy's doing well' after Giuliani taken to hospital with Covid

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      Donald Trump has said that the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was admitted to hospital on Sunday after being diagnosed with Covid-19, was “doing well” with the virus.“Rudy’s doing well,” Trump said in response to a question from reporters at the White House. “He’s doing very well. No temperature and he actually called me earlier this morning. Was the first call I got.”Neither the White House nor doctors for Giuliani released information about Giuliani’s condition, and the basics of Giuliani’s health status remained unknown. He was admitted to Georgetown University hospital on Sunday.Giuliani, 76, who has kept up a schedule of constant public appearances in recent weeks as the spearhead of Trump’s campaign to spread conspiracy theories about the US election, announced his Covid diagnosis on Twitter on Sunday.“I’m getting great care and feeling good,” Giuliani tweeted. “Recovering quickly and keeping up with everything.”Giuliani has appeared frequently in public recently closely surrounded by people not wearing masks or observing the social distancing measures health officials recommend to prevent the spread of coronavirus.The Giuliani appearances, which have included press conferences as well as video-streamed meetings with Republican legislators in Michigan and Pennsylvania, are part of an improvised traveling show that Trump has put together to challenge the election result.Following one such appearance, at the offices of the Republican National Committee in November, multiple attendees announced Covid diagnoses, including Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who appears to have had a mild case.For years, Giuliani has worked to build and feed conspiracy theories designed to help Trump politically. Before the impeachment inquiry that concluded earlier this year, Giuliani tried to get Ukrainian officials to make public statements the Trump campaign hoped would be damaging to Joe Biden.But Giuliani’s remit has changed since Trump lost the presidency, shifting from weaving complicated stories about a shady conspiracy in a former Soviet republic to weaving similar – entirely false – stories about a shady conspiracy among US elections officials.While he has made a great show of his fraud allegations for the cameras, with likely corrosive effects on US democracy, Giuliani did not dare advance fraud allegations in a court appearance last month, where lying could come with a price in the form of disbarment or other sanction.“It’s not fraud,” Giuliani told a district judge in Pennsylvania of the Trump campaign’s case. “This is not a fraud case.”As one of the highest-profile members of Trump’s inner circle, Giuliani had previously served as a significant source of misinformation about coronavirus. In one Fox News appearance, he mocked contact tracing, asking why it was not used to fight obesity and heart disease.Trump, 74, was hospitalized in early October at Walter Reed medical center in Maryland. He spent three days in the hospital. More

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      Armed pro-Trump protesters gather outside Michigan elections chief's home

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      Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said dozens of armed protesters gathered in a threatening manner outside her home on Saturday evening chanting “bogus” claims about electoral fraud.Michigan officials last month certified the state’s election results showing President-elect Joe Biden had won Michigan, one of a handful of key battleground states, in the course of his 3 November election victory.Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed, contrary to evidence, that the outcome was marred by widespread fraud in multiple states. State and federal officials have repeatedly stated that there is no evidence of fraud on any significant scale, and Biden is to be sworn in on 20 January.The individuals gathered outside my home targeted me as Michigan’s Chief Election officer. But their threats were actually aimed at the 5.5million Michigan citizens who voted in this fall’s election, seeking to overturn their will. They will not succeed in doing so. My statement: pic.twitter.com/RSUnPSN4Aa— Jocelyn Benson (@JocelynBenson) December 7, 2020
      The protesters who rallied outside Benson’s home held up placards saying “Stop the Steal” and chanted the same message, according to various clips uploaded on social media.In a Twitter statement on Sunday, Benson said the protesters were trying to spread false information about the security and accuracy of the US election system. “The demands made outside my home were unambiguous, loud and threatening.”The Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, in a separate Twitter post, accused the pro-Trump demonstrators of “mob-like behavior [that] is an affront to basic morality and decency”.“Anyone can air legitimate grievances to Secretary Benson’s office through civil and democratic means, but terrorizing children and families in their own homes is not activism.”Benson added: “They targeted me in my role as Michigan’s chief election officer. But the threats of those gathered weren’t actually aimed at me – or any other elected officials in this state. They were aimed at the voters.”Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has clashed publicly with Trump over state coronavirus restrictions, was the target of a kidnapping plot by a far-right militia group during the election campaign, prosecutors said in October.Michigan, one of a handful of key swing state in the 2020 presidential race, was a target of agitation by Trump and rightwing supporters against stay-at-home orders Whitmer imposed earlier this year to curb coronavirus transmissions. More

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      in Elections

      Trump's latest batch of election lawsuits fizzle as dozens of losses pile up

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      For a man obsessed with winning, Donald Trump is losing a lot.In the month since the election, the president and his legal team have come no closer in their frantic efforts to overturn the result, notching up dozens of losses in courts across the country, with more rolling in by the day.According to an Associated Press tally of roughly 50 cases brought by Trump’s campaign and his allies, more than 30 have been rejected or dropped, and about a dozen are awaiting action.The advocacy group Democracy Docket put Trump’s losses even higher, tweeting on Friday that Trump’s team had lost 46 post-election lawsuits following several fresh losses in several states on Friday.Trump has notched just one small victory, a case challenging a decision to move the deadline to provide missing proof of identification for certain absentee ballots and mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.Five more losses came on Friday. The Trump campaign lost its bid to overturn the results of the election in Nevada and a Michigan appeals court rejected a case from his campaign. The Minnesota supreme court dismissed a challenge brought by GOP lawmakers. And in Arizona, a judge threw out a bid to undo Biden’s victory there, concluding that the state’s Republican party chairwoman failed to prove fraud or misconduct and that the evidence presented at trial wouldn’t reverse Trump’s loss. The Wisconsin supreme court also declined to hear a lawsuit brought by a conservative group over Trump’s loss.Trump’s latest failings came as California certified Joe Biden as the official winner in the state, officially handing him the electoral college majority needed to win the White House. Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s formal approval of the state’s 55 pledged electors brought Biden’s tally so far to 279, according to a count by the Associated Press – just over the 270 threshold needed for victory.The Republican president and his allies continue to mount new cases, recycling the same baseless claims, even after Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, declared this week that the justice department had uncovered no widespread fraud.“This will continue to be a losing strategy, and in a way it’s even bad for him: he gets to re-lose the election numerous times,“ said Kent Greenfield, a professor at Boston College Law School. “The depths of his petulance and narcissism continue to surprise me.”Trump has refused to admit he lost and this week posted a 46-minute speech to Facebook filled with conspiracy theories, misstatements and vows to keep up his fight to subvert the election.Judges in battleground states have repeatedly swatted down legal challenges brought by the president and his allies. Trump’s legal team has vowed to take one Pennsylvania case to the US supreme court even though it was rejected in a scathing ruling by a federal judge, as well as an appeals court.After recently being kicked off Trump’s legal team, the conservative attorney Sidney Powell filed new lawsuits in Arizona and Wisconsin this week riddled with errors and wild conspiracy claims about election rigging. One of the plaintiffs named in the Wisconsin case said he never agreed to participate in the case and found out through social media that he had been included.In his video posted Wednesday, Trump falsely claimed there were facts and evidence of a mass conspiracy created by Democrats to steal the election, a similar argument made by his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others before judges, which have been largely unsuccessful.Most of their claims are rooted in conspiracy theories about voting machines, as well as testimony from partisan poll watchers who claimed they didn’t get close enough to see ballots being tallied because of Covid safety precautions.“No, I didn’t hear any facts or evidence,“ tweeted the Pennsylvania attorney general, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, after watching the video Wednesday night. “What I did hear was a sad Facebook rant from a man who lost an election.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump team’s discredited fraud witness compared to SNL character

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      The quixotic quest by Donald Trump’s legal team to overturn the results of the election have birthed an unlikely star this week: Michigan resident Melissa Carone.Carone, a contract worker for Dominion Voting Systems, appeared before a Michigan house panel on Wednesday and insisted, without providing evidence, that tens of thousands of votes had been counted twice.It was the manner of her claims, however, that made her a social media hit, with numerous Twitter users comparing Carone to a Saturday Night Live character.Carone repeatedly talked over a Michigan representative as he tried to get to the bottom of her allegations of voter fraud.Those claims seemed to amount to vague accusations of ballot recounting and poll tampering, apparently by the Republican-controlled house.Responding to Carone’s assertions that she saw ballot workers count a batch of 30,000 votes multiple times, Steve Johnson, a Republican Michigan state representative, said:“We’re not seeing the poll book off by 30,000 votes.”Carone, who repeatedly spoke over Johnson as he attempted to understand her claims, was unmoved.“What’d you guys do, take it and do something crazy to it?” Carone said.“I’m just saying the numbers are not off by 30,000 votes,” Johnson replied.“I’d say that poll book is off by over 100,000 [votes],” Carone said.In her appearance before the house, Carone earned the rare distinction of making claims that were too bizarre for Rudy Giuliani, who has become a fount of unhinged election conspiracy theories in recent weeks.Giuliani, who sat next to Carone at the Michigan hearing, was heard shushing her as she loudly spoke over a state representative, and could be seen wincing during some of her account of witnessing fraud.On 13 November a Wayne county judge had decided that Carone’s claims “simply are not credible”, but that did not stop Trump’s team from bringing her to Wednesday’s hearing, where Carone added of the vote total:“It’s wildly off, and dead people voted, and illegals voted.”Carone, who has been doing the rounds on rightwing media in recent weeks, claimed on Wednesday night she “had to get rid of social media” in the wake of her public appearances.That statement also seems to be false, given a Facebook account in her name still exists on the site. More

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      Trump to meet Michigan Republican leaders in bid to remain in power

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      Donald Trump was on Friday making a futile but dangerous last stand, without precedent in modern American history, to overturn the result of the presidential election so he can remain in power.As Joe Biden pressed ahead with plans for his administration, the president was set to meet Republican leaders from Michigan at the White House in an increasingly desperate bid to subvert democracy after a series of courtroom defeats over allegations of election fraud.The Trump campaign’s apparent strategy is to persuade Republican-controlled legislatures in Michigan and other battleground states that Democrat Biden won, and to set aside the will of the people and declare Trump the winner, despite officials declaring it the most secure election in American history.“The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump,” Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, told the Fox Business Network on Thursday, referring to the electoral college system.Most experts dismiss the idea as political fantasy and probably unlawful. But they warn that an American president trying to reverse a free and fair election could poison millions of minds, conditioning his base to lose faith in democracy and regard Biden as an illegitimate president.Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state defeated by Trump in the 2016 election, tweeted on Friday: “Protecting one man’s ego is not worth damaging the legitimacy of our democracy.”Biden, a former vice-president, won the election and is preparing to take office on 20 January, but Trump has refused to concede and is searching for a way to invalidate the results, alleging widespread voter fraud without providing evidence.Biden won nearly 6m more votes than Trump but the winner is determined by the electoral college, where each state’s electoral votes, based largely on population, are awarded to the winner of a state’s popular vote.Biden leads by 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 as states work to certify their results at least six days before the electoral college convenes on 14 December to ratify the vote.The Trump campaign is particularly targeting Michigan, which Biden won by 154,000 votes, in the hope that Republicans there will manipulate the electoral system.Its state legislative leaders, the senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, and the house speaker, Lee Chatfield, both Republicans, were said to be visiting the White House at Trump’s request.Shirkey was greeted by protesters and media at Washington’s Reagan international airport. There were chants of “Certify the results!” and a shout of “Where is the evidence of fraud?”Both Shirkey and Chatfield have previously denied that they might try to overturn Biden’s win, noting that Michigan law does not allow the legislature to directly select electors or award them to anyone other than the person who received the most votes.Even so, Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, told the MSNBC TV network: “It’s incredibly dangerous that they are even entertaining the conversation. This is an embarrassment to the state.”Earlier this week, two Republicans canvassers blocked the certification of votes in Wayne county, Michigan, where Detroit is located, a majority Black city. They later relented, amid cries of racism, and the results were certified. It then emerged that Trump made contact with the canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, on Tuesday to express gratitude for their support.On Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believed the county vote “should not be certified” after all. But Michigan’s secretary of state says they cannot rescind their votes.Trump’s dominance of the Republican party is such that, despite no significant reports of irregularities, few prominent figures have spoke out again his scorched earth strategy.However, Mitt Romney, a senator for Utah and the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, broke ranks on Thursday. He said: “Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the president has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”Trump’s attempts to reverse his defeat via lawsuits and recounts have met with no meaningful success.Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican and Trump supporter, confirmed on Friday that Biden won the state after a manual recount and an audit were conducted. “The numbers reflect the verdict of the people, not a decision by the secretary of state’s office or courts, or of either campaigns,” he told reporters.Despite the setbacks, the Trump campaign has not abandoned its legal offensive.Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, said in an hour-and-a-half-long press conference on Thursday that there are plans to file more lawsuits. He accused Democrats of masterminding a “national conspiracy” to steal the election, referencing China, Cuba, the Clinton Foundation, billionaire George Soros and the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez but offering no proof.“I know crimes, I can smell them,” said Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, sweating profusely as what appeared to be hair dye trickled down his face. “You don’t have to smell this one, I can prove it to you.” He offered no evidence to support his claims.Chris Krebs, the Trump administration election official fired last week over the comments about the security of the election, tweeted: “That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest.”Biden, celebrating his 78th birthday – he is the oldest US president-elect in history – was set to meet the House of Representatives speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, on Friday after spending most of the week with advisers planning his administration, despite the refusal of the Trump administration to cooperate with his team, even over dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. More