Subterms
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyNo One Expects Civility From RepublicansWhat’s worse: making Sarah Sanders leave a restaurant, or terrorizing election officials?By More
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
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
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
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
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
Donald Trump has mounted an all-out assault on the election result in Michigan, reportedly planning to fly state lawmakers to meet with him in Washington and phoning county officials in an apparent attempt to derail the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s 150,000-vote victory in the state.
On Tuesday night, Trump placed phone calls to two Republican members of a county-level vote certification board the night before the pair tried to reverse their previous endorsement of a large chunk of the vote in Michigan.
The news emerged as Republican lawmakers in Michigan prepared to fly to Washington on Friday to meet with Trump at his request, the Washington Post first reported.
While no explanation for the meeting has been given, Trump has been pressuring Republican state lawmakers to try to hijack the electoral college by advancing slates of electors that could compete with those selected by the states’ voters.
There was no indication that Trump’s strategy, which in addition to the consent of legislatures would require a string of highly unlikely court victories and ultimately participation by Democrats in Congress to succeed, had any remote chance of overturning the election.
But Trump’s full-court press in Michigan has raised concerns about the integrity of the state’s election result, which has an election certification deadline of Tuesday 23 November.
As members of the Wayne county board of canvassers, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer played a crucial role this week in transforming Michigan’s popular vote into all-important electoral college votes for Biden. Michigan has 16 electoral votes.
But at a meeting on Tuesday night, Hartmann and Palmer at first refused to certify the vote in Wayne county, which hosts the city of Detroit and where more than 80% of the vote is African American, citing minor irregularities. Biden won the county by more than 330,000 votes – his largest margin of any county in Michigan.
After three hours of discussion among community members attending the meeting virtually, some of whom accused Hartmann and Palmer of carrying out a brazen, racist assault on the right to vote, the pair certified the Wayne county vote. In the past the process has been treated as routine.
Trump spoke with Palmer on the phone later that night, she told the Detroit Free Press. “He was checking to make sure I was safe,” she said. Palmer said that she and her family had “received multiple threats”.
The next day both Hartmann and Palmer filed affidavits in court seeking to reverse their certification of the Wayne county result, claiming that they had been promised internally that the vote would be audited, only to discover it would not be.
The White House did not reply to a request for comment. Neither did Hartmann or Palmer. Trump inaccurately tweeted on Tuesday night that the board had declined to certify the Wayne county vote, indicating that he was following the process closely.
The Michigan secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said through a spokesperson on Thursday that the certification was final. “There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote,” she said. “Their job is done and the next step in the process is for the board of state canvassers to meet and certify.”
The vice-chairman of the Wayne county board of canvassers, Democrat Jonathan Kinloch, denied the substance of the affidavits, telling the Washington Post that the Republican pair understood the process and knew what they were certifying.
Ever since Trump’s election loss two weeks ago, the Trump campaign has been filing lawsuits and applying pressure on Republican officials in multiple states in an effort to overturn the election result or, barring that, to spread the false belief that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Polling indicates that they are succeeding in the latter objective with a majority of Republicans.
Trump campaign tampering had not caused a serious hitch in the process of vote certification, however, until Tuesday night.
Biden needs electoral votes to make his win over Trump official, although he defeated Trump in a sufficient number of states that he still would win in the electoral college even if the Trump campaign managed to steal the election in multiple big states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Separately in Michigan on Thursday, the Trump campaign withdrew an election-related lawsuit in federal court, making the false assertion in court documents that the Wayne county vote had not been certified. The Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was leading that case.
The Trump campaign’s legal strategy came under question in a separate case in Pennsylvania, where on Wednesday the campaign proposed that the campaign itself should conduct a review of mail-in ballots and let the court know what it found. As of this writing the court had not taken up the offer from the campaign, which has failed to advance any of its dozens of lawsuits since election night. More
Michigan’s largest county has reversed course and unanimously certified its presidential election results after Republicans first blocked the move in a party-line vote that threatened to temporarily stall official approval of Democrat Joe Biden’s win in the state.
The Wayne county board of canvassers acted after their 2-2 tie was condemned by Democrats, election experts and the meeting’s online spectators as a dangerous attempt to overthrow the will of voters.
The board met after days of unsuccessful litigation filed by Republican poll challengers and President Donald Trump’s allies. They claimed fraud during absentee ballot counting at a Detroit convention center but two judges found no evidence and refused to stop the canvassing process.
Biden crushed Trump in Wayne county, a Democratic stronghold, by more than a two-to-one margin and won the state by 146,000 votes, according to unofficial results.
The canvassers first rejected certification of the Detroit-area vote with a tie. Monica Palmer, a Republican, said poll books in certain Detroit precincts were out of balance. In response, Jonathan Kinloch, a Democrat, said it was “reckless and irresponsible” not to certify the results. “It’s not based upon fraud. It’s absolutely human error,” Kinloch said of any discrepancies. “Votes that are cast are tabulated.”
The board then listened to spectators criticising Palmer and fellow Republican William Hartmann via Zoom during the meeting’s public comment period.
The Reverend Wendell Anthony, a well-known pastor and head of the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called them a “disgrace”.
“You have extracted a Black city out of a county and said the only ones that are at fault is the city of Detroit, where 80% of the people who reside here are African Americans. Shame on you!” Anthony said.
Certification of the election results in each of Michigan’s 83 counties is a step towards statewide certification by the Michigan board of state canvassers.
“Glad to see common sense prevailed in the end,” said Detroit’s mayor, Mike Duggan. “Thank you to all those citizens who spoke up so passionately. You made the difference!”
The Michigan Democratic party chair, Lavora Barnes, called the initial 2-2 vote tie “blatant racism”.
At least six lawsuits have been filed in Michigan, the latest one landing on Sunday in federal court. But there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the US election.
The issues that Trump’s allies have raised are typical in every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots to have been miscast or lost.
The University of Kentucky law professor Joshua Douglas, who teaches election law, said certifying results was usually a routine task. “We depend on democratic norms, including that the losers graciously accept defeat. That seems to be breaking down.”. More
