[Trump] Well, the problem is it’s hard to get into the Supreme Court. I’ve got the best Supreme Court advocates, lawyers, that want to argue the case if it gets there. But they said it’s very hard to get a case up there. Can you imagine? Donald Trump, President of the United States, files a case, and I probably can’t get a case even with, and we have tremendous proof, we have hundreds and hundreds of affidavits, sworn affidavits, and it’s very hard to get a case to the Supreme Court. That’s what everybody is fighting for. I thought that Mike Kelley, Congressmen, I thought they had a great case and it got thrown out the other day. Now they’ll appeal it I hope to the Supreme Court. They have a great case, because the legislature didn’t make the decision on this stuff. And they have a great case. But you have to appeal it. The big thing is can you get it? We can have a great case. We do have a great case. We have the greatest case ever. We have many different forms of fraud! It’s not just one form. It’s ballot fraud. We have it all documented!
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — 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 to Trump’s supporters. 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 scathing ruling late Saturday, U.S. 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.
The campaign on Sunday filed notice it would appeal the decision to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a day before the state’s 67 counties are set to certify their results and send them to state officials. And they asked Sunday night for an expedited hearing Wednesday as they seek to amend the Pennsylvania lawsuit that Brann dismissed.
Trump’s efforts in Pennsylvania show how far he is willing to push baseless theories of widespread voter fraud, even as the legal doors close on his attempts to have courts do what voters would not do on Election Day and deliver him a second term.
The effort is being led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who descended on the state the Saturday after the Nov. 3 election as the count dragged on and the president played golf. Summoning reporters to a scruffy, far-flung corner of Philadelphia on Nov. 7, he held forth at a site that would soon become legendary: Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
The 11:30 a.m. news conference was doomed from the start.
Only minutes earlier, 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 found merit in the core legal claims, 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?” U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond asked at an after-hours hearing on Nov. 5, when Republicans asked him to stop the vote count in Philadelphia over their alleged banishment.
“There’s a nonzero number of people in the room,” lawyer Jerome Marcus replied.
The count continued in Philadelphia. The Trump losses kept coming. By Friday, Nov. 6, when a state appeals court rejected a Republican complaint over provisional ballots and a Philadelphia judge refused to throw out 8,300 mail-in ballots they challenged, Biden was up by about 27,000 votes.
Nationally, the race had not yet been called. But it was becoming clear that a Biden win in Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, was imminent.
When it came, Trump quickly pivoted to litigation. It did not go well.
A U.S. appeals court found Pennsylvania’s three-day extension for mail-in ballots laudatory, given the disruption and mail delays cause by the pandemic. Judges in Michigan and Arizona, finding no evidence of fraud, refused to block the certification of county vote tallies. Law firms representing the campaign started to come under fire and withdrew.
That left Giuliani, who had not argued a case in court for three decades, in charge of the effort to overturn the election.
“You can say a lot at a driveway (news conference). ... When you go to court, you can’t,” said lawyer Mark Aronchick, who represented election officials in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and elsewhere in several of the Pennsylvania suits. “I don’t really pay attention to the chatter until I see a legal brief.”
On Tuesday, Giuliani stepped into the courtroom. He was a late addition to the docket after election lawyers from Porter Wright Morris & Arthur had bowed out over the previous weekend. He had an entourage in tow, a show of force that had everything but a compelling legal argument.
Giuliani asked Brann to hold up the certification of the state’s 6.8 million ballots over two Republican voters whose mail-in ballots were tossed over technical errors.
“I sat dumbfounded listening,” said Aronchick, a seasoned trial lawyer.
“We were ready to argue the one count. Instead, he treated us to an even more expanded version of his Total Landscaping press conference,” Aronchick said. “It didn’t bear any relationship to the actual case.”
Giuliani, admired by some for his tough talk as Manhattan’s top prosecutor and his leadership as New York City’s mayor during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, struggled to answer even basic legal questions.
But he waxed on about a supposed conspiracy to rig the state election.
“The best description of this situation is widespread, nationwide voter fraud,” Giuliani argued. Under questioning, though, he acknowledged their complaint no longer included a fraud claim.
And then, just as it had at Four Seasons, reality came crashing down on him, when news broke in the courtroom that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had rejected the campaign’s appeal over observer access in Philadelphia. It was one of the campaign’s last remaining claims.
Even the dissent was crushing.
“The notion that presumptively valid ballots cast by the Pennsylvania electorate would be disregarded based on isolated procedural irregularities that have been redressed ... is misguided,” Chief Justice Thomas G. Saylor wrote for the minority in the 5-2 decision.
Brann, who sits in Williamsport, let the federal court hearing drag on past the dinner hour, and gave both sides time to file additional motions. The campaign filings were replete with typos, spelling mistakes and even an errant reference to a “Second Amendment Complaint” instead of a second amended complaint.
The campaign took the opportunity to answer one of the more puzzling questions that its election challenge raised: [It only wanted the presidential election results set aside, not votes on the same ballots for other offices. The briefs were filed by Giuliani and co-counsel Marc Scaringi, a local conservative talk radio host who, before he was hired, had questioned the point of the Trump litigation, saying “it will not reverse this election.”
Aronchick balked at the campaign’s core premise that local election workers — perhaps working for the Mafia, as Giuliani suggested — had plotted to spoil Trump’s win.
“You’re going to suggest part of them are in a conspiracy? How does that work?” Aronchick asked. “Who? Where? When? How?”
Brann, in his ruling, said he expected the campaign to present formidable evidence of rampant corruption as it sought to nullify millions of votes. Instead, he said, the campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.”
The 3rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia, may have already tipped its hand. In its Nov. 13 ruling, the appeals court called it “indisputable in our democratic process: that the lawfully cast vote of every citizen must count.”
Biden’s lead in the state has expanded to more than 80,000 votes.
“Our system depends on the possibility that you might lose a fair contest. If that possibility doesn’t exist, you don’t have a democracy,” said Levitt, the law school professor. “There are countries that run like that. It just doesn’t describe America.”
-- Trump’s legal team cried vote fraud, but courts found none, By MARYCLAIRE DALE, November 22, 2020
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — President Donald Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat in court Friday as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.
Trump’s lawyers vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court despite the judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit.”
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” 3rd Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote for the three-judge panel, all appointed by Republican presidents.
The case had been argued last week in a lower court by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who insisted during five hours of oral arguments that the 2020 presidential election had been marred by widespread fraud in Pennsylvania. However, Giuliani failed to offer any tangible proof of that in court.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, another Republican, had said the campaign’s error-filled complaint, “like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together” and denied Giuliani the right to amend it for a second time.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called any revisions “futile.” Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith and Judge Michael Chagares were on the panel with Bibas, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor. Trump’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, sat on the court for 20 years, retiring in 2019.
“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections,” Bibas said in the opinion, which also denied the campaign’s request to stop the state from certifying its results, a demand he called “breathtaking.”
In fact, Pennsylvania officials had announced Tuesday that they had certified their vote count for President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state. Nationally, Biden and running mate Kamala Harris garnered nearly 80 million votes, a record in U.S. presidential elections.
Trump has said he hopes the Supreme Court will intervene in the race as it did in 2000, when its decision to stop the recount in Florida gave the election to Republican George W. Bush. On Nov. 5, as the vote count continued, Trump posted a tweet saying the “U.S. Supreme Court should decide!”
Ever since, Trump and his surrogates have attacked the election as flawed and filed a flurry of lawsuits to try to block the results in six battleground states. But they’ve found little sympathy from judges, nearly all of whom dismissed their complaints about the security of mail-in ballots, which millions of people used to vote from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump perhaps hopes a Supreme Court he helped steer toward a conservative 6-3 majority would be more open to his pleas, especially since the high court upheld Pennsylvania’s decision to accept mail-in ballots through Nov. 6 by only a 4-4 vote last month. Since then, Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett has joined the court.
“The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud,” Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted after Friday’s ruling. “On to SCOTUS!”
In the case at hand, the Trump campaign asked to disenfranchise the state’s 6.8 million voters or at least “cherry-pick” the 1.5 million who voted by mail in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Democratic-leaning areas, the appeals court said.
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, wrote in his scathing ruling on Nov. 21. “That has not happened.”
A separate Republican challenge that reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week seeks to stop the state from further certifying any races on the ballot. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration is fighting that effort, saying it would prevent the state’s legislature and congressional delegation from being seated in the coming weeks.
On Thursday, Trump said the Nov. 3 election was still far from over. Yet he said for the first time he would leave the White House on Jan. 20 if the Electoral College formalizes Biden’s win.
“Certainly I will. But you know that,” Trump said at the White House, taking questions from reporters for the first time since Election Day.
On Twitter Friday, however, he continued to baselessly attack Detroit, Atlanta and other Democratic cities with large Black populations as the source of “massive voter fraud.” And he claimed, without evidence, that a Pennsylvania poll watcher had uncovered computer memory drives that “gave Biden 50,000 votes” apiece.
All 50 states must certify their results before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14, and any challenge to the results must be resolved by Dec. 8. Biden won both the Electoral College and popular vote by wide margins.
Election 2020 legal challenges
President Donald Trump's campaign and Republicans have mounted legal challenges in several states, although most are small-scale lawsuits that do not appear to affect many votes. This table updates daily.STATE / COURT / WHAT THEY'RE SEEKING / DECISION
Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / Lawsuit seeking an order allowing one voter to recast her ballot because she said a tabulator rejected it on Election Day and poll workers denied her request for another ballot. It also asked that certain voter-counting locations be made open to public inspection in future elections. / A judge dismissed the case on Nov. 20
Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / The Arizona Republican Party asked a judge to bar the state’s most populous county from certifying the Nov. 3 election results until the court decides its lawsuit that seeks a new hand-count of a sampling of ballots. / A judge on Thursday rejected Republicans' bid to postpone the certification of election results and dismissed the party’s legal challenge that sought a new audit of a sampling of ballots.
Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / A woman in the Phoenix area alleged vote tabulation equipment was unable to record her ballot because she completed it with a county-issued Sharpie pen. She asked the court to order that all Maricopa County voters whose ballots were rejected as a result of using a Sharpie be given a chance to fix them. / Plantiffs agreed to dismiss the case.
Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward filed a lawsuit seeking an inspection of both mail-in ballot signatures and duplicated ballots in metro Phoenix, alleging officials didn’t give enough legal observers enough access to ballot processing. / --
Arizona / Superior Court; Maricopa County / Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee sought the manual inspection of in-person Election Day ballots in metro Phoenix they allege were mishandled by poll workers and resulted in some ballot selections to be disregarded. They asked to delay the certification of election results in Maricopa County until the manual inspection it requested is completed. / A judge dismissed the case on Nov. 13 after the campaign’s lawyers acknowledged the small number of ballots at issue wouldn’t change the outcome of how Arizona voted for president.
Georgia / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of four voters seeking to exclude ballots from certain counties. / Plaintiffs voluntarily dropped their case on Nov. 16.
Georgia / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed by lawyer L. Lin Wood Jr. seeking to block the certification of election results in Georgia. / A judge on Nov. 19 denied Wood's request for a temporary restraining order to halt certification. Wood has appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Georgia / Superior Court of Chatham County / The Georgia Republican Party and Trump's campaign challenged 53 absentee ballots they alleged may have been received after the Election Day deadline. / A judge dismissed the lawsuit after local officials testified that all 53 ballots had all been received on time.
Michigan / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of two poll challengers that sought to block certification of election results until an independent audit to "ensure the accuracy and integrity of the election" is done. / Plantiffs voluntarily dismissed their case on Nov. 18 without explanation.
Michigan / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of four voters seeking an order blocking the counting of presidential results from Ingham, Wayne and Washtenaw, alleging voting irregularities. / Plaintiffs voluntarily dropped their case on Nov. 16.
Michigan / Federal Court / Trump campaign case seeking to block the certification of election results in the state, alleging that election officials "allowed fraud and incompetence to corrupt the conduct of the 2020 general election." / Trump's campaign withdrew their lawsuit on Nov. 19.
Michigan / Wayne County Circuit Court / An election challenger and group called the Election Integrity Fund sought to stop the Wayne County Board of Canvassers from certifying or delivering election results to the Secretary of State or State Board of Canvassers. / A judge denied the request, saying they have "offered no evidence to support their assertions"
Michigan / Wayne County Circuit Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of GOP poll challengers seeking to stop the certification of Detroit-area election results. / A judge denied the bid on Nov. 13, rejecting arguments that the city's handling of absentee ballots spoiled the count.
Michigan / Court of Claims / Trump's campaign case to stop the counting of absentee ballots, accusing election officials of failing to ensure that challengers and bipartisan observers could properly watch the process. / A judge denied the request, noting that votes had largely been counted by the time the lawsuit was filed. Trump's campaign has appealed.
Minnesota / Minnesota Supreme Court / Republican lawmakers, candidates and several voters sought a temporary restraining order to delay the canvassing board’s certification vote, alleging a variety of problems with the election. / The court deferred any action on the petition on Nov. 24, saying the plaintiffs provided no evidence that they had properly served it on all parties.
Nevada / Carson City District Court / Trump’s campaign, through Republican contestants in Nevada, are asking a judge to declare Trump the winner or to invalidate the presidential vote results, alleging voter fraud and irregularities during the election. / --
Nevada / Clark County District Court / A Republican congressional candidate who lost by nearly 3% to an incumbent Democrat in a district that covers Clark County sought a new election, alleging misconduct by election officials, an inability to track mailed ballots and that the use of an optical scanning machine to validate voter signatures was improper. / Dismissed by the judge.
Nevada / Clark County District Court / A Republican state Senate candidate who lost by less than 1% to a Democratic incumbent sought a new election, alleging misconduct by election officials, an inability to track mailed ballots and that the use of an optical scanning machine to validate voter signatures was improper. / A state judge rejected request on procedural grounds and dismissed, saying it could be refiled as a contest-of-election claim.
Nevada / Clark County District Court / A Republican congressional candidate who lost by nearly 5% to an incumbent Democrat is seeking a new election, alleging misconduct by election officials, an inability to track mailed ballots and that the use of an optical scanning machine to validate voter signatures was improper. / A state judge denied an immediate injunction.
Nevada / Clark County District Court / A voting watchdog group led by a conservative activist and former state lawmaker asked a judge to block statewide certification of the election. / A state judge denied the request for an injunction
Nevada / Nevada Supreme Court / Trump's campaign and Republicans sought to stop the vote count in the Las Vegas area, saying campaign-enlisted count-watchers should be allowed wider range to see operations. / Dismissed at the request of the Trump campaign.
Nevada / Federal court / A voter, a count-watcher and two Republican congressional candidates alleged more than 3,000 ineligible voters cast ballots and sought to stop the Clark County Registrar of Voters from using an optical scanning machine to process ballots and validate voter signatures. / A judge denied an immediate injunction to stop the vote count. The plaintiffs then moved to dismiss the case.
Pennsylvania / Federal Court / Lawsuit filed on behalf of four voters seeking an order blocking the counting of presidential results from certain counties. / Plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew their case on Nov. 16.
Pennsylvania / U.S. Supreme Court / The state Republican party is asking the US Supreme Court to reverse a decision extending the deadline to collect mailed in ballots by three days. Trump's campaign has asked to intervene in the case. / --
Pennsylvania / Federal Court / A Republican congressional candidate filed a lawsuit alleging officials in Montgomery County unfairly gave voters a chance to fix technical mistakes on their mail-in ballots before Election Day. The case involved 93 mail-in ballots. / Plaintiffs withdrew their case.
Pennsylvania / Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas / Trump's campaign challenged nearly 600 ballots it claimed were "defective." / Judge rejected the case on Nov. 13 and ordered that the votes be counted.
Pennsylvania / Bucks County Court of Common Pleas / Trump's campaign is challenging more than 2,000 ballots it claims are "defective." / A judge on Nov. 19 denied Trump's bid to invalidate the ballots.
Pennsylvania / Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas / Republican state senate candidate is challenging more than 2,000 undated mail-in ballots. / An appeals court ruled on Nov. 19 that the ballots cannot be counted in the western Pennsylvania state Senate race, saying handwritten dates "provide a measure of security." The state Supreme Court on Nov. 23 overturned that decision and said the votes should be counted.
Pennsylvania / Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas / Five Trump campaign cases challenging more than 8,000 mail-in ballots over alleged voter mistakes, typically where or if they put the signature, date and address. / A judge on Nov. 13 refused to reject the ballots, saying no fraud was found.
Pennsylvania / Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania / Republicans are challenging guidance from the Secretary of State that directed counties to allow voters whose mail-in or absentee ballot was rejected to still vote in person by a provisional ballot. / --
Pennsylvania / Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania / Trump's campaign challenged a decision to move the deadline to provide missing proof of identification for absentee and mail-in ballots. / A judge on Nov. 12 ordered counties not to count mail-in or absentee ballots for which the voter didn't submit valid identification within six days after the election. The injunction deals with an as-yet unknown number of ballots that may number a few thousand, or less.
Pennsylvania / Federal Court / Trump's campaign sought to block certification of election results in the state, alleging among other things that their observers weren't given meaningful access to review the processing of mail-in ballots. / A judge dismissed the case on Nov. 21, writing that the campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations ... unsupported by evidence." The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judge's ruling.
Pennsylvania / 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals / A Republican congressional candidate and others appealed a federal court decision rejecting a challenge to the deadline extension for collecting mail-in ballots. / On Nov. 13, the federal appeals court upheld the three-day extension.
Pennsylvania / Federal Court / The Public Interest Legal Foundation alleges 21,000 supposedly dead residents were on the state's voter rolls. It is seeking a court order to remove dead people from the rolls. / --
Pennsylvania / Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania / Trump's campaign asked that its observers be allowed closer access to the canvassing of ballots. / A judge ordered on Nov. 5 that party and candidate observers be allowed to get closer — 6 feet (2 meters) away — to election workers processing mail-in ballots in Philadelphia. But the state's supreme court ruled on Nov. 17 that the city had given observers sufficient access from the start.
Wisconsin / Federal Court / Three voters in northeastern Wisconsin are seeking to exclude ballots in Milwaukee, Dane and Menominee counties, alleging without evidence that absentee voting is rife with widespread fraud. / Plantiffs voluntarily dropped their case on Nov. 16.
Wisconsin / Wisconsin Supreme Court / A conservative group is seeking to block certification of the presidential election results. / --
-- Appeals court rejects Trump challenge of Pennsylvania race, By MARYCLAIRE DALE, November 27, 2020
And we have tremendous evidence. So we say, “We want to show you the evidence.” And then the judge will say, “They didn’t show us the evidence.” That’s what we want to do. We want to have hearings to show the evidence. The time people started seeing evidence was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when people started showing it, you probably saw that. Great people came forward with affidavits, signed affidavits. We have hundreds of people like that. Hundreds and hundreds. They make it like we don’t have evidence. We have evidence all over the place. And by the way, you asked about the machines, Dominion,
[Maria] Is there a path to victory?
[Trump] I hope so, for the good of the country. It will take a brave judge or a brave legislature. You know, Rudy Giuliani, he takes a lot of heat, let me tell you, that guy has guts, because we had lawyers that were afraid to go forward because they were threatened, viciously threatened. We have lawyers, Maria, good lawyers that had to leave the case in the middle because they were threatened. Absolutely threatened, both psychologically and otherwise. And they left the case. Numerous firms. Good firms doing a good job. And all of a sudden we end up having to scramble to get a case ready.
A lawyer spearheading the efforts by President Donald Trump’s campaign to dispute the election results in Pennsylvania complained to a federal court Sunday that she received an abusive telephone message from an attorney at the elite law firm representing the state, Kirkland & Ellis.
The Trump campaign lawyer, Linda Kerns of Philadelphia, said she received the one-minute-long voicemail Saturday morning from an associate — a very junior attorney — based in Kirkland’s Washington, D.C. office.
Kerns did not identify the Kirkland attorney by name or provide other details about the message, but said the communication “by any measure falls afoul of standards of professional conduct.”
Kerns’ filing said a Kirkland attorney working on the Pennsylvania suit told her that the lawyer who made the call was not involved in the case. Kerns said the attorney she contacted admitted the call was “discourteous” and apologized for wasting her time.
In a response filed with the court Monday morning, Daniel Donovan, Kirkland's lead attorney on the Pennsylvania-focused election suit, confirmed that he viewed the call as “discourteous and not appropriate,” but said he disagreed with Kerns’ characterization of it.
“That associate was acting unilaterally, in his personal capacity, without the knowledge or authorization of undersigned counsel or the Firm,” Donovan wrote.
“The associate provided a personal email and had a baby babbling in the background during the voicemail….The Firm expects that every lawyer will conduct themselves with the highest standards of professional conduct, including being respectful of and courteous to other members of the bar.”
Donovan said the unnamed associate was not aware of the firm’s role in the case and that no action by the judge was required.
Kerns’ complaint came as law firms working on Trump’s flurry of legal challenges in states across the country have faced public pressure from Trump’s political opponents to drop the litigation, which many legal experts view as fruitless and based on little or no evidence of actual fraud.
Some of the most prominent figures urging law firms to back out of Trump’s legal defense are associated with the Lincoln Project, a group of current and former Republican political consultants and activists who ran ads against Trump during the campaign and promised a similar media fusillade against the firms.
The torrent of criticism appeared to have an effect, as two firms working on the Trump cases — Arizona-based Snell and Wilmer and Ohio-based Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur — withdrew, leaving the work to small firms and solo practitioners. The Trump campaign turned on its lawyers as they exited last week, saying in a statement that the attorneys had “buckled” to “leftist mobs.”
Trump opponents have also put pressure on a prominent law firm with extensive ties to the Trump administration, Jones Day. But that firm has said it isn’t involved in any suits initiated after the election, although it does represent the Pennsylvania Republican Party in litigation related to an extension of ballot-receipt deadlines in that state.
Kerns said in her filing submitted just before midnight Sunday that the call from the Kirkland associate was just one part of a stream of harassment and invective Trump attorneys have faced in recent weeks.
“Since this case was filed, undersigned counsel has been subjected to continuous harassment in the form of abusive e-mails, phone calls, physical and economic threats, and even accusations of treason — all for representing the President of the United States’ campaign in this litigation,” she wrote.
Kerns, who did not immediately respond to messages from POLITICO seeking more details, said some of the communications may have violated state or federal law.
However, she told U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann that the message from the Kirkland lawyer was troubling as a breach of professional norms.
Kerns said the voicemail message violated court and state bar rules, but added: “If there needs to be a rule saying that Kirkland & Ellis associates should not call opposing counsel and leave an abusive voicemail then all hope is lost.”
-- Trump lawyer complains of harassing call from attorney at opposing firm. The Trump campaign lawyer said she received the one-minute-long voicemail from an associate based in Kirkland & Ellis' D.C. office. By JOSH GERSTEIN, 11/16/2020 09:52 AM EST, Updated: 11/16/2020 10:06 AM EST
What’s going on, nobody’s ever seen anything like this. It will take a brave judge or justice, or both, Supreme Court justice …
[Maria] It sounds like if you can’t be heard by the Supreme Court, you lose. Do you believe you will win this?
[Trump] We should be heard by the Supreme Court. Something has to be able to get up there. Otherwise, what is the Supreme Court? If election fraud at the highest level anyone’s ever seen with tremendous evidence, in presidential election, if a man gets 80 million votes – and he’s not even close to that number, Maria – look, again, I don’t want to bore you with this, He did not beat President Obama in areas where he said they beat President Obama. In fact, the Black community had very little enthusiasm for Joe Biden. You know that! You’ve been reporting on that! Very little enthusiasm for Joe Biden. And the Hispanic community has very little enthusiasm for Joe Biden. He didn’t get those numbers. And by the way, I was the most successful with the Hispanic and Black communities, I was unbelievably successful. You saw that: record numbers!
[Maria] Yeah. We’ve talked about that a lot.
[Trump] How did he get all of these votes? How did he get up to 80 million? How did he get up to 80 million votes? And again, I told you, we wanted to get 67, 68 [million] votes and we thought we had it made. John McLaughlin couldn’t believe it. John McLaughlin is a legitimate pollster, not one that says I’m 17 points down in Wisconsin, and then end up effectively winning. They tried to take it away, and we’ll see what happens with Wisconsin. But essentially, 17 points, a couple of days before the election, and I really won the state. It was 17 points off. Think of that. 17 points off. By the way, this is also corruption, Maria. This is also corruption.
[Maria] I want to ask you two more questions before we wrap up. I want to get your take on how much of an influence on this election was Big Tech and the media. We know that the media declared Joe Biden President-Elect on November 7th. They set the narrative that the election was over, and discredited any challenges. Big Tech and the media have been censoring you, and getting more aggressive at it. The President of the United States, and others, being censored, literally during a constitutional crisis. What can you do about it?
[Trump] It’s massively the powerful; it’s massively corrupt – the media and Big Tech. Section 230 should be taken out, because that’s their protection that was given artificially to them. But it’s a massive form of corruption and silence and suppression. Like for instance, this conversation that we’re having right now. They will only take if there was something that was slightly off, like you or I mispronounced a word, or you or I – that will be the story. And yet they won’t talk about Hunter Biden. Never talk about Hunter Biden. He stole millions and millions of dollars. And if you do talk about him, they take you off their platforms. No. It’s massively corrupt. I think what happened is in 2016 where I won, I caught them by surprise. I got them by surprise. And they said, “we’re not going to let this …” I don’t know why, though. Because business has never been better. You know, we got hit by a pandemic, but prior to the pandemic I had the highest numbers in history. And even now, the stock market just hit an all-time high during a pandemic. And what did I do? I came up with vaccines that people didn’t think we’d have for five years. And we have them. They are going to be distributed in two weeks. I mean, think of what we’ve done! And nobody’s done it like this. And we’re doing much better than Europe. By the way, you never hear about Europe. We’re doing better than the rest of the world. We’re doing better. But we have two vaccines. We’re coming up with another one. Johnson & Johnson is coming up with one. We’ll have four or five great vaccines four or five years ahead of schedule. People hardly talk about that. And they will try and claim, they’ll try and say that Biden came up with the vaccines. But actually, I watched, I watched a few of the shows last night. I got to see a couple of them. And Mark Levine was fantastic last night. Mark was great talking about the vaccines. His show is great. I guess they had it on like last night some time. And he was great, and so many others are great. Sean Hannity, he knows. He gets it! He gets it! But Mark Levine said it very well last night. But you have people that get it. But if people are afraid to speak out, so it is the power of the media. There’s no question about it. But with all that power, we won the race. Because we got far more votes than him! We got 74 million votes; he did not get anywhere near 80, and that’s 74 before they throw away – you know, they threw away ballots. They threw away many Trump ballots. That’s the easiest way they could cheat. But we got 74 million votes. He didn’t get anywhere near close to 80 million votes.
[Maria] And you believe that you will be able to prove this in the coming weeks?
[Trump] Well, I’m going to use 125% of my energy to do it. You need a judge that’s willing to hear a case. You need a Supreme Court that’s willing to make a real big decision based on everything – it’s not like you’re going to change my mind. In other words, my mind will not change in six months. There was tremendous cheating here. Boxes were brought in. The mail-in vote is a disaster. And by the way, if Republicans allow it to happen, you’ll never have another Republican elected in the history of this country, at a Senate level, or at a Presidential level, or at a House level. Mail-in voting is a total disaster.
One thing that did happen, very interesting, we won all the State houses. We won Congress. Everything that -- Kevin McCarthy gives me a massive amount of credit for what happened. We were supposed to lose seats. We didn’t lose one seat, and we gained many. And others were leading. And others –
And by the way, do you know why the votes aren’t in yet? There are like five or six others? Because the mail-in voting is all screwed up on Congressional races. And we held the Senate. Okay?
[Maria] Yep.
[Trump] And I’m the only one – they say it’s statistically impossible. I led the charge! We won state houses; we won Congress; we won the Senate; and I lost. They say it’s statistically impossible for that to happen.
An affidavit filed by President Trump’s legal team intended to prove voter fraud in Michigan apparently used data taken from counties in Minnesota, the latest in a series of embarrassing missteps that have made Mr. Trump’s uphill legal fight even steeper.
As part of the Trump campaign’s effort to discredit the results in battleground states, the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell have made a series of unsubstantiated and outlandish claims that Dominion Voting Systems, which sells voting software to states, electronically erased millions of Trump votes at the secret behest of liberal operatives.
To bolster that claim, they have pointed to areas that had abnormally high turnout rates compared to prior elections, most recently as part of a case filed in Georgia intended to show a nationwide pattern of fraud.
On Wednesday, L. Lin Wood, an Atlanta lawyer working with the team, filed an analysis from Russell Ramsland, a failed Republican congressional candidate and self-proclaimed election fraud expert, purporting to show suspiciously high turnout in blue areas of Michigan.
When the editors of Powerline, a conservative legal website whose contributors hail from Minnesota and other parts of the Upper Midwest, reviewed the nine-page document, they discovered a major problem: Many municipalities cited in the Michigan document — Monticello, Albertville, Lake Lillian, Houston, Brownsville, Runeberg, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, Kandiyohi — are located in an entirely different “M” state, Minnesota.
“This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn,” wrote John H. Hinderaker, a veteran litigator who believes any incidences of fraud are not on the scale Mr. Trump’s team is claiming.
Mr. Hinderaker surmised the error was the result of mixing up the abbreviations for the two states, “MI” for “MN.”
On Thursday, a federal judge in Georgia rejected Mr. Wood’s attempt to halt certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in the state. On Thursday, Mr. Giuliani said Mr. Trump’s team planned to plow on with its legal challenges in Georgia, even as it withdrew from cases in Michigan and Arizona.
Mr. Wood, Mr. Ramsland and Ms. Powell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
-- Minnesota or Michigan? Trump lawyers mix up ‘M’ states in an affidavit intended to prove vote fraud, by Joshua Rashaad McFadden for the New York Times, 1/20/20
An affidavit President Donald Trump’s legal team has hailed as proving fraud in the 2020 presidential election has a problem—the fraud it claims to show in Michigan used precinct listings that were actually in the state of Minnesota, in the latest legal gaffe involving the continually failing effort by Trump and his allies to show rampant voter fraud in the presidential election.
KEY FACTS
• The affidavit claimed to use data from the Michigan Secretary of State to show “a statistical anomaly so far outside of every statistical norm as to be virtually impossible.”
• Directly below that claim came statistics showing that the Benville Township precinct had a 350% turnout compared with the number of registered voters.
• But Benville Township is not in Michigan—it is in Minnesota, and only has an estimated population of 82 people, meaning that if even a handful of voters registered on Election Day itself, which is allowed in Minnesota, that could easily result in a much higher turnout than what was previously on the voter rolls.
• The affidavit goes on to list several other tiny townships in Minnesota, some even smaller than Benville.
• Trump’s legal team, particularly Sidney Powell, had promoted the affidavit as showing major evidence of voter fraud.
• Details of the document were first widely reported Friday by the pro-Trump Powerline Blog, which called the mix-up a “catastrophic error.”
KEY BACKGROUND
The affidavit was filed as part of a lawsuit that was neither in Minnesota nor Michigan, but in federal court in Georgia. That suit, brought by pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood, sought to discredit the state’s election results by claiming there were problems with the voting system. Like Michigan, Georgia uses the private company Dominion Voting Systems to tabulate election results—a system Trump and his supporters have continued to baselessly claim led to widespread fraud. The affidavit was filed Tuesday, and a judge threw out the case on Thursday, saying that the challenge came too late and “does not have merit.” Georgia also completed a hand recount and audit of its votes on Thursday, confirming President-elect Joe Biden won the state.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
Efforts challenging election results have been plagued by what seem to be sloppy errors. Wood’s lawsuit, for example, mentioned voting problems in Mercer County, Georgia, which does not exist. Another suit challenging vote counts in Wayne County, Michigan, was filed in a court that had no jurisdiction over the matter. Meanwhile, Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has continued to go off on rants in front of the press, making unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, and seeming to forget basic legal concepts during a Pennsylvania hearing.
-- Trump Ally Confuses Michigan And Minnesota In Affidavit Claiming Voter Fraud, by Nicholas Reimann, Forbes Staff, 11/20/20
WASHINGTON – An affidavit from President Donald Trump’s legal team that claimed to prove widespread voter fraud confused two "M" states: Michigan and Minnesota.
The affidavit was as part of a larger lawsuit actually filed in Georgia by pro-Trump and conservative attorney L. Lin Wood that sought to discredit that state's election results by pointing to alleged discrepancies and problems with Dominion Voting Systems.
Trump, his legal team, and his supporters have continued to tout unsubstantiated claims that Dominion Voting Systems has led to widespread fraud in several states.
To point out the supposed problems with Dominion Voting Systems in Georgia, the affidavit, filed as analysis from Texas resident and cybersecurity expert Russell Ramsland, was intended to show supposed errors in Michigan, as both states use Dominion Voting Systems to tabulate election results.
However, the Ramsland affidavit appeared to confuse townships in Minnesota for Michigan.
Ramsland highlighted a number of "statistical anomalies and red flags" he claimed proved "that election results have been manipulated within the Dominion/Premier system in Michigan."
He specifically highlighted several precincts in Michigan where the number of votes cast appeared to exceed the number of registered voters in the county.
Many of the municipalities cited in the Michigan (MI) document, such as Albertville, Houston, Monticello, Runeberg, Lake Lillian, Brownsville, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, and Kandiyohi, are located in Minnesota (MN).
The affidavit was filed Tuesday. A federal judge dismissed Wood's lawsuit on Thursday, which sought to halt the certification of Georgia's election, saying it came too late and lacked merit.
Georgia completed a hand recount and audit of votes on Thursday, confirming President-elect Joe Biden won the state.
The "risk-limiting audit" found Biden won Georgia by 12,284 votes, a narrower margin than the 14,196-vote lead he held immediately following the election. Local election administrators identified uncounted ballots in four counties. Each was the result of human error.
On Friday, saying "numbers don't lie," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certified those election results.
Trump’s legal team had promoted the affidavit as proof of widespread evidence of voter fraud.
Ramsland had claimed in the affidavit that "excess ballots" were allegedly processed, but it is unclear where the data listed came from.
According to actual data from the Minnesota Secretary of State, there were 4,202 registered voters in Monticello P-2, but only 3,776 votes were cast in the presidential election.
USA TODAY has reached out to Wood for comment.
This Georgia lawsuit that mixed-up Michigan and Minnesota is just one of several filed by Trump's legal team that have been dismissed.
-- Trump lawsuit confuses Michigan and Minnesota locations in affidavit claiming voter fraud, by Savannah Behrmann, USA TODAY, 11/20/20
[Maria] It’s all quite extraordinary, Mr. President. We want to thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you for your work on Operation Warp Speed. You told us you’d have a vaccine by year-end, and now we’ve got three. Thank you so much, President Donald Trump.
Steve Skrovan: Yeah, before we get to the body of that show, we're going to start off today with some commentary about the news about Pfizer and Moderna, how their highly successful COVID19 vaccine tests came in. And this seems like very positive news. But let's pause for a moment and take a closer look. What do you think, Ralph?
Ralph Nader: Well, it was a press release by the two drug companies puffing up their vaccine without releasing any data. And it pushed up Pfizer's stock a little bit and then it fell back. But the physicians at the Health Research Group [HRG] of Public Citizen criticized it on their website. You can go see it; it's pretty brief [at] citizen.org. And they criticized it, not only because there wasn't any data behind a puffing 95% assertion, but they didn't distinguish between moderate cases, serious cases, and how much actually it prevented hospitalization and fatalities. So, take that 95% with a grain of salt as just advertising puffing by two drug companies.
It's unfortunate that most of the media, Steve and David, just swallowed it whole and kept repeating it and repeating it, repeating it uncritically even though Public Citizen sent their statement out [to] everybody in the media and it didn't make much difference except it was pointed out in the Wall Street Journal and a couple other publications.
-- Ralph Nader Radio Hour EP 350 Transcript, Nov. 21, 2020
[Trump] Thank you very much, Maria. Goodbye.