Tag: Trump trying to cheat his way to a second term

Trump’s options dwindle as safe harbor deadline looms

President Donald Trump’s effort to snatch a second term through a series of state and federal court challenges has been flaming out for weeks. Now, the calendar has all but extinguished it.

Dec. 8 is the so-called “safe harbor” date for the presidential election, a milestone established in federal law for states to conclude any disputes over the results. Trump’s failure to gain traction in litigation, with his lawyers and allies failing to block crucial states from declaring Joe Biden the winner, means the safe harbor deadline stands as another potentially insurmountable reason for the courts to decline to intervene.

Trump’s legal team publicly says the safe harbor deadline is meaningless and they’ll simply disregard it. Set by a 140-year-old statute, the date isn’t enshrined in the Constitution, they say. But the campaign’s legal filings tell another story, as Trump’s lawyers pressed courts for urgent action ahead of the deadline midnight on Tuesday and warned of irreparable consequences if they don’t. Continue reading.

Trump asks Pennsylvania House speaker for help overturning election results, personally intervening in a third state

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President Trump called the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives twice during the past week to make an extraordinary request for help reversing his loss in the state, reflecting a broadening pressure campaign by the president and his allies to try to subvert the 2020 election result.

The calls, confirmed by House Speaker Bryan Cutler’s office, make Pennsylvania the third state where Trump has directly attempted to overturn a result since he lost the election to former vice president Joe Biden. He previously reached out to Republicans in Michigan, and on Saturday he pressured Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in a call to try to replace that state’s electors.

The president’s outreach to Pennsylvania’s Republican House leader came after his campaign and its allies decisively lost numerous legal challenges in the state in both state and federal court. Trump has continued to press his baseless claims of widespread voting irregularities both publicly and privately. Continue reading.

Judges turn back claims by Trump and his allies in six states as the president’s legal effort founders

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President Trump and his allies faced a crush of defeats in post-election litigation Friday, a further sign of their ongoing failure to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory through the courts and to gain traction through baseless claims of widespread fraud.

Just over a month after the Nov. 3 election, the Trump campaign and other Republicans suing over Biden’s win were dealt court losses across six states where they have tried to contest the results of the presidential race — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin.

Judges ruled decisively that Trump’s side has not proved the election was fraudulent, with some offering painstaking analyses of why such claims lack merit and pointed opinions about the risks the legal claims pose to American democracy. Continue reading.

Trump allies file emergency petition at Supreme Court over 2020 election

Lawsuit seeks to throw out all mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania in 2020 election

Weeks after President Donald Trump said the Supreme Court should decide whether to throw out millions of ballots in what he dubbed a fraudulent election, and with state and federal courts rejecting nearly all his legal team’s lawsuits in multiple states, a case from Pennsylvania has limped meekly to the nation’s highest court.

The emergency petition filed Thursday is no Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case about the disputed Florida recount that determined who won the state’s electoral votes and therefore the White House. The dispute about Pennsylvania’s election results could not by itself change the outcome of the presidential race.

Instead, the appeal comes from Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly and other Trump allies, in a lawsuit they filed after the election to challenge a 2019 state law that allowed voters to cast mail-in ballots for any reason. Continue reading.

Trump’s grievances feed menacing undertow after the election

WASHINGTON — The last throes of Donald Trump’s presidency have turned ugly — even dangerous.

Death threats are on the rise. Local and state election officials are being hounded into hiding. A Trump campaign lawyer is declaring publicly that a federal official who defended the integrity of the election should be “drawn and quartered” or simply shot.

Neutral public servants, Democrats and a growing number of Republicans who won’t do what Trump wants are being caught in a menacing post-election undertow stirred by Trump’s grievances about the election he lost. Continue reading.

Trump fired me for saying this, but I’ll say it again: The election wasn’t rigged

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Christopher Krebs is the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Post columnist David Ignatius interviewed Krebs Dec. 2 about the 2020 election on Washington Post Live.

On Nov. 17, I was dismissed as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a Senate-confirmed post, in a tweet from President Trump after my team and other election security experts rebutted claims of hacking in the 2020 election. On Monday, a lawyer for the president’s campaign plainly stated that I should be executed. I am not going to be intimidated by these threats from telling the truth to the American people.

Three years ago, I left a comfortable private-sector job to join, in the spirit of public service, the Department of Homeland Security. At the time, the national security community was reeling from the fallout of the brazen Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. I wanted to help.

Across the nation’s security agencies, there was universal acknowledgment that such foreign election interference could not be allowed to happen again. The mission was clear: Defend democracy and protect U.S. elections from threats foreign and domestic. Continue reading.

Trump’s dwindling prospects to overturn the election: A guide

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President Trump lost the 2020 presidential election decisively. But as he had signaled repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 3 vote, he has refused to accept the election outcome and instead has falsely claimed that his loss to Joe Biden was the result of massive fraud in six key states. He claims, without evidence, that he actually won those states, even though the election results have now been certified in all six.

So far, in virtually every court case, judges have rejected the Trump campaign’s claims, which in effect have called for nullifying the results of the popular vote and awarding electors to Trump instead. (There’s often a wide gap between what is argued in court, where there can be penalties for false claims, and what Trump says in public.) Moreover, Attorney General William P. Barr told the Associated Press on Tuesday that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Given the scattershot legal maneuvering of the Trump campaign and its allies, here’s a quick guide to where things stand in each state. Essentially, Trump seeks to toss out hundreds of thousands of votes on highly technical grounds, even though the courts generally do not invalidate ballots if voters acted in good faith. Moreover, even if Trump found success in one state, he would need to reverse the results in at least three states if he wanted to overcome Biden’s margin in the electoral college. Continue reading.

Trump on election claims: ‘My mind will not change in six months’

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President Trump on Sunday indicated that nothing will dissuade him from his belief that he won November’s election, even as his lawsuits fall flat and he fails to produce evidence of widespread fraud in the contest President-elect Joe Biden won.

“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,” Trump told Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures” in his first television interview since Election Day.

Trump spent most of the 45-minute phone call with Bartiromo levying unproven and baseless allegations that letter carriers, Dominion Voting Systems, Republican officials and mail-in ballots were all to blame for his defeat to Biden nearly a month ago. Continue reading.

Donald Trump spent $3 million on Wisconsin recount — only for Joe Biden to gain 132 more votes

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The re-election campaign of soon-to-be-former President Donald Trump spent $3 million for a recount of votes in Wisconsin in the hopes of throwing out tens of thousands of absentee and early ballots cast in support of President-elect Joe Biden.

But Trump’s $3 million dollar gambit hasn’t paid off. In fact, it actually increased Biden’s lead over him by 132 votes. As Slate explains, Trump was specifically asking for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee Counties, two Democratic strongholds where Biden beat Trump by over 360,000 votes total.

“By the end of the recount in Milwaukee County, Biden’s total had increased by 257 votes, from 317,270 to 317,527. Trump also saw an increase in votes, boosting his total by 125 votes to 134,482,” Slate wrote, showing how Biden ended up even further ahead. The new votes were originally excluded from the county’s total due to “human error.” Continue reading.

Georgia Secretary of State’s Message to Trump After State’s Election Recount: ‘You Should Leave Quietly’

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that President Donald Trump should “leave quietly,” after Georgia certified its election results for Joe Biden last week.

In an interview published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Saturday, Raffensperger, a Republican, said he’s received threats and angry messages from the president and fellow GOP politicians who disagree with his decision to certify the election.

“My job as secretary of state is to make sure we have fair and honest elections, follow the law, follow the process,” Raffensperger said in the interview. “When you lose an election, you should leave quietly. It’s the will of the people that has been expressed,” he added. Continue reading.