More conservatives break with Trump over election claims

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A growing number of conservative Republicans are breaking with President Trump and his legal team over what they view as a dangerous effort to overturn the election results by promoting conspiracy theories.

GOP lawmakers, conservative lawyers and key figures in rightwing media say it is time for his legal team to either back up their claims about fraud or concede defeat to President-elect Joe Biden.

The voices range from Fox News’s Tucker Carlson to Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) to conservative lawyers and thought leaders such as Karl Rove. Continue reading.

After Trump meeting, Michigan GOP leaders say Biden’s win still stands

The Michigan lawmakers said they had “not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome.”

A delegation of Republican state lawmakers from Michigan came to Washington on Friday as part of President Donald Trump’s Hail Mary attempt to usurp the results of the election he lost. 

But when the day ended, the lawmakers were unequivocal: President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan was still intact.

Trump has baselessly cast doubt on the presidential election in Michigan, which he lost Biden by approximately 150,000 votes, and has waged a campaign over the past two weeks to pressure Republicans in the state to back him in reversing the outcome. And despite White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s insistence that Friday’s gathering was “not an advocacy meeting” — and that no one from the Trump campaign would be present — several attorneys running Trump’s legal effort to overturn the election were expected to call in. Continue reading.

Psychiatric expert: Trump will not hesitate to cause violence to stay in power

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Dr. Bandy X. Lee was interviewed by Patrick R. McElligott, who is a retired psychiatric social worker from upstate New York. He has decades of experience in grass roots social-political activism, including working on his late friend Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s case, serving as Onondaga Nation Chief Paul Waterman’s top assistant on burial protection and repatriation, and providing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency information on Super Fund sites for federal court cases. Dr. Lee agreed to an interview regarding current events in post-election America.

McElligott: In April, 2017, you organized the “Duty to Warn” Conference. Later, you were the editor and contributor to the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Has Donald Trump’s behaviors since losing the 2020 election reinforced your opinion on the dangers Trump poses to a civilized society?

Lee: Absolutely. We are seeing the last bout of just how much he is willing and able to destroy norms and to push the limits. It is clear he does not intend to leave without placing us in further danger, and without obstructing the president-elect’s agenda as much as possible. My regret is that, because of the “gag order” on all mental health experts, which the American Psychiatric Association forced through public campaigns since this administration, the people are still left vulnerable without having learned much. As we see from the 72 million who voted for him again, we are very likely to repeat our errors. Continue reading.

Conservative media has stayed devoted to Trump’s bogus claims of victory — but cracks are starting to show

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After four long days of uncertainty, the purveyors of mainstream media credibility — including The Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press and all the major broadcast and cable news networks including the president’s once-favorite Fox News — all declared on Nov. 7 that Joe Biden had won the presidency.

Here and there, a few votes remained to be counted. But the outcome was clear to most of the media. The election was over. And President Trump had lost.

But nearly two weeks later, as courts shut down the Trump campaign’s long-shot legal challenges and states move forward with certifications of the vote, Trump himself is not letting go. And fighting alongside him are large — if wavering— swaths of the conservative media landscape. Continue reading.

Scoop: Trump lawyers to avoid Michigan lawmaker meeting after COVID exposure

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Why it matters: This added turmoil inside the president’s legal operation comes at a time when the president is urging Republican state lawmakers to interfere with the electoral process and reverse Joe Biden’s victory to a Trump win.

  • “It’s just a shitshow, it’s a joke,” said a Trump campaign adviser.

Behind the scenes: Top Trump campaign officials held a conference call this morning with Eric Herschmann, a lawyer on the White House staff, in which they candidly discussed their legal conundrum. Continue reading.

Republicans in key Michigan county try to rescind election certification under pressure from GOP

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The two Republicans on an election board for Michigan’s Wayne County want to take back their votes to certify the election results.

The pair agreed to a last-minute compromise Tuesday night after seeking an audit for the vote count in the Detroit area, where they said the results were out of balance, but they complained later they felt threatened into backing the certification, reported the Washington Post.

“I rescind my prior vote,” wrote Monica Palmer, the board’s chairwoman, in an affidavit. “I fully believe the Wayne County vote should not be certified.” Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Spent Months Pressing Georgia’s Top Election Official For Endorsement — And He Declined

Long before Republican senators began publicly denouncing how Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handled the voting there, he withstood pressure from the campaign of Donald Trump to endorse the president for reelection.

Raffensperger, a Republican, declined an offer in January to serve as an honorary co-chair of the Trump campaign in Georgia, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica. He later rejected GOP requests to support Trump publicly, he and his staff said in interviews. Raffensperger said he believed that, because he was overseeing the election, it would be a conflict of interest for him to take sides. Around the country, most secretaries of state remain officially neutral in elections.

The attacks on his job performance are “clear retaliation,” Raffensperger said. “They thought Georgia was a layup shot Republican win. It is not the job of the secretary of state’s office to deliver a win — it is the sole responsibility of the Georgia Republican Party to get out the vote and get its voters to the polls. That is not the job of the secretary of state’s office.” Continue reading.

The Trump campaign was not denied access to Philadelphia’s ballot count

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“They didn’t even allow Republican Observers into the building to watch. A terrible insult to our Constitution!”

— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 18, 2020

Trump is in overdrive, tweeting one absurd falsehood after another to delegitimize the election he lost.

One repeated theme is that Republican observers were not allowed inside the room as election workers counted mail ballots in Philadelphia. Fraud thrives under cover of darkness, Trump warns.

But, in fact, Trump’s own lawyers have attested in court that his campaign was granted access and observed the process, both in Philadelphia and in other cities, and has found no evidence of fraud. Continue reading.

Trump’s coup might not work. But he may pave the way for the next failed candidate.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP has dropped the pretense of respecting democracy. Having lost the election, and a string of attempts to challenge vote counts, he demanded on Wednesday that state officials simply refuse to certify the results. The end game, according to Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, is to enable Republican state lawmakers in a swing state such as Michigan to award their state’s electoral college delegates to Mr. Trump despite President-elect Joe Biden’s unassailable vote margins.

The Post’s Robert Costa reports that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, is also talking up what would amount to a coup. He knows that his desultory lawsuits will not succeed, but calculates that if enough states are prevented from certifying their votes by legal deadlines, the election could be thrown into Congress, which might hand the presidency to Mr. Trump — again, against the will of the voters.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump demonstrated Tuesday that he will retaliate against those who fail to read from his corrupt script by firing Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security election security boss who publicly refuted the president’s unfounded allegations that voting systems were manipulated. Continue reading.

Trump seeks to settle scores in final days

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President Trump is settling scores and taking steps to cement his agenda in his final 60-plus days in the White House, even as he refuses to concede an electoral loss to Democrat Joe Biden and his legal team flails at the results in nearly a half-dozen states.

Trump fired the administration’s top cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs on Tuesday evening, the latest example of Trump settling a score. He expressed displeasure that Krebs issued a statement that the 2020 election had been the most secure in history, a message that undercut Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about voting machine vulnerabilities and a “rigged” election.

The removal of Krebs followed the firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and raises the prospect that Trump will remove more officials, such as CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wray, while at the same time signaling that anything regarded as disloyalty to Trump will result in punishment. Continue reading.