NEW: Multiple Trump campaign officials tell @reuters the president's strategy for staying in power despite losing the election is to persuade state legislatures to do what their voters did not and simply declare him the winner.
President Trump called at least one Michigan election official who's now trying to take back her decision to certify votes in the state's largest county, she said. And he has summoned the leaders of the state legislature to the White House tomorrow. reuters.com/article/us-usa…
Trump's legal team nodded toward this strategy yesterday in a proposed amendment to the campaign's Pennsylvania lawsuit. They want the judge there to declare the state election "defective" and have the Republican-controlled legislature choose a winner instead.
It's not clear how this would work. Even if Trump got legislatures in MI and PA to disregard their voters and choose him -- which leaders have said they can't and won't do -- he'd still have to flip at least one other state to win. And it would create a massive political crisis.
But campaign officials tell @Reuters that's the plan.
Giuliani was asked about today and he responded by laughing.
Meanwhile, some Pennsylvania Republicans led by Rep. @MikeKellyPA are asking a state court to declare that the state's entire vote-by-mail system, violates the state constitution and that millions of votes cast this year must now be invalidated.
The lawsuit is marked as having been filed at 4 a.m.
The lawsuit is a challenge to Act 77, which it says is "another illegal attempt to override the limitations on absentee voting" in the state constitution. The act was approved more than a year ago; the lawsuit doesn't say why they waited until after this election to challenge it.
And the court says that even if Wood could bring this lawsuit (which he can't) and if he hadn't waited too long (which he did), he'd also lose on the merits.
The judge (a Trump appointee), goes out of his way to shoot down Wood's theory of an Equal Protection violation, which is very similar to the arguments Trump's campaign has made in its own lawsuit in Pennsylvania.
The judge said claims that lots of invalid ballots were counted in Georgia is "not supported by the evidence at this stage." The rejection rate for absentee ballots in Georgia in 2020 was the same as it was two years ago.
Exhibit J: Military ballots were "very clean." Many of the ballots "were for Biden. Many batches went 100% for Biden." Also, the watermark on three of the ballots didn't look right. "I believe the military ballots are highly suspicious of fraud."
[We're more than halfway there!]
Exhibit K: A witness says some workers did "fast counting" of ballots - instead of having each one verified by two people. Ballot boxes were left unattended. Some damaged ballots were "duplicated," but she wasn't allowed to ask what that meant. (It's a normal thing.)
Trump's lawyers said the other day that the press refuses to look at all the evidence the president and his allies have put forward of a massive scheme to rig the election.
I did.
Georgia edition, from the case filed by Trump ally L. Lin Wood ->
Exhibit A: A witness declares she was "not close enough to see much of anything" during Georgia's recount.
Exhibit B: A witness declares that people conducting the recount were not great at math. Also, sometimes ballots were left unattended on a table and drinks also were left on those tables.
President Trump's lawyers have filed a new motion in Pennsylvania making clear that they only want to block the state from certifying the results of the presidential election, which they claim was fraudulent. It can certify the other races, decided on the same ballots, they say.
Marks v. Stinson has become the hydroxychloroquine of the president's post-election litigation.
Interesting concession in Trump's filing: If PA certifies its electors by Dec. 8, its certification "shall be conclusive" when Congress meets to count electoral votes. (That's in the statute, but you'd think they'd want some wiggle room here.)
Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis seems to be saying the campaign has lots of evidence of "election official fraud," but they can't show it to us yet. This is just the campaign's opening statement, she says.
Giuliani says our votes are counted in German and Spain by companies affiliated with Maduro and Chavez (who died 7 years ago).
"Did you ever believe that was true?"
It isn't.
"There is nobody here who engages in fantasy," Giuliani says, after claiming some kind of conspiracy to rig the election by voting machine manufacturers, Hugo Chavez, antifa and others.