PART III – DENIAL
11/8/20: Today, the votes continue to run in Joe Biden’s favor. His lead in the popular vote stands at 4.4 million.
Biden: 75,241,849
Trump: 70,818,393
The margin in the popular vote is irrelevant; but Trump’s hopes of proving the system was rigged, and that ballot-box-stuffing Democrats screwed him over, look increasingly grim. Biden’s lead in Georgia, where Republicans control the levers of government, has risen to 10,352. Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania stands at 43,251.
The former Vice President leads the incumbent by 19,341 votes in Arizona, another state where the machinery of government is almost completely in Republican hands.
Finally, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by 31,464 votes in Nevada, a state where Team Trump insisted every vote must be counted.
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11/9/20: Someone is having a hard time coping with the election results, and that someone is not this cheery blogger. The president appears to have gone into hiding.
Also having a hard time: Former Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who called for God to smash the clay jar of Biden’s win.
And let’s not forget Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White, who promised African angels were on the way to grab the win for her hero.
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11/12/20: Members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee, including Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Assistant Director Bob Kolasky, U.S. Election Assistance Commission Chair Benjamin Hovland, National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) President Maggie Toulouse Oliver, and National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) President Lori Augino (whose job it was to safeguard the election) issue the following statement:
The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history [emphasis added throughout, unless otherwise noted]. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.
When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.
While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.
It’s worth noting that Mr. Hovland is a Trump appointee. Bob Kolasky at CISA, works for Chris Krebs, also picked for his job by Mr. Trump. The other signatories represent bipartisan groups of state election officials. This is not some mad-cap, feloniously-inclined, radical leftist crew.
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11/13/20: In Arizona, an attempt by the Trump legal team to block the counting of votes in Maricopa County, is withdrawn. As Axios explains, Kory Langhofer, a Trump campaign attorney, admits in court today, that the campaign is not alleging any kind of widespread voter fraud.
Trump’s lawyers instead “claimed that poll workers had submitted ballots with errors and did not give voters the opportunity to correct them.”
Since the number of ballots involved was less than 200, and many of those complaining likely failed to understand the vote “curing” process, the futility of pursuing the lawsuit dawned on even Trump’s lawyers.
Joe Biden leads in Arizona by more than 11,000 votes.
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11/14/20: Benjamin Hovland, Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, tells CNN that while the president has made a number of “bold claims” of voter fraud, “we’ve seen zero evidence.” There’s “nothing that we’ve seen that would cause any real doubt in the integrity of the election.”
Deep inside the White House, the president continues to insist that victory has been pried from his deserving grip.
In one tweet, he cites the claim of “Top US Pollster and Statistician Richard Baris,” who Trump also refers to as the “People’s Pundit.” Baris claims – and, of course, the president believes, “10,000 DEAD PEOPLE VOTED IN MICHIGAN. When will this RIGGED ELECTION be overturned!”
This could get embarrassing quick. As proof of such claims, the Trump campaign cites the shocking case of James Blalock, a World War II veteran, who voted in Georgia a few days ago, despite having died fourteen years before.
It required only the most minimal effort to show that Mr. Blalock had not in fact voted. His wife, Agnes, had, under her properly registered name: “Mrs. James E. Blalock, Jr.”
Team Trump also cited the case of “Linda Kesler,” a Georgia woman dead since 2003. She too had “voted” from the grave.
Once again, the ghost story proved not to be scary at all. Lynda Kesler – different address – different birthday – different zip code – and, for god’s sake, different spelling of the first name – did vote.
No rattling of chains required.
As might have been expected, however, Tucker Carlson picked up this story when it began running, and reported with horror on this travesty of dead World War II veterans and other corpses pulling voting levers with skeletal hands.
Then…um…okay….he had to admit he had been duped.
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11/16/20: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, unloads in a Washington Post interview.
With a hand recount of all votes in the state nearing completion, he said he was being pressured to find ways to exclude legal ballots. One of those pressuring him was Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Graham is not from Georgia. Graham would have no insight into how votes were cast in that state. Nor would Graham have legal standing to interfere. When reporters asked him about his call to Raffensperger, Graham played coy. Oh, no, they had a fine conversation – and if Raffensperger got the idea that Graham wanted him to find a way to make sure Trump won …well, Graham was shocked.
Raffensperger refers to himself as a Trump supporter, but tells the Post he and his wife have been receiving death threats. “You better not botch this recount,” one caller warned. “Your life depends on it.”
Meanwhile, Trump says the fix is in. Dominion Voting Systems, a Colorado-based manufacturer of Georgia’s voting machines, is, he claims, a “leftist” company with ties to Venezuela. Dominion, the president and his supporters say, left thousands of Trump votes out of the count.
Raffensperger noted Monday that several Georgia counties had already completed hand recounts and tallies exactly matched numbers reported by the machines.
As the day progressed, we learned that forty-two counties, with smaller populations had zero votes lost or gained for either candidate in the recount. Another 35 showed gains for the president of five votes or less. Peach County, for example, found six more votes for Biden, but eleven more for Trump, out of 12,422 cast.
In fact, 20 red counties, all uncovered minor counting errors in Biden’s favor: giving him a net gain of 45 votes.
Washington, a blue county, found six more votes, net, for Biden. Then you had several red counties, finding net votes for Biden: +6, +6, +7,+7, +8. Then a blue county, +10 for Biden. Calhoun, a blue county, netted Biden 16 votes. So did Coweta, a deep red county, giving Biden 9 and taking 7 from Trump. Bartow County, another red jurisdiction, took away 59 Trump votes, added seven for the challenger, and netted Biden +66 votes. The biggest gains for Biden came in four blue counties: DeKalb, where Biden picked up 560 votes out of a total of 366,509 – Cobb, where Biden lost 30 votes in the recount, but Trump lost 345 – and Dougherty and Henry counties (+117 each for Biden).
There were two major developments when it turned out some election official in Floyd County forgot to upload 2,600 votes from a memory stick in the first tally. Those votes were uncovered during the hand recount. Floyd is a red county, so Democrats were not to blame. The president managed to gain 686 votes from just that single mistake, the biggest change in any county in Georgia. A second red county uncovered a second error – again thousands of votes not uploaded. Fayette County also failed to record 2,755 votes from a memory stick that correctly tallied the votes. But even when those votes were counted, Mr. Trump had a net gain of only 26.
Then Douglas County (a blue country) found a smaller error, with votes on a memory card from one precinct not uploaded (Biden 156, Trump 128).
Walton County (red) also found a memory card with 284 votes not previously tallied. Trump netted another 86 vote gain.
The recount rolled on, with little gain for either candidate. Five blue counties, Fulton, Gwinnett, Rockdale, Clayton, and Bibb, with a total of more than 1,152,000 votes, retallied their numbers. Trump gained, respectively: 345, 285, 241, 145 and 88 votes.
Clarke, another blue county, netted the president +78 votes, Newton +26, Macon +24, Muscogee +12, Terrill +10, and a few other blue counties showed lesser gains.
Yet the following red counties made similar mistakes, all in Trump’s favor. So, in the following counties, he had votes taken away: Walton –86, Thomas –84, Ware –74, Lowndes –70, Columbia –69, Forsyth –65, Hall –46, Wayne –40, Appling –38, Screven –37, Grady –33, Glynn –25, Whitfield –23, Brantley –19, Jackson –13, Wilkinson –11, Cherokee, Paulding and Tattnell, –10 each.
So, when the smoke cleared, little had changed:
First count Recount Gain
Joseph R. Biden Jr. 2,473,383 2,475,141 +1,758
Donald J. Trump 2,459,825 2,462,857 +3,032
Margin: 13,558 12,284
Trump wasn’t happy with the recount – which Team Trump had demanded. Monday, he tweeted angrily about signature-matching in Georgia and criticized Raffensperger for his management of both the first election and the hand tally. “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state.”
11/17/20: Chris Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security continues to stand by this statement: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” during the recent election.
In fact, CISA has continued to update a website exposing what it calls election-related “rumors.”
For example, could some rigged computer software program steal all kinds of Trump votes and give them to Biden?
CISA explains:
The vast majority of votes cast in this election will be cast on paper ballots or using machines that produce a paper audit trail, which allow for tabulation audits to be conducted from the paper record in the event any issues emerge with the voting system software, audit logs, or tabulation.
How about this: An observer for Team Trump saw an official in (name a state) filling in ballots for Biden!
Some ballots cannot be read by a ballot scanner due to issues such as damage or misprinting. Some jurisdictions hand count such ballots, while others create duplicate ballots so they can be read by a ballot scanner. Some jurisdictions permit election officials to enhance markings on ballots that are too faint to scan following a process to adjudicate the voter’s intent based on state law. In jurisdictions where duplication of unscannable ballots is permitted, election officials duplicate the ballot precisely to ensure all the voter’s choices are transferred correctly to the new ballot. Both the original and duplicate ballot are labeled and logged so that the two ballots can be tracked and audited. Many jurisdictions require bipartisan teams of two or four personnel to complete this process and verify that votes are accurately transferred to duplicated ballots.
True or false: A malicious actor can easily defraud an election by printing and sending in extra mail-in ballots?
False:
“Security measures meant to weed out fake ballots include signature matching, bar codes, water marks, and even precise paper weights.”
If you would like to check out other rumors, you can go to the website, yourself.
In one of the least surprising developments since the election was held and votes were tallied, President Trump has a hissy-fit and fires Krebs for saying that the election was not rigged.
Election officials in Clark County, Nevada (one of the states the president insists he won with ease) announce that they are unable to call one race with confidence. Ross Miller, the Democratic candidate for a seat on the County Commission from District C, appears to have defeated Stavros Anthony by 10 votes – out of 153,000 cast; 139 ballots have discrepancies.
Trump tweets exultantly,
Big victory moments ago in the State of Nevada. The all Democrat County Commissioner race, on the same ballot as President, just thrown out because of large scale voter discrepancy. Clark County officials do not have confidence in their own election security. Major impact!
President Trump is too dumb to understand what a “large scale voter discrepancy” would be. Even if all 139 discrepancies are found to be votes that don’t count, or even if all of them go to Miller, that’s an error rate of .009 percent.
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11/18/20: Even many GOP lawmakers are taken aback by the president’s decision to fire Chris Krebs.
“It’s the president’s prerogative, but I think it just adds to the confusion and chaos,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells reporters. “And I’m sure I’m not the only one that would like some return to a little bit more of a – I don’t even know what’s normal anymore.”
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11/19/20: Thursday shall go down in history as the day Rudy Giuliani melted on live TV. Years from now political scientists will study what has to be one of the weirdest press conferences ever held by a team representing the President of the United States.
Rudy first showed up at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, apparently believing he was going to talk about election fraud at the four-star hotel. It turned out to be a classic f**k up, with Rudy talking from a podium in front of a garage door at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company, in a poor section of town. On one side you had a crematorium. On the other was a sex shop. Keen-eyed reporters noted the shop was running a special called “DILDO MADNESS.”
(And that’s not “Fake News.”)
*
IT ONLY GOT WORSE once a second press conference, in a more impressive setting, began. This time, Giuliani was accompanied by two other lawyers, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis. Both spoke at length. Ellis referred to efforts to prove massive voter fraud as the work of an “elite strike force.” (See: 11/22/20.)
Rudy said he was mad about voter fraud in multiple states – that is any state that failed to vote for Donald Trump.
“It’s not a singular voter fraud in one state,” Giuliani warned, this time speaking from the Republican National Committee headquarters. He was adamant – that he and his team had proof – and Trump had been robbed:
This pattern repeats itself in a number of states, almost exactly the same pattern, which any experienced investigator prosecutor, which suggests that there was a plan – from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud, specifically focused on big cities, and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats, and particularly if they focused on big cities that have a long history of corruption.
I know crimes, I can smell them. You don’t have to smell this one, I can prove it to you, 18 different ways. I can prove to you that he won, Pennsylvania, by 300,000 votes. I can prove to you that he won Michigan, probably 50,000 votes.
To be honest, it was hard not to be distracted, while “America’s Mayor” talked. Someone must have turned the thermostat up to 95°. Sweat poured down Rudy’s cheeks. A recent hair dye job proved problematic. Beads of sweat turned to brown streaks, and he had to keep mopping his brow.
Sidney Powell didn’t bring the melting hair dye. What she did bring was the supreme confidence of a person who would believe anything she heard and then want you to believe it too.
Here’s how Powell described the main plot against President Trump. There had been,
…massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems…were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he didn’t want it to come out.
She went on to claim,
We have one very strong witness, who has explained how it all works. His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood [a prominent attorney] and the lawsuit he filed in Georgia. It is a stunning, detailed affidavit, because he [the witness] was with Hugo Chavez, while he was being briefed on how it worked, with Hugo Chavez when he saw it operate, to make sure the election came out his way, that was the express purpose for creating the software, he has seen this operate, and as soon as he saw the multiple states shut down the voting at the…on the night of the election…he knew the same thing was happening here, that that was what had gone on.
Ms. Powell was just getting warmed up. She would go on radio the next day to insist that Biden had received ten million bogus votes. Seven million of those were switched from Trump’s column to the Vice President’s tally, all through the shenanigans of Dominion Voting Machines.
For good measure, she insisted that several million dead people had voted, apparently, all for Joe Biden.
Powell went on to say, in her radio interview, that the Trump campaign had plans to file a whole bunch of winning court challenges. That despite the fact, that as of Thursday, the Day Rudy Melted, Team Trump had already filed 30 challenges to the vote, and won (temporarily) one.
Powell had plenty to say, all of it cuckoo. At the press conference with Rudy and Jenna, she went on to claim that both Democratic and Republican politicians had paid bribes to the Dominion folks to get results they desired.
It was mesmerizing to watch Powell speak, a woman brimming with righteous indignation, possessed with a head apparently filled like a coconut. At one point, she insisted, “this is the 1775 of our generation and beyond,” which sounded like a threat involving muskets and Minutemen if Trump didn’t win.
(See: January 6, 2021, attack on Congress.)
While Powell talked, Ms. Ellis stood behind, a smirk on her face, not noticing or not caring that her colleague was talking civil war. Still, anything was better than watching another human being melt, live, on camera.
Finally, Ellis got up and ranted about “Fake News” and how almost no one was broadcasting their press conference live.
“This is what you can expect to see when we get to court, to actually have a full trial on the merits, to actually show this evidence in court, and prove our case,” she fumed. “This is not a Law & Order episode where everything is wrapped up neatly in sixty minutes.”
Clearly, she grumbled, most of the reporters in the room had never been court reporters. They didn’t realize what a great case the “elite strike force” was presenting right then and there. “This is basically an opening statement so the American people can understand what the networks have been hiding and what they refuse to cover because all of your fake-news headlines are dancing around the merits of this case and are trying to delegitimize what we are doing here.”
*
I, FOR ONE, found it impossible to look away. In the end, it was bad enough that the case for massive voter fraud in the November 2020 election, rested on the work of Hugo Chavez, dead since March 2013.
So, let’s give Christopher Krebs, until earlier this week, the head of U.S. cybersecurity tasked with protecting our elections, the last word.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest,” he tweeted. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.”
Remember: Krebs was a Trump appointee.
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11/20/20: All day, Friday, votes trickle in from the election. Biden’s lead continues to grow, passing six million:
Biden: 79,816,557
Trump: 73,781,603
Having insisted that Dominion Voting Machines used in Georgia and other states had been manipulated to cheat him out of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of votes, we now had our first statewide “proof” of that shocking claim.
The hand recount in Georgia showed no significant change from the original electronic tallies. (See: 11/16/20.)
Mr. Trump spent his time, leading up to the recount, alternately complaining that the recount would be a “scam” and then expressing confidence that Georgia would “flip Republican” when all the votes were recounted. At one point, Trump called upon the governor of Georgia to help a brother out. “Get it done! @BrianKempGA,” the president tweeted.
Alas, there was nothing “@BrianKempGA” could do to “get it done” and alter plain math. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that the recount again showed Biden had won.
In the face of clear evidence to the contrary, One America News Network’s Lilia Fifield reverted to retelling the big lie, but dressed in new clothes. “Election systems across the country are found to have deleted millions of votes cast for President Trump,” she wailed. “According to an unaudited analysis of data obtained from Edison Research, states using Dominion Voting Systems may have switched as many as 435,000 votes from President Trump to Joe Biden.”
The full Georgia recount showed that the president had been “cheated” out of less than 1,300 net votes, more than half of that net from a red county where election officials blundered and failed to download a memory card.
No matter. Fifield continued to insist that the “the author [of the Edison Research] also finds another 2.7 million Trump votes appear to have been deleted by Dominion including almost one million truckloads in Pennsylvania alone.”
That votes “appear to have been deleted,” isn’t evidence, and the claim of “one million truckloads” was bizarre. How many votes were there per “truckload,” one would want to know.
Let’s just make up a number, multiply it out, and run with it, like Trump and his lunatic crew. I’ll say “1,000.” Clearly, a truckload of votes could be 1,000. So, I am ready to “report” that 1,000,000,000 votes were stolen “in Pennsylvania alone.” I realize this is an impossible number, but the President of the United States has been making equally absurd assertions because the President of the United States is a fool.
Nor was the news from Georgia the only blow Team Trump suffered Friday. The president also summoned leaders of the Michigan legislature to the White House. He suggested they ignore the will of the people, declare him the winner despite Biden’s 150,000-vote lead, and send a slate of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College to gift him Michigan’s electoral votes. The Michigan Senate and House leaders, both Republicans, listened to Mr. Trump, but came away unmoved.
“We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders,” they told the free press, “we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”
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11/21/20: Various “Fake News” organizations spend time compiling examples of growing concern in Republican circles.
This is sometimes known as, “reporters going out to find quotes.”
Various Republican members of Congress go on record. When asked about Trump’s efforts to overturn election results, Rep. Kay Granger, a veteran Texas lawmaker, tells CNN she has “great concerns about it,” adding, “I think that it’s time to move on.”
When asked if Trump should concede, Fred Upton, a senior Michigan Republican who was targeted by Democrats but won reelection by 16 points, said, “Yeah. I think it’s all said and done.”
What about voter fraud in his home state? “No one has seen any real identification of any real fraud,” Upton said.
Referencing the president’s ploys to convince Michigan election officials to do his bidding, and just give him the state’s electoral votes, Sen. Mitt Romney is brutally honest:
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 image a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.
Stephen Saltzburg, who served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, and now serves as a professor at the George Washington University School of Law, told ABC that what was happening was a scandal. “If any other president were to have ever attempted what this president has been doing, people would begin to look at conspiracy to violate election laws.”
Reporters for The Hill applied a little shoe leather and tracked down a number of concerned Republicans.
“This is delusional,” Mark Braden, the former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee admitted. “I’m a professional Republican so it’s not easy for me to have to deal with my friends on this. Look – voter fraud occurs. I’ve seen it. It happens. But you have to be realistic about the size and scope of it.”
Republican lawyers told reporters that Trump’s “early legal challenges on voter fraud were defensible and reasonable, even if they had no chance of changing the outcome of the election.” Now, they admit to being “disturbed by the dark turn things have taken,” and worry that Trump’s claims were “undermining democracy and misleading millions of his own supporters [emphasis added].”
Braden, for one, had no use for the bizarre argument put forward earlier this week, by Rudy Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s legal team. “The Venezuelans didn’t screw around with the voting machines,” he grimaced. “That’s 100 percent total nonsense.”
I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s very dangerous that we’re undermining the system. Democracy isn’t a God-given right. It’s a fragile process. The two most important things are that the person with the most lawful votes wins, and that the people who voted for the losing side also believe their candidate lost. This is undermining that idea and it’s a dangerous thing.
Jonathan Turley, the constitutional scholar who defended the president during impeachment hearings in the House, may regret what he said at the time. That is, he did not think Trump’s conduct involving his pressure on Ukraine merited removal from office. “They’re claiming to have evidence,” he said of the president’s legal team now, “but that evidence has not been filed. They’ve filed a large number of affidavits stating voting irregularities, but they haven’t filed anything to support these sweeping claims about an international conspiracy. That’s what’s breathtaking.”
Since this blogger is not suffering from any mental illness (he hopes), he is having trouble getting past some of the dangerous claims that the Trump campaign and Trump pals and Trump himself have made. One favorite is a story that the U.S. Army had raided the office of a Spanish election software company, Scytl, in Frankfurt, Germany. There they supposedly seized several computer servers that had evidence of voting irregularities in the recent U.S. election.
First, that story took a major hit when the U.S. Army denied having raided any offices of any company in Frankfurt. When asked by the Associated Press about the purported raid, and the Army’s “seizure” of mythical servers, an Army spokesperson replied tersely, “Those allegations are false.”
Second, Scytl announced that it did not have any offices or servers in the city, although it did do work there in 2019 for the European Parliament.
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11/22/20: Today, the president’s “elite strike force” of lawyers shrinks by one. Sidney Powell gets the bounce (see: 11/19/20). On Thursday, she, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis held forth in a press conference for 1 hour and 45 minutes, a batsh*t performance, with three legs to the stool. Rudy, the first leg, literally melted on camera, as hair dye-colored sweat trickled down his face. Ellis, the second, railed at reporters and howled at networks that refused to carry the bizarre performance live. Powell, the third leg, topped it off, insisting that the ghost of Hugo Chavez, the deceased Venezuelan dictator, had managed to employ software to steal votes in multiple states without anyone (except people like Powell) catching on.
It didn’t help when she insisted – after the Georgia hand recount went against Trump, too – that she realized Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of the state, was also in on the Hugo fix.
On Saturday, she told reporters for right-wing Newsmax that an election lawsuit she had filed in Georgia would “be biblical.” She added optimistically, “Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m gonna blow up.”
She promised to “unleash the Kraken.”
Powell’s claims were so nutty, that even the other pistachios realized she was making them look like nuts by association.
Sunday the almonds released a statement: “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and Ellis insisted. That was interesting, since during Thursday’s press conference, Giuliani identified Ms. Powell as a member of the team and the president identified her as someone working for him in a November 14 tweet.
I look forward to Mayor Giuliani spearheading the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS! Rudy Giuliani, Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, a truly great team, added to our other wonderful lawyers and representatives!
Yes, a “truly great team.” Powell not included.
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11/23/20: Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results in several battleground states continue to falter, as courts slap away one lawsuit after another.
On the court front, Reuters notes, a suit filed by The Election Integrity Project, an organization led by a right-wing activist, was tossed by Clark County District Judge Gloria Sturman. The suit alleged to have identified roughly 1,400 people who had registered to vote in Nevada, moved to California, and then still voted in Nevada. Sturman explained that there was “an administrative remedy” for dealing with electoral fraud, but balked at “the civil remedy of throwing out an election,” which she described as “a shocking ask.”
Possible explanations for the number “1,400.” First, a person who moves out of a state within 30 days of an election may vote either in the state where they lived, or in the state where they reside. Second, military personnel, stationed at bases like Camp Pendleton, in California, but whose permanent homes are in Nevada, might send in a vote from a California address. Same for their spouses.
Completely legal, of course.
This was at least the third defeat for Team Trump in Nevada, including one rejection of a request to stop counting mail-in ballots by the Nevada Supreme Court.
Thursday, the federal courts give the president another black eye. This time, a case in Georgia had been filed by a prominent private attorney, Lin Wood, calling on the court to block certification of the state’s electoral votes for Joe Biden now that the hand recount was complete.
It fell to U.S. District Court Judge Steven Grimberg, after a three-hour virtual hearing, to blast a Trump legal case to bits.
Grimberg, a Trump appointee to the federal bench, first ruled that Wood lacked legal standing as an individual to mount a challenge to Georgia’s election procedures. But Grimberg didn’t stop there, noting that “evidence of improprieties,” as presented by Mr. Wood, “seemed limited to isolated cases and far short of what would be needed to justify a federal judge stepping in to alter the state’s election results.”
“It would require halting the certification of results in a state election in which millions of people have voted,” the judge continued. “It would interfere with an election after the voting was done.”
“It harms the public interest in countless ways, particularly in the environment in which this election occurred,” Judge Grimberg said. “To halt the certification at literally the eleventh hour would breed confusion and potentially disenfranchisement that I find has no basis in fact or in law.”
The Trump campaign did score a temporary win in Pennsylvania, Thursday evening. This time a state appeals court ruled, 2-1, in favor of a bid to disqualify 2,349 mail-in ballots in the Pittsburgh area because they lacked a date next to the voter’s signature. That ruling was expected to be appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If upheld, it could lower Biden’s vote total, but since the challenger had an 81,000 vote lead, the math still seemed daunting.
The joy felt by the president and his legal team was short-lived. In a separate case, Team Trump had argued that election returns for the entire state should be voided. U.S. Middle District Judge Matthew Brann ruled that the campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” that were “unsupported by evidence.”
Judge Brann continued in his opinion: “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.” If that wasn’t clear enough, he continued, “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. That has not happened.”
Rudy Giuliani, who handled the case insisted he was happy with results. Now the case would move rapidly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Still, Rudy was miffed after Brann described the legal case put forward as a “Frankenstein monster” badly stitched together. Rudy pointed out that Brann was an “Obama judge,” hinting that he was not to be trusted.
It took only a little digging to learn that Brann, previous to his elevation to the bench, was a Republican official in Pennsylvania for many years and remains a registered Republican to this day.
Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland said the president’s refusal to concede was harming the country. “We were the most respected country in respect to elections,” he noted. “And now we’re beginning to look like we’re a banana republic.” It was time, he said, for the president to “stop golfing and concede.”
Chris Christie pointed out that he had voted for Trump twice, but described the conduct of the president’s legal team as “a national embarrassment.” He was not the only observer to note a strange anomaly in almost every court proceeding to that point. Trump’s lawyers “allege fraud outside the courtroom, but when they go inside the courtroom, they don’t plead fraud and they don’t argue fraud,” he said. Christie, a former federal prosecutor, noted that you can’t go into court and lie to a judge.
He went on to add that “elections have consequences, and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen. You have an obligation to present the evidence. The evidence has not been presented.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander added his voice to the swelling chorus, telling reporters that he was hopeful that the president would finally admit he lost. “Since it seems apparent that Joe Biden will be the president-elect, my hope is that President Trump will take pride in his accomplishments, put the country first and have a prompt and orderly transition to help the new administration succeed.”
Finally, let’s wrap it up with a statement signed by more than 100 leading Republican national security experts.
They write:
We are former senior national security officials who served in Republican administrations under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and/or Donald Trump or as Republican Members of Congress. We believe that President Trump’s refusal to concede the election and allow for an orderly transition constitutes a serious threat to America’s democratic process and to our national security. We therefore call on Republican leaders – especially those in Congress – to publicly demand that President Trump cease his anti-democratic assault on the integrity of the presidential election.
…While the President is legally entitled to request recounts and file good-faith legal challenges, he has presented no evidence of widespread fraud or any other significant irregularities. Nearly every case filed by the President’s team across multiple states has been summarily dismissed. President Trump’s continued efforts to cast doubt on the validity of the election and to interfere in state electoral processes undermine our democracy and risk long-term damage to our institutions.
Although some Republican leaders have supported President Trump’s right to challenge aspects of the voting in various states, for the good of the country, they should now strongly oppose his dangerous and extra-legal efforts to intimidate state election officials [emphasis added] and distort the Electoral College process.
The signers included Tom Ridge, who served as homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush, former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden and John D. Negroponte, the first Director of National Intelligence, also under George W. Bush.
___
11/24/20: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania certifies its election results and Governor Tom Wolf signs off on its 20 electoral votes – going not to Trump, but Biden.
That certification came after a federal judge batted aside a Trump challenge to the vote. (The challenge revolved around the claim that in some counties voters were allowed to fix errors
on their mail-in ballots. In other counties that offer was not extended.)
Trump’s lawyer in Wisconsin, Jim Troupis, is fighting to have tens of thousands of ballots throw out, including absentee ballots which were voted in person. His legal case is not helped when he admits he and his wife voted by absentee ballot.
In person.
___
11/25/20: In a strange twist of political fate, Republicans in Georgia are suddenly calling on voters to cast supposedly fraud-prone mail-in ballots in the U.S. Senate runoff elections in January.
Since the election, The New York Times notes, the president has rarely appeared in public and has not taken a single question from any member of the free press. He has, however, fired off 550 tweets, including more than 400 which attack the legitimacy of the election. Trump was up late last night, railing against the Fates, on into Wednesday morning, insisting that he was the rightful winner.
___
11/26/20: President Trump calls American troops around the world to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving. Finally, he takes questions from reporters. It’s the first time since the election he has dared.
The first question (and every other one that followed) seemed to touch a raw nerve. A member of the press asked Trump, do you have “any big plans for your last Thanksgiving in the White House?”
This sparked one of the greatest diatribes in the history of the Presidency of the United States.
He began:
No one listening really has any idea what “numbers” the president is talking about or who is finding these “tremendous discrepancies” or where.
(You can go back and read previous entries, because judges don’t agree with Trump.)
He continues:
He continues venting. “We are looking at things that are so bad in Georgia,” he says. “Because, uh, we will find thousands and thousands – A very close race, it’s hair thin.” He insists, if people keep looking, they “will find tens of thousands of false ballots, fro – forged ballots.”
In point of fact, the recount in Georgia did not find “thousands of votes that were off.” When the hand recount was complete, Joe Biden’s lead in the state shrank from 13,558 to 12,284. The two biggest blunders of the entire Georgia election occurred in red counties, where Republicans controlled the count. In one red county alone, failure to upload votes from a memory card cost Trump 686 votes, which the recount caught.
No fraud was involved. No Democrats were involved in a plot. A Republican election official got fired, instead.
Yet, Trump saw crookery in every nook and cranny, and all over the place – although, oddly enough, never in any of the red states that went his way. Only in blue states. And red states that slipped from his orange grasp.
Trump cites one woman and multiplies her out to “tens of thousands of times.” If a person showed up to vote under such circumstances, they could cast a provisional vote; and the records could later be checked.
He rambled on:
You could do a little work if you wanted to get close to the truth – but Trump has no interest in getting close to the truth. Being the dedicated blogger I am, I did that work. In 2016, Baraga County, in the Upper Peninsula, went for Trump over Clinton, 61.3% to 32.9%. Four years later, the same county went for Trump again: 62.2% to 36.6% for Joe Biden. Part of the Democratic gain could be attributed to the absence of the kind of third party candidates that cost Clinton so many votes four years ago. Marquette County, the only county in the Upper Peninsula to go blue in 2016, was the only county to go blue in 2020, too. In 2016, Clinton garnered 16,042 votes in Marquette County, and Trump scored 14,646. There was no “fix” four years later, no massive “fraud.” Trump had 16,236 votes in Marquette in 2020; but Biden had 20,465.
You could figure this out for yourself. Trump could figure it out too, assuming he wasn’t intellectually stunted. Cheboygan, in the Lower Peninsula, gave Trump 10,186 votes in 2020. Biden had 5,437. Trump had only 8,683 votes in Cheboygan four years before. Clinton had 4,302. Turnout across the state was much greater in the 2020 election and turnout turned out to be key.
Not fraud.
One of the few Michigan counties to change color in 2020, Leelanau, went blue for Biden. The Democratic challenger piled up 8,795 votes (51.9%), to 7,916 (46.7%) for Trump. Third party votes were a non-factor, with three candidates sharing 209. In 2016, Trump defeated Clinton there, 7,239 to 6,724. Gary Johnson siphoned off another 510 votes. Again, turnout was up for both sides. I checked Ogemaw County, picking at random. Trump improved there over 2016 by 1,400 votes. Biden did better than Hillary, but gained only 500. Lake County was the same. The Democratic challenger in 2020 outperformed Mrs. Clinton by 300 votes; Trump picked up 800. In Alcona County, Trump did 600 votes better in his second run.
The pattern was clear. Higher turnout in every county I checked, in red counties, big gains for the President of the United States. If some mysterious machine was cheating Trump out of votes, it wasn’t doing a very good job.
Only two other counties changed color in 2020: Saginaw and Kent. Joe Biden squeezed past Trump in Saginaw, 51,088 to 50,785. In Kent, Biden piled up 187,915 votes, where Trump had only 165,741. The numbers in Saginaw were not much different than four years before, only the narrow margin of victory flipped. In Kent, Trump improved his showing by 17,000 votes, but his share, percentagewise, slipped. Fraud wasn’t involved. Biden outperformed Clinton by nearly 40,000 votes because, as Michigan reporters noted, Kent County demographics were changing every year. In 2000, the county went for George W. Bush, giving him 59% of the vote. In 2008, Obama won Kent by a handful of votes, with 49%. In 2016 Trump carried the county, but with only 47.7% of the vote. This time, his share slid to 45.9%, and heavy turnout gave Biden a fat win. Demographics explained the difference, not dead people voting from the grave.
The other blue counties showed similar gains in turnout, as did the red counties next door. Genesee went for Biden by more than 20,000. Clinton won by 18,000. One county east, Lapeer went for Trump by 19,000 in 2020, vs. 17,000 four years before. Oakland County, a Democratic bastion, went for Clinton by 54,000 votes in 2016, with Trump getting 43.2% of the vote. His percentage dipped to 42.2% this time around, certainly nothing unusual from election to election. Biden outperformed Clinton by 5% and rolled up a lead of 108,000.
Simply put, no wasted Green Party votes.
Wayne County – the focus of Trump’s entire attack on the Michigan results – shifted only slightly. Clinton earned 66.4% of the vote in 2016; Biden improved the Democratic share to 68.3%. Trump improved, too, from 29.3% to 30.3%. But in a county with 872,000 votes to be counted, a shift of one percent and higher turnout meant a huge lead for Joe Biden. Clinton won Wayne County four years earlier by 290,000 votes. Biden won Wayne by 333,000.
Again, you could look all this up. Trump could himself. The evidence of massive fraud just wasn’t there.
Trump continued to grumble. “Wisconsin they’re finding tremendous discrepancy,” he insisted. Yet, where the counting was going on, in Milwaukee County, Biden added 132 votes to his lead.
At 5:30 p.m. on Friday the Milwaukee County Board of Commissioners adjourned, noting that the recount demonstrated elections in the county were “fair, transparent, accurate and secure.”
Dane County, where the Trump campaign also asked for a recount, was livestreaming the process and officials expected to be done by Sunday.
Let’s just say, it wasn’t looking good for Trump and his fans.
Trump continued to spew nonsense, noting that he got more votes than Ronald Reagan when he won 49 states. So how was it possible he didn’t win 49 states?
The president started complaining about Georgia again. He whined about Dominion and their voting machines. “People say the votes are counted in foreign countries and much worse than that, by the way, with Dominion.”
“People say.”
Not exactly the kind of evidence you expect to hold up in court. (See, for example: 11/27/20.)
The Georgia recount said he lost by 12,000 plus. So how did he know that he won? “Everybody knows it,” the president said. “You go down the streets, there are Trump/Pence signs all over the place.”
In other words, don’t count the votes. Count yard signs.
 |
The blogger sees a yard sign he likes. |
A reporter wondered if, on December 14, the Electoral College declared Biden the winner, would Trump concede?
“It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede because we know there was massive fraud,” he replied.
“But will you?” the reporter tried again.
A reporter asked again, would he concede if the Electoral College selected Joe Biden?
“If they do, they made a mistake, because this election was a fraud.”
“But will you?” another reporter shouted.
“No, I can’t say that at all,” Trump said.
He insisted he was going to win Wisconsin too. Yes, the vote right now was close. “But when you look at the massive discrepancy that we’ll be revealing, that’s already been revealed, everybody knows it, they just don’t want to play. Between big tech and the fake news media, you just put out, like, this little railroad train.”
To be honest, listening to this diatribe, myself, I have no idea what “little railroad train” he means.
He can’t see any way he’s going to lose.
“We have tens of thousands votes more than we need in all cases, okay?” he says. “In all cases. So, I think you’re gonna see something. I mean, I think it’s gonna be a very big story….It’s gonna be not only a big story, it’s the most important story of our time.”
After 45 minutes, Trump has vented enough. He exits the room, leaving a stunned press corps behind.
___
11/27/20: On Friday, we had Trump at his absolute worst, just short steps removed from unhinged, vengeful dictator. First, he tweeted out a new benchmark low for making way for Biden. “Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he’s got a big unsolvable problem!”
So: F**k the vote. Trump would decide who sat in the White House after January 20. And, um … it would be him.
Later, he referred to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, a man already facing death threats, as was his wife, as “really, really an enemy of the people.” That put the President of the United States firmly in “Vladimir Putin territory,” if only he could get his way. You know. Maybe throw a few “enemies of the people” off balconies or serve them radioactive tea.
By day’s end, however, it was clear that the man with the real problem was Lame Duck Don, himself.
In Pennsylvania another legal challenge to the results of the state’s election was blown out of court.
The Trump campaign’s continuing effort to prove “massive fraud” landed in the U.S. Third District Court. Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee to the bench, with the concurrence of two other Republican-appointed judges, made short (relatively) work of the case. The three judges considered the evidence presented. “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Bibas wrote and tossed the hot mess out. “Charges of unfairness are serious,” he said in his ruling Friday. “But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
“Voters, not lawyers, choose the President,” Bibas wrote. “Ballots, not briefs, decide elections.”
Still, Jenna Ellis, one of the few lawyers remaining still willing to continue the legal charade, responded to defeat, insisting, “The activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania continues to cover up the allegations of massive fraud.”
Three Republican judges. One appointed by Trump.
FUN FACT: The autopsy into President Trump’s defeat finds hardening of the arteries in his head.
With youth turnout surging in the recent election, he did worse in almost every state with voters in the 18 to 29 age group. In Pennsylvania, Mr. Biden had a 20-point margin with the youngest voters (vs. a 9-point lead for Hillary Clinton.) Biden beat Trump by 16 points in Wisconsin, whereas Clinton barely led. Nationally, Biden won 61% of the vote from this group, vs. 37% for Trump.
In four of the key battleground states, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, younger voters gave Biden a margin of over 100,000. In Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, that alone, was enough for the win.
___
11/28/20: President Trump plans to spend Saturday in seclusion at Camp David. He has no public events scheduled.
In the wee hours of the morning, however, the soon-to-be-ex-president did fire off the first of several angry tweets. At 12:09 a.m. we had this: “The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know. The Pennsylvania votes were RIGGED. All other swing states also. The world is watching!”
Legions of the dead continued to march through Trump’s nightmares, voting for Joe Biden by mail, every time. (See: 11/27/20.)
Suddenly, it hits him. President Trump feels the need to run off and play golf, and he leaves the seclusion of Camp David behind. If he enjoys the morning outing, his afternoon darkens quickly.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court throws out his legal team’s lawsuit asking for 2.5 million mail-in ballots to be disqualified.
The ruling is unanimous, ending the case with “prejudice,” meaning Team Trump may not rework a few details and resubmit. The Court cites a lack of “due diligence,” noting that the law creating no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania passed in October 2019. The lawsuit was filed a year late, too late for the judges to overturn an entire election.
In a concurring opinion, Justice David N. Wecht noted that petitioners “failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted.”
Note: No fraud alleged.
It’s just not that hard to figure this out. When Pennsylvania lawmakers passed the new voting law thirteen months ago, Republican leaders in both the House and Senate were clear. “This bill was not written to benefit one party or the other, or any one candidate or single election,” said House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler. “It was developed over a multi-year period with input of people from different backgrounds and regions of Pennsylvania. It serves to preserve the integrity of every election and lift the voice of every voter in the commonwealth.”
Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman agreed. “The people of Pennsylvania have sent divided government to Harrisburg and, with that, this is what governing looks like,” he said. “We are thankful for the governor’s willingness [Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf] to work with us to enact the most historic change in how we cast votes since the election code was enacted in 1937.”
Corman went on to tout the law: “Compromise has given Pennsylvanians a modernized election code that preserves the integrity of the ballot box and makes it easier for voters to choose the people who represent them.”
___
11/29/20: A two-county recount demanded by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin is ended. At a cost of $3 million, the recount in heavily Democratic Milwaukee and Dane counties proved that if there was massive voter fraud, and machines magically cheated the president out of millions of votes, it didn’t happen in Milwaukee and Dane.
Joe Biden gains votes.
President Trump places a call to Maria Bartiromo of Fox News for his first interview since his bitter defeat. (There are so many lies and ridiculous claims during this call that we’ll just count them up at the end.)
Trump says the election was stolen, and “the whole world is watching, and nobody can believe what they’re seeing. And you have leaders of countries that call me say, that’s the most messed-up election we have ever seen.
Trump doesn’t mention any of the leaders by name. I am thinking: Maybe Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?
Next, the president complains about the “Dominion machines,” which he says cheated him out of millions of votes.
Trump: We have affidavits on – from many people talking about what went on with machines….we had glitches where they moved thousands of votes from my account to Biden’s account. And these are glitches. So, they’re not glitches. They’re theft. They’re fraud, absolute fraud. And there were many of them, but, obviously, most of them tremendous amounts, got by without us catching. We got lucky to catch them. I think we caught four or five glitches of about 5,000 votes each, and different states.
Blogger: You didn’t catch most of the glitches? But still, you know they happened? Why not be precise and specify the local jurisdictions where the four or five 5,000-vote “glitches” occurred? Because then people could look up the facts for themselves.
Trump is on a roll and Bartiromo decides her job is to stay out of his way:
Trump: That was fraud. And they got caught. But, for the most part, they got away with it. And what happened, if you watched the election, I was called by the biggest people, saying, congratulations, political people. Congratulations, sir. You just won the election. It was 10:00 [p.m. on Election Night]. And you looked at the numbers.
Blogger: At 10:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, polls in many Western states would just be closing. North Carolina, one of two battleground states Trump would win in the end, would not sort out its final count for a week.
By midnight, Eastern Standard Time, Biden would have already built decent leads in Arizona and Nevada at a time most people had headed for bed.
Trump rambled on about “dumps, big massive dumps” of votes, in “Michigan, Pennsylvania, and all over.” These dumps went against him in almost every battleground state. He complained about the Dominion machines again. He insisted one of the “great pollsters” said he would win Pennsylvania, but you had to allow “at least five percent for cheating, because they cheat.”
Blogger: A reasonable observer might remember that President-Elect Trump did not complain about “cheating” in Pennsylvania in 2016, when he won the state by a little more than 44,000 votes.
We also know on Saturday (see: 11/28/20) that the Trump campaign’s lawsuit in the state was pitched by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in part because no voter fraud was alleged.
Trump’s just making s*** up.
Bartiromo: Right.
Blogger: That’s her journalistic contribution. One word. She doesn’t ask questions. She lets the president rant.
Trump: The mail-in ballots were – are a disaster. They sent millions and millions and millions of mail-in ballots.
I’m sure you know people that got two, three, or four, because I do, where they said, you know, we got four ballots. They got one at a country home. Dead people were seeing ballots. Even worse, dead people were applying to get a ballot. They were making application to get ballots, many.
Blogger: Here in Ohio (a state Trump won handily) my wife and I did receive multiple ballots each. My daughter Sarah, who moved to Washington D.C. in 2008, and to Oregon this year, received one. (She notified the local election board years ago that she was no longer an Ohio resident.)
My wife and I each sent in one. We signed our names, one safety feature, to protect the integrity of the vote. We included one or the other: last four digits of our Social Security numbers, or our driver’s license numbers.
The state would count our ballots and add us to the computer. A second ballot in either of our names would set off alarms.
Mail-in balloting made safe.
Trump talked next about tens of thousands of dead people voting. Fourteen thousand corpses supposedly shuffled to the Michigan polls, according to one right-wing news story going the rounds. Some, Trump agreed, had been moldering in their graves “ten, fifteen years.”
Blogger: There was only one problem. CNN did what any news organization could have done. They examined this claim, amplified by several stalwart Trump supporters, including Newt Gingrich. And if you can’t trust Newt, a man who cheated on his first wife, then discussed divorce with her while she was hospitalized and recovering from cancer, and then cheated on his second wife to be with his third, if you can’t trust Newt, defending another man, who cheated on all three of his wives, who can you trust?
So, CNN did what Bartiromo could have done. They checked the list of “Dead Men Walking” to the polls. They checked the first 25. Then they checked 25 at random.
Thirty-seven of the alleged dead voters were in fact dead. Sadly, none had arisen, Christ-like from the grave, to vote.
Five of the fifty had voted – those dead rats – except that CNN found those five were very much alive.
That left eight others, all of them still walking the earth. None of those eight bothered to vote.
When CNN checked back again, they discovered that the list of 14,000 had been “removed from the site hosting it.”
But the zombie story of voter fraud refused to die. Trump, for one, still believed it, much like a five-year-old who still believed Santa Claus brought all the toys for good girls and boys in a sled.
The president soon dropped another bombshell, although, like all the others, this one was a dud.
Trump: And how the FBI and Department of Justice – I don’t know. Maybe they are involved. But how people are allowed to get away from this stuff – with this stuff is unbelievable. This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud. And it continues to be, as they hide. And the problem we have, we go to judges, and people don’t want to get involved.
Blogger: So now the F.B.I. (led by a Trump appointee) and the Department of Justice (led by a Trump toady) were involved in a plot to steal the election? That alone should strain anyone’s credulity. And the judges do get involved.
They keep throwing Trump’s trash out of court.
Trump: I mean, you’re doing something. You’re actually very brave, because you’re doing something.” He talks about how only the New York Post went after the story of Hunter Biden. No one else in the media would.
Bartiromo: Yes.
Blogger: Hunter Biden is totally irrelevant, unless maybe he voted three or four times. And we might note, since Bartiromo won’t, that the New York Post has already published an editorial, telling Trump to stop with the “stolen-election rhetoric,” and all the “conspiracy-addled talk.”
Trump: (Fill in with blather here.)
Bartiromo: Yes.
Next, the president turns his hand to math. He says “we don’t have freedom of the press in this country. We have suppression by the press.”
Trump: This is the whole ball game. And they cheated. Joe Biden did not get 80 million votes. Now, we were – we were planning – we – I got 63 million votes four years ago and won quite handily in the Electoral College, won quite handily.”
Bartiromo: Yes.
Blogger: The Fox News shill doesn’t ask Trump about his claims, in 2016, that even though he won the Electoral College, he still believed the election was “rigged,” and that he actually won the popular vote. Hillary Clinton won by almost three million votes.
Second, Biden got 81 million votes. He won by seven million.
If Bartiromo had been on her toes, she might have asked about Trump’s claim in 2016, after Ted Cruz won the Iowa Republican primary, that that vote was rigged. “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it,” Trump tweeted at the time. “That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!”
Back to the president:
Trump: …the largest in the history of a sitting president, so much more, many millions more than anyone thought – you know, than we were even trying to get. And everybody said, this is over. I’m telling you, at 10:00, everybody thought it was over.
Bartiromo: Right.
Trump: And then the phony – the phony mail-ins started coming in, Maria. But, just so you understand, I got 74 million votes. It was over. And then mail-in started happening.
Bartiromo: Yes.
Blogger: Even the dimmest wits who followed the news would have known the mail-in ballots would be counted last. In Pennsylvania, the Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature had agreed in the act that created expanded mail-in voting, that mail in votes would not be counted until polls closed on Election Day.
They were, by law, going to be counted last.
By mid-October, ABC News was already noting that 2.8 million requests for mail-in ballots had been filed in Pennsylvania, including 693,670 from registered Republicans. There were 216,971 requests from unaffiliated voters, and 1,794,448 requests from Democrats. In other words, it was crystal clear that once the count of mail-in ballots started the totals were going to change drastically, and Biden would be taking a chain saw to Trump’s 10:00 p.m. “victory” lead.
Bartiromo (responding to the president’s tirade): Yes.
Trump: This election was rigged. This election is a total fraud.
Bartiromo: Mr. President, these are obviously very serious charges. And I want to walk through them and ask you how you will prove this in the courts, because, as you know, what I have been saying on the air is that elections are the reason that our young men and women go on battlefields across the world and, in some cases, lose their lives, because they believe that their vote, my vote matters just as much as your vote.
Blogger: The host has finally asked a “follow-up question.” She’s really setting up Trump to respond as he chooses.
I should also point out that “our young men and women” on the battlefields aren’t just protecting Trump votes. They’d be protecting mail-in ballots like mine, tallied in the red state of Ohio, or mail-in ballots in the blue state of Minnesota. They’d be serving on the battlefield for those extra 87 votes, now tallied in Wisconsin. They’d be serving for the 81 million votes Vice President Biden piled up, just as much as the 74 million garnered by Mr. Trump.
Bartiromo misses the point again.
Bartiromo: So, this is no longer about you, President Trump. This is about America. And many people agree with you. According to Reuters, 68 percent of Republicans and 28 percent of all Americans – that includes Democrats – believe there was fraud in this election.
Blogger: Of course, 68 percent of Republicans believe there was fraud. The president has been howling “wolf” every day since November 3. People like Bartiromo have been regurgitating his cries.
At this point, Republicans will believe almost anything. In one recent poll, 56% said they believed QAnon conspiracy claims were “mostly or partly true.” If you went back to December 2017, you had a poll indicating that 51% of Republicans believed President Obama was born in Kenya, even after their Orange God admitted in September 2016 that Obama was, in fact, born in America.
Even Bartiromo would like the president to focus. She asks about the six key battleground states. What proof has he that the election was stolen?
Trump: Well, we’re trying to put the evidence in. And the judges won’t allow us to do it.
Blogger: Trump claims next that Democratic “thugs” threw poll watchers out of vote-counting rooms in “many cases.”
Trump: Maria, there’s never been anything like this in history. And it all started with the mail-in. But it also goes to Dominion. It goes to a lot of things. But the mail-in, millions and millions of ballots being shipped all over, and ballots – as you know, there were a lot of ballots where it was just Biden on top. They [Democrats supposedly stuffing ballot boxes] didn’t do anything else because they were in a rush. And from what everybody is saying, and from what – I don’t think we even have to prove this. They say that I was doing so much better than they thought that they panicked, and they started just doing ballot after ballot very quickly and just checking the Biden name on top.
Blogger: Did Trump just say, some of these stories “are unbelievable,” and “I don’t think we even have to prove this?” And the courts keep refusing to allow his campaign to “put in our proof?”
He did.
Bartiromo: Right.
Blogger: What Abrams is saying is that voters have already sent in 750,000 requests for mail-in ballots for a special election in January. In fact, in every tweet, she links to Georgia’s online “Absentee Ballot Request Form.”
A completed, mailed in ballot is the political equivalent of money in the bank. You’d think either Trump or Bartiromo would figure it out.
Trump: What kind of an election is it? She’s going around collecting votes. What kind of an election is this? What kind of a country are we living in now, where you can vote for months ahead of schedule?
Blogger: I check the website for the National Council of State Legislatures. Even red states like Texas and Florida, which Trump won, allow early voting by mail. Only five states have resisted the move to make voting easier, and not limit it to Election Day.
Blogger: If you’re keeping track, Trump had already called Raffensperger “an enemy of the people.” At best, the president sounds like a fascist in sheep’s clothing. He has insisted that the F.B.I. might be involved in fixing the election, and the Department of Justice. Now you have this “character” messing with the vote and “judges making deals” and “electoral officials making deals” too.
Trump: Joe Biden did not get 16 million more votes than Barack Hussein Obama. He didn’t get it.
Blogger: Trump doesn’t believe it because he doesn’t want to believe. If he admits to himself that Biden won, his narcissistic personality may unravel. You could easily find a story that debunks this kind of claim; but at this point it’s not worth it.
Trump: But he beats Obama in swing states. Now, think of that. He beat Obama in swing states. You know that didn’t happen. They stuffed the ballot box. Everybody knows that.
Bartiromo agrees, at length, citing a story from The Federalist, explaining that based on five “election norms” there was no way Biden could have won. “They call it Biden magic,” she scoffs. She continues:
Bartiromo: Biden won despite Democrat losses everywhere else in the House. Kevin McCarthy is still celebrating wins in the House of Representatives….So, there are certainly statistic impossibilities…Mr. President, will you be able to prove that the computers can circumvent the controls that are in place? A lot of people say, oh, no, we have controls in place. There are paper ballots. The computers cannot get through the controls that are in place.
Blogger: Yes, for example, paper ballots in Georgia, which also showed the president was defeated there.
I also do some checking later, while editing my blog. Across the U.S. the Democrats pile up 77,529,619 votes for 435 candidates for all the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Republicans get only 72,760,036.
That means the polls were right again, in terms of predicting the winning side, with Democrats getting 50.8% to 47.7% of the total votes.
At any rate, even Trump seems to realize he’s running out of options to steal the election himself. He insists that despite his campaign’s bleak record in the courts, it’s not really that bad. “A lot of the cases that have been lost haven’t been our cases,” he says, even though they’ve been filed in his behalf. In other words, the losing record isn’t as bad as it looks, legally speaking.
Blogger: It’s actually terrible.
Bartiromo let’s this pass. Trump talks next about “the most dishonest political places” in the country, all Democratic-run, of course. He cites Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee.
Bartiromo does not bring up the Milwaukee County recount vote (part of the recount in which Biden gained votes). Trump complains about the media again, and taps into his inner-fascist for real.
Bartiromo lets that attack on the First Amendment buzz right past her head. (If Obama had ever called Fox News, et. al., “enemies of the people,” she would have shrieked for a week on her show. Then she would have caught her breath and shrieked for another week. Ignoring the point, she asks Mr. Trump, if you take out the six “tainted” states, is that the plan? If Trump can win six separate cases, then Biden has only 227 electoral votes. Trump has 232.
Is that the plan?
Trump: Everyone knows that people were not allowed to vote when they walked in, so preciously, so beautifully, to vote. An elderly woman – we have her deposition – was told – who longed to vote, looked forward to the day of November 3, was told when she got in there, I’m sorry, you voted. And then they give her another ballot to sign, which they don’t use, because she already voted.
Blogger: Not a single top state election official has claimed that there was significant fraud in their state. In the case mentioned above, the poor elderly woman would receive a provisional vote. Her provisional vote would count if records showed in the end that she had not voted already.
Despite losing the machine vote in Georgia, and then losing the hand recount on top of that, Trump tells Bartiromo, “if I lost Georgia by, let’s say, 12,000 votes, we have tens of thousands more votes than that.”
The president starts babbling about dead people who voted again. Well, screw those zombies! We have “hundreds of thousands of votes more than we need in every swing state that we’re talking about,” he says.
He calls Chris Krebs, who he appointed to head the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity unit, whose job was to protect the election, “a fraud.” Krebs will be appearing on 60 Minutes later that evening. He has already called the 2020 election the most secure in U.S. history, and labeled Trump campaign lawsuits to overturn the results “farcical.”
Bartiromo: Where is the DOJ and the FBI in all of this, Mr. President?
Trump: Missing in action…You would think, if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is – this is the biggest thing you could be looking at. Where are they? I have not seen anything. I mean, I just – they just keep moving along, and they go on to the next president.
Blogger: No. What an asshole this guy is. Bartiromo doesn’t challenge. Fox doesn’t pay her to challenge the Trumpian narrative.
Trump: There are many mailmen that are in big trouble for selling ballots, getting rid of ballots. This is the craziest thing you have ever seen.
Blogger: I decided to check out these “mailmen” claims. I found a story about a mailman in West Virginia who changed absentee ballot requests from “Democrat” to “Republican. A total of nine votes were involved.
In New Jersey, another carrier was arrested after 1,875 pieces of mail were found in two dumpsters. But only 99 mail-in ballots were involved. In a deep blue state those votes would make no real difference and possibly hurt Democrats.
A Kentucky mail person was arrested for throwing “a large quantity of mail” in a construction dumpster, including 111 mail-in ballot requests. No actual ballots were involved.
In addition, you had the case of a Massachusetts man setting a fire inside a ballot drop box outside the main library in Boston. Authorities retrieved 122 charred ballots, 87 of which were legible and would still be processed.
Last, but not least, two USPS employees in Pennsylvania were arrested in early October and charged with tossing mail in the trash. In one incident federal agents recovered “314 items of First Class Mail, seven items of Certified Mail, one item of Priority Mail and 1,311 political advertisements or similar items of campaign mail.” One request for delivery of a mail-in ballot was found, but no completed ballots. The second arrest led to recovery of “75 items of First Class Mail and 25 items of political advertisements or similar items of campaign mail. The seized mail did not contain any mail-in ballots, but it did contain one request for a mail-in ballot.”
None of these cases involved any “widespread election fraud,” and certainly there was no proof of a plot to screw Mr. Trump.
Two days after the election, a New York postal worker was arrested and found to have delayed delivery of 813 pieces of mail, because he was too lazy to finish his route. Three ballots were involved.
I kept going down the rabbit hole, hoping to find the elusive proof of massive mail-in fraud. There was the Ohio postal employee charged with dumping and destroying letters and newspapers he didn’t feel like delivering, and 32 Dolly Parton book club books. Only one absentee ballot request was lost.
As for the Trump votes “dumped in the river,” a claim the president made during his first unhinged debate with Joe Biden, ABC News had already followed that claim to the river’s source. When White House Press Secretary “Birther” McEnany was asked which “river” the votes were found floating in, she accused reporters of “missing the forest for the trees.”
In reality, three trays of mail had been found by a Wisconsin roadside, including “several” absentee ballots, but none from Wisconsin voters.
No flowing water was involved.
No matter. Bartiromo finally asked what cases, specifically, Trump thought would make it to the Supreme Court? He’d need six. One to overturn the vote in Wisconsin. One for Nevada. One for Arizona. One for Michigan. One for Georgia. And one to block the Pennsylvania vote.
Trump: Well, the problem is, it’s hard to get into the Supreme Court. I have 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.
Blogger: You can get a case to the highest court in the land; but you have to have a case that has merit.
So far, the Trump campaign has only ridiculous claims to spread. But the president isn’t quitting. He has Rudy Giuliani on his side.
Trump: Well, I’m going to use 125 percent 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 that – 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.”
Blogger: No one expects the president to change his mind. If his head were filled with chocolate pudding instead of brains, it wouldn’t make any difference.
His mind is set.
Bartiromo thanks him for his call, and that’s it.
Sunday evening, at least one former Republican member of Congress has had all he can stand. Paul Mitchell describes himself in his Twitter bio as an “Opinionated defender of our Constitution and nation.”
He tweets:
11/30/20: In faraway Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey takes a stand for election integrity, and makes it clear Trump lost. “We do elections well here in Arizona. The system is strong,” he says.
___
December 1, 2020: The Trump campaign continues to wage a losing battle on multiple legal fronts in an effort to overturn election results.
Given the current situation, Trump campaign lawyer Joe diGenova tells a radio host that sprinkling the tree of liberty with a little gore might be a excellent idea. That situation being: Trump losing the vote in six critical swing states.
Since Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity unit, keeps insisting the election was one of the most secure in U.S. history, diGenova has a novel idea. “That guy is a Class-A moron,” he tells his host. “He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”
We already know that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who the president called an “enemy of the people” for upholding Georgia vote returns, has faced death threats, as has his wife.
So diGenova’s comments probably won’t help.
Since this blogger is retired, and also recovering from COVID-19, which precludes getting most yard work done, he has plenty of time to study the story of the Trump campaign and its efforts to overturn the vote.
One of Trump’s key lawyers is Jenna Ellis.
A tip from a friend told me it would be fun to turn back time to 2016, when Trump was just a lame-assed candidate running for president, and find out what Ellis thought about her current boss back then.
Once again, CNN did what any news network could have done – and this blogger did – to get the story straight. They went to Ellis’s old social media posts and they (and I) replayed old radio appearances from February 2016. Even People magazine did due diligence in this regard.
In one old Twitter post, from March 2016, it was discovered that Ms. Ellis had referred to Candidate Trump as an “unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag.”
In another post she wrote, “I could spend a full-time job just responding to the ridiculously illogical, inconsistent, and blatantly stupid arguments supporting Trump. But here’s the thing: his supporters DON’T CARE about facts or logic. They aren’t seeking truth.”
(Nothing has changed.)
In a radio interview from that period, Ellis talked about the candidate and warned, “his crazy is coming out.” Her host, Jordan Harbinger, agreed. “I’m fearful for the republic right now,” he said. Ellis wondered, if Trump won the Republican nomination, how “we’re going to preserve the republic.”
It’s a conservative talk show. So, Harbinger mentions two dictator wannabes. Obama, of course, is one.
Trump is the other.
“This guy can’t take criticism,” the host says of Candidate Don. Ellis agrees. She calls Trump a “typical bully” (go to around the 19:30 mark on the tape to hear). The host plays a recording of the candidate at one of his rallies, threatening to make it easier to sue newspapers for libel if elected. “That is about one of the scariest things, and you know what’s even scarier than what he said?” Harbinger asks.
“Is there something that’s scarier than that?” Ellis interjects.
Yes, he says, “The crowd’s reaction.”
Ellis agrees.
“That’s the sound of liberty dying,” Harbinger posits. “It is,” Ellis agrees.
“That’s the sound of a dictator taking over,” he says.
Ellis warns that people don’t understand that “this is going against the First Amendment right to free speech, right to freedom of the press, that the government doesn’t give us that right, it’s an unalienable right.”
Harbinger asks Ellis, in a joking reference to Trump, “Why do you hate the Supreme Leader?”
“I still value my First Amendment rights,” she replies.
Just before the 28:00 minute mark, Harbinger wonders if Trump – should he be elected – can “work within the confines of the Constitution?”
“I don’t think he wants to,” Ellis replies. She doesn’t think Trump is stupid. She admits he has run a strong campaign. But “he wants to go against the Constitution.”
Ellis explains that as a lawyer, her value is that she can explain to clients, predict, what will happen if they go to court. She says if she went before a judge “that was as insane as Trump” it would be impossible to know what the outcome would be. Around the 37:00 minute mark, she warns that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, the only GOP candidates left who still had a viable chance to stop Trump, really needed to focus on “how unpredictable and insane this guy is.”
Four years later, here we are.
Ellis is fighting to win the insane guy and the guy she called a threat to the First Amendment and the Constitution a second term.
Down in Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official under Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pleads for Trump to chill his fiery rhetoric. “Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed,” Sterling warns. “It’s not right.”
He cites a Twitter thread that accused a young technician working on the Georgia recount of altering votes. This led to his identity being released online and calls for him to be “hung for treason.”
Sterling explains that the young tech was “transferring a report on batches of votes from an EMS to a county computer so he could read it.”
“His family is getting harassed now. There’s a noose out there with his name on it. And it's not right,” he continues. “I’ve got police protection outside my house. Fine. You know, I took a higher-profile job. I get it, the secretary [Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger] ran for office; his wife knew that, too. This kid took a job. He just took a job, and it’s just wrong.”
“It has to stop,” Sterling adds. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators [Loeffler and Perdue], you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. And if you take a position of leadership, show some.”
Tuesday afternoon, NPR reports,
police were called to a Gwinnett County location where a man who was live-streaming video followed workers he believed were secretly transporting voting machines in violation of a court order. In the video, an officer explained that boxes were full of office phones and told the man he was trespassing.
(If a young technician got killed, Trump wouldn’t care a bit.)
Meanwhile, unproven allegations that Dominion Voting Systems machines were rigged against the Orange God, lead to crazy right-wing types putting a $1,000,000 bounty on the head of Dr. Eric Coomer, security director for the company.
(Trump, the “law and order” president, wouldn’t care if he got murdered, too.)
___
12/2/20: With seven bleak weeks left to run the table on the Trump presidency, let’s start cleaning out the junk drawers of this administration and prepare for Lame Duck Donald’s ouster from the White House.
If nothing else, Attorney General Bill Barr, until now a Trump lapdog, says today that “To date, we have not seen [voter] fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
In Georgia, we had a brief ray of sunshine where the Trump 2020 campaign was concerned. A federal judge agreed to freeze the “rigged” Dominion Voting Machines used in three counties. This came in response to a lawsuit brought by Sidney Powell, once an important cog in the Trump legal campaign.
(Until she started sounding looney.)
Those “rigged” machines, according to Powell, are central to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results.
In a four-page directive, U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten Sr. granted Powell her wish – to have the machines checked – writing: “Defendants are hereby enjoined and restrained from altering, destroying, or erasing, or allowing the alteration, destruction, or erasure of, any software or data on any Dominion voting machine in Cobb, Gwinnett, and Cherokee Counties.”
Alas, the clouds returned when Batten added that there was “precious little proof” to back up any of Powell’s claims.
Meanwhile, she and other lawyers working for, or in tandem with the Trump campaign, proved to be less than the sharpest legal minds in this great land. Powell claimed to be representing a congressional candidate in one of the lawsuits she filed. The candidate said he had no idea who Powell was. An expert witness in another case, claiming voter fraud in Michigan, cited illegal voting in Edson County. This will be difficult to prove since there is no “Edson County” in that state.
In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign licked fresh wounds, after a $3 million recount of two counties, for which they paid, showed Biden gaining a few score votes. Having nothing to show for their efforts, save a participation trophy, they filed another legal challenge, asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to disqualify 221,000 votes, most of which, for reasons we need not address, it was assumed had gone to Biden.
On a 4-3 vote, the court passed on the chance to overturn the Wisconsin results. Two of the three judges, in dissent, said they would have taken the case under review, but questioned the idea that disqualifying hundreds of thousands of votes was the proper legal remedy.
As the Associated Press explained:
Trump’s lawsuit challenged procedures that have been in place for years and never been found to be illegal.
He claimed there were thousands of absentee ballots without a written application on file. He argued that the electronic log created when a voter requests a ballot online – the way the vast majority are requested – doesn’t meet the letter of the law.
He also challenged ballots where election clerks filled in missing address info on the certification envelope where the ballot is inserted, a practice that has long been accepted and that the state elections commission told clerks was okay.
Trump also challenged absentee ballots where voters declared themselves to be “indefinitely confined,” a status that exempts them from having to show photo identification to cast a ballot, and one that was used much more heavily this year due to the pandemic.
Considering Trump’s repeated lies, regarding the dastardly theft of his electoral victory, Michael Frisch, the ethics counsel at Georgetown Law School, says the president is trying to sow doubt on the legitimacy of an election that he lost by creating a narrative “that’s very much like birtherism.”
___
BLOGGER’S NOTE: In March 2022, I was reading a story about Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni. I noticed a comment President Trump had made on December 2, 2020, and went looking for the source. Lo and behold, I turned up his entire press conference speech, which lasted for almost three quarters of an hour. Looking back here are a few of the whoppers he told that day.
It’s fun to remember that Ginni Thomas helped organize buses to transport Trump supporters to Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. We all know now, how festivities ended.
In any case, on December 2, Trump said all of this and more:
As President, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States.
That statement, at least, was true. He didn’t follow through, though.
For months, leading up to the Presidential election, we were warned that we should not declare a premature victory. We were told repeatedly that it would take weeks if not, months, to determine the winner, to count the absentee ballots and to verify the results. … Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner even while many key states were still being counted.
Surely, the dullest Trump fan would notice that now the president wanted to delay finalizing the vote.
Previously, he had said he wanted the vote-counting to end in the early morning hours of November 4, when he had the lead in several states he eventually lost. See also, statements below.
Trump claims next that tens of thousands of individuals showed up to vote on November 3, but were told they had already cast ballots.
They didn’t know what to do. They had no one to complain to, most just left and said, “That’s strange.” But many people complained and complained vehemently, and in a lot of cases, they filled out a provisional ballot, which was almost never used, but in virtually every case was a vote for Trump. In other words, they went in to vote and they were told that they voted and they didn’t vote. They left and they felt horror and they lost respect for our system. This happened tens of thousands of times all over the country. That’s how desperate the Democrats were. They would fill out ballots of people not even knowing if these people were going to show up. When they did show up, they said, “Sorry, you’ve already voted.”
It would be a violation of the law for poll workers not to offer, accept, and submit provisional ballots to the proper boards. No evidence of this kind of subterfuge has ever been presented successfully in court. In 2016, research showed that 2.5 million Americans submitted provisional ballots. Only about 60% were “fully counted,” and another 10% were “partially counted,” as allowed by states. The most common reason for rejection of provisional ballots was that voters were not registered.
Trump continued his ramble:
In one Michigan County, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what we caught. How many didn’t we catch? Are there 100s of other examples throughout the country? Are there 1000s? We just got lucky and they called it a glitch, but we found numerous glitches that evening.
This turned out not to be the tip of the iceberg. There was no iceberg. The mistake Trump refers to here, occurred in Antrim County, where the Board of Elections was in Republican hands. The mistake had nothing to do with Dominion systems being rigged. A hand recount of paper ballots later showed Trump gained 11 votes in Antrim, and Biden lost 1.
A “risk-limiting” recount of a little more than 17,900 ballots, chosen at random from across the state, showed 17 ballots “out of balance.”
A June 2021 report by the Michigan Senate, that body controlled by the Republican Party, can be summed up in one sentence: “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.”
Yep. Trump lost.
President Trump claimed on December 2, that there had been massive fraud in Georgia – a state where the governor and secretary of state were Republicans.
In Georgia, it doesn’t work, but we have a secretary of state, and a governor who made it very difficult to check signatures. … Why? You’ll have to ask them, but without a signature match, or a check, it doesn’t matter. They found thousands and thousands of votes that were out of whack, all against me. This was during a recount that I didn’t even think mattered. They found many thousands of votes, and that recount didn’t matter. The one that matters is the one that’s going on now, that because of the fact it’s so close, they had to by law give another recount, but the recount has to be a recount where they check the signatures. Otherwise, they’re just checking the same dishonest thing. It won’t matter.
In none of the three recounts performed in Georgia were “thousands and thousands of votes” found “out of whack, all against me.” Trump lost every time, in the final tally by 11,799. Biden’s margin of victory did drop by 1,779 votes out of five million cast. So the vote counts were 99.9+ accurate. The biggest mistake of all was made in Floyd County, as we have noted several times, where clerks initially failed to upload results from some precincts. The board of elections in that county, where Trump gained several hundred votes, was controlled by Republicans.
So a big cream pie in their faces.
Many people received two, three and four ballots. They were sent to dead people by the thousands. In fact, dead people, and we have many examples filled out ballots, made applications, and then, voted, which is even worse. In other words, dead people went through a process. Some have been dead for 25 years. Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone, and if that’s the case, the results of the individual swing states must be overturned, and overturned immediately.
Note: The president wants millions of votes “overturned immediately.” As of February 2022, the situation in Ohio is typical – where a Republican attorney general has 27 possible cases of illegal votes being cast in the 2020 election.
A special check of 5,000 ballots supposedly cast by dead people in Georgia turned up four examples. At least one of those four ballots was cast for Donald J. Trump.
Trump was so full of doody in his comments on December 2, he was lucky he didn’t get mistaken for a porta-potty in a suit.
He continued:
Maybe you’ll have a revote, but I don’t think that’s appropriate. When those votes are corrupt, when they’re irregular, when they get caught, they’re terminated, and I very easily win. In all states, I very easily win, the swing states, just like I won them at 10 o’clock in the evening, the evening of the election.
Trump can’t even get his message straight in the same press conference. He wants to revert to Election Day itself, when he had the vote lead, and just declare himself the winner.
Even what I’m saying now will be demeaned and disparaged, but that’s okay. I just keep on going forward, because I’m representing 74 million people, and in fact, I’m also representing all of the people that didn’t vote for me.
Trump deserved to be disparaged. As of March 2022, none of his claims has been upheld in any court – state, federal, or The People’s Court. He wasn’t representing any of the people who voted for Biden. He wanted to overturn the results rendered by those 81 million.
Robert Mueller spent $48 million of taxpayer money investigating me for two and a half years…
Trump could never decide how much money the Mueller investigation “wasted.” He repeatedly changed the number – almost as if he was making it up. Which he was. The Justice Department said the final cost was $31.7 million. That investigation, and others, also turned up proof that multiple Trump advisors and campaign officials, and even Trump kids and/or their spouses, met with Russians during the 2016 election. The short list would include Don Jr. and Jared Kushner, which Don Sr. later admitted, Roger Stone, who lied to Congress about his meeting, Paul Manafort, who had multiple contacts, and Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, who was working on a Trump Tower Moscow deal at the same time Trump was running for president.
Trump kept going:
Senator Marco Rubio, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated, “The committee found no evidence that then candidate Donald Trump, or his campaign colluded with the Russian government.” And, I thank Senator Rubio for that statement.
Rubio was never the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Trump can’t even get that right.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and most other states allowed anyone to get an absentee ballot and cast their vote without showing any ID. The voting took place entirely on the honor system, no identification of any kind was required.
Most Americans would also be shocked to learn that no state in the country verifies United States citizenship as a condition for voting in federal elections. This is a national disgrace. No other advanced country conducts elections this way. Many European countries have instituted major restrictions on mail-in voting, specifically, because they recognize the nearly unlimited potential for fraud. Out of 42 European nations, all but two prohibit absentee ballots entirely for people who reside inside the country, or else they require those who need absentee ballots to show a very, very powerful ID.
As always, with Trump you had the kind of vague claims that are hard to refute. What is a “very, very powerful ID?”
Here in Ohio, Mr. Blogger had to supply the last four digits of his social security number or his driver’s license number when he filled out an absentee ballot. He also had to sign his ballot before mailing. In Arizona, you needed to prove citizenship in order to get a driver’s license after 1996. So you could have proved eligibility to vote by…having a driver’s license and placing the number in “box 9” on your voter registration form.
Loser Donald kept babbling:
In addition, thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Floyd, Fayette, and Walton counties weeks after the election, and these ballots were mostly from Trump voters. They weren’t counted. They were from Trump voters.
We covered the story of Floyd County, above, where GOP election officials screwed their own pooch.
In Fayette County, Republicans again screwed their pet, failing to upload more than 2,700 votes. But of those votes, 1,128 were for Biden. Again these were red counties, muffing their own counts. In Fayette, Trump had a net gain, of 449 votes. Walton County is also a solidly red county, returning Trump more than 74% of its votes. Once again, the problem was failure to upload a voting card for one part of the county, which, when uploaded gave Trump a gain of 176 votes. Libertarian Jo Jorgensen also picked up 10 additional votes.
Dozens of counties in the key swing states have more registered voters on the rolls than they have voting age citizens, including 67 counties in Michigan. All of this is evidence.
This claim was egregiously false. Only 71% of Michigan voters bothered to mail in ballots or show up at the polls.
Donald keeps juggling numbers and dropping them ever time. He’s either ill-informed, or he’s lying.
Probably both:
In Detroit, everybody saw the tremendous conflict and the horrible way that the two Republican canvassers were treated so horribly because they wouldn’t vote when they saw that 71% of the precincts didn’t balance. Also, there were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters.
Detroit is in Wayne County. The population of the county is nearly two million. A total of 867,409 votes were cast for president in 2020. As for Detroit, itself, a Democratic stronghold, turnout was grim, as the Associated Press noted. “According to unofficial election results on the City of Detroit’s website,” the AP explained, “on Nov. 5, there were 250,138 votes cast and 504,714 registered voters. Detroit has an estimated population of 670,000.”
This election was rigged. Everybody knows it. … We already have the proof. We already have the evidence, and it’s very clear. Many people in the media and even judges so far have refused to accept it. They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say, “You’re right.” Our country needs somebody to say, “You’re right.”
This serves as a fitting ending to a Trump “stolen election” diatribe. “Everybody knows it,” he claims. He was robbed of a second term. Everybody knows it. Well, maybe not all the judges who “have refused to accept it,” or the countless media outlets that accurately reported on results from both red and blue states.
Sixteen months later, not a single court or recount or investigation of any kind as upheld any of Trump’s complaints.
___
12/3/20: Trump and his dwindling band of allies have now directed their rage at a new target: Attorney General Barr. Reporters ask the president if he still has confidence in Barr, after the AG downplayed the story of the haunted voting machines. Trump refuses to say, responding, “Ask me that in a number of weeks from now.”
Judge Jeanine Pirro, the crazy woman who works for Fox News, savages the Attorney General on her nightly show. No evidence of widespread fraud? Well, Pirro storms, “We need answers. We need action. We need justice. And you Mr. Barr are so deep in the swamp you can’t see beyond your fellow reptiles.”
Lou Dobbs, the only pundit at Fox crazier, also exploded with rage. “For the attorney general of the United States to make that statement [that there was no fraud], he is either a liar or a fool or both.”
Dobbs suggested that Barr might also be, “…uh, perhaps compromised. He may be simply unprincipled. Or he may be personally distraught or ill.”
Or? There might not be any evidence of widespread fraud. Clearly, old Lou hasn’t thought of that.
___
12/4/20: The president’s quixotic and crazy campaign to overturn the results of the November election continues – mostly because Trump is incapable of facing up to the truth.
As Politico notes, Team Trump continues to spin its wheels, unable to get any traction in a bid to steal the electoral votes of several states Joe Biden supposedly stole from Donald J. Trump. In desperation, this week, Republican lawmakers from Pennsylvania, including the Speaker of the House, called on their “Republican-heavy congressional delegation to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory when federal lawmakers certify the presidential election Jan. 6.”
In their letter to their brethren in Congress, they wrote, we “the undersigned members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly urge you to object, and vote to sustain such objection, to the Electoral College votes received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
Originally, they claimed to have 75 signatories, more than half the GOP lawmakers in the state.
Sadly, the letter had to be withdrawn when several “signatories” made clear they didn’t intend to sign for the fight.
In Arizona, Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers, a Republican, calls claims made by Rudy Giuliani, and repeated regularly by President Trump, about fraud in the state’s election “breathtaking.”
Not in an exciting way, rather a “I can’t believe the nerve” sort of way.
“I and my fellow legislators swore an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and the constitution and laws of the state of Arizona,” Bowers says. “It would violate that oath, the basic principles of republican government and the rule of law if we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of fraud.”
Rudy responded angrily via tweet, saying that, “Republican Legislature[s] let down America. I’m ashamed of them. They completely misled the President and me. All of us Republicans [who still believe in magic vote-switching machines should] let them know what we think of them.”
To the surprise of almost no one, sources inside the White House told CNN that Mr. Trump wasn’t budging from his position, no matter how many courts or state lawmakers shot down his claims of massive election fraud. “No one expects him to concede. No one!” a Trump adviser admitted.
Meanwhile, Team Trump suffered five defeats in court in a matter of three hours on Friday. At 4:30 p.m. the Minnesota Supreme Court tossed a case, in which Team Trump lawyers asked that the state’s electoral vote not be certified. Half-an-hour later, the Michigan Court of Appeals tossed out a challenge to certification of the vote in Wayne County. Nevada was next. A judge shit-canned a claim by several Republican electors that there had been widespread fraud in the November vote – and Nevada’s electoral votes should be transferred to Donald J. Trump’s win column – which was really the loser’s column. Judge James T. Russell rejected their arguments, writing in response that he found “no credible or reliable evidence that the 2020 general election in Nevada was affected by fraud.”
At 6 p.m., Team Trump got knocked to the canvas and took a ten-count after a Wisconsin judge blew up their case. Asked to overturn the state’s entire vote, and let a Republican-led legislature decide who got the state’s electoral votes, Judge Brian Hagedorn expressed shock. “Such a move would appear to be unprecedented in American history,” he wrote for the court.
“One might expect that this solemn request would be paired with evidence of serious errors tied to a substantial and demonstrated set of illegal votes. Instead,” he added, “the evidentiary support rests almost entirely on the unsworn expert report of a former campaign employee that offers statistical estimates based on call center samples and social media research.”
Judge Hagedorn went on to say, “Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election. This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread.”
Nevertheless, it was a path that Trump and his sycophants were willing to tread. Hagedorn and other judges simply said no.
Then came a fifth coffin nail. At 7 p.m. a judge in Phoenix denied a request by Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward to invalidate the results of that state’s election. And why did he turn her request down?
In rejecting Ward’s request, Judge Randall H. Warner wrote definitively: “The court finds no misconduct, no fraud, and no effect on the outcome of the election.”
So, Team Trump went 0 for 5 in just one day.
POSTSCRIPT: Any fool can find Democrats criticizing Republicans, and Republicans attacking Democrats. See, for example: Sean Hannity (pick any telecast).
So it should wake up those who care about democracy and free elections to note the number of Republicans calling out Trump for his post-election lies. Trey Grayson, former GOP secretary of state of Kentucky, referred to the president’s repeated claims of election fraud as “unfounded,” and pleaded with members of his own party to defend the election process.
In Arizona, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors said he would not “violate the law or deviate from my own moral compass,” even though that’s what the President of the United States and his fanboys, like Rudy G., would like him to do. “No matter how you voted, this election was administered with integrity, transparency, and most importantly in accordance with Arizona state laws,” Clint Hickman says.
Brian Corley, GOP election supervisor of Pasco County, Florida also decides to speak out. Trump won his county by 20 points. Corley releases a statement saying he feels compelled both in his professional capacity and as an “American citizen” to respond to all the lies about the process.
“I cannot stand by as my work, and the work of all professional elections’ administrators, becomes the scapegoat of those seeking political gain,” he explains. “I believe that history will not be kind to those who are cognizant of the truth and yet choose silence for political expediency.”
“It just it boggles my mind that these appeals are still being believed with no evidence,” Grayson adds with finality.
___
12/5/20: While the President of the United States punts on his duties as leader of the Free World, COVID-19 rages across the land.
And he rages about the stolen election, himself. In the last week, Mr. Trump has tweeted 145 times about the election he lost – which he insists he won – only four times about the pandemic – and then only to say he was right all along about what was going to happen, and the experts were wrong.
Classic Trump tweets include:
“NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION,”
“We won Michigan by a lot!” (Actually, he lost the state by 154,000 votes.)
If he [Biden] is inaugurated under these circumstances, he cannot be considered ‘president’ but instead referred to as the #presidentialoccupant.”
When a pair of Republican governors refused to overturn election results in their states, Trump blasted them both in another tweet, howling that Brian Kemp (in Georgia) and Doug Ducey (in Arizona) “fight harder against us than do the Radical Left Dems.”
Later, he vented for 46 minutes, in a rambling videotaped speech: “Many people in the media — and even judges — so far have refused to accept it. They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say you’re right. Our country needs somebody to say, ‘You’re right.’”
Peter Baker, in The New York Times, reports that some have compared Trump’s behavior to Shakespearean characters, King Lear and the like.
“Students of the American presidency, on the other hand, could think of no recent parallel. ‘As we move toward Inauguration Day, I have thought almost daily of a remark attributed to Henry Adams: “I expected the worst, and it was worse than I expected,”’ said Patricia O’Toole,” author of several biographies of American political figures, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
As if we didn’t already have enough problems, on Saturday evening, likely provoked by the president’s baseless conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen, armed Trump supporters gathered outside Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s home. There they shouted…baseless conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen. Benson’s 4-year-old son was home and neighbors were drawn into the fray, in her family’s defense.
In a statement soon after, Secretary Benson thanked the Michigan Attorney General for quick action to protect her and her family (you’d think Trump might care about her son’s safety, but then again, we’re talking Trump). “Through threats of violence, intimidation and bullying, the armed people outside my home and their political allies seek to undermine and silence the will and voices of every voter in this state,” Benson said, “no matter who they voted for.”
She said she wouldn’t be intimidated.
Meanwhile, a star witness in the fight to overturn Biden’s victory in Michigan turned out to be a questionable character for sure. Mellissa Carone, who swore she had been witness to massive voter fraud, turned out to have been on probation in an earlier case, involving a sex tape (in which Carone played a starring role), her boyfriend (co-starring), a computer, and her boyfriend’s ex-wife.
As HuffPost explained, Carone had been “charged under the name Mellissa Wright with first degree obscenity and using a computer to commit a crime. Under a plea agreement, she reduced her charge to disorderly conduct and received 12 months of probation,” that ended September 13.
That is, Carone sent the video to the ex-wife and then tried to frame her and make it seem as if she had stolen the tape.
As for Carone, and her actual testimony before a hearing of Michigan lawmakers, with crack Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis at her side, this blogger could never do justice to the lunacy as well as Saturday Night Live.
And yes, Rudy did punctuate the testimony at times with a barrage of farts.
___
12/7/20: Sunday, another top Georgia state official, also a Republican, Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan, made it clear he, too, had reached a breaking point. He had had about all of the president’s lies he could stand.
Commenting on Trump’s rally in Valdosta, Georgia, the night before, Duncan told Jake Tapper of CNN that Trump’s “mountains of misinformation” were hurting the Republican Party in his state. “I worry that this continuous…you know…fanning of the flames around misinformation puts us in a negative position with regards to the January 5 runoff,” he explained. Two seats in the U.S. Senate will be won or lost that day and may determine which political party controls the Senate for the next two years.
Duncan also made clear, he was “disgusted” by the president’s behavior since the election, an election in which he campaigned for Mr. Trump. Trump’s sustained allegations regarding a “stolen” election, and his attacks on Georgia officials for not helping him turn the state’s vote around, had led to death threats aimed at many of those officials and their family members.
Duncan continued:
All of us in this position have got increased security around us and our families and it’s not American, it’s not what democracy is all about but it’s reality right now. So we are going to continue to do our jobs. Gov. Kemp, Brad Raffensperger and myself all three voted and campaigned for the President but, unfortunately, he didn’t win the state of Georgia but it doesn’t change our job descriptions.
“If I had a chance to spend five minutes with every single person in Georgia that doubted the election results, I think I’d be able to win their hearts over, show them the facts and figures, separate fact from fiction,” he said during an interview on CNN. He did not, of course, have time.
Duncan was clear. Trump lost the vote in Georgia. Biden would be the next President of the United States.
“The Constitution is still in place. This is still America,” he added. “As the lieutenant governor and a Georgian, I’m proud that we’re able to look up after three recounts and watch and be able to see that this election was fair.”
Gabriel Sterling, the voting systems implementation manager for the Georgia secretary of state’s office – and also a target of death threats – along with several lower-level poll workers and their families – likewise spoke out Sunday. He categorized Trump’s statements at the rally the night before as “false.”
“They’re misinformation, they’re stoking anger and fear among his supporters,” Sterling – yes, another Republican – said in an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press. “And hell, I voted for him. The situation is getting much worse.”
Meanwhile, Team Trump has suffered a fresh series of courtroom beat-downs. First, a federal judge (and a Trump appointee to his post) threw out a lawsuit filed by conservative and-slightly-unbalanced lawyer Sidney Powell, asking to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia.
Powell had promised to “unleash the Kraken” in this instance, a legal monster made up of irrefutable evidence of massive fraud.
“No dice,” ruled Judge Timothy Batten.
Plaintiffs in this case, he said, were in essence asking, “this court to substitute its judgment for two-and-a-half million voters who voted for Joe Biden. And this I am unwilling to do.”
With that, Team Trump’s only “tie” in court, an earlier decision by Batten, becomes a loss, and their record is reduced to 0 for 2020.
Nor did the “Kraken” fare any better in a second election-related lawsuit farther north. Another federal judge threw out a lawsuit seeking to overturn the vote in the state of Michigan.
In this case, Powell had claimed that certain voters were treated differently in different counties. So, plaintiffs, she insisted, had been denied “equal protection under the law.” For example, in some counties, election officials called voters who had flawed mail-in ballots and allowed those flaws to be “cured.” According to Powell, that mean all the mail-in ballots in Michigan should be tossed.
Even if this were true, that some voters were treated differently, U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker ruled, “alleged injury does not entitle [Plaintiffs] to seek their requested remedy because the harm of having one’s vote invalidated or diluted is not remedied by denying millions of others their right to vote.”
Which is pretty obvious. Except to Team Trump.
Parker continued:
This lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the relief Plaintiffs seek – as much of that relief is beyond the power of this Court – and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic process [emphasis added throughout] and their trust in our government. Plaintiffs ask this Court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters. This, the Court cannot, and will not, do. The People have spoken.
With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden, Plaintiffs’ equal protection claim fails.
The bad news for Team Trump piled even higher when Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, a Trump supporter, and yet a man of principle, went ahead and recertified the state’s election results.
“Today is an important day for election integrity in Georgia and across the country,” he said. He couldn’t resist a little dig. “The claims in the Kraken lawsuit prove to be as mythological as the creature for which they’re named. Georgians can now move forward knowing that their votes, and only their legal votes, were counted accurately, fairly, and reliably.”
The final tally, based on a second recount, like the original tally, and the first recount, showed Biden taking the Peach State by roughly 12,000 votes.
POSTSCRIPT: You know Trump lawyers are trawling bottom when 1,500 attorneys from around the country sign a letter condemning the antics of the president’s legal team. In a statement they warn of growing danger:
More than 35 losses in election-related cases have made one thing painfully clear: President Trump’s barrage of litigation is a pretext for a campaign to undermine public confidence in the outcome of the 2020 election, which inevitably will subvert constitutional democracy. Sadly, the President’s primary agents and enablers in this effort are lawyers, obligated by their oath and ethical rules to uphold the rule of law.
12/8/20: Today, the Trump campaign briefly managed to advance a legal case to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the nine justices to block certification of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes.
This was a “Hail Mary” pass that slipped from the quarterback’s hand and traveled only fifteen feet before skidding along the turf. The players in the end zone, sixty-five yards away, gaped in silence.
Forty minutes after the case was filed, the court ruled:
“DENIED.”
(The full court ruling follows, below.)
Lame Duck Donald had pinned his fondest dream of being gifted a second term in the White House on this particular case. Tuesday afternoon, with the decision imminent, he tweeted his hopes:
Now, let’s see whether or not somebody has the courage, whether it’s a legislator or legislatures, or whether it’s a justice of the Supreme Court, or a number of justices of the Supreme Court – let’s see if they have the courage to do what everybody in this country knows is right
As it turned out, exactly zero judges on Supreme Court seemed to agree on what “everybody in this country knows is right.”
Not even Justice Samuel Alito, who agreed to allow the case to reach the court, seemed inclined to rule in favor of Trump and advance his quixotic quest for reelection. The full decision, which affirmed a unanimous decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, read as follows: “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”
Suddenly, it was all over but the quacking. With just eighteen words, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Lame Duck Donald in a critical case. The president won’t admit it, of course. His Narcissistic Personality Disorder won’t allow him. But it’s time to start learning how to walk with webbed feet.
(One for each justice.)
And one more for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court:
IN A bizzare development, also on Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit, on behalf of his state – against Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia!
In a nutshell, the nutjob is arguing that those state’s electoral votes for Joe Biden should not count. Texas electoral votes for Trump should.
As the Washington Post explains, Paxton’s filing is a “grab bag” of discredited claims, spiced with comical conspiracy thinking. “At one point,” the Post notes, “the complaint repeats discredited theories that Biden was rescued by a late dump of ballots, saying that as of 3 a.m. on the morning after the election, Biden’s chances at winning all four states was “less than one in a quadrillion.”
We might also mention that Paxton is currently under an F.B.I. investigation, after eight aides accused him of bribery and abuse of office. As the Texas Tribune notes, since those eight came forward, four have been fired, three have resigned, and the eighth has been placed on leave. This, in turn, has sparked a whistleblower lawsuit.
“Paxton has been under indictment for more than five years on securities fraud charges but has yet to stand trial,” the Tribune explains. “He has dismissed the charges as politically motivated and entered a not guilty plea.”
On Wednesday, F.B.I. agents showed up at his office and served at least one subpoena for records.
Some believe that Paxton’s desperation lawsuit is a subtle play for a presidential pardon, as the Orange God exits next month.
___
12/9/20: On Today’s show, Rush Limbaugh makes it clear. He’s unhappy with the results of the election. “I actually think we’re trending toward secession,” he tells his purportedly patriotic fans.
Equally upset: Lou Dobbs, Fox Business host most likely to have to get a prescription for anti-depressants.
Dobbs deflated today like a Trump baby balloon stabbed by an angry Trump supporter (yeah, that happened). He could hardly bring himself to admit that the U.S. Supreme Court had turned down the president’s court challenge to the Pennsylvania results. “Well, the Supreme Court demurred: courage lacking, and the will to stand up for the Constitution now very much in question,” he said, of the decision not to hear the idiotic case. “I mean, it really looks awful for them not to have said anything, to have not been enlightening in any way,” he moaned to Greg Teufel, an attorney representing the GOP in the case. “It’s downright frustrating, but it’s also very cowardly on the part, it seems to me, of the court.”
(Whereas it seems to this blogger that Lou and Don and Don’s desperate supporters would be only too happy to subvert the courts, and the U.S. Constitution, if they could see a clear path.)
___
12/10/20: Now, cometh before the court, the Texas case, an Alamo-like defense of Trump’s last chance to win a second term. (Some of these statements have already been noted, so we’ll count up the lies and stupidities with care, and try to avoid duplication.)
ONE: When a state sues another, over water rights or air pollution issues, the case goes straight to the U.S. Supreme Court.
If New York sues Ohio, for example, New York would not want the case to be decided in the Ohio courts, and vice versa.
TWO: The high court need not take the case. If a majority of justices find the Texas challenge without merit, or that core issues have been settled by previous decisions, they may choose not to hear it at all.
THREE: The president is pumped to learn that 18 red states have joined Texas in this last-ditch plea. On Thursday he tweeted, “19 states are fighting for us, almost unheard of support!”
Technically, you could argue there’s one more “ditch” if Trump is stymied by the highest court in the land. As that great “patriot,” Rush Limbaugh, suggested yesterday, if Trump loses, the red states should secede. (See: 12/9/20.)
(This is why Rush has a Presidential Medal of Freedom?)
FOUR: The president did not mention that the four states named in the lawsuit, and 23 other states and the District of Columbia joined in opposition to the move.
FIVE: This final challenge to the November results is the product of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s fertile imagination.
One legal expert, Amy Howe, explains the basics of the challenge:
The filing… accuses government officials in the four states of using the COVID-19 pandemic to make changes to their states’ election laws through “executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity.” The state officials, Paxton writes, “flooded” their states with absentee ballots and “weakened the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote – signature verification and witness requirements.”
As a result, Paxton contends, the 2020 election “suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities in those four states” – for example, treating voters in Democratic areas more favorably than in other areas.
SIX: Did you know that Texas allows mail-in ballots? In some mysterious way, these ballots, cast in red states by people that vote mostly for Trump, are legit.
In Paxton’s state only people over age 65 can be trusted to sign mail-in ballots, provide proof of who they are, fold them, put them in special envelops, lick the flaps, put the first envelops in seconds, lick the flaps, and affix the correct amount of postage. You can even vote from jail in Texas, under certain circumstances, which is kind of fun.
(Paxton may someday have to avail himself of that provision in the law.)
SEVEN: Texans may vote in person if they show one of seven kinds of photo identification, including driver’s licenses, and handgun licenses, because people who love guns, tend to vote Republican.
EIGHT: Texas relaxed its regulations regarding voter ID last year, after federal judges found old rules discriminated against poor voters, and had been written purposely to be discriminatory.
NINE: We know this challenge will face serious headwinds, since almost every legal point raised has been shot down in the lower courts. In a previous lawsuit, filed on nearly identical grounds, a conservative justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court joined liberal colleagues in rejecting the request to overturn the state’s vote. To do so, he said, in a case built “on so flimsy a foundation” would be to do “indelible damage to every future election.”
Now Paxton and his pals were back…resting their new filing on the same flimsy foundation as before.
TEN: A federal judge threw out a previous challenge to the Pennsylvania voting results, saying rather cheekily, “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so.”
ELEVEN: Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, admittedly a Democrat, had trouble taking the Paxton challenge seriously.
“This lawsuit seems to suggest that the voters of Michigan messed with Texas,” she tweeted. “They didn’t. Case closed.”
TWELVE: In the lawsuit filed by Attorney General Paxton and crafted by a lawyer named John Eastman, it was noted, as “evidence,” that no person had ever been elected president if they met defeat in both Ohio and Florida.
Interesting, perhaps.
Legally?
Irrelevant.
Trump’s lawyers might as well have said, “No man has ever been elected president who wore a toupee and enjoyed yodeling as a hobby.”
Plus, check your facts!
Nixon won both Florida and Ohio in 1960. JFK became president soon after. Not until 1968 did Nixon win a chance to take up residence in the White House and start tapping reporter’s phones and burglarizing people’s offices.
THIRTEEN: The Texas filing is a piñata filled with lame complaints. Signatures weren’t checked! Ballot drop-off boxes were not secured with locks and chains and chastity belts! The voting machines were rigged.
We even had another irrelevant claim: Trump won 18 of 19 “bellwether counties.” According to the Texas challenge. That somehow meant there was no possible way he could have lost.
FOURTEEN: Just for fun, the blogger decided to see how many counties there are in various states. Pennsylvania has 67; and if you want, you can go to this website and learn how all of them were named. Ohio has 88. I knew that because I have lived in the state most of my life. Georgia has 159. That includes Gwinnet County, named after this blogger’s ancestor, on his mother’s side.
Button Gwinnett signed the Declaration of Independence, got a Georgia county named after him, and has been generally forgotten since.
Gwinnett County went blue on Election Day, by the way, tallying 241,827 votes for Biden, 166,413 for Trump.
In the hand recount, which the Trump team demanded, the president did see a net of 285 votes in Gwinnett, which is a lot, and a bit of a stain on the county name. The totals after that second tally, in that county: Biden 242,490, Trump 167,361.
Statewide, Trump still lost.
FIFTEEN: Texas is not the only red state to sign onto this case and to have decided that under proper conditions (those conditions determined by their lawmakers and implemented by their officials), citizens can vote by mail! If you are over 65, and have certain health issues, in Missouri you can vote by mail.
Indiana: If you are scheduled to work during the entire 12 hours the polls are open on Election Day, or you have a disability, you can vote by mail.
South Carolina: Students attending school outside of the county in which they claim residence (i.e. college students, away from home) can lick a stamp and send in a vote.
Kansas: “Advance voting by mail has been allowed to all Kansas voters since 1996.”
Incredible.
The states complaining vociferously about other states allowing mail-in ballots – and not following their own rules – have their own different rules and allow mail-in ballots.
SIXTEEN: I live in Ohio, which went (sadly) for Trump, by 53.3% to 45.3% for Joe Biden.
This fall, Ohio was “flooded with ballots.” This blogger and his wife, who live in Cincinnati, each received from the state and various get-out-the-vote groups, four ballots apiece (4).
Having no interest in racking up felonies and spending our golden years behind bars, we each filled out and returned one (1).
As in other states, certain rules made it safe for officials to believe the ballots we cast were legit. My wife and I each signed our ballots in the same way we would if we had appeared in person on Election Day and asked to vote. Had we voted in person we would have been required to show voter ID. Since we voted by mail, we were asked to supply either the last four digits of our Social Security number or provide the number from our Ohio driver’s license.
So you had to ask: Why didn’t Texas challenge Ohio’s vote?
SEVENTEEN: How about Florida, which also went for Trump, and which, unlike Ohio, has signed onto the Texas challenge?
Almost the first line we see on the website, MyFloridaElections.com. reads: “Under Florida law, all registered voters are permitted to vote by mail.”
This.
Is.
So stupid.
President Trump voted by mail in Florida for this election. What the hell!
EIGHTEEN: Consider Utah. That state’s attorney general signed onto the Texas lawsuit. County clerks in Utah mailed out ballots to every registered voter, a practice the Texas AG and the president both sought to enjoin.
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, and Utah Governor-elect Spencer Cox, both politicians of the Republican style, seemed surprised Wednesday to learn the state’s attorney general had signed the amicus brief (a “friendly brief”) supporting the challenge. “We don’t know what his motivation is. Just as we would not want other states challenging Utah’s election results, we do not think we should intervene in other states’ elections,” they said. “This is an unwise use of taxpayers’ money.”
NINETEEN: The Arizona attorney general joined the fight on the side of neighbor Texas. That is, he agreed that Arizona should sue Arizona to ensure voting had been fair. Who disagreed with that choice? Governor Doug Ducey – another Republican. The election in his state, he said, had been fairly decided. Trump lost.
Gov. Ducey explained:
In Arizona, we have some of the strongest election laws in the country, laws that prioritize accountability and clearly lay out procedures for conducting, canvassing, and even contesting the results of an election. We’ve got ID at the polls. We review EVERY signature (every single one) on early ballots – by hand – unlike other states that use computers. Prohibitions on ballot harvesting. Bipartisan poll observers. Clear deadlines, including no ballots allowed after Election Day.
TWENTY: Even supporters of the president expressed serious reservations. Sen. John Cornyn (from Texas!!!!) was baffled by Paxton’s stratagem. He admitted to a reporter that he was struggling “to understand the legal theory.”
Senate Whip John Thune of South Dakota was equally baffled. “I just don’t know why a state like Texas which never wants anybody telling them what to do, now wants to tell a bunch of other states how to run their elections. I doubt the Supreme Court will take it up.”
Nebraska’s Sen. Ben Sasse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, predicted the justices would dismiss the case:
I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect the Supreme Court swats this away. From the brief, it looks like a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt rather than a lawsuit – as all of its assertions have already been rejected by federal courts and Texas’ own solicitor general isn’t signing on.
(That solicitor would have had the job of arguing the merits of the case before the high court. Assuming it had merits.)
Two conservative lawyers, Carter Phillips and John Danforth, who are, CNN noted, “close friends with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, respectively” also filed an amicus brief.
Against the Texas claim.
Attorney General Paxton, they argued, was making “a mockery of federalism and separation of powers. It would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles for this Court to serve as the trial court for presidential election disputes.”
Therefore, it is with great confidence that this blogger is ready to place a bet of $100 with any Trump supporter who believes the U.S. Supreme Court is about to rule in the favor of their Orange God.
I am betting the justices won’t.
FUN FACT – NUTJOBS: Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward explains why she supported the challenge to the electoral votes, cast for Biden, in her own state. Besides being a Republican, Sen. Ward admitted, “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”
___
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