It goes from bad to worse for the Trump legal team
By
November 13, 2020 at 2:43 p.m. CST
A
couple days ago, I wrote about how President Trump’s legal team was having a tough time in court.
Faced with proving or otherwise substantiating Trump’s baseless claims of massive
voter fraud, they’ve often confronted the limits of their evidence
and watered down Trump’s claims. And they’ve been shut down and even explicitly
rebuked on many occasions.
It’s
only gotten worse since then.
Over
the past two days, two prominent law firms have sought to withdraw from
representing the Trump legal effort in Arizona and Pennsylvania. And Friday,
the campaign was forced to reverse course in an Arizona case, acknowledging
that the lawsuit, even if successful, wouldn’t overturn President-elect Joe
Biden’s lead in the state.
Those
high-profile developments come as more of Trump’s arguments fizzle in court.
In
Arizona on Thursday, Trump attorney Kory Langhofer conceded that he was “not alleging fraud” or
“that anyone is stealing the election” — in direct contradiction with Trump’s
repeated public claims that this was indeed what has happened in multiple
states. Langhofer said the Trump legal team was simply raising concerns about a
“limited number of cases” involving “good-faith errors.”
It was
not the first time that Trump’s attorneys have declined to allege fraud in the
same way Trump personally has, with the same thing happening earlier this week in
Pennsylvania.
Similarly,
witnesses for the Trump side in the Arizona case acknowledged something else
that previous cases have revealed — that they weren’t even sure the
irregularities being alleged were true.
The
Trump campaign’s lawsuit alleged that poll workers nullified votes by pressing
or having voters press a button after the voting machine recorded more than one
vote in the presidential race. This was the baseless alleged scandal dubbed
“Sharpiegate.”
As reported by Law and Crime’s Adam
Klasfeld (who has done yeoman’s work on these cases), Trump’s
attorneys tried to object to their witnesses being cross-examined, and it
turned out they did so for good reason:
The
Trump campaign’s parade of witnesses hardly bolstered their case.
When
pressed by the Arizona Democratic Party’s counsel Daniel Arellano, each of the
witnesses in turn conceded they did not know whether their vote was counted.
“Do you
have any basis to believe your vote wasn’t counted?” Arellano asked voter Mia
Barcello.
“Uh,
I’m not sure,” Barcello replied with a laugh.
When
pressed about it further, Barcello replied: “No.”
Ms.
Barcello had plenty of company, with another witness responding “I couldn’t
say” to the same inquiry, and another replying “That’s correct” when asked if
he did not know one way or another whether his vote was counted, a matter that
could have been quickly settled by consulting the public record.
Not
even the Trump campaign’s Arizona State Election Day operations director Gina
Swoboda believed otherwise — and admitted as much under oath.
“I
don’t know whether they were counted or not,” Swoboda said, adding that she
could speak to voters’ “beliefs” but otherwise had “no way of knowing” whether
or not that was true.
Testimony by the Trump
campaign’s expert witness took a turn to the absurd when Zack Alcyone, whose
business bio boasts of his experience in “ballot access calculations,” conceded
that he is the business partner of Langhofer, the lawyer who argued the
president’s case all day.
The
scene echoed one in Chatham County, Ga., last week, in which a pair of Trump
campaign witnesses acknowledged that they didn’t actually know whether 53
ballots received after Election Day had been predated, as had been alleged.
Witnesses for the local board of elections testified under oath that they had
indeed been received on time.
An
attorney for the Arizona Democratic Party, Sarah Gonski, responded to the
spectacle by saying, “Your Honor, it’s not exactly clear what they’re asking
for, because it’s been a moving target.”
That
target moved again Friday. The Trump campaign filed a motion acknowledging that
its effort to challenge about 200 ballots in Maricopa County was now moot,
given that Biden’s margin in the state was more than 11,000 votes. The number
of remaining votes and contested votes in the case is now insufficient to change
the result, even if all of them were to go for Trump. That doesn’t mean the
Trump campaign will give up on Arizona, but given that this was an early legal
battleground, it reinforces that it’s running out of options.
And
that goes double with its legal representation. Political pressure has been
applied to large law firms representing Trump, with critics alleging they were
taking part in undermining democracy, given the lack of substance behind
Trump’s claims. On Wednesday, the largest of those firms, Snell & Wilmer,
withdrew from litigation in Arizona. And Friday, Trump’s lead law firm in
Pennsylvania, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, sought to abruptly withdraw from a lawsuit filed days
earlier.
It’s
not clear why the law firms have sought to withdraw from the cases, nor should
we expect them to elaborate, given that such firms will never acknowledge
publicly that they didn’t believe in the claims of their clients or submitted
to public pressure. But the withdrawals are difficult to separate from how the
cases have been going — especially given the pressure that has been brought to
bear in light of Trump’s baseless claims.
They
also suggest it will be difficult to retain top-tier lawyers to continue to
push Trump’s case, which is a real problem given the breadth of election results
that would need to be overturned.
(Republicans
including former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove have said that the margin is simply too great without
evidence of massive voter fraud, which the Trump campaign has yet to produce
and which has never been produced on such a scale as is required.)
Adding
insult to injury Friday, a judge in Michigan rejected the Trump campaign’s
effort to delay the certification of votes in Detroit, saying that allegations
of misconduct were “not credible” and that
granting the request “would undermine faith in the Electoral System."
The
ruling came as Trump continues to trail Biden by well over two percentage
points in Michigan, and the fact that it has pressed its case there is a clear
reflection of the desperate nature of his legal team’s effort. About 150,000
votes would need to be overturned, which would be, again, unprecedented.
That
desperation seems to be registering in plenty of other ways. The question is
increasingly how long the Trump campaign, which has conveniently used its legal
effort to retire debt and raise money for Trump’s other political efforts, can
keep the charade going.