Trump
lawyer details far-fetched strategy to reverse Pennsylvania win for Biden
PUBLISHED
WED, NOV 25 202012:30 PM EST
Kevin
Breuninger@KEVINWILLIAMB
KEY POINTS
·
A lawyer for President
Donald Trump’s campaign revealed that the campaign could be relying on pulling
off a complicated — and possibly unprecedented — legal and legislative trick
shot to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Pennyslvania and possibly
in other states.
·
That far-fetched
strategy would require a federal court to invalidate Pennsylvania’s
certification of its election results, and then get the state’s General
Assembly to agree to send Trump electors to the Electoral College.
·
Biden is projected to
win 306 electoral votes, 36 more than he needs to clinch the presidency.
A lawyer for President
Donald Trump’s campaign on Wednesday revealed that the campaign could be
relying on pulling off a complicated — and possibly unprecedented — legal and legislative
trick shot to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania and
possibly in other states.
That far-fetched
strategy would require a federal court to invalidate Pennsylvania’s
certification of its election results, and then get the state’s General
Assembly to agree to send Trump electors to the Electoral College.
The idea is buried in a
footnote in a three-page letter that campaign attorney Marc Scaringi wrote to
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
The Trump campaign is
asking that appeals court to hear its bid to block the effect of Tuesday’s
certification of a win for Biden in Pennsylvania.
That state has 20 votes
in the Electoral College. Barring any court or legislative intervention, Biden
will get those votes, which, along with several other states, have given him 36
more electoral votes than he would need to win the presidency. The Electoral
College is set to vote on Dec. 14.
Scaringi’s letter says
U.S. courts can decertify the certification of Pennsylvania’s election,
and thus invalidate the ascertainment of those results, which he wrote was
“allegedly issued” by Gov. Tom Wolf on Tuesday.
There is nothing alleged
about Wolf’s ascertainment of the certified election results, which the
governor announced in a tweet that day.
Scaringi’s footnote went
on to say, “Moreover, the Pennsylvania General Assembly has the power to
appoint the Commonwealth’s presidential electors.”
“A decision by the
District Court that President Trump won the legal votes may have significant
impact on the General Assembly,” the lawyer wrote.
Scaringi’s letter
explicitly details the strategy that the Trump campaign has hinted around for
weeks, ever since Biden was projected as the winner of the national election.
That strategy is to
cobble together enough successful legal challenges to Biden’s victory in enough
states to undo that victory, or, if necessary, get enough Republican-controlled
state legislatures to overrule the popular vote wins for Biden and send Trump
electors to the Electoral College.
As part of that
strategy, Trump campaign lawyers have repeatedly made allegations of widespread
voting fraud. But they have not provided any evidence of such fraud.
And the campaign and its
allies have repeatedly lost or withdrawn court cases that would achieve that
goal via lawsuits.
Last week, the GOP
leaders of Michigan’s legislature, after a meeting at the White House with
Trump, pointedly said that they would not overturn their state’s certification
of its vote results.
Days later, Michigan
certified that Biden had won that state, which has 16 electoral votes.
Despite that, the Trump campaign
has said it has hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court, which has three
Trump-appointed justices, ultimately will hear its claims.
The appeal in
Pennsylvania was filed after the Trump campaign suffered a major loss in U.S.
District Court in the state.
Federal Judge Matthew
Brann on Saturday rejected the campaign’s efforts to block
Pennsylvania’s certification of millions of voters.
Brann, in a searing
opinion, called the campaign’s claims “without merit,” and said that Trump’s
legal team, led by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, failed to present
“compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption” in the
state’s mail-in ballots.
In their appeal, the
Trump campaign did not request that Brann’s ruling be reversed.
Instead, the campaign
asked the 3rd Circuit to allow the campaign to file an amended version of its
legal complaint, to “restore claims which were inadvertently deleted” from a
previous version.
Brann’s ruling
effectively denied the request to add back in numerous claims that the Trump
campaign previously cut from its own lawsuit.
Those included the claim
that Pennsylvania elections officials had obstructed Trump’s supporters from
observing the counting of mail-in ballots.
“Over 70 million
Americans voted for President Donald J. Trump,” Scaringi’s letter said. “The
Campaign’s claims should be heard on the merits, and not dismissed for
perceived procedural irregularities.”
Scaringi’s letter
Wednesday also asked the 3rd Circuit to allow Giuliani to make oral arguments
in the appeal.
Giuliani is not
currently admitted to argue in that court, and “has not been able to obtain the
necessary certifications due to Covid-19 complications with government entities
in New York,” Scaringi wrote.
Lawyers for the
Democratic National Committee, one of the many parties who have joined the
appeal case in opposition to the Trump campaign, did not immediately respond to
CNBC’s requests for comment on Scaringi’s letter.
But Biden’s campaign on
Tuesday scoffed at the Trump campaign’s refusal to acknowledge that the
president lost.
“It’s readily apparent
to everyone besides Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and [campaign senior legal
advisor] Jenna Ellis that this election is over and that Joe Biden won
resoundingly,” said Bob Bauer, the Biden campaign’s senior legal advisor.
“Trump did everything he
could to disenfranchise voters and stop the results from being certified in
Pennsylvania, including filing over 15 unsuccessful lawsuits — most recently
producing one of the more embarrassing courtroom performances of all time, with
the judge in the case ruling that their arguments were ‘without merit’ and
‘unsupported by evidence,’” Bauer said.
“Trump did not succeed
in Pennsylvania and he will not succeed anywhere else. Trump’s lawsuits will
continue to fail, as they have in over 30 cases since election day, states will
continue to certify their results, and Joe Biden will be sworn in as President
on January 20, 2021.”
