President Trump on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene in Texas’s lawsuit challenging Joe Biden’s win at the Supreme Court.
In a brief filed by John Eastman, a professor at the Chapman University School of Law, Trump asserted that the federal government had an interest in Texas’s case, in which state Attorney General Ken Paxton accused Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia of abusing the mail-in ballots in the 2020 election.
“The violations of state election law, which is the ‘manner’ the Legislatures of the States have established for choosing presidential electors, violates the Electors Clause of the U.S. Constitution and thus this matter arises under federal law,” Eastman wrote.
Eastman added that because many Republicans won down-ballot races, which typically occurs when the top of the party’s ticket wins, it depicted Trump in an unusual situation where he “had coattails but … apparently no coat.”
“This, despite the fact that the nearly 75 million votes he received — a record for any incumbent president — was nearly 12 million more than he received in the 2016 election, also a record,” Eastman wrote, adding, “These things just don’t normally happen, and a large percentage of the American people know that something is deeply amiss.”
Eastman, echoing arguments laid out by Paxton in his complaint, said that officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia “under the guise of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic” tampered with the system of mail-in voting to skew to a Democratic advantage.
“For the first time in history, these officials flooded their States with millions of ballots sent through the mail, or placed in drop boxes, with little or no chain of custody and, at the same time, intentionally weakened or eliminated the few existing security measures protecting the integrity of the vote,” Eastman wrote.
Trump Wednesday morning teased the filing in a series of tweets, where he asserted that there is “massive evidence of widespread fraud in the four states” Paxton named.
“We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case,” Trump wrote. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”
Seventeen states on Wednesday joined Texas’s suit against the four states.
Texas’ suit comes amid the Supreme Court’s rejection of a similar case raised by Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly. The court of Tuesday denied Kelly an injunction in an unsigned order, just hours before the so-called safe harbor deadline, the date after which the court typically does not hear election disputes.
