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GROWING CONCERN ABOUT TRUMP LEGAL FIGHT: Thursday’s news conference by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis marked a turning point of sorts in the way some Republicans view the president’s challenge to election results around the country. Among those Republicans — Trump supporters all — there is concern that the attorneys’ sensational theories of election fraud are hurting the president’s cause rather than helping it.
Most worrisome was Powell’s presentation. The lawyer — who had earned the admiration of many for her bold and determined representation of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — told reporters that Joe Biden’s wins in some key states was the result of “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States.” The Dominion voting system and Smartmatic software used in the interference, Powell continued, was “created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez” to corrupt elections there. “President Trump won by a landslide,” Powell concluded. “We are going to prove it.”
But Powell did not prove it. She did not even allege with any specificity what she believes actually happened in the election. Powell said the Venezuelan software has the “ability to flip votes” and “can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President [sic] Biden, which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system, and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.”
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But Powell offered nothing to prove what she said happened. Her case appeared to be that it could have happened. Nor has Powell or the rest of the Trump team filed a lawsuit alleging that it actually occurred. In an interview Thursday night with Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs, Powell said the Trump team is “still in the process of collecting evidence. It’s coming in in massive amounts…I would think we would have fraud complaints ready sometime by late next week at the latest.”
A few hours later, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said that he had invited Powell to be on his program. “We would have given her the whole hour,” Carlson said. “But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us, Powell has never given them any evidence either, nor did she provide any today at the press conference.” Most importantly, Carlson said, Powell “never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.”
For his part, Giuliani pointed to allegations of irregularities in handling ballots and in not allowing Republicans to observe the ballot-counting process. There appears to be little doubt that some of that occurred, but the Trump team has not been able to show that it might have been large enough to affect the election results. Nevertheless, Giuliani flatly declared, “I can prove to you that [Trump] won Pennsylvania by 300,000 votes. I can prove to you that he won Michigan by probably 50,000 votes.”
Thursday’s news conference would have been an excellent opportunity for Giuliani to prove just that. But he did not. Meanwhile, National Review’s Andrew McCarthy published an analysis suggesting existing Trump litigation in Pennsylvania “cannot conceivably change” the results in that state. And without a successful challenge in Pennsylvania, “the president has no chance to reverse the nationwide result.”
After Powell and Giuliani, Ellis essentially pleaded for more time to make the case. “What you’ve heard now is basically an opening statement,” she said. “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. This is not a ‘Law and Order’ episode where everything is neatly wrapped up in 60 minutes.” Ellis went on to suggest that the media has made unfair demands for quick evidence from the Trump team. “We have been asked to provide an entire case that generally would take years in civil litigation,” she said.
But the Trump team needs to be fast. Time is passing. Georgia is scheduled to certify its results — an extremely narrow win for Biden — today. Monday is certification day for Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states the Trump team says saw massive fraud. Tuesday is Minnesota, North Carolina, and Ohio. And more follow quickly after that. The Electoral College is scheduled to vote on December 14.
After the news conference, some people familiar with the matter who are on the president’s side and who are open to the idea of voter fraud expressed concern that Powell and the others had made sensational allegations without offering evidence to support them. Not evidence that there is some software somewhere in the world that can change votes. Evidence that it was actually used to change votes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Why didn’t the team hold off on the allegations until they had the evidence ready to present in a lawsuit? One Republican who is even open to the specific allegations of software manipulation said, “I’m assuming they’ve got something.” That’s a big assumption.
The Republicans saw the entire exercise as moving Trump’s case backward, not forward. Yes, there are legitimate legal issues surrounding the campaign. For example, one of the biggest is in Pennsylvania, where the state supreme court unilaterally changed election law that had been rightfully passed by the legislature. But that case will not change the results in Pennsylvania; it is important for elections in the future. And that is not what Giuliani, Powell, and Ellis are talking about. Without actually making the case, they are talking about a vast conspiracy, directed “from a centralized place,” in Giuliani’s words, to change hundreds of thousands, or millions of votes. By doing so, in the way they are doing it, they are losing support rather than making gains.
