Former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney offered a bleak assessment of the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the election.
Mulvaney, who served as President Trump’s top aide from January 2019 to March 2020, called the campaign’s strategy “not a serious legal inquiry” during a Monday interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.
Bartiromo prefaced a question to Mulvaney by bringing up the Trump campaign’s first independent Supreme Court filing, in hopes of reversing actions taken by Pennsylvania’s high court. The campaign aims to reverse three Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases that changed the state’s mail balloting laws immediately before and after this year’s election.
“Mick, what do you make of this suit? Could this be a potential win for President Trump?” she asked.
“Potentially, sure. But I think we’d have to be honest with ourselves, Maria; no one’s been impressed with the results of the legal team up till now,” Mulvaney said. “It’s been run mostly as a PR campaign, it seems, not a serious legal inquiry.”
Mulvaney noted that he thinks the president will “use every tool available to him,” before adding that the two Georgia Senate elections, scheduled for Jan. 5, will play a role in determining how election-related fraud is investigated.
“I think one of the things that not enough folks are talking about, though, is probably the best way at this point for the president to make sure we finally find out what happened in the election in 2020 is to win the Senate in Georgia, because if the Democrats take control of the Senate, there will be no opportunity to do any investigations after Jan. 20,” he said.
Mulvaney has not been shy in criticizing the campaign’s legal efforts. Last month, he rebuked Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and personal friend of the president, who has been heading up the campaign’s legal team.
To date, the lawsuits filed from the campaign, as well as those from GOP-affiliated or adjacent groups, have been overwhelmingly rejected in the court of law, and President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn-in as president on Jan. 20.
