2020 Election Campaign

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What is that massive fraud election all about when:

• Even Bill Barr argues there was no fraud
  
• Even Erick Ericsson argues there was no fraud
  
• Rudy Guliani is simply in it to get a Presidential pardon from Trump
  
• The legal arguments presented in court are quite different from the grandiose claims made in the media
  
• They are 39-1 down in legal cases
  
• Republican officials and judges, even the ones appointed by Trump, keep shooting them down
  

Could it just be the biggest scam of them all, when the Trump fraud campaign has already collected more than $170M from poor suckers, and the form of their

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A Donald Trump supporter who donated $2.5m to help expose and prosecute claims of fraud in the presidential election wants his money back after what he says are “disappointing results”. Fredric Eshelman, a businessman from North Carolina, said he gave the money to True the Vote, a pro-Trump “election ethics” group in Texas that promised to file lawsuits in seven swing states as part of its push to “investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election”. But according to a lawsuit Eshelman filed this week in Houston, first reported by Bloomberg, True the Vote dropped its legal actions and discontinued its Validate the Vote 2020 campaign, then refused to return his calls when he demanded an explanation. Trump 'voter fraud hotline' inundated by prank calls Read more The founder of Eshelman Ventures llc, a venture capital company, said he asked “regularly and repeatedly” for updates, the lawsuit asserts, but that his “requests were consistently met with vague responses, platitudes, and empty promises”.

Trump supporter who gave $2.5m to fight election fraud wants money back | US political financing | The Guardian

For a man obsessed with winning, Donald Trump is losing a lot. In the month since the election, the president and his legal team have come no closer in their frantic efforts to overturn the result, notching up dozens of losses in courts across the country, with more rolling in by the day. According to an Associated Press tally of roughly 50 cases brought by Trump’s campaign and his allies, more than 30 have been rejected or dropped, and about a dozen are awaiting action.

The advocacy group Democracy Docket put Trump’s losses even higher, tweeting on Friday that Trump’s team had lost 46 post-election lawsuits following several fresh losses in several states on Friday. Trump has notched just one small victory, a case challenging a decision to move the deadline to provide missing proof of identification for certain absentee ballots and mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. Five more losses came on Friday.

Trump's latest batch of election lawsuits fizzle as dozens of losses pile up | US elections 2020 | The Guardian

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U.S. Attorney General William Barr has been one of President Donald Trump's most aggressive defenders, but this week, Barr essentially acknowledged Joe Biden as president-elect when he told the Associated Press that there is no evidence showing that widespread voter fraud robbed Trump of a victory. And Fox Business' Lou Dobbs is furious, accusing the Trump loyalist of joining "the deep state." Tuesday night on his Fox Business show, Dobbs made the baseless claim that in "six key battleground states," there has been "clear electoral fraud" that "nullified the will of the people in the November election." And he accused Barr of betraying Trump by siding with "insidious RINOs" and "radical Dems."

Fox's Lou Dobbs goes off the rails and accuses Bill Barr of joining 'the Deep State' to work against Trump - Alternet.org

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In an hour-long phone call on Saturday, Donald Trump pressed Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there in the election the president refuses to concede. The Washington Post obtained a tape of the “extraordinary hour-long call”, which Trump acknowledged on Twitter.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

Raffensperger, a Republican who has become a bête noire among Trump supporters for repeatedly saying Biden’s win in his state was fair, said: “Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.” Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

He also insisted: “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Trump did not win Georgia, which went Democratic for the first time since 1992. Its result has been certified and will stand. Attempts to pressure Republican officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania, other battleground states, have failed, as have the vast majority of challenges to results in court..

Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, went further, calling for Trump to be impeached a second time, even though he has little more than two weeks left in office. “The president of the United States has been caught on tape trying to rig a presidential election,” Bookbinder said. “This is a low point in American history and unquestionably impeachable conduct. It is incontrovertible and devastating.

'I just want 11,780 votes': Trump pressed Georgia to overturn Biden win | Donald Trump | The Guardian

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Abrams lost her 2018 gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate who also ran the election as secretary of state. Alleging improprieties, Abrams refused to concede. Asked about Republican charges that Trump’s objection to the presidential result is no different, she said: “Well, it’s not simply different circumstances. It’s apples and bowling balls. “I pointed out that there were a series of actions taken that impeded the ability of voters to cast their ballots. And in almost every one of those circumstances, the courts agreed, as did the state legislature.” By contrast, she added, “President Trump has lost every single one of his challenges in the state of Georgia and he has no evidence.”

On CNN, Tapper played remarks by Hawley from January, during Trump’s impeachment. “The consequences to the republic of overturning an election because you don’t like the result,” he said then, “and because you believe that that election was somehow corrupted, when in fact, the evidence shows that it was not … that’s an interesting approach. I think it’s crazy, frankly.”

'Traitors and patriots': Republican push to keep Trump in power seems doomed | Donald Trump | The Guardian

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Though Sunday’s Washington Post scoop provides arguably the starkest example of Trump’s long-running attempts to subvert democracy in order to remain in power — not to mention a more than passing resemblance to President Richard Nixon’s presidency-ending tapes — it is by no means the only time Trump has mounted an effort of this sort since losing reelection. In at least three other battleground states that he lost to Biden — Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — Trump has directly reached out to lawmakers and other officials to urge them to help him overturn the election results in their states, potentially awarding him an unelected second term in office. In Pennsylvania, one Republican lawmaker — state Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward — told the New York Times that she chose not to push back on Trump’s baseless fraud accusations. “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said in December, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

Washington Post: Trump demands Georgia secretary of state “find” votes to alter election results - Vox

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At the White House, Mr. Trump struck a defiant tone, insisting that he would remain a potent force in American politics even as aides and allies abandoned him and his post-presidential prospects turned increasingly bleak. Behind closed doors, he made clear that he would not resign and expressed regret about releasing a video on Thursday committing to a peaceful transition of power and condemning the violence at the Capitol that he had egged on a day before.  

Live News Updates: Impeachment, Trump's Twitter and Capitol - The New York Times

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Folks, we just survived something really crazy awful: four years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a network without integrity, each pumping out conspiracy theories without truth, brought directly to our brains by social networks without ethics — all heated up by a pandemic without mercy.

Opinion | President Donald J. Trump: The End - The New York Times

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Former President Trump sought to oust his acting attorney general in a bid to overturn the presidential election results in Georgia, according to a new bombshell report in The New York Times. Trump reportedly planned to replace then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer at the Justice Department, in an effort to apply pressure to Georgia politicians to overturn the results of the race there. Rosen had refused to back Trump’s disputed claims that voter fraud had cost him the election, drawing the president’s ire.  Trump had also pressed Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate what he said were irregularities in the election, though he never provided any evidence for his claims. Among the investigations he wanted launched was one into Dominion Voting Systems, a company that made the election equipment Trump’s backers falsely said had ties with Venezuela to prevent Trump’s reelection.  The plot failed after a group of Department of Justice (DOJ) officials uncovered the plan and threatened to resign en masse if Trump and Clark followed through with it. Rosen stayed in his position for the remainder of the administration.

Trump planned to oust acting AG to overturn Georgia election results: report | TheHill

• Shows how democracy depends not just on "institutions" but, critically, on people doing the right thing.
  
• Shows how vulnerable democracy is, people "doing the right thing" can be easily replaced..
  

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Last week, Donald Trump finally left the White House, after two and a half months of trying to steal the election — which culminated in Trump inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol. Even before he sent a mob to violently interrupt the certification of Joe Biden's win on January 6, Trump's efforts to overturn the election were relentless to the point of being uncountable: Dozens of lawsuits (which were nearly all struck down), pressure campaigns on local election boards and state legislators, an extortion scheme against Senate Republicans, threats against state officials, demands that then-Vice President Mike Pence illegally invalidate the election, and even meetings to explore the possibility of a military coup. In the face of all this, a narrative has shaped up: Trump's failure to pull off a coup was largely due to his own shortcomings.

It's a narrative that started early, with Max Boot of the Washington Post opining shortly after the election that he's "never been more grateful for President Trump's incompetence," because he "can't even organize a coup d'état properly." It culminated in Adam Serwer of the Atlantic arguing that Trump's "assault was most often futile, almost always buffoonish."

To be clear, no one is saying that Trump's efforts were inconsequential, just because he failed to steal the election. Even Ross Douthat, who was most devoted to the "incompetence" narrative, admitted in his New York Times column that it was bad that a violent mob had descended on the Capitol, killing a police officer and coming perilously close to getting their hands on the lawmakers they were threatening. As Ed Kilgore wrote last week at the New Yorker, the lesson we all learned is that there were "some moments of real peril," and Trump got distressingly close to pulling it off at times. Still, the focus on why Trump failed is largely on his own inadequacies and bad planning — Kilgore suggests he could have succeeded with "better timing and better lawyers" — and some lucky breaks, such as the quick thinking of some Capitol police who saved lawmakers from the insurrectionists..

Trump came closer to stealing a 2nd term than many realize — here's what really stopped him - Alternet.org