As they frantically searched for ways to salvage
President Donald Trump’s failed reelection bid, his campaign pursued a dizzying
game of legal hopscotch across six states that centered on the biggest prize of
all: Pennsylvania.
The strategy may have played well in front of
television cameras and on talk radio. But it has proved a disaster in court,
where judges uniformly rejected their claims of vote fraud and found the
campaign’s legal work amateurish.
In a ruling late Saturday, U.S. District Judge
Matthew Brann — a Republican and Federalist Society member in central
Pennsylvania — compared the campaign’s legal arguments to “Frankenstein’s
Monster,” concluding that Trump’s team offered only “speculative accusations,”
not proof of rampant corruption.
It was led by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal
lawyer, who descended on the state the Saturday after the Nov. 3 election as
the count dragged on and the president played golf. Summoning reporters to a
scruffy, far-flung corner of Philadelphia on Nov. 7, he held forth at a site
that would soon become legendary: Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Just heating up was Trump’s plan to subvert the
election through litigation and howls of fraud — the same tactic he had used to
stave off losses in the business world. And it would soon spread far beyond
Pennsylvania.
“Some of the ballots looked suspicious,” Giuliani,
76, said of the vote count in Philadelphia as he stood behind a chain link
fence, next to a sex shop. He maligned the city as being run by a “decrepit
Democratic machine.”
“It is a sideshow, but it’s a harmful sideshow,”
Levitt said. “It’s a toxic sideshow. The continuing baseless, evidence-free
claims of alternative facts are actually having an effect on a substantial
number of Americans. They are creating the conditions for elections not to work
in the future.”
Not a single court has agreed with the strength of
the case, but that did not stop Trump’s team from firing off nearly two dozen
legal challenges to Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania, including an early morning
suit on Election Day filed by a once-imprisoned lawyer.
The president’s lawyers fought the three-day grace
period for mail-in ballots to arrive. They complained they weren’t being let in
to observe the vote count. They said Democratic counties unfairly let voters
fix mistakes on their ballot envelopes. Everywhere they turned, they said, they
sniffed fraud.
“I felt insidious fraud going on,” Philadelphia poll
watcher Lisette Tarragano said when Giuliani called her to the microphone at
the landscaping company.
In fact, a Republican runs the city’s election
board, and has said his office got death threats as Trump’s rants about the
election intensified. No judges ever found any evidence of election fraud in
Pennsylvania or any other state where the campaign sued — not in Michigan,
Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada or Georgia.
Instead, Trump lawyers found themselves backpedaling
when pressed in court for admissible evidence, or dropping out when they were
accused of helping derail the democratic process.
“I am asking you as a member of the bar of this
court, are people representing the Donald J. Trump for president (campaign) …
in that room?” U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond asked at an after-hours hearing
on Nov. 5, when Republicans asked him to stop the vote count in Philadelphia
over their alleged banishment.
“There’s a nonzero number of people in the room,”
lawyer Jerome Marcus replied.
The count continued in Philadelphia. The Trump
losses kept coming. By Friday, Nov. 6, when a state appeals court rejected a
Republican complaint over provisional ballots and a Philadelphia judge refused
to throw out 8,300 mail-in ballots they challenged, Biden was up by about
27,000 votes.
Nationally, the race had not yet been called. But it
was becoming clear that a Biden win in Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral
votes, was imminent.
When it came, Trump quickly pivoted to litigation. It
did not go well.
A U.S. appeals court found Pennsylvania’s three-day
extension for mail-in ballots laudatory, given the disruption and mail delays
cause by the pandemic. Judges in Michigan and Arizona, finding no evidence of
fraud, refused to block the certification of county vote tallies. Law firms
representing the campaign started to come under fire and withdrew.
That left Giuliani, who had not argued a case in
court for three decades, in charge of the effort to overturn the election.
“You can say a lot at a driveway (news conference).
... When you go to court, you can’t,” said lawyer Mark Aronchick, who
represented election officials in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and elsewhere in
several of the Pennsylvania suits. “I don’t really pay attention to the chatter
until I see a legal brief.”
On Tuesday, Giuliani stepped into the court room. He
was a late addition to the docket after election lawyers from Porter Wright
Morris & Arthur had bowed out over the previous weekend. He had an
entourage in tow, a show of force that had everything but a compelling legal
argument.
Giuliani asked Brann to hold up the certification of
the state’s 6.8 million ballots over two Republican voters whose mail-in
ballots were tossed over technical errors.
“I sat dumbfounded listening,” said Aronchick, a
seasoned trial lawyer.
“We were ready to argue the one count. Instead, he
treated us to an even more expanded version of his Total Landscaping press
conference,” Aronchick said. “It didn’t bear any relationship to the actual
case.”
Giuliani, admired by some for his tough talk as
Manhattan’s top prosecutor and his leadership as New York City’s mayor during
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, struggled to answer even basic legal questions.
But he waxed on about a supposed conspiracy to rig
the state election.
“The best description of this situation is
widespread, nationwide voter fraud,” Giuliani argued. Under questioning,
though, he acknowledged their complaint no longer included a fraud claim.
And then, just as it had at Four Seasons, reality came
crashing down on him, when news broke in the courtroom that the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court had rejected the campaign’s appeal over observer access in
Philadelphia. It was one of the campaign’s last remaining claims.
Even the dissent was crushing.
“The notion that presumptively valid ballots cast by
the Pennsylvania electorate would be disregarded based on isolated procedural
irregularities that have been redressed ... is misguided,” Chief Justice Thomas
G. Saylor wrote for the minority in the 5-2 decision.
Brann, who sits in Williamsport, let the federal
court hearing drag on past the dinner hour, and gave both sides time to file
additional motions. The campaign filings were replete with typos, spelling
mistakes and even an errant reference to a “Second Amendment Complaint” instead
of a second amended complaint.
The campaign took the opportunity to answer one of
the more puzzling questions that its election challenge raised: It only wanted
the presidential election results set aside, not votes on the same ballots for
other offices. The briefs were filed by Giuliani and co-counsel Marc Scaringi,
a local conservative talk radio host who, before he was hired, had questioned
the point of the Trump litigation, saying “it will not reverse this election.”
Aronchick balked at the campaign’s core premise that
local election workers — perhaps working for the Mafia, as Giuliani suggested —
had plotted to spoil Trump’s win.
“You’re going to suggest part of them are in a
conspiracy? How does that work?” Aronchick asked. “Who? Where? When? How?”
Brann, in his ruling, said he expected the campaign
to present formidable evidence of rampant corruption as it sought to nullify
millions of votes. Instead, he said, the campaign presented “strained legal
arguments without merit and speculative accusations.”
Trump could appeal the ruling to the 3rd U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, but that court may have tipped its
hand. In its Nov. 13 ruling, the court called it “indisputable in our
democratic process: that the lawfully cast vote of every citizen must count.”
Biden’s lead in the state has expanded to more than
80,000 votes.
“Our system depends on the possibility that you
might lose a fair contest. If that possibility doesn’t exist, you don’t have a
democracy,” said Levitt, the law school professor. “There are countries that
run like that. It just doesn’t describe America.”