SOME REPUBLICANS TELL TRUMP: “PRODUCE EVIDENCE OF YOUR CLAIMS”

 

…This is how many of us see the current GOP Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell

 

In a recent poll, 79% of Americans don’t believe Trump came close to winning the election.

 

The GOP’s and Trump’s campaign allegations of election irregularities.  So far, not one of them has been proven.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a few Republicans have backed President Trump’s efforts to contest his loss to President-elect, Joe Biden.  But that is despite the lack of evidence of any significant fraud plus sharp rebukes from election officials who defended the integrity of the vote.

Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said from the floor of the Senate that the president is “100 percent within his right” to pursue recounts and litigation. McConnell did not repeat Trump’s baseless assertions that fraud had cost him the election.  However, McConnell did say he had met with Attorney General William Barr and he, “supports the president’s right to investigate all claims of wrongdoing.”

So, what else should someone that is acting as the president’s personal attorney supposed to say?

“We have the tools and institutions we need to address any concerns,” McConnell said. “The president has every right to look into allegations and request recounts under the law.”

Separately, Barr gave the federal prosecutors a green light to pursue allegations of voting irregularities in certain cases before results are certified. His memo blatantly reversed the normal Justice Department guidance that prosecutors should not take steps in cases involving alleged voter fraud until the election results are in and made official by the state’s certification.

White House officials have said they don’t ever expect the president to concede the election, but they know he will probably say he can’t agree to the election results, but he doesn’t have any choice.  This probably won’t occur until after the states certify the elections around the first week of December.

Meanwhile, this week, GOP officials continue to rush to bolster Trump’s case, including the two current US senators from Georgia, who have demanded the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, after his office said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the state.

And the Republican attorneys generals of about a dozen states threw their support behind a legal effort pending before the US Supreme Court to throw out mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that were received after Election Day.  It’s only a small number of votes that state officials said would not be enough to change the outcome, so what’s the point….?

A handful of congressional Republicans did call on the president to produce evidence of widespread election fraud after Trump baselessly claimed he had won.

To more fully explain the poll where 79% of those polled Americans thought that Joe Biden had won the election, 19% thought that it wasn’t yet fully decided.  But only 3% thought that Donald Trump had actually won,

Behind the scenes, Trump advisers and allies are increasingly resigned to the Biden victory.  This is according to people familiar with internal discussions, who, of course, like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to share any private conversations.

But few White House individuals are actively discouraging the president or his campaign from pursuing all legal paths to contest the results. Only a smattering of Republican senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory, and there has been little coaxing on the part of senior GOP lawmakers to help Trump come to terms with his loss. Some said there is value in ensuring the integrity of this year’s results, while others described a chaotic and scattershot operation that they hoped would eventually push Trump to cooperate in a peaceful transfer of power.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

That all sounds nice but Trump’s rhetoric has inflamed some of his supporters around the country, who have gathered in small “Stop the Steal” protests and declared that they do not have faith in the results.

As a result, two starkly different tones prevailed throughout the day.  Inside the White House, aides described a deflated president aware of the difficulty of reversing the outcome and even declaring plans to run again in 2024.

But publicly, Trump fired off tweet after combative tweet asserting without evidence that results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada had been illegally rigged against him.  And his campaign announced at least one new federal lawsuit, in Pennsylvania, seeking to block state officials from certifying the results.

“Pennsylvania prevented us from watching much of the Ballot count,” Trump tweeted despite extensive reporting, and some live feeds, showing poll watchers had access. “Unthinkable and illegal in this country,” from Trump.

Since Election Day, the Trump campaign and GOP allies have made claims of election irregularities in six states where Biden holds the lead in the vote count. But they have yet to prove any widespread fraud and have largely suffered defeat in courts.

Much of the legal activity recycled previously dismissed allegations. The new Pennsylvania suit filed by the Trump campaign alleged - again - that some counties had improperly allowed voters to fix problems on mail ballots, a claim that was thrown out last week. It also falsely claimed that observers were not allowed to watch the processing and counting of ballots.

Trump aides, who of course, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly, said there was little expectation inside the campaign that litigation would overturn Biden’s win.  These same advisers have told Trump this directly. But they also said the campaign will pursue the cases to their own conclusions, in part to sustain an argument about the risk of voter fraud.  The campaign has also urged allies to publicly encourage people to report evidence or firsthand accounts of suspicious voter activity.

The campaign’s top two officials, Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, met with the staff at their Arlington headquarters and urged them to keep fighting, officials said, adding that campaign leaders were closely watching who was still showing up.

However, further complicating their effort: David Bossie, tapped to lead the campaign’s legal effort, tested positive for the coronavirus. 

It was clear that the campaign’s strategy is at least as much about rhetoric as about legal tactics. Clark, the deputy campaign manager, and others spent the weekend assembling a plan, and a messaging strategy, for various states, officials said. The campaign also sent out “talkers,” talking points, that included such suggestions as “This election is far from over,” “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states,” and “Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.”

In Michigan, where Republicans have so far lost their legal challenges, a conservative nonprofit law firm filed a new suit asserting that ballots in Wayne County, home of Detroit, had been counted from voters not on the rolls and without verification of voter signatures, citing six signed affidavits. The suit also alleged that Republican poll watchers were not allowed to witness the counting, even though more than 200 GOP challengers were inside the counting room at the TCF Center in Detroit, where votes were counted last week.

“The allegations in this suit appear to be an exaggeration of routine situations that arise every election,” said Christopher Trebilcock, a longtime Democratic election lawyer in Michigan. “They either don’t understand the process or don’t care what the law actually provides.”

In Nevada, the Trump campaign and Republicans have already lost two attempts to get courts to order changes to ballot counting in Clark County, the state’s largest Democratic stronghold. State and federal judges rejected their demands for emergency intervention, citing a lack of evidence of any widespread voter fraud.

In response, Trump allies made a slew of new unsubstantiated allegations. On Sunday, Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union claimed “thousands of examples of voter irregularities,” including a “Biden-Harris van” at the Clark County vote-counting center in which ballots were “opened with letter openers, and ballots were filled in and resealed.”

Biden’s 11,595-vote lead in Georgia means the race is eligible for a recount, but Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger emphasized it was unlikely to change the outcome of the election.

Just as more Republicans came forward to back Trump’s legal push, others came forward to urge the country to move on.

“At this stage, I think the transition should be underway, even though it’s not finalized,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). “We want to make sure that the interests of national security and smooth transition is carried out.”

Being another Republican that has also lost a national, presidential election, the rest of the country should probably follow his lead about the national security interests of this nation.

Copyright G. Ater 2020