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The Trump campaign is bringing "legitimate accusations" to court through affidavits of credible witnesses and other evidence used in its challenges to electoral outcomes in various states, Federal Election Commission Chairman Trey Trainor said.
Trainor said his review of evidence, including numerous affidavits claiming voter fraud and a sworn
statement by a prominent mathematician flagging up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots,
met the first level of legal scrutiny under what's known as motion to dismiss or "Rule 12(b)(6)" of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which would dismiss less credible claims.
Noting the subsequent legal threshold beyond a "motion to dismiss" is the "summary judgment phase," Trainor said that
under this phase, the credibility of witnesses is presumed to be accurate, especially given the caliber of the testimonies Trainor has observed to date.
"When considering a motion for
summary judgment, a judge will view all evidence in the light most favorable to the movant's opponent," explains
Cornell University Law School's Legal Information Institute website.
"What I would be concerned with, if I were on the other side of these election contests that are going on around the country, is that if you look at the level of evidence that has been provided by these affidavits — hundreds of affidavits that corroborate events that have happened on the ground — in a summary judgment phase of these cases,
you have to take the evidence of the plaintiff as being true," Trainor told
"Just the News AM" television show Friday morning.
"The court has to take the evidence of the plaintiff as being true and see whether or not the other side can make a case against it," added Trainor. "So, the massive amounts of affidavits that we see in these cases show that there was in fact fraud that took place. And the other side really needs to answer these questions."
On Thursday the Trump campaign, led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, presented what it called its "opening statement" in a press conference. Members of the campaign's legal team reiterated that it would seek to protect the privacy of many of its sworn witnesses, waiting to sharing their identities with the court, to shield them from potential harassment.
With the Trump campaign's lawsuits in targeted battleground states across the country in various phases of progress through the courts, Trainor said, "At the end of the day, what I would say is that these are legitimate accusations that are going to be tried in court."
"And we need to let this legal process play out," Trainor added, "so that we come to a valid conclusion to this election that everybody believes to be legitimate."
In an interview with John Solomon on a Just the News election special, renowned legal scholar
Alan Dershowitz said that Trump campaign legal challenges to 2020 presidential election results could rise to the Supreme Court, provided that plaintiffs demonstrate that sufficient numbers of votes were affected to influence outcomes in particular states.
Dershowitz also said it was an uphill battle for Trump to win the election, saying the constitutional questions raised by the possible lack of certifying election results in certain states have never been asked before in American history.
The national conservative legal group Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society on Friday
announced that it will file federal and state lawsuits challenging the presidential election results in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. The Trump campaign is joining with the Amistad Project on the lawsuits on a case-by-case basis, Giuliani said.
Comment: Trump's lawyers are planning a new
Georgia lawsuit which attorney Jordan Sekulow says will be "shocking."
"It's nothing that we have talked [about] before. It's not what you heard in the press conference [on Thursday] either.
Sekulow, the son of Trump personal attorney and impeachment defender Jay Sekulow, said it is "something completely separate" from the allegations contained in the press conference held by lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Rudy Giuliani.
"They've got to be outcome determinative, but I will tell you, the Lt. Gov. [Geoff Duncan] in Georgia, the Secretary of State in Georgia [Brad Raffensperger] in Georgia, they're in for quite a shock on Monday and Tuesday about how poorly they run and they ran — there's going to be a proof — of how poorly run they ran the elections in one of their major counties," Sekulow said.
...
Sekulow said that his team is working on a constitutional case, while Powell, Giuliani, and Ellis are working on a case involving voting machines and allegations of fraud.
A state judge has rejected the final pending
Arizona lawsuit (brought by two private citizens), which alleged election officials failed to follow proper procedures.
Laurie Aguilera had claimed she was denied the right to vote because she was not given a new ballot after her vote was rejected by the tabulation machine. Meanwhile, Dovocan Drobina claims that his vote was not properly counted by the machines.
"I believe that it is the appropriate resolution and that is what I'll be doing," Mahoney said at the bench without elaborating on her reasons for dismissing the case with prejudice. She added that she would be issuing an order with her decision in writing at a later time.
Aguilera believes her ballot was rejected because she had used a sharpie to fill it out. Her lawyers had asked the judge for injunctive relief to allow Aguilera to cast a new ballot prior to the state's certification of the election results.
State officials had previously said that sharpies would not affect the ballots.
Former 8chan admin and cyber expert Ron Watkins points out that, despite officials saying nothing to see here, using sharpies can cause an error. Officials say that's fine, because the vote can then be tabulated manually. But that's the problem. Software techs can then tabulate the vote any way they want. Poll observers don't watch them do it.
A federal judge shot down the campaign's latest lawsuit in
Pennsylvania:
US District Court Judge Matthew Brann has ruled to dismiss the lawsuit from the Trump campaign on Saturday, saying the president's legal team failed to present "compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption" which would have warranted the court "disenfranchising almost seven million votes."
"That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence," Brann said in the 37-page statement.
The court refused Trump's legal team the right to amend the complaint on the grounds that it had already been amended once, and pointing to the looming Monday deadline for Pennsylvania to certify the votes.
The lawsuit, filed by the Trump campaign on November 9, claimed that electoral officials in some of the state's counties allowed voters to cast provisional ballots if they ran into any problems with mail-in ballots, such as the lack of "secrecy envelope," while other counties didn't. The complaint argued that the different treatment of voters in such cases amounted to a breach of the US Constitution.
Brann dismissed the argument, calling the legal challenge a "Frankenstein's monster" which did not justify the remedy proposed by the Trump campaign - to invalidate allegedly illegal votes.
Responding to the ruling, the Trump campaign's legal team, headed by Rudy Giuliani, said that although they were "disappointed" that they "did not at least get the opportunity to present our evidence at a hearing," they would seek "an expedited appeal" to the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, which has a conservative majority.
The campaign apparently found a silver lining in the ruling - which is seemingly another blow to the president's legal efforts to contest the election - saying the decision "turns out to help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the US Supreme Court."
Trump himself vowed to appeal the decision, blasting it on Twitter as "a continuation of the never ending Witch Hunt."
Stay tuned for how this plays out. The Republicans stole the 2000 election from the Democrats. Will the Democrats steal this one? If not, and Trump is chosen the winner and the Democrats are charged with fraud, just imagine the nutto stuff that will continue after.
Many of us who would like to be able to vote for a presidential candidate is actually just and brilliant and "Top of the Class", but - for whatever reason - we are not given that opportunity. Sooooo, here is some light hearted humor.
Don't take it too seriously. Ha, ha, ha
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