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"There is no hidden motivation and nothing unusual and nothing that could cause our relationship to deteriorate... This is purely a formality."Earlier this month, the president's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, informed reporters that Russia would wait to see the final results, or for one candidate to concede, before reaching out to either. He reiterated that "we consider it correct to wait for the official summing up of the results of the elections."
"We are facing [a] winter that's going to drive people inside more and more, and we're really at risk of seeing caseloads go up, and hospitals get overwhelmed, and more loved ones dying. So we need to do everything we can right now to slow the spread of Covid-19, to stop the spike in its tracks. A normal Christmas is quite frankly right out of the question."Covid-19 has been a gift to authoritarian leadership, especially those with a lockdown-the-herd mentality.
Meanwhile Trudeau brushed off claims that Ottawa would use emergency powers to re-introduce its own national-style lockdown, saying he is "not looking to bring in a federal hammer to try and do things."
Chief Public Health Officer Dr Theresa Tam warned "we are not on a good trajectory" as she discussed the latest Covid modelling. "I think across the board, across Canada, we have to say the time is now, with urgency, that we limit contacts."
"It's nothing that we have talked [about] before. It's not what you heard in the press conference [on Thursday] either.A state judge has rejected the final pending Arizona lawsuit (brought by two private citizens), which alleged election officials failed to follow proper procedures.
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 โ there's going to be a proof โ of how poorly run they ran the elections in one of their major counties," Sekulow said.
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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.
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.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.
"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.
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."

"We're in a time of anxiety, where people are looking for reasons for things that are happening to him, the difficult moments we're in. It's nice to be able to find someone to blame, something to point to, something to get mad at.
"We're seeing a lot of people fall prey to disinformation. If conservative MPs and others want to start talking about conspiracy theories, well, that's their choice. I'm going to stay focused on helping Canadians get through this, on learning lessons from this pandemic, and making sure that the world we leave to our kids is even better than the world we inherited from our parents."
Comment: President Trump turned out to be wiser than they thought. The PTB couldn't let that happen.
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