President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will seek to join a long-shot legal effort at the Supreme Court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to effectively reverse Democrat Joe Biden‘s win in the presidential election.
Trump said that in addition to intervening in the Texas case, he or his campaign will ask to join lawsuits in a number of other states as part of his attempt to undo Biden’s victory.
Legal experts say that — like other such cases lodged by the Trump campaign and its allies since last month — Paxton’s effort targeting votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin has little if any chance of succeeding.
The Supreme Court has not said whether it will take Paxton’s case, which Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called a “publicity stunt.”
Hours after that filing, the Supreme Court refused to accept a case from a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania that challenged Biden’s win there, a refusal that could foreshadow the fate of Paxton’s case.
“We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one,” Trump wrote in a Twitter post Wednesday.
“Our Country needs a victory!”
The Republican president, who has repeatedly claimed without evidence that widespread fraud swindled him out of a victory over Biden, also downplayed the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the Pennsylvania case filed by Rep. Mike Kelly.
“This was not my case as has been so incorrectly reported. The case that everyone has been waiting for is the State’s case with Texas and numerous others joining,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “It is very strong, ALL CRITERIA MET.”
“How can you have a presidency when a vast majority think the election was RIGGED?”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany in her own tweet called Paxton’s action, “The most significant, comprehensive case yet, outlining the election irregularities of 2020.”
Paxton, a Republican who remains under indictment for felony securities fraud charges, on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court for permission to file a lawsuit that seeks to block the certification of Biden’s wins in the four battleground states.
Paxton argues that a block is warranted because of supposedly improper changes to voting procedures there in the past year, purportedly different treatment of voters in Democratic-heavy areas, and voting “irregularities.”
The legal action implicitly suggests that the legislatures in each of those states could effectively overrule the popular vote wins for Biden, and then appoint electors for Trump to the Electoral College, which actually chooses the winner of the national election.
That is the same the end-game strategy that Trump is pursuing, both through legal cases and by his pressuring of elected officials in battleground states.
Biden is projected to win 306 votes in the Electoral College when it meets next week, 36 votes more than he needs to clinch a White House victory.
If he were denied the electoral votes of the four states named in Paxton’s motion, Biden would have less than the 270 Electoral College votes that candidate needs to win the presidency.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul on Tuesday said, “I feel sorry for Texans that their tax dollars are being wasted on such a genuinely embarrassing lawsuit.”
“Texas is as likely to change the outcome of the Ice Bowl as it is to overturn the will of Wisconsin voters in the 2020 presidential election,” said Kaul, referring to the legendary Dec. 31, 1967, NFL Championship Game, when Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers defeated Texas’ Dallas Cowboys as temperatures at Lambeau Field hit 13 degrees below zero.
On the other hand, Rudy Giuliani, the Trump campaign’s top lawyer, on Tuesday called Paxton’s effort “a great filing in the Supreme Court.”
Giuliani insisted Wednesday morning that his and Trump’s fight to overturn the election will not end even if the Supreme Court rejects Paxton’s motion.
“No, the end of the line is when the state legislatures make the final decision on whether they’re going to assume control of this, because there’s a real battle going on,” Giuliani said during a call to the “Bernie & Sid” show on WABC-AM.
Giuliani was hospitalized with the coronavirus this week.
In the call Wednesday, Giuliani implied that the Trump campaign and its surrogates have repeatedly lost legal challenges that would undercut Biden’s win as a result of media “spin” that has affected judges who heard the cases.
“Judges are just human beings, they read — they probably read more of those newspapers than most people do, so they’re very affected by the spin that’s put on things,” Giuliani said.
“And the spin put on this is, ‘Well, Trump really lost and he’s being a sore loser.'”
Last month, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, Matthew Brann, blasted Giuliani’s legal arguments in a case that sought to invalidate millions of votes in the Keystone State.
“This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by the evidence,” wrote Brann, a former Republican official, in a scathing opinion rejecting Trump’s case.
