Guest views are now limited to 12 pages. If you get an "Error" message, just sign in! If you need to create an account, click here.

Jump to content

Johnny Dinar

Members
  • Posts

    923
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Johnny Dinar

  1. Republican 2024 presidential hopefuls already descending on newfound battleground Georgia Published: Nov. 19, 2020 at 3:18 p.m. ET By Associated Press ATLANTA (AP) — Move over, Iowa. Step aside, New Hampshire. Georgia would like a few moments of early-stage presidential campaign time. The state has fast become a stage for the cast of possible Republican presidential candidates after President Donald Trump’s defeat. Even as votes are still being tallied in the last election, Georgia’s two high-profile Senate contests are drawing top GOP politicians to the state to campaign, network and raise their profiles. Too soon? Not if you’re Marco Rubio. The Florida Republican arrived in Georgia last week to rally Republicans behind Senate colleagues David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as they try to quash their respective Democratic challengers, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Fellow Floridian Rick Scott followed last Friday. A third Republican senator widely viewed as having presidential ambitions, Tom Cotton of Arkansas senator, will campaign in central Georgia on Friday. Vice President Mike Pence is also due in the state on Friday. Meanwhile, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has sent a flurry of fundraising emails coaxing rank-and-file Republicans to bankroll the Georgia runoff campaigns. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a former presidential candidate, has mentioned the contests in his regular circuit of cable television appearances. Loeffler’s campaign website homepage features a photo of the senator with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republican-2024-presidential-hopefuls-already-descending-on-newfound-battleground-georgia-01605817090?siteid=yhoof2
  2. Trump's chief of staff told GOP senators to 'make the most of' the next 45 days — an apparent admission that Trump could leave office Mia Jankowicz Thu, November 19, 2020, 7:42 AM EST·3 min read At a meeting, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told senators to "make the most" of President Donald Trump's remaining few weeks in office, the Associated Press reported. The remark is striking given Trump's continued refusal to concede that he lost the election. One senator present reportedly said Meadows added the qualifier "whether it's 45 days or four years and 45 days," still incorporating the hope that Trump might somehow win. As time passes, more and more Trump allies are — either on purpose or through verbal slips — letting go of the pretense that Trump could govern for another term. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. President Donald Trump's chief of staff has told GOP senators to "make the most of" the remaining 45 days of their time with Trump, an apparent admission the president will soon leave office. Mark Meadows made the comment in a meeting with lawmakers on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. It is striking in light of Trump's continued refusal to acknowledge he lost the 2020 presidential election and that Joe Biden is now president-elect. The AP said one of the senators, John Cornyn of Texas, paraphrased Meadows's message by saying "basically just that we got about 45 days left of the president's term." Meadows apparently did add a caveat in line with Trump's false insistence that he won. Cornyn, again paraphrasing, said that Meadows added "whether it's 45 days or four years and 45 days," the AP reported. All the same, the implication was clear: Senior members of Trump's administration have no certainty that he will remain in office. The White House did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. It is one of several covert or unintended signals that the GOP increasingly accepts the validity of Biden's victory in private, even as most of them continue to publicly support Trump's position. Trump continues to mount numerous legal challenges to the election result, and he has blocked the General Services Administration from authorizing official transition resources to Biden. In Pennsylvania, where Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is presenting a case to challenge Biden's win there, one the state's US senators, Pat Toomey, told the AP: "Let me just say, I don't think they have a strong case." On Tuesday, four GOP senators approached Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who represents California in the Senate, to congratulate her on her victory, the CNN reporter Manu Raju said. Of those, only one — Ben Sasse of Nebraska — has publicly acknowledged the election result. One of those who congratulated her, James Lankford of Oklahoma, later told CNN that he was simply being polite. Despite the continued public stonewalling of Biden's transition efforts, a trickle of current and former Trump administration officials have privately reached out to him with offers of informal help, CNN reported. "Nothing that would get us in trouble," the official told CNN. "Just an offer to be of help. They know what we mean, and what we can and can't do or say." Trump's refusal to release top-level information for Biden's transition is prompting a growing chorus of criticism. Some Senate Republicans — while still supporting the president's right to mount legal challenges — have said Biden should still be briefed, Politico reported. Lankford told the outlet: "Both of them have got to be ready to serve, if selected. We don't know who the winner is. So keep the briefings going." Insider and Decision Desk HQ projected Biden's election win on November 6, a day before major networks drew the same conclusion. Of the multiple lawsuits launched by Trump's team since Election Day, none have been successful. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-chief-staff-told-gop-124255676.html
  3. Shunning the Trans-Pacific Partnership Was a Costly Mistake The Editors Wed, November 18, 2020, 2:07 PM EST·3 min read Within weeks of his 2016 election victory, President Trump announced plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral trade deal intended to build an economic bulwark against China. That decision paved the way for this weekend’s signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a free-trade agreement between China and 14 Asian neighbors. The RCEP — signed by the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as well as Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea — covers 2.3 billion people, making it the largest-ever trade agreement, even after India’s withdrawal scaled it back. Though of marginal material consequence to the global economy, its signing represents another step in China’s march to regional dominance. The RCEP will phase out most tariffs between member countries over a 20-year period, a provision that essentially replicates existing trade arrangements. Indeed, previous deals with much more comprehensive and stringent rules have already achieved most of the trade liberalization included in the RCEP, muting its effect. Rather than altering the region’s economic terrain, the RCEP merges a hodgepodge of bilateral and plurilateral deals into a single framework. It does, though, contain one significant provision instituting a common rule of origin. Whereas previously businesses had to attain various certifications to ship products between member countries, they now need just one so-called certificate of origin. That makes supply-chain management easier and could incentivize companies to locate more of their production in the region. Otherwise, the agreement maintains the economic status quo in Asia: It leaves trade in services, investment, and intellectual property untouched, and unlike the TPP, it contains no environmental or labor rules. Still, the sheer extent of the trade zone should worry Washington, which has missed opportunity after opportunity to convert the grievances of China’s neighbors into meaningful policy victories. If previous ASEAN agreements are any indication, the scope of the RCEP is likely to expand over time. And those nations most willing to partner with the U.S. against China — Japan and South Korea — rank among the largest beneficiaries of the agreement. By abdicating our role in the region, we’ve allowed our allies to grow more dependent on Chinese corporations and consumers just as Beijing ratchets up its military and diplomatic aggression. The Trump administration deserves credit for emphasizing the dangers of China’s economic malfeasance. For too long, Western leaders overlooked the trade barriers, industrial subsidies, and intellectual-property theft that gave China an unfair advantage in international trade. But over the past four years, the White House never delineated clear, cohesive goals for economic policy in Asia, often taking measures at cross-purposes with each other. Tariffs meant to punish China ended up hitting imports from Japan, Taiwan, Canada, and the European Union. As with his decision to withdraw from the TPP, Trump’s trade war repeatedly weakened the U.S. allies best positioned to combat Beijing. Unfortunately, we don’t expect any better from the incoming administration. President-elect Biden has a history of downplaying the Chinese threat and has not announced plans to rejoin TPP or put together an alternative trade deal. The longer Washington neglects its leadership role in Asia, the sooner Beijing’s dream of regional dominance will come to fruition. https://www.yahoo.com/news/shunning-trans-pacific-partnership-costly-190715078.html
  4. Yes, Trump Is (Still) Engaged in an Attempted Coup; and Yes, It Might Lead to a Constitutional Crisis and a Breaking Point 19 NOV 2020 NEIL H. BUCHANAN World leaders, the media, most of the public, and even a few Republicans are now matter-of-factly saying that the post-election insanity being inflicted upon us by Donald Trump and his enablers is simply the dying gasp of a narcissistic sore loser. Perhaps that is true, but there are some very bad signs that suggest that we must be vigilant and not assume that the danger has passed. I have been writing for years that Trump’s rise to power represented an existential threat to the rule of law in this country, or what I called four years ago a potential “extinction event for American constitutional democracy.” I have even written down some ideas about what life would be like in a post-constitutional America (here and here). The results of the 2020 election are, therefore, quite welcome. Trump and the Republicans’ panicked efforts to set those results aside, however, are simply shocking even as they are unsurprising. There are many ways for national leaders to commit coups to try to hold onto power, and we should be clear that Trump has already tried and failed more than once to become a dictatorial strongman. In this column, I will first discuss what a coup is, then explain the ways that Trump has failed in his attempts thus far, and finally warn about how this could still end in a constitutional crisis that Trump creates and exploits to stay in power. This is not a prediction but a warning. If we want the United States to continue to be a constitutional republic, we cannot assume that Joe Biden’s election victory assures his inauguration on January 20, 2021. Not without a lot more work by those who care about this country. There Are Many Kinds of Coups One of the most frustrating aspects of writing about an extreme specimen like Trump is that many people are loath to describe his extremism accurately. Some combination of personal modesty (“I don’t like to use over-the-top language.”) and motivated disbelief (“Oh, come on, he’s not that bad!”) leads people to understate what is happening. News organizations eventually started to call Trump’s lies lies, but they are still more prone to use euphemistic terms like “unsupported assertions” or “claims without evidence” than to simply call Trump a liar. Similarly, we are peppered with descriptions of Trump’s “racially charged comments” or his “controversial language that many view as bigoted” rather than calling him the White supremacist that he is. Thus it is not surprising that calling this an attempted coup d’etat causes some people to reach for the smelling salts. To be fair, there are meaningful distinctions that can be made by modifying the word coup, as I discuss below. But even so, one political scientist insisted in a Washington Post op-ed that what Trump and the Republicans have been attempting “do[es] not constitute a coup.” Why not? “Because Trump is attempting to remain in power, rather than remove someone else from it[,] his efforts come closer to what scholars call an attempt at a ‘self-coup’—or, using the Spanish term, an autogolpe—in which a head of state attempts to remain in power past his or her term in office.” So it is not a coup because it is a self-coup? Does that not still make it a coup? Are defensive linemen in football not linemen? Are pale ales not ales? Are general elections not elections? Yes, there are reasons for the modifiers, but that does not make what Trump is doing not a coup attempt. The most addlepated response that I have seen thus far, however, arrived via email to complain about my most recent Verdict column: The writer added that he is “a lifelong liberal from Massachusetts and a career (38 year) public defender” and ended with this: “Please tone it down.” While concern trolling is always annoying and invariably disingenuous, this particular example of it was both simply naïve and dishonest. When something very bad is happening or is about to happen, we do ourselves no favors by being understated. When someone yells, “Hit the deck!” our response should not be, “Rude!” In any case, Dictionary.com provides this definition of coup d’etat: “a sudden and decisive action in politics, especially one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force” (emphasis added). Trump is trying to stay in power illegally (changing the post-January 20 government from the one that the people chose back to himself). This is a coup attempt. And even if one is fixated only on violence, as I noted in my Verdict column last week, there is reason to believe that Trump might yet resort to force, either by installing loyalists in the Pentagon (ahem) or by activating a heavily armed group of eager domestic paramilitary groups who are currently “standing back and standing by.” There are reasons that we use modifiers to describe different types of coups. There are military coups, bloody coups, bloodless coups, silent coups, people’s coups, aborted coups, and so on. And, as above, self-coups. They are all properly described as coups. For those who are interested in a clear explanation of the various types of coups—especially the nuances that arise when a government commits a coup to stay in power—Dean Falvy’s July 23 Verdict column, in which he coined the term “selfie coup,” is by far the best that I have seen. But whatever one thinks about the Marquis of Queensberry rules of word choice in the midst of an attempted coup, the point is that this is an existential political crisis, and Donald Trump is trying to hold onto power by whatever means necessary. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election and should take office in 62 days, but Trump is trying to prevent that from happening. Again, this is the very essence of an attempted coup. We should be clear that Trump has already tried and failed to seize and maintain power illegally. For example, he railed at his most loyal yes-man, Attorney General William Barr, because Trump wanted Barr to arrest his political opponents—a classic move by autocrats who attempt to seize power illegally. Trump also tried to use the Postal Service to prevent legal votes from being delivered and counted. Lest we forget, Trump also tried to get Ukraine to invent compromising political dirt to use against Joe Biden. That led to impeachment and a sham trial with no conviction, but it fortunately did stop Trump from successfully extorting a foreign government to help him steal our election. Currently, Trump is in the midst of another failing effort to hold onto his power, as he pursues dozens of baseless lawsuits designed to try to overturn election results in key states. From my position as a law professor, I find it incredibly gratifying to see how well our legal system can work, with independent judges applying the law fairly to the facts—or, in these cases, to the lack of facts. Indeed, if we do come out of this with our legal system intact, we can all be proud that the conventional anti-lawyer wisdom turns out to be quite false that “anyone can sue anyone and win, no matter how frivolous the claim.” Trump has also fired his own cybersecurity expert for daring to declare that the election was well run and fair. Again, this is what people do when they are planning to seize power illegally. The Threats Yet to Come We should thus be happy that Trump’s attempts to subvert the election have all failed thus far. As I discussed in my column last week, however, we should not be lulled into complacency by the utter failure of one of Trump’s strategies. Other legal strategies are, unfortunately, on deck. In particular, the “legislatures-only” gambit would have Trump’s supporters rely on what they will dishonestly claim is unambiguous constitutional text: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors . . . .” This does not require Rudolph Giuliani spreading fertilizer in the driveway of a landscaping store, or having him embarrass himself in federal court in Pennsylvania. It instead requires that state legislatures attempt to say after the fact that they will use their inherent constitutional power to say that the “manner” of choosing electors is for the legislature itself to appoint them, even though there has been an election. As I wrote last week, the legal arguments against this pseudo-literalist interpretation of Article II are incredibly strong. Even so, at least some Supreme Court justices seem to be quite open to overruling precedent and allowing such a power grab (aka coup) to go forward. To be clear, a majority of the Court would have to say not only that legislatures can act alone but that they can change the rules even after an election. The Court ought to reject that second possibility even more easily than the first, but there is no telling how this Court will rule on either issue. The good news is that Trump’s parade of losses in the silly cases thus far actually makes it more difficult for legislatures to justify doing any of this. In that sense, Trump would probably have been better off tweeting and holding shouting sessions in front of reporters to gin up anger among his base without actually testing any of the claims in court. Interestingly, I predicted in the months before the election that Republicans would go along with Trump’s coup attempt in part because many of them would have lost their own elections. Even though that turned out not to be true (with Republicans gaining House seats and thus far holding the Senate), however, they are still almost all-in on allowing Trump to rage about the election being stolen and fraudulent, at the very least. In any case, the other good news is that this gambit would only work if it involved lawless moves by several states, not just one. With Trump’s team already having failed to get Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to back down, and with Michigan now set to certify Biden’s comfortable win in the Great Lake State, it would appear that Biden is set to win 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. What needs to happen for Trump and the Republicans to pull off a bloodless coup? Both Arizona and Georgia not only have Republican legislatures but Republican governors as well, meaning that they could try to appoint Trump’s slates of electors without testing the “legislatures only” part of this Hail Mary strategy. They would still face the problem of trying to change the rules after everyone knows that Biden won under the existing rules, but again, they might try, and at least five of the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices might go along. Even so, that would result in Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and Georgia’s sixteen electoral votes swinging to Trump, leaving him at 259. He would have to get at least one of the states with Democratic governors and Republican legislators to go for the Hail Mary. Interestingly, flipping Wisconsin’s ten votes would create a 269-269 tie, which is the only situation in which the election would be determined (under the Twelfth Amendment) in the House of Representatives. If, on the other hand, Wisconsin’s Republicans tried to appoint a Trump slate of electors to compete with the slate of Biden electors that Wisconsin’s governor would try to appoint, the more likely outcome would be that neither slate would be recognized. As I recently explained in a piece co-authored with Professors Michael Dorf and Laurence Tribe, this would result in Biden winning the election, because a candidate needs only to win a majority of the electors appointed. In that column, we discussed an example with Pennsylvania’s electors in play, but in the example here, Wisconsin’s ten allotted votes would go to neither candidate, such that Biden would win by a vote of 269-259. This means that Trump needs three states, at least one of which has a Democratic governor, to successfully appoint electors in defiance of their states’ voters in order to pull off this Hail Mary play. Could he do it? The longer this goes on, the more agitated his supporters become, and the more pressure is put on Republicans to go along with anything and everything necessary to assist in Trump’s coup. Waiting for Trump to calm down—even as his rage continues unabated—only makes this more likely. Again, I am not predicting even that Arizona or Georgia would go along with this, nor am I certain that the Supreme Court would do such a large amount of heavy lifting, especially because what Trump would ask them to do is so nakedly outrageous. It would be a constitutional crisis of the first order, and thus far it seems that many Republicans do not have the stomach for it. But that could change. Even if this is Trump’s last gasp at a bloodless coup, however, he can—and certainly seems inclined to—try to move to less savory alternatives. It is certainly true, as the Biden campaign has said, that “[t]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.” And that is exactly the right tone to take, in their position. Neither the Secret Service nor members of the military or other law enforcement will (other than some rogue actors) carry out illegal orders, including orders from someone who is not the legitimate President of the United States. Al Gore, for example, could try to walk into the White House and tell the guards to arrest the kitchen staff, but no one would listen to him. They would, however, arrest Gore. The problem is that it might not be possible to know who is the rightful President, meaning that the Secret Service would not know who is the trespasser. The last gasp of Trump’s series of coup attempts would thus involve doing everything possible to muddy the waters and argue that even mere uncertainty about the outcome of the election would entitle Trump to stay. My central point in this column, however, is quite simple. Trump’s losses are piling up, making it tempting to think that he has become an ineffectual loser with no cards left to play. That is a dangerously complacent idea, however, because Trump has shown that he will try anything to illegitimately seize power—to commit a coup against the legitimately elected incoming President of the United States. One can hope that his losing streak will continue, but hope is not a plan. People must make it clear that any avenues by which Trump might try to stay in power are illegitimate—and then we will hold on tight and hope that enough people in responsible positions listen to reason, allowing us to keep our democracy intact for at least a few more years. https://verdict.justia.com/2020/11/19/yes-trump-is-still-engaged-in-an-attempted-coup-and-yes-it-might-lead-to-a-constitutional-crisis-and-a-breaking-point
  5. Local Officials Rebut 3 Dead-Voter Claims By Trump Campaign Davey Alba Thu, November 19, 2020, 8:16 AM EST·3 min read Last week, the Trump campaign published a series of posts on Facebook and Twitter identifying dead Americans whose names, the campaign alleged, were used to cast votes in this month’s election. The seven people were from Georgia and Pennsylvania, two battleground states that were crucial to Joe Biden’s victory. At least three of them, however, either did not actually vote in the election or were alive and well and cast legal votes, according to state and county election officials. The name that spread the most online was Deborah Jean Christiansen of Roswell, Georgia. On Facebook, 166 posts mentioning her name as proof of voter fraud collected over 280,000 likes, shares and comments from last Wednesday through Sunday, according to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool. The vast majority of that activity came from a video post from the account for “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the Fox News show. The post, “Yes, Dead People Did Vote in the Election,” generated 2.5 million views on Facebook. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times But Christiansen did not vote, according to election officials. “We don’t have a record of a new voter registration, and we don’t have a record of a ballot being sent to this person,” Jessica Corbitt, a spokeswoman for Fulton County in Georgia, said in an interview. “We have her in the system as deceased.” Some news outlets, like CNN and Agence France-Presse, reported that there was no fraud in Christiansen’s case. But each of the posts generated far fewer shares and interactions than the posts containing the false information, according to CrowdTangle data. The Trump campaign also argued that James E. Blalock Jr. of Covington, Georgia, and Linda Kesler of Nicholson, Georgia, had voted fraudulently. But county election officials told The New York Times that the two people had been correctly marked as deceased and did not vote. Mrs. James E. Blalock Jr., the widow of James Blalock, and a Lynda Kesler with a different address, birthday and Social Security number, voted legally, the officials said. The Trump campaign’s original posts about Blalock and Kesler collected 26,600 likes and shares on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle data, while a report from a local news outlet correcting the claim collected just 10,100. The post about Blalock was eventually deleted on Twitter but remains up on Facebook. On Friday, Carlson apologized for his erroneous reporting — but only in the case of Blalock. “On Friday, we began to learn some of the specific dead voters reported to us as deceased are in fact alive,” Carlson said in a statement on Tuesday evening. “We initially corrected this on Friday. We regret not catching it earlier. But the truth remains: Dead people voted in the election.” The other four people the Trump campaign held up are from Trenton, Georgia; and Drexel Hill, South Park and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Local election officials said they were still investigating those allegations. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. https://news.yahoo.com/local-officials-rebut-3-dead-131655906.html
  6. Fact check: Story of Army raid to seize election servers in Germany is false The claim: The military performed a raid in Germany to seize servers that show Donald Trump won the election Joe Biden is the president-elect, after winning key battleground states and securing enough electoral votes to win the White House on Nov. 7. A few more state calls brought his total number of electoral votes to 290 — significantly over the 270 votes required to win. In contrast, President Donald Trump has claimed 232 electoral votes. There are 16 votes remaining, in Georgia, pending a recount — though Biden is in the lead and the result will not change the outcome of the election. But some users on Facebook claim the military has seized servers in Frankfurt, Germany, that show very different results. Most of the posts on Facebook reference a post on Parler, a social media platform that has recently grown in popularity among conservatives. "So our military does a little raid in Germany to retrieve the server where our voting info was routed," the posts read. "After analysis of the server, they discover that this is what the voting outcome actually looks like." More: Fact check: Dominion voting machines didn't delete votes from Trump, switch them to Biden The map attached to the posts shows Trump with a whopping 410 electoral votes and Biden at just 138 electoral votes. Users on Facebook also shared clips of Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, speaking about the purported raid last week. "I don't know the truth, I know that there was a German tweet, in German, saying that on Monday, U.S. Army forces went into Scytl and grabbed their server," Gohmert said. Scytl is a software company based out of Bacelona, Spain, that specializes in election technology. Earlier in the clip, Gohmert said that its servers contained information that could help establish "how many votes were switched from Republican to Democrat." Travis Pope, the user who posted the video of Gohmert, told USA TODAY that "Louie Gohmert is about as honest as they come" and that he believes him over "fake news." George Papadopoulos — a former Trump campaign adviser who was sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying to the FBI — also wrote about the incident on Twitter. But he misstated the company Gohmert had referred to, claiming instead that the servers belonged to Dominion Voting Systems. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-story-army-raid-233620905.html
  7. Because he only hires the best... Trump's election lawsuits plagued by elementary errors When President Donald Trump sends lawyers to court, it seems he’s not sending his best. Fighting to challenge an election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden, Trump has launched a barrage of lawsuits across the country. Top Republicans have stood behind him and said they will wait for those cases to be resolved before officially recognizing the winner, a standard that has no modern precedent. But his attorneys have repeatedly made elementary errors in those high-profile cases: misspelling “poll watcher” as “pole watcher,” forgetting the name of the presiding judge during a hearing, inadvertently filing a Michigan lawsuit before an obscure court in Washington and having to refile complaints after erasing entire arguments they’re using to challenge results. “The sloppiness just serves to underscore the lack of seriousness with which these claims are being brought,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. Trump’s legal team has lost repeatedly in court and failed to uncover the kind of widespread fraud that might challenge Biden’s leads in several key battleground states. His lawyers and allies have still pressed forward with asking judges and certification authorities to block the results. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers held a press conference Thursday in which they berated reporters for questioning their claims and cited a Michigan affidavit already dismissed by a judge. They also argued a debunked conspiracy theory that Venezuela could have hacked election results through machines used by local authorities. “I know crimes. I can smell them,” Giuliani said as streaks of sweat and what appeared to be hair dye ran down the sides of his face. “You don’t have to smell this one. I can prove it to you 18 different ways.” Experts have noted that Trump is not employing the Republican Party’s top election lawyers, including those who represented the GOP in the Florida recount two decades ago. Law firms have faced public pressure from Trump opponents not to fight the election on his behalf. Legal giant Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from a case in Pennsylvania last week. Attorneys at the larger, more established firms that had been representing Trump have expressed concern privately about pushing a legal strategy without a body of evidence, and worry that it’s wrongly furthering a false narrative that the election was fraudulent, according to two people familiar with the litigation. The people were not authorized to speak about litigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The day before a major argument in Pennsylvania, three lawyers for Trump withdrew and were replaced in part by Marc Scaringi, an attorney and talk show host who wrote a blog post after the election referring to “President-elect Joe Biden.” Scaringi himself had told listeners on his radio show days after the election that “there are really no bombshells” about to drop “that will derail a Biden presidency,” and noting that several of the lawsuits “don’t seem to have much evidence to substantiate their claims.” Much of the derision has focused on Giuliani, who appeared in court on Tuesday in the Pennsylvania case. It was the first time he had represented a client in federal court in almost three decades. During the hearing, Giuliani forgot the name of an opposing lawyer, misstated the name of the presiding judge and mistook the meaning of the word “opacity.” Hasen pointed to Giuliani’s apparent lack of knowledge of the meaning of “strict scrutiny,” the highest of three standards used by judges to evaluate how a law or action taken by the government affects someone’s constitutional rights. The Trump campaign has claimed without providing evidence that Pennsylvania violated voters’ rights by allegedly allowing election fraud. Strict scrutiny is a basic concept taught to aspiring lawyers and constitutional law classes. “I’ve never seen an election lawyer handle a case as poorly as Giuliani has,” Hasen said. “The idea that the lawyer arguing the most important case in Pennsylvania would not understand what it means to apply the standard of strict scrutiny in a constitutional case is mind-boggling.” On Wednesday, the Trump campaign asked to file a new complaint in Pennsylvania partly to “restore claims which were inadvertently deleted,” according to their filing. An attachment to the filing, in citing state election law, references “only one pole watcher” instead of “poll watcher.” Experts say Trump has almost no chance of reversing his loss. “It’s kind of a fallacy to say, well, Trump might be doing better if he had better lawyers,” Hasen said. “Part of the reason he doesn’t have good lawyers is he doesn’t have good claims to bring.” https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-election-lawsuits-plagued-elementary-194614295.html
  8. Did you hear, the military seized a server in Germany with millions of votes for Trump!! He now has 420 electoral votes....
  9. Yes from fuzzy dice and good times to a face mask and madness.... I thought it was a good way to view the change....
  10. I'll say to him what his supporters say to everyone..... "Suck it up buttercup"
  11. At first it was surprising. Then it became a bit worrisome. Now it is just sad... January 20th is going to be a tough day of reality for some folks...
  12. “We’re going to have an orderly transfer from this administration to the next one,” McConnell said. “What we all say about it is, frankly, irrelevant.” https://www.yahoo.com/news/mcconnell-transfer-presidential-power-won-210912798.html
  13. This is really a big step in the right direction.... Thanks for the good news!!!
  14. And we were worried about the Russians interfering with the election... It looks like the Banana-Republicans are the ones trying to change the results... Lindsay Graham trying to get his own party member to throw out ballots in Georgia. Republican county commissioners in Michigan trying to hold up certification over 367 votes. Let's all say it together..... Lock them up! Lock them up! Lock them up!
  15. Georgia's Republican secretary of state says railing against absentee ballots cost Trump the state Tim O'Donnell Tue, November 17, 2020, 3:17 PM EST·1 min read Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger isn't holding back at this point. Raffensperger has been at the forefront of an intra-party feud in Georgia over his handling of the election, which he has defended ardently, and over unfounded claims of voter fraud. On Tuesday, in an interview with Atlanta's WSB-TV, the secretary reportedly took the fight straight to President Trump, who he suggested had no one to blame but himself for his defeat. Trump repeatedly railed against absentee voting leading up to the election, and Raffensperger believes that if he didn't sow distrust in the system, he could've picked up Georgia's 16 electoral votes, arguing that 24,000 Republicans who voted absentee in Georgia's GOP primaries did not vote in the general election. Raffensperger went so far as to say that Trump incidentally "suppressed" his own base with his complaints.
  16. I wasn't talking abut our members. I'm talking about the party leaders who are turning their backs to their sworn duties are elected officials.
  17. I don't understand why people take this stuff personal. Unless you are an elected official I don't think you are responsible for the actions of the party leaders... I wonder what people are going to do after Biden is sworn in. Are they going to protest? Are they going to raise arms against the military? Are they going accept it? The clock is running and people are going to have to decide whether they accept it and move on or call for a civil war which would end terribly for anyone who takes arms against our military. If these little militias think the can overthrow our government, they have a lot to learn.
  18. No I don't believe he could be that out of touch either. His people are starting come out and admit it is over. He will come around, but he will never say he lost... His past shows that he cannot accept defeat and will blame everyone around him. In school his study partner received a better test score than he did and he accused his study partner of cheating... I only hope that his supporters realize it is over and come back to supporting our country instead of supporting a man.
  19. Sorry CL, but the recounts are not showing any fraud. The president is someone who has never been able to admit defeat. Hell he even called the Emmys rigged because he didn't win. His presidency is quickly coming to an end. People can either accept it or not, but it is what it is.
  20. Certification is coming soon and in 64 days the president elect will take office and America will move on... Every lawsuit is failing, the lawyers are quitting. The recounts are happening and the results will not turn anything around. If you believe the election is filled with fraud, I suggest you volunteer to work the next election. JMHO
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.