NOVEMBER 13, 2020
President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr on May 15, 2019. – Evan Vucci/AP
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A group of 1,000 attorneys, including retired federal and state judges, state attorneys general and law professors criticized the Trump administration over baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“Every candidate has a right to ensure that an election is conducted lawfully. However, court challenges, if any, must be based on facts, on evidence,” stated the letter, which asked public officials to stop making false claims of systemic fraud that President Donald Trump has claimed “stole” the election from him.
“The President of the United States has directed the filing of court cases seeking to stop ballots from being counted on the ground that there has been widespread ballot fraud. His sons have sharply criticized Republicans who are not backing their father’s claims,”
Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have made statements backing Trump’s lawsuits and claims of fraud.
In a statement, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said: “The President owes it to the 73 million people who voted for him to ensure that the election was fair and secure, and he also owes it to everyone who voted for Biden. Every American deserves the peace of mind that our elections are sound.”
Trump had 72,319,510 votes. More than 77 million Americans voted for President-elect Joe Biden, winning the popular vote by about 5 million.
Trump campaign lawsuits
Trump has so far refused to concede to Biden, who beat the president in key battleground states that Trump won in 2016. The Trump campaign has filed a flurry of state and federal lawsuits in five states where Biden won to challenge election results, stop the counting of votes or block results from getting certified.
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But legal experts said that the Trump campaign is highly unlikely to succeed in court. The president’s legal team would have to convince judges that widespread fraud exists and could change the outcome of the election, but they have provided scant evidence and such allegations of systemic problems have so far failed to hold up in court.
In Michigan, a federal lawsuit filed earlier this week relied heavily on dozens of anecdotes from affidavits from poll watchers to support the claim that something sinister had occurred. Although the witnesses claimed being denied access to the vote counting, intimidation, ballot-counting problems, glitches and backdating of ballots, the allegations don’t show widespread voter fraud. Local election officials have also denied that ballots were improperly backdated, saying an incident was the result of human error and has been corrected.
In Arizona, where the president’s campaign has alleged “systemic, improper” vote overrides, a lawyer for the campaign acknowledged during a hearing that it is not alleging fraud but is simply raising concerns about a limited number of “good faith errors.”
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign has alleged that its poll observers were denied access to vote counts in Philadelphia. But during a recent hearing, a lawyer for the campaign acknowledged the opposite, saying there’s “a non-zero number” of observers present during ballot counting. The campaign also filed a lawsuit this week broadly attacking the state’s mail-in voting system, but legal experts said the case has little chance of succeeding.
‘Abuse of the rule of law’ and ‘assault on democracy’
The letter, which was signed by former Democratic and Republican administration officials, called out attorneys representing Trump, citing the American Barr Association’s code of conduct barring lawyers from misleading the court.
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“While an apparently defeated candidate has the right to pursue challenges that are authorized by law, it is an abuse of the rule of law to file charges that lack an objective evidentiary basis, and it is a violation of attorney ethics to represent a party that files such charges purely for political purposes,” said Stuart Gerson, a former Justice Department official under the presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and one of the letter’s signers.
Michael Frisch, an ethics counsel at Georgetown Law and former disciplinary prosecutor in Washington, D.C. said, the president is trying to sow doubt on the legitimacy of an election that he lost by creating a narrative “that’s very much like birtherism.”
“Elected officials, whether they’re senators, Cabinet members or lawyers representing the president, should have a responsibility to ensure that when claims are being made in court, that there is substantial basis in fact on those claims,” said Scott Harshbarger, former state attorney general in Massachusetts. “What we have seen is that there is simply no basis for this continued assault … it is an assault on democracy.”
The letter also singled out Attorney General William Barr who, earlier this week, authorized federal prosecutors to pursue allegations of voting irregularities before election results have been certified. The action, detailed in a carefully worded two-page memo, bucked decades of Justice Department policy that prohibited interventions that could influence election results and opened the department to claims of partisan interference that could delay the traditional post-election transfer of power.
The attorney general told prosecutors they could open inquiries “if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.”
A Justice Department official previously said that Trump did not direct Barr to take action. But the timing of the memo drew nearly as much notice as its contents, with Trump’s legal team largely failing in their efforts to contest voting in several swing states.
The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Courtesy/Source: This article originally appeared on USA TODAY
