A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit by President Donald Trump’s campaign that sought to block that state’s certification of millions of voters, which is expected to confirm a win for President-elect Joe Biden there, CNBC reported.
The judge’s scathing decision is a crippling blow to Trump’s already extremely long-shot bid to invalidate enough ballots in enough states to reverse the former Democratic vice president Biden’s victory in the national presidential election, whose outcome is determined by the Electoral College.
The Trump campaign and its allies now have lost or withdrawn more than 30 lawsuits that were part of that effort.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann, in his written decision, said that the campaign’s lawyers, led by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, failed to present “compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption” in their unprecedented bid to invalidate millions of ballots.
“Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by the evidence,” Brann fumed. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
At one point, the judge compared the lawsuit’s claim that voters had been denied equal protection in how their ballots were handled to “Frankenstein’s Monster,” since that claim was “haphazardly stitched together” from two different theories in an effort to avoid having them separately dismissed because of legal precedent.
Brann’s ruling, which was issued two days before Pennsylvania’s counties are due to ceritify their election results to Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, made moot the question of whether he would bother to hold an evidentiary hearing in the case.
The Trump campaign had claimed that voters in Pennsylvania were denied their constitutional right to equal protection under the law by the fact that some counties in the state, but not all, permitted voters who had mailed in their ballots to “cure” problems with those ballots by casting a provisional ballot.
The former New York City mayor Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, the Trump campaign’s other top lawyer, said they would seek an expedited appeal of Brann’s decision at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
They also said they believed his ruling would “help us in our strategy” to get their claims heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Although we fully disagree with this opinion, we’re thankful to the Obama-appointed judge for making this anticipated decision quickly, rather than simply trying to run out the clock,” Giuliani and Ellis said in a statement.
It was Ellis who on Tuesday, after Giuliani’s performance in court was criticized by a number of legal analysts, tweeted: “You media morons are all laughing at @RudyGiuliani, but he appears to have already established a great rapport with the judge, who is currently offering recommendations on martini bars for Team Trump in open court.”
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