Prominent conservative lawyers went to the trouble of examining in detail at all the lawsuits that were filed in 2020 to see if there was any truth to the assertions that there was massive voter fraud. Guess what?
It was obvious, of course. But it’s important that these conservatives did this work because Republicans all over the country are pretending that there was massive fraud in order to restrict voting going forward and give themselves an advantage. These attempts are going to end up in court and this sort of evidence will be important:
A group of conservatives, including prominent lawyers and retired federal judges, issued a 72-page report on Thursday categorically rebutting each of the claims made in court by former President Donald Trump and his supporters over the 2020 election results.
The report, “LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election,” looked at more than 60 court cases Trump and his supporters filed and lost in six key battleground states. It reached the “unequivocal” conclusion that the former Republican president’s claims were unsupportable — which Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security as well as election officials nationwide debunked days after the 2020 election.
The report was released as the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol has been holding public hearings that have connected Trump’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election to the attack that disrupted Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. Trump is considering an early 2024 presidential run announcement, CNN has previously reported.
“There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct,” the report says.
The report is signed by retired federal appeals court judges Thomas B. Griffith, J. Michael Luttig and Michael W. McConnell, former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, former US Sens. John Danforth and Gordon H. Smith, longtime Republican election lawyer Benjamin L. Ginsberg and veteran Republican congressional chief of staff David Hoppe. Several of them are longtime Trump critics.
“Even now, twenty months after the election, a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time,” the report says.
The report warns that it’s “wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.”
It delved into a detailed examination of each case brought by Trump and his supporters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump and his backers alleged fraud, irregularities and procedural deficiencies in their challenges in court.
Trump and his allies lost nearly all the more than 60 cases they brought challenging the 2020 election results, the report noted. Twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, 14 were dropped by Trump and his supporters, and 30 included a hearing on the merits, it found.
The group of conservatives argued that Trump and his supporters had “an obligation to recognize that the election debate was over.”
“Questions of election legality must be resolved dispassionately in courts of law, not through rallies and demonstrations—and most emphatically, not by applying political pressure and threats to induce Congress to ignore its constitutional duty and the electoral outcome for which the people voted, and which the legal processes of the affected states had examined and confirmed,” the report says.
We know that he was planning to do this if he lost the election regardless of the facts at hand. He could have lost by a million votes in every state and he still would have done it. But for the few people left on the GOP side who are still in touch with reality, some of whom may be in the judiciary, these facts may have some persuasive power.