On November 12, former President Donald Trump’s team of electoral lawyers knew that he had lost his candidacy for re-election, which, despite Trump’s public tweets and comments, “there was no substantial evidence of electoral fraud and there was nothing close by. of ‘irregularities’ to reverse the outcome in the courts, ” The New York Times reports. But his protests only made Trump turn to allies saying what he wanted to hear, so November 12 was also the day that “Trump’s long, fragile legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something entirely different – an extralegal campaign for subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of its most devoted followers that it made the January 6 deadly attack on Capitol almost inevitable. “
Trump’s experienced legal team quietly disappeared or was put aside by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and other lawyers “ready to move forward with propaganda processes that skated along the lines of legal ethics and reason”, the Times reports. This eventually included “the vast majority of Republican attorney generals, whose Supreme Court case seeking to cast off 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House.”
Prior to Thanksgiving, Trump’s allies – including Kris Kobach, a voting restrictions activist who previously led Trump’s “electoral integrity” commission; former North Carolina Supreme Court President Mark Martin; and Lawrence Joseph, a lawyer who worked to protect Trump’s tax returns – started working on a new lawsuit that, although “without legal or factual merit” was “rich in the kind of sensational claims” that would certainly spread across the conservative media , The Times reports. The argument was that Trump states could ask the Supreme Court to reject 20 million votes in certain states that President Biden won because, they claimed, those Biden states effectively cheated.
“Only one type of lawyer can bring a case against one state against another directly to the Supreme Court: a state attorney general,” the Times reports. “The president’s original electoral lawyers doubted that any attorney general would be willing to do so,” but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton took the chance. When the Texas attorney general refused to be involved in the lawsuit, Paxton hired Joseph as a special outside attorney, not revealing to the court that Joseph and other Trump external advisers had written the petition. Read more about Trump’s extralegal campaign at The New York Times.
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