Trump legal team zeroes in on expulsion of election observers, data irregularities

President Trump's campaign legal team has beefed up with several senior lawyers as it prepares to challenge hundreds of thousands of votes cast in Democratic stronghold cities like Detroit and Philadelphia without required GOP observers, arguing the expulsions created disparate treatment or unequal protection of voters in violation of the Constitution.

The team led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and longtime Trump private lawyer Jay Sekulow has been expanded to include former Justice Department officials Victoria Toensing and Sidney Powell, former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova and trusted campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis.

Paul Clement, a George W. Bush administration solicitor general with a strong record of arguing in front of the Supreme Court, would likely argue any cases that reached the nine justices, officials told Just the News.  

The lawyers are prepared to argue that votes that were counted on election night and the day after without GOP observers present in Democrat-led cities should be thrown out because they were tainted by a process that was left open to fraud and abuse and illegally treated voters differently in various jurisdictions. The Trump campaign lawyers have identified 680,000-plus votes in Pennsylvania and about 250,000 in Michigan they believe fall into the category.

To augment the case, the lawyers are securing affidavits and declarations from citizens who allege:

• they went to the polls to vote and were told they had already voted when they had not cast ballots
• they are listed as voting in a state where they did not cast ballots
• they witnessed fraudulent or improper vote counting activities as observers or election officials
• extreme statistical anomalies uncovered in a handful of battleground states' vote totals are prima facie proof of fraudulent or untoward vote collection and counting activities

The request to discount large numbers of votes is a high legal and political hurdle to surmount, but it is not without precedent. In the last year, North Carolina threw out an entire special congressional election in its 9th District after evidence emerged that mail-in ballots were tainted by a ballot harvesting scheme tied to a GOP operative. And in New Jersey, a state judge earlier this year ordered new municipal election in Patterson, N.J., after evidence of ballot fraud emerged.

Both cases involve mail-in ballots, which are at the heart of the Trump campaign's arguments that rule changes by state officials — not approved by their legislatures as required by the Constitution — coupled with the exclusion of bipartisan vote count observers created election irregularities in parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states that violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

"The President's election integrity efforts have always focused on guaranteeing that every legal vote is counted fairly, accurately, and according to the law. This is what our system requires and demands. The campaign has passionately advocated for his re-election and over 73 million Americans agreed the President deserves a second term. The litigation, however, is not a political endeavor; it is a legal one," Ellis told Just the News.

"President Trump is fighting to ensure that the people can have confidence in the legitimacy of the results for this election and every election in the future. Led by Mayor Giuliani, our legal team is aggressively pursuing the best legal remedies to stop the coordinated, systematic, pervasive irregularities, fraud, and outright disregard for the law that hijacked the 2020 election. Our U.S. Constitution contemplates that our election system may be attacked through corruption and our founders provided the remedies to safeguard our free and fair elections through our Electoral College system. The President will fight to preserve and protect our constitutional republic and our great nation."

Alan Dershowitz, the famed Harvard law professor and successful appellate lawyer, told Just the News that the Trump campaign's strategy appears aimed at throwing the results of three battleground states' elections where Biden leads into doubt and forcing the House of Representatives to choose a winner because neither candidate can lawfully claim he has the 270 electoral votes necessary to win.

"Their goal is not to get Trump to 270 or more electoral votes, it's to keep Biden from getting 270 electoral votes and throw the election to the House," he said in an interview Monday evening.

Dershowitz said the Trump team must go beyond sufficient legal arguments and also provide the courts evidence that the number of votes cast into question is enough to have swung each challenged state's election.

He also sharply criticized news media and Democrats for attacking Trump's lawyers for waging the court cases. Some activists have even doxed certain lawyers, outing their contacts and addresses. "It's abhorrent that his lawyers are being attacked," he said. "The lawyers are doing exactly what lawyers are supposed to do."

Editor's Note: The author, John Solomon, hired Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing as personal lawyers to represent him on matters in 2018 and 2019.