Rudy Giuliani was already heavily involved in the Trump campaign’s slew of lawsuits intended to make Donald Trump’s case that the 2020 election was stolen from him—that much was clear from the former New York City mayor’s infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, where he happened to welcome a registered sex offender to the stage. But as of this weekend, according to the New York Times, Giuliani is officially in charge of the campaign’s efforts. As Trump’s legal prospects grow increasingly dim, he has called on Giuliani to helm any new post-election litigation, a decision that has reportedly “vexed” campaign staffers and White House aides. Multiple Trump advisers have sounded the alarm on Giuliani’s involvement, describing his efforts as “counterproductive” and citing the “unwarranted optimism” that he has given Trump about what the future holds. “Those advisers have said that they are concerned Mr. Giuliani is damaging not only Mr. Trump’s remaining legal options, but his legacy and his future opportunities in politics as he considers another campaign in 2024,” according to the Times.
Giuliani’s expanded role follows a series of blows dealt to the campaign earlier on Friday—setbacks that further sunk the president’s hopes of overturning his defeat. In Pennsylvania, six cases the Trump campaign had brought to invalidate nearly 9,000 total votes were thrown out; five related cases were dismissed by a Philadelphia judge who said the campaign could not invalidate 8,329 ballots it claimed were improper, ruling that those ballots should be processed and counted. A separate case that sought to throw out 592 mail-in ballots because voters did not fill in their addresses on the outside envelope was dismissed by a second judge, who found voters were neither required by state law to fill out that envelope section, nor told to do so in the ballot instructions. “Voters should not be disenfranchised by reasonably relying upon voting instructions provided by election officials,” Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas Judge Richard Haaz ruled, per CNN. The same day, the law firm leading Trump’s effort in the state said it would no longer represent the president.
In Arizona, the Trump campaign dropped their so-called Sharpiegate lawsuit, with a lawyer for the president acknowledging that President-elect Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state was too wide for the case to affect. And in Michigan, a judge rejected two Republican poll workers’ motion to halt the certification of ballots in Wayne County—which Biden won by a margin of nearly 323,000 votes—and denied the request for an audit of the election. “It would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this court to stop the certification process,” Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny wrote, adding that doing so would not only “cause delay in establishing the presidential vote tabulation, as well as all other county and state races,” but also “undermine faith in the electoral system.”
In yet another sign that the campaign’s attacks are losing steam, 16 assistant U.S. attorneys who had been assigned to monitor election-related malfeasance said they saw no evidence of substantial voting irregularities in a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Friday. The memo, according to the Washington Post, asked Barr to rescind his directive authorizing federal prosecutors to “pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities” in certain cases before results are certified—a major shift in the Justice Department’s policy on the investigative steps prosecutors can take, and a move that reportedly blindsided current and former DOJ officials.
The signatories of Friday’s letter told Barr that in the places where they worked as district election officers assigned to monitor possible election-related crimes, there was no evidence of the fraud referenced in his directive. They urged him to rethink the policy change that “thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics” and “was not based in fact.” Rather, the assistant U.S. attorneys suggested, Barr’s memo was based on Trump’s broad and unfounded claims of fraud. “While serious allegations should be handled with great care, specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” they wrote.
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