Rebekah Jones is a data scientist in the state of Florida who was fired after becoming embroiled in a controversy with the Republican governor of the state Ron DeSantis about how the state reports its covid-19 data. Just another bureaucratic fight, right? But look at how an armed police team raided her home with guns drawn and treat her family, including her young children, like they are violent criminals.
This election has made many of us aware of the minutiae of US election processes and the series of dates that lead up to the results of the presidential election becoming official. One major date is December 14th which is when the people who were elected on November 3rd to serve as Electoral College voters meet in their respective states to cast their votes for president and vice-president. That is what is meant by the Electoral College meeting. But while much attention has focused on that date, today saw the so-called ‘safe harbor’ deadline when each state has to certify its election results, resolve any controversies about who the electors are, and submit their names, thus ending any unresolved issues. Enough states have done so for Biden to get over 270 electoral college votes and those electors are thus fixed, making the December 14th vote mostly a formality.
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In a 5-3 vote, the Wisconsin Supreme Court yesterday threw out yet another Trump legal challenge to the election. Such actions by courts around the country have become so routine as to be hardly worth noting, though if one is counting, there have been 46 such losses by Trump and his allies.
What I want to highlight is the incredulous tone of the majority opinion issued by justice Brian Hagedorn of both the merits of the challenge and the asked for remedy.
The Wisconsin Voters Alliance and a group of Wisconsin voters bring a petition for an original action raising a variety of questions about the operation of the November 3, 2020 presidential election. Some of these legal issues may, under other circumstances, be subject to further judicial consideration. But the real stunner here is the sought-after remedy. We are invited to invalidate the entire presidential election in Wisconsin by declaring it “null”—yes, the whole thing. And there’s more. We should, we are told, enjoin the Wisconsin Elections Commission from certifying the election so that Wisconsin’s presidential electors can be chosen by the legislature instead, and then compel the Governor to certify those electors. At least no one can accuse the petitioners of timidity.
Such a move would appear to be unprecedented in American history. One might expect that this solemn request would be paired with evidence of serious errors tied to a substantial and demonstrated set of illegal votes. Instead, the evidentiary support rests almost entirely on the unsworn expert report of a former campaign employee that offers statistical estimates based on call center samples and social media research.
This petition falls far short of the kind of compelling evidence and legal support we would undoubtedly need to countenance the court-ordered disenfranchisement of every Wisconsin voter. The petition does not even justify the exercise of our original jurisdiction.
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Service dogs aid many people, not just those with sight deficiencies, and as such are allowed into many areas that do not allow animals. But recently there has been an increase in the numbers of people who say they need the presence of emotional support animals that are not service dogs to overcome their anxieties, such as when they fly. This has resulted in airlines being faced with having to make ad hoc decisions as to whether to allow them or not.
In a surprise move, attorney general Bill Barr has said an interview with the Associated Press that the department of justice has found no evidence of widespread fraud in the last election, at least not enough to overturn the results.
His comments are seen as a big blow to Mr Trump, who has not accepted defeat.
…“There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results,” Mr Barr, who is seen as a top Trump ally, told AP News on Tuesday, referring to the assertion that ballot machines were hacked to give more votes to Mr Biden.
…Mr Barr said that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security have investigated that claim, “and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that”.
…Reacting to his comments, Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in a joint statement: “With the greatest respect to the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.”
The reason that this is a surprise is not because what he is saying is untrue but that he said it at all, since it goes completely counter to what Trump has been saying. Barr has up to now seemed to have seen himself as more of Trump’s personal lawyer rather than the nation’s top law enforcement official, often going to great lengths to use the department to support some of Trump’s most extreme claims. He could have just kept quiet on the election fraud issue and need not have weighed in on this matter publicly.
So why did he, since he had to know that this would anger Trump who sees anyone who disagrees with him as disloyal? After all, Trump fired Christopher Krebs for saying that this election was the most secure ever. As Democratic senate leader Chuck Schumer wryly noted after Barr’s statement, “I guess he’s the next one to be fired.” Maybe Barr is hoping for that to happen, because like so many people who have been deeply tainted by their proximity to Trump, he is trying at the last minute to salvage something of his tattered reputation.
Yesterday, Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration who has to write a letter to authorize the president-elect’s transition team access to resources to co-ordinate and work with the existing people in government to ensure a smooth transition, finally issued the letter. It appears that she had the power to do this without getting prior approval from Trump and her not doing so for three weeks after the election was over when it was clear that Joe Biden had won had resulted in much criticism. She finally issued a letter that was somewhat whiny and self-serving, saying that she had decided on her own to issue the letter and that she had not been pressured by Trump to not do so before nor to do so now.
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I have been trying to think about what the possible motivations could be for Trump’s bizarre behavior in continuing his futile quest to remain in office and have come up with four possibilities, presented here in no particular order.
1. The scorched Earth theory
This theory says that Trump knows he has lost and must leave the White House and what he wants to do, out of sheer spite, is make life as hard as possible for the new administration by refusing to allow the transition team the normal access to information, firing people left and right, filing lawsuits and raging against the integrity of the elections to sow doubt among his supporters as to the legitimacy of the Biden presidency, and possibly even bombing Iran.
The idea is not unlike that during wars when the retreating population burns their crops and homes so that the invading armies cannot use them. In this case, he wants to leave an administration in a shambles. Even if it results in the pandemic raging out of control and needlessly causing excess deaths in the order of tens of thousands, he does not care if he can gloat from the sidelines that things have gone to hell since he left.
He must be smarting from the fact that the stock market has gone up since the election despite his warnings that a Biden win would tank it, and that new vaccines seem to be appearing by the. day. He of course thinks that the vaccine companies conspired to not release this news until after the election because they too are working against him
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In what is being seen as the biggest setback to Trump’s futile quest to cling on to power. the lawsuit argued by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell (described by one of Trump’s legal advisors as “an elite strike force team”) before a federal judge in Pennsylvania has been thrown out. The suit alleged such widespread fraud in the election that they were asking the judge to invalidate the results and declare Trump the winner in the state. In what has been described as a blistering opinion, the judge was brutal in his assessment of the case presented by this allegedly elite strike force team, describing it as a “Frankenstein’s Monster, [that] has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent.”
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In the latest move during the current purge of people in Trump’s administration, he has fired the person who said that the recent election was the most secure in US history. (I wrote about the official expecting to be fired two days days ago.)
Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), in a tweet on Tuesday, saying Krebs “has been terminated” and that his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate”.
The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of the president-elect, Joe Biden, and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal. He fired Mark Esper, the defense secretary, on 9 November part of a broader shake-up that put Trump loyalists in senior Pentagon positions.
Krebs had indicated he expected to be fired. Last week, his agency released a statement refuting claims of widespread voter fraud. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” the statement read. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Krebs, a former Microsoft executive, ran the agency, known as Cisa, from its creation in the wake of Russian interference with the 2016 election through the November election. He won bipartisan praise as Cisa coordinated federal state and local efforts to defend electoral systems from foreign or domestic interference.
Trump and his fans are trying their best to convince themselves that he has not lost the election. But time is running out for them. The claims of fraud that have been filed in state and federal courts across the country are being tossed out one after another and prestigious law firms are withdrawing from some cases because bringing frivolous lawsuits damages your reputation and can result in judges slapping you down, and the easy money these cases bring in may not be enough to compensate for the ignominy. Clown lawyers like Rudy Giuliani have no reputation to protect and thus can make the most outlandish claims inside and outside the courtroom, which is probably why Trump likes him so much. Lawyers like him are the only only ones really benefiting from these lawsuits and are enriching themselves off the deluded dreams of the members of the Trump cult who are donating to the ‘legal defense fund’, although the fine print says that up to 60% of that money will actually go towards retiring the campaign debt.
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