Has the Supreme Court hit the pause button on all things President Trump?
The justices for more than three weeks have been holding on to the president’s last-ditch plea to shield his private financial records from Manhattan’s district attorney.
And all has been quiet on the election front. Continue reading.
The slip-up came as the Trump son continues to make baseless allegations of voter fraud.
Eric Trump, one of Donald Trump’s three sons, told Minnesotans to “get out and vote” on Tuesday — one week after the election concluded.
It’s unclear if the since-deleted tweet was a mistake (the American Independent Foundation reached out to the Trump campaign for a response, but has not yet received confirmation).
More than 130 Secret Service officers who help protect the White House and the president when he travels have recently been ordered to isolate or quarantine because they tested positive for the coronavirus or had close contact with infected co-workers, according to three people familiar with agency staffing.
The spread of the coronavirus — which has sidelined roughly 10 percent of the agency’s core security team — is believed to be partly linked to campaign rallies that President Trump held in the weeks before the Nov. 3 election, according to the people who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the situation.
In all, roughly 300 Secret Service officers and agents have had to isolate or quarantine since March because they were infected or exposed to infected colleagues, according to two people with knowledge of the figures. Continue reading.
(REUTERS) – The largest law firm representing the Trump campaign or its allies in post-election litigation challenging votes in key states has withdrawn from an election lawsuit in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Associate Presiding Civil Judge Daniel Kiley on Tuesday granted Snell & Wilmer’s request to withdraw as counsel of record for the Republican National Committee. The RNC had teamed-up with the Trump campaign and the Arizona Republican Party in the case, which alleges that Maricopa County incorrectly rejected some votes cast on Election Day.
Snell & Wilmer partners Brett Johnson and Eric Spencer first moved to withdraw on Sunday, a day after the case was filed. Johnson and Spencer did not respond to requests for comment. Snell & Wilmer chairman Matthew Feeney said the firm doesn’t comment on its client work. Continue reading.
In Florida, where President Donald Trump gained crucial support among Latino voters, his campaign ran a YouTube ad in Spanish making the explosive — and false — claim that Venezuela’s ruling clique was backing Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
YouTube showed the ad more than 100,000 times in Florida in the eight days leading up to the election, even after The Associated Press published a fact-check debunking the Trump campaign’s claim. Actually, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro expressed opposition to both presidential candidates.
The video was part of a broader Trump campaign strategy in heavily Latino South Florida that sought to tie Biden to Socialist leaders like Maduro and the late Cuban President Fidel Castro. Trump won Florida by about 375,000 votes, the largest margin in a presidential election there since 1988. He carried about 55 percent of the Cuban American vote, according to exit polls by NBC News. Continue reading.
To date, the Trump campaign’s many, many legal attempts to challenge his undeniable electoral loss have been, shall we say, not so successful. Like … at all. (Whether they were ever designed to succeed is a different question altogether). Still, the president and his team continue to push at least a dozen dubious lawsuits intended — at least in theory — to disrupt, or even overturn, vote counts in multiple states whose election results he simply does not like.
Among those lawsuits is one particularly frivolous-seeming case in Michigan, where Trump campaign lawyers filed a traunch of sworn affidavits this week, in which dozens of Republican poll challengers allege a host of electoral shenanigans. However, a huge portion of the claims seem to be less “massive, coordinated voter fraud” and more “I have no idea what I’m doing, but everyone there was kind of mean to me, and also I’m afraid of Black people.”
As many have noted, while the whole of the affidavits doesn’t exactly prove any sort of misconduct, it does contain a few allegations of genuinely inappropriate and unacceptable behavior; one poll challenger was confronted simply for not speaking English as their first language, while another ethnically Chinese observer was accused of not being American. But even these instances, like the bulk of the complaints in the filing, are less focused on actual electoral misconduct than on treatment of the poll challengers themselves. Continue reading.
There is no penalty for lying on television, as anyone who watches cable news already knows. It is considered normal today when Fox News personalities — to name one prominent group of habitual liars — repeat absurd falsehoods, even if the result is that people contract the coronavirus and die.
There is no penalty for lying on the radio, as everyone has known for decades. It is a highly lucrative daily routine for talk jocks such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage — among the most successful of their ilk — who are often exposed but never feel embarrassed.
There is no penalty for lying on the internet, where spreading the most implausible conspiracy theories, bogus rumors and fake videos is literally a billion-dollar industry and, in some countries such as Russia, a government function. Continue reading.
ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA. (FOX 9) – As the coronavirus surges in Minnesota, Republican lawmakers let Gov. Tim Walz keep his emergency powers without a fight during Thursday’s unprecedented sixth special session of 2020.
More than 60 percent of senators decided to vote from home Thursday. Republican Sen. Dave Senjem told FOX 9 he tested positive over the weekend after developing a slight cough, and was isolating at home in Rochester but feeling better.
Senjem said he attended Senate Republicans’ leadership election last Thursday before feeling symptoms. He said he likely got the virus before that, while campaigning in his district last week. Continue reading.
As the pandemic rages to new heights and we gear up for a new administration, there’s an important step President-Elect Joseph R. Biden could take right away to protect our most vulnerable population: He could restore the ability for nursing home residents to sue their facilities for poor health standards.
Though coronavirus cases for people living in long-term care facilities total just 8% of cases, that demographic accounts for 45% of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. through August, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The state-level data is even more grim. Nursing home deaths from COVID-19 in Minnesota and Rhode Island, for example, accounted for 81% of coronavirus deaths in those states as of early June, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation data. Long-term care facilities are a major driver of COVID-19 deaths in the country. Continue reading.
There are cracks starting to show — but there are strong political reasons for Republicans to hang on until the Senate runoffs in Georgia in January
Republicans’ private talking point about how they can continue to aid President Trump in denying election results boils down to what a senior Republican told The Washington Post this week: What’s the harm in humoring him?
Plenty, say national security officials who are concerned about how other countries — and the coronavirus — could take advantage of a slowed transition for President-elect Joe Biden. Plenty, say democracy experts who warn that the Republican Party is undermining the foundations of the U.S. electoral system and that the GOP is mirroring authoritarianism.
And amid such heavy criticism, and the fact that Trump’s legal team is struggling to provide any evidence or gain traction in the courts, we’re starting to see cracks in the GOP over holding the line for Trump. Continue reading.
