US District Court Judge Matthew Brann has ruled to dismiss the lawsuit from the Trump campaign on Saturday, saying the president’s legal team failed to present “compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption” which would have warranted the court “disenfranchising almost seven million votes.”
“That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” Brann said in the 37-page statement.
The court refused Trump’s legal team the right to amend the complaint on the grounds that it had already been amended once, and pointing to the looming Monday deadline for Pennsylvania to certify the votes.
The lawsuit, filed by the Trump campaign on November 9, claimed that electoral officials in some of the state’s counties allowed voters to cast provisional ballots if they ran into any problems with mail-in ballots, such as the lack of “secrecy envelope,” while other counties didn’t. The complaint argued that the different treatment of voters in such cases amounted to a breach of the US Constitution.
Brann dismissed the argument, calling the legal challenge a “Frankenstein’s monster” which did not justify the remedy proposed by the Trump campaign – to invalidate allegedly illegal votes.
Responding to the ruling, the Trump campaign’s legal team, headed by Rudy Giuliani, said that although they were “disappointed” that they “did not at least get the opportunity to present our evidence at a hearing,” they would seek “an expedited appeal” to the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, which has a conservative majority.
The campaign apparently found a silver lining in the ruling – which is seemingly another blow to the president’s legal efforts to contest the election – saying the decision “turns out to help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the US Supreme Court.”
Trump himself vowed to appeal the decision, blasting it on Twitter as “a continuation of the never ending Witch Hunt.”
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