Judge slam dunks Trump election lawsuit in Pa.
A federal judge Saturday emphatically tossed out President Trump’s lawsuit seeking to overturn Pennsylvania’s presidential election results — and trashed Rudy Giuliani’s much-mocked performance in his courtroom.
Sparing no words to express his disgust at Trump’s case, Williamsport, Pa. federal Judge Matthew Brann dismissed the suit with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot amend or refile the case because the judge considered it so far-fetched.
“This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations,” Brann wrote. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state.”
The judge noted that Trump was seeking the unprecedented tossing of millions of legally cast ballots in Pennsylvania, “from Greene County to Pike County, and everywhere in between.”
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann wrote in his scathing 32-page decision. “That has not happened.”
Instead, the judge wrote, he got “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations ... unsupported by evidence.”
Despite the legal slam dunk, Trump’s campaign can appeal the ruling to a federal appeals court and eventually to the Supreme Court.
But Brann left little doubt that he believes any appeal would have virtually no chance of success.
Unless a higher court steps in, the case’s dismissal clears the way for Pennsylvania to certify the results of President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the Nov. 3 election.
Trump’s suit had claimed that some Pennsylvania voters were disenfranchised because different counties have different processes for fixing minor errors on mail-in ballots.
Giuliani also made a stream of claims about wider fraud and ballot-counting issues in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other predominantly Democratic cities.
But those claims were never actually mentioned in the suit, a big procedural no-no.
The ex-mayor’s self-proclaimed “elite legal strike force” even electronically signed Brann’s signature to its proposed order, an embarrassing slip-up that legal eagles derided as worthy of a first-year law student.