TRANSITION
Cruz tells White House ‘you can do it’ and to get ‘serious’ lawyers
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday explained how much of a long shot President Donald Trump’s chances of overturning the election results are — just days after hewas on Fox News saying Trump “still has a path to victory.”
As President-elect Joe Biden’s margin of victory widened in several key states, the Texas Republican — and one of Trump’s most vocal supporters — said he is now urging the president and members of his administration to get serious about the court battles they face.
“To flip the outcome, the Trump legal team has to run the table,” Cruz said in an interview with conservative commentator Steven Crowder. “I’ve talked with President Trump and with Jared Kushner and with the White House. What I’ve told them is they need serious lawyers to present evidence at this point. It can’t be won or lost in the world of social media, it’s got to be facts and evidence in court. And by the way, you can do it.”
But it will be no easy task, said Cruz, who served on former President George W. Bush’s legal team
when the Supreme Court decided the 2000 election.
As Biden's lead in key states has grown since the race was called and is now in the tens of thousands — exponentially greater than any result ever overturned by a recount. Elections experts say there's virtually no chance of Trump winning at this point, even as the president continues to say the opposite. “WE WILL WIN!” Trump tweeted Wednesday.
It appeared some of the president's most ardent supporters in Texas were losing confidence that would happen.
Even as some Texas Republicans, such as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — who offered $1 million for credible tips of voter fraud — have stuck with the president, other prominent trump backers in Texas were striking a different tone.
The election won't be overturned, Karl Rove, the Texas political strategist behind george w. Bush's presidential campaigns, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “The president's efforts are unlikely to move a single state from Mr. Biden's column, and certainly they're not enough to change the final outcome,” Rove wrote.
Also onwednesday, Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, one of the president's top evangelical allies, who on Wednesday wrote a Fox News opinion piece urging his followers to pray for Biden, even if his win is “a bitter pill to swallow.”
“The Trump campaign is 0for-12 in post-election lawsuits,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, who served as a senior attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice Voting Section in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
Becker said the nation's election system “objectively is the most secure and transparent election system America has ever had,” despite a Republican-led onslaught of unproven claims of widespread fraud in recent years that appear to have affected the public's faith in election security.
Democrats, meanwhile, were urging Trump and his backers to “recognize reality.”
“There's no doubt that Republican politicians are undermining faith in our democracy,” said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat and vice chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The election is over, and Donald Trump's refusal to concede is a slap in the face to the record number of Americans who voted. The United States' credibility as a champion for the rule of law around the world is at risk with this nonsense.”
‘Let the process play out’
Becker said there have so far been no instances of widespread fraud proven in court and noted that even some high profile allegations have fallen apart in recent days. For example, a Pennsylvania postal worker, whose claims that postal workers were ordered to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day had been picked up by prominent Republicans, reportedly admitted to U.S. Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations.
Trump loyalists have filed at least 15 legal challenges in Pennsylvania alone in an effort to reclaim the state's 20 electoral votes. There is action, too, in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan. The campaign has so far scored just one small victory, allowing their observers to stand a little closer to election workers processing the mail-in ballots in Philadelphia.
Prominent Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, have held firm that the president is “100% within his rights” to look into fraud allegations and pursue his legal options. Attorney General William Barr has authorized the Justice Department to investigate “clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities.”
Nationally, Trump's legal strategy is being run by the president's allies such as Rudy Giuliani, the Trump's personal attorney; political operative David Bossie, who is not an attorney; and Jay Sekulow, a lead lawyer during the president's impeachment trial this year.
Election law experts say there are more prominent lawyers they would expect to be involved, if Trump had a strong case.
“Every experienced election lawyer is avoiding these lawsuits at all costs,” Becker said. “There's just very little way to steer the Titanic in another direction at this time.”
Cruz seemed to acknowledge as much Wednesday.
“In Pennsylvania it's 45,000 votes,” Cruz said. “Look, Bush vs. Gore in Florida, we had a couple thousand votes. Forty five thousand is a lot of votes. In Michigan, it's 130,000 votes is Biden's lead.
“To prevail you've got to demonstrate in the court that that many ballots are illegally cast, and you can't just make generalities — it has to be specifically proven up,” he said. “My advice to everyone is just calm downand relax and let the process play out. That doesn't mean pop the champagne and celebrate that Trump's going to win. We need to let the process play out and see what happens.”
‘Doing damage to everybody’
Elections experts say they expect any serious questions about the outcome of the election to be largely put to rest starting next week when states begin certifying results showing Biden's win.
Still, there was concern among some experts about the longterm effects of effort to undermine confidence in the results by the president, who has been frantically fundraising off efforts to “STOP COUNTING ILLEGAL BALLOTS.”
Many of Trump's supporters have not given up on the president's chances — or the idea that the election was being stolen from him. The Texas GOP on Wednesday announced a “Stop the Steal” rally Saturday in Austin. Trump supporters — including white nationalist and alt-right groups such as the Proud Boys — are reportedly planning a similar rally in D.C. on Saturday, as well.
A Morning Consult poll released this week found some 70 percent of Republicans don't believe the election was “free or fair.” Polling by the University of Texas at Austin in October found majorities of both Republicans and Democrats either said they were unsure about whether they could believe the election results — or said outright that they wouldn't.
Joshua Blank, research director at UT Austin's Texas Politics Project, said they were “some of the most troubling results of all the polling we've done.”
He attributed the lack of confidence to years of Texas Republicans warning of voter fraud without evidence, as well as growing concerns among Democrats about voter suppression and foreign election interference.
“It's doing damage to everybody,” Blank said. “Ultimately democracy has a problem if partisans will only believe elections if they win them.”