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Trump Campaign Attorneys Admit ‘There Is No Evidence’ of ‘Any Fraud’ in Connection with Challenged Ballots in Bucks County, Pa.

 

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 08: U.S. President Donald Trump makes remarks at the beginning of a meeting with Congressional Republicans in the State Dining Room at the White House May 08, 2020 in Washington, DC. Trump insisted that the national economy will recover this year from the damage caused by novel coronavirus pandemic, saying, "I'm calling it the transition to greatness."

Attorneys representing President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign in challenging thousands of ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania agreed to sign court documents on Wednesday informing the court that there was no evidence of fraud or misconduct pertaining to those ballots.

The lawsuit—filed last week by the campaign as well as the Republican National Committee and two GOP candidates for state office—sought to have the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas invalidate more than 2,200 “defective ballots” that were counted following a review by the Board of Elections.

According to Biden campaign attorney Marc Elias, the campaign agreed to sign a joint stipulation of facts—an instrument meant to provide the court with facts relevant to the case that are undisputed by either party in the action—which clearly disavows any claims that voting in the commonwealth’s fourth-largest county was affected by any fraudulent conduct. A partner at law firm Perkins Coie and the Democratic Party’s top election lawyer, Elias has filed to intervene in nearly every post-election lawsuit challenging voting tabulations.

“Petitioners do not allege, and there is no evidence of, any fraud in connection with the challenged ballots,” the joint stipulation stated.

The stipulation further specified that the campaign was not alleging, and there was no evidence of any “misconduct,” “impropriety,” “undue influence,” associated with the legal challenge, nor was there evidence that the Board of Elections “counted ballots without signatures on the outer envelope.”

During a Tuesday hearing, both parties also agreed that election observers from each party were permitted access to watch the pre-canvassing and canvassing processes.

Despite President Trump’s oft-repeated false claim that he “won Pennsylvania by a lot” and that he is only losing the state to Joe Biden due to fraudulent ballots, Trump’s campaign lawyers have had to take a far different approach when they get before a judge.

Indeed, Trump attorneys previously disavowed voter-fraud allegations before judges in three separate jurisdictions: two state courts in Pennsylvania and one county court in Arizona.

These statements to the court stand in direct contravention to the claims made by the Trump campaign’s newly added attorney Rudy Giuliani during a hearing in federal court on Tuesday.

As previously reported by Law&Crime, the former mayor of New York City alleged that 1.5 million votes had been illegally counted in Pennsylvania, though he failed to explain to a federal judge how he arrived at that number. At one point later on in the hearing, Giuliani himself even said, “This is not a fraud case.”

Giuliani also falsely claimed that Republican observers had not been allowed to watch the ballot count, an assertion he soon undercut by saying that they were kept too far away from the process. While the federal hearing was happening on Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled 5-2 on that an election observer in Philadelphia was not entitled to stand within a particular distance from employees who were processing mail-in ballots, overturning a lower court’s ruling on the matter.

Read the joint stipulation below:

Bucks County Stip by Law&Crime on Scribd

[image via Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images]

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Jerry Lambe is a journalist at Law&Crime. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and New York Law School and previously worked in financial securities compliance and Civil Rights employment law.