The week
White House allies secretly wrote the Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to reverse Biden’s victory
On Nov. 12, former President Donald Trump’s team of election attorneys knew he had lost his reelection, that despite Trump’s tweets and public comments, “ there was no substantial evidence of electoral fraud, and that there was not nearly enough ‘irregularities.’ to reverse the outcome in court, ”The New York Times reports. But their protests caused Trump to turn to allies to tell him what he wanted to hear, so November 12 was also the day that “ Trump’s feeble, protracted legal effort to undo his loss turned into something completely different – an fringe ”. campaign for the election, based on a lie so compelling to some of his most devoted followers that the deadly attack on the Capitol on January 6 was almost inevitable. Trump’s veteran legal team either quietly slumped or were sidelined by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and other lawyers “who were ready to continue with propagandistic suits skating the lines of legal ethics and reason,” reports The Times, which ultimately included “the vast majority of Republican attorneys general whose Supreme Court case on arrival, seeking to dismiss 20 million votes, was secretly drawn up by lawyers close to the White House.” Before Thanksgiving, the Trump’s allies – including Kris Kobach, a vote-restriction activist who previously headed the “Election Integrity Commission”; former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court Mark Martin; and Lawrence Joseph, a lawyer who had worked on the tax returns of Trump – began work on a new lawsuit that, although he “ fell short of legal whether actual merits, “” was rich in the kind of sensational claims “that would certainly spread across conservative media, the Times reports. The argument was that Trump states could ask the Supreme Court to throw out 20 million votes in certain states that President Biden won because, they claimed, those Biden states were effectively cheating. “Only one type of attorney can bring a case brought by one state against another directly to the Supreme Court: an attorney general,” reports the Times. “The president’s original election attorneys doubted an attorney general would be willing to do so,” but Texas attorney general Ken Paxton seized the opportunity. When the Texas attorney general declined to be involved in the lawsuit, Paxton hired Joseph as special outside counsel, not disclosing to the court that Joseph and other outside Trump advisers had written the letter. Read more about Trump’s fringe campaign in The New York Times. More stories from theweek.com Eric Trump reportedly bet on election day that his father would win 320 electoral votes The January 6 rally that fueled the deadly siege of the Capitol was reportedly a White House production of Trump’s Rise of the Barstool Conservatives