https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/ ... ans-436475
Rudy found one friend, a lawyer conspiracy nut:
Giuliani has been joined by Sidney Powell, an attorney for retired Gen. Michael Flynn. During a Sunday appearance on Fox News, she described a “massive and coordinated effort to steal this election” and said there had been an effort to “delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump” and “manufacture votes for Joe Biden.”
She added that Democrats “used an algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip and they used computers to flip those votes from Trump to Biden and from other Republican candidates to their competitors also.”
Powell was apparently referring to a debunked conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems, an election software company, altered vote counts in Michigan and Georgia.
Bossie has told the president there needs to be a more nuanced, state-by-state approach targeted to specific instances of irregularities, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
With Giuliani's ascendance, there are now expected to be two parallel legal teams working on different tracks. Senior Republicans doubt Giuliani’s ideas will go anywhere and say Bossie’s team will proceed with its own efforts.
Republican officials said they viewed Trump's decision to promote Giuliani as an implicit acknowledgment that his legal options are closing and a sign that he's determined to go out guns blazing. Top Republicans described a feeling of resignation late Friday that the election was coming to a close.
The president made the move after advisers informed him in the morning that the Arizona lawsuit had been dropped. Giuliani spent part of the day working out of the campaign's headquarters.
Trump’s legal team is also facing pressure campaigns from outside detractors. On Thursday evening, the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur told a federal judge that it was withdrawing from a Pennsylvania lawsuit the reelection effort had filed. The move came after the anti-Trump Lincoln Project published a tweet urging supporters to contact the firm’s attorneys through their social media accounts.
Advertisement
Still, the president’s team has pushed forward, working 12- to 15-hour days as they race against certification deadlines. They’ve set up a hotline staffed by 40 people to collect reports of irregularities. Prank calls have proven disruptive, however.
While the campaign is expected to lay off much of its staff in the coming days, it is keeping on employees whose work is relevant to the legal fight, including people in the communications and research departments.
Trump advisers have begun looking at the possibility of pushing Republican-controlled state legislatures to put forward a slate of Trump electors to the Electoral College rather than Biden ones.
But there is mounting skepticism even in Republican circles that Trump can pull it off in the courts. He has suffered a string of legal defeats in recent days and Biden’s lead in the contested states has climbed well into the thousands, making it unlikely that any recount could put Trump over the top.
And many see little evidence of irregularities.
“There’s zero, zero basis” for overturning the election, said Richard, the ex-Bush attorney. “They’re not going to win this. All these cases, I think, will be dismissed by the end of next week.”
