Fire The Kraken

Sidney Powell is apparently fired (or quit) from the Trump campaign legal team.

She appeared alongside Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani on the Trump Campaign press conference just this Thursday. She was notable in making perhaps the craziest claims, alluding that Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013) may have been involved in having fraudulent vote tabulation machines used to flip this election.

Tucker Carlson invited her to come on his show and show her evidence, she got angry and asked his staff to stop contacting her. The next day, Carlson has alluded that the rest of the legal team might think Powell's claims are too crazy to believe.

For the rest of the weekend, Powell went on a bender of further claims. She accused Republican Governor of Georgia (and longtime Trump supporter) Brian Kemp of being bribed into complicity on this conspiracy. In that same appearance on Newsmax, she further claimed that Hillary Clinton also used this "Dominion scam" during the 2016 Democratic primaries to fraudulently beat Bernie Sanders, (but was too confident to use it to steal the election from Trump?) and that Sanders is silent because he was paid off. The Newsmax anchors asked for evidence of any kind and Powell had refused to disclose anything. She promised it will be revealed within the next two weeks.

So now Powell seems to have gotten fired, and the only reasonable inference is perhaps that her claims were too crazy for even the Trump campaign. What else is there to any of these election fraud claims? My understanding is that the Trump campaign has lost 30 lawsuits out of 32 thus far (correct me if I'm wrong, it's hard to keep track), often in extremely embarrassing displays of incompetence. The latest defeat, in Pennsylvania in which Giuliani was involved personally, was especially scathing. During oral argument, the judge asked Giuliani what kind of scrutiny should apply and he said the "normal" kind. If you have any familiarity with constitutional law whatsoever you should appreciate what a boneheaded answer that is. The ruling didn't pull any punches on the lack of preparedness:

In this action, the Trump Campaign and the Individual Plaintiffs (collectively, the “Plaintiffs”) seek to discard millions of votes legally cast by Pennsylvanians from all corners – from Greene County to Pike County, and everywhere in between. In other words, Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters. This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated. 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, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.

It’s hard to summarize the PA lawsuit because it was so incoherent in the remedy it requested. Basically, it asked the judge to block certification of 6.8 million votes because different counties within the state had a different standards for whether faulty ballots get an opportunity to be "cured". Some counties would notify voters of problems (as recommended by the Secretary of State) while other counties would just reject the ballot. Two Trump voters, who had their mail-in ballots rejected, were parties to the lawsuit.

The logical remedy in this case would be to force counties without a "notice-and-cure" policy to implement one. They then would go through the rejected mail-in ballots and give those voters an opportunity to cure them so their vote would count. But of course that's not what the Trump campaign asked for, probably because such a remedy would not flip the outcome in PA in Trump's favor.

The hearing in this case started with Giuliani making sweeping nationwide accusations of fraud, but then walked it back and told the judge "this is not a fraud case". He also tried to argue that the sweeping request they were making was valid because "ballots could have been from Mickey Mouse. We have no idea." apparently contradicting his walk-back of fraud?

Asking a federal judge to intervene in the certification of a state election is an extraordinary ask. Giuliani didn't come anywhere near close to offering a compelling basis for this request. Maybe if he provided proof to the claims that he was willing to make in press conferences but curiously unwilling to repeat in court (almost as if making shit up has real consequences in that area), you'd get closer to the mark.

So my conclusion is that Trump lost fair and square in one of the most transparent elections ever conducted in this country. I have not seen any evidence for me to believe otherwise, but I'll keep an open mind. Given the flagrant incompetence on display in the legal proceedings that have already happened, I also see no reason to accept any claim of fraud from anyone of Trump's team at face-value. If you disagree, what evidence do you rely upon?