Trump's Lawyers Are Also Part of the Election Conspiracy, Apparently

Another day, another election fraud court case. The full opinion is written by a Trump appointee but ultimately rules against the Trump campaign.

The whole suit was a mess from the start, where the Trump campaign was asking the court to order some bizarre remedies, including a “remand” of the election to the Wisconsin Legislature (where presumably Trump expected to be crowned as the winner).

But one thing worth highlighting is that this is one of the few cases where the attorneys of both sides agreed on a stipulated set of facts. This is important to focus on. The Trump campaign lawyers were under no obligation to stipulate to facts with the party they were suing. They could have contested every claim the defendants were making, and also could have introduced their own evidence. They chose not to. This is actually often a good idea, especially if the goal is to streamline litigation and to prevent petty and immaterial factual disputes to get in the way of legal merits. I certainly do this in my legal practice all the time. But in this case, it plainly contradicts the claim that courts are refusing to give the Trump campaign an evidentiary hearing. The campaign could have had one, but the campaign's own lawyers chose not to have one. Any claim otherwise is plainly dishonest, unless the theory is that the Trump campaign lawyers are also complicit in the conspiracy.

Notwithstanding the numerous times courts have examined the evidence, the Trump campaign abandoning opportunities for evidentiary hearings has happened multiple times. In federal court in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign lawyers filed an amended complaint with a ton of paragraphs crossed out where they simply abandoned every allegation of fraud they initially claimed (this is the same case where Giuliani asked the judge for "normal scrutiny"). The same thing happened in a Michigan federal court, where the Trump campaign asked for an expedited emergency evidentiary hearing. By all appearances, the Trump lawyers seem to have abandoned the lawsuit, failing to even properly serve the defendants on this case, and losing out on the evidentiary hearing they claimed was an emergency (side note: the lawyer in this case made a mistake and originally filed the suit in an unrelated court in DC instead of Michigan. He then asked for a refund for the $400 filing fee, but the court denied the request because it concluded the lawyer was being less than honest on blaming the error on a computer glitch).

Given these realities, I can't imagine a coherent theory of fraud that doesn't also implicate the Trump campaign lawyers as complicit. If not that then, at best, the distribution of legal competence was strictly one-sided for inexplicable reasons.