CNN anchor Jake Tapper tore into the flailing legal strategy implemented by Donald Trump as he attempts to reverse the election he clearly lost, calling the effort “embarrassing” on Sunday while describing the president’s legal team as the “gang that couldn’t sue straight.”
While Trump has repeatedly and baselessly alleged that President-elect Joe Biden stole the election from him via widespread election fraud, the increasingly desperate lawsuits his lawyers have brought forth have almost entirely been thrown out of court, largely over the lack of evidence to back up his campaign’s claims.
At the end of CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Tapper highlighted a number of Team Trump’s cases that were dismissed. Notably, he brought up the Trump lawyers admitting in court that Republican election observers were allowed in Pennsylvania ballot-counting rooms, flying in the face of the campaign’s claims. He also pointed out other cases were tossed as they relied on inadmissible hearsay.
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“It’s been, frankly, embarrassing,” Tapper declared. “No evidence, unprofessional, desperate. Increasingly, Trump campaign lawyers seem to realize being involved in fact-free desperation efforts to overturn the results of a free and fair election might not necessarily enhance their resumes.”
The CNN anchor then highlighted that multiple law firms have decided to drop the Trump campaign as clients in these legal challenges, specifically bringing up Trump’s Arizona legal team that quit after unsuccessfully pushing the unhinged Sharpiegate conspiracy theory.
“On Friday, nine cases from Trump and his allies intended to attack and undo President-elect Biden’s victory in key states, nine cases rejected or dropped,” Tapper stated. “Nine! So what now? Well, now the President of the United States is literally embracing a deranged conspiracy theory that millions of votes were changed using software.”
The veteran anchor was referencing the baseless accusation that software in Dominion voting machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden, a theory the president and his allies have settled on as other conspiracies have fallen by the wayside.
This also appears to be the central focus of the Trump legal team’s new strategy. With lawyers fleeing Team Trump, the president announced over the weekend that his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani would lead his legal efforts. Giuliani, meanwhile, immediately ran to Fox News and other right-wing outlets to peddle the evidence-free software conspiracies.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s cybersecurity agency released a statement rebuking the president’s own claims of voter fraud, saying “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
“The problem with Republican officeholders arguing that President Trump has his right to present his evidence in court is that the president’s efforts do not have anything to do with evidence,” Tapper concluded. “They have to do with hearsay and rumor and insinuations and lies and conspiracy theories.”
“Once these efforts have been rejected by every court, outgoing President Trump will likely continue to make them,” he added. “How long is the Republican Party going to continue to defer to unhinged mendacious desperation led by the gang that couldn’t sue straight?”
