The Conversation - Trump claims fraud; his lawyers can’t

A federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed, in a withering opinion, a Trump campaign lawsuit challenging the conduct and outcome of the 2020 election in that state. Though the president has appealed, it was just the latest embarrassing setback in a string of failed lawsuits he’s mounted to undo his loss.

What’s interesting about those cases, writes scholar Steven Mulroy, is that unlike the president’s tweets and statements that claimed fraud, most of the lawsuits did not. “It’s one thing to speculate via tweet, but quite another for an attorney, who is an officer of the court, to make representations to a judge,” explains Mulroy, an elections law expert at the University of Memphis. And in the few cases where lawyers did assert fraud, they’ve quickly backpedaled when challenged. 

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