Page:Introductory Material to the Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/15

 pro-Trump lawyers in a case that a Federal judge described as “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process”: "It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here."

A group of prominent Republicans have more recently issued a report – titled Lost, Not Stolen – examining “every count of every case brought in these six battleground states” by President Trump and his allies. The report concludes “that Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case.” President Trump and his legal allies “failed because of a lack of evidence and not because of erroneous rulings or unfair judges…. In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims.”

There is no reasonable basis for the allegation that these dozens of rulings by State and Federal courts were somehow politically motivated. The outcome of these suits was uniform regardless of who appointed the judges. One of the authors of Lost, Not Stolen, longtime Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, testified before the Select Committee that “in no instance did a court find that the charges of fraud were real,” without variation based on the judges involved. Indeed, eleven of the judges who ruled against Donald Trump and his supporters were appointed by Donald Trump himself.

One of those Trump nominees, Judge Stephanos Bibas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, rejected an appeal by the Trump Campaign claiming that Pennsylvania officials “did not undertake any meaningful effort” to fight illegal absentee ballots and uneven treatment of voters across counties. Judge Bibas wrote in his decision that “calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” Another Trump nominee, Judge Brett Ludwig of the Eastern District of Wisconsin, ruled against President Trump’s lawsuit alleging that the result was skewed by illegal procedures that governed drop boxes, ballot address information, and individuals who claimed “indefinitely confined” status to vote from home. Judge Ludwig wrote in his decision, that “[t]his Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits” because the procedures used “do not remotely rise to the level” of breaking Wisconsin’s election rules.

Nor is it true that these rulings focused solely on standing, or procedural issues. As Ginsberg confirmed in his testimony to the Select Committee, President Trump’s team “did have their day in court.” Indeed, he and his co-authors determined in their report that 30 of these post-election cases were dismissed by a judge after an evidentiary hearing had been held, and many of these judges explicitly indicated in their decisions that the evidence presented by the plaintiffs was wholly insufficient on the merits.

Ultimately, even Rudolph Giuliani and his legal team acknowledged that they had no definitive evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the election outcome. For example, although Giuliani repeatedly had claimed in public that Dominion voting machines stole the election, he admitted during his Select Committee deposition that “I do not think the machines stole the election.” An attorney representing his lead investigator, Bernard Kerik,