“The Trump campaign’s disingenuous spin on its watered-down voter fraud claims”

I have reviewed the amended complaint filed in court and can attest to the accuracy of the reporting in this Washington Post story:

The crux of The Post’s report is that the lawsuit removed claims that elections officials violated the Trump campaign’s rights by limiting its ability to witness the ballot-counting process. This is significant because that claim involves more than 600,000 ballots in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. To the extent that the campaign is backing off that, its path to overturn its deficit in Pennsylvania — which is at nearly 70,000 votes and growing — becomes much more difficult. And without Pennsylvania, President Trump would have virtually no shot at retaining office, given that he would need to overturn the results in three states….

But the Trump campaign assures that this is not all that it seems. Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani claimed that The Post “didn’t read para[graphs] 132-150 which repeat all the allegations of the 680,777 mail in votes which were deliberately concealed from Republican inspectors.” Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis pointed specifically to Paragraphs 142 and 150. All of these paragraphs, they assured, kept the observers claim — and those more than 600,000 votes — on the table.

The Trump campaign also issued a lengthy statement Monday morning calling The Post’s report “a complete mischaracterization.”…

But while the campaign — as The Post’s report acknowledges — continues to assert in its lawsuit that its observers were not able to monitor the counting of mail ballots, it is no longer pursuing legal claims based on that allegation. References to the observers remain in the lawsuit, but the Trump campaign is not seeking legal relief based on that allegation anymore. Instead, those assertions are more or less filler at this point….

The newly amended lawsuit eliminates five of the previous seven allegations of violations, in fact, including all that focused on the access of observers. It also eliminates that claim from its request for relief, which is what really matters in such a lawsuit.

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