Tag Archives: Trump Campaign

U.S. judge declines to sanction Trump campaign over alleged ‘disinformation’ tactic

By Jan Wolfe

(Reuters) – A federal judge in Michigan has declined to reprimand President Donald Trump’s campaign for submitting a court document that opposing lawyers said was purposefully misleading.

In a four-page order issued on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Janet Neff said she would not strike the disputed document from the court record. Lawyers for the city of Detroit had asked Neff to strike the document as a way of sanctioning Trump’s campaign.

“While we are disappointed that sanctions were not awarded, this is only one of many cases filed in Michigan, and we do expect these lawyers to be sanctioned by some courts for their repeated frivolous lawsuits,” David Fink, a lawyer for the city of Detroit, said in a statement.

Trump’s campaign on Nov. 19 said it was voluntarily dropping a lawsuit contesting Michigan’s election results because election officials in Wayne County “met and declined to certify the results of the presidential election.”

In fact, Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers on Nov. 17 refused at first to certify the results, but then reversed themselves after a public outcry.

Detroit’s lawyers said on Nov. 19 that the campaign included “impertinent and false language” in the filing. They did not request a monetary penalty, but said Neff had “the authority to strike materials from the record as a sanction.”

Federal law allows Trump’s lawyers to “voluntarily dismiss their claims, but it does not allow them to use a Notice of Dismissal to spread disinformation,” according to Detroit’s motion.

Mark “Thor” Hearne, the Trump campaign lawyer who submitted the document, has said the sanctions request was meritless and an attempt to score political points.

Hearne argued affidavits attached to his filing accurately explained the facts to the judge.

Neff provided little explanation for why she did not think the sanction was warranted.

“With the filing of its motion, the City of Detroit’s factual position is part of the court record, and the Court, in its discretion, declines to impose the requested sanction,” Neff wrote.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Tom Brown)

Wisconsin to hold partial vote recount

By Jarrett Renshaw and Jason Lange

WILMINGTON, Del./WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign on Wednesday requested a partial recount of Wisconsin’s presidential election results, as part of its long-shot attempt to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

While staying out of the public eye, the Republican Trump has persisted in venting his anger on Twitter, where he made claims of election fraud, some of which were unsupported by evidence and others demonstrably untrue.

Election officials in Wisconsin, as well as in Georgia, said recounts in those states were very unlikely to reverse Trump’s losses.

Biden, a Democrat, warned that the continued delay in recognizing him as winner could mean the United States will be “behind by weeks and months” in the preparations to distribute a coronavirus vaccine.

Trump’s unfounded claims about the election having been “rigged” are failing in courts, but opinion polls show they have a political benefit, with as many as half of Trump’s fellow Republicans believing them, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission said it would oversee recounts in two heavily Democratic counties – Milwaukee and Dane, which includes Madison – after the Trump campaign paid the $3 million cost, less than the $7.9 million estimated cost of a statewide recount.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said a recount would start on Friday and finish within days. Only a few hundred votes changed in the county’s recount after the 2016 presidential election, he said.

“My guess would be that by focusing on Dane and Milwaukee the end result will be that Biden will have a slight increase in votes, but nothing terribly significant – certainly nothing anywhere near what would be required for changing the outcomes,” McDonell said.

In the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the election winner, Biden captured 306 votes to Trump’s 232. He won the popular vote by more than 5.8 million.

Biden won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes to lead Trump 49.5% to 48.8%.

To remain in office, Trump would need to overturn results in at least three large and closely competitive states to reach the threshold of 270 electoral votes. That would be unprecedented.

The president is clinging to hope that a manual recount ordered by Georgia can erase Biden’s 14,000-vote lead there and is also challenging results in the swing state of Michigan.

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, told journalists that as of Wednesday morning, election officials conducting the recount had reviewed 4,968,000 ballots – nearly all of those cast – and found Biden’s lead over Trump had fallen to 12,781 ballots, down from 14,156 previously.

Sterling said there was no evidence that fraud could have changed the outcome in Georgia.

FALSE CLAIM ON DETROIT

Trump on Wednesday falsely claimed that the number of votes counted in heavily Democratic Detroit, the largest city in Michigan, had surpassed the number of residents.

“In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!” he tweeted.

City records show that 250,138 votes were cast there in the presidential election. That is a little more than a third of the city’s population, which according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 670,031.

In a rare win for Trump in his legal assault on the election results, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said on Wednesday it would take up an appeal challenging thousands of mail-in votes cast in Philadelphia that were missing information on the return envelopes.

Trump’s refusal to concede the Nov. 3 election is blocking the smooth transition to a new administration and complicating Biden’s response to the coronavirus pandemic when he takes office on Jan. 20.

Biden on Wednesday held a virtual meeting with frontline healthcare workers in Delaware who complained about a lack of personal protective equipment and COVID-19 tests for themselves.

He warned that the delay in declaring him the election winner could mean that “soon we’re going to be behind by weeks or months being able to put together the whole initiative” to distribute coronavirus vaccines when they become available.

The General Services Administration agency, run by a Trump appointee, has yet to formally declare an election winner. Biden’s team says this is hindering coordination with the current White House coronavirus task force.

States face a Dec. 8 deadline to certify election results in time for the official Electoral College vote on Dec. 14.

Congress is scheduled to count the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, which is normally a formality. But Trump supporters in the Senate and House of Representatives could object to the results in a final, long-shot attempt to deprive Biden of 270 electoral votes and turn the final decision over to the House.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday showed about half of Republicans believe Trump “rightfully won” but the election was stolen from him.

Seventy-three percent of all voters polled agreed Biden won while 5% thought Trump won. But when asked specifically whether Biden had “rightfully won,” 52% of Republicans said Trump rightfully won, while only 29% said Biden had rightfully won.

Election officials from both parties, around the United States, have said there was no evidence of vote tampering, and a federal review drew the same conclusion.

As he battles to save his presidency, Trump will stay in Washington over next week’s Thanksgiving holiday, rather than travel to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, a spokeswoman for first lady Melania Trump said.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Delaware, Jason Lange, John Whitesides and Simon Lewis in Washington; Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)

Trump campaign loses lawsuit seeking to halt Michigan vote count

By Jan Wolfe

(Reuters) – A judge in Michigan on Thursday tossed out a lawsuit brought by U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign in hopes of halting vote-counting in the battleground state.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is the projected winner in Michigan, which Trump, a Republican, carried in 2016.

Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens made the ruling during a court hearing on Thursday. She said she planned to issue a written ruling on Friday.

Campaign officials for Trump have said they filed the suit to stop the counting in Michigan and gain greater access to the tabulation process. A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit was a “messaging exercise,” said Bob Bauer, senior adviser on Biden’s campaign.

“It has no other purpose than to confuse the public about what’s taking place and to support their baseless claims of irregularity,” Bauer said in a call with reporters.

Nationally, Biden inched closer to victory on Thursday in an exceedingly close U.S. election hinging on razor-thin margins in a handful of states.

Trump has launched a flurry of lawsuits across the country.

In another setback for Trump on Thursday, a judge in Georgia denied a request by his campaign for an order requiring Chatham County to separate and secure late-arriving ballots to ensure they are not counted.

In Michigan, Trump campaign lawyers had requested an order directing Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to require “meaningful access” for campaign poll watchers to the counting of ballots, plus access to surveillance videotapes of ballot drop boxes.

Judge Stephens said it was local election officials who were for the most part able to deliver the relief requested by the campaign.

“The relief that is being requested is in substantial part unavailable through the Secretary of State,” Stephens said.

Regarding the request for access to videotapes, there was “no basis to find that there is a substantial likelihood of success on the merits,” the judge added.

(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Karen Freifeld, Editing by Franklin Paul, Diane Craft, Sonya Hepinstall and Cynthia Osterman)

Trump campaign loses legal fights in Georgia and Michigan, vows Nevada lawsuit

By Tom Hals and Jan Wolfe

(Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s campaign lost court rulings in the closely-contested states of Georgia and Michigan on Thursday, even as it vowed to bring a new lawsuit challenging what it called voting irregularities in Nevada.

In the Georgia case, the campaign alleged 53 late-arriving ballots were mixed with on-time ballots. In Michigan, it had sought to stop votes from being counted and obtain greater access to the tabulation process.

State judges tossed out both the suits on Thursday.

Judge James Bass, a superior court judge in Georgia, said there was “no evidence” that the ballots in question were invalid.

In the Michigan case, Judge Cynthia Stephens said: “I have no basis to find that there is a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.”

Trump allies alleged that there had been voting irregularities in Nevada’s populous Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.

A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment on the Michigan and Georgia rulings.

Votes are still being counted in all three states, among a handful of battleground states that could decide the presidency. Democratic challenger Joe Biden has a narrow lead in Nevada, Trump a narrow lead in Georgia, and Biden has been projected to win in Michigan.

At a news conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt and other Trump campaign surrogates, including former administration official Richard Grenell, gave no evidence to support their allegations of irregularities and did not answer questions from reporters.

“We believe that there are dead voters that have been counted. We are also confident that there are thousands of people whose votes have been counted that have moved out of Clark County during the pandemic,” Laxalt said.

He said a lawsuit would be filed in federal court to ask the judge to “stop the counting of improper votes.”

Joe Gloria, an election official in Clark County, told reporters there was no evidence of improper ballots being processed.

Bob Bauer, a senior advisor to Biden’s campaign, called the various Trump lawsuits a “meritless” distraction and said the strategy was designed to undermine the integrity of the electoral process.

“This is part of a broader misinformation campaign that involves some political theater,” he said.

“They’re intended to give the Trump campaign the opportunity to argue the vote count should stop. It is not going to stop,” he told reporters on Thursday.

Election legal experts have said Trump’s legal strategy is unlikely to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the election.

Trump has repeatedly said that he expects the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority including three justices he appointed, to have a key role.

But it is unlikely the court would have the final word in any decisive way and any challenge would have to make its way through the usual court process, legal experts say.

In Pennsylvania, where Trump is narrowly leading but Biden is making gains, the Trump campaign and other Republicans have already filed various legal challenges.

An appeals court in Pennsylvania on Thursday ordered that Trump campaign officials be allowed to more closely observe ballot processing in Philadelphia, which led to a brief delay in the count.

(Reporting by Steve Holland, Doina Chiacu, Tom Hals, Karen Freifeld, Julia Harte, Jan Wolfe, Daphne Psaledakis and Lawrence Hurley; Writing by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Peter Graff, Sonya Hepinstall and Noeleen Walder)

Biden leads in pivotal Wisconsin; Trump campaign sues in Michigan

By Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland

WILMINGTON, Del./WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrat Joe Biden held a narrow lead over President Donald Trump in Wisconsin after officials completed their vote count and pulled further ahead in Michigan, even as the Republican incumbent’s campaign vowed to pursue a recount and a lawsuit to challenge the results in the two Midwestern battleground states.

Wisconsin and Michigan are critical in the race to the 270 electoral votes in the state-by-state Electoral College needed to win the White House. Trump won both states in his 2016 election victory. Losing them would greatly harm his quest for another four years in office.

Trump, who made attacking the integrity of U.S. elections a central campaign theme, in the early-morning hours falsely claimed victory in the election and made unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud. His campaign on Wednesday said it had filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the count in Michigan, asserting it had not been allowed to observe the opening of ballots.

Biden led by 38,000 votes out of more than 5 million ballots in Michigan.

“Michigan’s elections have been conducted transparently, with access provided for both political parties and the public, and using a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that all ballots are counted fairly and accurately,” Ryan Jarvi, press secretary to Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, said in a statement.

Wisconsin officials finished their tally at around midday after an all-night effort, showing Biden with a lead of just over 20,000 votes, or 0.6%, according to Edison Research. The Trump campaign immediately said it would request a recount, which is permitted under state law when the margin is below 1%.

CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press projected Biden as the winner in Wisconsin, though Edison Research, which provides voting data to the National Election Pool media consortium, has not announced a winner because of the pending recount.

Closely contested states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina were still counting votes, leaving the national election outcome still in doubt.

THE PANDEMIC EFFECT

Voting concluded as scheduled on Tuesday night, but many states routinely take days to finish counting ballots. There was a surge in mail-in ballots nationally amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump led in the two Southern states, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as in Pennsylvania. But if Trump loses Wisconsin and Michigan, he would have to win all three as well as either Arizona or Nevada, where Biden was leading in the latest vote counts.

At the moment, not including Wisconsin, Biden leads Trump 227 to 213 in Electoral College votes, which are largely based on a state’s population.

Biden led in Arizona, a battleground state with a high Latino population, which would make him only the second Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in 72 years. Trump won the state in 2016.

In Pennsylvania, Trump led by about 389,000 votes as officials gradually worked their way through millions of mail-in ballots, which were seen as likely to benefit Biden. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien called the president the winner in Pennsylvania even though state officials had not completed the count.

In dueling conference calls with reporters earlier on Wednesday, officials from each campaign insisted their candidate would prevail.

“If we count all legal ballots, we win,” Stepien said, setting the stage for the post-election litigation over ballot counting.

Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon told reporters the former vice president was on track to win the election, while senior legal adviser Bob Bauer said there were no grounds for Trump to invalidate lawfully cast ballots.

“We’re going to defend this vote, the vote by which Joe Biden has been elected to the presidency,” said Bauer, adding that the campaign’s legal team was prepared for any challenge.

Biden was expected to deliver an address later on Wednesday. The campaign also launched a new group, the Biden Fight Fund, to raise money for legal fights over the election.

Trump continued to make unsubstantiated attacks on the vote-counting process on Twitter on Wednesday, hours after he appeared at the White House and declared victory in an election that was far from decided. Both Facebook and Twitter flagged multiple posts from the president for promoting misleading claims.

“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said before launching an extraordinary attack on the electoral process by a sitting president. “This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

Trump provided no evidence to back up his claim of fraud and did not explain how he would fight the results at the Supreme Court.

In the nationwide popular vote, Biden on Wednesday was comfortably ahead of Trump, with about 3 million more votes. Trump won the 2016 election over Democrat Hillary Clinton after winning crucial battleground states even though she drew about 3 million more votes nationwide.

The election uncertainty only added to the anxiety many Americans were feeling following a vitriolic campaign that unfolded amid a pandemic that has killed more than 233,000 Americans and left millions more jobless. The country has also grappled with months of unrest involving protests over racism and police brutality.

Biden’s hopes of a decisive early victory were dashed on Tuesday evening when Trump won the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Texas. Among other undecided states, Nevada does not expect to update its vote count until Thursday, state officials said.

TEAMS OF LAWYERS

It was not clear what Trump meant by saying overnight that he would ask the Supreme Court to halt “voting.” The high court does not hear direct challenges but instead reviews cases that have worked their way up from lower courts.

Trump has repeatedly said without evidence that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud, although U.S. election experts say fraud is very rare.

Legal experts have said the election outcome could get bogged down in state-by-state litigation over a host of issues, including whether states can include late-arriving ballots that were mailed by Election Day. Both campaigns have marshaled teams of lawyers in preparation for any disputes.

The Supreme Court previously allowed Pennsylvania to move forward with a plan to count ballots mailed by Election Day that arrive up to three days later, but some conservative justices suggested they would be willing to reconsider the matter. State officials planned to segregate those ballots as a precaution.

The election will also decide which party controls the U.S. Congress for the next two years, and the Democratic drive to win control of the Senate appeared to be falling short. Democrats had flipped two Republican-held seats while losing one of their own, and five other races remained undecided – Alaska, Michigan, North Carolina and two in Georgia.

Trump’s strong performance in Florida, a must-win state for his re-election, was powered by his improved numbers with Latinos.

Edison’s national exit poll showed that while Biden led Trump among nonwhite voters, Trump received a slightly higher proportion of the nonwhite votes than he did in 2016. The poll showed that about 11% of African Americans, 31% of Hispanics and 30% of Asian Americans voted for Trump, up 3 percentage points from 2016 in all three groups.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Wilmington, Delaware, and Jeff Mason in Washington; Additional reporting by Jason Lange, Steve Holland and Susan Heavey in Washington, and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Will Dunham)

Exclusive: Hackers test defenses of Trump campaign websites ahead of U.S. election, security staff warn

By Jack Stubbs

LONDON (Reuters) – Hackers have stepped up efforts to knock Trump campaign and business websites offline ahead of the U.S. election, in what a security firm working for the campaign said could be preparation for a larger digital assault, according to emails seen by Reuters.

The security assessment was prepared by staff at U.S. cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, which has been hired by President Donald Trump to help defend his campaign’s websites in an election contest overshadowed by warnings about hacking, disinformation and foreign interference.

Cloudflare is widely used by businesses and other organizations to help defend against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which aim to take down websites by flooding them with malicious traffic.

Internal Cloudflare emails sent to senior company managers – including CEO Matthew Prince – on July 9 state that the number and severity of attacks on Trump websites increased in the preceding two months and reached record levels in June. The emails did not give the total number of attacks.

“As we get closer to the election, attacks are increasing in both numbers (and) sophistication” and succeeded in disrupting access to the targeted websites for short periods of time between March 15 and June 6, the assessment said.

Cloudflare did not respond directly to questions about the emails or their contents. The company said it was providing security services to both U.S. presidential campaigns and declined to answer further questions about the nature or details of its work.

“We have seen an increase in cyber attacks targeting political candidates. We will continue to work to ensure these attacks do not disrupt free and fair elections,” it said in a statement when asked about the emails.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. The Biden campaign declined to comment on its work with Cloudflare or any attacks on its websites.

A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization said no Trump websites had been taken offline by cyber attacks. She did not respond to further questions about the attacks or Trump’s work with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare’s security team did not comment on the identity of the hackers and Reuters was not able to determine who was responsible for the attacks.

DDoS attacks are viewed by cybersecurity experts as a relatively crude form of digital sabotage – easily deployed by anyone from tech-savvy teenagers to top-end cyber criminals.

But seven of the attacks on Trump websites, including donaldjtrump.com and a Trump-owned golf course, were judged to be more serious by the Cloudflare security team, the emails show.

The increasing number and sophistication of attempts suggested the attackers were “probing” the website defenses to establish what would be needed to take them fully offline, the security assessment said.

“We therefore cannot discount the possibility that there are attackers using this as an opportunity to collect information for more sophisticated attacks,” it added.

The Cloudflare team said they would continue to monitor the attacks and carry out “a further round of security hardening” to better protect the websites.

(Additional reporting by Joseph Menn in SAN FRANCISCO; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Edward Tobin)

FBI raided former Trump campaign manager Manafort’s home in July

FILE PHOTO: Paul Manafort, senior advisor to Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, exits following a meeting of Donald Trump's national finance team at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, U.S., June 9, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo

By Sarah N. Lynch and Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – FBI agents seized documents and other material last month at the Virginia home of Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, as part of a special counsel’s probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a spokesman for Manafort said on Wednesday.

The predawn raid was conducted at Manafort’s home in the Washington suburb of Alexandria without advance warning on July 26, a day after Manafort had met with Senate Intelligence Committee staff members, the Washington Post reported, citing unidentified people familiar with the probe.

The search warrant was wide-ranging and FBI agents working with Robert Mueller, the special counsel named by the U.S. Justice Department in May to head the investigation, departed the home with various records, the Post said. Investigators were looking for tax documents and foreign banking records, the New York Times reported.

Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni confirmed the raid had taken place.

“FBI agents executed a search warrant at one of Mr. Manafort’s residences. Mr. Manafort has consistently cooperated with law enforcement and other serious inquiries and did so on this occasion as well,” Maloni said in an email.

The raid was the latest indication of the intensifying of Mueller’s probe, which Trump has derided as a “witch hunt.” Allegations of possible collusion between people associated with Trump’s campaign and Moscow have dogged the Republican president since he took office in January.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the presidential race, in part by hacking and releasing emails embarrassing to Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, to help him get elected.

Manafort has been a key figure in the congressional and federal investigations into the matter. Mueller’s team is examining money-laundering accusations against Manafort, poring over his financial and real estate records in New York as well as his involvement in Ukrainian politics, two officials told Reuters last month.

Congressional committees are looking at a June 2016 meeting in New York with a Russian lawyer organized by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who released emails last month that showed he welcomed the prospect of receiving damaging information about Clinton at the meeting. Manafort attended the meeting.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not immediately return a request for comment on the raid. Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for Mueller’s office, declined to confirm the raid.

Manafort has been cooperating with the congressional committees in their Russia probes, meeting with staff members behind closed doors and turning over documents. He also has been in talks with them about testifying publicly.

He met with investigators from Senate Intelligence Committee staff last month and has been negotiating an appearance before the Judiciary Committee.

Committee leaders said they wanted to discuss not just the campaign, but also Manafort’s political work on behalf of interests in Ukraine. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine was one reason the U.S. Congress defied Trump and passed new sanctions on Russia last month.

Manafort previously worked as a consultant to a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine and helped support the country’s Kremlin-backed former leader, Viktor Yanukovich. According to a financial audit reported by the New York Times, he also once owed $17 million to Russian shell companies.

A Senate Judiciary Committee aide said the panel on Aug. 2 received approximately 20,000 pages of documents from Trump’s presidential campaign that it requested for its own Russia investigation, as well as about 400 pages of documents from Manafort the same day.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch, Patricia Zengerle and Richard Cowan; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Will Dunham)