Trump Is Already Talking to Lawyers About Contesting the Election Results
Donald Trump has reestablished contact with a lawyer involved in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and who is now encouraging the former president to begin laying the groundwork to once again contest the outcome.
According to a Wednesday report from The New York Times, Trump has spent the last weeks of the campaign in frequent contact with Kurt Olsen, a MAGA lawyer involved in several legal challenges to state results in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 loss. Olsen also spoke to Trump multiple times on Jan. 6, 2021.
Sources who spoke to the Times said that Olsen has been encouraging Trump to begin preemptively demanding that voting machine data be preserved by election authorities in the key swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Olson was one of the primary advocates for Texas v. Pennsylvania, a 2020 election lawsuit which sought to prevent the certification of vote counts in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Trump has reportedly entertained Olsen’s advice, but others in his circle worry that taking advice from the lawyer — who is facing ethics complaints related to his actions in 2020 — could muddle the Trump campaign’s plans to legally contest election results following November’s vote.
Trump and his advisers have learned from their semi-improvised, patchwork efforts to challenge battleground election results in 2020 — and are plotting what they hope will be a failsafe strategy this time around.
As previously reported by Rolling Stone, a major portion of their strategy hinges on leveling claims of fraud as early as possible on the night of the election as swing states count mail-in and absentee ballots they’re not allowed to touch before Election Day.
When Trump lost in 2020, he falsely claimed that the manipulation of mail-in ballots — the use of which surged during the Covid-19 pandemic and heavily favored social-distancing conscious Democrats — had cost him the White House. But in the four years since Trump’s defeat, Republicans have worked to tank state-level efforts that would allow election officials to begin processing mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day.
“You gotta call them out very early in the process, like that night, otherwise they can get away with it and cover their tracks,” one source told Rolling Stone.
The repeat push against mail-in ballots could take place alongside a wave of lawfare challenging vote counts and certifications in court, efforts to pressure state officials to deny certification to results, and a flood of conspiracy mongering.
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