PHILADELPHIA — A federal appeals court on Friday roundly rejected President Donald Trump's last remaining legal challenge to Pennsylvania's election results, calling it "light on facts" and "breathtaking" in the presumptuousness of its request to disenfranchise millions of voters in the state.
And yet, once again, Trump's lawyers tried to spin a victory out of another loss in court, saying the ruling sets the case up for the venue in which they've always wanted it to be heard: the U.S. Supreme Court.
Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee who authored the opinion for the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, was less enthusiastic about the merits of their case.
"Calling an election unfair does not make it so," he wrote. "Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here."
Bibas — who was joined on the panel by the circuit's Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith and Judge Michael A. Chagares, both appointees of President George W. Bush — noted that despite the campaign's speculative claims and fiery rhetoric it never even alleged, let alone proved, that Trump's campaign had been treated differently from Biden's or that any votes had been improperly counted.
But despite the all-Republican-appointed panel that decided their case, including one handpicked by the president, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis dismissed its members as part of "the activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania."
"On to SCOTUS!" Ellis tweeted Friday afternoon.
The 3rd Circuit panel, however, was not high on the Trump team's chances, starkly stating at one point in their 21-page opinion: "The campaign cannot win this lawsuit."
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office represented state elections administrators in the case, said in a statement that, if necessary, the state was more than prepared to take on the president's team before the nation's highest court.
"The sitting president and his enablers can lie without penalty in tweets, 'hearings,' (and) press events," he said in a statement. "Where they can't get away with it is in court. That's why they keep losing — there's no evidence to back up their claims."
Friday's ruling affirmed a lower court decision last week from a federal judge in Williamsport who dismissed the campaign's lawsuit last week as a "Frankenstein's monster" of claims lacking in evidence or proper basis in the law. It came four days after state elections officials certified Pennsylvania's presidential election results, cementing Joe Biden as the state's victor by some 81,000 votes.
Though Trump and his lawyers have made numerous unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud in the state, their federal case — the linchpin of a legal attack that has seen them lose more than a dozen other court challenges in the past month — failed to make even a single allegation, let alone provide evidence, of illegally cast ballots in the state.
Instead, the suit challenged the state's process for the casting and counting of mail ballots, complaining about the level of access GOP monitors had to the tallying of votes and that some Democratic leaning counties, under guidance from state officials, had allowed voters to correct mistakes on their ballots like missing signatures or secrecy envelopes.
After last week's dismissal of the case, the Trump campaign turned to the 3rd Circuit seeking a chance to amend its claims and make broader allegations, with no evidence, of a Democratic conspiracy to rig the vote Biden.
The revised suit asked the court to throw some 1.5 million mail ballots of voters in seven counties including Philadelphia and its suburbs or, alternatively, to decertify the election, declare the entire process "defective" and appoint the GOP-controlled state legislature to select the state's 20 delegates to the Electoral College vote.
Bibas scoffed at the idea, calling it "drastic and unprecedented" in Friday's ruling.
"Voters, not lawyers, choose the president," he wrote. "Ballots, not briefs, decide elections. ... Alchemy cannot transmute lead into gold."
