PHILADELPHIA — President Donald Trump's legal team repeated its vow Sunday to bring a wave of new lawsuits contesting Joe Biden's win of the presidency, starting with a suit to be filed Monday alleging that Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were awash in vote fraud.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, elaborated on the pending suits in an interview on Fox News, but either presented no evidence to back up his allegations or reiterated complaints that the GOP has already argued in previous court challenges, many without success.
Still, he contended the suits could reverse the outcome, at least in Pennsylvania.
"We have enough to change Pennsylvania," he said. "The Pennsylvania election was a disaster."
Giuliani said there were voting issues in as many as 10 states. "This was a national plan by Democrats," he told interviewer Maria Bartiromo on her "Sunday Morning Futures" show.
Democratic lawyers have fought back against GOP lawsuits ever since the election. They have dismissed the challenges as fact-free attacks on what amounted to a fairly routine election process.
The former mayor of New York City called Philadelphia "a city that is an epicenter of voter fraud" and said: "We have dead people voting," possibly in "very, very substantial" numbers. However the only examples he cited were from past elections, such as a vote cast in 2018 in the name of boxer Joe Frazier, seven years after his death.
In the suit Monday, he said, the Trump camp would argue that the Pennsylvania process violated federal civil rights law and Pennsylvania law.
He also said the brief would argue that improper counts in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh meant the statewide count violated requirements under the U.S. Constitution for equal protection under the law — an argument that Giuliani noted was advanced by President George W. Bush in the 2000 legal war that won Bush the presidency.
He also said that "more likely than not" the allegations of fraud would reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
He said the Monday lawsuit would repeat a GOP contention that Republican observers had not been given proper access to watch the counting of the votes.
In Pennsylvania, he said that after a state appeals judge ordered that monitors should be permitted to be as close as six feet from the counting, Philadelphia election officials moved them back six feet.
In a federal court hearing on Thursday about the counting in Philadelphia, GOP lawyers argued that the six-foot rule still left Republican observers too far away. The federal judge who heard their argument did not endorse that GOP contention.
In all, Giuliani said, the Trump lawyers had as many as 50 or 60 witnesses across the state ready to testify to wrongdoing, including an allegation that corrupt election workers had backdated late ballots to make sure they counted. In the only specific examples, he cited three GOP vote monitors who accompanied him to a news conference in Philadelphia on Saturday and described their experiences trying to observe the counting process.
In coming days, Giuliani told Fox News, the Trump campaign would also bring similar lawsuits in other states, possibly including Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia.
As for Trump, Giuliani said, "At this point, it would be wrong for him to concede."
