When it comes to the election fraud claims, watch what the lawyers do, not what the politicians say.
There seems to be a real disconnect between the claims of widespread fraud, a stolen election and illegal voting made by President Donald Trump and his allies and the actual claims formally made by his lawyers in court. Both Trump in his Twitter feed and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany in her press conferences have made allegations of broad-based election fraud. But under questioning from judges in Arizona and Pennsylvania, Trump’s lawyers have backed away from actually asserting fraud. Despite Trump’s allegations to the contrary, his lawyers have acknowledged that they are not claiming that dead people voted or that occasional computer glitches were part of a deliberate conspiracy. In one of several Pennsylvania cases, Trump attorneys actually signed a legal document in which they stated, The attorney backpedaling is not surprising. It’s one thing to speculate via tweet, but quite another for an attorney, who is an officer of the court, to make representations to a judge. Trump’s lawyers are constrained in what they can assert by three major restrictions that apply to lawyers: professional ethics, rules of civil procedure and rules of evidence. As members of the bar association — the state entity that grants attorneys their license to practice law — lawyers have a professional ethics obligation “not to abuse legal procedure” by filing “frivolous” claims. Rule 3.1 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, some version of which applies in all states, forbids a lawyer from bringing a claim or argument “unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous.
