According to the D.C. Bar, Rudy Giuliani has been “administratively suspended” from their ranks over “non-payment.” The website for the lawyers association in the nation’s capital revealed that the administrative suspension seemed to be active as of late Tuesday morning/ early Tuesday afternoon. On Tuesday, Giuliani filed a court request to join a Pennsylvania case that the Trump campaign brought against election procedures in the state, and in his application to join the case, Giuliani claimed to be a member in “good standing” of the D.C. Bar — but the association’s website seemed to reveal that, as of Tuesday morning, that simply was not the case.
Here is a screenshot of the DC Bar's membership listing web page for Giuliani: pic.twitter.com/ngPzkCYF7m
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) November 17, 2020
In the Pennsylvania case, the Trump campaign has sought to block the state from officially certifying its presidential election results while the court process plays out. Previous Trump campaign lawsuits have repeatedly failed, and there’s no meaningfully conclusive evidence that this case in Pennsylvania will fare any differently.
According to the Associated Press, the Trump campaign already dropped a central request in their Pennsylvania lawsuit, which sought — until recently — to throw out a whopping 682,479 mail-in ballots in the state. Trump and his allies have claimed that Republican observers were systematically blocked from watching the processing of huge numbers of ballots, but this claim is categorically untrue. Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt — a Republican — has confirmed as much. The Trump campaign based their request to throw out those hundreds of thousands of ballots on the lie that Republicans had been systematically blocked from observing the process.
Going forward, the Trump campaign is still claiming that Pennsylvania election authorities were out of line in giving some voters the opportunity to fix issues with their mail-in ballots while other voters went without this opportunity. The lawsuit suggests that no Pennsylvania voters should have gotten this opportunity to fix mail-in ballot issues, although authorities give voters this opportunity elsewhere. Notably, Trump’s side has taken the exact opposite approach elsewhere — in an Arizona case, Republicans argued that Election Day voters didn’t get an appropriate chance to fix issues with their ballots. The Trump campaign has since withdrawn that Arizona case.
The claim that Pennsylvania voters should not have gotten a chance to “cure” their mail-in ballots — meaning fix any issues — has emerged in a previous court case over the election. On November 4 — the day after Election Day — U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Savage cast doubt on an argument that a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling should be construed as a ban on letting voters fix mail-in ballot problems. Savage suggested that the implication of the ruling in question was that local election authorities were not required to give voters the opportunity to fix mail-in ballot issues, not that these authorities were outright banned from extending this chance to voters.
In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania — one of the counties targeted by that earlier post-Election Day lawsuit — Chief Operating Officer Lee Soltysiak indicated earlier this month that less than 100 votes seemed to fall into the group of challenged “cured” ballots. That number is exponentially lower than the total number of votes that would need to be thrown out to swing the state to Trump, and adding other counties to the mix likely would not change this conclusion.
