Another shake-up has rocked an election-related court challenge that the Trump campaign filed in Pennsylvania. Barry Berke, who’s a partner at the Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel law firm, has filed to join the legal team of Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who’s a target of the Trump campaign’s lawsuit. During the impeachment proceedings against Trump, Berke served as a special counsel for the Democratic majority on the House Judiciary Committee, and during his work on the impeachment proceedings, Berke conducted what Law.com characterizes as a “withering” cross-examination of ex-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, among other highlights.
In the Pennsylvania case, Berke is slated to square off against top Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, who recently joined the Trump campaign’s legal team after the abrupt departure of previous lawyers. Giuliani has already appeared in court on behalf of the Trump campaign in this case, and the event didn’t exactly go well for Giuliani and his allies. He belligerently asserted that fraud plagued the recent election — but he admitted that the Trump campaign’s court challenge, as-is, wasn’t actually a fraud case at the time. The Trump team had amended their complaint, whittling their points of contention down to an allegation that the law’s equal protection demands had been violated. In short, the campaign challenged the provision to some voters of chances to fix mail-in ballot issues while other voters went without a similar opportunity.
During a recent hearing in the Pennsylvania case, Mark Aronchick — a lawyer for the defense — tore into Giuliani’s rants. Aronchick said that Giuliani was “talking about another case, some invented case, some fantasy world case” rather than the actual case at hand, which, Giuliani admitted, was “not a fraud case.” Smoke and mirrors don’t hold up in court, and these sprawling, chaotic claims from the Trump team haven’t come anywhere remotely close to overturning enough of the recent election results to hand Trump a victory.
During a recent press conference, Giuliani outlined the utterly ridiculous foundation of the Trump team’s fraud claims. He insisted that a centrally-planned Democratic conspiracy to perpetrate election fraud and swing the election to Biden had unfolded across the country, but there is absolutely zero hard evidence for this unhinged claim. If that scheme actually unfolded, the perpetrators could have possibly required the cooperation of: frontline election workers, county canvassing boards, state canvassing boards, supervisor of elections offices, frontline observers from both major political parties, Secretary of State offices… and the list goes on. The claims are ridiculous.
