Republican surrogates for President Donald Trump resumed their legal fight Monday to try to stop the vote count in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, but faced long odds given the Electoral College tally and recent court rulings that found no evidence of widespread vote fraud.
While some Republican officials invoked the Trump mantra that only "legal votes" should be counted, others emerged to counter the campaign narrative and urge voters, and perhaps the president, to support the results.
"The process has not failed our country in more than 200 years, and it is not going to fail our country this year," said Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who won her reelection bid and has congratulated President-elect Joe Biden on his victory.
Still, Trump lawyers soldiered on six days after the election, just as personal counsel Rudy Giuliani had promised they would during a surreal weekend press conference outside a landscaping storefront in northeast Philadelphia.
Giuliani denounced the city's vote count — which fell about 4-1 for Biden, giving the Democrat the win Saturday in both Pennsylvania and the U.S. election — as "extremely troubling."
Across the country, Republicans have complained about problems with the signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, the inability of their poll watchers to scrutinize them and the extensions granted for mail-in ballots to arrive. They filed another lawsuit Monday evening in federal court in Pennsylvania.
Attorney General William Barr on Monday authorized federal prosecutors across the U.S. to pursue "substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities" before the election is certified.
His action, described in a memo to U.S. attorneys across the country, gives prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt actions before the election is formally certified.
