Trump campaign distances itself from attorney Sidney Powell: Transition updates

The campaign now says she's not a member of the president's legal team.

Last Updated: November 23, 2020, 1:31 PM EST

President-elect Joe Biden is moving forward with transition plans, capping a tumultuous and tension-filled campaign during a historic pandemic against President Donald Trump, who still refuses to concede the election two weeks after Biden was projected as the winner and is taking extraordinary moves to challenge the results.

Running out of legal alternatives to override the election loss, Trump invited Michigan's top Republican state lawmakers to visit the White House on Friday, as he and allies pursue a pressure campaign to overturn results in a state Biden won by more than 150,000 votes.

Despite Trump's roadblocks and his administration refusing to recognize Biden as the president-elect, Biden is forging ahead as he prepares to announce key Cabinet positions.

Though Trump has alleged widespread voter fraud, he and his campaign haven't been able to provide the evidence to substantiate their claims and the majority of their lawsuits have already resulted in unfavorable outcomes.

Top headlines:

Here is how the transition unfolded this past week. All times Eastern.
Nov 18, 2020, 9:16 PM EST

Lawsuit filed in Nevada by Trump electors against Biden electors

In what appears to be a last-ditch effort to scrounge together more electoral votes for the president, Trump's state electors sued Biden's electors -- a decision one expert said might be the most legally questionable move seen thus far in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the courts.

"I cannot conceive what valid legal theory there would be for suing these electors over Clark County's actions," Myrna Perez, the director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center, told ABC News. "There's nothing those other electors can do about what Clark County has already done."

The suit alleges, without evidence, irregularities it allegedthat would affect as many as 40,000 ballots in the state, which would be enough to close the gap on Biden's lead of 33,000 votes and overturn the results. The central allegation focuses on the state's signature verification machines, which they argued were "inherently unreliable." Notably, this allegation was already raised in court and rejected.

The suit asks a Nevada judge to either invalidate the election results in the state and declare Trump's electors officially elected, or to null the election results entirely and prevent either candidate from receiving the state's six electoral votes. Legal experts told ABC News the strategy has virtually no chance of being taken seriously.

-ABC News' Alex Hosenball and Olivia Rubin

Nov 18, 2020, 8:41 PM EST

Giuliani revises Trump campaign challenge in Pennsylvania

The Trump campaign's new lead attorney, Rudy Giuliani filed court papers to catch up with the unsupported claims he laid out in a U.S. District Court one day earlier, alleging an "illegal scheme to favor Joseph Biden over President Donald J. Trump." 

Giuliani returned to a claim that had been removed from the campaign's election challenge -- alleging that Trump campaign volunteers could not "meaningfully observe" the vote count, which the campaign said violated the Equal Protection clause because in-person voters were subject to greater scrutiny than mail-in voters. Just one day earlier, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued an opinion rejecting outright the claim that observers were deprived of their chance to watch the vote count.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, personal attorney to President Donald Trump, speaks after media announced that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has won the election, in, Philadelphia, Nov. 7, 2020.
Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

In the newly amended complaint, the Trump campaign asks Judge Matthew Brann to stop Pennsylvania from certifying results from a range of mail-in ballots and instead "compel (the state) to certify the results of the election based solely on the legal votes." Barring that, the Trump campaign wants Judge Brann, to declare the election results "defective," and allow the Republican-led state legislature to choose the state's electors, which is contrary to Pennsylvania's Constitution.

The Trump campaign also asked the court to give them "access to the outside and inside envelopes for the approximately 1.5 million mail ballots at issue" so they can "examine these envelopes to determine the percentage of mail ballots which were illegally counted."

Giuliani submitted multiple versions of the new complaint -- the first one pock-marked by typos and entire sections he struck out an hour later. Both included vitriolic language directed at "Democratic counties" and the Pennsylvania government, mirroring his language in press conferences over the past two weeks.

-ABC News' Alex Hosenball and Olivia Rubin

Nov 18, 2020, 7:41 PM EST

Ga. official says Floyd County error was 'dangerous'

While no additional counties in Georgia have found uncounted ballots, Gabriel Sterling, the statewide voting systems implementation manager in the Georgia Secretary of State's office, called the errors in Floyd County's process "a lot more dangerous" for the potential of losing votes.

That country, Sterling said Tuesday, "had 2,700 ballots that they just flat out didn't scan and but for this process, we likely may not have been able to find those, and that -- that is a huge problem."

An election worker examine ballots as vote counting in the general election continues at State Farm Arena on Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020, in Atlanta.
Brynn Anderson/AP

"That is very different than the situation we saw in the other ones where they missed a card, and they just didn't do the reconciliation process," he added. "There wasn't a reconciliation process that was going to catch this thing in Floyd County, which made it a lot more dangerous in terms of losing potential votes."

Officials found uncounted ballots in Floyd, Fayette, Walton and Douglas counties. In Fayette, Walton and Douglas counties, officials found memory cards that were not uploaded properly.

In these four counties, the county boards of election must convene to re-certify their results to account for the uncounted ballots, so those results can then be what the state certifies. Sterling said that his understanding is that all of the county boards have "lined up" to do this, and that he hasn't heard of any issues.

-ABC News' Quinn Scanlan

Nov 18, 2020, 6:54 PM EST

Only 21 counties in Georgia still working data entry in election audit

Gabriel Sterling, the statewide voting systems implementation manager in the Georgia Secretary of State's office, said Tuesday afternoon that the counties have passed the 5 million vote count threshold for the physical hand tallying and only 21 counties are still working on the data entry part of the audit. 

Of those 21 counties, six have single-digit deviations from their original results, so Sterling said it was possible that the counties just haven't hit the "finalize results" button in the audit system, but are basically done. 

Since the morning press conference, no other counties have discovered a batch of uncounted ballots, but Sterling said that it "doesn't mean it can't happen between now and midnight tonight."

But absent that happening, according to Sterling, Biden still leads by 12,781 votes. 

At the end of this press conference, Sterling said that he hopes that when this is through everyone -- regardless of party affiliation -- will "have faith in the outcome." 

"I'm prayerful that we can get through this, and that we can find a way to have everybody at the end of the day -- Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, independent, socialist, whatever -- have faith in the outcome of the election regardless of how it came out," he said.

Sterling said that the goal is to release the results of the audit by noon Thursday. The state plans to upload all the audit results on a website.

-ABC News' Quinn Scanlan

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