Giuliani to potentially lead Trump’s election court battle, report says, as he calls for ‘major legal effort’

As Rudy Giuliani campaigns for Donald Trump across the country, the president is reportedly considering his personal lawyer for a potential disaster-scenario job: overseeing a historic legal battle if the election is contested come November.

The former New York City mayor has pushed conspiracy theories about election fraud ever since the 2016 election, when he claimed “dead people usually vote for Democrats” and that the vote was rigged against Mr Trump.

Mr Giuliani echoed those comments in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity earlier this month, claiming the Democratic Party was getting “dead people” to vote in state elections and adding that any evidence of mail-in voter fraud during the Covid-19 pandemic must be met with a major legal challenge.

Meanwhile, the president has told those within his orbit that he wanted Mr Giuliani to spearhead the possible legal battle, the Daily Beast reported on Tuesday, as well as Jay Sekulow, an attorney and conservative media personality who worked on Mr Trump’s legal team throughout former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“I want Jay and Rudy on this,” the president said, according to an anonymous source who spoke to the news outlet about Mr Giuliani’s potential involvement in the upcoming legal challenges the Trump campaign may launch in the weeks and months ahead.

It’s a legal battle Mr Giuliani has seemingly been preparing for over the last several years.

In his recent interview with Mr Hannity, the conservative TV host and friend of the president, Mr Giuliani quipped about how he “couldn’t get a single dead person to vote Republican” as he campaign for mayor of New York City.

“I mean it’s amazing, these guys have been cheating for years … you know how many dead people are in those books?” he said. “This is very serious, Sean.”

He added: “I’ve talked with the president about this — I mean, we have to have a major legal effort.”

Mr Trump declined to confirm whether he would accept a peaceful transition of power — a bedrock of American politics and society — were he to lose in his re-election bid against Joe Biden, the former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee.

Mr Biden has meanwhile assembled an army of lawyers to work on a potential post-election legal fights, according to numerous reports, recruiting top experts like Eric Holder, the former attorney general.

It remains unclear when Americans will learn the official results of the 2020 elections due to expanded mail-in voting options in key battleground states due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many of those states, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, do not begin processing ballots until Election Day, meaning a delay in their official counts is all but inevitable.

How long exactly that delay extends, and what legal challenges may arise during that time, is also unknown. Mr Giuliani hinted at a potentially tense battle against the Biden campaign following the upcoming vote.

“We’ve got plenty of lawyers,” He said about the president’s campaign potentially battling the result of the elections in the courts. “We out-lawyered them before, we can out-lawyer them again. They’re a bunch of bullies anyway.”