Today’s edition of quick hits:
* Executing the plan we were promised all along: “President Donald Trump’s campaign pressed its legal blitz across key battleground states Thursday, homing in on Pennsylvania with state judges denying or dismissing lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan.”
* That said, part of me wonders whether Trump’s lawyers are just humoring him by filing these cases: “President Donald Trump’s barrage of lawsuits related to the 2020 presidential election got off to a mixed start on Thursday, with his campaign winning closer access to ballot counting in Philadelphia but losing bids to invalidate a few dozen mail-in ballots in Georgia and for better access to counting in Michigan.”
* Derailing “Stop the Steal” was obviously the right call: “In 2019, a group of right-wing political operatives promoted a fundraising website to build a section of border wall, and the site later became the subject of a money-laundering investigation. Now those same operatives are behind a Facebook group dedicated to delegitimizing election results that don’t favor President Trump, which went viral Thursday.”
* Afghanistan: “Enemy attacks against Afghan security forces and civilians increased by 50 percent in the third quarter of 2020, according to the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) quarterly report to Congress.”
* USPS: A federal judge in D.C. on Thursday ordered the Postal Service to begin conducting twice daily sweeps of its facilities for any mail-in ballots in states where there is still time for them to be delivered and counted.
* Pentagon: “Defense Secretary Mark Esper has prepared a letter of resignation, according to three current defense officials.”
* I’d be interested in hearing more about this: “The Justice Department told federal prosecutors in an email early on Wednesday that the law allowed them to send armed federal officers to ballot-counting locations around the country to investigate potential voter fraud, according to three people who described the message.” * An interesting story on New Berlin, Wis.: “President Trump told suburban voters that affordable housing would hurt property values and increase crime. The story of one Wisconsin community challenges those assumptions.” * Even Rove isn’t buying Team Trump’s line: “Karl Rove wrote today that the claims of voter fraud on the scale that Trump and his cronies are making are ridiculous. ‘[S]tealing hundreds of thousands of votes would require a conspiracy on the scale of a James Bond movie,’ Rove wrote. ‘That isn’t going to happen.’” See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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