According to a report at the Washington Post, federal employees appointed by Donald Trump are using their “personal time” to help staff an outside organization desperately searching for evidence of voter fraud that the president hopes will salvage his re-election hopes.

Of note, the Post reports, the federal government’s chief information security officer has chosen to use vacation time coming to him to lend a hand working for “the Voter Integrity Fund, a newly formed Virginia-based group that is analyzing ballot data and cold-calling voters in an attempt to substantiate the president’s outlandish claims about illicit voting.”

While the government is ready to shift into a transition phase with President-elect Joe Biden taking the reins on January 20th, Camilo Sandoval, who oversees the information security for the federal government is out of the office and pitching in to find anything that can help the president.

“Sandoval is one of several Trump appointees in the federal government — some in senior roles — who are harnessing their expertise for the project, according to the group’s leader,” the report states. “The participation of administration officials in the project shows the extent of the efforts by the president’s allies to justify his unfounded allegations of widespread ballot fraud. Federal employees are required under ethics rules to keep political activity separate from their government roles. Officials with the Voter Integrity Fund said the political appointees participating in the project are doing it in their personal time.”

According to Sandoval, who started in his position last month, he is doing nothing out of the ordinary.

“I am doing this in my private capacity, just as many others have done in past elections. I think it’s pretty clear that this is acceptable and normal,” he explained.

Sandoval is not the only federal employee pitching in.

“Sandoval is part of a hastily convened team led by Matthew Braynard, a data specialist who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Another participant is Thomas Baptiste, an adviser to the deputy secretary of the Interior Department, who also took a leave to work on the project,” the report states. “Braynard said in an interview that several other government officials on leave are also assisting the effort, but he declined to identify them.”

In an interview with the Post, both Braynard and Sandoval claim that they have found evidence of possible fraud, but they have yet to make their any detailed findings public, with Brayard admitting “some of the evidence isn’t terribly compelling,” before adding, “If this was a clean election, we can dispel a lot of the concern out there.”

You can read more here.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

CNN ” State of the Union” host Jake Tapper brutally mocked the attempts by lawyers representing Donald Trump in election fraud cases for their flailing performances before judges — wondering how it will affect their careers in the long run after being publically embarrassed.

In his closing comments, the CNN host detailed legal pleadings made by the president’s lawyers and how quickly they were shot down by judges.

All in all, the CNN host said the lawyers were being humiliated trying to make a case for non-existent fraud — and they likely knew it was going to happen before they entered the courthouse.

“It’s been, frankly, embarrassing,” Tapper claimed. “No evidence, unprofessional, desperate. Increasingly Trump campaign lawyers seem to realize being involved in fact-free desperation efforts to overturn the results of a free and fair election might not necessarily enhance their resumes.”

“On Friday, nine cases from Trump and his allies intended to attack and undo President Biden’s victory in key states. nine cases rejected for dropped — nine,” he continued. “So what now? Well, now the president of the United States is literally embracing a deranged conspiracy theory that millions of votes were changed using software. The problem here, a group of national, state, and private election officials issued a statement Thursday promoted online by the cybersecurity czar at the Department of Homeland Security with this sentence bolded: ‘There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,’ unquote.”

“The problem with Republican officeholders arguing that President Trump has his right to present his evidence in court is that the president’s efforts do not have anything to do with evidence,” he added. “They have to do it with hearsay and rumor and insinuations and lies and conspiracy theories. Once these efforts have been rejected by every court, outgoing President Trump will likely continue to make them. How long is the Republican Party going to continue to defer to unhinged mendacious desperation led by the gang that couldn’t sue straight?”

Watch below:

An opinion columnist at The Hill has predicted that after pardoning people in his inner circle, “Trump will resign from the presidency before his term officially ends, and he will be pardoned by Vice President Pence, when Pence becomes president.”

Columnist Brent Budowsky explains, “A presidential pardon by Pence would not offer protection from cases originating in states, but those cases will be far more manageable if they are not sunk into a morass of federal cases that only a federal pardon can protect him from.”

Without a federal pardon, Budowsky continues, Trump will almost certainly spend his coming years stuck in federal cases that not only threaten his freedom, but also his ability to secure lucrative multibillion-dollar business deals capitalizing off of his presidency and media savvy.

However, Trump would remain on the hook for criminal investigations on the state level.

https://twitter.com/eliehonig/status/1326959067294806016https://twitter.com/herbyboxturtle/status/1327651650761355265https://twitter.com/Mom_in_uniform/status/1327650199473434626https://twitter.com/laurie_joy7/status/1327649432465154048https://twitter.com/graverobberJC/status/1327646026769920000