WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump will push ahead on Tuesday with longshot legal challenges to his loss to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden in last week’s election, as Republican officials at the state and federal level lined up behind him.

Pennsylvania Republican state lawmakers plan to call for an audit of the results in the state that gave Biden enough electoral votes to win, the day after US Attorney General William Barr told federal prosecutors to look into “substantial” allegations of irregularities.

Trump for months before the election made repeated claims without providing evidence that results would be marred by fraud and has kept up those unfounded allegations over the past week. Judges have tossed out lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia, and experts say Trump’s legal efforts have little chance of changing the election result.

But Congress’s top Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, on Monday lined up behind Trump, saying that he was “100pc within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities,” without citing any evidence.

The dispute is slowing Biden’s work in preparing for the work of governing, as a Trump appointee who heads the office charged with recognising election results has not yet done so.

Biden on Saturday secured the more than the 270 votes in the Electoral College needed to win the presidency. He also led Trump in the popular vote by 4.6 million votes on Tuesday morning as states continued to count the remaining ballots.

Barr’s directive to prosecutors prompted the top lawyer overseeing voter fraud investigations to resign in protest.

Barr told prosecutors on Monday that “fanciful or far-fetched claims” should not be a basis for investigation and his letter did not indicate the Justice Department had uncovered voting irregularities affecting the outcome of the election.

But he did say he was authorising prosecutors to “pursue substantial allegations” of irregularities of voting and the counting of ballots.

Richard Pilger, who for years has served as director of the Election Crimes Branch, said in an internal email he was resigning from his post after he read “the new policy and its ramifications”.

The previous Justice Department policy, designed to avoid interjecting the federal government into election campaigns, had discouraged overt investigations “until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded.” Biden’s campaign said Barr was fueling Trump’s far-fetched allegations of fraud.

“Those are the very kind of claims that the president and his lawyers are making unsuccessfully every day, as their lawsuits are laughed out of one court after another,” said Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to Biden.

Published in Dawn, November 11th, 2020