By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump lambasted the Supreme Court on Saturday for declining to take a case he hoped would overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory and called Attorney General William Barr a “disappointment.”
On Friday evening the nation’s high court rejected a long-shot lawsuit by Texas seeking to throw out voting results from four states.
The decision comes ahead of a meeting by the U.S. Electoral College on Monday to make Democrat Biden’s victory official.
Trump, a Republican, has refused to concede despite losing to Biden, who took 306 votes to Trump’s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College, which allots votes to all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on population.
“This is a great and disgraceful miscarriage of justice. The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!” Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning.
“The Supreme Court had ZERO interest in the merits of the greatest voter fraud ever perpetrated on the United States of America.”
The court said Texas did not have legal standing to bring the case, abruptly ending what Trump had touted in recent days as his best hope for overturning the election. The three justices nominated by Trump – Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – signed on to the court’s order without comment.
In a series of apparently frustrated tweets, the president also lashed out at his attorney general after the Wall Street Journal reported that Barr knew earlier this year about an investigation into Biden’s son Hunter’s taxes.
In a statement released by the president-elect’s transition team, Hunter Biden said on Wednesday that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware was investigating his tax affairs, which he said he had handled “legally and appropriately.”
Trump retweeted a comment from radio host Todd Starnes saying Barr should be fired. “A big disappointment!” Trump said in his tweet.
Barr’s fate in the waning days of the Trump administration has been in question since he said last week that a Justice Department investigation had found no sign of major fraud in the November election, contradicting Trump’s false claims.
The president has continued to press his allegations of widespread fraud without evidence despite dozens of failures in courts. Though he has said he will leave the White House on Jan. 20 if the Electoral College affirms Biden’s win, he is likely to continue to decry the election as rigged and seek to undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency.
Conservative groups supporting Trump rallied in Washington and elsewhere around the nation on Saturday to press the issue.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
