Trump just shot himself in the foot with new voting threats: GOP election lawyer
President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with supporters at an "An Address to Young Americans" event. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Ben Ginsburg, a longtime Republican election lawyer, said on Monday that President Donald Trump's threats to send lawyers into Pennsylvania to challenge mail-in ballots were not part of some grand strategy to steal the election.

While appearing on CNN, Ginsburg argued that the president's threats were instead acts of desperation by a president who doesn't believe he can win if every ballot is counted.

"Look, there's a real tactical error, a head scratcher in somebody from the Trump campaign telegraphing this particular strategy," he said. "Because if he's going to go in and say it, no matter what the results are, which is the apparent thrust of what they're saying, it just becomes a transparent line in a script, as opposed to something on the merits of the numbers on election night."

"So you're suggesting it's not three-dimensional chess they're playing, Ben Ginsburg?" asked CNN host John Berman.

"I am suggesting that," Ginsburg said while laughing. "It's really puzzling why spokespeople for his campaign would leak things both to Jim Acosta of CNN and to Jonathan Swan of Axios that say that they're going to do this no matter what. It takes away the authority with which he can declare victory on election night."

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