How Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general fought back against Trump’s bogus election lawsuits — and won at least 40 times: report

In Pennsylvania, supporters of former President Donald Trump filed one bogus lawsuit after another following the 2020 election. None of them were successful, however, and Josh Shapiro — the Democrat who serves as Pennsylvania attorney general under Gov. Tom Wolf — aggressively fought back against Trump's election lies. Shapiro, according to the Daily Beast, prevailed in at least 40 Republican lawsuits. And Shapiro discussed his success with journalist Molly Jong-Fast during an appearance on the Beast's "The New Abnormal" podcast.

Shapiro told Jong-Fast, "When the former president began talking about how vote by mail was not OK and that the Democrats were going to try and steal the election — all of his greatest hits — I immediately put together a team in my office made up of lawyers from both our criminal division and our civil division."

The Pennsylvania attorney general told Jong-Fast that he expected the worst from Trump and his allies and asked himself, "How could we deal with the inevitable legal challenges that would come after the election, trying to deny people's votes from being counted? I predicted that would happen; unfortunately, I was right. We faced 19 lawsuits before a single vote was cast in Pennsylvania; we won every single one of them. Then, we had a free and fair, safe and secure election on Election Day. And then, we faced over 20 more lawsuits to try and make it harder for people's votes to be counted — and we won every single one of those."

Shapiro added, "But Understand, Molly, they didn't stop there. And that's why our democracy is still a central issue here in Pennsylvania and across the country. They continued with the Big Lie."

Pennsylvania is among the five battleground states that went to Trump in 2016's presidential election but was flipped by Biden four years later in 2020; the others were Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.

Two of the important elections that will be taking place in the Keystone State in 2022 are its gubernatorial race and a U.S. Senate race. Wolf, a two-term governor, is term-limited — and it remains to be seen who the Democratic and Republican nominees will be.

Primary battles are also taking place in Pennsylvania's 2022 U.S. Senate race. Sen. Pat Toomey, a hard-right Republican, is not seeking reelection, and the MAGA crowd hates Toomey for voting "guilty" in Trump's second impeachment trial.

On "The New Abnormal," Shapiro stressed the importance of Pennsylvania's 2022 gubernatorial election — telling Jong-Fast, "Democracy is on the ballot right now here in Pennsylvania and indeed across the country. And that is something that is motivating me. It is motivating the people I see when I'm traveling across the commonwealth. And I think it will be a central theme in this campaign."