of its presidential election results. She signaled she intended to file for similar recounts in the subsequent days in Michigan and Pennsylvania. President-elect Donald Trump issued a statement denouncing the recount request saying, "The people have spoken and the election is over." Trump further commented that the recount "is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded." On December 2, 2016, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette filed a lawsuit to stop Stein's recount. On the same day in Wisconsin a U.S. District Judge denied an emergency halt to the recount, allowing it to continue until a December 9, 2016 hearing. On December 3, 2016, Stein dropped the state recount case in Pennsylvania, citing "the barriers to verifying the vote in Pennsylvania are so pervasive and that the state court system is so ill-equipped to address this problem that we must seek federal court intervention." Shortly after midnight on December 5, 2016, U.S. District Judge Mark A. Goldsmith ordered Michigan election officials to hand-recount 4.8 million ballots, rejecting all concerns for the cost of the recount. Goldsmith wrote in his order: "As emphasized earlier, budgetary concerns are not sufficiently significant to risk the disenfranchisement of Michigan's nearly 5 million voters". Meanwhile, however, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that Stein, who placed fourth, had no chance of winning and was not an "aggrieved candidate" and ordered the Michigan election board to reject her petition for a recount. On December 7, 2016, Judge Goldsmith halted the Michigan recount. Stein filed an appeal with the Michigan Supreme Court, losing her appeal in a 3–2 decision on December 9, 2016. On December 12, 2016, U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond rejected Stein's request for a Pennsylvania recount. In May 2018, The Daily Beast reported that approximately $1 million of the original $7.3 million had yet to be spent and that there remained uncertainty about what precisely the money had been spent on. Russia probe On December 18, 2017, The Washington Post reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking at the presidential campaign of Green Party's Jill Stein for potential "collusion with the Russians." The Stein campaign has released a public statement stating that the campaign will work with investigators and provide requested materials, citing public transparency. In December 2018, two reports commissioned by the US Senate found that the Internet Research Agency boosted Stein's candidacy through social