Hours after Steve Bannon was launched from jail Tuesday upon serving a four-month stint for evading a congressional subpoena, the onetime adviser to former President Trump sounded the alarm in regards to the upcoming election.
“The Democrats are not going to give up,” he instructed reporters. “They just hired Marc Elias. And you only hire Marc Elias — who I think is the toughest election lawyer in the country — you only hire Marc Elias when you want to go to the mattress.”
Elias, a pacesetter of Vice President Harris’s election litigation efforts, hit again: “My workforce of legal professionals is healthier than the GOP’s. And we’re able to beat them once more in 2024.”
The trade got here simply days till the nation decides who will subsequent occupy the White Home — and the expectation {that a} dramatic authorized standoff awaits, which each the Trump and Harris campaigns are getting ready for.
Already, there are greater than 200 voting and election instances pending throughout the nation, in keeping with Elias’s tally, with many in key battleground states that might alter the trajectory of the election’s end result.
For weeks, legal professionals for the Republican and Democratic events have gone toe-to-toe in courtrooms on challenges to voter rolls, mail ballots and different election procedures.
Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican Nationwide Committee (RNC) and the previous president’s daughter-in-law, says the GOP’s election litigation operation is functioning “as planned and as intended.”
“There were so many people in the wake of 2020 with a lot of questions,” she stated on a press name Wednesday. “And we hope that in 2024, we are going to ease any fears and any concerns that any American — regardless of if they’re voting Republican, Democrat or third-party candidate — may have out there.”
However Democrats have stated the playbook just isn’t so reduce and dry.
“All of this is ‘cheating’ only in the mind of someone who wants to claim he was cheated, and it’s yet another example of how Donald Trump tries to sow doubt in our elections and institutions when he’s afraid he can’t win,” a senior Harris-Walz marketing campaign official stated Thursday. “He wants to lay the groundwork now to claim the election was stolen.”
The Harris marketing campaign has assembled a big authorized workforce as they brace for a repeat of 2020, when former President Trump baselessly claimed mass election fraud in his slender loss to President Biden.
Past Elias, who runs an eponymous election regulation agency, Harris’s workforce contains former solicitors common Seth Waxman and Don Verrilli, in addition to Biden’s private counsel, Bob Bauer.
The workforce has already drafted 1000’s of pages of authorized briefs that reply to dozens of eventualities, in keeping with an inner marketing campaign memo obtained by The Hill.
“The 2024 presidential election is already the most litigated in American history, but we are also the most prepared campaign in history for what we face,” Dana Remus, senior adviser and outdoors counsel to Harris’ marketing campaign, and Democratic Nationwide Committee appearing co-Govt Director Monica Guardiola wrote within the memo.
“We brought together the country’s best lawyers for each type of challenge we will face and expanded our footprint with national law firms and hundreds of lawyers on the ground across key states, monitoring closely and taking legal action wherever necessary,” it continued.
Although the most recent voter fraud claims overlap with the accusations made 4 years in the past, some key attorneys on Trump’s “elite strike force team” in 2020 aren’t anticipated to be concerned this cycle.
Rudy Giuliani, the previous New York Metropolis mayor who helped lead the 2020 push, has been disbarred and this week was compelled to show over most of his belongings to 2 election staff he defamed. Two others concerned, Jeff Clark and John Eastman, have additionally been disbarred and forged out of Trump’s internal circle. And attorneys Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis have pleaded responsible to felony fees stemming from their post-2020 election work.
Some are nonetheless combating within the court docket of public opinion, nevertheless. Final week, Giuliani appeared at Trump’s rally in Madison Sq. Backyard, and he hosts two day by day exhibits the place he talks extensively in regards to the election.
“There’s a chance he can have a big win. There’s also a chance everything could go wrong, only because they did last time. And I’m sorry, you can torture me all you want, he was elected in 2020,” Giuliani stated Thursday on his “America’s Mayor Live” present.
Trump himself has began planting seeds of election misconduct, claiming on his Fact Social social platform that his marketing campaign caught Democrats “CHEATING BIG” in Pennsylvania, a important state for each campaigns to win.
Authorities in a number of Pennsylvania counties have introduced investigations into potential fraudulent voter registration purposes caught throughout processing. However there isn’t any indication that any fraudulent ballots have been counted.
“Should announce and PROSECUTE, NOW! It is a CRIMINAL VIOLATION OF THE LAW,” Trump wrote on Fact Social Thursday. “STOP VOTER FRAUD! CHECK OUT KAMALA’S NEW SLEAZEBAG LAWYER. WE ARE ON THEM ALL THIS TIME! Who would have ever thought that our Country is so CORRUPT?”
A lot of Republicans’ authorized efforts are being led by the RNC’s election integrity unit and outdoors regulation corporations like Jones Day and Dhillon Regulation Group.
Attorneys with distinguished roles embody Gineen Bresso, who beforehand chaired the U.S. Election Help Fee; Christina Bobb, a former One America Information host who faces felony fees in Arizona associated to the 2020 election; and Invoice McGinley, an legal professional who served within the Trump administration.
RNC co-chair Michael Whatley instructed reporters on Wednesday that the celebration has additionally recruited over 230,000 volunteers who can be deployed as ballot observers all through the nation.
“We have built the most expansive and experienced election integrity team in history,” Whatley stated.
The senior Harris-Walz marketing campaign official asserted that Republicans are utilizing the courts to “try and sow their narratives,” however it may backfire.
“It’s really useful after they accomplish that in court docket, as a result of they do not have proof,” the official stated. “In a number of cases where they’ve been doing this, we’re expediting those cases and winning, and that is an effective — to say the least — way of countering their misinformation.”
It’s not simply the campaigns and celebration committees getting concerned, nevertheless. Many outdoors teams have fashioned or grown over the previous few years in anticipation of a bombardment of litigation.
“We are working hard to make sure that it does NOT happen again this time,” Cleta Mitchell, a central determine in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 outcomes who leads the Election Integrity Community, wrote on X this previous week.
“We haven’t fixed everything in elections that the leftists spent billions of dollars breaking. But at least we know what to watch for in 2024. And we will be watching,” she wrote.
