WASHINGTON – The last time Donald Trump ran for president, the lawyers most directly involved in his efforts to overturn the election wound up sanctioned, criminally prosecuted or even sued for millions of dollars.
This time around, Republican party leaders are working to present a more organized, skilled legal operation even as Trump continues to deny he lost the 2020 election and sows doubt about the integrity of the upcoming one.
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“It has been very important to make sure that in every aspect, we are going to have a fully professional operation,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley told The Associated Press.
As Republicans and Democrats fight in court over election rules, the Trump team finds itself under a particularly intense microscope given the aftermath of the 2020 race when meritless legal efforts challenging the results were repeatedly rejected by judges appointed by presidents of both political parties. Scrambling to undo the results, Trump's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a violent clash with law enforcement.
The chaotic court challenges were pushed by a loosely organized group of lawyers who ascended in Trump's orbit after experienced, establishment attorneys who had advised the then-president during the campaign backed away from his false claims of widespread fraud. This year, the Republican National Committee has launched a coordinated “election integrity” initiative that involves the recruitment of thousands of lawyers, polling-place monitors and poll workers and that officials insist will operate within the law.
“What we have seen in court over the course of the last six months and as we’ve ramped up to these 130-plus lawsuits is a testament to making sure that we’re working with the states and working with the courts to get a really truly, responsible program up and running," Whatley added.
But there’s no guarantee that a well-credentialed team will equal better results if the arguments are again rooted in baseless claims, or that the effort, like in 2020, won’t be co-opted after the election by different attorneys.
A new legal team takes shape
Among the lawyers with prominent roles are Steven Kenny, the RNC’s senior counsel, who worked at the high-powered law firm of Jones Day; Gineen Bresso, who was nominated by then-President George W. Bush to serve on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and later became chair; and Josh Helton, general counsel for Mike Huckabee's 2016 presidential campaign.
David Warrington, who represented Trump during the congressional Jan. 6 investigation, has also been involved in lawsuits, including one in Michigan challenging the designation of voter registration agencies.
The RNC’s litigation so far has been aimed at ensuring voter ID requirements; asserting that non-citizens are improperly voting; and challenging what they see as lax rules on mail-in and absentee voting.
Democrats have sounded alarms about the election integrity initiative, calling it an effort to sow distrust in the process and pave the way to cry foul if Trump loses, and have have warned that election deniers installed in voting-related positions may refuse to certify legitimate results. They’ve assembled a team of veteran attorneys, including longtime Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, and filed their own lawsuits, including challenging Georgia rules they fear could be used by Trump allies to delay or avoid certification. A judge last week invalidated seven of the rules.
The flurry of litigation is hardly surprising in a competitive election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, that could turn on about a half-dozen battleground states.
Familiar figures from 2020 have resurfaced
Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who participated in a January 2021 phone call in which Trump implored Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner, has championed lawsuits challenging rules on how overseas voters, including military members abroad, cast their ballots. (On Monday, judges in North Carolina and Michigan rejected efforts to disqualify ballots of certain overseas voters.)
The RNC earlier this year named Christina Bobb to head its election integrity division. A former reporter for the conservative One America News Network, Bobb has been indicted by Arizona’s attorney general, accused of joining an effort to promote a slate of Trump electors after the 2020 election even though Democrat Joe Biden won the state. Her attorney, Thomas Jacobs, said Bobb “had no involvement in the arrangements to select or present these alternate electors” and would seek to dismiss the charges.
Trump says there's no evidence of cheating so far in 2024
Trump has been criminally charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election, yet his continued insistence that the contest was marred by fraud has been adopted by many within the party even though judges, election officials and Trump’s own attorney general found no evidence of that.
It's also created continued divisions within the party.
In May, Charlie Spies, a veteran election law attorney with ties to Mitt Romney and Ron DeSantis, resigned as the RNC's chief counsel after about two months. He made waves at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference by saying there was “zero evidence” a voting machine software glitch had caused thousands of votes to switch in the 2020 election.
Whatley said in a radio interview in the weeks after the 2020 election that there was “massive fraud.” But he has largely avoided using Trump’s characterization of Biden’s victory, and said in one 2021 interview that Biden “absolutely” was legitimately elected.
Standing together Monday in North Carolina, Trump praised Whatley as having been “very much into stopping the steal” in 2020. Though Trump has said he hasn’t seen evidence of cheating in 2024, he has repeatedly raised doubts about the process, telling his supporters they need to turn out to make the result “too big to rig.”
Among the established Republican political lawyers who resisted the legal challenges in 2020 was Justin Riemer, a lawyer for John McCain’s 2008 campaign who was later chief counsel for the RNC but clashed with Trump allies after the election. He warned an RNC colleague in a November 2020 email that the legal efforts by lawyers including Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis were getting "laughed out of court.”
“It’s setting us back in our fight for election integrity and they are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing,” Riemer wrote in the email about Giuliani and Ellis, who were both instrumental in engineering Trump's failed efforts to overturn the election.
Consequences for Trump-allied lawyers
Giuliani was disbarred in New York and Washington; Ellis lost her law license in Colorado. The two, along with Sidney Powell, another lawyer central to advancing Trump's claims, were among 19 people charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with conspiring to overturn the election.
Both Powell and Ellis pleaded guilty.
Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million to two former Georgia poll workers who sued him over lies he spread about them in 2020 that upended their lives. He subsequently filed for bankruptcy.
“All of that," said UCLA law professor Rick Hasen, “should be a deterrent to a thinking lawyer who might want to replicate something like that.”