by Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld | The Hill
Hours after Steve Bannon was released from prison Tuesday upon serving a four-month stint for evading a congressional subpoena, the onetime adviser to former President Trump sounded the alarm about the upcoming election.
“The Democrats are not going to give up,” he told 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 mattresses.”
Elias, a leader of Vice President Harris’s election litigation efforts, hit back: “My team of lawyers is better than the GOP’s. And we’re ready to beat them again in 2024.”
The exchange came just days until the nation decides who will next occupy the White House — and the expectation that a dramatic legal standoff awaits, which both the Trump and Harris campaigns are preparing for.
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Already, there are more than 200 voting and election cases pending across the nation, according to Elias’s tally, with many in key battleground states that could alter the trajectory of the election’s outcome.
For weeks, lawyers for the Republican and Democratic parties have gone toe-to-toe in courtrooms on challenges to voter rolls, mail ballots and other election procedures.
Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the former 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 said on a press call 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.”
But Democrats have said the playbook is not so cut 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 campaign official said Thursday. “He wants to lay the groundwork now to claim the election was stolen.”
The Harris campaign has assembled a large legal team as they brace for a repeat of 2020, when former President Trump baselessly claimed mass election fraud in his narrow loss to President Biden.
Beyond Elias, who runs an eponymous election law firm, Harris’s team includes former solicitors general Seth Waxman and Don Verrilli, as well as Biden’s personal counsel, Bob Bauer.
The team has already drafted thousands of pages of legal briefs that respond to dozens of scenarios, according to an internal 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 outside counsel to Harris’ campaign, and Democratic National Committee acting co-Executive Director Monica Guardiola wrote in 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.
Though the latest voter fraud claims overlap with the accusations made four years ago, some key attorneys on Trump’s “elite strike force team” in 2020 aren’t expected to be involved this cycle.
Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who helped lead the 2020 push, has been disbarred and this week was forced to turn over most of his assets to two election workers he defamed. Two others involved, Jeff Clark and John Eastman, have also been disbarred and cast out of Trump’s inner circle. And attorneys Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis have pleaded guilty to criminal charges stemming from their post-2020 election work.
Some are still fighting in the court of public opinion, however. Last week, Giuliani appeared at Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden, and he hosts two daily shows where he talks extensively about 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 said Thursday on his “America’s Mayor Live” show.
Trump himself has started planting seeds of election misconduct, claiming on his Truth Social social platform that his campaign caught Democrats “CHEATING BIG” in Pennsylvania, a critical state for both campaigns to win.
Authorities in several Pennsylvania counties have announced investigations into potential fraudulent voter registration applications caught during processing. But there is no indication that any fraudulent ballots have been counted.
“Must announce and PROSECUTE, NOW! This is a CRIMINAL VIOLATION OF THE LAW,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “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?”
Much of Republicans’ legal efforts are being led by the RNC’s election integrity unit and outside law firms like Jones Day and Dhillon Law Group.
Attorneys with prominent roles include Gineen Bresso, who previously chaired the U.S. Election Assistance Commission; Christina Bobb, a former One America News host who faces criminal charges in Arizona related to the 2020 election; and Bill McGinley, an attorney who served in the Trump administration.
RNC co-Chair Michael Whatley told reporters Wednesday the party has also recruited over 230,000 volunteers who will be deployed as poll observers throughout the country.
“We have built the most expansive and experienced election integrity team in history,” Whatley said.
The senior Harris-Walz campaign official asserted that Republicans are using the courts to “try and sow their narratives,” but it could backfire.
“It is actually helpful when they do so in court, because they don’t have evidence,” the official said. “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 just the campaigns and party committees getting involved, however. Many outside groups have formed or grown over the past 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 figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results who leads the Election Integrity Network, wrote on X this past 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.