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The public-facing effort has been spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump loyalists whose credibility has waned among the kind of elite legal talent that a presidential campaign might turn to during an election challenge.
On the legal team, Trump’s efforts to challenge election results in states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan have been guided by attorneys who have stood by the president’s side for years, including Jay Sekulow, the conservative attorney who helped lead defending Trump in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and is helping to orchestrate some of the legal challenges presented in Pennsylvania.
“What a campaign must do to have a state recount, much less multiple recount, is overwhelming,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent Republican election attorney who served as a national adviser to the Bush campaigns.
“Bush v. Gore was a state. We made a call and hundreds of attorneys, political agents and many others responded,” Ginsberg said. “Even with that, it taxed the Party to its limits to make a single state. At best, it is not proven that the Trump campaign could have the kind of infrastructure that they would really need to achieve this.”
The blame spreads
The president is not the only person who questions the strength of his legal team. Many at the highest levels of the White House wonder why, given Trump’s explicit vote to challenge the results in court, before Tuesday there was no longer a legal apparatus.
Blame runs in multiple directions. Trump himself has told advisers that his campaign staff should have anticipated the need for more experienced campaign attorneys. But others accuse Jared Kushner, who oversaw the campaign from his post in the White House, of failing to identify this critical gap.
A senior administration official said it was ultimately the campaign’s responsibility to have attorneys who could undertake a multi-state effort to challenge the results.
On Thursday, White House attorney Pat Cipollone met with some of Trump’s campaign advisers to weigh new legal action.
Trump’s top allies have been calling on donors to try to solicit funding for legal efforts. One person familiar with fundraising efforts described them as “slow.”
Ask for help
On Friday, Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s political operation sent out a “call for Republican attorneys,” saying that ballots remained to be counted and that the state party “is assembling a team of highly qualified attorneys to ensure the process is smooth. fair and transparent. “
Republican sources say prominent conservative legal minds like Noel Francisco, Trump’s former attorney general, whose firm, Jones Day, has done Trump’s campaign work; Emmet Flood, a Williams & Connolly partner who was Trump’s acting White House counsel; and Cleta Mitchell, active in conservative causes, including gun rights, would be among the names a Republican presidential campaign would turn to for a seriously contested electoral legal fight.
So far, they have not been filed in court cases.
“The frustration expressed by the president over the apparent unwillingness of his legal team to take certain positions is not unusual, as there are many cases where clients want their attorneys to take steps that attorneys simply do not see as viable.” . “said Ashley Taylor, an attorney who has represented Republican candidates in recount and other electoral law matters.
Some of this could change, Republican legal sources say, if Trump manages to bring the race closer, winning states like Arizona and Georgia. That would allow the campaign to focus its efforts on a single state.
So far, Pennsylvania has been the focus of legal cases, with the Trump campaign and the Republican Party filing pre-election claims as a way to lay the groundwork to contest the final count.
In the 2000 election, Republicans could focus on Florida and its very narrow margin and summarize their legal claims to challenge how canvassing boards were guessing voters’ intent on paper ballots. That kind of simple strategy has not emerged in the 2020 election cases.
