Trump and Harris camps prepare to 'go to the mattress' in election legal battle

Hours after Steve Bannon was released from prison on Tuesday after serving a four-month sentence for evading a congressional subpoena, the former adviser to former President Trump sounded the alarm about the upcoming election.

“The Democrats will not give up,” he told reporters. “They just hired Marc Elias. And you only hire Marc Elias – who I think is the strongest election lawyer in the country – you only hire Marc Elias if you want to go to the mattress.

Elias, a leader of Vice President Harris’ election litigation efforts, hit back: “My team of lawyers is better than the Republican Party’s. And we are ready to beat them again in 2024.”

The exchange came just days before the nation decides who will next occupy the White House — and expectations are set for a dramatic legal standoff that both the Trump and Harris campaigns are preparing for.

There are already more than 200 voting and election cases pending across the country. according to Elias’ count, with many in key battleground states that could change the trajectory of the election outcome.

For weeks, lawyers for the Republican and Democratic parties have sparred in courtrooms over challenges to voter rolls, ballots and other election procedures.

Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and daughter-in-law of the former president, says the Republican Party’s election dispute operation is functioning “as planned and intended.”

“There were so many people in the aftermath of 2020 with a lot of questions,” she said during a press call on Wednesday. “And we hope that in 2024 we will allay any fears and concerns that every American – whether he or she votes Republican, Democrat or a third party – may have.”

But Democrats have said the playbook is not so short-sighted.

“All this is only ‘cheating’ in the mind of someone who wants to claim he has been cheated, and it is yet another example of Donald Trump trying to sow doubt in our elections and institutions when he fears he cannot win ,” a senior Harris-Walz campaign official said Thursday. “He now wants to lay the groundwork to claim the election was stolen.”

The Harris campaign has assembled a large legal team that is bracing for a repeat of 2020, when former President Trump baselessly claimed massive election fraud in his narrow loss to President Biden.

In addition to Elias, who heads an eponymous election law firm, Harris’ team includes former attorneys 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 responding to dozens of scenarios, according to an internal campaign memo obtained by The Hill.

“The 2024 presidential election is already the most closely contested in American history, but we are also the most prepared campaign in history for what lies ahead,” said Dana Remus, senior advisor and outside counsel to Harris’ campaign, and the Democratic National Committee working together. Executive director Monica Guardiola wrote this in the memo.

“We have brought together the nation’s best attorneys for every type of challenge we face and expanded our footprint to include national law firms and hundreds of attorneys on the ground in key states, maintaining close monitoring and taking legal action where necessary,” continued the report.

While the latest claims of voter fraud overlap with those made four years ago, some key lawyers on Trump’s “elite strike force team” are not expected to be involved in this cycle in 2020.

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who helped lead the 2020 campaign, has been suspended and this week forced to hand over most of his assets to two election workers he defamed. Two other people involved, Jeff Clark and John Eastman, have also been expelled and thrown 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.

However, some are still fighting in the court of public opinion. Last week, Giuliani appeared at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, and he hosts two daily shows in which he talks extensively about the election.

“There is a chance he can get a big win. There’s also a chance that everything could go wrong just because it did last time. And I’m sorry, you can torture me all you want, he was elected in 2020,” Giuliani said Thursday on his show “America’s Mayor Live.”

Trump himself has started planting seeds of electoral misconductand claimed on his social platform Truth Social that his campaign caught Democrats “MAJOR CHEATING” in Pennsylvania, a critical state for both campaigns to win.

Authorities in several Pennsylvania counties have announced investigations into possible fraudulent voter registration applications caught during processing. But there is no evidence that fraudulent ballots have been counted.

“Must announce and FOLLOW NOW! This is a CRIMINAL VIOLATION OF THE LAW,” Trump said wrote Thursday about Truth Social. “STOP VOTER FRAUD! CHECK OUT KAMALA’S NEW SLEAZEBAG LAWYER. WE ARE ON THEM ALL THIS TIME! Who would have thought that our country is so corrupt?”

Much of the Republicans’ legal effort is being led by the RNC’s election integrity unit and outside law firms such as 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 anchor who faces criminal charges in Arizona in connection with the 2020 election; and Bill McGinley, a lawyer who served in the Trump administration.

RNC co-chair Michael Whatley told reporters on Wednesday that the party has also recruited more than 230,000 volunteers who will be deployed as poll workers across the country.

“We have built the most comprehensive and experienced election integrity team in history,” Whatley said.

Harris-Walz’s senior campaign official claimed that Republicans are using the courts to “plant their narratives,” but it could backfire.

“It’s actually helpful if they do that in court because they don’t have evidence,” the official said. “In a number of cases where they have done this, we are expediting those cases and winning, and that is – to say the least – an effective way to counter their disinformation.”

However, it is not only the campaigns and party committees that are involved. Many outside groups have formed or grown in recent years in anticipation of a bombardment of lawsuits.

“We are working hard to make sure it does NOT happen again this time,” Cleta Mitchell, a central figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results and who heads the Election Integrity Network, wrote last week. week on X.

“We didn’t solve everything the leftists spent billions of dollars on in the elections. But at least we know what to look out for in 2024. And we will watch,” she wrote.

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