Trump’s Lawyers Are Ready to Subvert the 2024 Election — But They Don’t Want to Go to Jail
With Election Day 2024 just over a week away, both the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump camps are anticipating a historically close outcome, with the winner being decided by a small number of votes in a handful of states. Both sides have assembled their respective legal war rooms, deployed their legal muscle to a slate of swing states, recruited armies of local counsel in those battlegrounds, and devoted mammoth resources to prepping for a tense fight in the courts.
They’re all ready for, as one Trump adviser puts it, “total warfare,” should the post-election period devolve into madness.
The MAGA side, however, has a unique concern gnawing at its pro-Trump lawyers, to the point that some of these attorneys have felt the need to issue new guidance to staff.
It all boils down to: How do we do this without maybe going to prison or being sued into oblivion?
In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s clear victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential contest, the then-president and conservative figures embarked on a months-long crusade to overturn the election results — in an effort that culminated in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In the years that followed, Trump and his allies cemented into Republican Party orthodoxy the anti-democratic lies and conspiracy theories that fueled his election-denial effort. Still, the sprawling Trump-led operation to nullify his 2020 loss resulted in various lawsuits, Trump’s record-setting second impeachment by the U.S. House, a high-profile congressional probe, and state and federal investigations that brought criminal charges against a host of MAGAland luminaries including Trump himself.
Understandably, many of the current batch of Trump-aligned attorneys and staffers gearing up to do “Stop The Steal” all over again, if he loses a second time, aren’t too enthusiastic about the idea of going to prison. They are doing things a little differently this year.
“We don’t want to get indicted or arrested, like they were last time,” says one source involved with the vast Trump 2024 legal apparatuses — which are being spearheaded and overseen in this election season by the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign itself. Rolling Stone spoke to five lawyers and advisers involved in the planning and strategy.
One such attorney says they recently advised lawyers and other Trumpists working on the effort in Pennsylvania — perhaps the most crucial of the swing states, and where Harris and Trump are running neck-and-neck — not to put anything “in writing” that would, if publicly revealed, risk making it look like the legal team didn’t believe the merits of any of their, or Trump’s, claims or legal arguments.
In the indictments of Trump and his associates, prosecutors have consistently painted a portrait of the then-president and his allies having corrupt intent — including in the notoriously scandalous fake-electors plot — because there was apparently ample evidence they knew what they were doing was based on lies, but did it anyway.
Others working on the Trump 2024-aligned legal teams, including in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, say they’ve issued or been handed similar guidance, with another source describing a memo they’d received, with the message being — in one source’s paraphrase — “just don’t be stupid about it… and keep out the crazy,” especially in private written communications between fellow staff. (This source notes the irony of their colleagues issuing a written memo about not writing certain things in written memos.)
“My biggest mistake was assuming everyone around me was operating in the same good faith and professionalism as I was,” Jenna Ellis, a former senior legal adviser to Trump who faced charges and legal consequences stemming from the former president’s post-2020-election efforts, tells Rolling Stone. “I would advise anyone involved in any post-election litigation to do their due diligence and especially to distance [themselves] from anyone who may be encouraging actual criminal conduct.”
Furthermore, different Republican Party organs have tried to establish a semblance of guardrails when it comes to keeping some of the more obvious lies and cartoonishly embarrassing conspiracy theories from dominating Trumpworld’s court documents and legal arguments, as they did in 2020 and 2021. As ABC News reported, for instance, “Republicans in Arizona have set up a team tasked with receiving and sorting through reported election issues from around the state, which one source familiar with the operation described as a ‘daily turn of frivolous problems.’”
And yet, it is not like frivolous and outrageously false claims have trouble breaking through — including to the leader of the Republican Party, as he prepares for another possible set of post-election legal battles.
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Trump has been privately speaking again with Kurt Olsen, an attorney who aided Trump in his attempt to steal the 2020 election. “Mr. Olsen has insisted to Mr. Trump that it’s important to make legal demands before Election Day related to the preservation of data from voting machines in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia,” according to the Times.
The false idea, pushed by then-President Trump and many Republican figures, that Dominion Voting Systems machines played a key role in rigging the 2020 election against Trump quickly became one of the most consequential far-right conspiracy theories of that entire election. The conspiracy theory, which helped fuel Trump’s attempted coup, led to a massively expensive lawsuit for Fox News.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, within the past several months, Trump has indeed been asking close confidants about Dominion machines and other common American voting tech, in the context of the bitterly fought 2024 race. It’s not much of a surprise, given that some in the Trumpland upper crust are revving the Dominion conspiracy theory back up, and publicly putting it front and center.
“There’s always this question of, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County [in Arizona] but not in a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?” billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk said as he rallied for the former president in Pennsylvania this month.
Dominion very quickly pushed back on Musk’s remarks. ”Dominion is closely monitoring claims around the Nov. 2024 election and strongly encourages use of verified, credible sources of info,” the company posted last week on X, which Musk owns. “We remain fully prepared to defend our company & our customers against lies and those who spread them.”
Elsewhere, both presidential contenders and their parties have plowed extensive legal and professional resources into getting ready for what may prove a brutal election aftermath, particularly if the winner is not known for days.
“It has been very important to make sure that in every aspect, we are going to have a fully professional operation,” RNC chair and close Trump ally Michael Whatley recently told the Associated Press. “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.”
On the other side of the aisle, Biden and the Democratic Party elite spent years building out a legal “superstructure” (which Vice President Harris inherited) across the country, and have war-gamed an array of nightmare scenarios in which Trump would again try to steal an American election in a blisteringly close race.
“The veteran lawyers who fought and won in 2020 have been preparing for dozens of scenarios, drafting thousands of pages of legal briefs, and working directly with hundreds of lawyers and experts on the ground in battleground states so we are ready for whatever the other side throws our way,” a 2024 Harris campaign internal memo reads, according to ABC.
Though Trump and Republicans could conceivably win the election outright, the former president isn’t willing to leave it up to chance. He and his allies have spent years laying the groundwork, state by state, to corrupt the 2024 election and to make it easier for Trump to steal, if it’s close and he’s losing.
As Rolling Stone recently reported, Trump is already cynically planning to declare, even as soon as on Election Night, that the election is being “rigged” against him by citing a slower vote count in certain states — a slow count of mail-in ballots that Trump and other Republicans worked to ensure would happen this year.
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