President Donald Trump’s Justice Department made a last-ditch move to shield a vulnerable Republican senator, and legal experts say it’s dead on arrival.
The DOJ filed a suit Thursday seeking to stop Alaska from certifying its Senate race if GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, Politico reported Friday. Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller didn’t mince words about the case. “The legal argument is one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the DOJ’s third-ranking official, brought the case. It asks state officials to hold off on certification if Sullivan is defeated until they investigate supposed “voter confusion” stemming from a second man named Dan Sullivan appearing on the ballot. Alaska’s Supreme Court already tossed out an identical challenge in June, which would ordinarily end the matter.
Trump made no secret of his role. “I’m the one that said ‘do it,’” he said Friday when asked about the lawsuit.
Critics from across the legal spectrum piled on. Walter Olson of the libertarian Cato Institute said the suit “is abusive in intent and nearly frivolous in argument, and should fail on the merits.”
Stan Brand, who represented top Trump allies in January 6 congressional and criminal proceedings and once served as the House’s top lawyer, was just as blunt. “This is a political document,” he said, calling it another of the administration’s “ploys to try to confuse people, distort the process and intrude into something that’s the exclusive prerogative of the states.”
Brand also pointed to the DOJ’s own manual, which limits the department’s election role to investigating and prosecuting federal election crimes and warns against interfering in how states tally and certify votes.
A DOJ spokesperson defended the move Friday, arguing the National Voter Registration Act requires states to safeguard election integrity and that the department is acting to keep a “frivolous candidacy” from undermining the will of Alaska voters.
The case now sits with U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason, an Obama appointee, who had not responded to the lawsuit as of Friday afternoon.
Meanwhile, top congressional Democrats asked U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Friday to force the administration to disclose any pressure the Justice Department has put on state and local election officials to skip counting certain ballots or purge voters from the rolls.
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