Across battleground states, attorneys who helped former President Donald Trump undermine confidence in the 2020 election results are back at it, filing lawsuits that seed doubt in advance about this year’s outcome.
Some of Trump’s attorneys from the 2020 election cycle were disbarred, indicted, or otherwise sanctioned for their roles, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell. But other lawyers active in Trump’s 2020 efforts, including prominent election conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell, have popped up in cases in the key states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. The lawsuits drive a narrative of rampant voting fraud without offering hard evidence to support their claims.
“Most of the lawsuits then were not designed to win on the merits, but to confuse the public.”
“One of the lessons from 2020 was that the impact of bringing all these lawsuits in terms of public trust in the election was significant,” said legal ethics professor Scott Cummings, who has written about the MAGA legal braintrust’s efforts to keep Trump in power. “Most of the lawsuits then were not designed to win on the merits, but to confuse the public. These cases are of a same piece.”
“It seems like there’s a political calculation,” Cummings said. “These lawyers unfortunately believe it’s worth it.”
The most well-known of the attorneys involved in conspiracy-mongering lawfare once again this election cycle is Mitchell, who was once a partner at a powerful law firm in Washington, D.C. After it came to light that she advised Trump during his infamous phone call asking Georgia officials to “find” him thousands of votes, Mitchell resigned from the firm and leaned hard into the “election integrity” brand. In 2022, a Georgia grand jury recommended that Mitchell be charged alongside Trump and others on that call with soliciting election fraud plus other crimes, but she was not ultimately indicted.
Today, Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute and founder of the Election Integrity Network. In recent weeks, she has helped plant lawsuits that seek last-minute changes to election procedures based on the hypothetical risk of election fraud from overseas voters. Mitchell did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, including about the status of a disciplinary complaint filed against her in 2022.
But in an interview that aired last week, Mitchell told a conservative radio host about her strategy. Speaking as if she already has irrefutable proof in hand, Mitchell claims that Democrats had “completely exploited” a federal law, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, that helps military service members and other U.S. citizens living abroad to vote.
“They’re literally getting people to lie,” Mitchell said, “and to say that they’re overseas or to say that they’re citizens, and the states are not checking at all. And so I’ve helped to organize suits in two states: one in Pennsylvania, one in North Carolina.”
Mitchell’s comments follow recent claims from Trump that Democrats’ get-out-the-vote efforts among overseas citizens was actually cover for fraud. Two lawsuits match the timing of Mitchell’s interview and her description: one filed in federal court in Pennsylvania on behalf of six Republican members of Congress, and the other in state court in North Carolina on behalf of the Republican National Committee and the state GOP.
The RNC filed a similar third suit last week in Michigan, after Mitchell’s interview. And Mitchell said she hoped to see similar litigation over overseas ballots filed soon in Wisconsin and Georgia.
A spokesperson for the RNC disputed that Mitchell played a role in the North Carolina case, telling The Intercept that Mitchell “was not involved in any way in either of the RNC’s cases.”
In typical form for suits aimed at sowing doubt, none of the three lawsuits filed so far has offered concrete proof of widespread voter fraud using overseas ballots, much less evidence of the kind Mitchell suggested she had in her interview.
“This is not a legitimate legal concern,” Angela Benander, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State, told The Intercept. “Just the latest in the RNC’s PR campaign to spread unfounded distrust in the integrity of our elections.” On Monday, the agency asked for sanctions against the RNC’s attorneys for filing a last-minute lawsuit “devoid of legal merit” over long-standing overseas ballot procedures.
This lack of evidence of actual fraud may be why, as Mitchell explained, she had a tough time finding attorneys willing to file the challenge in Pennsylvania except a fellow hard-line Trump ally: Erick Kaardal.
“We were unable to persuade anybody else to take the case,” Mitchell said in her radio interview.
Since the 2020 election, filing thinly supported election challenges has been one of Kaardal’s hallmarks. (Kaardal also did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.)
In December 2020, Kaardal filed a lawsuit aimed at stopping Congress from counting the electoral votes and certifying Joe Biden’s victory. Two days before the January 6 insurrection, a federal judge ruled his clients’ demands rested “on a fundamental and obvious misreading of the Constitution.”
“It would be risible were its target not so grave: the undermining of a democratic election for President of the United States,” U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote.
Boasberg referred Kaardal to a misconduct committee, finding Kaardal filed “a sweeping complaint filled with baseless fraud allegations and tenuous legal claims.” He criticized Kaardal’s tactics as “political grandstanding” and “political gamesmanship,” but the committee ultimately did not pursue disciplinary action.
Also in late 2020, Kaardal made similarly baseless demands to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which also rejected them. “This petition falls far short of the kind of compelling evidence and legal support we would undoubtedly need to countenance the court-ordered disenfranchisement of every Wisconsin voter,” wrote one justice in an order. “Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election.”
In a filing as part of the Pennsylvania overseas ballot challenge, Kaardal disclosed that he has never been disciplined or censured but has a pending investigation before the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility in Minnesota, where he’s based. He did not mention Boasberg’s scathing referral order.
The “Twins”
Two other attorneys who joined Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election have also made recent court appearances: Kurt Olsen and Bill Olson — or, as one witness to the House January 6 committee called them (despite their different surname spellings), the “Olsen twins.”
As The Intercept has reported, both attorneys tried their best to take the 2020 election fight to the U.S. Supreme Court using a hash of statistically preposterous claims and fringe legal theories.
As Kurt Olsen later testified, he was one of the “principal drafters” of the briefs, including the statement that Biden’s probability of winning four states was “less than one in a quadrillion.”
After the Supreme Court rejected the case, Bill Olson urged Trump to make the federal Justice Department file it again with minor revisions, and to fire the acting attorney general if he refused to do so. After a tense phone call with Kurt Olsen, who claimed he was acting at Trump’s personal direction, DOJ leadership nixed the plan, according to testimony and records released by the January 6 committee. In another case, Bill Olson filed a conspiracy-fueled brief arguing that Kamala Harris was ineligible to serve as vice president.
Now, both Olsen and Olson are part of a Georgia lawsuit over another go-to boogeyman: Dominion voting machines. In a suit against Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, Kurt Olsen represents the DeKalb County Republican Party, which claims the machines are “wide open to hacking and alteration of election results without detection.”
Bill Olson, who is representing Republicans in multiple other counties, filed a brief that claimed the machines were “irresponsibly vulnerable to intrusion — permitting unlimited manipulation of the data and the unmasking of cast votes.”
Raffensperger’s office called it a “last-minute effort to push false claims about Georgia’s voting system and cast doubt on the upcoming presidential election.” The judge dismissed the case on October 4, and the DeKalb County GOP quickly asked the Georgia Supreme Court for emergency review.
As the secretary of state’s office noted in a motion, Kurt Olsen has been hit with sanctions by two different courts in recent election-related cases. In 2023, the Arizona Supreme Court found he made “unequivocally false” statements and fined him $2,000, while a federal judge in Arizona ruled in 2022 that Olsen and his co-counsel filed a frivolous lawsuit over election security.
Olsen is currently fighting fallout from both sanction orders. “During my many years of practice, no complaint was made against me by any client or any opposing party until recently when I began representing clients in election-related actions,” he wrote in a filing disclosing the sanctions.
Olsen and Olson did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about the status of disciplinary complaints filed against them with their respective state bars for their efforts following the 2020 election.
