Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s attorney general, lashed out during an interview on Sunday while defending the justice department’s pre-emptive lawsuit to block certification of Alaska’s US Senate results if the GOP incumbent loses, calling a TV host’s question “crazy”.
The testy repartee unfolded on CNN’s State of the Union over the DoJ’s unprecedented legal action, which alleges that there could be “voter confusion” due to two candidates named Dan Sullivan on Alaska’s ballot. Trump told reporters, “I’m the one that said do it” when asked about the suit.
Dana Bash, State of the Union host, said “one of the big questions is whether or not “Trump tries to overturn the election, and the result of that could be, God forbid, what we saw after January 6”.
“Oh, stop it,” Blanche said. “Oh, you got to stop it with that. You are not being a real person. Come on, man.
“That is crazy!”
Bash said, “it is not crazy.”
“I would have said that before January 6,” Bash said, referring to election-denying Trump supporters’ shocking attack on the Capitol. A bipartisan Senate report said there were seven deaths in relation to this incident.
“Because the president, because the Department of Justice, is concerned that there is an absolute fraud happening in Alaska, and he wants to do something about it, you’re saying, Mr Attorney General, because the president of the United States wants to stop a fraud and confusion in Alaska, is he going to do something crazy? That is not, that is not a real question.”
“We’re not laying any groundwork for the president to do that,” a fiery Blanche insisted. “What I said is the groundwork that we are laying is for Alaska, for the state of Alaska.”
“If it becomes an issue after the election, we’ll have the ability to determine whether there was confusion that violates the law in determining who the senators should be.”
Blanche also appeared irked during an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation after she summed up the litigation and asked whether Trump directed him to file suit.
“Well first of all, let me correct you, OK,” Blanche said. “You described facts that were just simply either at best misleading, but really a lie to your viewers.”
While Trump’s DoJ has claimed there might be “voter confusion” on Alaskan ballots, potentially propelling Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola to victory, election experts maintain that this position is legally weak.
“The legal claim is so absurdly thin, there’s essentially no likelihood of success,” said Derek Mueller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, in a blogpost.
Another expert, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said this suit marked “an unprecedented intervention by the federal government” and noted that Alaska’s courts had “fully litigated” this issue.
The lawsuit, Becker said, “raises serious concerns about political interference” and that he could not remember “ever attempting to stop the certification of an election – and certainly not 11 days before polls close”.
Richard H Pildes, a law professor at New York University who focuses on elections, told the New York Times: “It is one of the weakest election lawsuits I’ve ever seen.”
“It should have no realistic chance of success in the courts,” Pildes said.