Trump has never accepted an election he lost, and now he’s getting a head start for the GOP’s predicted midterm loss. In Alaska, Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan is locked in a dead heat with Democrat Mary Peltola—and a third candidate and would-be spoiler, a retired teacher named Dan J. Sullivan, whom, it seems, operatives tied to Peltola’s campaign had a hand in recruiting. Alaska’s courts have already ruled that the second Sullivan can run.
But state election officials have gone out of their way to tell the two apart, listing the challenger as “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” with no party label and the senator as the “(Registered Republican) Incumbent.” Predictably, that didn’t satisfy Trump, whose singular goal is a MAGA victory, not fairness—so he ordered the DOJ to sue to block Alaska from certifying the result if his candidate loses. He didn’t even bother pretending the call was made independently by the DOJ.
The Guardian reports:
“I’m the one that said do it,” the president told reporters as he landed in Florida for a campaign rally on Friday. ... Experts saw the lawsuit as extremely weak and unlikely to succeed. “The legal claim is so absurdly thin, there’s essentially no likelihood of success,” Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in a blogpost.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the department’s lawsuit was “an unprecedented intervention by the federal government” and said the issue of two candidates with similar names appearing on the ballot had already been “fully litigated by Alaska’s courts.” He said the lawsuit “raises serious concerns about political interference,” adding that he could not recall an administration “ever attempting to stop the certification of an election—and certainly not 11 days before polls close”.
The lawsuit asks the court to hold certification while investigators figure out whether people who voted for Dan J. Sullivan really meant to vote for the senator—an impossible task in a country with a secret ballot, where no one knows who cast which vote. When Alaska’s Republican-led state government moved to dismiss the case as having “no legal basis,” the DOJ rewrote the complaint and asked that every ballot ranking Dan J. Sullivan be set aside for some future inquiry. Judge Sharon Gleason has already flagged the timing: the department waited until Alaskans had started voting, nearly four months after the state Supreme Court cleared Dan J. (the challenger) to run. A suit this late and this thin has little chance in court, but it makes a handy pretext for contesting a Peltola win.
Trump is demanding that Peltola be disqualified from running over what, if the reporting holds up, is a dirty but all-too-common trick by both sides. The machinery is already humming. The Justice Department has been issuing grand jury subpoenas since August in a criminal probe of Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy, and Alaska’s lame-duck Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, has ordered his own investigation and refused to commit to certifying a Peltola win.
The plan for a race the GOP might lose is coming into focus: block the result, remove the opponent, and haul her into court.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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