Government

GOP Lawyer Slams Trump For Undermining Election Confidence Despite Long Career Of Undermining Election Confidence

Ben Ginsberg doesn't like Trump walking the road that Ginsberg paved.

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Ben Ginsberg was the go-to election lawyer for the Republican party for decades. He’s since retired from Jones Day, but he’s using his voice as a conservative expert on elections to call out the Trump campaign for sowing doubt over the sanctity of the election process. He told Rolling Stone over the summer that Trump was lying about the prevalence of voter fraud. Yesterday, he put out a Washington Post op-ed titled, “My Party Is Destroying Itself At The Altar Of Trump” blasting voter suppression efforts. Ginsberg is doing everything he can to be the media-friendly model of a principled Republican.

And while it’s laudable that he’s taking this opportunity to tell an audience of liberals exactly what they want to hear, let’s just stick a pin in this rehabilitation effort.

Ginsberg never really trafficked in the nonsense conspiracy theories that the Trump 2020 campaign is peddling every morning. Or in the middle of the night, depending on whenever the candidate wrests control of his Twitter account from terrified staffers. But Ginsberg spent his entire career prominently serving candidates that have systematically eroded confidence in American elections to the point that Trump’s rantings sound plausible to the slice of the electorate he’s trying to whip into a frenzy.

He was at Jones Day when Trump 2016 hired them to work on that campaign. What was being said under the Jones Day aegis back then?

Trump claimed “people that have died 10 years ago are still voting,” citing a report that found 1.8 million deceased people remain on voter registration rolls. But the report did not find evidence of wrongdoing, and numerous studies have found such voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.

Trump claimed there is a massive problem with “illegal immigrants [who] are voting,” citing research by Old Dominion professors who say noncitizen voters may have benefited Democrats in 2008. But a Harvard professor who manages the data used in the Old Dominion study said the data was misused and the study’s conclusions are wrong.

Finally, Trump broadly claimed that “voter fraud is very, very common,” and he has called for poll watchers to look for people impersonating voters or voting numerous times. However, numerous academic studies and government inquiries have found in-person voter fraud to be rare.

Ginsberg was already showing signs of discomfort even then. While his firm was lending its name and credibility to these ramblings, Ginsberg did tell the Washington Post that:

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“There will be Republican candidates who are winning by narrow margins and losing by narrow margins,” Ginsberg said. “The party as a whole has a collective interest in having the results upheld.”

A lovely sentiment.

At the time Jones Day was doubtless already preparing a number of challenges based on the expectation that Trump would narrowly lose. In 2012, Ginsberg was running Romney’s legal team when it was shutting down early voting locations in the hopes that it might depress poor and minority turnout in states like Ohio and coordinating the legal aspects of “ORCA” the party’s much ballyhooed voter intimidation initiative. He worked for the Swift Boat SuperPAC at the same time he worked for the Bush campaign in 2004 which was… not great.

Most notably, in 2000, Ginsberg worked for the Bush campaign that plunged America’s confidence in elections directly into the toilet by getting the state of Florida declared prematurely for Bush and getting himself played by Bob Balaban in the movie Recount. In his recent Post op-ed, Ginsberg has the gall to suggest that Democrats in 2000 hurt their credibility when they asked for one site’s results to be disregarded over “administrative error” when in actuality, the county had allowed a Republican to just put voter registration numbers on ballots that didn’t have any, which seems like a lot more than an administrative error.

The guy is the architect of a thing he personally branded as Project Ratfuck that re-gerrymandered the South to give Republicans the massive local advantages they enjoy today. Got to admit, that one was kind of a clever long-con — a tactical alliance between the Congressional Black Caucus and Republicans to district white Democratic districts out of existence in favor of majority-minority districts and Republican districts. There really has never been as much of a reckoning over that error as there probably should be within Democratic party circles.

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Still, this is the guy who’s now scolding Trump for suggesting that elections may not be trusted? Rather than patting him on the back as the latest “Welcome to the #Resistance” cosplayer, what someone needs to ask Ginsberg is “after a career of gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics, what the hell did you expect was going to happen?” Everything he’s ever done has entrenched the mindset among Republican officials and voters that there are problems with the voting process and that maps need to be drawn to minimize the will of the voters. And while he almost certainly maintained a puckish, internal “this is just how you play the game” mentality that never envisioned someone actually believing this nonsense, at a certain point you have to reap what you sow. The inmates run the Republican asylum now and every hand-wringing Project Lincoln type needs to be forced to take a long hard look at what they did to build the braying masses of QAnon nuts out there.

But, yeah, read his op-ed I guess. Just remember most of what he’s complaining about didn’t materialize out of thin air.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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