As former President Donald Trump openly plans to bring 2024 election challenges in states where the results are close, he faces a major problem: whether he’ll have the legal talent to back him the way he did four years ago.
Trump and his allies have vowed for months they are prepared to challenge the results of this year’s election should they see it necessary. But the fallout of more than 60 failed election challenges in 2020, coupled with indictments against him and his attorneys over attempts to insert so-called alternate electors to subvert his defeat, could ruin his chances to galvanize the legal talent needed to bring similar challenges this cycle.
Conservative lawyers have acknowledged it may be a “more difficult proposition” for Trump to find top legal talent heading into the final stretch of the race against Vice President Kamala Harris, arguing that bar associations across the country “have been captured by the Left.”
“All of those prosecutions, all those disbarments, are a complete abuse of the law, the legal system, and an abuse of the professional licensing system for lawyers,” Hans von Spakovsky, an attorney and former member of the Federal Election Commission, told the Washington Examiner.
The root of this uncertainty stems from the consequences many Trump attorneys faced for their role in aiding his 2020 election challenges. At least five attorneys — Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, and Kenneth Chesebro — have had their law licenses permanently or temporarily suspended due to their work related to Trump’s election litigation.
“The result of all of that is that, yeah, there’s a lot of lawyers, very good lawyers, who will be very reluctant to represent the president no matter how valid his legal claims are,” von Spakovsky said.
