Two corporate law firms are helping Trump attack democracy. What do their other clients think?
https://popular.info/p/two-corporate-law-firms-are-helping
Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria
Joe Biden won the presidential election. But Trump won't concede. Instead, he's launched a scorched-earth legal strategy to undermine confidence in the entire democratic system. Two prestigious corporate law firms are helping Trump turn his conspiracies into court filings.
This year, many states expanded mail-in voting to give people a safe way to participate in an election during a deadly pandemic. Trump claimed, without evidence, that allowing more mail-in voting would result in widespread fraud and allow Democrats to "steal" the election. And Jones Day, one of the largest law firms in the world, has been happy to do Trump's bidding in court.
For example, after Election Day, Jones Day filed a motion on behalf of the Pennsylvania GOP asking the Supreme Court to order election officials to segregate ballots received after November 3. (There is an ongoing legal dispute about whether ballots postmarked by Election Day but received by November 6 will be counted.) The motion was successful but made some lawyers at the firm uncomfortable. Six Jones Day lawyers told the New York Times that "given the small number of late-arriving ballots involved in the litigation, and the fact that they already had been segregated, the main goal of the litigation seemed to be to erode public confidence in the election results."
Jones Day has represented the Trump campaign since 2015, collecting "more than $20 million in fees from the Trump campaigns, political groups linked to Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee." One Jones Day partner, Don McGahn, represented Trump during his first campaign as an outside attorney, was named White House counsel, and then returned to Jones Day. Another Jones Day partner, Noel J. Francisco, was named Trump's first Solicitor General before returning to the firm. John Gore, a former official at Trump's Justice Department, is helming the firm's election-related work for Trump.
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