Biden Campaign Expands Legal War Room for General Election Battle
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign is expanding its army of election lawyers and experts in preparation for what is likely to be an intense legal battle leading up to Election Day and afterward, if the general election is close.
Biden’s campaign, which has been assembling lawyers and volunteers for its election integrity efforts since the summer, announced on Monday that Dana Remus and Bob Bauer would helm the effort, as reported by The New York Times.
Remus, who until now has served as the campaign’s general counsel, and Bauer, a former Obama administration official, will be responsible for building out a “special litigation” unit within the campaign. The unit, which will serve as a legal war room for election issues, will “focus on the state-by-state 0ver vote casting and counting rules.” It will be led by two solicitors general, Donald Verrilli and Walter Dellinger, from the Obama and Clinton administrations, respectively.
Also involved in the effort, according to the Times, are former Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder and Marc Elias, a Democrat superlawyer who was the general counsel for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign. Holder, in particular, will focus on liaising between the Biden campaign and outside progressive groups mobilizing to fight legal challenges over voting rules and balloting.
The move comes as Biden has been signaling on the campaign trail for months that Democrats will not take any risks in the event of a close contest.
“We put together 600 lawyers and a group of people throughout the country who are going into every single state to try to figure out whether chicanery is likely to take place,” the former vice president told donors at a fundraiser in July.
Democrats appear specifically concerned about the upcoming general election relying heavily on vote-by-mail. Since the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the party has fought to ease restrictions on absentee and mail-in balloting, while simultaneously using the new process to boost turnout among the core members of its constituency.
Most notably, this was exhibited in July when PrioritiesUSA, the largest super PAC aligned with the Democrat Party, announced it would invest $24 million in mobilizing black and Latino voters to vote-by-mail. The Super PAC’s effort is targeting six battleground states–Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida–considered pivotal to Biden’s hopes of taking the White House.