President Donald Trump's new effort to seize control of election infrastructure from states is more than a pursuit of his 2020 conspiracy theories, election lawyer and Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias warned MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday — it's a "desperate" reaction to his fear of losing the midterms, and his frustration that his pressure campaign to get Republican states to redraw congressional maps to give him extra seats backfired on him.
"Marc Elias, let me bring you in on this," said Wallace. "This is a playbook you and I have been talking about and covering really for years now, since before Donald Trump was elected a second time. But Chairman Rob Pitts again at this press conference, suggesting that he and other major Georgia figures would be arrested."
"Look, I've been sounding the alarm about the risks that Donald Trump faced to democracy since I was a general counsel to Hillary Clinton's campaign," said Elias. "You and I did a lot of television sounding the alarm before the 2020 election and what we saw afterwards. And I am here to sound a larger and louder alarm today than I ever have before."
"I mean, the fact is that Donald Trump has proven himself desperate," Elias continued. "As you point out, the redistricting has not worked out the way he wished. I'm proud that my law firm represented the Democratic Party in defeating the Republican effort that we just won in the Supreme Court. But the fact is that when that didn't work out, he then went to plan B ... It is political prosecutions. It is the threats of more political prosecutions. It is the dry-running of how one seizes ballots. Yes, he's interested in 2020, but he's really interested in setting up the mechanism to be able to seize ballots in 2026. He has found a prosecutor in Missouri — not in Georgia, in Missouri — seizing ballots in Georgia."
And while this is going on, he said, "You have Steve Bannon on TV, who, as you know, is, you know, never too many degrees away from Donald Trump's psyche, this morning saying that that ICE should should be around polling locations. And when we have what we have seen ICE do is tragic towards U.S. citizens, including killing U.S. citizens."
"If I can just add one final thing, the biggest lie that Donald Trump is telling right now that we really can't let go slide and that we cannot let normalize, is this idea that states operate as his 'agents,'" said Elias. "The Constitution does not allow the president to have any role in federal elections. I just want a case in D.C. district court in which the judge rejected the executive order that Donald Trump issued, saying that the president has no role in elections, but yet he is trying to turn the Constitution on its head."
"States run elections, period," he added. "They don't act as the agent of the federal government. They don't act as the agent of the president. The president has no role, and we cannot allow him to sort of slide this by people, as if somehow the states are doing his bidding and therefore, if they don't do the job he likes, he can — he can go in. He can't."