2020 election

What’s next, MSNBC? Will you bring in Michael Avenatti, on a Zoom from his federal prison cell, as your expert on lawyer-client ethics?

The question arises because, of all the 330 million people in the United States, Saturdays’ edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend chose Marc Elias to attack Pam Bondi — Trump’s AG nominee — as a 2020 “election denier,” and someone who had suggested the existence of “fake ballots.”

This is the same Marc Elias who is fresh from his failure to steal the Pennsylvania senatorial election for his client, Democrat Bob Casey. As the National Review described it, “Casey’s strategy — spearheaded by his counsel, Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias — has turned to seeking to count illegal ballots.”

In service of Elias’s larcenous strategy, three counties counted ballots that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled to be illegal. Democrat Bucks County Commissioner Chair Diane Ellis-Marseglia defiantly boasted:

“We all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country and people violate laws any time they want. So for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”

Well, Denise, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did “pay attention” to your flouting of the law. In a unanimous 7-0 decision, the five Democrats and two Republicans on the court ordered, in capital letters, that the election officials: “SHALL COMPLY with the prior rulings of this Court” that the ballots in question were illegal.

Prior to Elias’s comments, the show rolled a 2020 clip of Bondi on Fox News, in an exchange with Steve Doocy, saying she would fight till Trump was declared the winner of Pennsylvania, and suggesting there could have been fake ballots cast there. So the irony and hypocrisy of inviting Elias—of all people—to condemn Bondi as an election denier is compounded by the fact that the very state where he acted to steal an election by relying on illegal ballots was . . . Pennsylvania!

Elias had the chutzpah to declare that, now more than ever, Dems need to speak with “moral clarity.” The Weekend hosts, predictably, were way too diplomatic to mention Elias’s attempt to steal the Pennsylvania election, and his nerve in accusing anyone else of being an election denier relying on fake ballots.

This was not the only bit of stunning hypocrisy during the segment’s attack on Bondi. Co-host Alicia Menendez quoted Stephen Colbert to the effect that Bondi “is the only person to ever make money off Trump University.”

That was a reference to the Trump family foundation having made a $25,000 to Bondi’s campaign for a second term as Florida AG at a time her office was deciding whether to investigate Trump University, something her office ultimately decided not to do. 

So Menendez, via Colbert, was unsubtly accusing Bondi of accepting a bribe. 

We’ve made a point in our coverage of Alicia Menendez to avoid visiting upon the child the sins of the father. But all bets are off when she goes out of her way to accuse an elected official of bribery. She is the daughter of Democrat Sen. Bob ‘Gold Bars’ Menendez of New Jersey, who in July was convicted of corruption on all 16 counts, including bribery.

Here’s the transcript.

MSNBC
The Weekend
11/23/24
9:18 am ET

MICHAEL STEELE: This is the woman who is going to be the head of our Justice Department. What concerns you with this pick, Marc?

MARC ELIAS: Look, she’s an election denier. Just straight out and out. I Mean, Steve Doocy, of all people, was dubious of her claim of fake ballots. I mean, when you’ve lost Steve Doocy, on right-wing claims, you’ve come a long way.

Not only, not only was the 2020 election fair and free, and the results accurate, but, you know, this notion of fake ballots. That isn’t even something that the, that most of the Trump world was embracing. They were embracing a lot of other cockamamie theories. But the idea of fake ballots in Pennsylvania. That was on the fringe of the fringe.

And so, look, you know, a few weeks ago, it was widely accepted in the mainstream media, in Democratic politics, in the center of American political discourse, that election denialism was disqualifying. You could be a lot of things, but you couldn’t be an avowed election denier. And now, here we have someone who is an avowed election denier being nominated, and in some corners at least being treated as a more acceptable pick simply because she is not a sexual predator under, you know, like the last nominee.

. . . 

SYMONE SANDERS: She is an election denier. It should be disqualifying. What — we have just gone to the Twilight Zone, Marc.

ELIAS: We have. And that is the thing that has me most worried.  

. . . 

Now is the time we all need to stiffen our spines and harden our fortresses around democracy. Now is not the time to capitulate, now is not the time to appease. Now is the time to speak with more moral clarity than we even did before the election. 

. . . 

ALICIA MENENDEZ: It is telling that there is an an old Stephen Colbert clip where he says that Pam Bondi is the only person to ever make money off Trump University. That, in an ordinary environment, would be the scandal that we would be focused on.