It was just two months ago when the new leadership team at the Republican National Committee started making significant personnel changes, including hiring two new lawyers to oversee the party’s election-year legal efforts.
One of the attorneys was longtime Republican lawyer Charlie Spies, who was hired to serve as the RNC’s chief counsel. That didn’t last: Spies was “pushed out” after failing to embrace Donald Trump’s ridiculous election conspiracy theories.
The other lawyer the RNC hired in March was Christina Bobb, who was tapped to serve as the party’s senior counsel for election integrity, and who was back in the news Tuesday. My MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim reported:
Rudy Giuliani and several other defendants in the Arizona “fake electors” case have been arraigned on charges of conspiracy, fraud and forgery over an alleged scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor. … Others arraigned Tuesday include former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward and Christina Bobb.
All of the criminal defendants, including Bobb, pleaded not guilty.
And while time will tell what becomes of the prosecutions, it’s difficult not to marvel at the ongoing set of circumstances. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked online, “What do you think the news cycle today would be like if the DNC’s head of voter mobilization got arraigned for voter fraud?”
That need not be a rhetorical question. Bobb, of course, enjoys the presumption of innocence, but it continues to be no small detail that the Republican National Committee’s election integrity lawyer has been indicted on election-related charges.
What’s more, by all appearances, this has not affected her status at the RNC. It’s not as if party officials learned of the criminal charges and hastily arranged her going-away party. On the contrary, Bobb stands accused of election-related crimes and she’s still the RNC’s election integrity lawyer.
Charlie Spies was shown the door because he was a little too reality-based for the party, but at least for now, the importance of Bobb’s arraignment is being downplayed at the RNC.
In case anyone needs a refresher, a recent Washington Post analysis made clear that Bobb’s not just another Republican lawyer.
She has a robust pedigree, at least as far as Trump is concerned. Soon after the 2020 election, she began working with Giuliani and others to elevate baseless or later-debunked claims about the results in various states having been tainted by fraud. She was involved in the “audit” of votes in Arizona, working with Trump campaign official (and Georgia co-defendant) Mike Roman. She wrote a book, published in January 2023, cataloguing familiar (and baseless or debunked) criticisms of the results. It’s all there, from Antrim County to State Farm Arena to True the Vote. (The book’s forward was written by Stephen K. Bannon; Jim Hoft of the conspiracy-promoting site Gateway Pundit wrote a blurb.)
That was just a sampling. Bobb also talked in 2022 about a plot to overturn the 2020 election results and possibly return Trump to the White House before the 2024 elections. A year later, the lawyer raised the possibility of someone “intentionally” having released Covid as part of a scheme to interfere with Trump’s re-election effort.
A year after that, she suggested that it shouldn’t much matter whether a presidential candidate was found guilty of insurrection. Complicating matters, in 2022, a leading Justice Department official went to Mar-a-Lago with a few FBI agents in the hopes of retrieving documents Trump improperly took and refused to voluntarily give back. As part of that meeting, as regular readers might recall, it was Bobb who signed a certification statement, indicating that the former president had fully complied with a grand jury subpoena and no longer had any classified materials at his glorified country club. That statement, we now know, wasn’t true: As the FBI discovered during a search two months later, Trump still had plenty of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Bobb later told investigators that she did not draft the statement she signed and blamed the mess on another Trump attorney. In other words, the lawyer who will help oversee the Republican National Committee’s “election integrity” efforts is a “big lie” proponent, an election conspiracy theorist who played a prominent role in a scandal that led to one of Trump’s many felony indictments, and is now under indictment in Arizona, where she has been charged with election-related crimes. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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