This is going to be a long post…very long if you read the excerpts at the bottom from a 60 Minutes interview with Marc Elias, founder of the voting rights website Democracy Docket to which I strongly encourage anyone concerned about voting rights and the future of democracy in America to subscribe*.
Today’s post is cut and pasted from Democracy Docket and speaks for itself. It’s important.
Democracy Docket, June 1, 2025
The Department of Justice no longer represents the best interests of the American people. Under Bondi, it has been transformed into little more than a cog in the authoritarian machine doing Donald Trump’s bidding. It has abandoned independent judgment and fealty to the law and replaced it with unquestioned obedience to the White House.
After only five months in office, Trump has transformed the Department of Justice into an instrument for voter suppression. This should come as no surprise.
When Trump nominated Pam Bondi as Attorney General, Democracy Docket described her as an “election denier” who helped spread “voting conspiracy theories and false allegations of election fraud.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post editorialized that she should be confirmed because she was “qualified” and “serious.”
Sadly, we were right, and much of the corporate legacy media was woefully wrong.
Since taking office, Bondi has appointed Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican lawyer with her own history of supporting anti-voting litigation and election denialism, as head of the Civil Rights Division. The most recent addition to the voter suppression team is Maureen Riordan, who recently helped lead a prominent anti-voting legal group. As Democracy Docket reported, she is now the acting head of the Voting Rights Section.
The first sign of the new regime’s focus came last week in North Carolina. Republicans spent six months trying to steal a state Supreme Court election by throwing out more than 65,000 ballots, claiming the voter registrations were incomplete.
Eventually, a federal judge nominated by Trump stepped in and ordered the state’s Board of Elections to certify the Democratic candidate’s victory. Republicans ultimately conceded the battle, but Trump’s DOJ is now engaged in the war.
On Tuesday, the DOJ filed a new lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections, echoing the claims made by the Republican Party. The goal of this lawsuit is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in future elections. The fact that North Carolina will feature marquee Senate and House midterm elections seems an unlikely coincidence.
When I founded Democracy Docket in 2020, the most important litigation involved efforts to make voting easier in the middle of a pandemic. Though the Republican Party opposed these efforts, the Department of Justice remained on the sideline.
When Joe Biden was elected, Republican legislatures responded in 2021 by enacting a slate of new voter suppression laws aimed at making voting more difficult, particularly for minority and young voters. While private litigants actively challenged these laws in court, the DOJ was more selective — in part, I suspect, because it wanted to avoid claims of partisanship in the cases it brought in the name of the United States.
In the run up to the 2024 election, the Republican Party and a constellation of well-funded right-wing groups brought a barrage of litigation aimed at making it harder to vote and easier for election deniers to cheat. This new breed of cases was bolder and more consequential than what the GOP had advocated in the past. Luckily, they were mostly defeated.
One of which — the last one to be defeated from the 2024 election cycle — was the case brought by Republicans to overturn the results of a free and fair election in North Carolina. At the end of his term, Biden’s DOJ continued to stay out of such cases — even though it was clear what federal law and the Constitution required.
Whether that is described as a norm or a guardrail, it does not exist within the Department run by Pam Bondi. The Department of Justice’s flip-flop to the anti-voting side of the coin is consequential. Its adoption of an overt partisan agenda is potentially devastating.
Bill Barr, the Attorney General in Trump’s first term, was far from a folk hero for our democracy. Yes, he promoted baseless claims about the dangers of mail-in voting during the pandemic. Yes, Barr often liked to act as Trump’s personal lawyer. But he had a line he would not cross.
Barr refused to interfere in the vote counting and open bogus investigations to affect the results of the 2020 election. To this day, he refused to parrot Trump’s claims that the election was stolen.
Pam Bondi is another story. She is a Trump sycophant before she is Attorney General. With her at the helm of the DOJ, we must remain vigilant, and we should be concerned for democracy.
Trump knows that the greatest threat to his power is a devastating loss in the midterm elections. He knows the best way to secure Republican victories is through voter suppression and election subversion.
That’s why the Department of Justice’s recent lawsuit in North Carolina is of such concern. Lawsuits aimed at undermining free and fair elections are sadly not new. Those lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice are unprecedented. What used to be a stalwart fighter for American voters is now the right hand of a wannabe dictator who knows voter suppression is his best chance of his party retaining power in Congress.
Make no mistake, North Carolina is a test for a broader plan. They are seeing what works. They are seeing what sticks. They are seeing what they can get away with. With 2026 around the corner, we must prove that they cannot succeed in using the courts to undermine democracy.
Pro-democracy lawyers around the country have been gearing up for this moment, and we won’t be afraid or ill-prepared when we’re called up to battle.
As we defend our democracy against our own Department of Justice, I’m saddened for our country — but we cannot afford to run from this moment. Trump and his Republican sycophants will not back down until they have suppressed our voices and our ballots, and we cannot back down until we have protected free and fair elections.
60 Minutes background on Marc Elias (excerpts)
..Marc Elias, a long time opponent of Trump who is the only lawyer the president has named who was willing to appear on 60 Minutes. Elias, and others, are warning that Trump’s assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself. Elias says that for him, it began with the president’s personal grudge.
Marc Elias: Donald Trump hates me because I fight hard, and I fight for free and fair elections. I insist on fighting for democracy in court, fighting for voting rights in court, and insist on telling the truth about what the outcome of the 2020 election was.
Scott Pelley: Are there risks in doing the work that you’re doing?
Marc Elias: I’d be an idiot not to be worried. The question though is what do you do? Right, do you just cower in the corner? Do you just try to disappear? Do you just leave democracy to– fend for itself? Or do you stand tall and do the best you can every day to– represent your clients and try to preserve the rule of law?
Marc Elias first crossed Trump in 2016. He was the top lawyer for the Clinton campaign. Then, in 2020, when Trump and allies challenged the election results, Elias fought in court and won. Trump calls him a “thug.”
Marc Elias: Donald Trump is the walking embodiment of everything that is wrong with the American political system. And so, when Donald Trump says that I am unethical or that I am undermining his vision of America, I say, “Boy, I must be doin’ something right.”
Elias was top of mind for Trump this past March, both he and another lawyer who had once investigated the president.
President Trump (March 14, 2025, Department of Justice remarks): With the help of radicals like Marc Elias, Mark Pomerantz. And these are people that nobody’s ever seen anything like it. So many others, but these are …bad people, really bad people. …
Beginning in February, the president signed the orders attacking six firms in six weeks, including Marc Elias’ former firm. Targeted firms say what the president signed amounted to a corporate death penalty. Each had a connection to an investigation or legal case related to Trump or his allies, including Robert Mueller’s 2017 probe of Russian election meddling, subversion of the 2020 election, and alleged mishandling of classified documents.
President Trump (March 6, 2025, in the Oval Office): This is an absolute honor to sign. What they’ve done is — it’s just terrible and it should never be allowed to happen again.
In a shock to the legal community, nine major firms went to the White House to make a deal. Some say they were pressured, not by a written order, but by a message from the White House threatening an order. The orders threatened to bar attorneys from where they work, courthouses and federal agencies and cancel the contracts of law firm clients. For example, an aerospace company could lose its federal contracts if it stayed with the firm. A senior partner at one firm told us the president’s orders were, quote, “diabolical.” “Intended to bankrupt [us].” He said, within hours, his major clients were threatening to drop his firm. It took only a matter of days before America’s wealthiest and most powerful law firms buckled.
Marc Elias: It is trying to intimidate them the way in which a mob boss intimidates people in the neighborhood that he is seeking to either exact protection money from or engage in other nefarious conduct. I mean, the fact is that these law firms are being told, “If you don’t play ball with us, maybe somethin’ really bad will happen to you.”
The nine firms did not admit wrongdoing but, altogether, they agreed to give nearly $1 billion in legal services to causes that the firms and Trump support….
Now, America’s legal community is torn between those who want to fight and those who made a deal. One firm that reached an agreement with Trump was Skadden Arps, where attorney Brenna Frey resigned in protest.
Brenna Frey: I think the message it sends to the country is power is what matters. If you have power, you can exercise that power however you want. And if that’s true, why have a legal system at all? Why have law firms or lawyers at all.
Brenna Frey: The law firm is tacitly saying, we’ll listen to the administration, we won’t fight in court. If we won’t fight over this, what else won’t we fight over in court against the federal government?
Brenna Frey: I think that they’re naïve if they think this makes the issue go away.
Brenna Frey: There was nothing in these agreements that prevents the president from issuing another executive order against the law firm in the future.
Donald Ayer: Someone must stand up to this because it is a direct attack on the whole functioning of our judicial system.
Four firms are standing up and fighting in court. Judges protected them with temporary restraining orders. Law professor Donald Ayer says, in his view, Trump’s orders violate the constitutional rights to free speech, due process and the right to counsel.
Donald Ayer: Everyone’s got a right to a lawyer. Everyone’s got a right to go to court. And it’s something we’ve always assumed to be true, and now it’s threatened.
Scott Pelley: So, if the president targets a few specific law firms, the message to law firms across the country, in a nutshell, is what?
Donald Ayer: I think the message is that this can happen to you. But it’s a real effort to prevent zealous representation of your clients’ legal interests when that results in something unacceptable to the administration.
John Keker is a prominent attorney and Democrat in San Francisco: You’re at the mercy of the government and it really, it’s like a protection racket.
Scott Pelley: You’re not suggesting that the president’s running a protection racket.
John Keker: I am, I’m suggesting that he is violating the rule that says, “you can’t offer a thing of value in return for an official act.” That happens to be the definition of bribery. Anybody else who came to Washington and said, “I will give you $100 million of free legal services if you do this for me,” would be convicted of a bribe.
John Keker: We don’t have to agree on politics, but we do have to agree that the legal profession has to protect the rule of law in the United States which means lawyers and judges need to be independent from the executive branch.
Scott Pelley: If the president brings the legal profession to heel what situation is the country in then?
John Keker: No rule of law. You’re in a dictatorship. That’s what’s happened in China. It happened in Russia. These are legal systems that look like legal systems, but in fact are controlled by a dictatorship.
President Trump (March 24, 2025, during investment announcement): I just think that the law firms have to behave themselves.
Trump’s attack on the law firms has been described by a federal judge as “…a personal vendetta…” None of his targets is charged with any crime. Trump, however, was indicted by federal grand juries in cases about the 2020 election and allegedly concealing classified documents. He pleaded not guilty. Those prosecutions were droppedonly because he was reelected. Last year, a state jury convicted him of falsifying business records, making him the first felon in the Oval Office.
President Trump (Feb. 25, 2025, in the Oval Office): I’ve been targeted for four years longer than that. So, you don’t tell me about targeting. I was the target of corrupt politicians for four years and then four years after that. So don’t talk to me about targeting.
President Trump (March 21, 2025, in the Oval Office): Well, the law firms all want to make deals. You mean the law firms that we’re going after, that went after me for four years, ruthlessly, violently, illegally? Are those the law firms you’re talking about? They’re not babies. They’re very sophisticated people. Those law firms did bad things, bad things. They went after me for years, Russia, Russia, Russia, hoax, all a hoax.
Scott Pelley: Are we reaching a point where a person will go to a law firm with a case that is opposed to the president of the United States and the law firm will think, “Do we really wanna take this case?”
Marc Elias: We’re already there. They are deciding not to take on certain kinds of clients that might upset the administration or not taking on certain kinds of causes that might put them in the crosshairs of the administration.
Scott Pelley: If lawyers give up their independence, what is lost?
Marc Elias: The rule of law. And this is why the business community ought to care. Today, it might be that, you know, Donald Trump thinks he can take over the election system through one of his executive orders. Tomorrow maybe it’s the banking system. After that, maybe it’s contracts. Maybe he decrees I’m gonna decide which contracts are binding and which contracts aren’t binding. So, the legal system is fundamental to how our society operates, how capitalism operates, and everyone should have a stake in that.
* Follow link to Democracy Docket
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