Arabic version: بلانش يدافع عن دعوى التصديق على انتخابات مجلس الشيوخ في ألاسكا

According to The Guardian, Todd Blanche defended the justice department’s pre-emptive lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s US Senate results if the Republican incumbent loses. The department argues that two candidates named Dan Sullivan on the ballot could create “voter confusion”. Donald Trump said he ordered the suit, telling reporters: “I’m the one that said do it.”

During CNN’s State of the Union, host Dana Bash raised the possibility that an effort to overturn an election could lead to a repeat of the events after 6 January. Blanche rejected the suggestion, calling it “crazy” and saying Bash was “not being a real person”. Bash replied that it was not crazy and referred to the attack on the Capitol by election-denying Trump supporters. A bipartisan Senate report said there were seven deaths in relation to that incident.

Blanche said the administration was not laying groundwork for the president to take such action. He said the groundwork concerned Alaska and that, if the matter became an issue after the election, officials would be able to determine whether confusion violated the law in deciding who the senators should be.

In a separate interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, Blanche objected when Margaret Brennan summarized the litigation and asked whether Trump had directed him to file the case. He said her description of the facts was “either at best misleading, but really a lie to your viewers.”

Election-law experts questioned the case’s legal basis. Derek Mueller, a University of Notre Dame law professor, said the claim was “so absurdly thin” that it had essentially no likelihood of success. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research called it an unprecedented federal intervention and said Alaska courts had fully litigated the issue. Richard H Pildes of New York University described it as one of the weakest election lawsuits he had seen.