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Now that Donald Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee, the institution is undergoing some rather dramatic staffing changes, with dozens of staffers being pushed out of their current positions.
But the RNC isn’t just moving personnel out, it’s also bringing new personnel in. NBC News reported on the party hiring two new lawyers to lead its legal efforts.
Republican lawyer Charlie Spies will serve as the RNC’s chief counsel, the source said. ... Christina Bobb, who has served on the Trump campaign’s legal team and is a prominent figure in pushing the GOP’s unfounded claims of a stolen 2020 election, will serve as senior counsel for election integrity, the source said.
At first blush, this might not seem especially notable. After all, it’s an election year; recent history reminds us that court fights are likely; so it stands to reason that the major parties would add staff to their respective legal departments.
But in this instance, it’s not quite that simple — because Bobb is not just another Republican lawyer. A Washington Post analysis summarized:
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.)
Really, that’s just a sampling. Bobb talked in 2022 about a plot to overturn the 2020 election results and possibly reinstate Trump to the White House. 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 and election conspiracy theorist who played a prominent role in a scandal that led to one of Donald Trump’s many felony indictments.
What could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, quite a bit.