One of the reasons we agree to election rules in advance is so the loser buys into the result, That is why you do not change the rules in the middle of the game. That is why you do not have a billion dollars flood the zone with biased spending by election offices. (Image source: iStock)
Some of you may have heard that first New York City and now Washington D.C. passed a law allowing non-citizens to vote in city elections.
When I tell people in the real world about this, they don’t understand what I mean at first because it sounds so outlandish. After all, Americans are supposed to be electing American leaders — not people from the Dominican Republic, or Chinese nationals, and so forth.
We filed a lawsuit. We’ve got four clients, and we’re suing New York City.
You may have heard the Republican Party suing them on some procedural things. We’re suing them on the 15th Amendment. The 15th Amendment was passed right after the Civil War, and it prohibits racial discrimination.
When these jokers on your New York City council passed this law, they were all talking in terms of race. Let us help this race. Let us hurt that race. We are sick of white faces. A black representative on the council said, “Whoa. Slow down. This is going to hurt us.” They didn’t care.
There is a bunch of crazy things happening in the election architecture. Some people are trying to fundamentally transform how our elections are run, and who is voting.
The reason they have allowed foreigners to vote in New York City elections, here is the important part is that they are trying to normalize it. They are trying to normalize foreign voting in the United States.
I thought this was crazy. I was testifying to the House Judiciary Committee about two years ago, and Representative Jeremy Raskin from Maryland said to me, “What’s wrong with foreigners voting?”
I thought: Thank goodness it’s only Jeremy Raskin in Congress who believes this. One congressman believes in foreigners voting. Wrong. He now has 140 co-sponsors – 140 co-sponsors to allow non‑citizens to vote in federal elections. Now you can start to see the linkage between what goes on in New York City and what goes on in Congress.
Let me move briefly to one other story of normalization, another case we have. Public Interest Legal Foundation, is representing two parents in Maryland challenging a school board that is allowing children to vote. Maryland allows children to vote as young as sixth grade for a government seat on the school board that gets them to vote.
The seat is held by a child from the school who gets to vote on all the school board issues. It is part of this broader architecture to normalize things like that, to infantilize elections, and to shift power away from adults and Americans. It is not an accident.
What I want to get across is explaining an architecture that exists were hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars from philanthropies are pouring into what are really “boring” mechanical election issues.
You saw this in 2020. If I had been talking in 2014 about mechanical election issues, you would have said, “What are you talking about?” We hadn’t seen how election planners work. I was at the Justice Department voting section in 2005 and 2010 and saw how these voting issues work. There is a stranglehold by many in this area.
There seemed to be no counter to it. It was all the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, Project Vote, and the Brennan Center at NYU. I could go on a list of 50 organizations. It all came to pass in 2020 when you saw how these new plans could work.
Let’s talk a bit about 2020. Do you remember the New Black Panther case? That was my case: the New Black Panthers were stalking in front of a polling place in Philadelphia.
The Justice Department, when I was there, we filed a lawsuit and then the inauguration happened and then the case got dismissed. We saw this phenomenon happening where your skin color determines what happens in the outcome. Your politics decide innocence or guilt. We saw this coming years ago.
People say to me, “Was the 2020 election stolen?” The answer, s “Yes.” But the hard part is how.
Three main things made the difference. Number one is the suspension of the rules. In other words, because of COVID, the laws we agreed to ahead of time to run an election were suspended.
One of the beautiful things about a democratic republic is you agree on the rules in advance. That way, everybody buys into the outcome. It’s like a football game. If you were to change the rules in the middle of the game, first half Super Bowl, for example, the Los Angeles Rams needed 10 yards for a first down, but in the second half, it went up to 15. That’s what happened in the 2020 election, are the rules changed in the middle of the game?
The second thing that happened, and this is the most important. Philanthropy, primarily through the Center for Technology and Civic Life, started pouring money through 501(c)3s. The Mark Zuckerberg‑funded C3s poured money into state and local election offices. They would give the state and election office money and say, you now need to enact these policies. In the old days, giving a government official money and telling them what to do with it was called a bribe, right? It was. It was a bribe. If I were to give money to a government official and say, you need to now do this, I would be arrested. But that is what happened all over the country to the tune of almost $600 million, according to 990 filings.
Let me show you Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, the original election budget was $9 million for the city office, according to the city council’s budget. Center for Technology and Civic Life gave Philadelphia $10 million. They massively increased the Philadelphia budget; what did they do with the money?
First of all, they upped their staff. They hired lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of new city employees. Now, where did they hire them from? Activist organizations on the ground in Philadelphia, like the Committee of Seventy and other groups. Some became deputized city employees.
Number two: They went door‑to‑door collecting the new‑fangled mail ballots, or bringing their ballots with them. Now, they were allowed to do that because they were city employees. In other words, regular people cannot touch someone’s ballot in Pennsylvania –unless they are a government official.
These newly hired activists went door‑to‑door handing out ballots. Strangely, the ballots had what is called “undervoting” in them. They would vote for president — and nothing down below. Because after all, there was only one important election to the crowd that was funding all of this. The city employee could not wait around on the front porch to get all those dog catchers and judge races filled in. He would go door to door. Also in Philadelphia, they bought radio advertisements. They did a marketing campaign.
Any of you with any amount of marketing experience knows if you spend all your money on one certain type of radio station, you get a certain kind of result. Get-out-the-vote campaigns on radio stations — but they weren’t on all the stations, the country stations. They were targeted, where they bought ads.
It was a targeted marketing campaign to crank up the vote, and it wasn’t just Philadelphia. It was Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburg, Flint, Madison, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Maricopa County, Fulton County, Georgia, and Atlanta. Do you get the picture now of how this was working? It was like election operatives suddenly had a billion dollars for a ground game, that had never existed before.
All of this was deployed to crank up turnout. That is why in places like Detroit…Look at the numbers. You can see that Trump in inner‑city Detroit went up a whole bunch from the previous election. Trump got his numbers up across Michigan.
Guess what was happening in Detroit and Flint. The numbers were going up even higher because with all of this private money the spigot was turned open as wide as it would go.
The last element, the third big thing was vote‑by‑mail litigation. Our organization is involved in about 10 or 11 cases playing defense. Do not change the rules. You cannot do that. Reed versus Virginia Board of Elections was one of the cases.
We represented a county election official who was being told by the government, by the state of Virginia Election Board, “Allow ballots to come in after the election with no postmarks.” Think about that. Allow ballots to come in the mail late with no postmarks.
Guess what the Virginia law said. The Virginia law said, “If they come in late…” — that, by the way, had been enacted the year before: ballots could come in late in Virginia, but they had to have a postmark. Here you have the chief election official of Virginia saying, “Ignore the law. Don’t worry about the postmark,” literally in written guidance.
This was not word of mouth. This was literally in written guidance, “Ignore the law.” We found a client, Reed. He was an elected official in the Shenandoah Valley. His argument was, “I need to enforce the law correctly.” I have standing. We sued the state board of elections. We won. We got an injunction against breaking the law.
That one story I just told you is the exception, not the rule of what happened in 2020. What happened was a full attack on the rule of law. Philanthropy was funding this just as it had with the “Zuckbucks.” They were rolling over state procedures to allow ballots to be counted that under the law would not be counted.
Those are the three things, number one, Zuckbucks,” number two, the wave of lawlessness as far as not following the law, and three, litigation. That is what happened in 2020. Was the election stolen? Yes. That is how it was stolen.
All of you are probably wondering what is going to happen next.
You should see what is going on in law schools. That is a whole other topic. The problem is that in most places the laws broke down. What’s going to happen in 2024?
Think of the consent of the governed. One of the reasons we agree to election rules in advance is so the loser buys into the result, right? That is why you do not change the rules in the middle of the game. That is why you do not have a billion dollars flood the zone with biased spending by election offices.
What’s going to happen in 2024? I have some good news and bad news. First of all, there is an enormous amount of dark money that is pouring into the coming elections just as it did before.
I have a piece, that talks a lot about dark money, its history of it is, and why it actually has a pedigree in American history that is noble — but is being used improperly.
There is dark money, and there is darker dark money. What has been happening is all of these litigation shops such as the New York University Brennan Center, and League of Women Voters — many people are not non‑biased — all of these litigation shops are being fueled by dark money.
We do not know where Marc Elias is getting his donations. He will not say. He does not have to. He has 60 lawyers — 60. Do some payroll calculations here. These are not fee cases that can fuel this. You can look at the disclosures from the party apparatus to Elias. It does not add up to the accounting. Somewhere, someone is funding this.
What Elias is doing is attacking every state election law that is designed to fix what happened in 2020. Every state is under attack. We just filed to be intervenor‑defendants to help Texas and Georgia, and wherever he goes, but we have only five lawyers. There aren’t other groups like us. They have a huge, gigantic army.
My concern is in 2024, not only will 2020 be repeated, but it will get even worse.
President Biden recently proposed $10 billion of your tax dollars, federal money, to flood the zone in elections for structural transformation, turning federal agencies, for example, into turn‑out machines, turning the Justice Department into an even more weaponized tool to help one side and not the other.
Will it pass? We have something to look at for a model. When COVID broke in 2020, they did the same thing, and Nancy Pelosi proposed $1 billion to do what I’m talking about. Zuckerberg was not enough. They needed another billion dollars in 2020.
Senator Mitch McConnell was able to slow it down, but they still got $400 million in 2020 to engage in this sort of transformative architecture. Federal tax money went to states to do the sorts of things that Zuckerberg money was doing, so they worked hand‑in‑hand.
Will the $10 billion become $4 billion? Will it become $ 1 billion?? Will Congress dig in and not let it pass at all? I don’t know the answer to that.
What I want to leave you with, is that many have developed this massively well‑funded, philanthropic architecture, much of which we do not know the funding sources. Are they sovereign? Are they Kellogg’s Foundation? Do we even know? Are they Russian? Are they Chinese?
Election operatives have developed this architecture that changes how we run elections. Child voting, foreigners voting, early voting, mail voting. Mail voting, by the way, is the worst form of voting there is. Let me mention a few mail-voting things.
The post office sets a goal for mail voting: the success rate to deliver ballots. They have their own internal goal. It is 95 percent success, a five percent failure.
We found at the Public Interest Legal Foundation that 158,000 ballots, –158,000 mail ballots in the 2020 election — came in late and were rejected. 150,000 people lost their vote. They filled the ballot out, mailed it in, and the post office got it late to the destination.
Who are those 150,000? No one has looked at that. We also found that 15 million ballots are unaccounted for. What that means is the government election office mailed out a ballot, and it never came back. Mailed it out. We don’t know what happened. 15 million.
We got this through federal data. It wasn’t a crystal ball we looked at. There is an election assistance commission. It is a federal agency that collects this data and puts it in a spreadsheet that nobody can read. We have some fellows in our firm that can read them. It is extremely complicated, but we just tallied it up, and it was 15 million lost ballots.
In Nevada, they went to complete, total, vote‑by‑mail. They did it first without legislation in the primaries. They just said, “Ok, we’re going to go vote‑by‑mail.” Then they automatically mailed ballots to everybody on the list. That is in the 2020 primaries in Nevada.
We have photographs of ballots piled up in apartment complexes. I went to Nevada with a film crew, and we videotaped looking for the voters, vacant lots, mines, and abandoned mines in Pahrump. That was quite fun.
Casinos, head shops, and liquor stores were places we visited where somebody was registered to vote. We have a camera crew. You can see the video if you Google PILF Nevada mail ballots. It’s funny at times, but nobody finds it funny when you see all these fake voters.
Mail is the worst way to run an election, and many are getting ready to do it again. Patterson, New Jersey, had a mail‑ballot election, remember, and they had to do it all over again because of voter fraud. This was in 2020. They had two Patterson elections because the first one was a failure.
I will leave you with the story of Susie Wood. Susie Wood was a witness in a case that I tried in Jackson, Mississippi when I was in the US Justice Department. We proved that people were having their ballots voted by third parties. Susie Wood was one of the people who had someone else vote for them.
What would happen in Mississippi is the activists would follow the postman. They would drive down the road behind the post office, they would snatch ballots out of mailboxes, and they would knock on the door of the voter.
They’d say, “Hi, Susie. I’ve got your ballot here. Would you like help to vote on it?” They would go inside Susie’s kitchen. I would be happy to send the transcript to anybody interested in this trial.
They go into Susie Wood’s kitchen, and all of the activists would mark the ballot for Susie. They would vote for her. She wasn’t telling them who to vote for. The whole reason this was possible was that it was mail. You did not have an elected official in the precinct watching over this. It was a mail-in ballot.
We were doing the trial in Jackson, Mississippi, and Susie was on the stand and she was so preposterous in her testimony. The judge stopped the trial. Those of you who are lawyers know, judges don’t often ask questions of a witness.
The judge said, “Hold on here. Miss, I want to ask you a question. You can read and write, can’t you?” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, why on earth were you allowing someone else to vote for you?” Susie Woods said, “Well, Your Honor. She always knows the best person to vote for.”
She gave up a right to vote in her kitchen to somebody who “knows the best person to vote for.” That is what mail-in-balloting does.
* * *
Question: Are we going to have foreigners voting?
Adams: We fought a lawsuit, as I told you, on behalf of Deroy Murdock, Phyllis Coachman who’s a 300‑year Black American like her family’s been over 300 years. She says, “We all know how they got here, but I’m an American and foreigners should not be voting. We are going to fight this to the death in court.”
Whenever you enact a law of racial intent under the 15th amendment, it’s like a nuclear bomb. It’s blown up. I won a case in Guam because only CHamorus were allowed to vote in an election. chorus, you see, that’s race.
You absolutely can’t do it in America. It was part of the Civil War amendments. I’m confident we’re going to beat New York City and it’s going to blow that law, and you aren’t going to have to have that here.
Q: There are states now that have passed a law saying you’re not allowed to give private money to election officials, the Zuckerberg issue. Is that going to spread? Are there other states considering it?
Adams: People didn’t know what to do. They thought it was just per se illegal. Why is it illegal? Everyone here could give their estate to the government. It would be stupid, but you can. That is what Zuckerberg did because he understands the architecture I was trying to describe to you all.
Now you ask about the new laws? Right after that, I wrote the first statute for Arizona, for Representative Jake Hoffman in Arizona, to ban Zuckerberg. I wrote one for Representative Smith in South Carolina, and Representative Ranson in Virginia. I all three of these people I know and so I wrote a law to ban this.
The Arizona one passed, the South Carolina one in a Republican legislature died, and the one in Virginia died in committee in a Democrat‑controlled legislature. The other states started getting involved, and Texas and Florida passed one.
When Florida passed one, Palm Beach County still have half a million dollars. They couldn’t take anymore, but they were sitting on the nest egg from the previous time…I thought they were going to use it against DeSantis.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were where the Zuckbucks money was used most effectively and not banned, and the governor would veto any legislative change. I’m afraid it’s going to happen again in those states. Those three are the places that worked, where Zuckerberg made a difference in Philadelphia and surrounding suburbs, Detroit, Madison, and Milwaukee. I’m telling you guys the reason Trump lost those states was this private spending in those urban centers through philanthropic money.
Adams: Some billionaires are donors to us, but not very many. Look, we have a crisis in philanthropy. Many do not like the founding principles of our country — the institutions of democracy: one-man, one-vote; individual rights as opposed to group rights, freedom of expression …it is against their religion. They have an organizing principle: and they do this on other topics. They hate Israel. They hate America. They hate institutions that have built the country. I could go down the list.
They have been mobilized with their different, twisted worldview for the last 30 years, to organize philanthropy against these institutions. We’re just getting a late start. Look, a few other people and I, were the only people writing about this 12 years ago, about these issues about the election process. We may be the only people writing about it. We are like a voice in the wilderness, “Watch out. They’re controlling the architecture of how the mechanics of our elections work.” We saw it coming in redistricting…
There are maybe 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 foundations that keep the country afloat, that allow us to confront these efforts to take down our Constitution. Bradley, Art Pope, Scaife Foundation….I’ll give you a direct example. Florida passed a law on a referendum to allow felons to vote again if they paid back the restitution. If you stole money from someone and went to prison, you lost your right to vote until you got out of prison and pay back your victim.
Florida passed a law that said they get the right to vote after they pay back the restitution. The Florida legislature enacted what’s called enabling legislation. How does this work in the real world? You got to pay back your victim.
The ACLU sued and said, “Oh my gosh, that’s a poll tax. You can’t expect them to pay their victim back. That’s a poll tax. That’s Jim Crow.” We filed briefs in the case saying it’s not a poll tax. Required conditions to get the vote back, give the victim their money back.”
A federal court ruled against it. Some so many people have ruled in favor of felons. It went to the 11th circuit, which is in Atlanta. It’s a federal court that oversees south Florida and the Koch Foundation-funded briefing to help the felons. My friends did it. I’m friends with these guys. Ilya Shapiro at Cato and someone from American for Prosperity, AFP. They talked about libertarian principles and so forth.
I went out and researched Murray Rothbard on restitution. Murray Rothbard is s a big libertarian thinker, he has written about restitution. Libertarians love Murray Rothbard. He is one of the apostles of the movement.
We filed a brief against Cato and AFP on the restitution issue. All we did was cite libertarian theory on restitution to counter them. The point is Koch is funding the opposite of this, and at every meeting, we go to where Koch people are there, they raise skeptical questions like, “Are you sure that there’s any voter fraud?” They’re stuck on something I can’t understand.
Koch does great work in other areas. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying they’re evil or any of that nonsense the Left says, but in this particular area, they’re behind the times.
I do have something good to say actually. I’m only trying to be candid. I’m not trying to be alarmist. Good news, Virginia, people are awake. There’s a whole citizen mobilization that has occurred in the last year and a half.
We are filing litigation in advance as we did before the Virginia election to get them to follow the law. We’re just about to release a study in New Jersey, which was also a close election in 2020. e details. We’re finding people registered in New Jersey six times, simultaneous, identical registrations.
In Pennsylvania, I found a guy named RaShawn Slade in Swissvale. I always have to talk about RaShawn Slade. He had seven active registrations at one address in Swissvale, PA, RaShawn Slade. He did it all within two weeks. All of these registrations were from a third party, please fill out your registration.
When I was in the Pittsburg election office talking with the Allegheny County officials, they said, “We knew about him.” We told the state about RaShawn Slade being registered seven times, and we wanted to take six of them off the rolls, and the State of Pennsylvania, the secretary of state said, “If you do that, you’ll disenfranchise him.” This is a state election official.
We’re finding stuff like this all over the country, these little stories.
They didn’t take him off. We had to find him, and we sued Pennsylvania in 2020 for all of the problems on the voter rolls, and they settled, and they fixed this.
Q: I’m curious if the net effect of winning these lawsuits is a deterrent for them doing it again and again or if it just constantly is just whack‑a‑mole. And Zuckerberg, what does he want? Why is he doing this?
Adams: I like both of those questions. Let me answer the first one. I don’t know if it’s whack‑a‑mole or success yet. I do know that some places are starting to get the message.
North Carolina, we sued. We got a $200,000 fee award from Harris County, Texas over an alien voting document case. The judge was mad. It was like you guys should have given them what they wanted. Some things make me think it’s not whack‑a‑mole, but yet we’re always going to Michigan. I haven’t figured that one out yet. We’ll see.
Zuckerberg is like this was like a big donation to the church or synagogue, the church or synagogue of enfranchisement. There’s a whole pseudo-theology around this. The sacred right to vote, that’s not an accidental term. Many people believe we need to fix things in election offices so people aren’t disenfranchised with this newfangled mail voting.
The way for us to do that is to help them buy new printers, and new mail processing, tell people it’s safe to vote on Hispanic radio, and help people go door to door to make sure that they don’t have any problems in casting their ballots
That’s a term that many on the Left use to elevate anything that is a barrier to the ballot. They hate voter registration. They don’t think you should register. They do that. I tell people that. They do in states. You just walk up to the polls and vote in North Dakota. There is no registration.
Having to vote where you live is another thing that is barrier to the franchise. You should be able to go to any precinct in New York and cast your ballot. They believe that. I’m telling you I used to work with these people in the Justice Department. I wrote a whole book about it called “Injustice: ‑‑ Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.”
It was a New York Times Best Seller 10 years ago. I still get a royalty.
These people truly believe this stuff. I used to work with them. I tell stories in the book about its messianic almost to them. This is the purpose of their life is to knock down any Right‑wing Nazi barrier to the ballot. I know it seems hard to believe they believe it, but they do.
Q: In terms of illegal people voting, non‑citizens, whatever. I think in Maryland that’s gone on for some time, in some town, or city, or something like that, so there is a precedent, right? The question is, this is the first time it’s been such a huge number.
Adams: It was about 2008, and those cities you’re talking about in Maryland, Takoma Park ‑‑ help me ‑‑ Kensington, all the kooky interring suburbs allow aliens to vote in local elections per Maryland law. I was with the Justice Department. I was a Justice Department GS‑15 lawyer, and I said, “I don’t like this. This can’t be good. This is going to disenfranchise black voters.”
I started an investigation at DOJ with the approval of the section chief of the voting section. This has never been in the media. I didn’t write about it in my book. It’s pure inside. My theory was, under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, that when you allow foreign Hispanics to vote in primary elections, you will hurt black candidates.
That was my theory. That’s how Section 2 works. You have to show causality. The first thing you do when you have an investigation of voting rights cases, you have to get records. You have to get the voting results.
I called up Takoma Park, I called up Kensington, all of the places that, “Could you send me your voting results from these primaries?” Which I got. I said, “So, how do you keep the rolls separate for your federal elections?” They said, “Oh, we have a separate voter roll book.” I said, “Oh, how convenient for me.”
I said, “How many people have registered to vote in your special immigrant, alien, voting roll book?” They said, “Two or three.” I was like there goes my case. I will never prove causality that blacks are losing because only two or three of them are even coming to vote.
Under the Voting Rights Act, you have to have real causality. It cannot be imaginary, “I don’t like this.” It has to be honest-to-goodness causality. Nobody is using it in Maryland.
I said, “Oh, my gosh. This is a bad thing.” Guess what happens? New York City happens. Finally, my theory that I’ve worked on the DOJ in 2008 had a real causality issue because there are going to be Black council members in New York City. They’re going to lose their elections because foreigners are voting. We’re going to show it, and so has Deroy’s standing.
The 15th Amendment is a beautiful thing. It’s simple in language and effect. That is actually what the Supreme Court said about it. Either you violated the 15th amendment or you didn’t. All it takes to prove that you violated it is you talked in racial terms when you passed it. That is what I did in Guam on summary judgment.
They wanted a CHamoru‑only vote. Anytime anyone said it shouldn’t be CHamoru‑only, it should allow Whites, they said, “We don’t want Whites’ voting. We only want CHamorus voting.” I got summary judgment on that case. It went to the Ninth Circuit twice, and we won both times. I worked on it with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. It was a nine‑year legal fight in Guam.
They insist on being called Black, by the way. Deroy is very insistent on that. If any of you are a little shivery of that term, that’s what Deroy Murdock wants me to say. Any Black in New York City has standing to challenge this law. That’s the story.
Q: If Donald Trump is not running in ’24, let’s say. Do you have a sense that Republicans would fight harder than to come back? What is the resistance, if it’s not about him?
Adams: I think that if he wasn’t on the ballot, some of the zeal in this space would be lost. In other words, for good or real, he keeps fueling this. The zeal on the Republican side would be lost.
The architecture that I describe to you, the Left‑wing philanthropic architecture, was not a Donald Trump event. They have been doing this for 15 years. They all happened after the loss in the 2004 election.
After the loss in the 2004 election where Kerry had enjoyed a lot of hard dollars, 527 benefits. Reportable hard dollar and reportable soft money and failed, the Left said, “Wait a minute. This doesn’t work. We need a new architecture.”
They started building up data capabilities through something called Catalyst, which is a whole other topic. It’s a data mothership. They built up Catalyst. They started building up infrastructures like the Brennan Center, Deimos, and Project Vote. All of these groups.
It pre‑dated Trump, but Trump was the first candidate ever to confront them on this stuff. They flipped out and lost their minds.
More groups started showing up, like the ones I talked about earlier with Zuckerberg. It’s a little of both. They were there before Trump, but when Trump came they amped up their game.
Q: When you say the election was stolen, usually that means to people that something criminal had been done. Would you say that the election was not stolen from a criminal point of view, but it was really because the other side has the lawyers, outstudied, and out-maneuvered the situation? Or was there anything criminal?
The important reason is how to prevent that in the future, if it was criminal, you go one way. The Justice Department is law enforcement. But if everybody was outmaneuvered, out-lawyered, and outspent, the reaction is to try to outspend and out-lawyer the other side.
Adams: You have just asked a question related to the last 16 months of my life that keeps me awake at night. Part of the problem is, and you nailed right into the semantics of it. Is it stolen? Is it something else?
We spend so much of our energy at PILF trying to up everybody’s game to understand this architecture. I don’t know this for sure. We built a database ‑‑ I do know that for sure ‑‑ of every voter roll in the country. No one else has done this. It’s cost us a lot of money.
I’m able to tell you who voted in multiple states. I’m able to tell you people who voted twice. I’m able to tell you who voted after they were dead like Judith Presto in Pennsylvania, the photo of her gravestone. Her husband was arrested after we reported this.
I will tell you straight up that there were not more criminal votes that cost Trump the election. It did not happen. They are smarter than that. Why would they build an architecture that relies on crime if they can build one that relies on really smart legal stuff that no one’s thought of?
It’s a story of innovation across the ages. It’s somebody who adapted better to the environment. Somebody thought up new ideas that no one had ever thought about. Dick Morris did this in ’96.
They came up with soft money in ’96 with Clinton. Get all these people to donate to funds and then forget about hard money. They are very good at adapting. I can’t explain why we’re not. We’re entrepreneurs, aren’t we? They’re the ones who live off the trough. Why are they so good at figuring out new mechanisms?
They adapted, and here’s how they did it.
They saw a vulnerability, an opening, that is not illegal, to flood the zone with resources. Just like any war throughout history is about. How do you move treasure into the vulnerability of your enemies? They figured it out in a way that left the two top lawyers of the Trump campaign dumbfounded. They didn’t even understand what I’m talking about. I’ll never forget it.
We’re at the Greenbrier when this conversation happened. It took me about 20 minutes to even get them on track to what was happening. It was like saying that you saw a ship with 10 wings and eyeballs. It was like the scene from the “2001‑Space Odyssey” with the bone or the monkey. They just didn’t understand. They were so beyond our thoughts.
That is, unfortunately, what the Left is very good at because, after all, they’ve been doing this on the world stage since 1917. They’ve been finding vulnerabilities in the West to transform what we’re all about. They’re just very good at that way.
Q: At the hierarchy of the RNC or maybe with some of unspent Trump money, is there a SWAT team anywhere where state-by-state smart people, those Trump lawyers, etc., are saying, “This is what we did wrong last time. Let’s work with this Republican legislature. Let’s get rid of mail‑in voting here because there’s a window where we might be able to win this venue to get rid of mail‑in voting, etc.” Is there any such effort?
Adams: In places where mail‑in voting exists, you’re going to have a very hard time politically to do that. You certainly can’t do it with a lawsuit. Oh, wait. Yes, you can. I forgot. We just sued Delaware a few months ago.
Public Interest Legal Foundation is representing another election official, and Delaware has mail voting and permanent absentee mail voting, which means you get on a permanent list and they mail your ballot for 50 years. We’re finding people on the list who were dead. We sued on behalf of an election official.
Jane Brady is my co‑counsel. She used to be the Attorney General of Delaware, and she’s a judge. We’re attacking Delaware mail voting because it’s not constitutional in their constitution. Other than that, one nice little glimmer of hope, it is hard to undo mail voting. People like it.
There are people on the Republican side like, “Don’t fool with mail voting. Our site uses it.” I’m like, “OK.” We put up with a lot of that early on in 2020. Oh, my. Now it’s coming back to me. I would get these nasty emails from Republicans saying, “Stop criticizing mail voting. Our site relies on it.”
We used it the way we always did, which is so-so, and the other side turned it into a campaign Juggernaut. Is anybody doing anything? That micro‑story about Delaware, macro‑story about the country.
Every Friday at nine o’clock, what you call a SWAT team, lawyers and activists, and smart people gather on a call every single Friday at nine o’clock to talk through this. We are much more organized now. We have a whole citizen army that is on the ground. The groups like Tea Party Patriots, just to name one of them, are involved.
Virginia coalitions that were active in the Virginia lawsuits, so yes, we’re adapting ourselves. That’s not to say that the GOP establishment is fully on board. There’s some division. We’re not the best image in some places.
The elections are overlooked forward. There is an effort to disbar all the lawyers. Have you guys seen project 65? Talk about architecture… Project 65 is another Left‑wing philanthropic effort. They have no shortage of money. Project 65 was announced a month ago. They’re going to go after the law licenses of any lawyers who do anything after the election, to try to have them disbarred.
Their explicit purpose, they say this, is to shrink the talent pool of election lawyers like me to shrink the talent pool of election lawyers, so the next time we don’t have soldiers who can go to court. That is literally what they say their purpose is. You’ve probably seen this.
Republicans have faith that we have better ideas. We have policies that work. We don’t feel the need to cheat. I think that’s legitimate. That is what most people think on our side of the aisle, right? The problem is, it isn’t enough because they don’t have their ideas, they don’t have their successes. They do have to cheat and we have to be there to counter them.
It’s depressing after Hillary lost, it seems to me it was that election we thought Republicans has gotten in the game. They figured out the election issues. They figured out the mechanics. I don’t know how it happened in four years, but we just lost our way. It’s very depressing.
Q: There was a study that came out, John Lott, which showed that on the mail‑in ballot, the results were not right. This was a peer‑reviewed study. It’s the first…What happens then? If people become convinced that there was skullduggery enough in Fulton County, for example, to change George’s outcome, what happens? What do we do about that?
Adams: I haven’t read John Lott’s study. He and I talked about a year ago. I knew he was going to go down this road. I can talk about that. My understanding is that he is taking mail voting turnout deltas, in other words, more delta, and matching it up in counties where there are allegations of voter fraud. Now, that’s a very clumsy match. What is an allegation of voter fraud?
There was a case in Michigan where, right after the election, all these people said, “Oh my gosh. Look at all these dead people who voted.”
What did they cite for this evidence? Not the database that we had been working on for years and buying the Social Security Death Index and everything else to pour into it to get credible results. They were looking at the voter rolls, and these people who voted on the voter rolls had a birth date of 1900. My gosh, they must be dead!
Then they would file a lawsuit based on this. Now, we knew enough from our experience that those are placeholders, often from Y2K. It’s all over the country. We call it bad hygiene.
There was a conversion of the database in 2000 that required certain registrations to have a date of birth in the file, but they just stuck 1900 in because it was easy.
These are placeholders. These are not real 120‑year‑old people. But yet, they went to court saying they were real 120‑year‑old people who had to be dead. I could tell you story after story after story of that kind of incredible, in the classic sense of the word, litigation.
We’re suing Michigan. We’re suing Illinois. We’re suing Maine. We’re suing Colorado. We’re suing Alaska. We’re suing Louisiana. I know I’m forgetting states. We’re suing Pennsylvania. We have active litigation in these places to try to stop this from happening.
We’ve won cases in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Michigan…I’m sorry. Pennsylvania. Not Michigan. We’re still in active litigation. North Carolina. Virginia. It’s just a constant war with…
Q: Is there a plan though how to win in November of 2024, despite what the other side might be planning to do?
Adams: We meet every Friday morning to discuss the architecture. We collaborate and say, “This is somewhere you could do something.” We’re going to sue Minnesota for something.
Oh, I’ve got to tell you one quick Civil Rights Commission story. I’m a presidential appointee on the US Commission on Civil Rights. I told you guys that I’ll be the last Trump appointee. We had a hearing in Puerto Rico two months ago. I’d never been to Puerto Rico.
I got there and you wouldn’t believe the testimony like, “Oh, we do not need to have a power grid. Everybody needs windmills and solar panels on their house paid for by FEMA.” It was like, I was in a crazy show and I left Puerto Rico saying, I told my wife this when I get home, “That place can never be a state.”
J. Christian Adams is President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity. He served in the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice and currently serves as a commissioner appointed by President Trump on the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
