The nationally renowned large law firm Boies Schiller Flexner announced late last month that it had hired Former Attorney General Mark Brnovich as a partner. Progressive Harvard Law School Emeritus Professor Laurence Tribe posted on X criticizing the hire, citing an article that said the firm shouldn’t have hired Brnovich because he was an “election denier.”
Tribe quoted the article, “A law firm that rewards such destructive conduct deserves the profession’s full-throated condemnation.” He added, “Every lawyer in America needs to read this brilliant reminder of our profession’s solemn responsibility.”
“A law firm that rewards such destructive conduct deserves the profession’s full-throated condemnation.” Every lawyer in America needs to read this brilliant reminder of our profession’s solemn responsibility.https://t.co/LR1s2JLSz4
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) November 1, 2023
Jeff Clark, who served as a high-level attorney at the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump and who is now under attack himself for his work related to combating election fraud, said on X that he believed Tribe was hypocritical. “The irony of this stupidity by Tribe in trying to get former AZ AG Mark Brnovich canceled is patent in that: 1) Tribe represented Al Gore in Bush v Gore — on the losing side. And then 2) David Boies, represented Al Gore too after Tribe’s first Supreme Court argument in the dispute was lackluster. Both could be called election deniers as Bush wound up winning that election despite Gore’s attempt to engineer a biased and unequal Florida recount. Thank goodness David Boies doesn’t have the same attitude as Tribe, who has really flipped his lid with TDS. … Under Tribe’s new standard, both he and Boies should have been canceled in 2000 and beyond.”
In addition to representing Gore, Tribe has a long history of helping progressive causes. In 1987, he testified during the Senate confirmation hearings against Robert Bork becoming appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. He co-founded the American Constitution Society as a left-wing counterpart to the conservative Federalist Society. In 2017, he called to impeach Trump. Most recently, he argued that Trump isn’t fit to serve as president under the 14th Amendment due to J6.
In 2017, Dartmouth College Political Science Professor Brendan Nyhan labeled Tribe “an important vector of misinformation and conspiracy theories on Twitter” due to posting articles from sketchy far left sites. Tribe admitted he plagiarized several phases and a sentence from another author in his 1985 book God Save this Honorable Court.
The author of the article Tribe cited, Dennis Aftergut, is an attorney for Lawyers Defending American Democracy, which filed complaints against Trump’s former attorney Kenneth Chesebro for challenging election fraud in the 2020 election.
Aftergut cited a complaint that Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs filed with the State of Arizona Bar after Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes issued a press release complaining that Brnovich had not included the opinions of two of his employees in a report he compiled about 2020 election problems when he was attorney general. Those two employees disagreed with Brnovich’s finding that Maricopa County had not cooperated with Brnovich’s investigation.
Aftergut also referenced an editorial board piece published by The Arizona Republic in February, titled “Mark Brnovich Disgraced Arizona and its Institutions. That Can’t Go Unpunished.” It also attacked Brnovich for issuing the report, which was quite critical of Maricopa County’s handling of the election.
In the report, Brnovich found “problematic system-wide issues that relate to early ballot handling and verification.” The signature verification system in place within Maricopa County is “insufficient to guard against abuse.” Part of the problem, he said, was that election workers only had seconds for each signature verification, an average of 4.6 seconds.
A second critical problem involved chain of custody of ballots. “Maricopa County failed to follow critical procedures when transporting early ballots from drop locations to the election headquarters.” Brnovich’s Election Integrity Unit (EIU) estimated 100,000 to 200,000 ballots fell into this category. Failure to maintain chain of custody for ballots is a class 2 misdemeanor.
His EIU civil attorney Jennifer Wright asked the county four times for various documents and equipment, and the county eventually just blew her off. Without subpoena authority granted to the office in statute, Brnovich was unable to force the county to comply. There were multiple more problems highlighted in the report, including the county’s threats of litigation in response to requests to cooperate.
Brnovich has a lengthy history of combating election fraud as attorney general. He prosecuted and obtained convictions of two notorious Democratic officials in Yuma County who had conducted ballot harvesting operations for years.
When Hobbs refused to defend the state against a lawsuit filed by Democrats challenging Arizona’s new ballot harvesting law, Brnovich stepped in and represented the state instead. He fought the lawsuit all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Brnovich v. DNC, along with another challenge to a law prohibiting voters from casting ballots at precincts located where they didn’t live. After arguing in front of SCOTUS, he won the case with a 6-3 decision.
At the same time, Brnovich attempted to be pragmatic in his approach to the reports of election fraud. In late October 2022, he appeared on 60 Minutes and said the claims of election fraud in the 2020 election were “horse****. He investigated reports that sharpie markers were deliberately handed out in heavy Republican areas in order to cause tabulators problems reading them, and found no problems.
Aftergut begrudgingly admitted in his article, “He was against election denialism before he was for it.”
Aftergut pointed out that the firm was started by longtime Democratic operative Boies, who in addition to representing Gore in the 2000 presidential election dispute, also was an attorney for progressive filmmaker Michael Moore, and obtained a temporary victory suing to strike down California’s Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage.
Brnovich said in a statement that joining the firm marked “a natural career evolution for me given its sterling track record across white collar, constitutional law, regulatory, class action, and consumer matters.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
