Across battleground states, attorneys who helped former President Donald Trump undermine confidence in the 2020 election results are back at it, filing lawsuits that seed doubt in advance about this year’s outcome.

Some of Trump’s attorneys from the 2020 election cycle were disbarred, indicted, or otherwise sanctioned for their roles, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell. But other lawyers active in Trump’s 2020 efforts, including prominent election conspiracy theorist Cleta Mitchell, have popped up in cases in the key states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. The lawsuits drive a narrative of rampant voting fraud without offering hard evidence to support their claims.

“Most of the lawsuits then were not designed to win on the merits, but to confuse the public.”

“One of the lessons from 2020 was that the impact of bringing all these lawsuits in terms of public trust in the election was significant,” said legal ethics professor Scott Cummings, who has written about the MAGA legal braintrust’s efforts to keep Trump in power. “Most of the lawsuits then were not designed to win on the merits, but to confuse the public. These cases are of a same piece.”

“It seems like there’s a political calculation,” Cummings said. “These lawyers unfortunately believe it’s worth it.”

The most well-known of the attorneys involved in conspiracy-mongering lawfare once again this election cycle is Mitchell, who was once a partner at a powerful law firm in Washington, D.C. After it came to light that she advised Trump during his infamous phone call asking Georgia officials to “find” him thousands of votes, Mitchell resigned from the firm and leaned hard into the “election integrity” brand. In 2022, a Georgia grand jury recommended that Mitchell be charged alongside Trump and others on that call with soliciting election fraud plus other crimes, but she was not ultimately indicted.

Today, Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute and founder of the Election Integrity Network. In recent weeks, she has helped plant lawsuits that seek last-minute changes to election procedures based on the hypothetical risk of election fraud from overseas voters. Mitchell did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, including about the status of a disciplinary complaint filed........

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