WND's Election Fraud Dead-Ender Columnist

Rachel Alexander can't let go of still-unproven claims about stolen elections. even as she frets that her right-wing fellow travelers are facing the music for spreading those lies and others are coming clean to spare themselves further legal consequences.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 3/11/2024

Rachel Alexander

As Arizona experiences a repeat of the 2020 election with 2022, where MAGA candidates allegedly lost to poor Democratic candidates like Katie Hobbs who refused to debate, some are turning on the MAGA candidates and blaming them instead of election fraud. The candidates' lawsuits are predictably going nowhere, as judges throw them out for supposed "lack of evidence" or narrow technical reasons such as "lack of standing."

The judges pretend that witness testimony and affidavits don't constitute evidence, but every first-year law school student learns that of the 11 sections of the traditional Rules of Evidence in law, an entire section, section 6, is devoted to witness testimony. Witness testimony throughout history has been the smoking gun in many cases; defendants have suffered the death penalty based on witness testimony alone.

Well, there's evidence and there's credible evidence, and Alexander offered no proof that the former is the latter. Instead, she touted how Lake still has a chance:

Lake's appeal brief is one of the best in all of the election lawsuits. It should be a slam dunk especially considering there is precedent; the Arizona Supreme Court once overturned a gubernatorial election where fraud was alleged and replaced the Democrat who had been in office for months with the Republican. Judges routinely overturn elections around the country where there was voter disenfranchisement and don't require the excessively high standards of proof we're seeing when Republicans lost or were disenfranchised. For example, in 2019, a judge ordered a new election for a Georgia House seat based on merely finding that four voters were ineligible.

But judges cannot rule in favor of election integrity when it helps Republicans because they are terrified of what the left will do to them and their careers. The type of person who becomes a judge is someone who isn't looking for the spotlight; most judges go their entire careers with very few headlines about them. If you look their names up on the internet, you can rarely find anything about them. They have relatively quiet, peaceful lives outside the public eye, and they live well with generous salaries.

The instance of a gubernatorial election being overturned "where fraud was alleged" happened in 1916 -- just four years after Arizona became a state, meaning that frontier justice had not yet been eliminated -- so that may not have been the best example Alexander could have used. She spent the rest of her column railing against judges for not being the right-wing lapdogs she demands them to be.

In her March 20 column, Alexander complained that Trump attorney Jenna Ellis agreed to getting censured for spreading election falsehoods (and, even worse, pointed out that Lake is scamming people by perpetuating a lie):

Earlier this month, Ellis quietly settled the case. She admitted to spreading "misrepresentations" "with at least a reckless state of mind." For these concessions, which are very damaging to Trump and his cause, Ellis escaped with a censure for professional misconduct from the Colorado courts. Based on her tweets, Ellis appears now to be leaning toward Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump for president in 2024, although a year ago she offered to represent Disney against DeSantis.

Ellis' censure deal required her to say she had misled Americans with statements such as, "The election was stolen and Trump won by a landslide." And, "The proper and true victor … is Donald Trump." These are statements most Republican voters believe are true, according to polls. A Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Republicans believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Immediately before the censure was announced, Ellis tweeted that Kari Lake was a "grifter" for appealing her alleged gubernatorial loss in Arizona. While there's only a slim chance any judges will dare rule that there was voter suppression since it affected Republicans, Lake's supporters would be devastated if she dropped the battle to expose corruption, especially since more information continues to come out, including an exit poll finding that an astounding 8% more voters chose her over Katie Hobbs.

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It's a Pyrrhic victory for Ellis, since she will continue to have the state bar hanging over her head, ready to pounce if she dares to say anything "controversial" again. The settlement serves her interests but not those of MAGA. Increasingly, zealous advocacy of a client's interests is allowed for criminal defendants and causes of the left, but few others. The right's lawyers, if they dare speak at all, must stick to the most humdrum of legal theories and narratives, or they risk professional sanctions or even bogus prosecution.

Caving in to the left-wing fascists is the last thing powerful figures on the right should be doing if we ever hope to stop election fraud and legal corruption. The 65 Project is currently going after a long list of attorneys on the right, and Ellis' surrender will be used against them as precedent.

We weren't aware that making liars face consequences for their lies is something "left-wing fascists" do.

Alexander's March 27 column was devoted to gushing of Ryan Heath, an attorney for Lake who sued a judge over the election-fraud stuff, going on to cheer, "He's filed and threatened lawsuits over face masks, CRT and mutilating children in the name of 'affirmative care.'" As Wonkette's Liz Dye noted, Heath is also an anti-vaxxer and wrote "the greatest footnote of all time" to explain that he didn't sue the state in 2020 despite the fact the same exact election procedures were used then because he had just graduated from law school and "this election cycle is the first opportunity Petitioner has ever had to challenge this process."

Rather than note any of that, Alexander declared that "Unlike some attorneys who cower when it comes to election fraud and other areas where patriots are under attack, Heath is taking the exact opposite approach. In response, the left has filed six frivolous bar complaints filed against him in two separate states." She didn't explain what, exactly, was "frivolous" about those complaints." She concluded by encouraging her readers to donate to him.

Defending John Eastman

Alexander ran to the defense of the lawyer who manufactured a legal basis for overturning the 2020 election, John Eastman, as he faced a disbarment trial before the California bar. She wrote in her Sept. 4 column:

Former Republican Jennifer Rubin wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post last week criticizing Trump attorney John Eastman’s defense in the California bar disbarment trial against him. Unlike her, I’ve watched every minute of the trial, which is going into the third week. The bar is desperately trying to show there was no legal authority for Eastman to advise Trump that Mike Pence could have rejected electoral slates from states suspected of election fraud, but as more evidence comes out, their case is getting weaker and weaker.

But all Alexander is doing is nitpicking the prosecution without landing any serious punches. She started by going after Greg Jacob, former attorney for then-Vice President Mike Pence, who asserted that it was “gravely irresponsible for you to entice the president with an academic theory that had no legal viability,” but she claimed he “contradicted himself” by “that “scholars disagree” whether it’s the vice president’s responsibility to substantively deal with accepting electoral slates” and that the Constitution is “at best ambiguous.” but as another, more honest reporter pointed out:

But Jacob made clear that while there are certainly reasons to quibble over some of the fine points of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and the 12th Amendment — the two pillars of American government that lay out the Jan. 6 electoral vote counting process — there’s simply no basis in history or law that Pence would have had authority to determine the outcome of the election himself — or even to jump-start a state-level process that would have the same effect.

Alexander then went way into the weeds to discuss elections from 150 years ago to try and impugn another prosecution witness:

Rubin also claimed that a 91-page report authored by the bar’s expert witness Matthew Seligman somehow destroyed Eastman’s defense. The report from Seligman, who has probably been illegally practicing law without an active license while assisting the California bar on this, was all over the board on that issue. Rubin said his report found that the 12th Amendment, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and congressional precedent show that “the Eastman positions were so devoid of support that ‘no reasonable attorney exercising appropriate diligence in the circumstances would adopt them.'”

However, Miller got Seligman to discuss the legislative debates of the 1876 election, where Republicans wanted the vice president to decide competing sets of electoral slates from some Southern states, but Democrats did not. There, a deal ultimately was reached by a special commission, allowing Republican Rutherford Hayes to become president, and Democrat Samuel Tilden conceded. No Republicans were prosecuted nor their attorneys disciplined.

If Seligman thought Eastman’s position was so outrageous, why does he prominently feature a debate between Eastman and progressive legal scholar Lawrence Lessig about it on his website? One of the scholarly articles that Seligman wrote, “Disputed Presidential Elections and the Collapse of Constitutional Norms,” discussed how a political party could have deserted “constitutional norms” “while staying within the strict bounds of the law” to “steal the presidency in 9 of the 34 elections since 1887 and the opposing party would have been powerless to stop the theft.” Tellingly, Seligman wrote the article in 2018, shortly after Hillary Clinton claimed she lost to Trump due to election fraud.

Alexander’s claim that Seligman was “has probably been illegally practicing law without an active license” linked to an article she wrote elsewhere obsessing over how his his law license was inactive because he was working as a teacher.

Alexander concluded by ranting that any discipline Eastman might face, in this case as well as in Georgia, will overturned by a biased right-wing Supreme Court:

The criminal prosecutions will likely go on for years, since the left wants to drag them out to damage Trump during the presidential race. But it is not likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold a conviction sending Trump – or the others – to prison; not only does the current court lean to the right, but several of the justices were appointed by Trump. They won’t stand for sending a president to prison over politics. Nor will they allow Eastman, a fellow legal academic who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, to be disbarred over the First Amendment.

Rubin gleefully discussed the indictment of Eastman, but failed to discuss how a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, failed to discuss how RICO laws are so vague and broad they can be used to get anyone, and failed to discuss how attorneys regularly represent some of the most heinous criminals on earth and protect their lies. “Your honor, my client could not have been there bombing all those people since he was with a friend at the time.”

Everyone already knows how Disciplinary Judge Yvette Roland, who contributed recently to Democrats while serving as a judge, is going to rule. Can’t wait for the grown-ups – SCOTUS – to take over.

Meanwhile, in reality, Eastman’s defense continued to do poorly. For instance, his first defense witness was Michael Gableman, a Wisconsin activist who had no experience in election law and said he did not have “any understand of how elections work” when Wisconsin Republicans — mad that Biden won the state in 2020 —  chose him to look for evidence of rampant election fraud in the state (which he didn’t find because there was none). Not an auspicious start — not that Alexander will admit it, of course.

Alexander lashed out at Ellis again in a Sept. 18 column that was largely about defending right-wing Rep. Lauren Bobert over her notorious grope-and-vape session in a Colorado theater:

Compounding the problem is all of the holier-than-thou people on the right piling on. Former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who is expected by many to turn on Trump during the Georgia prosecution due to her selling out to the Colorado State Bar last year, said on X that the Colorado GOP needs to primary Boebert. Ellis, who is now supporting Ron DeSantis for president, is known for frequently citing the Bible to defend RINO positions, such as when she admitted to the Colorado State Bar that she made “misrepresentations” when she said there was fraud in the 2020 election.

The left and its helpful enablers on the right such as Ellis like to use Old Testament judgment against Christians, while ignoring the New Testament where Jesus preached forgiveness. It’s rather hypocritical, considering if the left doesn’t believe in biblical principles, why would it use something “made up” and a “fairytale” to judge others? It’s even more hypocritical when you consider the left conveniently ignores one of the few verses that it loves to cherry pick from the Bible, directly from Jesus, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Or Jesus when he said, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

The “log” in Ellis’ eye, in Alexander’s view, is that she stopped being a Trump toady and is trying to save her skin since Trump clearly can’t be bothered to help people who were loyal to him.

Alexander went the dead-ender route again in her Sept. 25 column:

The left and its comrades in the MSM and judiciary have been dismissing all evidence of significant election fraud, coming up with excuse after excuse to justify every single anomaly, even though there are hundreds of them. Despite the fact the anomalies in 2020 and 2022 all went against Republicans, favoring Democrats, which violates the law of large numbers, they still threw out all kinds of unbelievable excuses.

Let’s look at how these kinds of strange abberations would be treated in other illegal and criminal activity. Can’t find tens of thousands of chain-of-custody records or deleted server logs? Let’s compare that to the medical industry, which is somewhat similar since medical records are treated very securely, like elections. If you lose or delete medical records, it’s considered medical negligence, and doctors have lost their licenses to practice medicine for doing so.

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In contrast, we are seeing the opposite in elections. Runbeck Election Systems, the private contractor hired by Maricopa County to assist with processing ballots, is fighting tooth and nail in court to prevent its video surveillance of ballots being dropped off and sent back out from being released. During the motion to dismiss hearing last week, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer thought it was acceptable to argue with a straight face that it would take too many resources to fulfill public records requests like that. Runbeck lost chain-of-custody records on tens of thousands of ballots, and 22,000 ballots that showed up at Runbeck cannot be accounted for.

Alexander’s disregard for facts begins with the fact that she can’t be bothered to get her targeted company’s name correct; it’s Runbeck Election Services, not Systems. Further, actual fact-checkers have shown that ballot chain of custody was maintained. She went on to complain:

The law of large numbers is violated when all the anomalies harm Republicans. A team of experts put together a report on the large vote dumps in states suspected of election fraud that occurred the night of the 2020 election, batches of 25,000 or more net votes for Joe Biden. There were 26 dumps in 14 states. Pennsylvania had four. I’m no statistician, but this seems next to impossible odds.

In fact, vote-count spikes are not proof of election fraud. More complaints followed:

Election fraud never gets prosecuted because the judges find technical excuses not to hear the cases. And even though prior to 2020, elections were often overturned due to merely a handful of lesser statutory violations, not fraud, the left and MSM have successfully convinced people that fraud must be proven. Fraud is extremely difficult to prove since the standard is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Since election officials thwart efforts to improve security measures, it’s easy for the fraudsters to escape detection. In reality, hundreds of thousands of class 2 misdemeanors, which occurred in Kari Lake’s 2022 gubernatorial race, were always sufficient to overturn an election ... until now.

That’s another reference to the bogus chain-of-custody claims. She concluded by whining that attorneys are being held accountable for their actions:

The patriotic attorneys who dare to file lawsuits challenging election corruption are targeted with bar complaints. The 65 Project was started to go after the attorneys who filed 65 lawsuits challenging the 2020 election results. John Eastman, arguably the top constitutional legal scholar in the country, is currently undergoing a disbarment trial for advising Trump that Vice President Mike Pence had the option of rejecting or delaying certification of electoral slates from states suspected of election fraud.

Can you imagine attorneys being targeted for trying to stop corruption in other areas of life? What if the #MeToo attorneys were disbarred? How about the prosecutors who are going after Hunter Biden and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J.? Election corruption is often compared to racketeering; can you imagine if attorneys were disbarred for going after the cartels and Mafia for racketeering?

Next time you find yourself in a testy situation involving the law in one of these other areas, just point to how election corruption is treated as a precedent to get off the hook. Bet it doesn’t work.

Alexander is merely complaining that attorneys aren’t getting away with pushing bogus and partisan election fraud claims. And she needs to present credible evidence of election fraud — not just partisan rants without substance — before she can legitimately claim it’s being ignored.

Alexander continued her election fraud dead-ender ways in her Oct. 30 column, bizarrely insisting that holding those who pushed bogus claims accountable for their actions is “fascist”:

The left has gleefully discovered that by dominating the legal system, they can squelch conservative agendas and viewpoints through the courts. Judges afraid of losing their careers and reputations and being harassed by protesters are issuing rulings that comply with the fascists. State bars are disbarring conservative attorneys, deterring other attorneys from representing conservative positions like challenging election corruption. Prosecutors are going after the brave attorneys who assisted President Donald Trump with the 2020 election lawsuits.

Knowing the legal system is stacked against them, so they would very likely end up serving time in prison if they went to trial, attorneys Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro, along with bail bondsman Scott Graham Hall, agreed to accept plea deals in the politically motivated RICO prosecution by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis this past month.

The justice system has become so corrupt that conservatives can no longer get a fair jury trial. The Democrat-appointed judge who handled the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News forced a nearly $1 billion settlement by granting a summary judgment motion for Dominion, which resulted in jury instructions stating that all of the statements made by attorneys Powell and Rudy Giuliani, as well as all negative claims made on the network about Dominion, were false. So there’s no way a jury would have found for Fox News based on that.

Alexander then ran to the defense of Eastman once more:

Judges can also keep out evidence and witnesses based on bogus technical reasons. In the disbarment trial of Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman, California Bar Disciplinary Judge Yvette Roland, who contributed to Democrats while serving on the bench, has kept out the majority of evidence based on relevance or hearsay, even though the hearsay rules in that type of trial are much more relaxed.

She’s even refused to allow multiple official government documents into evidence, such as reports by the Georgia State Election Board and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s office regarding election irregularities. Many of Eastman’s witnesses were not allowed to testify because she said their testimony wasn’t relevant, even though they were going to testify about their interactions with him regarding investigating election corruption – the precise issue he’s on trial for.

Alexander again complained that Ellis has completely recanted her Trump work in an effort to save her skin:

Ellis, who cut a deal with the Colorado Bar earlier this year to avoid losing her law license, admitting she “spread misrepresentations” about election fraud, continued her implosion implicating others. Instead of merely accepting the plea deal, she decided to read a statement throwing everyone under the bus. She said she failed to do her “due diligence,” claiming that if she had known then what she knew now, she wouldn’t have represented Trump. She was charged with felonies related to the alternate electoral slate, and pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.

The four will be required to testify against others. While Ellis appears to have no restraint at throwing others under the bus, the others are expected to be far more cautious with their testimony. Ellis raised over $200,000 for her legal defense, no doubt due to her name recognition from representing Trump, so after her statement in court some of her donors want their money back. The Colorado Bar is expected to go after her again due to her plea deal.

Alexander concluded by ranting:

While the Georgia court may be a kangaroo court, there is always a chance any conviction will be reversed by a fairer court. While the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to accept any election cases related to the 2020 contest – granted some were very narrowly split votes among the justices not to accept them – no doubt due to the justices not wanting to be hassled by the left the rest of their lives as “election deniers,” there is a good chance they will draw the line at putting people in prison for merely being concerned about real election fraud.

Yes, Alexander is really claiming that it isn’t “fair” for people to held accountable for their actions in perpetuating falsehoods because those lies advance her right-wing political agenda — never mind that a lawyer getting caught lying in court is very much an easily actionable offense.

Dubious defense of Giuliani

Alexander used her Jan. 1 column to claim that Rudy Giuliani is a victim of “lawfare” because he was held accountable for spreading lies about two Georgia election workers:

The left continues its growing trend of destroying the right through lawfare – prosecution on the criminal side and sanctions and defamation lawsuits on the civil side. Most people know the lawfare is groundless, but with the left now dominating the legal system, including the judiciary and state bars, it’s become easy to destroy the lives of vocal conservatives on the right, holding them up as warning examples to any other principled conservative who next dares to go against the fascism of progressivism. Anyone who bravely defends those targeted with defamation suits risks being sued for defamation themselves. It’s a perfect way to chill conservative speech, especially attempts to expose illegal election activity.

The latest victim is Rudy Giuliani, who lost a $148 million defamation case, forcing him to file for bankruptcy. He was sued over telling a Missouri House committee that a video posted on The Gateway Pundit “shows demonstrably the theft of about 40,000 ballots right in front of your eyes.” The site accused Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a mother and daughter who counted ballots at State Farm Arena, of producing and counting ballots from suitcases.

The video showed election workers grabbing rectangular black boxes that looked like suitcases from underneath tables – they even had pull-up handles to haul them around like suitcases – after workers had told poll watchers to go home for the evening due to a burst pipe. Election officials claimed later that they did not count ballots from the containers, but merely put ballots away in them, which was routine.

Alexander then took the revisionist-history route to make Giuliani look like a victim:

Giuliani tried to back out of his statements once he saw how bad his chances were in the lawsuit, saying three years later that he’d made false statements. However, he did not admit that his statements had damaged the two plaintiffs, an element required to prove defamation.

D.C. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, didn’t care that Giuliani said he was unable to adequately defend himself in responses because federal agents had seized many of his documents, and that he was buried with “seven or eight cases that had pending requests for discovery” including “not just civil but criminal investigations.” Howell entered a default judgment against him in August, concluding the proceedings in December as to the amount, which prompted Giuliani to file for bankruptcy.

By entering a default judgment against him, she ducked having to rule on the merits or have a jury decide the merits (granted, in Washington, D.C., it would be almost impossible to find a fair jury). The elements of defamation include proving that the defendant made a false statement and engaged in at least negligence.

Though Alexander linked to Howell’s ruling of default judgment against Giuliani, she failed to note the part where Howell called out Giuliani for using the excuse that his documents were “seized” as a reason for not complying with discovery, pointing out that “his devices were returned no later than August 19, 2022” yet he still continued to invoke the excuse: “Despite Giuliani’s repeated reliance on the FBI’s seizure of his electronic devices to excuse his discovery preservation and production failings, responsive information held in his email and other communications-related accounts could and should have been preserved since the contents of these accounts presumably remained accessible online and through alternative devices.”

Alexander then baselessly attacked all election workers for purportedly and deliberately ignoring evidence of fraud — while offering not a single example of this happening, let alone that Freeman and Moss did this — while also playing whataboutism in complaining that those pushing election fraud lies were also harassed:

Many of the election workers who were accused of wrongdoing in 2020 or 2022 fit a pattern of realizing monkey business was going on but preferred to pretend not to notice it, since they were lower-level employees who did not want to lose their jobs. Georgia election officials have repeatedly fought attempts to further investigate the occurrences on election night.

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The plaintiffs claimed that their lives had been turned upside down by the publicity. However, there are thousands of people who investigated the concerns of election fraud, both officials and private citizens, whose lives were turned upside down, receiving death threats and canceled, yet that’s treated as routine.

Alexander didn’t mention that the vast majority of those who have “investigated the concerns of election fraud” were found to be lying or misleading, much like Giuliani. Their goal was to deceive people, while Freeman and Moss were falsely attacked for doing their jobs.

Alexander concluded by lamenting: “There has been little pushback defending Giuliani, even on the right. If more people don’t start exposing the circumstances behind this lawfare, instead allowing the left to pile up victory after victory, election fraud will never be stopped.” Again, she didn’t explain why holding Giuliani accountable for his defamatory lies was “lawfare.”