A Democratic Legal Team is Working Overtime to Scare Off President Biden's Challengers. They're Coming Out of the Shadows to Do So.

By Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos, The Kennedy Beacon

Lawyers for presidential candidates generally work quietly behind the scenes. Now a few of the legal minds behind President Joe Biden are coming out of the shadows.

Biden’s primary legal fixer is Marc Elias, who leads the Democratic Party’s efforts to manipulate ballot access and limit voter choice, as reported in the Beacon. Two additional lawyers, Dana Remus and Robert Lenhard, have been tasked with carrying out tactics to scare off Biden challengers. 

In short, these three are the type of attorneys who give lawyers a bad name. They use the law to stay in power. They stand in contrast to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has used the law to advocate for people and public health.

While Remus and Lenhard have less name recognition than Elias, they are leading figures in the Democratic Party despite their early ties with Republicans. 

Lenhard cut his teeth in Washington as an appointee of the Federal Election Commission, having been nominated by George W. Bush. Although Lenhard has spent most of his career in private practice, his area of expertise pertains to election law. 

A recent New York Times article outlining the Democrats’ upcoming strategy quotes Lenhard, who reveals that the aim of his party’s legal strategy “is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules” and to “hold them accountable when they are not.” The article outlines the goal of these legal fixers to target Kennedy in particular, a candidate who has polled above 20% and should appear on ballots if Lenhard cares about “playing by the rules” of democracy.

A graduate of Harvard undergraduate and Yale Law School, Remus clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Bush appointee who serves as one of the Republican Party’s most dependable judicial allies. 

Remus has become a favorite of the Biden administration, having served as legal counsel for the president’s 2020 campaign. She also worked for the Obama Foundation, representing former first lady Michelle Obama and working for Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a prestigious white-shoe law firm that specializes in bringing “deep government experience to bear in counseling clients across industries on high‑stakes regulatory, enforcement, compliance and investigations matters,” according to its website.

Remus later served as official White House Counsel from November 2020 to January 2022. She is married to Brett Holmgren, a Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research in the Biden administration. Barack Obama officiated their wedding.

Since Kennedy presents a possible challenge to the Democrat incumbent who employs them, these attorneys are focused on harming his campaign so that they can stay in power.

In fact, the party (with Remus’s help) already introduced this strategy in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles when they targeted Green Party candidates, and often successfully kept them off ballots in key states. The lawsuits were based on minute formalities that in Wisconsin, for example, led to invalidating petitions for Green Party vice presidential nominee, Angela Walter. She wasn’t allowed on the state’s ballot because she had obtained signatures of support before changing addresses.

In Texas, Democrats sued the Green Party over filing fees and the Greens couldn’t afford to fight back. Given that the Democrats claim climate change is a “global emergency,” it seems hypocritical to banish candidates from the most ecologically-focused political party in the country, while Biden’s administration has undertaken the most federal drilling in history, as reported by CNN.

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed the policies of the Biden administration, but this legal team provides more evidence that the party’s priority is neither the American people nor principles, but holding onto power. 

Remus and Lenhard are forces to be reckoned with, as demonstrated by their records. They’re actions against Kennedy, specifically related to his ballot access drive have shown an all-eager to undermine and discredit, already reaping fruit in states like Nevada, as reported by ABC.

Even though the Kennedy campaign had collected the required signatures in Nevada, as instructed, and they had submitted them successfully to the Board of Elections (BoE), those signatures were later thrown out because the campaign had been advised incorrectly by the BoE about the requirement to name the VP pick on the petition, first. Local news in Nevada reports that the Kennedy campaign, “intends to depose the Secretary of State to find out exactly which White House or DNC official concocted this scheme.” 

The legal strategy led by Lenhard and Remus aligns with the DNC’s larger, substantial push to discredit challengers like Kennedy They have been employing a team of publicity spin masters, as previously explained in the Beacon, who worked with journalists to shape media narratives to their liking. These savvy men and woman are tasked with placing stories in the most influential news outlets, designed to make Kennedy not only look crazy but also fringe, a potential spoiler, a man who must be stopped at all cost — for the sake of ‘democracy.’”

Attack strategies, which use top lawyers in tandem with PR teams against presidential candidates, have succeeded in derailing campaigns before, as revealed in the cases against Green Party members. But as the legal top guns come out of the shadows to target Kennedy, his supporters and the media have an opportunity to turn the tables: to expose the corrupt and dirty ways these games are played.

Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos studied government at Georgetown University and interned for several Democratic elected officials and their campaigns, and other affiliated groups. He then earned a master’s degree in urban studies in France, where extremely strict COVID-19 lockdowns led to his political reawakening and inspired him to try to help fix the broken two-party system.