Meet SG3: The Elite Legal Squad That Vowed to Safeguard the Election - By Jane Mayer

[DonViejo]

February 20, 2021

Last March, after President Trump declaimed that the only way he could lose the election was if there was fraud, Seth Waxman couldn’t sleep. A member of the tiny, élite club of litigators who have served as Solicitors General of the United States, Waxman is not a mellow guy. An obsessive runner with the wound-up energy of a twisted rubber band, he often wakes up at three in the morning agitated by something or other. Typically, he makes a cup of tea, works for an hour, and goes back to bed. But the insomnia last March, he said, “was, like, five nights in a row!”

The proximate cause was what he calls “the Doomsday scenarios,” which he feared could unfold if Trump tried to subvert the 2020 election. Could the President order the election postponed because of the pandemic? he wondered. Could he call a reunion of the ice agents he sent into Portland to intimidate minority voters in urban centers?

Night after night, Waxman tabulated every possible thing that could go wrong. Having advised several Democratic Presidential campaigns, he was familiar with the pitfalls. But none of the nightmares conjured by Trump “corresponded with anything I’d worried about in earlier campaigns,” he said. He ended up with a three-and-a-half-page single-spaced list of potential catastrophes.

Eleven months before the Senate impeachment trial exposed an unprecedented level of political savagery, Waxman quietly prepared for the worst. He reached out to two other former Solicitors General, Walter Dellinger and Donald Verrilli, who served as the Clinton and the Obama Administrations’ advocates, respectively, before the Supreme Court. By April, they had formed a small swat team to coördinate with the Biden campaign. They called themselves the Three Amigos, but the campaign referred to them as SG3. Their goal: safeguarding the election.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/meet-sg3-the-elite-legal-squad-that-vowed-to-safeguard-the-election

[lark]

1. Weird, everyone else could see this, why couldn't they?

Sounds like they didn't really go whole hog, probably worried about sounding demented, and didn't account for drumpf's illegality. I'd been telling everyone for months drumpf was going to pull something really bad and try to overthrow the election and that 1/6 was the last good shot for this. Legislators knew, they wore tennis shoes and said goodbye to loved ones. Totally not impressed with this team one bit if they couldn't see this happening or at least the possibility of it going on. Hell, drumpf wanted martial law, but military wasn't supporting him so he just worked directly with militias and repug crazies to accomplish his goal of stealing this election.

[ariadne0614]

4. The article describes everything they did to protect the election. It's beyond impressive.

They kind of had their hands full with that, so I'm not about to second-guess them over what happened on 06Jan after they prevented disaster on the electoral end of things.

[msfiddlestix]

2. What a fascinating story

But at the end of the article the final analysis is that they didn't even imagine what took place on January 6th. Concluding with that our democracy is in peril. And that is the ultimate lesson.

Biden and others understandably states that our democracy is resilient. But we all know that it is in peril, and we need to bring in all of our resources to repair and rebuild. Hard to do when our enemy is within. Can we accomplish this?

[Indykatie]

3. Biden Brought Competent Experts to Every Area of the Campaign, Election and Administration

It's one reason I refuse to stress out over what we are seeing in red states as they try to pass new legislation to further restrict access to the ballot box. I'm sure Biden and the Dems are already devising their strategy to fight off the changes. After what we saw from Trump and GOP this past election cycle hopefully the courts are in no mood to let them get away with this bullsh*t.

[Fiendish Thingy]

5. Fortunately, Trump's campaign was too disorganized to take advantage of the expired consent decree

Regarding police presence and voter intimidation at polling places.

In 1980, Roger Stone (who else?) organized armed, off duty police officers to serve as “poll watchers” in precincts with high percentages of black voters. They would question voters’ ID and eligibility to vote. It was so egregious that after the election, the GOP entered into a consent decree with the FEC agreeing not to use this strategy for 40 years, until 2020.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

6. Joe had a large legal group organized early

I was on zoom calls starting in 2019 with 150+ attorneys. Marc Elias was one of the top litigators. The general counsel for the campaign is an impressive lady