WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Friday said he ordered a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to prevent certification of Alaska's Senate election result if the Republican incumbent loses -- ramping up questions over whether he will accept midterms defeat.
"I'm the one that said, 'Do it,'" Trump announced during a trip to Florida, where he is due to cast his own early ballot for the November 3 election to decide control of Congress -- currently in Republican hands.
The extraordinary intervention by a president to launch a preemptive challenge against a possible election result casts a new shadow over the midterms.
Trump -- who tried to overthrow the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden -- has repeatedly questioned the validity of the upcoming election in which Democrats are forecasted to make big gains.
If Democrats win the House of Representatives, as widely expected, they would be able to exert the first real brake on Trump's unprecedented exercise of power since he secured his second term two years ago.
Democrats also have an outside chance of winning the Senate if they can flip a handful of Republican-held seats, including in Alaska, where incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan faces Democrat Mary Peltola.
Sullivan v Sullivan
In its lawsuit, filed Thursday, the Justice Department alleged that the presence on the Alaska ballot of a minor additional candidate named Dan J. Sullivan Jr. is part of a deliberate ploy to confuse voters and harm the Republican incumbent's chances.
"The sole purpose of his candidacy is to benefit the Peltola campaign by reducing the number of votes for Senator Sullivan," the lawsuit said.
Democrats and Sullivan Jr. himself, a registered Republican, have denied this.
The lawsuit asks for certification of a Democratic win to be held up pending investigation if the Republican incumbent's losing margin is smaller than the votes won by his namesake.
Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has repeatedly broken Washington norms about keeping political distance from the White House, said Thursday that the Justice Department was not preparing to interfere in the midterms.
But he refused to rule out what he called a "doomsday scenario."
"To say that there's no circumstances that we would ever do that. Of course, I'm not going to say that."
Democrats have accused the Trump administration of seeking ways to steer the results of the November vote by trying to expand federal government control over state-run elections and by repeatedly questioning the integrity of results.
Trump won Alaska by 13 percentage points in his 2024 comeback election. But amid growing discontent with Republicans and Trump nationwide, Peltola, a former tribal judge and Alaska Native, is running a strong race.
Alaska is a vast state with a population of just 740,000.
Legal analyst Derek Muller described the Department of Justice's case as "absurdly thin" and unlikely to prevail in court.
"There’s essentially no likelihood of success," Muller wrote on the Election Law Blog.
Sullivan Jr. was briefly ejected from the ballot this summer, but he was reinstated by an Alaskan lower court -- a decision affirmed by the state's supreme court.