Attorney Paul M. Davis, who lost his in-house counsel job with an insurance company shortly after recording himself protesting outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th, says he’s planning new and imminent litigation surrounding the 2020 election. His new move is partially being forced upon him: he’s been “fired” by some, but not all, of his clients in the case he filed just weeks ago which asked a federal judge in Texas to remove Joe Biden from the White House and to install a council of “stewards” from Donald Trump’s cabinet to help oversee the country. (Biden would nominally remain the president subject to the check and balances of the “stewards” under Davis’s proposal.)
Davis characterizes the move as a positive step which will free his own plaintiffs from pressing a claim connected to — and under the same case caption as — institutional plaintiffs which facially support Trump.
Two early Friday court filings provide the legal details.
In the first, Davis announced to the court that, in essence, he’d been terminated by some of his own clients. That document explains that Davis and his co-counsel Kelly SoRelle have a difference of opinion — and that he was sad to leave:
Due to Mr. Davis’s refusal to implement the strategy advocated for by Ms. SoRelle, who has a long history working with Plaintiffs Latinos for Trump, Blacks for Trump, Joshua Macias, B.G., and M.S. (the “SoRelle Plaintiffs”), these Plaintiffs have fired Mr. Davis as their counsel in this case. Mr. Davis, by now used to being fired for standing up for his principles, is saddened by the decisions of these Plaintiffs to pursue what he believes is not a sound strategy, since he was very proud to represent the same.Nonetheless, the decisions of the clients must be respected, and Mr. Davis understands these clients loyalties to Ms. SoRelle.
Davis accurately notes that lawyers are generally ethically bound to withdraw as counsel when clients so request.
The upshot, the document states, is that Davis has parted ways with many of the named plaintiffs, including the organizations Latinos for Trump and Blacks for Trump. He’s also no longer representing individuals listed as Joshua Macias, B.G., M.S., R.C., T.L., A.B., R.R., A.P., J.G., M.B., E.R., E.R.(2), C.H., I.M., A.L., C.S., H.D., M.T., and I.M.
However, Davis says he’s still representing a group of plaintiffs who wish to press forward: J.B. (“Jeremy Bravo”), J.J., P.P., R.D., and H.H.
In the motion to withdraw, he explains the process further:
Because the Davis Plaintiffs’ strategy and interests are no longer aligned with the SoRelle Plaintiffs, and, because the Davis Plaintiffs believe the SoRelle Plaintiffs’ claims they apparently wish to bring in to the case will be detrimental to the Davis Plaintiffs’ claims, the Davis Plaintiffs will be filing a voluntary dismissal of their claims contemporaneously herewith, and be refiling their claims in a separate lawsuit.
Following the motion to withdraw, Davis filed a motion to dismiss on behalf of his own clients. It similarly explains:
[T]he Davis Plaintiffs wish to pursue a different case strategy with different evidence and claims than the SoRelle Plaintiffs. The Davis Plaintiffs believe that the claims and evidence the SoRelle Plaintiffs wish to assert be would be detrimental to their own claims. Both experts of record in this case also wish not to be in a case of the nature the SoRelle Plaintiffs wish to pursue. The expert witnesses wish to provide support to the Davis Plaintiffs’ claims.
In a Friday morning telephone interview with Law&Crime, Davis said that the split was “the best thing that could have happened” given the legal trajectory he wished to take. “I merely severed out the claim [because the clients] have different interests.”
Davis said the differences revolved around his clients’ desires to press apolitical claims surrounding voting policies and procedures and the other plaintiffs’ interests to clearly support Donald Trump. He called those plaintiffs “special interest groups” who “weren’t down with” his broader strategy to tie in additional plaintiffs for a broader legal constituency.
Rather, Davis said his interests are aligned with the so-called M90USA movement. It seeks to represent what it characterizes as the interests of the middle 90-percent of the country and neither the hard left nor the hard right. Davis reiterated that his claims, as tied to that movement, are about procedural matters, not election fraud.
Davis said that SoRelle’s clients sought to press “factual allegations” he believed were “going to taint the case” his clients wished to present. He summarized his arguments this way: in his view, Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution and the Help America Vote Act contained “provisions [that] were not followed in one way or another in all 50 states” and, therefore, that the current Congress and President Joe Biden are “illegitimate.”
Davis, who says he’s been working 80 to 100 hours a week for free, is also working “through the weekend” to add new plaintiffs to the case. He described one of his plaintiffs as “a former Democratic candidate;” he said he’s talking to Christians, a group of Vietnamese descent, and to supporters of Bernie Sanders.
He promised a “new motion for a TRO [temporary restraining order] with new evidence from our experts” — likely to be filed next week.
When asked about using Trump’s cabinet members as “stewards” to check President Biden, Davis said he was struggling with ascertain “the remedy” which the court should apply to cure what he argues were legal problems with the 2020 election.
“Injunctive relief is for the purpose of preserving the status quo,” he explained. “If they’re illegitimate, then the electoral college vote [for Biden] is illegitimate.”
He said the proposed remedy was a remedy that he “stayed up all night trying to craft.”
“It’s a privilege to be in the White House,” he continued. “If the president himself wasn’t elected through a Constitutional process, I really don’t think the president should be living in the White House. It’s not like we’re saying he should be thrown out not he street. He’d be put in the Blair House. He’s not going to be slumming it.”
Davis said he’s considering abandoning that specific claim of relief when he refiles the case.
His bigger concern now, he says, are Biden’s “extraordinary” numbers of executive orders and Congress’s proposed election law reforms. He explicitly called out the “For the People Act” — referred to by its sponsors as a plan to “improve access,” “promote integrity,” and “ensure security” — as, in his view, problematic; he said it was filled with “dramatic departures from previous existing policies” and contrary to previous bipartisan reports which found that mail-in ballots were troublesome. (The “For the People Act” aims to “simplify voting by mail.”)
“We’re not trying to shut down the government; we’re just trying to decide whether we need another election” under current law, Davis said. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
“This case unfortunately became very political,” Davis said. He said that too many “shadowy figures” have been “pulling strings in the background” to alter America’s political landscape. “This is a conspiracy between all these bad actors in both of these parties, in connection with some people in the media, some people in social media, and some people big tech.”
“This is about having free and fair elections under federal law,” Davis also said. “Everyone should agree with that.”
He seems pleased with his newly found freedom to litigate election matters outside the Trump orbit. He promised “a true class action lawsuit” on behalf of his own plaintiffs who believe “their constitutional rights were violated.”
“We now have the freedom to do what our M90USA movement represents without interference from partisan political interference,” he said.
With reference to the Trump supporters he previously represented, Davis said as follows: “they have good intentions, but they have their interest, and it’s very specific to Trump, and we want this to be a movement for all Americans.”
SoRelle did not respond to a phone call or an email seeking comment.
Read the relevant court filings below:
Paul M. Davis – Docket #16 by Law&Crime
Paul M. Davis – Docket #17 by Law&Crime
[Paul M Davis via Social Media by way of KDFW-TV]