Hutzell: Oversight Project is the real story in the Maryland redistricting lawsuit

Samuel Everett Dewey will walk into an Annapolis courthouse Tuesday morning, ready to attack a Maryland constitutional amendment that would change boundary requirements for congressional maps.

He might succeed. He might not.

But Dewey’s involvement and that of his organization, the Oversight Project, are as significant as the lawsuit itself — maybe more.

Dewey is head litigator for the investigative provocateur group, created four years ago by the Heritage Foundation to root out supposed fraud in President Joe Biden’s administration.

“The Oversight Project’s legal team is prestigious and patriotic,” said Hannah Fry, a spokeswoman for the Oversight Project. “We are thrilled that we can give the good people of Maryland what they deserve: a world-class legal team fighting for their voting rights.”

Some of its results include questioning Prince Harry’s visa and a video deposition showing Biden’s sad confusion over presidential records.

With the election of President Donald Trump, the project’s mission changed. Founder Mike Howell split with the foundation — The New York Times called it part of a wider fracture among conservative activists positioning themselves for power in post-Trump America.

His new targets, wrapped in red-state rhetoric, are blue-state elections. In a funhouse mirror retelling of the last five years, these activists claim it’s Democrats like Gov. Wes Moore who are trying to rig elections.

“The Governor and his radicals want to impose insane policies on the good people of the Eastern Shore through extinguishing their congressional representation,” Howell said in announcing the lawsuit. “There’s a reason why the Eastern Shore is more beautiful and happy than the crime dens around other parts of Maryland.”

The outcome of the lawsuit filed by Howell, who lives in Maryland, and Republican state lawmakers isn’t just whether the General Assembly correctly changed the rules for drawing congressional boundaries and sent them to voters for approval.

The Annapolis courthouse is a testing ground for the ambitions of a network of election deniers, partisan integrity champions and thinly coded white nationalists.

“If we get the districts right, mass deport millions of illegal aliens, make sure the 2030 Census is not a joke, and fight like our lives depend on it for election integrity, then we can really see some great structural pro-America changes to save the country,” Howell said.

Accusing Democrats of trying to cheat has long been a Republican gimmick in Maryland, where Democrats have controlled the General Assembly since before the Civil War. Nobody paid much attention, and smart Republicans looked sheepish when asked for proof.

It metastasized on Jan. 2, 2021, when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to find 11,000 votes. That was the margin of Biden’s November victory in that state and key to his national victory.

Raffensperger refused. Trump has been obsessed since, setting a radical election agenda for his party.

The insurrection followed four days later at the Capitol. Challenges to mail-in ballots, Republican gerrymandering to cook the midterms, Justice Department bullying and stalled SAVE America Act voting restrictions came next, all to sow ​doubt in democracy’s single most important verb: vote.

The Oversight Project carries that baggage into Circuit Court Judge Robert Thompson’s courtroom Tuesday morning.

Dewey is leading this lawsuit and strategizing with lawyers who filed a second on the Eastern Shore.

He’s a Washington lawyer who started as a Republican congressional aide. While a political appointee in the first Trump term, NPR reported, he tried to discredit Voice of America ​journalists.

Dewey was central to the Oversight Project’s Freedom of Information Act carpet-bombing campaign, hitting the Biden administration with more than 100,000 requests and 100 lawsuits.

Wins, summarized in all caps on the project’s website, include exposing “radical” educational resources, gender diversity programs and a former NIH official’s emails about the origin of the pandemic.

In the Maryland lawsuit, Dewey leads a team of lawyers with their own history of election denialism and voter suppression efforts.

Jeffrey Clark was an assistant attorney general in the first Trump administration. When Trump refused to concede in 2020, Clark drafted an infamous letter threatening Georgia officials with false claims about voter fraud.

Acting AG Rod Rosenstein refused to send it, and only the prospect of mass resignations stopped the president from replacing him with Clark. He was indicted along with the president and others on racketeering charges in Georgia — charges later dropped because of the prosecutor’s personal misconduct.

Clark still faces possible disbarment in D.C. In May, then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asked the courts to drop the proceedings, Politico reported, but the matter awaits a final decision.

Marshall Yates also worked as a Republican congressional staffer, focused on finding election fraud. He briefly headed the Election Integrity Network.

Founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican attorney who advised Trump during the Raffensperger call, it worked to overturn the 2020 election. Two of its affiliates unsuccessfully sued Maryland to gain access to voter rolls.

After Trump returned to office, Yates joined the FBI. Director Kash Patel appointed him to the Interagency Weaponization Working Group, linked by Reuters to prosecution of Trump’s political enemies.

In November, ProPublica reported that Yates was one of three top Patel aides unable to pass a polygraph test. The FBI denied the reporting, but Yates has not commented publicly.

He resigned in February, and Howell picked him to head his state-focused integrity initiative the following month.

Welcome to the bottom of the election conspiracy rabbit hole.

That’s where you’ll find Steve Hershey, Justin Ready, Mary Beth Carozza, J.B. Mautz, Chris West, Christopher Adams, Matt Morgan, Kathy Szeliga, Lauren Arikan, Brian Chisholm, Mark Fisher, Robin Grammer Jr. and Ryan Nawrocki.

The Republican lawmakers signed on as plaintiffs in this lawsuit, joining what Howell calls “maximum warfare.”

Maryland has lawyers, too, and they’ve been preparing for the fight. Thompson could rule that the legislature and Moore acted legally and validate the referendum.

Or not.

Expect quick appeals. No matter who wins, a deadline to finalize the ballot looms in September.

When oral ​arguments begin, one thing will be ​clear — the stakes are bigger than Maryland.