the last book I ever read (I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, excerpt eighteen)

from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker:

Giuliani elevated a protégée, Jenna Ellis, thirty-six, who had worked on the Trump campaign’s legal team. Ellis had a high opinion of herself. “I’m the Cinderella story of the legal world,” she told The Wall Street Journal. She marketed herself as a constitutional law expert, though her experience in that realm was largely limited to self-publishing a book in 2015, The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution, in which she argued that the Constitution was designed on the foundation of the Judeo-Christian worldview and that our rights come from God, not government. She had worked as a deputy district attorney handling court violations in a Colorado county but was fired, and later worked at the conservative law firm Thomas More Society, where she represented churches in religious liberty cases. Before December 2020, court records showed that Ellis had not handled an election law case nor appeared in a federal district court, where constitutional matters are weighed.

With Giuliani’s blessing, Ellis walked through Trump campaign headquarters telling people they had to answer to her if they wanted to keep their jobs and must no longer take instructions from Stepien or Clark, the campaign manager and deputy campaign manager, respectively. She sent text messages to others saying the same thing. Rank-and-file staffers were shaken by what was happening; one quietly complained to Jason Miller and said, “Hey, Jenna’s going crazy.” Ellis said this account of her conduct, described by other campaign officials, was “completely false.”