Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has decided to leave a national attorneys general association.
Just not the one you’re thinking of.
Marshall isn’t leaving the AGs association that was caught red-handed planning and funding robocalls encouraging people to attend the rally-that-became-an-insurrection — the same organization that spent weeks furthering the outright lies about election fraud that led to the insurrection.
No, Steve Marshall isn’t leaving the Republican Attorneys General Association. Instead, he announced on Tuesday that he’s leaving the National Association of Attorneys General.
Because it’s just “moved too far to the left.” That was Marshall’s reasoning for leaving NAAG.
And what big shift leftward pushed him over the edge? That’s unclear. Marshall didn’t elaborate in his comments to a rightwing propaganda website and his office would only confirm the decision to al.com.
But from the NAAG website, recent actions by the organization include electing a Black man — Washington D.C. AG Karl Racine — as its current president and implementing his presidential initiative: “The People v. Hate: Standing up for Humanity.”
Clearly, Steve Marshall doesn’t belong in this outfit.
(By the way, NAAG’s immediate past president is a noted tree-hugging liberal, Republican Louisiana AG Jeff Landry.)
To be fair, NAAG is a bit boring. It focuses on nonpartisan initiatives, such as training and workshops, and provides resources and information for AGs all across the country. And it focuses its training on meaningless fluff, like consumer protection, antitrust, ethics and white collar crime.
It doesn’t do cool stuff, like provide pre-written lawsuits that you can file against the evil liberal empire in hopes of seeing your name in a headline.
For really important stuff like that, we have the Republican Attorneys General Association, of which Marshall remains a member. In fact, he also chairs RAGA’s dark money political action committee, The Rule of Law Defense Fund.
It was the RLDF that funded a robocall encouraging people to participate in the so-called “Save America” rally, at which Donald Trump, Mo Brooks and other traitors to the country sought to rile up a crowd — a crowd that was already fuming after being fed for weeks a steady dose of lies about election fraud — and then sent them marching on the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the electoral college returns.
And it was RAGA that helped further the lies of election fraud by encouraging its members to sign onto a frivolous, pandering lawsuit challenging the vote counts in four states. That lawsuit contained baseless allegations of fraud, and in one instance condemned a state for making election law changes identical to changes made in Alabama.
Marshall, of course, signed Alabama onto that lawsuit and issued a press release proudly proclaiming it.
In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, where five people died, including a police officer, and multiple officers were beaten with poles and other weapons, Marshall, RLDF and RAGA couldn’t get away from the disaster their lies caused fast enough.
The head of RAGA resigned. Marshall promised to investigate his organization. Two other RAGA officials resigned.
The contrition, however, has been short lived. Not that it was ever really genuine.
RAGA is trying to hire as its director the guy who greenlit the robocalls. And Marshall’s investigation into himself is still ongoing and no updates are available.
The truth is Steve Marshall doesn’t care that his participation in the Big Lie about the 2020 election led to American deaths and one of the ugliest scenes in American history. If he did, he would have resigned as RLDF chair and left RAGA, or at least left the RLDF.
That never crossed his mind. But getting a cheap headline by leaving a nonpartisan group that’s focused on AGs actually doing a decent job? Oh, that’s definitely on his mind.
In his interview, Marshall said he might possibly use the money saved by leaving NAAG to hire a young staff attorney to work in his office. And I hope so.
Maybe that guy can help wrap up Steve Marshall’s investigation of Steve Marshall.
