RNC Chief Counsel Charlie Spies Resigns

‘Great news for the Republican Party,’ former President Donald Trump wrote. ‘RINO lawyer Charlie Spies is out as Chief Counsel of the RNC. I wish him well!!’

FILE - The Republican National Committee logo is shown on the stage at the North Charleston Coliseum, Jan. 13, 2016, in North Charleston, S.C. The Republican National Committee’s Washington headquarters was briefly evacuated on Wednesday as police investigated vials of blood that had been addressed to former President Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee. AP Photo/Rainier Ehrhardt, File

Charlie Spies has resigned from his role as chief counsel of the Republican National Committee (RNC) after just two months on the job, The Epoch Times has learned.

Mr. Spies, a longtime Republican election attorney who joined the RNC in March amid a Trump-led overhaul, said his full-time duties at the committee were in conflict with his commitments at a private law firm.

“Working full time at the RNC wasn’t the right fit with my law firm client commitments, but I will remain focused on getting President Trump and Republicans at all levels elected in November,” Mr. Spies told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

RNC spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez laid out the same rationale for the move while suggesting that the decision to part ways was mutual.

“Charlie approached RNC chief of staff, Chris Lacivita, about potential time commitment conflicts and it was agreed that, while we appreciate and value Charlie’s expertise and professionalism, he cannot do this role full time and still maintain the obligations to his law firm that he has spent years successfully building,” Ms. Alvarez told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

Mr. Spies’s departure comes just weeks after the RNC launched a historic, 100,000-person-strong election integrity program, in which a team of lawyers was to play a key part by providing rapid response services in the event of voting irregularities or problems. At the time, Mr. Spies issued a statement saying that “RNC legal is committed to making sure that victory can’t be rigged.”

‘Great News’: Trump

While both Mr. Spies and Ms. Alvarez portrayed the parting of ways as mutual, there have been rumors that former President Donald Trump was dissatisfied with Mr. Spies for his public rejection of the former president’s claims of 2020 election fraud.

For instance, at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Spies defended the vote recounts in Georgia and pushed back on some allegations regarding voting irregularities in Michigan.

Pro-Trump activist and investigative journalist Laura Loomer wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in April that rumors were swirling that Mr. Spies might be fired from his role at the committee: “Hearing Charlie Spies might be fired from the RNC very soon.”

On May 5, Ms. Loomer took to X to say her prediction had come to pass, mentioning “growing displeasure” on the part of President Trump over Mr. Spies’s ties to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

President Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to express satisfaction with Mr. Spies’s departure.

“Great news for the Republican Party. RINO lawyer Charlie Spies is out as Chief Counsel of the RNC. I wish him well!!” the former president wrote.

RINO stands for “Republican in name only.”

The Democrat National Committee (DNC) issued a statement reacting to Mr. Spies’s departure.

“Donald Trump’s MAGA takeover of the RNC has already led to mass staff firings and an election denier litmus test for new hires—and now the committee’s top lawyer is the latest GOP official purged for disagreeing with Trump’s dangerous conspiracy theories about the 2020 election,” DNC Rapid Response Director Alex Floy said in a statement.

President Trump maintains that he was cheated out of victory in the 2020 presidential election in part because of outright fraud and in part because of last-minute changes to election rules that sharply expanded opportunities to cast mail-in ballots while softening voter verification requirements.

Mr. Spies was hired amid the Trump-led overhaul of the RNC in March, which involved the departure of now former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel. She was replaced by Michael Whatley as RNC chair, with President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump joining the organization as its co-chair.

‘Protecting the Vote’

In her final speech as the head of the RNC on March 8, Ms. McDaniel called on Republicans to unite around President Trump and his agenda, which she said includes reversing President Joe Biden’s “open borders” policies, getting tough on crime, and tackling inflation.

Ms. McDaniel said she believes that Mr. Whatley will be “phenomenal” in the role and, in particular, on an issue that President Trump “cares deeply about, which is election integrity.”

President Trump said in mid-February that he’s convinced that Mr. Whatley, who served as general counsel for the North Carolina GOP in addition to being its chairman, will be “committed to election integrity, which we must have to keep fraud out of our election so it can’t be stolen.”

Ms. Trump said in an interview on Fox News on March 10 that the RNC’s top priorities this election cycle focus on “protecting the vote.”

“We have three pillars that we need to focus on at the RNC to ensure victory on Nov. 5, turn out the vote, protect the vote, and raise money,” she said. “But I would argue that maybe the most important of those three is protecting the vote, election integrity.”

The RNC’s recently announced election integrity effort is part of the committee’s focus on ensuring the fairness and transparency of the 2024 election.

The program will focus on five areas of observation in which the RNC will seek to ensure adequate coverage by poll watchers and engagement by attorneys who will be laser-focused on working “to stop Democrat attempts to circumvent rules.”

The five areas are testing the logic and accuracy of voting machines, early voting, Election Day voting, adjudication and duplication of mail-in ballots, and post-election auditing, recounts, and canvassing.

Austin Alonzo contributed to this report.