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The Portland plaintiffs suing state, city and county elections officials over a police-hiring initiative that failed to qualify for the November 2026 ballot have hired a former U.S. deputy associate attorney general to help make their case.
While at the U.S. Department of Justice, Abhishek Kambli represented the Trump Administration in court cases challenging the President’s executive orders, including those banning transgender participation in the military, the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport undocumented immigrants, and to punish law firms that had represented the president’s political adversaries.
After leaving the DOJ, Kambli joined Holtzman Vogel, a D.C.-based law firm that has has close ties to the Trump Administration. In this current job, Kambli has filed recent amicus briefs in support of the Trump Administration in some of its most controversial court cases, including seeking federal access to Michigan’s voter rolls.
That makes the choice of attorney a noteworthy one for a group of plaintiffs that have said their decision to sue is based in a desire to uphold voters’ rights and to ensure the integrity of local elections.
Prior to joining Holtzman Vogel in June 2026, Kambli worked as deputy associate attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice from February 2025 to May 2026, where he served as lead counsel on a number of high-profile cases.
Now, Kambli has come to assist in a Portland case. His latest clients are the chief petitioners of a ballot initiative that would have rerouted 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund tax revenues to hiring about 400 police officers. The initiative failed to qualify for the November 2026 ballot after city and county elections officials determined its backers had not turned in the necessary 40,437 verified signatures. But the chief petitioners of the initiative, and the campaign behind the initiative called Safer Portland, alleged that elections officials erroneously threw out thousands of signatures.
Then, on Aug. 20, the chief petitioners took their allegations to federal court. They’re suing the Oregon Secretary of State, City of Portland elections officials and Multnomah County elections officials, alleging that officials erroneously discarded hundreds of signature sheets that contained thousands of signatures, leading the initiative to fall short. (Elections officials have denied the allegations. At the time of the initial allegations from the campaign, the city’s elections division released a detailed statement explaining how the sheets had been rejected.)
The Safer Portland campaign, who funded the signature-gathering efforts and were funded primarily by the Portland Police Association, which represents the city’s sworn police officers, have said the case is fundamentally about election integrity. In a July 31 email to Portland City Auditor Simone Rede, the campaign wrote that “we want Portland voters to have confidence that this verification process is fair, accurate, transparent, and worthy of public trust.”
The campaign added: “As Secretary of State Read recently observed, ‘we can work within our trusted election systems with the shared goal of allowing the voters of Oregon to make their voices heard.”'
And the federal complaint alleges that “Instead of having a fair and transparent process, Defendants disenfranchised thousands of voters through an arbitrary and standardless one.”
Elise Haas, Safer Portland spokesman, said that the plaintiff’s legal representation is irrelevant.
“This lawsuit is about ensuring Portland voters are not disenfranchised,” Haas said in an email. “The work history and client lists of the lawyers involved are irrelevant to the merits of the case and the need for a fair and accurate count of signatures.”
While at the DOJ, Kambli was the lead counsel for major cases. He argued on behalf of Trump’s January 2025 executive order barring transgender people from serving in the military. He argued on behalf of Trump’s executive orders that sought to punish large law firms that had previously represented some of Trump’s political foes, a move many of the law firms would later argue in court were retaliatory and violated the First Amendment.
In March 2025, NBC reported that a U.S. District Court Judge during a hearing had criticized Kambli after the Trump Administration, despite a ruling by the judge to halt deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, had deported Venezuelan immigrants that Trump alleged were Tren de Aragua gang members. Until Trump invoked it last year, the law hadn’t been invoked since 1941. Kambli at the time argued to the judge that the administration had complied with the judge’s written order, which had come just hours after the judge’s oral ruling.
Kambli is currently leading a team of attorneys at Holtzman Vogel that, in conjunction with attorneys from America First Legal, a law firm co-founded by White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of two Republican senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, who are seeking to uphold the Iowa Attorney General’s defense of the state’s 2024 immigration enforcement law that sought to make being an unauthorized immigrant a state crime. That law remains blocked by a federal court.
And in July, Kambli and his team filed twin amicus briefs in support of the DOJ’s request for a new hearing after a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals panel determined that the state of Michigan did not have to turn over its unredacted voter rolls to the Trump Administration.
Kambli has spoken at events hosted by the Federalist Society, an influential conservative law society. He’s slated to give a talk at an upcoming society event on Sept. 9 entitled “Executive Power in the Trump Era.”
When asked by the online publication Original Jurisdiction in June 2026 how MAGA he was on a scale of 1-10, Kambli replied: “I don’t know if I would put it on a 1-to-10 scale, but I’ve definitely supported Trump personally since 2016—and even before that, when there was skepticism among others within the Republican Party—and I’ve maintained that ever since.” Kambli said he had “litigated over 20 cases personally” for the DOJ under Trump’s second administration before departing for Holtzman Vogel.
Kambli did not respond to a request for comment from WW.
The PAC associated with the Safer Portland Campaign appears to have $36,000 cash on hand after spending $1.4 million on canvassing and campaign efforts. However, it appears the PAC has about $27,000 in outstanding payments, leaving just $9,000 available. The largest donor to the campaign was the Portland police union.
Haas, the Safer Portland spokeswoman, did not respond to a question about about who is paying the plaintiffs’ legal bills.
