Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday defended the Justice Department’s pre-emptive lawsuit to block certification of Alaska’s Senate results if the Republican incumbent loses, calling a CNN host’s question about the possibility of another Jan. 6 “crazy.” The suit alleges there could be “voter confusion” because two candidates named Dan Sullivan appear on Alaska’s ballot.

The exchange occurred on CNN’s State of the Union, where host Dana Bash said “one of the big questions is whether or not Trump tries to overturn the election, and the result of that could be, God forbid, what we saw after January 6.”

“Oh, stop it,” Blanche responded. “Oh, you got to stop it with that. You are not being a real person. Come on, man.”

“That is crazy!” he said.

Bash replied that “it is not crazy,” adding that she “would have said that before January 6” — a reference to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. A bipartisan Senate report said there were seven deaths in relation to the incident.

Blanche said the question was not a real one. “Because the president, because the Department of Justice, is concerned that there is an absolute fraud happening in Alaska, and he wants to do something about it, you’re saying, Mr Attorney General, because the president of the United States wants to stop a fraud and confusion in Alaska, is he going to do something crazy? That is not, that is not a real question.”

“We’re not laying any groundwork for the president to do that,” Blanche said. “What I said is the groundwork that we are laying is for Alaska, for the state of Alaska.”

“If it becomes an issue after the election, we’ll have the ability to determine whether there was confusion that violates the law in determining who the senators should be,” he said.

Trump told reporters “I’m the one that said do it” when asked about the suit. The Justice Department has claimed there might be “voter confusion” on Alaskan ballots that could potentially propel Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola to victory.

During an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation, Brennan asked whether Trump directed him to file the suit. “Well first of all, let me correct you, OK,” Blanche said. “You described facts that were just simply either at best misleading, but really a lie to your viewers.”

Election experts say the department’s position is legally weak. “The legal claim is so absurdly thin, there’s essentially no likelihood of success,” said Derek Mueller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, in a blog post.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the suit marked “an unprecedented intervention by the federal government” and noted that Alaska’s courts had “fully litigated” this issue. The lawsuit, Becker said, “raises serious concerns about political interference” and he could not remember “ever attempting to stop the certification of an election – and certainly not 11 days before polls close.”

Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University who focuses on elections, told the New York Times: “It is one of the weakest election lawsuits I’ve ever seen.” “It should have no realistic chance of success in the courts,” Pildes said.

Blanche, with Trump, delivered remarks at a roundtable in the East Room of the White House in Washington DC on Oct. 21.