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Editors’ Blog
In press conference comments today, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened that state election officials could face jail time if they fail to cooperate with the White House’s purported efforts to “secure” the midterm elections, which seems to involve a range of illegal demands from the White House, Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. The specific demand is for states to feed their voter rolls into the federal “SAVE” database which purports to identify noncitizens on the rolls. Mullin seems to be saying that if states refuse to bend to these illegal White House demands, the federal government will then scrutinize those states’ election returns (by seizing ballots?) and hold state election officials criminally responsible for any illegal voting. (Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has already sent out threats all 50 states and D.C. along these lines).
We have here again the old story. States run elections in the United States. This is guaranteed and mandated by the federal Constitution. Congress can set uniform rules for administering elections. The executive branch plays no role at all in setting rules for elections or administering them. The White House’s strategy is to use illegal means (threatened criminal punishment against state officials) to assert power or compel authority the Constitution simply doesn’t allow. This isn’t how anything works. A president cannot legitimately create by force powers that the Constitution specifically denies him.
The AP has just posted a detailed investigation into the background of David Brouillette, the recently hired ICE agent who shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. It’s genuinely horrifying on more levels than are easy to describe. Brouillette was hired during ICE’s recent hiring spree, as the agency attempted to rapidly staff up to manage a program of mass deportation. Brouillette has a long history of severe mental illness, a lengthy history of violence against at least two wives as well as his children, stalking, a seemingly endless list of restraining orders, violent threats against other family members and more.
The big announcement of a “prime-time,” “Oval Office” “address” was typical Trump, encouraging Americans to live in his world. In the end, none of what he said was new. He did make the ill-founded claims about non-citizens on voter rolls, described in that “draft press release” which was covered by Politico and which Josh noted below. He also said some stuff about China acquiring voter files that we’ve known for years. He did not even go so far as to baselessly allege votes were changed, or that the election was otherwise stolen, as so many predicted he would. He of course concluded with a demand that the Senate pass the SAVE America Act.
We’ll look through the documents his government released and share any interesting or amusing details. More soon.
Voting rights, voter intimidation and the politics of voting have been central themes of TPM reporting going back more than 25 years. Over a quarter century you develop a lot of institutional knowledge. Today we’re seeing some of the most egregious journalistic negligence, sloppiness and ignorance helping propel forward the Trump White House’s assault on the integrity of the 2026 midterms. The piece I want to point you to this evening is Politico’s claim that DHS found “thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls in California and three other states.”
This claim is almost certainly false for reasons I’ll explain. I want to briefly summarize the multiple levels of journalistic negligence in Politico’s reporting.
I hope you’ve gotten a chance to read Josh Kovensky’s exclusive from yesterday. The guy DOJ has assigned to lead the task force targeting left-wing organizations/”antifa” in the U.S. was himself one of the January 6th boys. Amazing. (Of course, MAGA claims Jan. 6 was an antifa false-flag operation so perhaps prosecutor Brian W. Lynch is actually antifa? Which would be weird. But I jest…) We got a lead on this exclusive because of another exclusive Josh reported at the end of last month revealing the existence of the task force itself.
Investigative work like this is basically never economic. You sink way more hours into the work than the publication of the story can ever reap in direct terms. That’s where your dollars come in, where the TPM Journalism Fund comes in. These are the critical exclusives, revealing the details of the Trump White House’s crackdown on civic freedoms in the USA, that your contributions make possible. Want to get in on the action? We need your help in this year’s drive. Just click right here to contribute any dollar amount and help us get toward our goal of raising $500,000. This is what your dollars make possible. We appreciate your support so much.
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Outrage at the mind-boggling scheme was instantaneous. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called it “an egregious scheme to profit off the presidency and enrich Wall Street while doing nothing to help Americans.” Others went further; “Trump makes more off insider trading,” wrote Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO).
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Exclusive: Trump DOJ’s Top ‘Antifa’ Prosecutor Marched With Crowd on Jan. 6
It was not known publicly that a federal prosecutor marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6. He was appointed this year to run a national task force targeting alleged left-wing political violence.
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