A legal expert says the Trump Justice Department is about to be caught with nothing behind the curtain of its latest election gambit.
Michael Popok, an attorney and host of Legal AF, said in a Friday episode of "The Intersection with Michael Popok" that the Department of Justice can't back up its list of 20,000 alleged noncitizens registered to vote, which he said the department handed to California officials to use against voters. Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has ordered the department to turn over the data and methodology behind the list by 5 p.m. Friday.
"We know in our heart of hearts, the reason the Department of Justice doesn't want to turn it over, it's like the Wizard of Oz," Popok said. "There's nothing behind it."
"You pull back the screen, there's nothing there," he added. "They know it's rife with errors. They know they can't really testify under oath that these are definitively illegal voters who have voted."
Popok pointed to Nevada, where he said a similar claim of roughly 17,000 illegally registered noncitizens eventually dwindled to zero.
"That's a big drop, don't you think?" he said.
He argued the database was built on shaky ground from the start. According to Popok, the Trump administration has gone "0 for 26" in decided cases seeking voter data from blue states and filled the gap with commercially available voter rolls.
"What could go wrong with some sort of internet voter data thing?" he said.
Popok added that the DOJ used an unidentified artificial intelligence tool to close the gaps. "AI hallucinates," he said. "It sees things that aren't there. It puts in data that isn't real data to match the existing data because it thinks that's what you want."
Former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, who joined Popok on the show, argued the list was built less to stop votes before Election Day than to contest close races afterward.
"This is the one where it gets close and they're going to go to court and say, 'Your honor, we had a list of 20,000 people, a thousand people in this district and you have a thousand-vote margin. This election must be set aside,'" Aronberg said.
Aronberg, who called Boasberg "the judge that MAGA loves to hate," said the department owes the court an explanation. "You can't just drop an unverified spreadsheet into an election office like five days before an election and then demand tens of thousands of ballots be set aside and then refuse to show your math," he said.
Popok agreed, saying the election could prove "too big to rig and too big to fail."