Trump's brutal tactic crashed into a wall — and his new strategy isn't faring any better

The November midterms will hand Trump his ass on a platter, so he is doing everything a fascist can do to stop them.

He reassigned the Director of National Intelligence — statutorily assigned to guard Americans from foreign threats — to oversee the seizure of Americans’ confidential voter data in Georgia.

He issued an executive order, laughable for its breadth, trying to mandate new voter registration and rules nationwide.

He is urging Republicans to both gerrymanderand “nationalize” federal elections, threatening to surround polling places with armed ICE goons.

After ICE killed two protesters in Minnesota, he tried to leverage the violence to obtain the state’s voter rolls. (Nice state you got there …)

Where brute physical force and intimidation won’t work, Trump is pushing the Department of Justice to fight for confidential voter rolls through the courts.

It’s not going so well.

Stolen election chorus

In multiple pending lawsuits, the Trump administration argues that it is entitled to access voters’ confidential information to “prevent the inclusion of ineligible voters” on states’ voting rolls. Using the ruse of a “stolen” 2020 election, the regime claims this litigation is designed to prevent “voter fraud” in upcoming elections.

The legal problem for Trump is that more than 60 judges in state and federal court, including judges appointed by Trump himself, have already examined all his theories and evidence and ruled that there was no voter fraud. Contrary to Trump’s obsession, it’s illegal and extremely rare for noncitizens to vote. The Brennan Center for Justice found just 30 incidents nationwide of suspected noncitizen voting in 2016 — or 0.0001 percent of votes cast.

That’s a formidable wall of evidence for Trump lawyers who value their law licenses to misrepresent in court.

Trump DOJ wants Social Security numbers

The Constitution says that states — not the federal government — are responsible for “the times, places and manner of holding elections.” Although Congress has limited power to make some rules, a president has no constitutional authority whatsoever over federal elections because the drafters knew a corrupt figure like Trump would eventually come along. They knew a charlatan president, if given any role at all, would use it to manipulate the process to stay in power.

Last summer, despite the glaring unconstitutionality of the move, Trump’s DOJ started requesting complete, un-redacted voter files from every state. Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi asserts her own statutory duty “to ensure States conduct voter registration list maintenance to prevent the inclusion of ineligible voters of any type on any state’s voter registration list.”

The DOJ is trying to sue the 20 states that told Trump to shove it.

Another smackdown

On Tuesday, in a 23-page opinion, another federal judge appointed by Trump told Trump’s DOJ lawyers to peddle their nonsense elsewhere.

Judge Hala Jarbou of the Western District of Michigan sided with the government of Michigan, ruling that the state was legally entitled to refuse Trump’s request for confidential voter data, including Social Security numbers, addresses and drivers license information, and dismissed the administration’s lawsuit.

The AG’s complaint in Michigan was carefully drafted to avoid any inference of partisan motive and instead focused on “data integrity.” In it, Bondi whined that states “submit dates of birth, driver’s license/ID card numbers, and Social Security numbers to ERIC, a voluntary democratic voter organization data base,” yet these same states refuse to give those same data to the federal government.

Bondi wonders why.

“Michigan provides the identical information that the Department has requested to ERIC, a private organization which lacks any enforcement authority, yet refuses to adhere to federal law and provide that same information to the Attorney General of the United States,” she wrote.

Why? Let’s let a federal judge in Oregon answer that question.

Strongarm tactics

In response to the Trump administration’s demand for confidential voter information in Oregon, Judge Mustafa Kasubhai said that the Trump administration, through its public statements and actions by the Justice Department, had forfeited any right to be trusted by the courts.

Kasubhai said the presumption that the DOJ “could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.”

Kasubhai focused on the letter Bondi sent to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota after federal agents killed two American citizens in January. Projecting Trump’s mob-boss mentality, Bondi said Walz could take “three simple steps” to restore order and stop federal agents’ violence in his state, including handing over Minnesota’s voter rolls.

Clearly disgusted, Kasubhai added that when the department claims “that any private and sensitive data will remain private and used only for a declared and limited purpose, it must be thoroughly scrutinized and squared with its open and public statements to the contrary.”

Let me in … cried the wolf

The DOJ’s complaint seeking voter rolls admits that, “Historically, elections in this country have been administered at the state and local level,” but adds that “the federal government can play a valuable [role] by assisting state and local government in modernizing their election systems.”

That explains it: Trump and Bondi are assisting us. They don’t want voters’ confidential data to feed Palantir’s national database. They only want to “modernize” Democratic-run voter rolls to help Democrats purge voters before November.

How magnanimous.

They must think we’re idiots.

• Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.