All posts tagged "California"

A veteran Trump adversary heading into federal court to fight the administration's latest election push thinks he knows what's really rattling the president.

Norm Eisen, co-founder of Democracy Defenders Fund and a former House Judiciary Committee special counsel during Trump's first impeachment, wrote in The Contrarian on Saturday that record early turnout may explain what he called the Justice Department's election "freakout" in courts.

"What is causing this freakout in the courts? Perhaps it's early-voting numbers," Eisen asked....

A California sheriff rebuked by the state's highest court over a sweeping election move now wants someone else to cover the fallout.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, whose seizure of roughly 650,000 ballots was ruled "unlawful" by the California Supreme Court last month, is pushing the county to pick up the tab for his private legal defense, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

A representative for Bianco filed a claim last week seeking more than $10,000 in damages, contending the county owes him for attorneys' fees and expenses racked up across four civil cases that stemmed from his actions as sheriff....

A federal appeals court is moving at breakneck speed on the Trump Justice Department's bid to sideline thousands of mail ballots before Election Day.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday gave California and other defendants until noon Pacific time Saturday to respond to the department's emergency motion for an injunction pending appeal, according to a brief order signed by the court's clerk.

The department is asking the court to force California to set aside the mail ballots of more than 20,000 registered voters whom federal agencies flagged as likely noncitizens, keeping them out of the tally until each voter's citizenship is confirmed, as previously reported....

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department escalated its election showdown with California on Friday, giving local officials just 48 hours to set aside ballots from suspected noncitizen voters — or face legal action.

Federal prosecutors sent demand letters to county election officials across the state, according to a new report from the San Francisco Chronicle, which obtained one of the letters.

“BREAKING: In an escalation from the DOJ, prosecutors sent demand letters to individual registrars across California, giving them 48 hours to sequester the ballots of suspected noncitizen voters,” Chronicle politics editor Sara Libby wrote on X....

Former GOP strategist Amanda Carpenter argued in a Bulwark guest column that President Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to dispute a midterm loss, using pre-dawn voter-fraud arrests and eleventh-hour lawsuits.

Carpenter, who now writes for Protect Democracy, began with a Monday raid in Commerce, California. Before sunrise, armed agents surrounded the home of Omar Muñoz, 72, a lawful permanent resident from Belize, and marched him outside in his pajamas as a government film crew and invited press recorded it.

Muñoz, who is accused of illegally registering and voting, denies the allegations. His daughter said, “They’re trying to instill fear in society.”...

Bill Essayli, the Trump administration prosecutor spearheading the legal case against California's voter rolls, is probably not going to last in office long before he can prove any of the far-fetched voter fraud schemes he's trying to litigate, Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News wrote on Friday.

Klasfeld made his note in response to Essayli clashing with another legal expert, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, who wrote on X that "Once again @USAttyEssayli continues to SERIOUSLY misrepresent what is going on here. As the lawsuit HE filed makes clear, DHS and DOJ identified 20,000 people they *believe* are noncitizens on voter rolls. But they ADMIT that the federal government HAS NOT investigated further! x.com/TheJusticeDept…"

"That's not true," shot back Essayli. "The 20k represents the number of noncitizens confirmed by a review of federal databases. This has been confirmed by @USCIS and @HSI_HQ. The data has been provided to California, and they are free to check the work. But that suggests California is actually interested in complying with federal election laws."...