from the this-is-also-the-DOJ-saying-IT-can't-be-trusted dept

A last minute attempt to throw the midterm election into chaos failed. Leading up to this point, the signs were never good in the Magic 8 Ball way. The Trump administration wants people to believe California was overrun with non-citizen voters. The facts, however, refuse to comply with the narrative.

This particular ship has been sinking for a couple of weeks now. The DOJ delivered an accusation before it even delivered a list. It claimed — absolutely without facts in evidence — that there were at least 20,000 “illegal” voters in California. And by “illegal,” the administration definitely meant “brown people we’d like to expel from the country.”

California pushed back. First, it questioned the claim and received no definite answer. Then the administration reluctantly admitted — as it has in other states — that its first allegation may have been overstated. But rather than pull back and reassess, the DOJ went the other way.

I assure you that I am not making this next part up: it delivered a thumb drive containing a list of the 20,000 “illegal voters,” along with a password written on a Post-It note… you know, the way aging parents handle login info for their cable TV-provided email accounts.

Then the state sued the DOJ, right after the DOJ demanded California investigate each and every one of these 20,000 allegations within 48 hours of being thumb-drived. Other voters sued the DOJ as well, which set it up for the string of extremely speedy failures it recently experienced.

Things already looked bad for the DOJ when its DHS-aided raids in California resulted in the arrests of 28 “illegal” voters — this in a state that has 23 million registered voters. Not content with this failure, the DOJ then claimed California election officials just weren’t doing enough and demanded they do all the heavy lifting while the DOJ pursued its minuscule number of prosecutions.

With the mid-term election just a couple of days away, the courts moved speedily to handle this bullshit. As Chris Geidner reports, the first thing the DOJ did with the clock counting down to “FLIP EVERYTHING” time is shoot itself in the face while attempting to shoot itself in the foot:

A Justice Department lawyer on Monday admitted in court that it was “fair” to say that the Trump administration’s list of “likely noncitizen” voters has a high error rate.

The shocking admission from Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kao came in a hearing in a lawsuit brought last week by unions representing election workers and civil rights organizations over the Trump administration’s threatened prosecution of those election workers and other related conduct.

Yep, that’s the way the DOJ does business under Trump’s control: You fuck up until you’re forced to admit you’ve fucked up. Firings and forced resignations ensue. New sychophantic rubes are pressed into service. Rinse and repeat.

But what’s really enjoyable about this is how fast the DOJ (and the administration overseeing it) lost at every single level of the federal court system after making this admission. Geidner has reproduced the entire timeline, which is truly a sight to behold.

At 10:10 pm (ET), the federal court handling the lawsuit denied a request for a stay of its order. This led immediately to the administration running its election interference campaign to the next two levels of the court system, hoping against hope that at least one set of judges would give the DOJ permission to fuck with midterm elections in Calfornia. No dice.

[UPDATE, 4:00 p.m. ET November 3: After a flurry of activity in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since Judge Thompson denied DOJ’s motion for a stay of her TRO, a 6-5 limited en banc panel of the appeals court issued an order Tuesday that stays Thompson’s TRO pending the Justice Department’s appeal of it at the Ninth Circuit.]

[UPDATE, 6:15 p.m. ET November 3: The plaintiffs are seeking full court en banc review at the Ninth Circuit, arguing, “Federalism principles of the highest order, embedded in our Constitution, require correction of this erroneous decision by the full Court.”]

Meanwhile, the administration was trying to secure a parallel victory in the highest court in the land, pursuing its appeal of an earlier rejection of the DOJ’s lawsuit against California — one that demanded election officials “segregate” any ballots that might be related to the DOJ’s admittedly highly erroneous list of 20,000 voters.

The Supreme Court couldn’t be bothered. Its rejection failed to state if it was less than impressed with the administration’s lack of subtlety when it came to its own election-rigging efforts:

[Update, 6:05 p.m: The Supreme Court quickly rejected [Solicitor General John] Sauer’s request on Monday evening — before any opposition was even sought or filed… There were no noted dissents.]

So, if you’re following along and can read a clock, you’re seeing something rather remarkable: an administration being shut down by three consecutive levels of the federal court system in less than 24 hours.

And that means California doesn’t have to do any of the bullshit the DOJ demanded and then sued about. It also means the DOJ doesn’t actually have any illegal election dirt on 99.9999% of California’s voters and we wouldn’t be shocked at all if it doesn’t have any dirt on the 28 people it managed to round up during its statewide sweep.

Filed Under: dhs, doj, trump administration, voter suppression