Photo: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
The U.S. Department of Justice is escalating its election integrity battle with California after state and Los Angeles County election officials refused to sequester the ballots of 20,000 people the DOJ has determined may be “likely noncitizens,” according to RedState.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta have continued to push back and issue warnings, even after Judge David Carter of the Central District of California, a Clinton appointee, ruled against the DOJ’s emergency motion on Wednesday. Newsom posted a warning to President Donald Trump on X, saying he was deploying election lawyers to key battleground districts and had made it a felony to illegally seize ballots.
In a 26-page order, Carter compared the federal effort to past efforts to keep black Americans or women from voting, and to Jim Crow-era measures such as “poll taxes.” At the end of the order, however, he wrote that there is “a clear remedy available,” noting that the United States can prosecute individuals under Section 611 and that California has procedures to cancel the registrations of anyone proven ineligible.
The DOJ appears to have taken the judge up on that. Reporter Ben Penn reported on X that the Justice Department had directed California’s U.S. attorneys to begin criminally subpoenaing state and local officials over their roles in allegedly unlawful voting.
According to a Bloomberg Law report cited in the article, Justice Department leadership directed top federal prosecutors in California to pursue grand jury subpoenas of officials regarding their roles administering allegedly illegal voting, citing people familiar with the situation. The report called the move “a major escalation” in the Trump administration’s pre-midterms push, and said an initial batch of subpoenas went out Thursday. It said the Los Angeles U.S. attorney’s office, led by Trump ally Bill Essayli, has been eager to investigate officials including California’s secretary of state.
The report said the pressure for subpoenas came shortly after the judge rejected the DOJ’s bid to force California to set aside up to 20,000 ballots. The names of those being targeted and the charges the department will pursue were not immediately known. RedState pointed to Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber as likely candidates, and Penn later posted that subpoenas had been issued and that the secretary of state was among the officials Essayli was expected to target.
Essayli, who serves as First Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, also responded Thursday evening to Bonta, who he said had called the DOJ’s list of noncitizens “garbage.” Essayli said Bonta should check his own voter rolls, claimed at least 20,000 suspected noncitizens are registered to vote in California, and said, “We have the receipts and presented them in court.”
