This Is Not a Drill … Repeat … NOT a Drill

The Trump administration has launched a full-blown attack on the midterm elections in California. It’s the very thing that everyone has been worrying that Trump would do for more than a year and yet … it doesn’t feel like the totality of what’s happening has really sunk in or embedded itself in the national political conversation as we sit here 12 days out from the end of voting.

To recap for those just joining us, the Trump administration has used the false pretext of rampant noncitizen voting to:

• gin up criminal prosecutions nationwide against noncitizens for alleged voting-related crimes, with a special focus on California, where it rolled out a bunch of dubious new charges with high-profile arrests and official press conferences two weeks before the election;
• sue California to force it to segregate and not count mail-in ballots from alleged noncitizen voters until it undertakes some new, uncertain, and open-ended investigation into whether the voters are citizens;
• send federal agents door-to-door looking for noncitizen voters in what is at best a fishing expedition and at worst a campaign to terrorize and instill fear in potential voters in minority communities.

All of this happening — and I cannot emphasize it enough — while universal mail-in voting is already underway in California.

The various ways in which the Trump administration spent the past several months trying to monkey with the midterms — asserting unprecedented federal control over state-run federal elections, attempting to use the Postal Service to throttle mail-in ballot delivery, demanding access to voter rolls and individual voter information; marshaling federal databases in a purported effort to ferret out noncitizen voters; among other things — was merely a prelude to its open attack on the midterms now ongoing in California.

The breadth and persistence of those earlier efforts by the administration has probably dulled the senses a bit and made it harder to distinguish what it happening now as a more serious and immediate threat to free and fair elections. The other complicating factor is that the fight to fend off the administration’s attack in California stretches from coast to coast, making it harder for reporters to cover it as a single unified story and for the public to grasp the various tendrils.

There’s a major civil lawsuit underway in California and two separate important lawsuits in D.C. Plus the myriad criminal cases in California, which won’t be decided until after the election. At the same time, federal grand jury subpoenas are still outstanding that demand voter information from California election officials. And amidst all of that the Trump DOJ continues to actively threaten California election officials with prosecution if they don’t capitulate to administration demands.

None of this is normal.

None of this is how the Justice Department behaved in the run up to past elections — quite the opposite.

None of this is how to run an election.

Drilling Down Into the Details

I hope you’re still with me!

Above is the high level view of the battlefield. If you only take away that broad impression, it’s all good.

But of course, I want to dig down into all the specifics and give you updates on each front in this battle so you know exactly what you need to follow this closely. I’ll still try to keep it manageable in these next few items.

More Threats From the Trump DOJ

I hadn’t zeroed in on this until yesterday, but in the litigation between the Trump DOJ and California, it emerged that acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, the No. 2 official, sent another letter last Friday containing an array of new threats against California election officials:

The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant. Noncitizen voting in a federal election is a federal crime—and knowingly facilitating such conduct is equally unlawful. Under 18 U.S.C. § 611(a), noncitizens are prohibited from voting in any election involving federal offices. Under 18 USC. § 2, anyone who aids, abets, ‘counsels, induces, or procures the commission of a federal offense is equally liable. If persons: knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors: to a federal crime.

…

Administrative difficulty is not a defense to violating federal law or aiding or abetting a federal offense.

The Department strongly urges the County and the SOS to reconsider their positions before taking actions that risk significant federal scrutiny and legal exposure.

As California subsequently told a court, election officials are being asked to conduct the midterm elections under the threat of criminal prosecution from the federal government.

DOJ Is Running Out of Time

In the main case in California, where the Trump DOJ is suing to force California to segregate and not count mail-in ballots from alleged noncitizen voters, both sides are seeking quick rulings.

• The Trump DOJ wants a TRO issued by noon PT today.
• For now, the federal judge has set a hearing on the Trump DOJ’s TRO request for next Tuesday, Oct. 27. (The judge set this hearing before the Trump DOJ asked for a ruling by noon today.)
• California and its election officials want a hearing on their motion to dismiss the federal case no later than Oct. 30 so they can count ballots unfettered.

With voting ending in 12 days, the timeframes are tight under every scenario. But they’re slightly tighter for the Trump DOJ, assuming it wants to get this case to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture before Election Day, a fair assumption.

Meanwhile, in D.C. Federal Court …

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg is overseeing two separate but related cases that are challenging more broadly aspects of the Trump administration’s attack on the midterm elections. As of yesterday, Judge Boasberg put one of those cases on an expedited pre-election timeline similar to the California case. The other case, just filed on Tuesday, isn’t moving as quickly yet, but it may.

I’m sparing you details on these cases until they ripen a bit more.

Judge Halts DHS Voter Fraud Ops

In yet another case, a federal judge in California blocked DHS from carrying out field operations focused on uncovering voter fraud in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. The order is to remain in place until the polls close on Nov. 3.

The judge was most concerned with U.S. citizens getting swept up in and being intimidated by the DHS field ops, so she blocked ops when they are “likely to involve” people who DHS agents “know, suspect, or should reasonably know or suspect are U.S. citizens.”

That leaves some wiggle room for DHS to exploit.

The judge’s ruling came the same day that CBS News reported that armed and uniformed DHS agents have have been knocking on doors in several states to ask residents about their immigration status, in an operation that ramped up beginning in September.

“[T]he public’s interest in safe elections, free from interference or intimidation, far exceed Defendants’ purported interest in combating unlawful voting by non-U.S. citizens,” U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin wrote.

A Final Point

While the California battlefront is the most urgent and pressing threat to the midterms, I would still assess as low the Trump administration’s chances of ultimately prevailing in court. But that doesn’t mean it can’t win. And even more importantly, the fight itself is part of the point and is doing real damage right now by actually interfering in an ongoing election.

Third Country Removal Update

Updates on a couple of the most egregious third country removals that I’ve mentioned over the last couple of months:

• Ghana/Togo/Nigeria: A federal judge in California has confirmed that a wrongfully deported Nigerian national is back in the United States after she ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return. Etinosa Osahon — who was legally barred from being deported to Nigeria because he had already been tortured twice there and was at risk of future torture — was wrongfully deported in May to Ghana, which promptly attempted to transfer him to Nigeria. He refused to continue on the overland journey and was dumped en route in Togo, where he had remained in hiding.
• Equatorial Guinea: A federal judge in Arizona who ordered the Trump administration on Oct. 6 to facilitate the return of an Egyptian national who had been deported to Equatorial Guinea ratcheted up the pressure on the administration to act more quickly to abide by his original order. The new order comes after Gillian Brockell reported that an ICE deportation flight was scheduled to arrive in Equatorial Guinea today but still not retrieve Ahmed Soliman, whose health is reportedly rapidly deteriorating.

The Retribution: Free Press Edition

Two new developments in the Trump White House’s attack on a free press:

• In a retaliatory move, the Trump White House removed Andrew Feinberg, the reporter whom it derided earlier this week as a “Mongoloid moron,” from the out-of-town print pool for President Trump’s trip to Iowa today.
• In an extraordinary letter, a White House lawyer demanded that Politico retract a series of palace intrigue stories on Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, concluding his letter with this not-at-all-veiled retaliatory threat:

I therefore demand that Politico immediately correct or retract these publications, issue a prominent and public apology to the President of the United States and to Ms. Wiles, and remove the false reporting from your digital archives. Failure to do so or otherwise respond justifying Politico’s publications within 48 hours will prompt an immediate review of Politico’s relationship with the White House, and, of course, consideration of all other appropriate and available legal remedies.

Hegseth Broke Eisenhower’s Globe

The WaPo, with a metaphor for our time: Hegseth wanted Eisenhower’s globe for his office. His staff broke it.

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That Didn’t Take Long

The top election official in Los Angeles County has done a preliminary review of the Trump DOJ’s purported list of alleged noncitizen voters and found it to be … shoddy. Surprising absolutely no one.

Out of DOJ’s list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters in California, more than 7,000 had Los Angeles County addresses. Dean C. Logan’s office took a sample of 200 of those L.A. voters and found that 1/4 may have been born in the United States, nearly 1/2 were cancelled or inactive voters, and nearly 3/4 had never voted, according to a new court filing:

It’s critically important to frame this properly: Election administrators must always balance making sure ineligible voters don’t vote with assuring that eligible voters aren’t wrongfully denied their right to vote. Make voting rules and regulations too strict and the risk goes up of excluding legitimate voters and not counting their votes.

It’s a balance that Trump and Republicans refuse to strike in their jihad to vilify noncitizen voters and elevate a vanishingly small problem into a reason to distrust election results. It’s telling that they voice more apparent concern about what they call “vote dilution” by noncitizen voting than they do about outright denying U.S. citizens the right to vote and have their vote counted.

In the California case, the shoddy list makes even more stark the incredible demand the Trump administration is suing to impose on the state. It wants California — with voting already underway — to introduce new additional steps into the vote tabulation process: review DOJ’s crap list, segregate all the ballots cast by people on that list, and run a real-time review to confirm whether those voters are citizens. Then — and only then — can California count those ballots.

Note on whom the burden falls here: The Trump administration can supply a flawed and unreliable list, then California — while already conducting a live election — has to run around and jump through the extra hoops that the administration has created for it.

Here’s how a top Los Angeles County election official put it in her own declaration in the case:

Because the County results must be submitted by December 3, 2026, and certified by the State by December 11, 2026, ballots held pending an open-ended federal review may, in practical effect, never be counted. This process would risk disenfranchising voters who are validly registered. The process the DOJ seeks to have the Registrar undertake jeopardizes that core right for potentially thousands of voters, not to mention the finalization of election results, confidence in election results, and the ability to allow new elected officials to be instated in their positions.

I should mention that the administration has offered to “help” California and work together in cooperative fashion to vet the administration’s crappy list, but it’s too precious an offer to need its own debunking:

“We’re not perfect and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said in a Monday press conference, anticipating exactly what happened yesterday. “These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are noncitizens.”

“Kind of the most confident.”

You get it.

Dems Sue Trump for Election Interference

Various Democratic entities filed a new federal lawsuit in D.C. to try to block the worst of President Trump’s attacks on the midterm elections, including his demands to purge voter rolls and not count ballots, his threats against election officials, and his interference in state-run elections:

The Corruption: $50M Woman Edition

Where to even start with this?

The recently remarried Alina Habba, who now goes by Alina Mildon, landed a guaranteed $50 million deal to serve as general counsel of a brand new corporate entity tied to Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini, the NYT reports. Among the lowlights:

• The company — Concord Partners, LLC — was formed in Florida on Oct. 22, 2025 by Isabela Herrera, 27, the billionaire’s daughter and a U.S citizen.
• The deal was for $10 million a year for four years, plus bonuses, bringing the total guaranteed compensation to $50 million.
• Mildon “finalized the deal” while she was still the acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
• Mildon’s start date was Jan. 1, 2026. By then, Mildon was a senior adviser to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the role she took after being disqualified as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
• President Trump pardoned Julio Herrera Velutini on Jan. 15, 2026.

Mildon denies having any role in the pardon.

The timing of this revelation may be connected to the epic ongoing feud between Mildon and Ric Grenell that has produced a sleazefest of competing allegations of off-the-charts corruption.

Russia’s Failed Attack on Germany

This still hasn’t broken through in the U.S., but over the summer, Russia intelligence launched a drone attack on a cargo plane carrying military assistance to Ukraine while it was parked at an airport in eastern Germany. It was the most dramatic of Putin’s provocations against NATO countries which have been on an uptick since that failed attack.

The WSJ offers a comprehensive overview of that incident and its significance:

The attack was part of a broader effort to position agents, explosives and weapons across Europe to strike targets supporting Ukraine and sow chaos that could strengthen political opposition to military aid for Kyiv, according to investigators and intelligence officials.

Investigators have uncovered networks smuggling explosives, drones and weapons into the EU, along with safe houses and concealed underground caches near airports, arms manufacturers and other potential targets.

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about whether World War III is already underway. I think that’s overdetermined, but it’s also true that we probably won’t notice until we’re deep into it.

‘Mongoloid Moron’

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg writes about being targeted by President Trump as a “Mongoloid Moron” in the Oval Office yesterday — an outburst that the White House happily touted on social media.

Who Gets to Define We the People?

Jamelle Bouie: “[T]he drive to denaturalize Omar is, by itself, a startling attack on the liberty of all Americans. It’s a move that harks back to the worst of the nation’s past — those moments when the government sought to shape, define and ultimately choose who would be ‘the people’ of the United States.”

The Most Rancid Racism

In the racist rants of President Trump and his enablers, Somali Americans are both primitives who eat your pets and ingrates who are undeservedly “living the high life” at your expense:

Stephen Miller claims Somali-Americans in Minnesota are "buying Mercedes, buying BMWs, they buy a nice house, all their kids fly first class all over the world"(This is a lie!)

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T18:37:16.369Z

The only consistency is the rancid appeal to every base human emotion.

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Open and Ongoing Ratfuckery

The Trump DOJ — corruptly deployed by the White House as an unprecedented election interference tool — sure is getting the headlines it wants from its campaign to prosecute alleged noncitizen voting while the midterm elections are already underway:

• NYT: Justice Dept. Charges 28 in California With Voting-Related Crimes
• AP: Justice Department arrests more than 2 dozen in California sweep targeting alleged noncitizen voters
• NPR: DOJ charges 28 in California with voting crimes as election tensions escalate

Even though those stories include the usual caveats — about the rarity of noncitizen voting, Trump’s track record of inflating the risks thereof, and the administration’s disinformation campaign targeting the election — the top-line news remains arrests and prosecutions.

DOJ says it has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting and illegal registration offenses over the last seven weeks. 

The timing is no accident, of course.

Rolling out alleged noncitizen voting prosecutions right before the election instills fear in Black and brown communities, may dampen voter turnout, provides a ready-made excuse for GOP losses, serves as a pretext for challenging/delegitimizing the election results, and generally is a brazen display of ratfuckery.

The DOJ has not been discreet or muted in its approach. It has issued press releases touting its noncitizen voting prosecutions that contain photos of the defendants (albeit with their faces digitally obscured). Yesterday, acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter held a press conference in California — where mail-in voting is already underway — to announce the 28 new prosecutions there, which DOJ has dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”

The arrests weren’t low-key either. The wife of a 72-year-old man from Belize said federal agents showed up at their house before dawn in full tactical gear with guns drawn — along with camera crews and news helicopters. He later appeared in court still in his pajamas. He is reportedly a registered Republican.

The timing is especially glaring because some of the new alleged noncitizen voting cases go back years, to 2020 and earlier. A couple of the new California cases allege fraudulent voter registration as far back as 2002 and 2003. Some of the cases don’t even allege illegal voting per se, but rather making false statements on naturalization paperwork. One lawful permanent resident charged in North Carolina has been in the United States for so long that DOJ identifies her as a “national of former Yugoslavia.”

Why The Timing Is Extra Pernicious

But the timing isn’t accidental for another reason: Bringing these cases so late in the cycle leaves no time to test these allegations in court before the election. If the cases later fall apart, if they’re dismissed, if they result in acquittals, then … too bad, so sad.

The attempted prosecutions will have served their election disinformation purposes, and there’s no way to roll back the clock and undo the damage.

There are already early signs that some of the new prosecutions in California are flimsy. Some of the newly charged immigrants said they had no memory of ever registering to vote, the LA Times reported:

At the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles late Monday, several green card holders arrested in a crackdown on alleged California voter fraud expressed confusion over the charges — with some saying they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.

Among them was Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach as a lawful permanent resident. Federal authorities accused her Monday of fraudulently registering to vote in July 2006 and then lying about it in her naturalization paperwork in March 2026.

Domínguez said she did not have any memory of registering to vote.

Another man accused of the same crimes as Domínguez said the same: He wasn’t aware of ever registering to vote, as federal prosecutors claimed he had.

It’s not uncommon for noncitizens to end up being unknowingly registered to vote during previous interactions with the government. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law,” election law expert Rich Hasen noted.

DOJ’s One-Two California Punch

The new round of criminal cases is happening in parallel with the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit against California trying to force it to segregate and not count alleged noncitizen mail-in ballots — again, while voting is already happening.

The administration continues to try to ratchet up pressure on California election officials. In a letter Friday, the DOJ reportedly warned that state election officials who knowingly process ballots cast by noncitizen voters are at risk of investigation.

In a striking admission, acting DAG McCotter, the DOJ’s No. 2, conceded yesterday that the list of some 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters that the administration is demanding California use to segregate ballots may contain some citizens:

WOW. Trump’s #2 at DOJ just admitted this:“There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect.”

— Governor Newsom Press Office (@govpressoffice.gov.ca.gov) 2026-10-19T18:25:27.311Z

Ultimately, the most pernicious aspect of this campaign against the phantom scourge of noncitizen voting is the risk that the administration’s sloppiness, indifference, and aggressiveness results in legally cast ballots from U.S. citizens not being counted.

In a 180-degree turn, the Justice Department has gone from its historic role of protecting and defending the individual right to vote to being the leading threat to free and fair elections.

Why California?

I remain puzzled why so much of the Trump administration’s election-interference and disinformation campaign is focused on California. The electoral math doesn’t add up. Thoughts?

Good Read

ProPublica:

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request. 

This scheme appears to have never gotten off the ground.

Just In …

WaPo: A small group of about 10 current and former U.S. national security officials with DoD experience has been discreetly advising state governments and members of Congress on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in November’s midterm elections.

Quote of the Day

“Our number one risk at this point is the federal government.”—Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) on the biggest threat to free and fair elections

Pure Unadulterated Racism

Trump: "You go up to Minnesota — number one place in the entire country for the sale of Mercedes-Benz. And Somalians are buying them. They come here with low IQs and no money and they get rich. Do we feel stupid? Our fraud division is getting them all."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T00:27:21.787Z

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Trump Calls Judge ‘Crazed Lunatic’

Over the past week, the East Potomac Park case has morphed from another of President Trump’s personalist projects in D.C. to a burgeoning confrontation between the executive and judicial branches.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes had, by her own admission, bent over backwards to accommodate the Trump administration as it defended its supposedly nascent plan to remake a popular park in the heart of monumental D.C.

But then — in violation of her orders that the administration provide advanced notice and a chance for the court to intervene before undertaking any major projects in the park — the National Park Service removed hundreds of trees from the park’s golf course after providing scant notice just before 5:00 p.m. ET on a Friday before a holiday weekend.

That led to a fiery hearing in front of Reyes on Columbus Day in which she deplored the conduct of the administration and its DOJ attorneys. The hearing culminated with Reyes temporarily blocking any more tree removals at the park.

In the kind of self-defeating move that’s become common in cases where Trump has taken a close personal interest, the Trump DOJ responded to the courtroom woodshedding with a defiant motion on Friday evening calling on Judge Reyes to step aside from the case.

The motion to disqualify was over the top, accusing her of “histrionics,” “bias,” “disdain,” “open hostility,” and “animosity” toward the Trump administration in this and other cases.

The motion was signed by a single attorney: Stanley E. Woodward, Jr., the No. 3 official at DOJ.

Judge Reyes last night denied the motion to disqualify herself but not before eviscerating the Justice Department again: “That is a serious charge. The Court answers it. With the record.”

With that prelude, Judge Reyes spooled out pages of transcripts from prior proceedings in the case that rebutted the administration’s claims against her, before concluding:

It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion. But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record. By any objective measure, the Government fails to meet the standard for recusal.

But things didn’t stop there.

Trump announced over the weekend that he plans to begin work on remaking the park on Nov. 15, closing it for 15 months. So much for Trump’s plans being nascent, as the administration had insisted for months. Judge Reyes took judicial notice of Trump’s post on Sunday and asked if it changed the administration’s prior position in the case:

The Court ORDERS that the Government notify it, by 8:00 p.m. today, whether it continues to take the position that it took in its October 16, 2026, filing, that, “there is no final agency action” and that “at most [] the President has given preliminary thought to” the plan to rebuild East Potomac Golf Course.

In its response — signed again only by Associate Attorney General Woodward — the administration insisted nothing had changed.

Then came this morning’s pre-dawn tirade from President Trump in which he called Judge Reyes a “crazed lunatic.”

Another hearing in the case is underway this morning on whether to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s plan. In her Sunday order, Reyes upped the ante by requiring Woodward and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert N. Stander to appear in person at today’s hearing.

Stay tuned …

We Can Afford to Have Nice Things

Until the open clash between Trump and Judge Reyes, I’d hesitated to cover the East Potomac Park case for a national audience because in some ways it’s a parochial D.C. issue and not of the same import as, say, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, the blight of the Trump Triumphal Arch, the renamings of the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Peace, or the unspeakable painting of the intricate exterior of the grand Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

But there’s more going on here than a threat to one public golf course.

For those not familiar, it should be noted that while the public golf course within the historic park is at the center of the dispute, the identity, public use, and access to the park as a whole is at stake. The park features a heavily used paved waterfront loop for walkers, runners, and cyclists. It has a playground and picnic area. People fish, enjoy the views of the D.C. core and northern Virginia, and watch planes taking off and landing from DCA.

The park was created for the public by Congress in the late 19th century and then was built using fill on the tidal mud flats of the Potomac. The low-cost golf course, like two other public courses in D.C. on National Park Service land, has always catered to a broad clientele, trying to keep the sport accessible.

What makes this a national story beyond the clash with Judge Reyes is that the narrowing of public spaces is happening in parallel with the shrinkage of civic life under Trump. The concern is that Trump’s plan would make the golf course more exclusive and less accessible. It would alter the public nature of the park as it has existed for more than 100 years.

Must See

Let me join the chorus of reviewers urging you to go see Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything.” It’s among the smartest documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I came to it unfamiliar with Fielder’s previous work and with only passing Wikipedia-level familiarity with the Theranos scandal.

If you’re a Theranos obsessive, you may come away disappointed. It’s not a Theranos documentary. It’s a psychological profile of Elizabeth Homes and of her romantic partner Billy Evans. While it may be tempting to make a judgment on Holmes’ culpability in the Theranos scandal based on Fielder’s work — and audiences probably come out of theaters chatting about exactly that — it would be a mistake.

The Theranos fraud, while inextricably woven into the documentary, exists separate and apart from it. Trials and depositions and financial filings and good investigative reporting already explore the fraud itself in great detail. This isn’t that. (If you feel the strong need for a villain in the documentary, Billy more than fills that role on his own — even though he had nothing to do with Theranos and didn’t first meet Holmes until after the company’s collapse.)

What really sets Fielder’s documentary apart is its acute self-awareness. It grapples openly with the range of challenges that confront documentarians and storytellers: the limits of objectivity, the nature of truth, the intrusive role of the observer, the inevitability of bias, the constraints of narrative forms. I’m barely even getting started. There’s a lot going on.

Fielder inoculates himself against the most obvious criticisms by confronting them as part of the story he’s telling. It gets super meta at times, but it doesn’t lose the thread of the story. I can’t say much more than that without spoiling it for you.

If you’re comfortable with uncertainty, bask in nuance, enjoy the challenge of juggling competing explanations, and can tolerate not having everything reduced to a single “answer,” you’ll delight in this artwork.

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Do You Get Morning Memo Via Email?

Beginning next week, we’re going to be using a new email provider to send out Morning Memo each day. If you already receive Morning Memo by email, you don’t need to do a thing. Morning Memo will still come to you the same as usual, but directly from TPM instead of from Substack. You’ll still be able to read Morning Memo in the email version or on Substack or at TPM.

Trump DOJ Sues California

I’ve had my hair on fire the last three days on the Trump administration’s unprecedented new interference in the midterm elections because it represents a high water mark in its effort to intrude in state-run elections.

Sequestering and not counting already-cast ballots — on the dubious grounds that the Trump administration has identified alleged noncitizens who received mail-in ballots — is a dramatic escalation of its month-long attack on state-run federal elections. (It also fits perfectly into the thematics of a GOP campaign largely being run on racist and xenophobic themes in the absence of any affirmative arguments for more of the same.)

But we haven’t really talked about the administration’s end game here, which has now become a little more clear.

At this stage, the administration doesn’t appear to be advancing a strategy to tilt the outcomes in particular elections by disqualifying a significant number of ballots or by suppressing the overall vote. Even if that was its goal, the numbers involved at this point just aren’t big enough.

We learned yesterday in the lawsuit that the Trump DOJ filed against California that its list of “likely noncitizen voters” contained in the vicinity of 20,000 names. I had assumed that the DOJ list was specific to Los Angeles County since acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent his list on an encrypted thumb drive (along with a sticky note containing the password). But the lawsuit says the 20,000 names is a statewide list — “with many addresses listed in Los Angeles County.” (That’s down a wee bit from the 190,000 noncitizen voters that the Trump administration previously claimed California had.)

Even if you account for the atmospherics of the DOJ suing to weed out alleged noncitizen voters having some dampening effect on minority voter turnout, the number of alleged noncitizen voters aren’t anywhere near big enough to have either a significant or predictably pro-GOP effect on election outcomes in California.

So what does that leave as plausible goals for the administration?

Goal #1: Get a federal court somewhere to rule that the law provides a role for the federal government in making sure noncitizens don’t vote

Given what the law says, including the Constitution, legal experts insist it’s a long-shot bid. But it’s a gambit with a high upside and not much political downside. You don’t make shots you don’t take, etc.

That being said, I’m struggling with why the Trump DOJ would pick California as the venue for this gambit versus a reliably red state in a federal circuit that is more obviously MAGA-tilted than the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California.

(For what it’s worth, the Trump DOJ is trying to get the California case in front of the Trump-appointed judge who presided over Hunter Biden’s tax fraud conviction, arguing that this case is related to an election case he’s already hearing. But there’s nothing about U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi that marks him as a radical MAGA-coded judge. Already fighting back, California wants the case assigned to a Clinton-appointed judge who is already hearing a election case that it claims is more related than Scarsi’s is.)

Ultimately prevailing in the California lawsuit — or in yet-to-be-filed cases in other states — would open the door wide to the Trump administration being able to intervene in the election in much more robust ways under the guise of policing the virtually nonexistent problem of noncitizen voting.

But with less than three weeks until voting ends, it might make more sense to view this as a long-term bid with bigger potential impacts coming after the 2026 election — except in one regard, which brings us to the next goal.

Goal #1A: Create election chaos

In the short term, with Republicans almost certain to lose the House and the Senate increasingly at risk, sowing chaos has mostly upside for the GOP. In that sense, the California lawsuit is less a legal strategy than a political one.

Noncitizen voting is the Big Lie of 2026, so think of this as a prelude to a post-election refusal to accept the results, fights over close individual races, and desperate attempts to salvage a majority in either chamber. Conflicting court rulings, emergency appeals, and a last-ditch bid to get the Supreme Court to decide the election somehow all gin up a crisis atmosphere that’s then used to justify extraordinary interventions of one form or another.

The point isn’t to fear-monger here, but just to note that chaos favors the sure loser desperate to do anything to avoid their fate.

Goal #2: Delegitimizing a Democratic win

Regardless of the outcome of the California lawsuit, the Big Lie of noncitizen voting will inevitably be sustained past the election into the new Congress — as a GOP hand-wave to minimize its own losses, dismiss the Democratic mandate, resist a post-election narrative of MAGA’s demise — and soothe the wounded ego of a certain former reality TV star.

The lawsuit in California helps to fortify that rhetorical argument, even if the Trump DOJ ultimately loses. Time and again, MAGA has seized on setbacks and losses as proof of is own victimhood.

One caveat to all of the above: California may not be the only place that the Trump DOJ decides to do battle on noncitizen voting while voting is underway. It laid the same groundwork in some two dozen states as it did in California by requesting voter information over the past several months in its pursuit of the mythic noncitizen voter, ultimately losing repeatedly in court. If you see evidence of this happening in other states, please let me know. My contact info is linked at the bottom of this post.

Quote of the Day

Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times:

And now the Trump administration is attempting to strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, of her citizenship so as to deport her. This is more than just another persecution of one of Trump’s political enemies. Rather, his government is tacitly declaring the citizenship of all foreign-born people provisional, their Americanness something that can be revoked. It’s a frontal attack on the idea of constitutional equality.

Uneven Playing Field Alert

Your occasional reminder that U.S. elections are, by law, tilted in favor of monied interests to a greater extent than at any point since at least the Gilded Age:

• NYT: Avalanche of G.O.P. Cash Keeps the Party Competitive Despite Its Problems
• Politico: Megadonors are powering Republicans’ spending advantage
• NYT: Most of Ken Paxton’s Money Can Be Traced to One Man: Elon Musk

See You Back Here Monday

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News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

A Quick Heads Up

For transparency reasons, I like peeling back the curtain on any changes we make to Morning Memo — but doing so always runs the risk of creating some confusion. So let me be really clear upfront: The change I’m about to mention doesn’t require you to do anything differently on your end.

Beginning next week, we’re going to be using a new email provider to send out Morning Memo each day. If you already receive Morning Memo by email, it will still come to you the same as usual, but it will come directly from TPM instead of from Substack. It might look a tad different in your inbox — and the email itself will look more like TPM — so I wanted you to be aware in advance.

You’ll still be able to read Morning Memo in the email version or on Substack or at TPM. Your choice.

We’re making this change because in this deeply fractured media world, we’re trying to build out the TPM ecosystem and not be overly reliant on outside platforms. Better to live and die on our own merits than be subject to the vagaries of third parties.

OK, let’s get to today’s news.

A Hugely Important Distinction

As I feared, the developing story on the Trump DOJ targeting actual ballots in Los Angeles County is creating some confusion.

I tried in yesterday’s Morning Memo to make clear that this was different in kind and degree from the Trump administration’s previous efforts to purge voter rolls in advance of the election. But the reactions I’ve seen since, both to what I wrote and in the larger coverage, suggest that’s still not coming across entirely clearly.

Ironically, the Trump DOJ turns out to be helpful in this regard because it’s now admitted to NBC News that this is in fact different from a purge of voter rolls: “A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list.”

Now, the Trump DOJ has its own reasons for making that distinction, among them trying to get around the federal statute that bars the mass purging of voter rolls in the 90 days before the election. But in this instance what the Trump DOJ is saying also happens to be true — and the truth is even more damning. Its election interference is no longer hypothetical; it’s happening now while real ballots are being cast.

Once you make the category distinction between voter rolls and actual ballots already cast or soon to be cast, the seriousness of the threat from the federal government becomes a lot more obvious. The Trump DOJ is demanding that a specific batch of ballots be sequestered and not counted until citizenship is confirmed — an additional step in the tabulation process not provided for by law and which experts say would lead to a rushed and sloppy process that likely to disenfranchise legal voters.

The threat is serious even if the Trump DOJ is unable to cite any lawful authority for its demand to California and even if there is no legal basis for it to order states to sequester ballots of people the Trump DOJ claims to have identified as “likely noncitizen voters.”

With that framework in mind, let’s run through the latest developments and the big questions still outstanding …

The Latest From California …

• READ: The Oct. 13 demand letter that acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter (the No. 2 official at DOJ!) sent to California Secretary ‌of State Shirley Weber.
• READ: McCotter sent a virtually identical letter to Dean Logan, the top election official in Los Angeles County.
• A “Sticky Note”!?! In a statement, Secretary ‌of State Weber revealed that the “password-protected thumb drive” containing the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” that McCotter references in his letters was accompanied by … wait for it … a sticky note with the password on it. Top notch information security going on there at the Trump DOJ.
• Say More About “Election Integrity”: Popping an unsecured thumb drive (see sticky note above) into a USB port in your election office is just not something election administrators not named Tina Peters would dream of doing. “We have not accessed the drive because doing so would conflict with established data privacy and information security protocols,” Logan, the Los Angeles County election official, said in a statement. “We do not consider the device a secure medium.” This is not the first time that the “election integrity” crowd has revealed how little regard it has for actual secure processes and procedures.

JUST IN: Trump DOJ List Challenged in Court

This morning, the UCLA Voting Rights Project, on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and a Los Angeles resident, sought a temporary restraining order to preempt the Trump DOJ’s actions in California.

The requested TRO, filed in an existing case in D.C. against Attorney General Todd Blanche and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, seeks to block the Trump DOJ from coercing California officials into using its purported list of “likely noncitizen voters” to withhold ballots from voters or to segregate and not count ballots already cast.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan did not immediately scheduled a hearing on the TRO but set a deadline of 5 p.m. ET Friday for the parties to file a proposed briefing schedule.

What We Still Don’t Know

The big outstanding questions include:

• How many people are on the Trump DOJ list? Since McCotter doesn’t say in his letters and California officials haven’t even opened the file, we don’t know how long the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” actually is. A DOJ spokesperson allowed to the LA Times that the number is “in the thousands.” That’s a pretty big range.
• Did all or just some California counties receive a similar letter from the Trump DOJ? Similar letters were mailed out to other California counties, CBS News reports, but it’s not clear if it went to all or just some of them.
• Has the Trump DOJ targeted other states with similar demand letters? While the thrust of the Trump DOJ’s election-chaos has been aimed at blue states, there are tight House races in red states, too, where chaos might serve to delegitimize election results unfavorable to the GOP. Also worth noting that red state officials might be cooperative and not as quick to go public as California officials were.

If you know of similar efforts by the Trump DOJ in other states, please get in touch with me via the encrypted methods here.

‘Amateur Hour at the Department of Justice’

UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen, in a not-so-succinct headline: “DOJ’s Threat Letter to California Voting Officials with a 48-Hour Deadline is Amateurish Political Theater Aimed at Sowing Chaos, Not to Mention a Demand That Likely Violates Federal Law and Election Security Practices”

The Retribution: Ilhan Omar Edition

The one-two punch of retributive investigations of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by both the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice is looking worse the more that comes out:

• Denaturalization Is Trump’s Goal: The WSJ confirms that the investigation of Omar is “aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her.”
• Flashback: D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who touted her office’s role in the DOJ investigation of Omar during a Fox News appearance this week, was suspended by the same network in 2019, when she hosted a show there, for on-air comments about Omar: “Omar wears a hijab, which, according to the Quran 33:59, tells women to cover so they won’t get molested.” Pirro said at the time. “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”
• Speech or Debate Clause: U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh of D.C. did in fact limit the scope of the search warrant for Omar’s D.C. home after a protracted back and forth, CNN reports. In doing so, Sharbaugh reportedly cited precedent that preserves the protections for member of Congress contained in the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Nonetheless, Omar’s phone was among the items seized during the search of her home, NBC News reports.

Trump: Execute the Leakers

Trump: "In my opinion, leakers should be shot. In the old days we used to shoot leakers."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-10-14T21:35:22.772Z

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What Election Officials Have Long Feared

In a major escalation of its multi-prong attempts to interfere in the midterm elections, the Trump DOJ has given California 48 hours to take steps to prevent an unknown number of alleged noncitizen voters in Los Angeles County from voting — or face legal action, Reuters exclusively reports.

This new Trump DOJ initiative is different from its earlier, largely unsuccessful efforts to obtain voter information from various states. Instead, it is now demanding that Los Angeles County take affirmative steps to prevent the counting of ballots cast by people on a list provided by DOJ who it alleges are “likely noncitizen voters” who received mail-in ballots.

The Trump DOJ’s demands came in the form of a threat letter Tuesday to California Secretary ‌of State Shirley Weber from acting Deputy Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter — an extraordinary intervention by the department’s No. 2 official.

The existence of the letter was confirmed by the Justice Department. It’s not clear how DOJ came up with its list, which was provided to Los Angeles County on a “password-protected thumb drive.” Past attempts by the Trump administration to identify noncitizens who are allegedly registered to vote have been deeply flawed and wildly inaccurate.

In the letter, McCotter sets an arbitrary 48-hour deadline for California to review the DOJ list, but the more alarming development is what other steps McCotter demands that California take, according to Reuters:

• refuse to send ballots to people who appear on the DOJ list until their citizenship status has been confirmed;
• segregate the mail-in ballots already returned by people who appear on the DOJ list;
• don’t count the mail-in ballots of those on the DOJ list until their citizenship status has been confirmed.

These are the most aggressive steps the Trump administration has taken in its jihad against mythical noncitizen voting, which it greatly exaggerates as a pretext for the federal takeover of elections, the delegitimization of free and fair elections, and the disregard of election results that it disfavors.

“Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” McCotter wrote in the letter, echoing one element of the Trump administration’s long-running disinformation campaign. McCotter threatened to seek emergency relief in court if California does not comply with his demands.

The latest move — challenging entire batches of ballots and threatening to go to court unless Los Angeles County undertakes specific steps in its handling of the election — comes as the election in California is already underway. Mail-in ballots were sent out to every voter in the state beginning on Oct. 5, the same day that ballot drop-off centers opened statewide.

This is the kind of Trump administration interference that election officials nationwide have been dreading and planning for this entire election cycle. The executive branch has no constitutional role in the conduct of federal elections, which is delegated to the states.

It’s not yet clear if the Trump DOJ sent similar demand letters to election officials in other states.

Essayli Likely to be Booted As LA USA

In another blow to President Trump’s U.S. attorneys scheme in blue states, a federal judge appears poised to disqualify Bill Essayli as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bloomberg reports.

Essayli was already disqualified by the court from serving as acting U.S. attorney, but the Trump DOJ tried to sidestep that ruling by making Essayli the first assistant U.S. attorney — with all the powers to run the office.

But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a similar case in Nevada, ruled that first assistants assume the power of the U.S. attorney only if they were already installed when the office was vacated.

Not Just DHS — DOJ Targets Rep. Omar, Too

D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is stumbling all over herself to get in on the targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by the Trump administration.

The day after DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant on Omar’s D.C. home in a what appears to be a bogus investigation into how her late father obtained naturalized U.S. citizenship, Pirro went on Fox News to declare that Omar is under separate DOJ investigation over her financial disclosure forms.

The public announcement of a criminal investigation by Pirro would be highly irregular at any time, but especially coming just three weeks before the election, further cementing the politicized nature of the Trump administration’s targeting of Omar … as if there was any doubt.

In the immigration investigation, family members of Omar have been issued grand jury subpoenas, the NYT reports.

DOJ Stiffed Minnesota Over ICE Shootings

You can be forgiven for thinking that the Trump DOJ had relented after six months and began sharing evidence with Minnesota in the three ICE shootings during Operation Metro Surge. Hennepin County prosecutor Mary Moriarty held a press conference in July announcing the evidence-sharing agreement that had been reached with DOJ.

But in new court filings yesterday, Minnesota officials, including Moriarty, revealed that the Trump DOJ ceased cooperating again after her press conference. And the impression they leave is that the agreement, which was struck with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis and led to an initial round of evidence sharing, was quickly scotched by Main Justice after news of it broke.

In her declaration, Moriarty says that she spoke with U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen on Sept. 10, “who told me, in sum and substance, that evidence sharing from the USAO as agreed to in the June 26 letter would be on pause indefinitely ‘in light of challenges with D.C.’”

The new revelations come in a federal lawsuit that Minnesota filed in D.C. seeking to obtain evidence gathered by DHS and DOJ in the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Minnesota has already charged ICE agent Christian Castro in the Sosa-Celis shooting.

Texas Considers Charges Against ICE Agent

In Houston, the district attorney is considering charging an ICE agent who allegedly ran his vehicle over a Mexican national Saturday with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. ICE’s claim that the man ran in front of the ICE agent’s vehicle is undermined by security camera footage showing the car veering toward the fleeing man. One of his legs was broken, not both, as previously reported.

Thread of the Day

WOW. Kristi Noem and Elon Musk, among others, "chose to turn the power of the federal government against a singular employee with an impeccable record of public service. … The attacks against Ms. Comans were based entirely on false information" and many officials "knew [they] were untrue."

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) 2026-10-13T18:24:07.535Z

Pete Hegseth Watch

• After firing the publisher and editor of Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon has installed one of its own public affairs officials to run the once-independent military newspaper — and he will keep his Pentagon job while doing it, Military.com reports.
• In “The Dawn Of The Self-Funding Pentagon,” Spencer Ackerman warns of the dangers of the “deal” that the Trump administration has stuck to give the Pentagon an equity position in Venezuela’s oil fields outside of the congressional appropriations process: “This is a step in the direction of the U.S. military holding a revenue-generating stake in sectors of another country’s civilian economy.”

AI Did Me In: The Kim Guilfoyle Story

All the credit to the WSJ for the devastating series of stories that led to the forced resignation of Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece. In surveying the aftermath of its work, the newspaper had a few more gems to drop about Guilfoyle’s final days:

Bad self portraits (the lyrics from the Lake Street Dive song are unbelievably on point): Guilfoyle decorated the official ambassadorial residence with large self-portraits.

AI did it: After the second major WSJ story, which relied on text messages showing her soliciting a major GOP donor to pay off her $100,000 Amex bill, Guilfoyle told White House officials that the text messages were AI-generated. “The officials didn’t believe her claims,” according to the WSJ.

Did she find out at the same time we did? This account raises the possibility that Guilfoyle found out that she was being asked to resign when it was announced by the White House, although that is not the only plausible interpretation:

During a Tuesday-morning prep session for his new press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first briefing at the White House, the president instructed Zacharia to tell the world that he was asking Guilfoyle to resign, people familiar with the matter said. Trump didn’t speak directly to Guilfoyle before making the decision, one of the people said.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Retribution: Ilhan Omar Edition

It’s easy to get tripped up by the sheer volume of Trump II depredations — the corruption, the retribution, the destruction, and the absurdity of it all. Add in the proximity of the midterm elections, and there’s a risk of falling into the pedantry of category distinctions.

What’s an election interference gambit versus an appeal to racism? What’s a fit of retribution versus an attack on the constitutional order? What’s an abuse of power versus conspiracizing? One easy framing adjustment is simply to use “and” or “all of the above.”

The unparalleled early holiday morning search by federal agents of the D.C. home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) three weeks before the election perfectly captures the importance of allowing for an “all of the above” category. Otherwise, you can’t truly make sense of it all.

An Attack on Elections

An overt investigatory step against a sitting member of Congress up for election in three weeks is an astonishingly brazen abuse of power. The DOJ norm to refrain from such actions within 60 days of an election doesn’t quite do justice to how out of the ordinary this search was.

The DOJ norm was put in place before the widespread use of mail-in ballots stretched out Election Day from a single date to a rolling two-month election, which would caution restraint even farther out. And in fact even in the old days, notable developments in investigations, in my experience, tended to slow by the summer, after the primaries had locked in the candidates for the general election.

This is precisely the kind of pre-election ugliness we talked about Friday.

An Attack on Naturalized Citizens

The purported basis for the investigation of Omar is immigration fraud — based on a persistent but baseless far-right conspiracy that decades ago, when she was 12, her now-deceased father schemed his way into the country illegally.

The search warrant, as described to the New York Times, lists “potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge.”

The underlying theory of the case, such as it is, is that Omar should be denaturalized. It makes the citizenship of all naturalized citizens contingent and dependent on who is holding power at any given time.

An Attack on Somalis

Black women — see, e.g., Lisa Cook, Fani Willis, Letitia James — are a favorite target of Trump. Omar is Black and Somali and from Minnesota, a trifecta of Trump race-baiting, smearing, and dehumanizing. The search of her home came just a few days after Trump tried to instigate Minnesotans into a race war against Somalis. The message is so rancid: Omar doesn’t belong here, conned her way in (as a child), defrauded her way to financial prosperity, and has no right to be here, let alone in Congress.

An Attack on Congress

The executive branch enforcing the law against members of the legislative branch has always required a delicate balance of constitutional imperatives. There is nothing delicate or well-balanced about Trump’s ongoing attacks on Congress’ constitutional role. The Omar investigation is another in a series of threats against all members of Congress and against the legislative branch’s constitutional role.

An Attack on Elected Democrats

The Omar search is made worse because it comes after President Trump targeted her for years and publicly announced in January that a criminal investigation of her was underway. He has made the retribution element abundantly clear. It’s part of his broader attack on elected Dems — not merely a rhetorical attack but an abuse of his office to unleash the power of the federal government against his political foes.

It is all of the above — and more.

One other notable element of this retributive investigation: It is being helmed by Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of DHS, not DOJ. HSI has been in the lead on some of the most glaring retributive investigations in recent months. With a bloated budget, DHS, across its many component agencies, has police and investigatory powers that lets the Trump White House bypass or sideline DOJ. The FBI and DOJ aren’t sidelined completely. HSI can’t prosecute cases without DOJ, and DOJ had a role in obtaining the search warrant for Omar’s home (which, dismayingly, a D.C. federal judge signed off on). But this adds to the evidence that DHS is Trump’s favored tool of authoritarianism.

If there was any doubt that the Omar case is being run out of the White House, the administration did little to hide it. A senior Trump administration official told the Washington Post that in addition to Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow, the investigation involved White House deputy homeland security adviser Anthony Salisbury. I can’t emphasize enough how far over the cliff’s edge we are with White House-directed investigations.

The worst predictions of what a second Trump term would be like are coming true right before our eyes.

Thread of the Day

There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.

— Andy Craig (@andycraig.bsky.social) 2026-10-12T12:48:26.501Z

The Retribution: Full Court Press Edition

It’s not just Ilhan Omar. You can feel the ramping up of retribution from President Trump as the midterm election draws closer:

• Free press: In another in a series of targeted attacks on the press by the Trump administration, the Trump DOJ has purported to launch an antitrust investigation against ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC over their pool coverage of the White House. The move comes after the networks banded together to boycott President Trump’s ban of CNN from the White House.
• Federal Reserve: President Trump renewed his effort to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board, establishing a committee to “investigate” the bogus mortgage fraud charges the administration has ginned up against her.
• ICC: The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the ​International Criminal Court on Friday within hours of one of its former judges winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Lawlessness: Defiance of Judges Edition

D.C.: U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of D.C. damned near lost her mind in an emergency hearing over the Trump administration’s holiday weekend removal of more than 400 trees from a National Park Service golf course in the nation’s capital that President Trump wants to redesign unilaterally. Reyes had previously ordered that the Trump administration provide notice to the plaintiffs before any major changes were made to the course — and time for the court to address them. Instead, the administration provided notice at 5 p.m. on the Friday of a three-day weekend and removed the trees on Saturday. Reyes became the latest federal judge to rue having trusted the administration and given it the benefit of the doubt. “I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done,” she said.

New York: The Trump DOJ apologized to a federal judge in Manhattan after pro-Trump TV ads paid for by the federal government continued to air after the court ordered an immediate halt to the ads on Sunday evening. The DOJ lawyer told the judge that he emailed her temporary restraining order blocking the ads to DHS counsel 72 minutes after it was issued, but DHS counsel didn’t see the email until the next morning. Notably, the Trump DOJ had stopped short of defending the legality of the ads in court, arguing instead that the ads were already scheduled to stop running so the case was moot.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Florida/D.C.: After losing its last two chief prosecutors, the “grand conspiracy” investigation in south Florida is now being run out of Main Justice, the Wall Street Journal reports: “Lawyers in the deputy attorney general’s office are now directly overseeing the Florida-based investigation from Washington, officials said.”
• Nationwide: “[M]ore than 60 people charged in the past few months as part of a surge by the Justice Department to prosecute as many noncitizen voters as possible before November’s midterm elections,” the WSJ reports.
• Arizona: A federal judge sanctioned a DOJ attorney in an immigration case for making a “factually baseless” accusation against the immigrant’s attorney. The DOJ lawyer was ordered to undergo at least one hour each of continuing legal education on (i) the special role of U.S. attorneys; and (ii) the need for evidentiary support for all factual contentions.

Midterms Watch

• Texas-Senate: To celebrate the arrival of 2025, Ken Paxton partied in Dubai with his girlfriend and two fugitives from the U.S., the WSJ reports.
• Nebraska-Senate: The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC for the Senate GOP leadership, is pouring in another $8 million to save Sen. Pete Ricketts (R- NE), bringing its total spend in the race to $15 million.
• NYT: Inside Elon Musk’s $276 Million Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans

Trump Mocks Protester Assaulted at His Rally

holy shit — a protester at the Trump rally gets physically assaulted after they interrupt the rally by a man who punches her in the face. Trump smears the protester as a "fat guy"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-12T23:46:07.086Z

Mass Deportation Watch

Surveillance video captured an ICE agent appearing to strike a fleeing immigrant Saturday morning near Houston. The man, who was apparently not the initial target of ICE, reportedly suffered two broken legs in the incident.

No More Kimberly Guilfoyle to Kick Around

Even as President Trump was publicly dangling the possibility of firing Kimberly Guilfoyle, the WSJ was cranking out another in its series of wtf stories on the U.S. ambassador to Greece: “At Davos, Kimberly Guilfoyle Boasted of Private Jet Trips, Luxury Stays.”

The WSJ didn’t just have witnesses to Guilfoyle’s grasping at Davos in January. It had a recording of her, too. Some of these quotes, y’all:

• To an American businessman whose help she wanted getting into a dinner thrown by Greek House Davos for Eric Trump: “You know, I can deliver the world to you. Which you deserve. …  “I’m going to make you a lot of f—ing money.”
• Furious that she wasn’t invited to the dinner: “You don’t have the f—ing U.S., you know, ambassador to Greece not come. She should be kissing my f—ing ass.”
• Bragging on her ties to Greek shipping tycoon Nikolas Tsakos: “I see Nikos every f—ing day. … I’m flying with him to Paris. I’m with him for a f—ing week. … He loves me. Honey, I spent Christmas with him. New Years. OK? Gstaad. Like, everywhere.”

Alas, we learned this morning from the White House press secretary that President Trump has asked Guilfoyle to resign. It was fun while it lasted.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

One Dark Damn Day

We’ve endured some very dark days in Trump II, but yesterday was particularly grim — and a possible taste of what’s to come between now and Election Day.

President Trump launched a race war against Somalians and Somali-Americans in Minnesota.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth exuberantly announced that the holiday season execution by firing squad of former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan for the Ft. Hood shooting will be live-streamed.

In New York City, an ICE agent shot and wounded a Dominican national who was in his car with his 5-year-old child in the backseat.

In a televised debate in the Michigan Senate race, GOP nominee Mike Rogers used Islamophobic smears to baselessly associate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed with terrorism — after which President Trump called El-Sayed a “Terrorist Sympathizer” in a social media post.

Somehow, the Michigan Senate debate was worse than the Georgia Senate debate, where GOP nominee Rep. Mike Collins has so many ties to neo-Nazis that it’s hard to keep count, prompting Sen. Jon Ossoff to scoff that Collins had “hired half the Third Reich” in his congressional office.

Against that backdrop, the Trump DOJ is actively seeking to vindictively prosecute former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for allegedly lying to Congress as the star witness in the Jan. 6 committee hearings.

While the chaos of Trump II is often erratic and unpredictable, yesterday’s events are all tied to the upcoming election one way or the other. Even the ICE shooting came only two days after ICE increased its daily quota back to 3,000 arrests a day ahead of the midterms. The collective desperation of Trump and the GOP to avert a disastrous electoral defeat is likely to produce some even darker days over the next three and half weeks.

Reaction of the Day

Sen. Chris Murphy stunned as he hears for the first time that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to livestream a firing squad execution, describing the decision as “disgusting” and “medieval.” pic.twitter.com/SR0E6hS67k

— Erin Burnett OutFront (@OutFrontCNN) October 9, 2026

The Persecution of Cassidy Hutchinson

The vindictive prosecution of Cassidy Hutchinson is being improbably spearheaded by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. It would normally have absolutely no role in pursuing this kind of case, but the division is led by the ambitious Harmeet Dhillon, who is eager to audition for a promotion.

Dhillon’s team began presenting purported evidence against Hutchinson to a D.C. federal grand jury this week. While most of the reports cast it as investigation into whether Hutchison lied to Congress, the Washington Post, citing an unnamed source, suggests there maybe a twist: “[P]rosecutors have been exploring charging Hutchinson with a civil rights violation, potentially bringing a more unusual case than a simple charge of lying to Congress, one of the people familiar said.”

In Other Vindictive Prosecution News …

A federal judge has cleared the way for Kseniia Petrova to conduct discovery into whether she was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump administration. Petrova is the Harvard researcher who was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport in February 2025 and later charged with smuggling for bringing frog embryo samples into the country for her research.

New Info on Kurt Olsen’s Failed Polygraph

The exact circumstances of the failed polygraph of Trump DOJ official Kurt Olsen keep dribbling out. The latest, from the New York Times (emphasis mine):

It turned out he had failed a polygraph test about his contacts with foreigners, which imperiled his security clearance, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Olsen said he complied with all requirements regarding foreign contacts and had not resigned over his clearance, but declined to say more.

Kimpossibly Dumb

With everything else going on, the Kimberly Guilfoyle scandal is almost a welcome relief — a Molière comedy of the Trump era.

The official responses to the Wall Street Journal blockbuster were quite unimpressive.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio spewed a lot of bluster in refusing to answer any questions about his ambassador to Greece — but he also offered no defense of Kimberly Guilfoyle:

Vice President JD Vance was similarly unenthusiastic about rushing to Guilfoyle’s defense:

JD Vance dodges a question on Kimberly Guilfoyle asking a donor for $100k in exchange for political access:"Well, so… with, with that hypothetical, obviously I don't love that. But, you know, I don't know exactly who you're talking about. I don't know the full details."

— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2026-10-08T18:24:15.109558991Z

Bad News for Kim: Loose Cannon Is Talking

If there’s one thing to know about the latest Guilfoyle scandal, it’s that her accuser doesn’t exactly fit the profile of the most reliable narrator. So the WSJ really had to bring the receipts, as it describes here.

Making matters worse for her is that her accuser seems to love the spotlight and spent the day talking to damn near any TV news outlet that would listen.

ABC:

CBS:

CNN:

'There was no question it was a quid pro quo. She knew she was nominated. She tried to cover it up.' MAGA Donor Eric Deters talks with @jaketapper about Amb. Kim Guilfoyle asking him for $100K. pic.twitter.com/q8Wz6GSxP5

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) October 8, 2026

MSNow:

Late Night Fun

With so few Trump scandals truly breaking through into the broader cultural zeitgeist, Guilfoyle’s brazenness, shamelessness, and sloppiness have combined to potentially make her the rare exception.

Kimmel:

The Daily Show:

Have a Good Holiday Weekend

See you back here Tuesday.

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The Tip of the Politicization Spear

Since the dawn of Trump II, Stephen Miller has been the barely hidden hand running the Justice Department from the White House. Now a new report from CBS News adds quite a bit more detail to the level of influence and control that Miller exerts over the Trump DOJ.

The story is framed around an apparent conflict of interest. Miller attended an counterterrorism training session at FBI headquarters on Sept. 29 that was focused on President Trump’s notorious NSPM-7 on domestic terrorism and political violence. Miller urged the federal agents in attendance to be more aggressive in pursuing threats against government officials and their families — at the same time he was an alleged victim and potential witness in a case of alleged threats to his wife, Katie. Miller was reportedly frustrated by the pace of the criminal investigation into the allegedly threatening communications.

“In his comments, Miller spoke about the need for federal law enforcement agents to be more proactive in investigating threat cases and told them that no case is too small, whether the threats are directed toward a congressman, a spouse, friends, loved ones or a speaker at a college campus, the senior FBI official said,” according to CBS News.

The top two FBI agents in the counterterrorism division of the FBI Washington Field Office were demoted last month over “frustration shared by the Miller family” that the Katie Miller case was moving too slowly. Their demotions reportedly factored into the resignation of FBI co-deputy director Andrew Bailey, although the FBI publicly dimissed that reporting as “fake news.”

Two days after Miller spoke to federal agents at the training session, a Massachusetts man was indicted for cyberstalking on Oct. 1 — despite reported concerns from career prosecutors in Boston that his communications to Katie Miller didn’t amount to a federal crime. He was charged with using interstate communications with the intent to harass and intimidate by sending her at least 40 calls, voicemails, and text messages in August and September, some of them crude and profane.

But a glaring conflict of interest is just one element of this story, and probably not the most important one.

Notably, this episode appears to be a subset of the Trump administration’s broader push to lump all threats together with legitimate political opposition and brand them as domestic terrorism. The criminalization of political opposition to Trump is one of the darkest through-lines of his second term.

In this episode, two things jump out: (i) Miller picked a counterterrorism training session to urge more aggressive action in cases involving threats and harassment, citing the assassination of Charlie Kirk; and (ii) Katie Miller’s alleged cyberstalker was “arrested by members of the F.B.I.’s joint terrorism task force, an unusual show of force for a cyberstalking case,” the NYT noted last week.

In other words, what might have normally been a local law enforcement matter is now federalized and turned into a counterterrorism investigation. The Trump White House went so far as to defend Miller’s presence at the training session on domestic terrorism grounds, telling CBS News that Miller is tasked with carrying out the NSPM-7 mandate to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle all stages of organized political violence and domestic terrorism.”

The other big picture issue is the one Morning Memo keeps coming back to: the mind-blowing fact of an unabashedly political White House aide addressing federal agents at FBI headquarters. The DOJ, including the FBI, being run out of the White House remains the defining corrupt act of the Trump II presidency.

The CBS News story — co-bylined by Sarah N. Lynch, a superb reporter on the DOJ beat — goes quite a bit further in revealing how involved Miller is in the running of the Justice Department:

• In an earlier episode, Miller pressured the DOJ to take action against a Virginia political activist who protested outside of the Millers’ Arlington home and distributed their address on flyers. A federal magistrate judge twice rejected search warrant applications in the case, CBS News previously reported.
• In the Virginia case, Miller asked FBI counterterrorism agents to go undercover in his neighborhood’s political activist group and regularly called the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the the Eastern District of Virginia for updates.
• Miller has been holding monthly meetings with the heads of federal law enforcement agencies about the deployments of the National Guard and federal agents to D.C. and Memphis in Trump’s “violent crime crackdown.”
• “Miller is also in touch multiple times a week with the Deputy Attorney General’s office to discuss fraud and immigration cases, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter,” according to CBS News. The DAG is essentially the chief operations officer at DOJ and runs the department day to day.

Miller’s meddling (which may be too weak of word) at DOJ is truly unprecedented. He is the tip of Trump’s spear aimed at politicizing the Justice Department.

Kurt Olsen Reportedly Failed a Polygraph

Kurt Olsen — the Big Lie proponent who stepped down as the lead prosecutor in the bogus investigation into a “grand conspiracy” by the Deep State to deprive Donald Trump of his civil rights — had his DOJ security clearance terminated last month after failing a polygraph test, Reuters reports.

‘I Can Do Whatever I Want, If I Want’

Trump: "I could've done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could've done very very bad things to Joe Biden. I could've done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama … I can do whatever I want, if I want."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-07T17:44:12.919Z

Mass Deportation Watch

• The American Prospect: In an important development, U.S. District Judge John C. Hinderaker, a Trump appointee in Arizona, has ordered DHS to “facilitate” the return to the United States of an Egyptian man that it deported to Equatorial Guinea, a country where he has no ties. As reporter Gillian Brockell notes, the ruling “could have far-reaching implications for thousands of others subjected to the Trump administration’s third-country removal scheme.”
• Washington Sun: In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Gary R. Brown, a Trump appointee in Brooklyn, condemned ICE agents for falsifying records to cover up a pair of bad arrests. “The evidence suggests that ICE attempted to support their unsupported misidentification argument through false or misleading documentation and testimony,” Brown concluded.
• CNN: ICE told agents nationwide on Tuesday to increase immigration arrests by 1,000 people per day, returning to a previous goal of 3,000 daily arrests.

Quote of the Day

“On Monday night, it was our understanding that Christa was brain dead and that life support would be removed the next day. But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team, including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking.”—Randy Spivey, a lawyer for Christa Pike, on her recovery from Tennessee’s attempted execution

The Corruption: Kimberly Guilfoyle Edition

The WSJ manages to outdo its remarkable story last month on Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece and former fiancée of Don Jr., with a follow-up bombshell.

I started to summarize the highlights, but I really can’t do it justice. Just go read it.

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Worse Than 2006?

Republican political consultants are practically falling over each other to make the most dire pronouncements about the GOP’s fate in the midterms.

“If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006,” one national Republican strategist tells Politico. Democrats picked up 31 seats that year and ended 12 years of GOP control of the House.

I’m deeply skeptical of poll-driven narratives in election coverage — which the past few cycles have only reinforced — but there’s quite a bit more to go on than just public opinion surveys in assessing the state of the midterms. Between now and Election Day, I’ll be frequently including in Morning Memo a sampling of those additional data points: which races are being newly contested and which aren’t, where the spending is going and where it’s not, and other markers on the state of the race — including President Trump’s unscripted intemperate outbursts.

The Cook Political Report on Tuesday moved three Senate races in Democrats’ favor:

• Kansas from Lean Republican to Toss Up
• North Carolina from Lean Democrat to Likely Democrat
• New Hampshire from Toss Up to Lean Democrat

In deep-red South Carolina, appointed Sen. Darline Graham (R) is struggling to hold on to her late brother’s seat, forcing the Senate Leadership Fund to dump $5 million into her race against Dr. Annie Andrews. In a sign of the brewing trouble for the GOP, Trump went on a “crazed, manic tirade” this week against Andrews, using an anti-trans slur among other attacks.

On the House side, in a sign of increasing desperation, Republicans have quietly resumed backing Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) despite earlier calls from within the party for him to drop out of the race amidst allegations against him of domestic abuse.

Election Ratfuckery Alert

The Trump administration continues to pull levers and push buttons to try to abuse the power of the federal government to swing the election its way:

• The Department of Homeland Security has investigated more than 150 voter registration groups in search of evidence that they’re helping noncitizens illegally register to vote, according to internal documents obtained via FOIA and provided to the New York Times. The DHS effort has been most heavily focused on groups in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. DHS has considered using undercover agents in its investigations, the documents reveal. Also of note:

The documents also reveal that Heather Honey, a prominent 2020 election denier who now serves as the department’s point person on “election integrity,” provided 48.4 million records of unknown provenance to federal investigators who are trying to find noncitizens on the voter rolls.

• The Trump DOJ dispatched federal prosecutors and an FBI agent to monitor polls in Maricopa and Pima counties in Arizona during its July primary election — a dramatic departure from past DOJ practice of using Civil Rights Division personnel as poll monitors to avoid intimidating voters and local election officials, Democracy Docket reports. The Trump DOJ is apparently planning to continue using prosecutors as poll monitors in the general election, telling Democracy Docket that “department attorneys, including prosecutors, will serve as election monitors.”
• In the run-up to election, ICE has begun asking detainees if they have ever voted illegally and, if so, whether in person or by mail, the WaPo reports. “ICE reviews credible allegations of potential criminal activity within its jurisdiction, including allegations related to election integrity,” an ICE spokesperson told the newspaper.

The Big Lie Crazies Still Big Lie-ing

Big Lie purveyor Tina Peters met with President Trump in the Oval Office this week to discuss “election integrity.” Meanwhile, election denier Cleta Mitchell is “pushing a scheme to have Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seize voting machines,” Democracy Docket reports. Former Trump DOJ official Ed Martin helpfully ties all of this together:

Ed Martin says that Tina Peters met with Trump in the Oval Office today to discuss election integrity and “the plans” for the upcoming midterms elections.

— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) 2026-10-06T01:22:18.693Z

A footnote: All of this comes as the Trump DOJ continues to fight to enforce a grand jury subpoena of Fulton County, Georgia, for the names and personal information of the hundreds of staffers, contractors, and volunteers who worked on the 2020 election. Jan. 6 never ends.

How Trump Can Still Subvert the Election

Election law expert Rick Hasen gives a fairly glowing assessment of how well the guardrails have held so far against Trump’s assault on free and fair midterm elections — and assesses where the greatest risks remain.

Another Classic Trump Con

Trump’s claim that he and his super PAC will start paying for the pro-Trump TV ads that the taxpayer funds have been used to air during the stretch run of the midterms does not mean that he will reimburse the government for the expenses it already incurred.

“White House officials clarified on Tuesday to Politico that the president’s post did not mean the PAC would pay for the spots that had already aired,” Politico reports.

More than $10 million of a $20 million DHS contract has already been spent on the ads, the NYT calculates.

Trump DOJ Watch

• Emil Bove: Last year, when he was acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove pressed the FBI to illegally investigate ICE protesters in Los Angeles in violation of their constitutional rights and bureau policy, an FBI whistleblower alleges. The allegations emerged in a whistleblower complaint to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee by Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s LA field office. Fields also claims that FBI Director Kash Patel succumbed to pressure from the White House to investigate another group of ICE protesters after President Trump saw them in TikTok post.
• Harmeet Dhillon: After purging career lawyers, the Trump DOJ’s once-prestigous Civil Rights Division — led by Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon — is turning to partisans and conspiracists to fill its depleted ranks, the NYT reports.
• David Hearn: Lawyers for David Hearn, the man wrongly accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, sent a letter to the inspectors general of DOJ and DOI asking for an investigation of the circumstances of his arrest and subsequently dismissed prosecution. Among his lawyers is Michael R. Bromwich, a former DOJ IG.

EU Preps for Mass Casualty Russian Attack

In a restricted, closed-door meeting last Wednesday, EU ambassadors discussed how to respond collectively to a hybrid Russian attack that results in mass casualties, a risk they fear looks increasingly likely, Politico reports.

Quote of the Day

“[W]hen a majority of the justices on our highest court show themselves to be consistently indifferent to the growing chasm between law and justice, it is not ‘public rhetoric’ that causes Americans to distrust the Court. It is the Court that surrenders its own legitimacy in the eyes of the public.”—civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill

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Good mix of ages. Mostly guys, as expected.Audiophiles in Vancouver know that there are a few pretty good-sized stores with decent sound rooms locally. I suspect the largest one is HiFi Centre just outside Chinatown. Not the nicest/safest locale in Vancouver and close to some of the open drug use in the city so you'll probably need to be buzzed in if coming for a visit. This location