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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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

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

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