| The Trump Justice Department’s efforts to interfere in the midterm elections intensified this week on multiple fronts. The administration’s prospects for success continue to appear remote, but at a bare minimum, it has eviscerated the idea of a pre-election quiet period for DOJ actions that could influence a federal election. |
| In many of these cases, the DOJ’s efforts are so unimpressive or ham-fisted that people have wondered whether the department is really serious. |
| The answer is “yes” — the administration is earnest and would like to succeed — but at the same time, the lawyering and the arguments are so bad that it’s sometimes hard to tell. One reason for this is that many competent and honest lawyers have left the Justice Department, so the people developing and arguing these cases — including the department’s most senior political appointees — are often unscrupulous, partisan, inexperienced, or some combination thereof. |
| In California this week, a district court denied the department’s request to segregate 20,000 ballots from “likely” noncitizens after the judge concluded that the department’s request was legally baseless and that its methodology for identifying these “likely” noncitizens could not be trusted. The Justice Department is appealing, and although a similar lawsuit in Washington state over a list of 400 alleged noncitizens may be imminent, that case should meet the same fate. |
| The judge presiding over the DOJ’s lawsuit in Alaska over the Senate race is likely to rule any day now on multiple motions that have been filed to dismiss the case. The case is weak and ought to be thrown out, but in the meantime, the Justice Department has issued more than 40 subpoenas and document requests in connection with a criminal investigation into the inclusion of the non-incumbent Dan Sullivan on the state’s ballot. |
| The department’s aggressive tactics in Alaska are notable in themselves, even though the odds that anyone could be criminally convicted over the events at issue — which involve fairly standard if unseemly election tactics in the US — are incredibly low. |
| The Justice Department also spent the week defending the unusual criminal charges that prosecutors filed in Washington, D.C., against two former FBI agents accused of lying to Congress about their knowledge of Hunter Biden’s laptop. The presiding judge indicated that he will rule on Monday on whether to dismiss the criminal complaint filed against the agents, but even if he lets it slip by, prosecutors will still have to get an indictment from a grand jury if they want to move forward. |
| Also in Washington, prosecutors tried and failed to indict Cassidy Hutchinson. This was eminently predictable, but it was a partisan abuse of the department’s authority all the same. |
| All of this, of course, comes in addition to the department’s recent search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home and the indictment of L. Louise Lucas, a Democratic state lawmaker in Virginia, over an alleged marijuana trafficking conspiracy. Whatever you make of the allegations at issue in those cases, there is no reason that the department had to take those actions in the weeks leading up to Election Day instead of, say, a week from now. |
| Former FBI Director James Comey is also dealing with a third set of criminal charges this week, this time based on an alleged disclosure of classified information to a reporter. Prosecutors filed the charges in a document known as a criminal “information” — on the cusp of a 10-year statute of limitations expiring — on the theory that this would pause the clock while the government continues its investigation. |
| Prosecutors cannot proceed on a criminal information unless the defendant waives his right to an indictment, which has not happened and will not happen. The only reason the department filed the charges was to preserve its ability to indict Comey later, but Comey has a good argument that the information should be dismissed and that any charges are now untimely. |
| The people pushing all of these dubious efforts include the department’s top political appointees — not just Attorney General Todd Blanche, but also FBI Director Kash Patel, Jeanine Pirro (the US Attorney in Washington, D.C.), Harmeet Dhillon (the head of the Civil Rights Division), Bilal Ali Essayli (the man masquerading as the US Attorney in LA), Trent McCotter (the acting Deputy Attorney General), and Stanley Woodward (the Associate Attorney General). |
| This is a collection of partisan sycophants and loyalists who never should have been installed in the first place, and they are proving their critics right in real time. |
| Woodward, to take just one example, had never even worked in the Justice Department before Republicans in the Senate confirmed him to serve in the third-highest-ranking position in the department. Trump nominated Woodward because he previously represented a bunch of Jan. 6 defendants and people involved in Trump’s criminal cases, and because he is willing to do whatever Trump wants. |
| With just four days to go before the midterms, people are right to worry that the Trump DOJ will undertake more efforts to meddle or otherwise cause political havoc before and after Election Day. Even if these efforts are ultimately clumsy and unsuccessful, that does not mean they are harmless. |
| We learned this most clearly in the run-up to the siege of the US Capitol on Jan. 6, which occurred after Trump and his lawyers spent months making baseless allegations of election fraud and filing meritless lawsuits. This post-election period could also prove tumultuous if the Justice Department continues to pursue spurious investigations, lawsuits, and criminal cases in an effort to blunt the Republican Party’s losses or to simply make life difficult for Democrats and election officials. |
